© Beatrice Murch
Note: This is the first of a series of posts expanding on my platform. You can find my list of priorities here.
Shadows of the Past
On June 27, 2022, Glen Rock’s Board of Education met for its final regular biweekly meeting of the 2021-22 school year. Among the routine agenda items was the much more significant matter of a proposed contract extension for the then-Superintedent, Dr. Brett Charleston1. The initial contract between the district and the Superintendent was for five years, initiated in 2019 and running through 2024. At the time of this meeting, the contract had two more years to run. It is unclear why the BOE felt that it was necessary to offer an early extension that would run until 2027.
Needless to say, the period of time from July 2019 to June 2022 was challenging for the country at large and for school systems, to say the least. The COVID pandemic created massive challenges for families and teachers that were, bluntly, impossible to solve without tradeoffs2, and it is almost certainly unfair to make judgements based on a situation that was sui generis. However, the Superintendent had been in place for the better part of a school year before anyone had known about COVID, and schools reopened full time for the entire school year leading into the June 2022 meeting. It is safe to say that there was a sufficient track record of relatively normal operations, on which one could judge the performance of the district.
Over the course of 31 minutes, at least 14 Glen Rock residents offered their opinions on approving a contract extension that was both premature and lucrative (in addition to members of the Glen Rock Athletics Association). Of these 14 residents, 12 of them were against the extension, citing the costs involved, the deterioration of relationships with the community, and the exodus of teachers and decline in academic standards.
The contract extension was approved 6-2.
You likely know what came next. Increasing conflict between the BOE and the Superintendent, multiple extended leaves of absence, a request for medical information from the board to the Superintendent, and finally a termination agreement formalized in November 2025, which involved paying out the better part of a year in salary while the Superintendent stayed on leave.
None of this was difficult to foresee. Current board trustees who voted for the contract extension, including two of those on the ballot this fall (the third incumbent on the ballot was not a board member at the time), would argue that hindsight is 20/20. However, if it was so difficult to anticipate what went wrong, why was it that 86% of Glen Rock’s residents who participated in the public meeting could anticipate it?
More pertinently – given that track record of decision-making, and a lack of explanation for it, do we trust the same people to pick the right person to lead our school district in the future? And do we trust them with shepherding that relationship successfully?
Looking forward
This is not some kind of hypothetical debate. As mentioned, the BOE felt obliged to request medical information from the former Superintendent in March 20253 (and deny a request for bereavement leave at the same time). The termination agreement was entered into in November 2025. And yet, the school district still has no permanent superintendent going into the 2026-27 school year. The search firm contract itself was only finalized in March 20264; public comments were only solicited starting in May. There was been no clear explanation of why this should have taken so long.
This has left the school district in the rather comical situation of having an interim superintendent replacing an active superintendent at the beginning of the school year, only for a permanent superintendent to (perhaps) replace the interim superintendent four months later. It doesn’t take any deep expertise to realize that this kind of instability will not serve anyone well – whether that is teachers, staff, students, or families.
Unfortunately, the timeline for hiring a new permanent superintendent is out of anyone’s hands at this stage. However, what we can control is ensuring that the BOE is able to create and maintain a more fruitful, longer-lasting, and less needlessly expensive relationship with the incoming Superintendent than was the case with the prior one.
Public service is service
The purpose of public service is just that – service. To adequately serve the community, the minimum that a public servant owes is to share information and explain decisions, and to acknowledge and take responsibility when things have gone wrong. Faced with this mess in district leadership, I would have accepted responsibility, and worked to alleviate the problem as fast as possible. I cannot promise perfection, but I can promise transparency, accountability, and prioritizing the community.
- The minutes for the meeting, including a summary of the public comments, can be found at this link – the public comments and other matters related to this are on Page 3-5. ↩︎
- The debates on school closures and COVID are obviously complicated and tend to shed more heat than light, so I do not intend to focus on them. However, interested readers can find all the information they would like, and more, in this independent review on school closures in New Jersey. ↩︎
- See page 17 of the minutes for March 17, 2025 ↩︎
- Page 5 of the meeting minutes for March 23, 2026 ↩︎
Gautam Surya for Glen Rock BOE 