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7-26-13 Superintendent Salary Caps, Privacy Rules In the News
NJ Spotlight - Schools Must Warn Students, Families If Big Brother Is Watching...New guidelines require districts to notify parents, kids that software and built-in camera can monitor use.

NJ Spotlight - Fine Print: Final superintendent salary cap ruling…Former schools chief in Parsippany-Troy Hills ordered to give back $17,500 he was overpaid.

John Mooney | July 25, 2013

 

What it is: The state’s acting education commissioner last week ruled against former Parsippany-Troy Hills superintendent Leroy Seitz in his epic two-year fight against Gov. Chris Christie’s salary caps for school superintendents. The ruling made by assistant commissioner Evo Popoff, serving as acting commissioner, found that Seitz will have to repay the school district $17,500 in salary that was found in excess of the caps.

What it means: Besides being the highest profile of the cases, the ruling is all but certain to be the last legal step in what had been a multi-faceted set of court challenges against the 2011 salary caps that have shaken up school districts across the state. Two other challenges on broader grounds had been rejected by state appellate court this spring, and then passed over on appeal to the state Supreme Court last month.

The politics: Seitz’s case had been the most volatile of the challenges, drawing the ire of Christie, who called Seitz’s contract “the definition of greed and arrogance” after it was renewed on the eve of the caps in late 2010. The new contract would have paid him on average about $225,000, compared to the cap’s limit at $177,500.

The case: The state’s county superintendent subsequently rejected the contract, and Christie threatened to withhold $3 million in state aid if the board did not rescind it. Under pressure, the local board demanded Seitz return the extra pay, prompting Seitz’s challenge that the contract had been properly extended and the state did not have the authority to reject it. He subsequently resigned in May, but maintained the challenge against the board and the state.

The decision: An administrative law judge in May provided the first ruling against Seitz in saying that the contract had not been approved in writing by the state’s county superintendent and he was not entitled to keep the money. The judge settled on the $17,500 as being in excess of the base salary set in the contract first year in 2006. As expected, Popoff in his decision posted on July 16 upheld the judge’s ruling, saying that administrative judge’s decision supported by the facts and testimony.

Why Popoff? At the time of the decision, state education commissioner Chris Cerf was on vacation, and Popoff was serving as acting commissioner.

Really the end? This case was more on the technicality of how contracts were approved as the cap was falling into place in late 2010 and early 2011, a big point of contention at the time with the state starting to enforce the new regulations before they were actually formally in place. But it was the last hope of superintendents and others who had fought with little success to at least put a legal dent in the new rules.

The eulogy: “Anything else we had out there basically ended when the state Supreme Court refused to hear our appeals last month,” said Richard Bozza, executive director of the state’s superintendent’s association, which led the legal challenges and represented Seitz in his case.

What’s next? The caps continue on, with a host of districts continuing to see veteran superintendents retire or move to jobs out of state due at least in part to the caps that would lead to big cuts in pay. Bozza said at least 75 superintendent posts are already turning over for next year, part of a trend where about half of the districts have seen their top leadership change since the caps were imposed.

Sunset coming, sometime: The regulations are set to expire or “sunset,” although precisely when is unclear, said Bozza. The regulations themselves list a Nov. 25, 2014 expiration, at which time they can be amended, extended or changed outright. But the uncertainty comes in a separate regulatory change that extended all education regulations’ timeframe to a seven-year cycle, meaning these specific regulations would last until 2016.

 

 

NJ Spotlight - Schools Must Warn Students, Families If Big Brother Is Watching

John Mooney | July 26, 2013

New guidelines require districts to notify parents, kids that software and built-in camera can monitor use.

 

The provocatively named Anti-Big Brother Act arose out of a situation in Pennsylvania in which a school district was accused of spying on students through their school-issued laptops, including taking literally thousands of pictures.

New Jersey legislators seeking to prevent such incidents here passed the new law this past spring. It requires districts to notify students and their families that computers issued to them may be equipped to record their locations and use. It also says that such information will not be used “in a manner that would violate the privacy rights of the student or any individual residing with the student.”

But that’s where things can get murky, so the state Department of Education this week released additional guidelines about what the law covers and what other policies should also be in place to cover extenuating circumstances.

For instance, the guidelines explains that the law specifically pertains to computers furnished to students for use outside of schools, something that is not the norm in New Jersey but is hardly rare anymore, with some schools providing every student with a computer.

The guidelines say students should also be notified not just that the computer may have a camera but also that software records very document opened, every email sent or received, and every online site visited.

“The intent of this law is for the district to notify the student that their electronic device will store information when the student is outside of school, and that the stored information will not be used in any way to violate the student’s privacy rights (or that of any individual who resides with the student),” read the memo written by assistant commissioner Evo Popoff.

Still, in an age when privacy is a big topic in the news and is being tested online and off, even one of the law’s primary sponsors said there may need to be some exceptions added to the legislation, or at least addressed.

What if, for example, tracking or even just maintenance of the computer resulted in discovery of something troubling of a sexual, violent or potentially criminal nature?

Other laws may cover some of these eventualities, but state Assemblywoman Annette Quijano (D-Union) said she didn’t want her bill complicating the situation.

“It is a blanket law now, and maybe there need to be exceptions,” said Quijano, one of the primary sponsors in the Assembly. “There can be a lot of things that kids can get into. It’s something we should look at.”

Quijano said she moved on the bill after learning of the 2010 case in Lower Merion, Pa., where students discovered that certain school employees had been able to watch them at home through the computers’ cameras, ostensibly in an effort to find some missing computers. News reports said as many as 50,000 photos had been taken.

Parents sued the district, and the school settled with the families for a total of $600,000. A separate criminal investigation cleared the district, but the incident set off alarms elsewhere, including in New Jersey where state Sen. Donald Norcross (D-Camden) filed a bill on the Senate side.

“You wonder if something like that could happen here, and I saw that there wasn’t any legislation or regulation,” said Quijano in an interview yesterday. “It only takes one bad actor.”

The bills passed easily in both chambers and were signed by Gov. Chris Christie in April.

School associations have so far supported the act, saying the notifications are useful in letting students and families know their rights and limits.

The state’s school boards association initially voiced concerns about the fines imposed for districts not complying -- $250 for each student affected and each incident – but a spokesman yesterday likened it to locker searches or random drug testing.

“Whenever you are dealing with expectations of privacy and whether or not violated, you get into dangerous ground and need to have that notification,” said Frank Belluscio, the association’s communications director.

“This helps draw that line where the privacy ends and the school’s authority begins,” he said, adding the school boards association plans to develop some model policies in the coming months for schools to consider.

Belluscio remembered a decade or so ago when rules centered on “accepted use policies” for computers inside schools, with various filters and limitations that followed.

“But we’ve gone beyond that to the iPads and laptops taken home, to the social media and even cyber-bullying,” he said. “It is getting increasingly complicated.”