At the NJEA Convention, Sunlight Tells Teachers the Truth About the Spiller Scandal While NJEA Leadership Tries to Keep Teachers in the Dark

Sunlight at the NJEA convention in Atlantic City. Sunlight is hard at work at the NJEA annual convention in Atlantic City, trying to inform NJEA members of the truth and hold NJEA leadership accountable for wasting $45 million in teachers’ dues on former-NJEA President Sean Spiller’s vanity run for governor while hiding the truth from teachers.  Meanwhile, NJEA leadership wants to pretend the Spiller debacle never happened and sweep their misuse of dues under the rug forever. We thank our good friends at NJEdReport for providing an excellent summary of Sunlight’s activities at the convention and urge you to read their report and see the ads we are running.

NJEA leadership wants to keep teachers in the dark.  We write today to highlight why it was necessary for Sunlight to insert itself into the convention in the first place: NJEA leadership continues to try to keep teachers in the dark about how $45 million of their highest-in-the-nation dues were wasted on Spiller without their knowledge or consent.

Teachers launch a petition and file a lawsuit. Frustrated by leadership’s deception and unresponsiveness, teachers (who learned the truth from Sunlight’s past reporting) have taken matters in their own hands. Roselle teacher Dr. Marie Dupont launched a petition that attempts to hold leadership accountable and ensure this doesn’t happen again. The petition has already been signed by over 2,000 teachers, which is a remarkable number given that we know many teachers are afraid to speak out for fear of retaliation. In addition, Dr. Dupont and Hamilton teacher Ann Marie Pocklembo filed a lawsuit against the NJEA, which likewise targets the misuse of their dues by leadership. Yet leadership has steadfastly ignored these thousands of teachers’ voices, seeking to discredit the petition and declaring the lawsuit as “baseless and without merit.”

Total information blackout by leadership. Even worse, leadership has still not come clean with teachers about how $45 million their regular dues were wasted on Spiller’s failed run by paying $533 per vote for the long-shot candidate Spiller, who finished a distant fifth out of six.  It’s a major scandal, yet there’s never been an explanation of how the decisions were made or an accounting of how that money was spent. For example: what about the highly suspicious $9.3 million for canvassing paid to an obscure Newark firm with no evident expertise in canvassing? There’s been a total information blackout by leadership — as if the Spiller debacle never occurred.

Many teachers are still in the dark. As Sunlight documented thoroughly, NJEA leadership has never informed teachers that $45 million of their dues were wasted on Spiller in any of the NJEA’s main interfaces with teachers: the NJEA website, the NJEA monthly magazine, the NJEA Facebook page or any other social media sites, the Delegate Assembly minutes, or the Summary Budgets.  Nothing. As a result, and despite Sunlight’s best efforts, many — perhaps most — teachers are still not aware about what happened. Sunlight still gets many (erroneous) comments from teachers on our Facebook feeds stating that teachers’ regular dues are not allowed to be spent on politics.  This is a deliberate and continuing effort by NJEA leadership to keep their own members in the dark.

Leadership wants to pretend the Spiller scandal never happened, but we won’t let them. The bottom line is that leadership wants the entire Spiller scandal to disappear down the memory hole, but we are going to try to keep that from happening. Our efforts at the convention are part of that. It’s quite remarkable that it takes an outside organization to inform NJEA members’ of the truth while their own leadership tries to keep them in the dark. We ask again: which organization is pro-teacher and which is not?