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A state commission dismissed ethics complaints against two Newark Board of Education members in connection with the school board’s decision not to swear in a charter school teacher who had been appointed to fill a vacant seat last fall.
The New Jersey School Ethics Commission found insufficient evidence that board President Hasani Council violated the state school ethics act by denying Thomas Luna his oath of office because of his employment as a KIPP charter school teacher and failing to place his swearing-in on an agenda.
The commission also dismissed another complaint that alleged board member Josephine Garcia violated the ethics act because she voted against a motion to swear in Luna to the nine-member governing board.
Both state rulings were made in September.
Council and Garcia did not respond to emailed questions about why Luna was not sworn in last year despite unanimous board approval and why they voted against a motion to seat Luna.
The complaints all stem from confusion around the fall 2023 appointment of Luna, a KIPP Rise Academy teacher and two-time school board candidate. Though the board unanimously voted Luna into a seat vacated by former member Asia Norton in October 2023, it failed to swear him in without explanation during November and December meetings.
Luna and the complainants believe he was kept off the board because of his status as a charter school teacher, even though charter teachers have served in the past and doing so violates no board bylaws.
One of the complainants, Ade’Kamil Kelly, a 2023 school board candidate, said in a call to Chalkbeat on Tuesday that he doesn’t feel the matter is settled and disagrees with the state’s decision. “Tommy should be serving on the board,” he said. In his complaint, Kelly alleges Council went “beyond the actions of policy making” and took away the state’s power to investigate a “perceived conflict of interest.”
“How do you vote for someone unanimously as a group and then double back?” said Kelly, whose complaint, along with Sakinah Ahmad’s, a Newark resident, was consolidated into one case for the state’s review.
Luna’s swearing-in was supposed to take place during the November 2023 board meeting, but it was delayed without an explanation. During that meeting, Council attributed the delay to information the board received from a public records request and a review of School Ethics Commission opinions regarding conflicts of interest for board members.
Kelly said that if the board voted on Luna before that information came back, “you didn’t do all of your proper due diligence.”
In an email to Chalkbeat last week, Luna said he was unaware of the ethics complaints and was not contacted by state officials during their review process. Luna also said he was never given a full explanation by Newark district leaders as to why he wasn’t seated.
Before the November 2023 school board meeting started, Council and the district’s business administrator Valerie Wilson spoke with Luna and told him they were pausing his swearing-in “because there were questions about my employment,” Luna told Chalkbeat.
“And that’s the last I heard about the matter despite some attempts to get clarification,” Luna added.
At the December 2023 school board meeting, two board members expressed confusion about the delay in seating Luna after member Allison James-Frison introduced a motion to swear him in but was shot down.
The New Jersey Children’s Foundation also raised questions about the move and in January submitted a legal memo to the Newark school board that recommended Luna’s appointment to the board after finding no legal basis for delaying his swearing-in. The memo also noted school board members who have previously served and had ties to the KIPP charter school network.
Former board member Rashied McCreary was a teacher at KIPP Rise Academy when he was elected to the board in 2012. Norton, who was first elected in 2018, was a kindergarten teacher at KIPP Life Academy when she ran for a seat on the school board. She left that position in June 2018, according to her LinkedIn profile. In 2021, Murray-Thomas’s appointment to the board of directors of the KIPP Foundation, a nonprofit that assists KIPP charter schools through training and fundraising, also sparked ethics questions but she continued to serve on the board.
Ahmad and Kelly’s complaints claim that Luna was denied his oath of office by the board president, who “is responsible for placing items on the agenda for the Board to consider, and therefore, violated the Act.”
“When you’re the board president, the council president, you’re CEO, the buck stops at you,” said Kelly in a phone interview, adding that he filed his complaint because he felt an “injustice” was done.
In February and March, Council filed written statements to the state against Ahmad and Kelly’s complaints and called the allegations “frivolous” and said they “failed to allege facts sufficient to establish violations.” Also in February, Garcia filed a written statement to the state that alleged the complaint against her, filed by former KIPP teacher Cara Gagliano Costa, was frivolous.
In her complaint, Costa alleged that Garcia’s vote against the December 2023 motion to swear in Luna “is not a power granted by statute to any board member,” and therefore, a violation of the ethics act.
Claims that the members violated any board policies or procedures for not seating Luna “fall beyond the scope, authority, and jurisdiction of the Commission” and were dismissed by the state, the decisions read. Complainants could have brought their allegations to a court of law to substantiate their claims that members violated board procedures and policies, according to the decisions.
The School Ethics Commission is responsible for enforcing the state’s School Ethics Act.
Kelly said “there could be more information out there that we just don’t have access to right now” and alluded to the board’s lack of transparency about the situation.
Luna, who continues to teach at KIPP Rise, says he is grateful that community members “would take the initiative to seek out actual answers to a very bizarre situation.”
Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.