NJ Education Report

An ex-School Board member from Hamilton Township had almost as much fun writing this op ed in the Trenton Times as his audience will have reading about the breath-taking degree of nepotism in this Mercer County school district. Entitled “Everything is Relative,” George W. Fisher, tongue firmly in cheek, espouses his esteem for this “exclusive patronage pool,” a veritable “family welfare system is in the making:”

Nevertheless, I feel compelled to express publicly my admiration of the district’s ability to engineer its version of relativity into a family support system . A greater utopia I am hard-pressed to imagine. Let me offer supporting facts. In 2003, only one of the nine members of the board had any relatives working in the district. He had three, so he might be regarded as a pioneer of the project. By 2008, five members were relative-on-board, with a total of seven employed in the district. In 2009, while the number of members with family in-district dropped to four, the total of employed relatives remained at six. Meanwhile, the superintendent and two assistants were also nurturing the value of paid family togetherness. In 2003, they contributed five relatives to the district; by 2009, the number had doubled to 10.