Board members receive ethics training in public
HAMILTON >> Nearly four years after the federal extortion trial of former Hamilton mayor John Bencivengo exposed a culture of corruption within the Hamilton Township School District, the nine current members of the Hamilton Township Board of Education received formal ethics training at a special openpublic meeting.
The Tuesday evening training session provided hypothetical scenarios on what is allowable and not allowable for school board members, such as the fact that board members are permitted to post comments on Facebook on the condition they identify themselves as school board members and post content that is factual and content that does not breach confidentiality.
“Don’t discuss confidential matters with anyone but the board,” said Jesse Adams Jr., a field services representative for the New Jersey School Boards Association.
At the ethics training session Tuesday evening, Adams gave a presentation educating Hamilton’s Board of Education members about the history, scope and wisdom of the state’s ethics rules that school board members are required to abide by.
Adams said New Jersey school board members, despite being unpaid public servants, are the most regulated public officials in the state. “You have rules and regulations that none of the others have to worry about,” he told the board members during his presentation.
According to the New Jersey School Boards Association, the New Jersey School Ethics Act requires local board of education members to avoid prohibited conduct, adhere to a code of ethics and undergo training in the responsibilities of school board membership.
The School Boards Association, also known as the NJSBA, is the organization that trains New Jersey school board members on the state’s ethics rules.
“I’m glad to see the Hamilton Township Board of Education conduct an ethics training in such an open and transparent manner which will help the public better understand the board’s ethical obligations,” said former Hamilton school board member John Hulick.
Although the special board meeting was being video-recorded by the school district’s in-house camcorder, Hulick criticized the board for passing a policy March 21 that allows the district to cherry pick when and what it wants to film. Since the policy passed, the district generally videotapes school presentations and ceremonies but does not film general comments from the public.
Only six members of the public attended the special meeting, including 2016 school board candidate Girard Casale, who called the meeting “a joke” and “waste of time.”
“Too many problems in Hamilton to waste time on this,” Casale said in a written statement to The Trentonian before he left the meeting. “This was a joke. As board members, they should know this.”
For the school board members to receive mandatory ethics training in an open-public session shows the Hamilton Township Board of Education wants the community and lawenforcement authorities to know it takes the state’s code of ethics very seriously. of dollars between 2005 and 2007.
Warney admitted he had accepted corrupt payments from Ljuba, but Coluccio previously told The Trentonian he had never taken any bribes, and Tozzi’s allies in Robbinsville said they had found no evidence Tozzi engaged in illegal or unethical conduct.
“I’ve never once seen anything in her character to give me pause,” Robbinsville Mayor Dave Fried said of Tozzi during a Robbinsville Township Council meeting in November 2012.
Tozzi served on the Hamilton Township school board from 2002 until she resigned in 2008. She began working for Robbinsville Township municipal government in 2008 as a constituent relations specialist and eventually was promoted to her current job as
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