EAST ORANGE, N.J. (PIX11) -- Deficit or deceit? That's what parents, teachers and some school administrators were chanting at an East Orange Board of Education meeting Monday night.
The group is upset about what it says is the lack of transparency from East Orange School Superintendent Christopher Irving and members of the board.
In October, the superintendent used the term "deficit" in a public presentation about the district's financial situation. In December, dozens of people including social workers, Spanish teachers and substitutes, lost their jobs under a Reduction in Force (RIF).
Thelma Ramsey Bryant, the president of the East Orange Administrators' Association, then used the Open Public Records Act to obtain documents the superintendent and an auditor sent to the New Jersey Department of Education (DOE). The New Jersey DOE had accused the district of violating the law by not reporting the deficit.
In those documents, Superintendent Irving stated he did not mean deficit in the legal sense of the word, and added, "The District has and had adequate funding, and was not in a deficit situation prior to the RIF." Irving added, "The RIF action was in most part academically-driven to improve academic performance, and to ensure that the District’s limited resources was used more effectively and efficiently."
Amid the public outcry, Superintendent Irving addressed the issue at the start of Monday's meeting. He said he should have used another term like "projected shortfall," but added, "The bottom line is, we do not have enough money to match our revenues and expenditures over the course of this year."
The superintendent said the district was hit with millions of dollars in overdue bills from vendors, explaining, "When you only have a $2.3 million surplus from the year before, and you have almost $7 million in bills going into the new year, that surplus is almost all wiped away. We've talked about reserves. We used up every dollar."
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