A vote on the controversial contract of superintendent Charles Epps was postponed by the Jersey City Board of Education Thursday for a second time this month, shifting the focus of the meeting away from the contract and back to the day-to-day struggle to improve Jersey City schools.
Even though the Board of Education didn’t vote on a new contract for superintendent Charles Epps, this week’s three-hour public hearing exposed fault lines in state, city and community politics that are likely to persist even after the board votes.
Despite the Board of Education’s (BOE) June 22 6-2-1 vote in favor of negotiating a new contract with superintendent Charles Epps, tensions at the board’s public meeting last night suggest that the contract controversy is far from over.
As the Jersey City Board of Education’s last public convening of the school year, Thursday’s meeting doubled as a showcase of the past ten months of student and teacher achievements in the Jersey City Public Schools. And yet the drama did not end when the student performers and their parents went home — several high stakes issues, most notably the future of Superintendent Charles Epps’ contract, elicited impassioned pleas from concerned community members for whom the performances and award ceremony were but a preamble to the night’s main event.
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