I hope everyone is having a spectacular start to their summer, and I cannot thank this community enough for helping to make our Community Day Festival on June 8 the biggest and best we have ever hosted!
Some of the many wonderful non-profit vendors at Community Day specialize in mental health awareness and are well-versed in the issues of bullying. School may be out for the summer, but troubling incidents of bullying are showing no signs of taking a vacation.
As I penned in a Facebook post on my personal page last month, we have taught our children that bullying should not be tolerated. Schools take it very seriously, and most have a zero-tolerance policy, or at least they should. But, sadly, it is the adults who do not get the message. They think the same rules don’t apply to them because “they know better.”
The retirement of Robbinsville Schools Superintendent Brian Betze became effective on July 1. Over the course of a year Betze has been the target of cyber bullying, an online campaign led by a long-time teacher at the school, who also happens to hold considerable influence with the teacher’s union (NJEA).
Online harassment in the form of emails from anonymous addresses and fictitious Facebook profiles have targeted him and some of his fellow administrators. This hurt his cause as an administrator and damaged his reputation during a time when he was trying to get two budget referendums passed to make up for huge gaps in the district’s budget.
As it turns out, I was also targeted by these fake profiles, and was appalled by some of the vile things that have been said about me.
The veteran teacher responsible was confronted following an investigation using digital forensics, which revealed that they used a school computer and a private on-site server to push their agenda, which was to do everything possible to make Betze’s life miserable.
They were suspended until a more thorough investigation by the school is complete. To clarify one of my earlier social media posts on the subject, this is currently not considered a criminal matter in the eyes of the Robbinsville Township Police Department, or the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office.
However, even if the actions of this teacher and anyone who may be complicit with them may not rise to the level of criminality, this behavior is not okay. Full stop. This individual and the special interest group they are very closely aligned with have also been wading into our local elections, which includes the most recent Board of Education election in November 2023.
Knowing what we now know, are we to assume those election returns, which resulted in a slew of new BOE members, were all legitimately won? Do we want our candidates, and our taxpayer dollars, chosen and funded by special interest groups that have no qualms about creating fake profiles to spread lies and misinformation?
As of this writing, no one from the BOE had issued a statement on the matter or even publicly acknowledged that the conversation was ongoing. Why?
As previously stated in my original post, I am not here to say whether Mr. Betze did a good or a bad job. I do not believe I’m qualified to make that call. What I can say is that no one, and certainly not someone in a leadership position tending to our children, should be subjected to harassment or bullying because a specific interest group disagrees with the decisions being made.
How is this district supposed to attract a quality permanent replacement for Brian Betze if this undercurrent of toxicity is allowed to permeate the school system? This is not who we are. We do not tolerate it from our kids, so why should we tolerate it from the adults?
I have been asked why I have chosen to speak out on the matter. There has already been a police investigation, which is now closed, and I felt this needed to be made public in the name of transparency. This behavior is abhorrent and has no place in our schools or community.
When things of this nature happen, the person in question usually resigns, and it is labeled a personnel matter, thus leaving the public in the dark as to what exactly happened and the rest of the collateral damage. This is a serious issue, and the public has a right to know. We believe this individual was working with a small group of people, some of whom are not district employees, but are highly engaged politically in Robbinsville.
My genuine concern is how the School Board will handle this, including whether it will ever tell the public how and why this happened. Some of our freshly elected BOE members may have received endorsements from this individual, who also may have helped those now-seated Board members with financial assistance during their campaigns.
Need more reasons why I decided to make the post, then follow it up here in the Robbinsville Advance? I had over a dozen people contact me within two days of the post to share similar stories of bullying that have happened to them and/or their children. This behavior has been going on for way too long.
We are taught that if we see something, we should say something. I did that.
For as long as I am in this office, I will be standing up for anyone being bullied. I don’t have kids in school any longer, so I can handle anything thrown my way. The best way to handle a bully is to stand up to them… and expose them.
Dave Fried is the mayor and Director of Public Safety for Robbinsville Township
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