N.J. school board member could lose seat in backlash over survey about gender identity – NJ.com

A member of Cedar Grove’s school board criticized for her role in distributing a gender identity survey to students last year could face a recall election after residents collected thousands of signatures on a petition for her ouster.

Christine Dye, who has served on the Essex County district’s board of education for 11 years, including five years as president, is the target of the recall.

Dye was board president when the pre-K-12 school district administered a survey last spring that asked students as young as 9 about gender identity and other issues without first asking parents if they wanted to opt-in. Dye also served on the local Equity Diversity and Advisory Council that created the survey.

Community members filed a petition with the state Department of Education in July 2021 objecting to how the survey was distributed in the 1,570-student district. A state administrative law judge later ruled the district violated the law in administering the survey without the required parental consent.

Dye did not respond to requests by email and phone to comment on the petitions calling for a recall election.

Recall petitions seeking to remove Dye from her position as a member of the board of education were approved for circulation in April, the Essex County Clerk’s Office said.

Dye wrote a letter to the editor published on a local news site in April stating she could “fully understand the concern of the parents over how the survey was administered,” but added, “this topic has been exploited to the point of destruction.”

She noted that all five board members agreed to send out the survey and, ultimately, the state Education Commissioner did not fine or punish the board.

Dye, a resident of Cedar Grove for 17 years, wrote she has three children who went through the district’s schools and she has been a volunteer in town for years, starting with being a class mom. She is a certified public accountant and chief financial officer of a software company, she said.

The controversy over the student survey began less than a month after it was distributed when community members filed a petition of appeal with the state Department of Education.

The appeal was less about the survey’s subject matter than it was about the way it was distributed, said Patricia Montana, a Cedar Grove parent and one of the petitioners in the case.

“They did not follow district policy and state and federal law when it comes to administering surveys of this nature,” Montana said.

A state administrative law judge found the Cedar Grove Board of Education violated state law when it surveyed students about their gender, race and religious affiliation without first going through parents. The state Department of Education upheld the ruling.

Montana was among parents asking the district leaders to acknowledge wrongdoing, review district policies and procedures and remove members of the Equity Diversity Advisory Council who contributed to the survey.

But Dye, who was then the president of the school board, and other board members did not take the concerns seriously, said David Newman, a sponsor of the petition to recall Dye and father of two Cedar Grove students.

Friction over the surveys also bubbled over during a November board meeting, when board members left during the public comment portion of the meeting, resulting in lack of a quorum and adjournment of the meeting.

That was final straw for Newman, who said the incident stifled public opinion.

“It was an aggressive, kind of dismissive reaction,” Newman said. “Despite where you land on the aisle, when it comes to children, we have to make sure that we’re being insanely over-protective with the things that are being taught to them and the people that are being trusted with their part of the day.”

The recall petition is about more than Dye’s involvement with the survey, said Montana.

“It’s in large part due to her mistreatment and behavior towards community members who might hold different views and her unwillingness to listen and address parental concerns,” she said.

Dye is also under fire for her actions at the high school’s June 21 commencement ceremony, where she allegedly refused to shake the hand of a Cedar Grove High School graduate because of a dispute with the students’ parents.

The Cedar Grove Board of Education passed a resolution apologizing for the incident on Tuesday. Dye was not present at the meeting.

“The motive for this inexcusable and childish act related to disputes between this board member and the graduate’s parents, which the board member chose to visit on the graduate,” the resolution said.

Under state law, a petition to recall a school board member must be signed by more than 25% of the people registered to vote within the district on the date of the last general election. That can be a difficult threshold to reach, which is why most recall efforts never get to a vote.

Nationwide, only about 20% of attempts to force recall elections for school board members were successful between 2009 and 2021, and they only resulted in about 10% of the subjects of the recalls being kicked out of office, according to statistics tracked by the nonprofit website Ballotpedia.

There were two recall election efforts launched in New Jersey last year — one in Nutley Public Schools and the other in Ridgefield Park Public Schools — but neither went to a vote.

In Cedar Grove, a total of 2,802 signatures was required for Dye’s recall petition, according to voter registration data. The petition surpassed that amount and was certified by the Essex County Clerk’s Office earlier this month.

Dye attempted to challenge the petition, but the clerk’s office upheld its original ruling, a spokesman said.

Dye has until next Thursday to resign from her seat on the board of education or file an action against the clerk’s office in superior court, a spokesman said.

If she does neither, a referendum on Dye’s recall will be placed on the November general election ballot and the clerk’s office will begin accepting petitions from school board candidates who could run to take Dye’s place.

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Jackie Roman may be reached at jroman@njadvancemedia.com.