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Had they gotten into some kind of trouble? Were they fired? Did they quit?
“We found out that we had no principal and vice-principal through the hair salon and through town gossip,” prominent civil attorney Michael Epstein said during a Wyckoff Board of Education Zoom meeting Monday night.
Parents in the northwest Bergen County town who are concerned for their children’s safety and well-being clicked into the meeting, where the board approved the appointment of an acting principal for the Eisenhower Middle School.
Little was said apart from that, leaving them with more questions than answers.
For nearly a month, parents of the school’s 670 or so students had emailed the district’s new superintendent, Dr. Kerri Postma, and board members asking why all traces of Principal Christopher Iasiello and Assistant Principal Christopher Giordano were abruptly gone.
Many had come to love Iasiello, who’d been in the position eight years, and Giordano, who came to the district five years ago.
District officials ignored public and private requests for information – not just from parents but for district taxpayers, several told Daily Voice.
Both men have also essentially remained unreachable.
Meanwhile, remote learning continued without incident.
The next piece of correspondence from the middle school didn’t address the issue, parents said. It did, however, replace the signatures of both Iasiello and Giordano with that of Stacey Linzenbold, who’d been the district’s “anti-bullying coordinator."
Then came a letter from Postma last Friday informing parents that the board was voting in a few days to appoint Assistant Supt. Grace White as acting principal.
Board members approved White’s appointment during Monday night's Zoom meeting without explaining what had happened.
"The board really has no comment at this time for reasons of privacy and confidentiality,” Board President Robert Francin said (WATCH meeting on YouTube below).
“We have two primary objectives,” Francin said. “One: Are the children safe and two, are they learning? And that is our goal. It’s not the board’s role to make those things happen. It’s the BOE ‘s role to ensure those things are happening by the administration.”
Township Committeeman Thomas Madigan pressed the board president for more of an explanation.
“There are so many people in town who are concerned,” he said. “There’s so many rumors out there that I don’t think is helpful to anybody.”
Madigan, himself a former trustee for the joint Ramapo Indian Hills Regional High School, said he completely understands the legal implications of discussing personnel matters.
Yet while the board “may not be able to say what it is,” the committeeman told Francin, “you can say what it isn’t.”
“There’s a lot of people, parents, who are concerned about their children. Maybe you can communicate it better directly to them,” he said. “They’re coming to us, we have nothing to do with it.
“You could take whatever position you want. But it may be helpful reassuring parents who are in the school today that their safety and welfare of their kids is paramount and there are no issues there.”
Francin thanked Madigan.
Then he asked for other concerns before the board began discussing snow days.
All appearances showed success at Eisenhower.
The middle school has “consistently demonstrated excellence in academic achievement by outperforming over 90% of districts in New Jersey on standardized assessments such as the PARCC exam," the The National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform wrote in naming it a "New Jersey School to Watch" in 2016.
The forum recertified Eisenhower two years ago.
“It is very strange in NJ for 2 tenured admin to disappear like this with ZERO communication to parents and taxpayers,” one of the parents who reached out to Daily Voice said. “They have literally vanished into thin air!”
The "lack of transparency and information” should be considered a “black mark on the board and the administration,” Epstein said during Monday night's meeting.
The attorney told the board that he understands there is “probably a legal proceeding that does not allow you to say much, but you could have said something, that they are not gonna be in the building for reasons which you can’t disclose.
“It could have been a three-sentence letter that at least we know that the people who’ve been running this building for a long period of time weren’t there,” he said.
“We all know the value of a good principal and assistant principal,” Epstein said. “No one can tell me that just moving two other people into those offices is the same thing, especially in a pandemic when our kids are suffering as is.”
The discussion ended with Francin, the board president, telling Epstein: “We’re not thrilled that this is the position that we’re in. But as an attorney you would understand that we have to respect the privacy rights of folks that work for us.”
WATCH THE MEETING HERE:
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