More Proof that NJEA Leadership Hid the Truth About Spending $45 Million of Dues on Sean Spiller’s Vanity Run for Governor

A few more interesting tidbits from the September NJEA Review, which contains the most recent NJEA Summary Budget and Delegate Assembly (DA) minutes provided to teachers. Both reveal the extent to which NJEA leadership hid the truth from teachers: that $45 million of their highest-in-the-nation dues were being spent on then-NJEA President Sean Spiller’s vanity run for governor.  It’s a scandal of historic proportions.

The DA minutes are so dated as to be useless. The DA minutes are from May 20, 2023, so they are over 2 years old. We’re not sure why it takes so long to type up the minutes, but nothing actionable could come from such dated information. We’d guess that’s deliberate.

And don’t reveal anything about the NJEA’s spending dues on politics.  As has always been the case with the DA minutes, there is no mention of the NJEA’s Super PAC, Garden State Forward, at all, nor of the NJEA’s dues-funded political activities at the time. This is despite the fact that by May 20, 2023, NJEA leadership already knew Spiller was going to run for governor and had secretly contributed $3 million of dues via Garden State Forward to Protecting Our Democracy, the dark-money Super PAC that served as Spiller’s publicity platform leading up to his official announcement. Members would presumably want to know how millions of their dues were being spent, but nothing was revealed in these minutes or any previous ones.  Again, we’d guess that’s deliberate.

The Summary Budget provides no real-time information. Sunlight has amply documented how NJEA leadership hid the truth about the using $45 million of dues to fund Spiller’s run.  Part of that occurred in the annual Summary Budgets where Garden State Forward’s expenditures are disguised as “Organizational Projects.” But even if a teacher somehow knew that “Organizational Projects” meant “Garden State Forward,” the massive expenditure on Spiller was never revealed in any of the Summary Budgets published prior to election day (which included proposed budgets for future years). Only in the most recent, September 2025 Summary Budget does a $36,750,000 expenditure appear.  Needless to say, it jumps off the page, but now the primary is over and the money is long gone.  Again, we’d guess that’s deliberate.

Spiller and NJEA leadership hid the truth from members. All of this goes to show how NJEA leadership deliberately hid the truth from members.  Up until the very end of the primary campaign, when Spiller and NJEA leadership were finally forced to admit that they were using teachers’ dues to fund his run, NJEA leadership succeeded in hiding the truth, and the most recent DA minutes and Summary Budget show how they did it.

It’s a scandal of historic proportions.