Legal Woes Don’t Stop NJEA President Sean Spiller from Spending Teachers’ Dues on His Personal Political Career

Despite NJEA President Sean Spiller’s legal woes and his decision not to run for re-election as Montclair mayor, he’s still pursuing his (post-Montclair) personal political career and using hundreds of thousands of teachers’ dues to do it.  That’s the conclusion we draw from an InsiderNJ press release from Protecting Our Democracy, Spiller’s personal dark-money Super PAC.  The NJEA is Protecting Our Democracy’s founding donor, bankrolling a multi-million-dollar statewide campaign to ….. promote Spiller.  ALL of this is paid for by NJ teachers’ highest-in-the-nation dues.  The conflict of interest is manifest, but that’s never stopped Spiller.

Per InsiderNJ, Protecting Our Democracy will be running TV and digital ads in 2024 as “part of a statewide, six-figure multimedia communications campaign that will complement Protecting Our Democracy’s outreach efforts.”  Predictably,  the ad is all about Spiller: he narrates it and is the dominant video presence.  Having been forced to give up his scandal-plagued mayoralty — the word around Montclair is that Spiller would have lost a re-election bid — Spiller is now aiming to slay dragons like Donald Trump, as the ad depicts.  Despite his on-going legal woes — he was named in a whistleblower lawsuit and has pleaded the 5th — Spiller apparently still has his eye on higher office.

Recall that Protecting Our Democracy was a launched with the NJEA as its “founding donor,” bankrolling a “substantial seven-figure” — that is, millions of dollars — statewide, multi-media campaign.  The NJEA’s largesse is almost certainly funded by the NJEA’s Super PAC, Garden State Forward, which in turn is funded by NJ teachers’ highest-in-the-nation regular dues.  Yet, as Sunlight has amply documented, NJ teachers have been kept in the dark about Garden State Forward.  Most teachers do not even know it exists, let alone that they are paying for it.  They almost certainly don’t know they are paying for Spiller’s personal political career.

This is just another in a long line of conflicts of interest that have characterized Spiller’s political career.  As president of the NJEA, Spiller has a duty to represent the best interests of the teachers who are his members, but how does spending millions of their dues on his own political ambitions benefit teachers?  Teachers have no say in the matter.  No wonder NJEA leadership wants to keep the facts hidden from them.

Once again, we are struck by Spiller’s brazenness.  He has been rebuked repeatedly for his various conflicts by a Superior Court and Montclair citizens.  He is under a dark cloud of legal troubles with criminal implications (the 5th Amendment protects against self-incrimination).  And yet he boldly goes forth, spending even more of teachers’ dues for his own benefit, blithely ignoring the obvious conflict of interest.

We wonder what teachers would think about their dues being used to fund the personal political ambitions of soon-to-be-ex-Mayor Sean Spiller, a controversial political figure to say the least.  We believe that if they knew the facts, they would be outraged.