Will NJEA-Funded Mendacious Michael “Hundreds of Millions” Gottesman Remove the Names of School Children from His Open-Records Request?

What say you, Mendacious Michael “Hundreds of Millions” Gottesman?  Will you remove the names of the 82 Cherry Hill school children from your open-records request so that they are no longer visible to the public?

Sunlight was alerted to a recent blog post that accused Gottesman and his New Jersey Public Education Coalition (NJPEC) of allowing the erroneous publication of the names of at least 82 Cherry Hill K-5 students whose parents had opted them out of the state’s controversial sex education curriculum.  Making these names public would be a violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.  The blog makes clear that the Cherry Hill school district made the mistake of providing the names of the students rather than the number in response to a an open-records request from Gottesman, and that the private entity OPRAmachine actually published the information on its website.  But Gottesman saw the Cherry Hill response and knew it contained the names of children and yet did nothing, letting the names sit there in public for over a year. He’s a lawyer; he presumably knows the law.

Gottesman professes to care about the well-being of school kids — indeed, protection of children from “attack by extremists” is a core NJPEC principle. But what about the 82 children whose parents opted them out of sex ed classes?  What about the protection of their identities from public disclosure, Mr. Gottesman?

As Sunlight’s readers know, Gottesman’s NJPEC is a NJEA-funded front that has been an active participant in the “culture wars” in many New Jersey school districts, including recruiting, training, and supporting progressive/NJEA-friendly school board candidates both in 2023 and 2024.

The progressive zealot Gottesman is a proven liar whose trademark is bullying.  He has tried to intimidate parents and school boards that dare to oppose him (here and here).  One of Gottesman’s go-to tactics is inundating 387 school boards with onerous open-records requests.  This is basically lawfare against selected districts and parents — that is, those that dare to challenge Gottesman’s progressive view of education.  The Cherry Hill request was part of this onslaught.  

But his zeal appears to have blinded him here.  We’ll see if Gottesman tries to correct this blatant infringement of these children’s privacy rights.

And we ask whether this is really the sort of effort that the NJEA wants to bankroll.  Is the NJEA OK with the violation of the privacy rights of school kids?