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Thursday, August 9, 2012

Jersey Jazzman: Tea Partyin' = Teacher Bashin'

Jersey Jazzman: Tea Partyin' = Teacher Bashin':


Tea Partyin' = Teacher Bashin'

Maureen Castriotta is no ordinary suburban school board member.

Castriotta serves on the Roxbury, NJ Board of Education, a high-performing system in Morris County. She urged the defeat of her own board's budget in 2011, and supported a slate of anti-union, cost-cutting board candidates (they lost).

Castriotta got into hot water with her fellow board members back in 2010 during Chris Christie's War On Schools. At the time, high school students in some districts were organizing protests against Christie's draconian school budget cuts. The Roxbury administration decided the best course of action was to allow a student protest but to manage it, hopefully creating a safer atmosphere than an unsupervised, spontaneous