Where Did the Money Go?

How to Read This Report

If you have ever tried to follow a Board of Education meeting, on BoardDocs, in person, or in the minutes, you know the language can be hard to follow. Resolutions are full of parliamentary jargon: "WHEREAS," "BE IT RESOLVED," "pursuant to N.J.S.A. 18A:18A-4.1," and references to prior resolutions by number. It is designed for legal compliance, not for residents trying to understand what is happening with their tax dollars.

This report is a plain-language guide.I translated the jargon into straightforward English so that any Jersey City resident, whether you are a parent, a student, a homeowner, or just someone who pays taxes here, can understand what the Board is approving, what documentation is missing, and why it matters. When I do use technical terms (like "encumbrance" or "excess surplus"), I explain what they mean right there in the text.

Think of this as the companion guide you wish existed when you tried to read the meeting minutes yourself.

TLDR

I looked at every contract the Jersey City Board of Education approved over the last two years. I checked whether the actual agreements, the documents that say what a company will do, for how much, and under what conditions, were available to the public.

They almost never were.

Out of 484 unique spending commitments worth $514.9 million, I found 25 actual signed contracts attached across only 15 of those commitments (3.1%), covering just $39.2 million (7.6% of total spending). The count of 25 is higher than 15 because a few items have multiple signed agreements attached. For example, the 2024/25 Preschool Program Contract has separate signed contracts for two of its childcare providers, Academy House Child Development Center and the Head Start grantee Greater Bergen Community Action. That means over 92% of contract approvals lack the actual agreement.Another 281 items (58%) are backed only by internal PO forms, and 81 items have zero documents attached at all. And when I compared my findings to the district's own official audit? The auditors found the same problems, and then some.

The documentation gap is both a transparency problem and a compliance problem. It affects every taxpayer and student in Jersey City.

Who I Am

OCC Research builds governance infrastructure for institutions that matter. The Governance Memory System (GMS) treats governance as a solvable engineering problem. When decisions are documented, tracked, and made accessible, better outcomes follow.

This investigation applies GMS methodology to a question any Jersey City resident should be able to answer: When the Board of Education votes to spend your money, can you see the actual contract?

What I Did

I built software that systematically analyzed the Jersey City Board of Education's public records on BoardDocs, the platform where the Board posts its meeting agendas and attachments.

Here is what I checked:

1. Every meeting from January 2024 through March 2026, 42 meetings total (regular sessions, special meetings, and reorganizations)
2. Every contract approval on each agenda, 504 items where the Board voted to spend money on a contract, agreement, or purchase order over $10,000
3. Every attached document. I downloaded 461 PDFs and analyzed what was actually inside them using text extraction and OCR (optical character recognition for scanned documents)
4. Every vendor name. I identified who received the contracts, extracting names from resolution text, cross-referencing procurement numbers, and OCR-ing purchase order forms

All data was collected from publicly available records. No private or restricted information was accessed.

The Numbers

This report uses two headline numbers depending on what is being measured. 504 is the total number of contract-related board actions tracked. Every time the Board voted on a contract item, it counts. 484 is the number of unique spending commitments. 19 Feb 29 to Mar 19, 2024 re-votes and one Hewlett Packard state contract #89974 re-vote (May 22 to Aug 28, 2025) are removed to avoid double-counting. The 68 / $77.6M genuine undocumentedfigure filters the raw 81-item gap further by removing 13 items that are not vendor spending: 1 rescission (a cancellation of a prior obligation), 1 grant application (incoming money, not outgoing spending), 1 bid threshold policy resolution, and 10 amendments whose parent resolution is documented and whose chain cumulative increments stay within the parent's not-to-exceed ceiling.

What's Actually in the Attachments?

When the Board votes to approve a contract, they sometimes attach a document. You might think that document would be the contract itself, the agreement with terms, signatures, and a scope of work.

It almost never is.

Here is what I actually found inside 461 attached PDFs:

The bottom line, at the item level: 25 actual signed contracts are attached across only 15 unique Board commitments. Those 15 items cover $39.2 million of the $514.9 million the Board approved. That leaves 469 unique commitments (96.9% of items, 92.4% of dollars) where a signed agreement is not publicly available. Among those 469, the biggest sub-category is items backed only by PO forms, 281 items ($164.5M, nearly a third of total spending).

One item alone represents 38% of all undocumented spending:the June 26, 2025 Contracted Childcare Center Contract for 2025/26 (Resolution 8.69), worth $31.3 million, has zero documents attached. The prior year's version of the same program (Resolution 8.73 from June 27, 2024, $34.3 million) had signed contracts attached for two childcare providers: Academy House and the Head Start grantee Greater Bergen Community Action. The 2025/26 vote attached nothing. Same annual program, same drafting department. The documentation regressed from partial coverage to none.

What the Auditors Found (And How It Confirms My Investigation)

The district's own independent auditors, Lerch, Vinci & Bliss, LLP, have now completed audits for two consecutive fiscal years: FY2023-24 (ending June 30, 2024) and FY2024-25 (ending June 30, 2025). The FY2024 audit contained 19 findings. The FY2025 audit contained 13 findings.

Here is the problem: 10 of the same findings appear in both years. The auditors told the district to fix these issues in 2024. The district did not fix them. The same problems showed up again in 2025.

Repeat Findings, Two Years Running

The FY2024 audit also found issues that may or may not have been resolved: CASPER program timesheets missing (2024-3), payroll check verification not done since 2019 (2024-4), invalid purchase order encumbrances (2024-5), Energy Savings payments not in financial system (2024-6), food service deposits made a month late (2024-16), ESEA/ESSER budget reporting inaccuracies (2024-11.1, 2024-11.2), ESSER employee rate/timesheet issues (2024-12), payroll deduction discrepancies (2024-2), and capital assets ledger not maintained (2024-19).

The FY2025 audit found new problems not in the prior year: employment contracts missing for Board-approved administrators (2025-2), federal grant salary approvals missing from Board minutes (2025-7), and students categorized as special education on state aid application without current IEPs (2025-11).

Many directly confirm what my GMS investigation discovered.

Finding-by-Finding Comparison

Missing Contract Documentation

What I found: 81 unique board actions worth $81.7 million had zero documents attached on BoardDocs. After filtering out items that are not vendor spending, 1 rescission, 1 grant application, 1 bid threshold policy, and 10 amendments absorbed within documented parent contracts, the genuine undocumented vendor spending is 68 items worth $77.6 million. Of 461 PDFs attached across the dataset, only 25 are actual signed contracts, attached to just 15 of the 484 unique commitments.

What the auditors found (Finding 2025-8): "Contract awards and purchases which exceeded the bid threshold were not approved in the minutes and therefore we were unable to determine the method of procurement." The auditors also found:

• Prevailing wage reports from construction vendors were missing
• Political contribution disclosure forms were missing
• Post-award advertisement notices were missing
• Quotes were not obtained for certain purchases exceeding the legal threshold

What this means: The auditors could not even verify how contracts were awarded because the documentation did not exist. The FY2024 audit (Finding 2024-13) found the same thing the year before, plus two additional problems: "Contract change orders were not always approved by the Board in the official minutes" and "Documentation was unable to be provided for audit with respect to certain contracts awarded through the public advertisement for bid."

Two years in a row, the district's own auditors said: we asked for the contracts, and the district could not produce them. My GMS data shows this is not an occasional oversight, it is the norm.

Missing Employment Contracts

What I found:The Superintendent's employment contract ($330,440) and the School Business Administrator's contract ($216,000) were approved without attached documentation.

What the auditors found (Finding 2025-2): "Salaries of certain administrative personnel approved by the Board in the minutes were not supported by employment contracts. Such contracts are required to be submitted to the County for review and approval."

What this means: The people managing a $900+ million budget do not have publicly verifiable employment agreements. The County is supposed to review these contracts, but they cannot review what does not exist.

State Contract Purchasing Problems

What I found: A Hewlett Packard contract ($1.03 million) for software licenses and hardware maintenance under state contract #89974 was voted on at two separate meetings (May and August 2025) with nearly identical resolution text and no contract documentation at either. CDW contracts ($429K) were also approved under state cooperative purchasing without attached documentation.

What the auditors found (Finding 2025-9): "Contract award documentation was unable to be provided for audit... Per unit prices charged on vendor invoices for payment were not in agreement with the cooperative purchasing contract award documentation... Vendor invoices were not sufficiently detailed to determine compliance with contract award pricing."

What this means: The district is buying from state contract vendors but cannot prove they are getting the prices they agreed to. Without the actual contract on file, there is no way to verify whether the district is being overcharged.

Contracts Over $2.5 Million Not Reported to the State

What I found:Multiple contracts exceeding $2 million without required State Comptroller notification, including a $7.26 million capital reserve withdrawal funding two contractors (C. Dougherty & Co. for $5.19M in boiler replacements and Pennetta Industrial Automation for $2.07M in HVAC upgrades), a $31.3 million 2025/26 Contracted Childcare Center Contract, $10 million in A. Harry Moore and Regional Day School tuition contracts, a $4.84 million property/casualty insurance contract, and $9.7 million in HVAC upgrade contracts at PS#27 and Academy I.

What the auditors found (Finding 2025-10): "Post-award notification to the State Comptroller's office was not made for certain contracts, the cost of which exceeded $2.5 million."

What this means: New Jersey law requires that the State Comptroller be notified about large contracts. The district did not do this, in either year. The FY2024 audit (Finding 2024-15) was even more specific: "a pre-bid notification for a contract exceeding $12.5 million was not made." That means a contract worth more than $12.5 million went through without the State even being told it was happening.

Combined with my finding that these contracts lack public documentation, there is a pattern of large expenditures moving through without proper oversight at any level, not from the public, not from the Board's own records, and not from the State.

Transportation Contract Delays

What I found: Transportation contracts were frequently amended. I found 11 amendments to special education transportation routes across multiple meetings. The original vendor lists were only available in spreadsheet attachments from the original award meeting; follow-up amendments never re-attached the vendor list.

What the auditors found (Finding 2025-13): "Renewal contracts for student transportation services were not submitted to the County for review and approval in a timely manner. Certain contracts were not submitted while others were submitted up to twelve (12) months after approval by the Board."

What this means: The County is supposed to review transportation contracts before they take effect. Instead, contracts were being executed and kids were being transported for up to a year before the County even saw the paperwork.

Financial Reporting System Not Closed on Time

What the auditors found (Finding 2025-3): "The financial reporting system for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025 was not closed for several months subsequent to year end, resulting in financial reporting misstatements related to the District's cash balances. In addition, checks for the 2024-25 fiscal year issued subsequent to year end were back dated."

What this means in plain English:The district's books were not closed on time, which means the financial numbers were shifting even after the fiscal year ended. And checks were being backdated, meaning payments were made to look like they happened during the previous budget year when they actually happened later. This is a basic accounting control that was not being followed.

Bank Reconciliation Problems

What the auditors found (Finding 2025-6): "The District's year-end reconciliation of the general operating bank account was revised several times, resulting in a significant variance between the cash balances reported on the District's financial records and the final reconciled bank account balance."

What this means in plain English:The district tried to reconcile its main bank account at year-end and had to redo it multiple times because the numbers did not match. A "significant variance" between what the books say and what the bank says is a red flag for any organization managing public money.

Three Systems, Zero Contracts

The district operates three separate systems for tracking contracts. None of them reliably contain the actual signed agreement.

System 1: The Procurement Portal (OpenGov)

The district uses an OpenGov e-Procurement portal to manage the bidding process. Vendors register, receive bid notifications, submit proposals, and the district posts solicitations with addenda and specifications.

I manually created an account on the procurement portal to see firsthand what information the district makes available through this system. Even though procurement records should be easily accessible to the public, I wanted to check whether the district kept more detailed documentation behind this slightly gated venue, a portal that requires registration to browse. What I found is that the portal confirms the bidding process happened, but still does not house the signed contracts.

The portal's own terms, written by the district, say this:

"Upon notification of award of contract by the Board of Education, the contractor shall sign and execute a formal contract agreement between the Board of Education and the contractor."

"Contracts and related documents shall be returned to the Office of the School Business Administrator/Board Secretary within ten (10) days of receipt of notification and shall not exceed twenty-one (21) days."

In other words: the district's own procurement rules require a signed contract to exist within 21 days of every Board approval. These contracts are supposed to be returned to the School Business Administrator's office.

I browsed the procurement portal's project list and focused on the highest-value solicitations and ones that indicated contract documentation should be present. The portal confirms these projects went through a formal bidding process with PD numbers, release dates, and addenda. The bidding happened. The Board voted. But the resulting signed contracts still are not on BoardDocs.

System 2: BoardDocs

The public-facing system where residents go to see what the Board voted on. My analysis of 461 attached PDFs found that 68% are internal purchase order forms and 14% are vendor proposals or quotes, together a majority of attachments. Only 25 documents (5.4%) contain actual contract terms, scope, and signatures, and those 25 contracts are attached to just 15 of the 484 unique Board commitments.

System 3: The SBA's Office

The procurement portal says contracts must be returned to the School Business Administrator within 21 days. But when the independent auditors asked for these contracts, they could not find them. Finding 2025-8: "Contract awards and purchases which exceeded the bid threshold were not approved in the minutes and therefore we were unable to determine the method of procurement." Finding 2025-9: "Contract award documentation was unable to be provided for audit."

What This Means

The contracts should exist. The district's own rules require them to be signed within 21 days. The procurement portal proves the bidding happened. The Board voted to approve them. But somewhere between the Board vote and the SBA's filing cabinet, the actual agreements disappear, from the public portal, from the Board's records, and from the auditor's reach.

All three systems exist and function. The issue is a governance memory problem, no system is responsible for ensuring the signed contract makes it from the vendor's desk back to a place where the public, the Board, or the auditors can find it.

The Amendment Chain Gap, A Problem Only Memory Can Solve

This is one of the most important things I found, and it is worth explaining carefully because it affects millions of dollars and it is almost invisible unless you know to look for it.

How It's Supposed to Work

Let's say the Board votes in June to hire 12 bus companies to drive special education students to school. That is a big deal, $1.85 million, split across a dozen small companies. At the June meeting, there is a 5-page spreadsheet attached that lists every company, every route, every daily rate, and every annual total. If you attend that meeting or pull up the agenda on BoardDocs, you can see exactly who is getting paid what.

So far, so good.

What Happens Next

In August, one of those routes needs a change. A student needs a personal aide on the bus. That costs an extra $100 per day. The Board votes to approve the change, an "amendment" to the original contract.

Here is what the August agenda says:

"WHEREAS, the Jersey City Board of Education adopted Resolution 10.16 at the June 27, 2024 board meeting, awarding contracts to multiple vendors..."

That is it. No spreadsheet. No vendor names. No route numbers. Just a reference to "Resolution 10.16" from a meeting two months ago.

If you are a parent, a journalist, or a concerned citizen reading the August agenda, you see: "$1.85 million to multiple vendors." Who are those vendors? The agenda does not say. You would have to know to go back to the June meeting, find Resolution 10.16, and hope the spreadsheet is still there.

Then It Gets Worse

In November, another route gets amended. More money for a different aide. The November agenda references the same June resolution. Then in December, another amendment. Then in March. Then in April, the Board votes to add three routes that were "omitted from the original resolution", another $1.85 million, same generic language.

By now you have a chain that looks like this:

June 2024:  Original award -- $1.85M, 12 vendors, 5-page spreadsheet attached
   |
Aug 2024:   Amendment -- references "Resolution 10.16" -- no vendor list
   |
Nov 2024:   Amendment -- references "Resolution 10.16" -- no vendor list
   |
Dec 2024:   Amendment -- references "Resolution 10.16" -- no vendor list
   |
Mar 2025:   Amendment -- references "Resolution 10.16" -- no vendor list
   |
Apr 2025:   New routes added -- $1.85M -- "multiple vendors" -- no vendor list

Each link in the chain only makes sense if you can see the link before it. But the only meeting that actually names the vendors is the first one. Every subsequent amendment is a dead end unless you know to go back to June 2024.

Why This Matters

The same pattern shows up across special education services, construction projects, and software licenses, renewals and amendments that reference a prior resolution instead of attaching the current agreement. The Board's public record becomes a maze of cross-references. Each individual item looks fine in isolation, "approved per Resolution 8.07", but no single meeting gives you the full picture. The institutional memory lives in the chain, and the chain is broken.

A methodological note: when I count undocumented spending, I separate amendments into two cases. If an amendment chain's cumulative additions stay within the parent contract's original not-to-exceed ceiling, I count each amendment as a governance event (it is still an undocumented Board action) but I do not add its dollar value to the headline undocumented total, the money is already counted through the parent. If a chain's cumulative additions push it above the parent's ceiling, that excess is new spending and does count. Across the four transportation chains in this dataset (Resolution 10.18 from 6/27/24, Resolution 10.16 from 6/27/24, Resolution 10.16 from 5/22/25, and Resolution 9.13 from 12/11/25), none of the cumulative amendment increments breach their parent ceilings, so the $706K in route-amendment dollars are absorbed within already-documented parent contracts. That is the difference between the 81-item / $81.7M raw gap and the 68-item / $77.6M genuine undocumented figure above.

What Would Fix This

This is exactly what a Proposal Lifecycle Metadata (PLM) system solves. In a PLM system, every amendment is linked to its parent contract. When you look at the August amendment, the system automatically shows you: here is the original June award, here are the 12 vendors, here are their rates, and here is what this amendment changes. No digging. No cross-referencing. No broken chains.

I effectively built a static version of this system for this investigation. My scripts crawl every meeting, identify every contract, trace amendment references back to their originals, and surface the gaps. The fact that I found what I found, using the same public data anyone can access, proves that the infrastructure to solve this problem already exists. It just needs to be built into the process, not bolted on after the fact.

The Big Picture: Follow the Money

Where the Money Goes

The district's total General Fund expenditures for 2024-25 were $911.8 million. Here is how some of that breaks down based on the encumbrances (committed spending) I found:

The district is also sitting on an $80.5 million excess surplus, money collected from taxpayers but not spent or allocated to a specific purpose.

Which Types of Spending Have the Worst Documentation?

I categorized all 484 unique commitments by what they are for. Here is where the undocumented dollars concentrate:

Biggest undocumented categories by dollars, genuine spending total is $77.6 million across 68 contributing items (out of 81 raw undocumented events):

Item counts include every undocumented Board action in each category, including amendments whose dollar value is absorbed within a documented parent contract's ceiling (so they count as governance events but contribute $0 to the dollar total). The $77.6 million genuine total excludes a rescission, a grant application, a bid threshold policy, and 10 chain-absorbed amendments. The remaining $2.2 million sits across eight smaller categories (Community/Vocational, Health/Therapy, Facilities Ops, Telecom, Community Programs, Insurance/Benefits, Security, Grants).

Three patterns stand out after the deep audit:

1. One item is 38% of the entire gap. The 2025/26 Contracted Childcare Center Contract (Resolution 8.69, June 26, 2025) is a $31,299,853 annual agreement between the district and ~20 preschool childcare centers. Zero documents attached. The 2024/25 version of the same program (Resolution 8.73, June 27, 2024, $34.3M) had at least two actual signed contracts attached, one for Academy House Child Development Center and one for the Head Start grantee Greater Bergen Community Action. The district demonstrated the capacity to attach provider-level signed contracts one year, then stopped the next. Same program, same drafting department, same fiscal rhythm.
2. Facilities and construction work is broadly undocumented. Bathroom renovations at PS#23 and PS#25 ($3.7M), HVAC upgrades at PS#27 Alfred Zampella and Jersey City Academy I ($9.7M across four items), emergency roof and chimney repairs at PS#16 and PS#37, the district has approved tens of millions in construction and facilities work where the attachments are internal PO forms or nothing at all. The Feb 29, 2024 capital reserve withdrawal (Resolution 11.06, $7.26M) funds two contractors simultaneously: C. Dougherty & Co. for $5.19M in boiler replacements at five schools, and Pennetta Industrial Automation for $2.07M in HVAC cooling units at Central Office. Both contractors' underlying agreements exist elsewhere in the district's records, but the capital reserve withdrawal itself has no attachments.
3. Legal services and employment contracts are almost never documented. Adams Lattiboudere (labor & employment law) and Machado Law Group (special education law) were approved for $600,000 combined across four items over two years, none with contracts attached. The Superintendent's and Acting School Business Administrator's employment contracts were approved without attached documentation, which the auditors also flagged (Finding 2025-2). In 2025/26 the Board also approved a $2.2 million renewal of employment contracts for "non-affiliate" administrative staff with no attached documentation.

Who Gets the Contracts?

Across 504 board actions I identified roughly 476 vendors by name. A few patterns worth flagging:

Largest undocumented commitments (genuine gap items):

• Early Childhood Department / Contracted Childcare Centers, $31.3M for the 2025/26 Preschool Program Contract (Resolution 8.69, June 26, 2025). No attachments. The 2024/25 version of the same program was $34.3M and had two signed provider contracts attached.
• A. Harry Moore Tuition Contracts (SY2024/25), $6.54M for special education placements at A. Harry Moore School. No documentation at the October 30, 2024 vote.
• C. Dougherty & Co., Inc., $5.19M for boiler replacements at Liberty HS, PS#8, PS#16, PS#29, and PS#41. Funded via a Feb 29, 2024 capital reserve withdrawal that referenced Dougherty's original November 16, 2023 bid award (Resolution 10.03 from that earlier meeting, outside this dataset window). The capital reserve withdrawal has zero attachments.
• Bathroom renovations at PS#23 and PS#25, $3.7M (Resolution 11.03, September 25, 2024). No attachments.
• School Pre-Plated Meals contract amendment, $2.77M (Resolution 10.27, August 26, 2024). No attachments.
• Regional Day School Tuition Contracts (SY2024/25), $2.77M for out-of-district special education placements. No attachments at the October 30, 2024 vote.
• Non-affiliate employment contract renewals 2025/26, $2.2M (Resolution 12.15, June 26, 2025). No attachments.
• GL Group HVAC upgrades at PS#27 and Academy I, $4.92M combined across two August 26, 2024 resolutions. Only internal PO forms attached.
• Pennetta Industrial Automation direct contracts, $4.85M across 9 direct items ($425K undocumented: HVAC and boiler retubing additional funding from May 22, 2024). Pennetta's biggest documented item is the $2.07M cooling units contract from February 29, 2024, which has a bid tabulation attached but not a signed agreement.
• Hewlett Packard, $1.03M in software and hardware maintenance under state contract #89974, voted at two separate meetings (May 22, 2025 and August 28, 2025) with nearly identical resolution text. Deduplicated as one item; no documentation at either vote.
• Adams Lattiboudere (labor and employment law), $450,000 across two annual contracts (August 2024 and June 2025). Undocumented at both.
• Machado Law Group (special education law), $150,000 across two annual contracts. Undocumented at both.

The transportation ecosystem:Special education transportation involves more than 20 small vendors (Amity Bus, Azza Care Coach, Blessings Transportation, E-Z Bell Transit, Gharries Coach, Horizon Link, Hudson County Transport, Jersey Kids Transportation, JR Transportation, Kid's Empire, La Belle, Mayor Transportation, Newark Transport, NJ Transportation, Nu Heights, NW Transportation, Pameh, Pat & Carie, R & May, TLC Couriers, V.A.F. Transport, American Star). The Board awards routes in bulk through umbrella resolutions like 10.18 (6/27/24, $20.25M for 17 vendors) and 10.16 (5/22/25, $23.54M for 21 vendors), then amends individual routes throughout the year. The umbrella awards are documented with per-route spreadsheets. The amendments typically reference the umbrella resolution without re-attaching the vendor list, so a reader of any single amendment sees "$1.85M to multiple vendors" without an easy path back to the actual carriers and rates.

The 17% Tax Increase (And $183 Million in Reserves)

In March 2026, the Board voted 6-3 to submit a preliminary FY2027 budget of $1.027 billion that includes a roughly 17% increase to the local tax levy, approximately $452 million from Jersey City property taxpayers.

The Board says the increase is driven by $98 million in lost state equalization aid. That is a real funding challenge. But the district's own audited financial statements raise questions about whether the full increase is necessary.

What the District Is Sitting On

The ACFR, that is the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, basically the district's official, auditor-verified financial records, for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025 shows a General Fund balance of $284.4 million. That is the total amount of money the district had in its main operating accounts at year-end.

Here is where that money is:

What "excess surplus" means: New Jersey has a rule that says school districts cannot stockpile too much money, the cap is 2% of their total spending. For JCPS, 2% works out to $17.4 million. The district is holding $80.5 million above that legal limit. By law, they are required to spend or allocate that excess in next year's budget, they cannot just keep sitting on it.

The big picture: The total reserves entering FY2026 were $183 million ($102.7M designated + $80.5M excess). To put that in perspective, that is nearly 20% of the entire budget sitting in accounts while taxpayers are being asked to pay 17% more in property taxes.

Growing Costs, Cancelled Projects

The ACFR also reveals cost trends that compound the picture:

• Workers compensation claims nearly doubled, from $13.8 million to $22.8 million in one year. The auditors flagged in both FY2024 and FY2025 that the district did not get a required actuarial report for this self-insurance plan. The district is carrying $22.8 million in workers comp liability without a professional estimate of what it should actually cost.
• Health insurance claims up 22%, from $9.5 million to $11.6 million in unpaid claims. The new budget shows health/benefits spending jumping 15% to $168.9 million, the single largest spending increase.
• $5.2 million in capital spending was cancelled during the audit, projects that were budgeted and encumbered (committed) for schools, then reversed. The total capital budget was $16.7 million, but $5.2 million was pulled back. That is money that was supposed to go to school buildings and did not.
• District enrollment dropped 1.5%, from 25,040 to 24,668 students (per audited enrollment schedules, Oct 2023 vs. Oct 2024), yet the budget continues to grow. Charter school pass-through was $171.9 million in FY2024-25 (ACFR actual).

The Question for April 30th

The Board has said a corrective action plan based on the audit recommendations will be presented publicly at the April 30 meeting. Superintendent Fernandez and SBA Luce have committed to this timeline. Three questions deserve answers:

1. How much of the $183 million in reserves was actually spent in FY2026? If the designated funds were not fully used, the surplus may be even larger entering FY2027, which weakens the case for a 17% tax increase.
2. Why were $5.2 million in capital projects cancelled? These were already approved and encumbered. What happened? Were the schools that were supposed to benefit from these projects told?
3. What does the excess surplus corrective plan look like? NJ law requires the district to appropriate the excess above 2%. How is the $80.5 million being deployed, and does the FY2027 budget draw it down, or does it grow further while taxes go up?

The state aid loss is real. But asking taxpayers for 17% more while holding $183 million in reserves, cancelling school construction, and unable to produce signed contracts for 97% of current spending items (92% of spending dollars) is a credibility gap that the corrective action plan needs to address.

Why This Matters

This report asks a basic question: Can you, as a resident of Jersey City, verify how your tax dollars are being spent? This is a documentation and transparency analysis, not an allegation of wrongdoing.

Right now, the answer is mostly no. Here is what is broken:

1. The public portal is not doing its job. BoardDocs is supposed to be the place where residents can see what the Board is voting on. But attaching a PO form instead of a contract is like giving someone a receipt instead of a menu, it tells you money was spent, but not what was agreed to.
2. Amendments break the chain. When a contract is amended to spend more money, the amendment should include or reference the original agreement. Instead, amendments reference a resolution number from a different meeting, and the resident has to go hunt for it themselves.
3. The auditors confirmed the same problem independently. The district's own certified public accountants identified 13 findings across the FY2025 audit, including missing contract documentation, missing employment contracts, backdated checks, and failures to notify the State about large contracts.
4. The documentation gap is systemic. Across 484 unique spending commitments, 15 have a signed contract attached, covering $39.2 million of $514.9 million in total approvals. The other 469 commitments (96.9% of items, 92.4% of dollars) were backed by internal PO forms, proposals, bid tabulations, rate schedules, or nothing at all. The contracts that are provided tend to be smaller, lower-profile agreements (healthcare providers, engineering firms), while the largest expenditures go undocumented.

What Can You Do?

File an OPRA Request

New Jersey's Open Public Records Act (OPRA) gives you the right to request any public record. If a contract is not on BoardDocs, you can file a request directly with the district. The JCBOE has an online OPRA form.

Priority contracts to request (highest-dollar undocumented items from the genuine gap):

1. Early Childhood Department, Contracted Childcare Center Contract for 2025/26 ($31.3M, Resolution 8.69 from June 26, 2025). Ask specifically for the signed Preschool Program Contracts with each childcare center provider, the district attached Academy House and Head Start provider contracts for the 2024/25 version, so the same documents should exist for 2025/26.
2. A. Harry Moore Tuition Contracts SY2024/25 ($6.54M, Resolution 9.02 from October 30, 2024) and Regional Day School Tuition Contracts SY2024/25 ($2.77M, Resolution 9.04 from the same meeting).
3. C. Dougherty & Co., $5.19M for boiler replacements at Liberty HS, PS#8, PS#16, PS#29, PS#41 (the Nov 16, 2023 original award Resolution 10.03, plus the Feb 29, 2024 capital reserve withdrawal Resolution 11.06).
4. Bathroom renovations at PS#23 and PS#25, $3.7M (Resolution 11.03 from September 25, 2024).
5. GL Group HVAC upgrades at PS#27 Alfred Zampella and Academy I, $4.92M combined (Resolutions 11.01 and 11.02 from August 26, 2024 and September 25, 2024).
6. School Pre-Plated Meals contract amendment, $2.77M (Resolution 10.27 from August 26, 2024).
7. 2025/26 Renewal of Employment Contracts for Non-Affiliate administrators, $2.2M (Resolution 12.15 from June 26, 2025).
8. Edmentum Inc., $2.13M district-wide tutoring services (Resolution 10.22 from August 26, 2024), purchased via Omnia national cooperative contract R191103.
9. Hewlett Packard, $1.03M software and hardware maintenance under NJ State Contract #89974 (Resolutions from May 22 and August 28, 2025, both voting on the same underlying contract).

Attend Board Meetings

The Board meets regularly at 346 Claremont Avenue, Jersey City. Meeting schedules are posted on BoardDocs. During public comment periods, you can ask the Board to explain why contract documentation is not being attached to agenda items.

Use This Dashboard

I built an interactive dashboard that lets you explore all 504 board actions (484 unique commitments after dedup), see which vendors have documentation gaps, and track the gap rate over time.

Share This Report

The more residents who understand these findings, the more likely the district is to improve its practices. Share this report with your neighbors, your PTA, your local news outlet, or your Board representative.

About This Project

This investigation is part of OCC Research's Governance Memory System (GMS), a framework for building institutional memory infrastructure that makes governance cumulative, queryable, and accountable.

Two of the five GMS layers are directly demonstrated in this investigation, both built and applied by me:

Proposal Lifecycle Metadata (PLM): My scripts track every contract from proposal through approval, amendment, and payment, flagging when required documentation is missing at any stage. The amendment chain analysis, the vendor extraction pipeline, and the document classifier are all components of a static PLM Agent. A live version would do this in real time, blocking incomplete proposals from advancing rather than flagging them after the fact.

Outcome Review Anchors (ORA):The cross-reference between my findings and the official Lerch, Vinci & Bliss audits is an ORA in action. An Outcome Review Anchor asks: "did what was decided actually produce the expected result?" The Board decided to approve 504 contract-related items. The expected outcome is that each contract would be publicly documented, properly executed, and reported to the State where required. The ORA, anchored to the auditor's independent findings, shows that outcome was not achieved. And by comparing the FY2024 and FY2025 audits side by side, the ORA reveals something even more important: the Board was told about 19 problems, and 10 of them came back the next year unchanged. The decisions to fix those problems did not produce outcomes either. That is a second-order governance failure, failing to document contracts, and failing to fix the failure.

The tools I built for this investigation are a proof of concept: a static PLM + ORA system that does retrospectively what a live system would do in real time, track every contract from proposal to payment, anchor outcomes to independent verification, and surface the gaps before they become repeat audit findings.

My name is Othman Gbadamassi. I am the founder of OCC Research and a product of the Jersey City Public School system, McNair Academic High School, Class of 2017. I am a long time Jersey City resident who went through these schools, benefited from the teachers and programs they fund, and came back to ask a simple question: can the community see how the money is being spent?

The answer, right now, is mostly no. But it does not have to stay that way.

Methodology

Data Sources

• BoardDocs (go.boarddocs.com/nj/jcps/Board.nsf), all meeting agendas and attachments from Jan 2024 through Mar 2026
• JCBOE Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR), fiscal year ended June 30, 2025
• Auditor's Management Report on Administrative Findings, FY2024, Lerch, Vinci & Bliss, LLP, dated February 27, 2025 (19 findings)
• Auditor's Management Report on Administrative Findings, FY2025, Lerch, Vinci & Bliss, LLP, dated February 24, 2026 (13 findings)
• OpenGov e-Procurement Portal (procurement.opengov.com/portal/jcboe), manually reviewed high-value solicitations and those indicating contract documentation

Tools and Process

1. API mapping, Identified BoardDocs API endpoints and tested rate limits
2. Contract detection, Regex-based identification of contract approval language in agenda items, with personnel/HR items excluded. Matches on both subject lines and body text with a 200-character window, keyed on trigger words including contract, agreement, purchase order, professional services, renewal, tuition, jointure, and casualty.
3. PDF analysis, Downloaded 461 PDFs; classified using text extraction (PyMuPDF), OCR (Tesseract), and a 7-category classifier with 20 content signals. Long scanned contracts are OCR'd across up to 30 pages to catch signatures and terms-and-conditions language that tends to sit near the end of multi-page signed agreements.
4. Vendor extraction, Multi-pass extraction: regex patterns on resolution text, PD# cross-referencing against original meeting agendas, OCR of attached PO forms, and a canonicalization table that merges name variants (e.g. "Pennetta Automation" / "Pennetta Industrial" / "Pennetta Industrial Automation, LLC" all map to "Pennetta Industrial Automation").
5. Re-vote deduplication, Items voted twice with identical resolution language are deduplicated by normalized subject line plus rounded amount. This catches the 19 Feb 29 → Mar 19, 2024 re-votes (where the Board re-approved a tranche of items at a special budget meeting three weeks after the regular meeting) and the Hewlett Packard state contract #89974 re-vote that spanned May 22, 2025 and August 28, 2025.
6. Chain-within-NTE accounting, For amendments whose parent resolution is documented in the dataset, I separate the amendment event from its dollar contribution. If the chain's cumulative increments stay within the parent's not-to-exceed ceiling, the amendment still counts as an undocumented Board action but contributes $0 to the headline undocumented spending total. If the chain breaches the parent ceiling, the excess counts. All four transportation chains in this dataset stay within their parent NTE.
7. Procurement portal review, Created an account on the district's OpenGov e-Procurement portal to manually inspect what documentation was available behind the registration wall, focusing on high-value solicitations and those that indicated contracts should be present.
8. Cross-referencing, Compared GMS findings against the official FY2024 and FY2025 audit reports to identify corroborating evidence.

Limitations

• Vendor names could not be cleanly extracted for roughly 28 of 504 items where the resolution uses generic language ("lowest responsible bidder", "multiple vendors") and the vendor is named only in attached spreadsheets
• PDF classification relies on text signals and may still miscategorize documents with unusual formatting. I re-OCR'd high-value multi-page PDFs and corrected several, but systematic reclassification across all 461 PDFs remains ongoing
• I did not analyze meeting minutes (which may contain additional context about votes and discussion)
• Contract value figures use the maximum amount stated in the resolution, which may differ from actual expenditures
• The 2023-24 school year Contracted Childcare Center Contract (Resolution 7.44 from August 31, 2023) is outside the dataset window. It is referenced once in the trend discussion but not included in the headline totals

Reproducibility

All code, data, and methodology are published at github.com/Othmangba/GMS-JCBOE. Anyone can run the same analysis and verify my findings.