Montclair BOE Suspends Assessment Investigation

The Montclair Board of Education has suspended a more than two-month investigation into how student assessments saved on a teacher portal ended up on a public website last October, The Montclair Times reported.

The board voted 4-3 in a special meeting Monday night to put their investigation on hold after learning last week that the New Jersey Department of Education plans to conduct its own probe. The resolution calls for district employees to cooperate with the state.

The DOE informed the district last week that the Office of Fiscal Accountability and Compliance (OFAC) will look into how 14 assessments created to align with new Common Core State Standards appeared on Gobookee.org for a brief period just days before the tests were to be administered to students.

The school board's own investigation met with a number of roadblocks.

In December, the township council voted to deny the school board access to the servers shared by the two entities.

A memo from the township manager to the council dated Dec. 29 said the township's IT Director checked for security breaches and found none. The township employee said in the memo the assessments were saved with the wrong permissions and were not "leaked."

The ACLU-NJ also blocked an effort by the board's attorney to obtain the name and contact information of an anonymous blogger who the board said could potentially know something about the potential security breach.