Lawrence School Board Issues

With the shutting down of newspapers all across the country, information regarding elections is scattered all over the internet and oftentimes appears biased because it is coming from the candidates themselves and their parties. The local paper, The Daily Journal, was absorbed by a parent company and the last reporter in the county seems to come around intermittently. Without a trusted 3rd party entity providing objective oversight regarding issues facing the county, the public is oftentimes left woefully under-informed about what is going on, especially in regards to local elections where biased political messaging could be running rampant. While most of the candidates agree we need press coverage, none of them seem to be particularly interested engaging in an action plan to fix the problem for a variety of reasons. One candidate said "With the lack of press coverage, candidates are left to be their own press on social media." While we appreciate the pro-active approach to do something to get information out to the public, this approach could easily lead to the appearance of overwhelming bias and scattered sources of information... who has the time to scour all the candidates social media pages, verify the facts, send follow-up questions that oftentimes go unanswered, attend various events that have entrance fees, etc etc etc? The press, that's who. Another candidate said "If I get involved in forming the local press, it could be viewed as a bias for my party." Understandable, but we are still ultimately left under-informed. The public needs reasonable access to comprehensive, consolidated information regarding election choices. "We'll let the public know what we want them to know", this did not come from a candidate, but rather from a campaign organizer. It's pretty clear that we have a problem, but not necessarily anyone willing to solve it.

After 2 years of doing outreach to help solve the problem of press coverage, we here at InformTheVoteNJ are not fully aware of the *current* issues relevant to the Commercial Township School Board. We can, and will to an extent, review issues brought up during prior races covered, but that is not sufficient for this year's race where anything could have happened up until this point. 8-11-25.