Board, administrators face credibility issue
Whether they want to admit it or not, the members of the Freehold Regional High School District Board of Education and several of the district's administrators now have a significant credibility problem.

The credibility issue stems from the advanced degrees that at least three administrators, including Superintendent of Schools James Wasser, received from Breyer State University.

Breyer State is an online institution that offers a variety of degrees, including doctoral degrees.

Red flags should go up when an institution's Internet Web site has carefully crafted answers to the question of whether the degrees it confers will be acceptable to an individual's employer.

An examination of the Breyer State Web site raises concerns about the academic legitimacy of any degree obtained from the university, even if a significant amount of work was done by the person applying for a degree.

The degree entitled the FRHSD administrators to an annual raise and the use of "Dr." before their name. Whether vanity, greed or true educational advancement was the issue here, we do not know.

But the people running the FRHSD are left to deal with the fallout. There are two investigations reportedly under way in this matter: one by the state Department of Education and one by the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office. There is not a lot of information from either of those agencies as to exactly what is being investigated.

The other fallout has thus far included a large turnout of residents at one school board meeting. Almost every single one of the residents who spoke at that meeting condemned what they called the administrators' questionable degrees.

There have also been several letters to the editor published regarding the situation, and there has been a multitude of mostly anonymous tirades on Internet message boards regarding the administrators' degrees and the board members' alleged lack of oversight about the school from which the district's administrators were seeking degrees.

Residents should not expect the school board to call for the resignation of any administrator who holds a Breyer State degree at any time prior to the conclusion of the investigations being conducted by the state Department

of Education or the prosecutor's office.

However, that should not deter residents from attending meetings of the FRHSD board and asking for the administrators' resignations if they believe that is the appropriate step to take. The board and the administrators may not like hearing from residents, but it is their responsibility to listen to what members of the public have to say.

And, if any resident believes he is being ill-served by a board member, he should run for a seat on the board and apply his own standards to helping to oversee the district.

Perhaps the current controversy in the Freehold Regional High School District should, and will, spur the board or even the state Department of Education to review the process through which an administrator can receive an advanced degree.

More explicit rules regarding an institution's accreditation might be one place to start, especially since that is a significant point of contention in the present situation.

The 200,000 residents of the eight towns that make up the Freehold Regional High School District, and the 12,000 students who attend the district's six schools, are waiting to see what happens next.