On February 5, 1998, Judge Alfred Wolin of the United States District Court held that N.J.S.A. 18A:13-8, the statute which apportions membership on limited purpose regional Boards of Education in New Jersey, is unconstitutional. Riker Danzig brought a case before Judge Wolin on behalf of Marlboro, which is a member of the Freehold Regional High School District Board of Education. We argued that N.J.S.A. 18A:13-8, which provides that every member municipality in a limited purpose regional board of education shall be entitled to at least one member, led to an unconstitutional deprivation of the voting rights of Marlboro citizens.
We argued that it was unconstitutional for Farmingdale and Englishtown, each with only approximately 1,000 residents, to have one vote, while Marlboro, with over 25,000 residents, had one vote as well. Despite the fact that the Board had utilized this voting scheme for over 40 years, and the scheme was allowed by the statute, Judge Wolin agreed that the statute, as applied, was unconstitutional. Judge Wolin further held that the Legislature should amend the statute to comply with the constitutional mandate of one person, one vote.
We suggest that all members of limited purpose high school regional district boards be cognizant of Judge Wolin's holding, because the holding applies to any other board where one or more of the constituent municipalities was several times larger than the smallest municipalities in the district, but did not have commensurately greater Board voting rights. In our research for this case, we discovered several limited purpose regional districts where such a constitutional attack could successfully be made. Please call if you are interested in the material we have gathered on this subject. This is a rapidly evolving area of law which one cannot ignore.
