A member of the Board of Trustees at the College Achieve Paterson Charter School has been suspended for 30 days for allegedly violating the School Ethics Act, according to state records.
Craig Woolridge allegedly failed to “timely complete charter school trustee training.” Board members, under state law, are required to undergo training to obtain “skills and knowledge necessary to serve as a local school board member.”
School Ethics Commission charged Woolridge with having failed to go through the required training on Oct. 25, 2019. Subsequently, Woolridge tried to cure the violation by completing the training.
However, the state had previously cited Woolridge for the same violation. He was “reprimanded” in 2018, according to state records, for “failing to timely comply with the statutory requirement to complete ethics training.”
The state also “admonished” Woolridge for “causing the unnecessary expenditure of administrative and adjudicative resources at both State and local levels.”
Contact information was not available to reach Woolridge for comments for this story on Wednesday. College Achieve Paterson Charter School officials did not respond to a call for comment. A woman at the school picked up the phone and transferred a reporter’s call for comment to a classroom teacher.
Woolridge was suspended from his position as a board member in the state decision issued on Jan. 3. He neither appealed the decision nor filed an exception, according to state records. Suspension starts from the decision date.
College Achieve Paterson Charter School has been a hotbed for controversy since its opening in 2017. Next year, the school claimed it was a “high-performing” school when data showed 80-percent of its students failed the math portion of the state standardized exams in the 2017-18 school year, according to Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) scores the school released after the Paterson Times filed a lawsuit seeking the public records.
The school’s principal Henry McNair and its vice principal Manny Martinez were previously accused of sexual harassment by women.
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