Ruth Turner hadn’t had anything fried in five months. She mentioned this almost apologetically, scanning the menu at Turtle + the Wolf on a warm June evening, eyeing the fried chicken section with the particular restraint of someone who has been very good for a very long time. “If you’re gonna treat yourself,” co-host Farnoosh Torabi told her, “this would be the place.”
It was the third installment of Supper with the Super, the Montclair Pod’s recurring dinner with the superintendent — following our first session at Italiana by Zod and our second at Mesob on Bloomfield Avenue — and the restaurant was Mike’s pick. Turtle + the Wolf has been the town’s unofficial special-occasion destination since chef Lauren Hirschberg, a Montclair native who came up through Tom Colicchio’s kitchens in New York City, came home and opened it. Mike has been evangelizing the fried chicken since the place opened. The chicken liver mousse, the server told Turner at the table, is the low-key crown jewel of the establishment — and she, a self-described non-liver person, was eventually persuaded to try it.
The group shared a green salad, the mousse and eventually a full order of fried chicken between the three of them. Between dishes, Turner gave a candid update on the forensic audit, pushed back on the viral claim that special education is draining the district, walked through the My School Bucks billing problems parents have been reporting, and discussed the controversy from the Sodexo Juneteenth menu.
The Forensic Audit Is Stuck
The audit has been the accountability measure Montclair residents have pushed hardest for since the $19.6 million deficit went public last year. The Board of Education agreed to commission one, budgeted $250,000 for it — down from an earlier figure of $500,000 — and issued a request for proposals — an RFP — to find a qualified firm to conduct it.
The board wants auditors focused on the 2023–24 fiscal year, on the theory that problems there cascaded into the larger shortfalls that followed in 2024–25 and 2025–26. Contracts, purchase orders, the bidding process and the district’s financial records are all on the list.
The problem: many of the firms that responded to the district’s RFP are not qualified to do it.
“That’s the part that’s concerning,” said Turner. She and interim business administrator Dana Sullivan share the same core worry: many respondents have no background in school auditing, the specific credential that makes findings credible and legally defensible. The requirement was stated clearly in the posting. People applied anyway.
At dinner, Turner suggested the reduced budget may not have been the primary obstacle — pointing instead to timing. June and July are when most auditing firms are occupied with the annual reviews every New Jersey school district is required to complete. “It might have been something that they missed, or they might have been overwhelmed,” she said of qualified firms that didn’t apply. Still, the question of whether halving the budget narrowed the field of serious respondents remains an open one.
The board is now weighing whether to reissue the RFP, which would add another month to an already delayed process.
When Farnoosh asked what Turner would say to the residents for whom the audit is, above everything else, the only thing that matters, her answer was notably spare. “I don’t have anything to say to them,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. For a lot of people, that’s an important aspect.” As for where it sits in her own mental queue: “When I say it’s not a priority for me — in my mind I check things off. RFP is done, this is gonna take place, and I don’t think about it. I have something else to move on.”
Farnoosh pressed on the timeline. “The longer this takes,” she said at dinner, “people are worried that the further away we get from the 2023-24 year, it’s going to be harder to get to the bottom of things.”
Turner acknowledged the concern but noted that many of the key people from that era have already left the district, so institutional memory is already degraded regardless of when auditors arrive. A couple of months, she said, is unlikely to change what’s recoverable. Years would be a different matter.
Turner was also direct about what she thinks the audit can actually deliver — and what it can’t. “I do want it to take place and I think we have to deal with whatever those findings are,” she said. “I’m just not convinced that’s going to be enough.” For residents who believe the district is concealing something, an audit finding no missing funds is unlikely to close the debate. “If things are not revealed that people strongly believe, then I think that will come into question,” she said. “That’s just my sense about it.”
On a parallel track, the district’s new Superintendent’s Community Advisory for Finance held its first meeting within the past two weeks, bringing together residents with varied financial and professional backgrounds as the audit process works itself out.
The Tax Increase Nobody Voted For
By now, most Montclair homeowners know how the March vote went. Voters passed Question 1, covering the one-time $12.6 million debt, and rejected Question 2, a permanent $5 million levy increase. And yet taxes are still going up — roughly $851 for the average homeowner — through a separate state mechanism called a healthcare waiver that lets districts exceed the 2% tax levy cap when employee health insurance costs rise faster than that ceiling allows. Montclair’s did.
Critically, that increase is permanent: it is now baked into the district’s tax base, meaning any future use of the waiver would layer additional permanent increases on top of it.
Mike raised what many residents have quietly been asking: if the district could exceed the cap through the waiver anyway, was Question 2 even necessary? Turner’s answer was candid. “Probably because it’s the first time it’s been shared transparently,” she said of the waiver mechanism. “But yes, it’s always existed.” She was direct about the connection between the two: had Question 2 passed, the district would not have needed to exercise the healthcare waiver at all. The five million dollars from the referendum would have covered the gap, and the waiver — with its permanent tax consequences — would have gone unused.
Turner said the district chose not to use the full waiver amount, banking about $1.2 to $1.3 million for future years rather than taking everything available at once. That restraint had a direct cost. “That also meant that we had to make more reductions,” she said.
The waiver is also not a guaranteed annual tool. “We may have it next year, we may not,” Turner said. Whether the district qualifies depends on healthcare cost increases each year — and if it does qualify and uses it again, that too would become a permanent addition to the tax base. The structural problem underneath all of it remains. “We will always be in this mode of cutting and raising taxes,” she said. “And then after a while, there’s only so much you can cut — you still have to educate students.” Her call to action was directed beyond Montclair: “That is the one thing we should all hopefully be in agreement with and create a synergy around” — meaning sustained pressure on the state to address a cap that hasn’t kept pace with the real cost of running schools.
Special Ed Is Not ‘Sucking the District Dry’
A Facebook post that circulated among Montclair parents this spring argued that special education spending is the real driver of the district’s financial problems, with one commenter using the phrase “sucking the district dry.” Turner said she does not use social media and had not seen it, but she addressed the underlying claim directly.
The five-year trend in out-of-district placements — arrangements where the district pays to educate students with disabilities in specialized external programs when it cannot adequately serve them internally — is moving in the right direction, Turner said. She was careful to note that the district is not cutting corners to save money. Students who genuinely need out-of-district placement get it. Students the district can serve internally stay. When families disagree with that determination, it sometimes ends in litigation, which Turner acknowledged happens more often than she would like. “You’re almost like spending the money that you would have spent on the kid on lawyers,” Mike observed. Turner didn’t dispute it.
Where she sees room to improve: catching students who need services earlier, before problems compound quietly across years. In practice, she said, there’s a tendency in education to wait — to let a student mature, to see if kindergarten struggles resolve by first grade — and then it hits hard in third and fourth grade. Catching those students sooner may raise the district’s identification numbers, and she’s not troubled by that if the need is real.
She also named two other improvements she’s focused on: making sure every educator in the building — not just special ed teachers, but gym teachers, music teachers, everyone — understands what an IEP requires; and holding to the principle that students with IEPs belong to the whole school, not just the special education department. “Students with IEPs don’t belong to the special ed department, the multilingual learners don’t belong to the multilingual department,” she said. “All students are ours.”
Lunch Accounts, Billing Errors and $400,000 in Unpaid Balances
Parents have been reporting unexplained charges through My School Bucks, the app the district uses to manage cafeteria payments. Turner said her team is still working through the complaints. In some cases, students have accidentally or intentionally given the wrong account number in the lunch line, charging another family’s account. In others, students appear to have eaten more than their parents knew about. Turner described catching her own daughter eating two breakfasts, a lunch and buying lunch for a friend — discovered when she noticed there was no way her daughter could have been eating $50 worth of lunch.
Her team has added a photo-match step at checkout, where a lunch aide now confirms a student’s face against the account before processing the charge. “We’ve caught some,” Turner said.
The deeper issue surfaced when the district started examining the books more carefully: it is owed roughly $400,000 in unpaid lunch balances, some dating back years. Some belong to families whose children have already left the district. Turner said the previous administration did not communicate urgently with families that accounts had fallen behind, so many did not know they owed anything. Since outreach began, some families settled immediately. Others sent in voluntary donations to cover balances for families who can’t pay. “It’s a problem across school districts,” Turner said. “It’s a loss.”
Every family that contacts the district at lunchbalance@montclair.k12.nj.us gets a response, Turner said, though working through each case takes time.
The Assistant BA Hire, and What’s Still Unresolved
Montclair still does not have a permanent business administrator, and the search has not produced a hire Turner is satisfied with. “It’s tough out there. It really is,” she said. Dana Sullivan, serving as interim BA, has agreed to stay on while the process continues — something Turner described with undisguised relief. She said she genuinely does not want to find out how chaotic things get without a business administrator in place.
What the district does have, as of July 1, is a new assistant business administrator: Barbara M. Warmuz, promoted from her role as payroll supervisor, a position she has held with the district for about a decade. The Board of Education approved her appointment on June 10 at a salary of $115,000. She replaces Edwin Brown, who left the district in July 2025 at the same time former school business administrator Christina Hunt resigned amid unanswered questions about the district’s debts — meaning the assistant BA position had been vacant for a full year. “She’s very knowledgeable about compliance and payroll regulations, also business and finance — so we’re really excited,” Turner said.
Turner also flagged one item she considers unambiguously good news: parents banded together to raise more than $176,000 for the freshman athletic program at Montclair High School after budget cuts eliminated it, and the district formally accepted the donation at a recent board session. We covered how that campaign came together. The Montclair Foundation for Educational Excellence — MFEE — is separately preparing to launch a major fundraising campaign tied to the district’s instructional priorities. Details will be announced publicly soon.
The Cell Phone Ban Is Coming This Fall
New Jersey’s bell-to-bell cell phone policy takes effect this fall, requiring students to be off their phones from first bell to last. The law was signed by Governor Murphy in January 2026 and applies to all K-12 public school districts statewide. Turner supports it without reservation — and said so as a parent as much as an administrator. “As an educator and as a parent, I gotta be honest, I do like that,” she said. “I am in big support of no cell phones, so that students can be present and deeply focused in the educational process.”
Farnoosh described her own experience with the national Wait Until 8th campaign — a pledge parents sign committing to withhold smartphones from their children until the end of eighth grade. She had signed it. She had held. Her son is entering seventh grade and is, she said, by far the minority in his grade without a cell phone. The social cost has become real. “I feel like I’m up against a wall,” she said. “Do I not give him the cell phone, and then there are consequences for him socially which are not good? Or I give him the cell phone — and it’s essentially giving him a pistol in his pocket.”
Turner didn’t hesitate. “It’s one of my biggest regrets as a parent,” she said. “I say that to any of my friends and colleagues.” She used the word mourning to describe where she is with a similar phone decision she knows is coming in her own household.
Her practical concern about the new mandate isn’t the policy itself but how it gets paid for. Collecting and storing phones requires physical infrastructure — lockers, cubbies, dedicated systems — and the state has not indicated it will cover any of it. Turner called these arrangements unfunded mandates and said they are harmful to district budgets. The district has already raised the issue with the state Department of Education directly.
Montclair High School’s open campus adds a layer of complexity that K-8 buildings don’t face. Turner said the specifics of how the district handles enforcement there will follow once the state issues its guidance. In the meantime, she noted, parents can help: elementary students have no reason to bring phones to school at all. “There’s no reason why your child in elementary school needs a cell phone,” she said. “You can help by not giving them one.”
A Coming Change for Chromebooks
The cell phone conversation was part of a broader technology reckoning Turner previewed at dinner. The district’s director of technology is scheduled to present a set of changes to the board in the coming weeks, and Chromebooks are explicitly on the agenda.
Montclair has operated a 1:1 Chromebook program since 2021, providing a device to every student in the district. Turner said she is now questioning whether that model makes sense at every grade level. For K–5, she said, the answer is clear: there is no educational justification for one-to-one devices at the elementary level, and she has committed to ending it there. “I’ve said it: definitely K–5, there’s no one-to-one device,” she said. “I promised that early on and that’s something I’m going to do.”
The middle school question is more complicated, largely because state assessments have moved to computer-based formats, requiring students to have access to devices to complete them. Turner’s view is that shared device carts — brought into classrooms for assessments and specific instructional tasks — can meet that need without putting a personal device in every student’s hands every student’s hands every day. “We’re also looking at how necessary it is in middle school,” she said, “outside of assessments.”
She framed the change not just as a cost-saving measure but as part of a broader philosophy about the role of screens in learning — one that runs directly alongside the cell phone ban. “When I talk about advocacy,” she said, “we also as community members have to advocate beyond Montclair — to the State Department, to the governor — to say we don’t want EdTech to take over. Assessments should be pencil and pen, like they’ve always been. At least up until eighth grade.” That is a fight, she acknowledged, that has to happen at the state level, not just inside Montclair classrooms.
The full technology policy update, including the Chromebook changes and the district’s new AI policy, is expected to be presented publicly at an upcoming board meeting.
How Turner Thinks About the Noise
One thread that ran through the evening was how Turner protects her ability to do the job. She does not use social media, does not read comment sections, and describes that choice not as avoidance but as a deliberate decision about where her attention goes. She learned about the Juneteenth menu controversy through a parent’s direct message, not a feed. It is, she said, how she prefers to hear things.
There is, she added — almost in passing, and in a way she said she couldn’t quite articulate — something particular about Montclair that she hadn’t expected when she arrived. “When I first got here, I would often hear this and I was just kind of like, well, maybe I’m not quite getting it,” she said. “There is something very different, especially about Montclair. It’s almost like an invisible feeling or sense. I don’t quite know how to articulate it.” She let it sit there.
One More Thing on Sodexo and Juneteenth
The Pod noted last week on the Sodexo Juneteenth menu controversy, in which a watermelon image appeared on the June cafeteria calendar on the date of the holiday. At dinner, Turner added one detail not in that story: she is now personally reviewing all lunch menu imagery before it is distributed, and her directive to Sodexo going forward is to drop imagery from menus entirely. “I told them moving forward I will now add an additional thing to my plate, which is I need to approve all the imagery on lunch menus,” she said. “There shouldn’t be any imagery anyway. Just send out the lunch menu as it is.”
Turner noted that the watermelon, whatever Sodexo’s intent, carries a history that cannot be set aside. “I can’t tell you the last time it’s been used in a way to depict liberation and freedom,” she said. “Let’s just be honest about it.”
Montclair’s Class of 2026 graduation was just around the corner at the time of this dinner. Turner singled out one student who spent time digitizing the district’s yearbooks going back to 1923, and previewed a public-facing data dashboard being built by a rising senior that she said blew her mind. Before the night was over, Farnoosh and Mike were already pitching Cape May for the next edition.
