Jersey City schools settled 14 employee lawsuits over discrimination, harassment & retaliation.

A shadow has fallen over the classrooms and administrative offices of the Jersey City Public Schools, a shadow cast not by a lack of funding or pedagogical failure, but by a deeply rooted culture of fear and favoritism that has cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars and, more tragically, has broken the careers and spirits of dedicated public servants.

An exhaustive review of court records by Jersey City Times reporter Sarah Komar reveals that over the past five years, the Jersey City Board of Education has quietly settled at least 14 lawsuits filed by its own employees, who alleged they were victims of workplace discrimination, harassment, or retaliation.

At least six more such battles are still being waged in the courts, painting a distressing portrait of a district where whistleblowers are silenced and civil service rules are treated as mere suggestions.

The allegations, detailed in sworn legal complaints, read like a blueprint for institutional decay.

They speak of employees punished for reporting expired food meant for schoolchildren, of affirmative action officers blocked from conducting their investigations, and of veteran staffers passed over for promotions in favor of pre-selected candidates in what one plaintiff described as “sham interviews.”

At the center of many of these claims is the district’s Human Resources Director, Edwin Rivera, a former middle school principal who was elevated to the top HR job in 2020 despite having no professional experience in the field beyond what his previous role entailed.

The human cost of this turmoil is staggering.

Eleven of the twenty lawsuits identified were filed by Black women, and four by Black men, echoing complaints of racism and nepotism that have been shouted into the void of public school board meetings for years.

These are not anonymous grievances; they are the formal, legal actions of individuals like Wilma Ann Anderson, a former affirmative action officer who claims Rivera repeatedly attempted to interfere with her investigations and openly favored Hispanic employees over Black ones.

They are the claims of a woman known in court documents as M.M., who alleged that after she rejected unwelcome physical advances from Rivera—including, she says, his hands on her thighs—her job duties were stripped away and she was eventually transferred out of the department.

The financial toll is equally alarming. The district’s budget for legal costs has more than doubled per student since 2019.

While the full sum of the 14 settlements remains shrouded in secrecy, the glimpses are damning.

A former food services deputy, Christopher Sarullo, who claimed he was fired for reporting expired turkey being directed to student cafeterias, was paid $62,000 to settle his case. M.M. received $120,000.

And in a rare case that actually went to trial, a jury unanimously awarded former Assistant HR Director Sabrina Harrold $245,000 after finding the dchool board illegally retaliated against her for whistleblowing on Rivera’s conduct.

This verdict, it seems, was finally too loud to ignore.

Three weeks after that jury spoke, the Jersey City Board of Education voted unanimously to launch an investigation into its own Human Resources department.

During that meeting, Board Vice President Christopher Tisdale called it “ridiculous” to assume there is no racism within the school system and lamented the “astronomical” resources spent on these lawsuits.

“We could be doing so [many] other things with the money,” Tisdale said, a stark admission of failure from within.

Yet, for all the public hand-wringing, the district’s leadership remains cloaked in silence.

The Superintendent, the HR Director, and the Board President did not respond to numerous questions posed for this report. Their silence is a loud testament to an administration that appears more comfortable writing settlement checks than confronting the systemic rot within its own offices.

The money flows out, the confidential agreements are signed, and the voices of the plaintiffs are legally muzzled by non-disclosure clauses.

But the cost of this silence is more than financial; it is a cost paid in the trust of parents, the morale of employees, and the very integrity of a public institution meant to serve the children of Jersey City.

This is not just a story of legal liability; it is a story of a moral failure, one that continues to unfold behind closed doors and in sealed court documents.