Board Budget Workshop: Distraction Concerns Over Carey's Phone Use

The Hardyston Board kicked off budget season on January 20, 2026.

It was a long workshop with real pressure points: rising costs, staffing needs, facility repairs, and state-aid uncertainty.

During that meeting, Board Member Donna Carey was visibly on her phone at several points. Afterward, an OPRA request was filed for any district-accessible communications or images connected to those moments. To be clear, this isn’t about anyone’s private life. It’s about how elected officials conduct themselves in public meetings while decisions affecting students, staff, and taxpayers are on the table.

What was being discussed during those phone-use windows

We filed OPRA to determine whether any district business explained the phone activity. The request listed specific timestamps from the meeting video, and those windows lined up with core budget topics, including:

• 7:10 - 7:38: District goals and priorities tied to budget planning
• 8:55: Curriculum and intervention overview (K-8 programming)
• 14:12: Facilities and operational projects (security systems, transportation savings, building needs)
• 17:02 - 20:49: Local tax levy, state-aid history, and operating-budget context
• 25:00 / 26:17: Tax-levy cap illustration and early projection assumptions (including flat state aid and grant uncertainty)
• 35:12 - 38:57: Staffing and student-support needs (including behavioral support capacity)
• 39:47 - 44:15: Board discussion on status-quo budgeting, cost increases, and transfer accuracy
• 1:07:20 - 1:15:16: Preschool-aid mechanics and budget-allocation constraints

Whatever your politics, these weren’t throwaway moments. This was the core of budget season.

And the optics were hard to ignore.

Why the OPRA request matters

The OPRA request asked for:

• Existing electronic communications concerning board/district business sent or received during the meeting
• Existing photos, screenshots, or images captured during identified timestamps
• District-retained email records during the meeting window

Timeline: recurring concerns in prior coverage

This January 2026 workshop didn’t happen in isolation. Prior reporting on this site has raised similar concerns over time about meeting focus, transparency, and accountability:

• Jan 7, 2025 - Phone use during student recognition In Hardyston BOE’s First Meeting: Where Are Their Priorities?, this site documented visible phone use by board leadership during student recognition.

• Mar 3, 2025 - OPRA follow-up on device-related records In What Was More Important Than Students? OPRA Results, this site reported that the district response indicated no responsive records to that specific request.

• Jul 11, 2025 - Records-handling/transparency concerns In YahooGate: Hardyston BOE President Donna Carey’s Private Inbox Revealed in OPRA Dump, prior coverage raised questions about official communications and records transparency.

• Dec 13, 2025 - Leadership presence concerns In Donna Carey and Kids First Leadership Absent from Regionalization Meeting as Others Attended, this site questioned absence from a key public regionalization discussion.

• Jan 20, 2026 - Budget-workshop phone-use concerns (current post) During core budget deliberations, an OPRA request identified multiple timestamp windows tied to visible device use and requested any corresponding district-accessible records.

Taken together, these posts reflect a recurring resident concern: whether board leadership is consistently focused and transparent during high-stakes decisions.

Accountability and public confidence

Budget workshops are where districts face hard tradeoffs in real time: healthcare and utility increases, staffing decisions, building repairs, negotiations, and reserve planning. People watching those meetings have a right to expect visible attention from everyone at the table.

At minimum, this meeting reinforces a simple point: clear standards and consistent behavior around device use matter, especially when public trust is already fragile.