Board Members Receive District Email Addresses

Board of Education members now how their own Hillsborough Township Schools (@hillsborough.k12.nj.us) email addresses, but the addresses will not be posted on the school website.

Instead, the board’s existing email address, boe@hillsborough.k12.nj.us, will appear on the site, Board President Steven Paget said at the Feb. 28 meeting.

Prior to the creation of individual board member emails, the joint address would sent any emails to board members’ personal email addresses and to the superintendent and business administrator. 

“Board members will either need to use that for all messages or CC that address if using their personal email,” Paget said.  “It allows all correspondence to be recorded to the school server.”

Correspondence with the board that pertains to board business falls under the Open Public Records Act, regardless of whether the emails go to a board, personal or work email address.  The responsibility of archiving response sent to work or personal email addresses falls to individual board members, since board servers do not host the personal email addresses.

With the board email addresses, a copy of the email and the response can be saved on the server, as long as a board member uses that email or copies it when responding from another address.

During the board’s Feb. 14 meeting, questions about archiving responses and whether a single board member replying to an e-mail would be considered representative of the full board’s response. The disclaimer now on the board’s website states that responses from individual board members do not constitute a full board opinion. 

For board member and Communications Committee Chairman Judy Haas, the district-issued addresses does not solve the problem of confidential information going to work or personal email addresses.

“That doesn’t solve the problem that people have unsecured email addresses that confidential information is going to,” Haas said.  “Nor does it deal with the fact that everything that goes on between board members is not captured by the central address.”

According to Paget, carbon copying the district-issued email address should address Haas’ concern.