Phil murphy gives cory booker's brother high paying patronage job

TRENTON-Cary Booker, the brother of U.S. Senator and flailing U.S. presidential candidate Cory Booker has a new a job, and it was given to him in June, just six days before Murphy hit the campaign trail for the family.

Cary Booker is now New Jersey’s Division of Early Childhood Education. There’s just one problem, he really has a bad track record when it comes to managing educational institutions, according to NJ.Com.

Cary will earn $150,000 per year in his position where his prominent experience lies in the operation of a failed charter school, the Omni Prep Academy of Tennessee. That school shut down after it was unable to afford to pay its teachers and the bills. The school was doomed from the beginning under Booker’s leadership. Students didn’t get books, teachers had no training and there was no formal curriculum to guide the educational path of the students.

After being rank consistently as one of the worst in the state, the school eventually closed in 2016 and Cary went on to work for Murphy’s political campaign shortly afterwards as a political consultant.

The hiring of Booker comes as Murphy is embroiled in another scandal at the School Development Authority where friends and family were given high paying patronage jobs they were not qualified for. That scandal eventually led to the resignation of SDA CEO Lizette Delgado.

“Yet Cary Booker has never worked in preschools in any capacity, and his primary experience with young elementary school students was at Omni Prep, according to a resume obtained through an open records request. His tenure as an administrator at the small charter school should raise questions about how qualified he is to lead a department shaping pre-K and early elementary education for an entire state, former employees said,” NJ.com reported.

In fact, in Booker’s resume, he omits his years as head of the failed charter school.

“This is an Example of why NJ is #1 in all the wrong things, why our state is failing, why everything is so expensive and we still get nothing,” Said Hirsh Singh, the Republican candidate challenging Booker’s U.S. Senate position. “New Jersey politicians are selling us out.”

Booker said he is happy to now be back in New Jersey, “Being part of a team that has strengthened public education from pre-K through an associates degree.”

For now, it appears that being the brother of U.S. Senator Cory Booker is proof enough for Governor Phil Murphy and his administration that Cary Booker is qualified to lead within the New Jersey Department of Education.

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