CAIR Files Ethics Complaint Against New Jersey High School Principal for Visiting Israel

A New Jersey high school principal who accepted an all-expenses-paid, two-day visit to Israel is facing an ethics complaint by an Islamic advocacy group who says his decision to participate in a “propaganda trip” could impair his judgment in the classroom.The principal of Columbia High School, Frank Sanchez, was singled out among eight educators and other guests hosted by the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest. The January 2024 trip included stops at Tel Aviv, a school at Jerusalem where Muslim and Jewish children learn alongside one another, and a kibbutz in southern Israel that was attacked by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023. The trip was designed to encourage state lawmakers and educators “to ask tough questions,” the federation’s Jewish community relations council director, Linda Scherzer, who organized the trip, told The New York Sun.“We’re not asking them to accept everything that they’re being told: we want them to use their critical reasoning skills, right?” Ms. Scherzer said. “This is a very complicated story. It’s steeped in the thousands of years of history. We don’t expect them to come away after two days understanding all that’s going on here, but we’re challenging them to act as educators, to do what they would ask their own students to do in the classroom and to come back, perhaps a challenge to deepen their understanding of this story.” The trip was publicly reported at the time, but the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations says its members were unaware of Mr. Sanchez’s participation until this July after they submitted public records requests. CAIR-NJ filed a complaint with New Jersey’s School Ethics Commission last week asking the commission to investigate the freebie as an inducement that could negatively shape school discussions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.“It’s our position that if you are accepting a trip that can reasonably be perceived as impairing your judgment on educating on a certain issue, that warrants an investigation,” the public affairs director of CAIR-NJ, Naureen Akhter, told the Sun. “This is an issue that affects our community and we expect the educators who are tasked with taking care of our kids, with addressing this in the classroom, approaches it from an impartial point of view and can be sensitive and cognizant to both sides,” Ms. Akhter said in a phone interview on Thursday. “This is an issue that affects our community and we expect the educators who are tasked with taking care of our kids, with addressing this in the classroom, approach it from an impartial point of view and can be sensitive and cognizant to both sides,” Ms. Akhter said in a phone interview on Thursday. She added that Mr. Sanchez cannot be impartial when being hosted by a sponsoring organization that “has a very clear, stated objective on securing and supporting a Jewish, democratic state of Israel.”Mr. Sanchez did not respond to an emailed request for comment. South Orange Maplewood schools superintendent Jason Bing also did not respond to an emailed request for comment before the time of publication.Essex County, where the Maplewood and South Orange public school district is located, has the largest number of Jewish households with children in the Greater MetroWest area, according to the federation. Maplewood and South Orange are also two of the most progressive communities in New Jersey. In the 2025 governor’s race, Democrat Mikie Sherrill beat Republican Jack Ciattarelli by a nine-to-one margin in Maplewood, racking up just over 90 percent of the vote. This is not the first time Mr. Sanchez has been caught in the center of a school district dispute. When he was in the interview process for the principal position at Columbia High School, some members of the community objected to his hiring because the district where he worked was previously deemed insufficiently diverse. Census estimates show Maplewood is 52 percent white, 28 percent black, and 11 percent Hispanic and Latino. The U.S. Census does not measure religious affiliation.In March 2023, Mr. Sanchez was the center of a controversy after breaking up a fight between two female students in the high school lobby. One of those teenaged students, who is black, filed an affirmative action complaint against Mr. Sanchez and accused him of slamming her against a wall. An outside law firm claimed Mr. Sanchez used “excessive” force and said he lost his temper “and escalated rather than de-escalated the situation.” That report was later called into question, with the law firm saying it was only a draft and should not have been circulated. The law firm’s revised report cleared Mr. Sanchez of the affirmative action complaints and said he should be taken off his paid suspension and reinstated as principal.Mr. Sanchez was arrested on second-degree child endangerment charges in March 2024. The case led to a groundswell of support for Mr. Sanchez, with students staging a walkout in protest of Mr. Sanchez’s arrest days after it happened. Students and parents spoke out in his defense and descended on a local school board meeting. A crowdfunding campaign raised over $70,000 to pay his legal bills.A grand jury declined to indict Mr. Sanchez on the child endangerment charge, and the school board voted to reinstate Mr. Sanchez to his job as principal in June 2024. A simple assault charge against Mr. Sanchez was later dismissed by a municipal court judge.In 2025, the civil rights group Building One New Jersey honored Mr. Sanchez as its 2024 public servant of the year “for his courageous leadership as a teacher, administrator, and fearless advocate of children and students and champion of inclusive and equitable education.”“Frank Sanchez is a good man, he’s a good educator. He was with us for literally 48 hours,” Ms. Scherzer said. “I assure you he did not come back with any agenda nor did we attempt to give him an agenda to go back into his school with.”The School Ethics Commission is a state Department of Education panel that conducts investigations and renders decisions regarding ethical complaints against school board members and school administrators.Mr. Sanchez has 20 days to file a statement calling the complaint frivolous, and CAIR will have 20 days after that to respond to Mr. Sanchez if it chooses. The commission will then vote on whether it has probable cause to investigate the complaint. Penalties can range from a formal reprimand to suspension to termination. Frivolous complaints can also be punished.In its complaint, CAIR asked the commission to investigate whether Mr. Sanchez violated disclosure requirements. The organization said it found “deeply troubling” the “profound moral affront of accepting an all-expenses-paid trip to a state currently carrying out a genocide.”Ms. Akhter said CAIR has no evidence that Mr. Sanchez, who encouraged other administrators to attend the trip to Israel, has made any instructional or curriculum changes as a result of his trip, but it is asking the commission to look into that as part of its investigation.The Jewish Federation is planning another trip to Israel with educators this January. Ms. Scherzer said she is “grateful that we have a means to be able to do it again.” She added that the organization is “not trying to exert any undue influence and made no requests of educators upon their return. There was nothing that was expected of them, very little follow-up,” she said, adding, “All we asked of them was to join us to ask whatever questions that was on their minds, to use their critical thinking skills, and to embrace the idea of complexity.”

CAIR Files Ethics Complaint Against New Jersey High School Principal for Visiting Israel

CAIR Files Ethics Complaint Against New Jersey High School Principal for Visiting Israel

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