Gov. Chris Christie said today he was not at all involved in the decision to reassign three state police commanders and said he has total confidence in State Police Superintendent Rick Fuentes.
The commanders were reassigned in the wake of an uproar about state police twice escorting a caravan of luxury cars at high speeds along the Garden State Parkway.
Christie suggested the media have overblown the incident and countered critics who found his initial reaction cavalier when he dismissed the episode last Monday as simply “dumb.”
Said Christie, “I called it as I saw it — it was dumb. I also said I was very happy no one was hurt in the process and that it would have graduated beyond dumb if someone had gotten hurt.”
He said he would let a state police internal inquiry run its course, saying “I’m not going to get myself involved in an internal law enforcement investigations. And so on the very first day that this happened I made it very clear that I was leaving this in the hands of the attorney general, who I’ve had enormous confidence in, and who I’ve known for 20 years and I believe the attorney general will handle this in a completely appropriate way both retroactively and prospectively.”
He was asked if he has seen the written policies of the state police on providing trooper escorts on the roads.
“I haven’t asked the attorney general to send them over to me to look at because candidly I just don’t think that’s at my pay grade. The attorney general, the superintendent of the state police, I’m confident that as they examine the entire situation, they’re going to be looking at those standards and whether those standards are being met and enforced appropriately,” responded Christie.
The governor’s remarks came on a visit to West Windsor-Plainsboro North High School.
He was there to announce he is scrapping the state’s High School Proficiency Assessment and replacing it with final exams for math and reading courses along the lines of the New York State regents exams.
The current test, according to Acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf, only measures graduating seniors at an eighth grade level.
“The only way you can hold people accountable is to have the relevant data that you need to be able to make that judgment,” Christie said. “And we can’t any longer go with the test that we have now, teaching children and then testing them, having them perform at an eighth grade level to pass this test and tell them they’ve graduated from high school.”
The changes won’t happen overnight. In fact, today’s fourth-graders will be the first to feel the effects. According to Cerf, that’s to make an orderly transition from the HSPA to the new end-of-course final exams.
Chief Political Correspondent Michael Aron reports from Plainsboro.
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