Earlier this month, a Manhattan court confirmed the conviction of disgraced Sen. Bob Menendez on bribery charges. As a result, a New Jersey elementary school has decided to change its name and remove the association with Menendez.
According to the New Jersey Globe, the Robert Menendez Elementary School located in West New York, N.J. will now go back to its previous name, PS #3.
According to the newspaper, the mayor of the city has confirmed that the name change of the facility, which has been named after Menendez since 2013, will be completed before the commencement of the new school year, marking a decade since its original naming.
New Jersey has seen a recent trend of removing the names of disgraced public officials from public buildings and educational institutions. This follows the example of Princeton University, which dropped the name of former President Woodrow Wilson in 2020 due to his inadequate handling of race issues.
In 1979, the Metropark train station was named after former Sen. Harrison A. Williams Jr. However, just two years later in the Abscam scandal, he was convicted for bribery and subsequently jailed.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has officially confirmed that Senator Menendez will be resigning from his Senate seat on August 20th. This news comes after Menendez’s resignation was entered into the congressional record last week.
In Manhattan, a federal jury recently convicted him of leveraging his political power to favor businessmen in his state. Additionally, he was found guilty of accepting substantial bribes, including gold bars, from Middle Eastern governments like Egypt and Qatar in exchange for his services. The bribes he received amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars.