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You can read all about them and their amazing uh support of our work uh in your program. flights are sponsored, our teams are sponsored, and we're very, very grateful for that. Um, I want to also uh acknowledge that the poster and some of the donations are also noted on the poster as you walk out tonight. So, you can um be sure to check that out as well. And then, of course, I want to thank Dartmouth High School for hosting us tonight. So, I know that Dr. Bonnie Gford, our superintendent, is on a team. if she could raise her hand. And also, uh, Mike Martin is here, who is assistant principal of Dartmouth High School and has been amazing helping us get ready tonight. So, we are very grateful for the hosting and our ability to be here, uh, and and have this site to do this work.

David, just raise your hand. Um we have Jim Story here on this end uh deputy chief of uh Dartmouth PD. And we have Dr. Cynthia Marland, a retired director of our DCTV media for the town of Dartmouth who's in our midst tonight. And finally, I want to introduce Dr. Steven Witzig, who is a member of our Dartmouth Education Foundation Advisory Council, and he is so gracious to be willing tonight to be our announcer, and we're grateful to him for for doing that. So, um, before Steven comes up and we get this shindig started, I do want to, um, allow, uh, Harmonics to come out and it is my pleasure to introduce them. They are there are members of harmonics here tonight and they are Dartmouth High School's amazing ac cappella group and they are going to be singing our national anthem. Oh, say can you see by the dawn early light so proudly we held at the twilight last gleaming whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight for the ramp.

and uh and i was i just was amazed then and i continue to be amazed at the amount of forest the feel of the city is completely different than an urban area even though you know there's a lot of people living in ann arbor it's a small city but it's it's lots of people it doesn't feel like it feels it's just fantastic and all of these aspects here are what uh these forest fragments are promoting they're promoting human well-being the connections that we have you go for a hike you're more likely to say hi to someone during the hike than you are walking down a city street for sure right um so so they're critically important and they serve as reservoirs of biodiversity so so they provide habitat for plants fungi like in mosses animals soil microbes and many others and this is a picture of the nichols arboretum in 2009 now i know exactly where this picture was taken and it doesn't look anything like this today the trees are still there but the trilliums are gone and i never would believe in a million years that this is nichols arboretum if i didn't know the person who took this i've worked with that guy uh it's the whole time i've been here jeff blocky and uh you know there's no way i would like you would have to really convince me like this this is the real deal yes this believe it or not this is the uh this was the arboretum it just blows me away because it's all it's really hard to find a trillium uh an adult trollium and flower uh today in that same forest so forest fragmentation so what does this mean again breaking contiguous lots of forest forest into small parcels and again that the impacts are cumulative in other words it's one at a time but to add up to something bigger one plus one plus one plus one you know it really impacts and it's actually kind of exponential in its impacts so forest fragments uh result in increased what ecologists call edge effects so along the edges of these forests are really different environments than in the interior of the forest and if it's a really small forest block it's all edge it doesn't have any interior so there's differences in climatic differences from the edge to the interior uh increased invasive species increased edge numbers like edge species like deer increase rates of songbird nest parasitism like cow birds increased levels of measle predators and other like raccoons increased songbird nest failure due due to egg and nestling predation by mesopredators and other edge species increased wind throw and and all a lot of this results in loss species loss so just loss of a species from a woodlot dude possibly because it's the species home range is bigger than the woodlot or because a habitat specific habitat requirements let's say a salamander that requires a vernal pool or or a coarse frog that requires a vernal pool and let's say that forest has one but that portion of the vernal pool is lost well then those species can't exist there and as i'm as at this time of year as i move around my neighborhood and elsewhere and i hear these frogs calling from these little little ponds you know i just hope and pray that those those ponds those vernal pools will still be there in the future and somebody won't come build a house on it or or do or build a garage or expand or whatever it might be uh and those those vernal pools will still be able to be maintained um the other fact the other loss of species is just simply these at the edge species as illustrated up above all right mentioned up above with nest parasitism deer and raccoons and other species they just they impact they detrimentally impact species and cause uh species lost in these remaining in these remaining forest fragments so they're it's critically important to protect them and when possible to create ways or our connections between them so in um eo wilson and macarthur's uh island biogeography theory they published this in 67 and it really really kind of launched a huge area of research and the forest fragmentation was part of that all of that stuff i mentioned there's lots of studies on each of that and um it was really spurred originally by by macarthur and wilson in their island biogeography paper so so the take home message here is that these isolated forest fragments or any habitat fragment if they're not connected through to a bigger core area if they're not connected to a big area through a corridor or something they will lose species so the more isolated they are the more species they'll just simply lose species in other words something will happen to that sound that that species of salamander over time and boom it's gone if it can't replace itself the corridors allow them to be replaced so and this was looking at islands and then in other words islands next to a mainland are farther apart of really isolated islands and that's where the theory was developed it's been tested and tested both in islands and still being tested on islands i just went to a talk last week about it in the islands off of greece but it's also looked at as forest fragments so the smaller isolated preserves will lose species over time and it's not because somebody did something or well maybe but it just this is the process it was predicted and it's what we see it's what we see based on observations um some hurricane comes through and that species and you know species is lost and if it's isolated and can't colonize no one brings it there then it's lost and the reason i bring this up is this is critically important just understand there's a theory when you're managing force fragments so there's a series of conservation design principles conservation reserve design principles that's well established in the field of conservation biology and and i just want to highlight a couple of them one is the bigger preserves the bigger the better it's better to have a bigger preserve than a bunch of small preserves and if you're going to have a sponge bunch of small preserves it's better that they're closer together so that species can move between them and if possible it's even better if you can have some type of greenway some type of connectivity between these preserves that makes a huge difference in build a species ability to migrate and it and it helps then if a species does blink out in one preserve it helps a nut that same species from another preserve recolonized the other thing is reserve shape areas that long linear corridors are fine when they're connecting larger core preserves but as a preserve itself it tends to be all edge and so those edge effects tend to be more pronounced in long linear strips than in strips that are uh round in shape would be the best square but a bigger with they have some core areas and lastly but not least buffer zones in other words having some type of natural area got a forest if it's got some natural land next to it it's much better than if it's just a hard edge of a subdivision or worse you know shopping center or something where there's just no uh habitat parking lots so um at least most uh at least in ann arbor the you've got so many trees that uh that the suburb the uh you know residential where there's a high amount of trees at least better better certainly much better than um you know some big shopping mall next to next to one of these natural areas so one of the things we deal with is invasive plants and i'm sure you know many of you or all of you know lots about invasive plants and the detrimental impact on ecosystems but what you might not be quite aware of or maybe not as processed and thought long and hard about is native plants and why they're so critical well native plants co-evolve with native animal with a native animal species with fungi and other taxa and this process happened over millions of years and so they provide these species with the critical food and habitat consequently most species rely on native plants for their survival and that native plants make up the foundation of local food webs and structural structure local ecosystems and many pollinators evolve to specialize on a single plant genus or family it's bumble bee pollinating hera uh a zigzag golden rodgers a forest very common forest herb um in in our natural areas in ann arbor a forest in an arbor and golden they support over 135 caterpillar species and hundreds of pollinators in ann arbor including many specialists that that are dependent entirely on goldenrod pollen and nectar so they're they're uh this is just one goldenrod is a genus gina saladegal there's you know maybe maybe about eight to a dozen species of saladago in the ann arbor area and they uh they're just so important these native plants the invasive plants so for example purple loose stripe purple loose stripes invaded in an invasive plant uh came over in 1800s it's a wetland plant and they've documented in europe and asia about 114 different species and that's from the 1980s it's probably more now that that uh that live on the planet that use the plant and 14 of those are host specific in other words they live their whole life on that purple loose stripe we've only found three species in north america that feed on three species so consequently um that species invades wetlands it grows really fast and it just takes over wetlands luckily luckily for us there's some long-term research and they found some some um brought over in they tested insects from europe and asia and found three beetles that are host specific that don't migrate to other plants and uh so they're european species insects but they don't move on to our to our native species they specialize and spend their time on purple new strength and that has been a successful uh introduction of those species as a biological control agent but if you look at native plants you'll see there if you look closely their leaves are often full of full of holes or they have some fungus on them you look at a native a non-native plant a honeysuckle a buckthorn and they're like perfect like nobody's touching it no wonder so they've left these invasive plants they've left their predators they left their their pathogens at home they came here they're happy as all get out and they grow like crazy and expand like crazy and while the native plants are dealing with this burden this burden of 135 different species of caterpillars that are feeding on it my god how does it exist at all well it it's this is a a battle that's been going on evolutionarily from literally millions of years and and it results in the insects changing their body shape to fit the flowers and the flowers trying to attract different species or protect themselves through chemical means but it's a battle that's going to continue going on it really has created this diversity where the invasive plants are it's like they can go hog wild here and at the expense of our natives another keystone species that's impacting our our woodlands are deer so deer in high numbers really act as keystone species in that they disproportionately impact other species and they do this through competition for limited resources like acorns nuts and wildflowers they are alt and altering habitat features that determine the distribution of other other species so they really can change a forest uh by eliminating seedlings of some species opening up completely changing the understory yeah i'm sure you've all seen these browse lines reducing or eliminating our basis plants and these have cascading effects in other words it propagates through the ecosystems it propagates through the soils plants insects birds amphibians mammals and other other organisms ground nesting species uh this is i mentioned i showed you this forest this is a another picture from the same spot back in 2009 and this is that forest today you can see a few trilliums here at the base of this tree this one here there's a couple here and there's a log here with a few of them and uh other than that this is one of jacqueline corteau's uh deer exclosures that she installed it's one meter square deer exclosures so a huge difference uh just massive crazy difference in in the forest like i said i would not ever think that that was uh from the same site so deer are browsing common trillium at levels that prevent it from reproducing and uh that prevent it from being able to support pollinators and what's really fascinating is if you look at this plot you can see a couple trillions like here's one here's one here's one they're not in flower but there's a few there but what you don't see are all these little stems and jacqueline is an expert on looking at dear brothers because she did her dissertation her phd dissertation uh on this in the at the george yes george reserve in washington county and um so she's really been doing this for 20 some or more years looking at uh dear brows versus small mammal brows and so on and so forth and uh i just think it's crazy that that all of these trilliums are here but they're not here in other words they can't support pollinators they're not going to live forever you can't keep taking off the leaves of a plant and expect its roots to live forever right the roots are recharged through the fakes through the folded process of photosynthesis generating those those sugars that then feed the roots so um so uh this could it recover probably over time but over a long period of time it can recover and uh this this was amazing to me so this is jacqueline's work at the arboretum and she's looking at fencing trillium versus unfenced trillium and in three years in three years it went from two percent to forty five percent and there's this cutoff of thirty percent that's been used in the literature if it if a species flowering is browsed to a level that's less than 30 percent it really starts to decline it's not sustainable and if it's over 30 it's sustainable so that's what's been postulated in several studies so um you can see that in three years it was able to rebound which is super super encouraging that uh there's the if if we could reduce deer densities if the land managers in ann arbor i think that's you guys those who are responsible for the health of our forests whoever that is who's responsible for the health of our forest if we can reduce deer densities we may be able to recover the wildflowers and uh chris introduced me as a botanist and and i thank him for that because i i don't think of myself as a botanist i think of myself as an ecologist and uh who would love to be a good botanist and um and uh but i know that i am a good botanist because that when i'm out with others you know i typically know more plants than than most people because that that's what i've used to interpret the landscape it's how how i if i see a plant i can tell you what the soil type is often i can tell you the ph of the soil if i see particular groups of plants i know what the soil is doing and that's what i mean when i say ecology my focus is on ecology the plants are indicator species to me and so i move around in the ann arbor area and what i see and it's not just ann arbor you know i don't mean to single out an arbor it's much of southern michigan is force that are just decimated just decimated by over browsing and if i you know i did surveys for rare plants for 15 years and i know right where to find if i see a big pile brush pile blow down a tree fall over that's where i know i could find uh certain rare species because that's the only place they're left because they're browsed out everywhere and it's just amazing it's not just in our deer abundance is just rocketed it over the last couple decades so the case of the missing oak seedlings so browse levels on oak seedlings over 10 to 15 percent uh result in reproductive failure for oaks in other words the oaks can't regenerate uh when there's a certain level of brows and this is this is uh this is data collected by jacqueline corteau again and you can see that 15 line there the 10 to 15 uh line of deer brows and look at the levels of deer brows it's it's unsustainable and what does that mean well it means some songbirds like the eastern bluebird that rely on caterpillars to raise their youngs well where do they get those caterpillars oaks support the most caterpillars of any other species and high deer densities inhibit oak regeneration through repeated and concentrated browsing she was looking at oaks that the seedlings could browse over and over again over a four or five year period and eventually they just they just died they just couldn't handle that uh the case of the missing wildflowers songbirds like the great crested flycatcher depend on being able to afford six thousand to nine thousand caterpillars to raise their young as adults as adults moths and butterflies feed on the nectar of wildflowers and high deer densities drastically reduce the number of native wildflowers negatively impacting insects and birds so here you see number of zigzag golden rod i showed you goldenrod support 135 species of the the critters that this guy this great crested flycatcher and 96 percent of the other birds in north america require look at this offense versus unfriends yes we can yes we can yes we can recover our force yes we can but we can't do it without reducing dirt instances because look at look at this like there's wiped out so so if you're responsible for managing block of forest if you're a habitat then you need to take into consideration all the species i love deer don't get me wrong i love deer i mean my heart smiles when i see deer but i my heart also smiles when i see butterflies and caterpillars and birds and mammals and we need we need all these critters we just can't have one dominating the whole sh whole um the whole forest so willow flycatcher is another species look at this pollinators again fenced versus unfenced this is incredibly good news this is incredibly good news if we can reduce deer densities we can increase the number of wildflowers we can increase the number of wildflowers and in doing so we can provide habitat for the insects and food for the insects and thereby provide food for the birds who require them so the case of the missing pollinators and the case of the missing songbirds so i mentioned earlier we've had precipitous declines in insects precipitous declines in birds amphibians reptiles mammals across the globe we're in an area a time that's called the sixth greatest extinction the sixth greatest mass extinction event uh on earth so so i know that's a huge issue and you know tropical rainforest and everywhere comes into play but we can do it we can in our own backyard and the case of the missing songbirds well we have about 95 percent of north american birds rely on a diet of insects to feed their young insects feed and shelter on native herbaceous woody plants only the native plants can provide insects with the food and habitat they need to survive the invasive plants cannot do that only the native plants do that high deer densities reduce the abundance and diversity of flowering plants and thereby reduce populations of insects and bird populations decline as their insect prey becomes scarce so in concluding force fragments in an arbor uh in force fragments in an arbor forest are an invaluable resource for all of life preventing further forest fragmentation and forest loss will reap dividends for generations to come maintaining biodiversity and forest fragments requires active management we cannot be passive because if we're passive the island uh the island biogeography theory predicts and is borne out through through lots and lots of research that will lose species which is simply if we just put a fence around it we'll lose species so it requires active management invasive species control it requires uh prescribed fire it requires uh managing our deer herd and maintaining oaks is critically important because they sustain wildlife and to do so will require reducing deer densities to allow the oak seedlings to grow above the reach of the deer so reducing dirt densities also is also required to allow populations of native plants to rebound and re resume their functional role of providing critical food and habitat resources to the animal community so i want to thank you for your time and i'm happy to engage in conversation if anybody would like to well thank you mr cost um we only have about four minutes for questions um to keep on schedule so um um please um okay so chris your hand up is and then lisa dish okay i i'm curious uh if the speaker ever had a chance to uh have a conversation with tanya hilgendorff who's the ceo of the local humane society and if you haven't i wonder what we'd have to do to get the two of you together because she has mounted a huge campaign against any kind of durer management uh i do not know who she is um this first time i've heard her name i'd be happy to engage in a conversation with her it might be interesting thank you thanks chris lisa uh thank you so much for this excellent excellent presentation so um i think you do a wonderful job um explaining to us how jacqueline corteau's studies help us understand the damage that deer are doing and the and the effects that exclosure have on forest health and biodiversity you so you've given us lots of evidence that deer are clearly dense deer populations are clearly a causal factor but is it possible to quantify what counts as high levels yeah yeah you know um a lot of studies it's it's actually really a low number of deer like seven per square mile i mean it's really it's really small anything over that i'm not an expert on and i used to have those numbers better at my fingertips and i i should have considered looking that up again but my memory was seven to f less than 15 number 15 deer per square ml and so they that was in the literature it was like seven and then the dnr was like no it's got to be higher uh so it's it's really a small number and you think about what if we were all like trying to live off the land all you and me and all the rest of us on this call and you know like deer would be great right you'd love to have a uh have some deer or meat right there wouldn't be a lot of deer and there were a lot of people here the populations of north america were like excuse me really really high uh native before desoto and 95 imagine being in new york city and reducing the population by 95 percent that's that's what we saw that's what we saw when when you know these indian wars were happening there were way more people previously if you have sites for any of the research that offers those numbers um i'd be interested and numbers of the deer density yeah because yeah that's one thing that we debate and we're hopeful to have scholarly sites for that thank you so much okay thanks rita you're up next thank you um michael i just want to say that i appreciate very much your description of the carbon sequestration of large trees that was probably the best description i've heard of of what that means how how it happens um so just thanks oh good good yeah there's a great podcast on that with with the guy who's an engineer he goes through like really detailed how he figured it out it was really amazing yeah okay right are there any more questions well chris graham has his hand up it's hiding behind a flower thank you michael uh it's not just about deer though our native forest fragments are a um spectacular um component let's call them or um our good fortune is that we had some steep slopes in ann arbor we had places that were wet we we had a lot of microclimates and some of those were fairly large areas we had farmers who left their back five or ten acres on plowed and on change to farms we have a collection of native forest fragments in ann arbor that are really extensive and really quite special but they're still fragments and as michael says we really have to manage them we have been managing the best ones on our parks we've paid precious little attention to the rest of them and i hope our committee can be bringing to you some changes to the code of the city to do a better job thank you chris um any other comments questions all right well thank you again mr costa this is very enlightening it's going to be a great help to us as we you know try to make try to improve the natural features in town and try to connect uh you know wildlife corridors as well right and do proper deer management great do i have galen's i don't know if i have galen's email address he wanted me to send the talk to him i'll give it to you michael say that again i'll get it to you oh craig great thank you chris all right thank you chris and thank you all for the opportunity to speak with you and uh wish you all the best of luck uh our force depend on on your your ability to to manage them so thank you for doing what you do it's it's a pleasure to be associated with you guys and uh ann arbor it's just an incredibly beautiful city and it's it's not by accident uh it's it's by direct thoughtful people like yourselves taking time to to do what you do so thank you thank you for all your hard work all right take care bye-bye okay uh so let's move on the next item on the agenda is unfinished business so there's the resolution to begin discussion of the um housing resolution that was discussed last month um let's see kathy would you like to lead this discussion uh yes thank you um the resolution that posted to the agenda was approved by the energy commission on march 8th and i would just like to um introduce this that even though there are quite a few whereas clauses the resolution seems to have grown considerably as more people look at it the purpose of the resolution is really just to provide a policy direction and to ask elected leaders to provide some direction really to provide policy leadership to staff members who have been discussing these topics with very limited results for many years when i talked to a planning staff they have many ideas of where housing could be located on transit corridors in northeast ann arbor but even though the university of michigan staff and the ann arbor city staff meet quarterly there there hasn't been um really direction or incentive to do this and so i believe there's considerable frustration among city staff uh frustration among the students at the university of michigan um and i can give you a couple of personal examples um i'm chair of the friends of the michigan league and the custodians that are full-time that work at the michigan league some of them drive in from detroit and that is a major hardship in my opinion uh and it's it's actually a social justice issue um that that people have to drive that far and the other thing is i was in the hospital for a just a minor procedure a couple of weeks ago and so i was asking the staff and the nurses where they live and then one of them said well where do you live and i said oh i live about two miles away and she looked at me and she said you must be very rich so i thought that statement sort of summed up how many of the staff at the university of michigan feel that you'd have to be very rich to live here and so how can we change that dynamic and provide more housing and the i can repeat some of what's in the resolution but if you've looked at it it's pretty obvious that this is consistent with our a20 goals it's consistent with the university of michigan sustainability goals and so i would appreciate support for this and i understand if um commissioners who are employed at the university of michigan if they feel some hesitancy to move forward because of a conflict with their employment um that's fine um i i know that this is going to be a difficult ask but i think that it is the right direction to take and i believe that it will be possible in the long run ufm is entering a new land planning phase uh one of the regents ron weiser is the owner of mckinley property mckinley provides affordable housing in other communities and so this this is something that mckinley is already familiar with um and i i think that's about it for right now if if other people want to comment i'll try to summarize at the end oh other than i would like to remove the fifth whereas clause which men mentions 118 private companies have been launched by u of m uh we don't know how many jobs have been created and this resolution is scheduled to go to the economic development corporation and so if they want to add back some information about that that would be fine and also the fourth resolve clause uh which mentions our lobbyists we just need to strike the name of the lobbyist as we change lobbyists and it's probably better not to have a specific company reference in this document anyway okay um thank you kathy um a few things there are two resolutions actually posted here for our consideration there's the workforce housing resolution that we discussed last month but there's another one which is environmental commission endorsement um i'm not sure um i'm not sure uh how well you would like to proceed on this because one refers to the other um oh galen could you um allow me to share my screen and i can put up the uh i can put up the resolution for for people to look at while we're having a discussion okay and then the second resolution i would defer to rita mitchell to to lead any discussion on that that's really a formality and an option if we want to be that formal to have a resolution in support of the environmental commissions i mean the energy commissions version of the resolution okay um let's see um john well let's um john you have your hand up and then rita sure thanks i appreciate all the work that's gone into this i know several folks have been working hard on this um as i kind of read through where this is at right now a couple of things kind of stand out to me that i would find it difficult to support that moving this forward um but perhaps you know if we can make if it's there's a possibility to make some you know revisions to it i'll just share my ideas i find the the res the resolved clauses to be very the ones about workforce housing to be very clear so those i'm fine with those i'm struggling with the title where we say 2000 units based on what data what analysis i know it's aspirational but i i think that is problematic so if it's possible to rename it that we're going to be to match the the resolve clauses that we're going to resolve to begin discussions with u of m for net zero affordable sustainable workforce housing i think that's great just for clarification so just strike the 2 000 units it's just to to match what's in the resolve causes is the recommendation we're we're going to start a conversation with u of m we're asking you know like you have in the the resolve clauses asking the city administrator to move it forward i to me that's how i i i would approach this and then the the question i have about the resolve clauses though is the adding in of the student issue to me that's that's an important issue too but it's it's i don't really see it connected to the workforce housing and i think that maybe you know adds more to you know what we're trying to accomplish here um then you know then then would be helpful so my suggestion would be just to focus on starting the conversation with work on workforce housing between you know the university and the city um i think that would be fine i i definitely agree that the scope of this resolution has grown and it needs to be pulled back um and i wasn't thinking so much about dorms i was thinking about housing for graduate students many of them are also already employees of the university and then would qualify for this workforce housing due to their employment so uh that would be fine with me i don't know how other people feel um arita you have your hand up yes sorry um i just wanted to explain the second resolution i put it together just to give us something for process because it seemed to me that the main resolution stands on its own and this gave us an opportunity to excuse me to either support it or not so it's just there as a possible administrative process thing we don't have to use it depends on how the group wants to go okay um let's see um anne marson you have your hand up hey yes um in reading through this i'm not i'm not um terribly familiar with the issue however it wasn't clear to me what exactly it is we're asking of the university other than entering into discussions uh i'm wondering like when you say you know you know 2 000 units of housing here um and i know we're maybe perhaps uncomfortable with that precise of a number um but i i mean are we asking the university to develop this themselves or to provide land or like what's the scope of what we're asking the university it would be all of those options and in this resolution even though it has become it's grown to become quite prescriptive the purpose of the resolution was to simply start a discussion among elected leaders at the university of michigan the regions and the city council as well as county elected officials our state leaders and our federal leaders as interested um does that answer the question i mean it was really to provide policy direction because the feedback that i've had from staff is is that they meet they they know of many uh areas of land that that would be ideal for workforce housing but it's i don't want to say anything negative about the university of michigan but the university of michigan is a huge organization that is very protective of its um its traditions and it's very difficult for uh the university to change direction in any way and so just the uh the concept of providing workforce housing in itself is is significant so i think we should ask for the the least amount but it is about having a discussion i yeah i just i guess what it wasn't clear about that was that the city staff feels like they they've they see potential except that what is it the university owns that land that they feel like would be ideal for workforce housing um some of it is owned by the university and so it would require cooperation with the university there is other land along plymouth road that will probably be developed you know private land once we have a transit corridor along plymouth road that would provide that type of of housing i see i see thank you okay um any other questions at this point then i think would be proper for us to entertain friendly amendments or suggested amendments and uh but i'm i'm unclear about how to proceed with which uh with which resolution i think uh it's important that uh we've already discussed this one that i have displayed and the energy commission has already discussed it and approved it and i understand that the planning commission has discussed it but that they have not uh they have chosen not to endorse it um they have mostly because it's not um it's not part of their um not card and it's not on their plate right now and they have many other issues to deal with so my impression and let me know if i'm wrong shannon is that the planning commission will get engaged as soon as like there's some kind of uh rubric or framework that's ongoing um uh that presents something tangible that you can deal with i'm shannon hear the floor yeah and and lisa please feel free to jump into here because you were part of that discussion as well um shannon you're super hard to hear for me okay sorry is this any better let me check my audio settings is this better yes okay sorry about that um so lisa please feel free to jump into because you were part of this discussion as well um uh we we have a very ambitious set of uh a work plan in front of us that i think that we were hesitant to because we really kind of taking this apart and um and and looking at it deeply we know would take several iterations of like meetings and things like that and we're kind of moving on some other things right now that we didn't want to derail for things that we felt like we actually have um we we are certain that we have influence over like parking standards and and tc1 zoning and things like that that we absolutely have jurisdiction over and this is something that i though i personally feel like it would be awesome if this this were to to happen um there's a certain amount we just don't know you know if if they'll engage it takes two to tango right um and so i don't think it was born out of we don't support this as much as we're already trucking in a different direction where we know we have influence and we didn't want to kind of get off of that of that train to be able to take this on um so that that's more i would say my impression of kind of where the group was going with it um and there certainly has been a lot of um work i think that energy commission especially has really poured a lot into this and this has morphed significantly you know since when it first came out so i think that there's been and they've incorporated you know the feedback that we had our who whoever it was you know from the the times that we've had before so it really is i feel like great that it's getting close for sure um i i am i i hope it goes somewhere excuses what i would say but you have to try right you know i mean so just kind of ringing our hands and saying you know it's never going to work is i think it's important that that um that we try um but uh so and and it could be that there are other influences and that there's just kind of a tipping point for all kinds of things that may make this um have a more receptive time than other times you know in the past and it is just astounding how much the university owns in our city right you know along some of these very important um corridors so um yeah so i don't i don't think it's like this is a bad idea as much as for planning commission as much as that we feel like we have a slam dunk on some of the things that we have in front of us where we know we have jurisdiction that this one is uh it's it's totally supported in in the comprehensive plan like almost all the things that are in here are just you know you're referencing the a20 plan and all these other things but it is all through the comprehensive plan too in terms of the different things that you're talking about here so it's absolutely supported by many planning documents that we already have too you know so that also is important i think as well so lisa anything from you that you remember beyond that okay okay kathy you have your hand up um yes i i have mentioned this to a a few regents and maybe they were just being polite but no one has said this is a bad idea this is not workable uh there are ways to do this where there would be no uh cash flow impact for the university of michigan initially and there might actually be a positive cash flow uh over time if this is if the development is done uh by private companies on a 99 year lease of university land then we would get property taxes from the building just not from the land um i did mention it to the former president i realized he's not here right now but his comment back was sounds like a win-win-win so um i know that's not communicated down to staff at this point but if we could continue those conversations and we used to have annual dinners with the regions and because of kobit we haven't done that and hopefully we will be able to uh spring or summer and at that point this resolution then could uh be shared with them uh lunia is not here tonight but she has been working on a press release showing uh support from the graduate students and central student government i know that john mursky also is talking to um some other leaders at the university of michigan so um i know this is being televised but i i want to say this is definitely a hard sell i realize that uh but i think it will if we can get enough people moving in the same direction the university of michigan is entering their planning process uh we just have to remove as many obstacles as possible and make this sort of the easiest road to walk down um yeah that seems hopeful to me and then the other thing i think that is also important is some of their north campus housing is really starting to age out at this moment you know and so they have to make decisions about things and yeah who knows this could be coming at a good time that may have been different ten years ago or something like that too so okay yeah i agree and there is a statement in here about protecting the uh the trees i don't know what exactly what the term was um something recommended by rita you know so that yes it's that high quality natural features if you could go up just a an inch or so so we would take that into consideration another thing that um that was brought to my attention is we really need a statement about ada compliant buildings as a whereas clause and so i was going to ask the um that that goes without saying kathy that's just like you can't build anything without that anyway so you think so oh no i know single yeah there's no way i'll get me that's your job oh okay it was it was just a feeling that with all these whereas clauses maybe that should be mentioned but if it's it's bound by law you know there's you have to do it anyway it can't hurt just to have you know more people as part of it but yeah that has to be done no matter what okay and does that law require a certain percentage of units um it's more getting being able to get to places and things like that but certain percentage that's a good question i'm not sure and that it may be worth asking um you know that that group to see i don't know again i feel like what this probably should be is more about beginning the dialogue than getting too prescriptive you know about things okay um thanks okay i mean my take on this is that the whereas clauses are good and that they outline different discussion points that are worth consideration on when these discussions begin to happen and um you know and uh i think that we're in the in the uh as well the resolve clauses here um seem to be compatible with everything that's been discussed so i don't have any personal problem with this myself so rita you have your hand up i just want to point out that with respect to the natural features it fits really well with what michael coast told us today about the um the edges the forest fragments it's like those are the kind of places that i had in mind when we were um discussing this last time that to preserve those components yeah that should also be a discussion point you know um as this says this conversation involves you know with the university um and wetlands is another area that we really don't need to mention because it is a state law okay all right kathy um so let's see um please raise your hand now if you'd like to have any more preliminary preliminary discussion about this resolution um i don't see any right now so um i think we should all remind ourselves that we shouldn't let the uh the perfect be the enemy of the good and uh it's a very timely uh it's very timely for us to be presenting this resolution to council because um of course the university leadership is not in place yet the new university leadership and this is an opportunity to to get get this on the ground floor for consideration especially because this is a long time social problem here in ann arbor uh social and infrastructure problem with all the new jobs that were created by the university principally and all the people that have to commute long distances in here and and and this could only help uh both the city's some carbon neutrality goals and universities as well so i think this is something this is a long-standing problem that's been recognized by many people in the community that we need to do whatever we can to make sure that debbie dingle doesn't have to get involved eventually like she had to for the yellow and plume so um so that's what i have to say right now and i guess um what we need what we should do is um entertain motions for friendly amendments um john keller just mentioned a few so if he would just repeat those and we can get those written down do you have a floor yep so sure uh let me just pull it back up so what i'm suggesting is the title uh just say resolution to begin discussions with the university of michigan for net zero affordable sustainable workforce housing okay um uh do i have uh what do you have any other amendments to propose john well i'm kind of deferring a bit to kathy here because i don't want to okay i think the student piece is is kind of beyond scope yeah yeah okay well let's um well yes exactly so we were discussing that as well so do i have a motion to accept that for a moment uh john's already do i have a second cat kathy our sec has seconded um if you accept this amendment raise your hand or say aye hi are there any uh no's i hear and see none any abstentions i hear in cnn so those amendments are passed unanimously are there any other friendly amendments that are proposed john do you want to remove on additional student and so it's just employee residential units yes in the title okay so we we'd be striking additional student and yeah i think it should just end at sustainable workforce housing whether it's on campus or not i mean that's again i'll i don't want to take it too far afield but that that's my opinion okay i'm not capable of modifying this copy but i have displayed so galen would you keep track of that um young women you have your hand up yeah yeah i just have a question uh what's the reason for striking out the additional student part again sorry i missed it i just think for me the topic of workforce housing is is kind of big enough is is focused enough and that when we bring in student housing that's a whole other issue in terms of student enrollment and and i don't think talking about workforce housing and addressing student housing and enrollment at the university it's to me it's it's gonna pull the it's gonna dilute the conversation yeah but like i think like below in the body paragraphs you talk about how like another campus enrollment has increased a lot over the past and that just means like brought in the student conversation here though how what's the connection to workforce housing though from that no i'm just talking about like um somewhere else in body paragraph yeah it's the third one down yeah it's on the screen now i mean are we saying that increasing student enrollment is pushing workers out of because students can um are willing to pay more for off-campus housing and that would then create more competition and possibly push lower paid staff out but i'm i'm willing to to have this resolution focus on employees given that many grad students are also employees do you agree with that yep yes okay does that clarify for you young young man yeah i guess so okay i just want to say we can always come back and address that issue and i really think that having that uh student initiated resolution that we then support would make more sense you know if we just focus on workforce at this point all righty because as a student like over the past couple of months it was a bit challenging for me to find affordable housing too for next year so like looking at this i think like building affordable housing for students will be also really important that was a point oh okay i i totally agree with you and i'm willing to start working on that as soon as this one passes and again i really think it should be student initiated though yeah that seems prudent to me as well um and it and i think john had a very good idea to separate these two issues because it could just um they could just you could complicate the discussion of warfare workforce housing tremendously um so um any other comments on this shannon you have your hand up a ball back um okay i guess there's um no more comments so with those friendly amendments do i have a motion to to vote on this as uh as amended rita raised her hand um i guess that's a that's the motion do i have a second kathy seconded um all right well let's proceed to a vote um see i gotta stop sharing here so i can see everybody all right so um who uh let's see all those who agree with accepting this resolution as amended um uh please raise your hand or say i i don't see or hear any nays any abstentions i don't see any so that's it the resolution passes unanimously so thank you everybody i know it's a complicated issue but uh it's good to get this ball rolling as soon as possible um and um so what about the second resolution that was attached here entitled um environmental commission endorsement um that seems to be uh seems to be moved at this point i think it is yeah just an issue of my own thinking things through it's okay to set it aside so do you want to do you want to advance a motion to uh um to table it at least or wrong agenda i think i would just remove it from the agenda i don't feel i mean unless the group thinks that's necessary so okay i think we did what need we needed to okay we should still vote on it so do i have a second now kathy's seconding this um um all who agree to uh to eliminate consideration of this uh resolution raise your hand say hi any uh any uh nays here in cnn any abstentions here in c9 so that that passes unanimously we will not be considering this resolution at any time in the future then so the next item on the agenda is reports from committees other commissions council and chairs so let's start off with uh um with uh the natural features working through we meet tomorrow at noon uh anyone wants a zoom link that doesn't have one we can get you one among other things on the agenda are looking at some of the first sections of amendments to the code updating natural features um a key thing on in that group is a revised and updated landmark and heritage tree list much more comprehensive um we'll also be looking chapter 40 which um uh has been um kind of a muddled and old ordnance uh often amended um but a hot button at the moment because of people wanting to replace turf grass on their sidewalk buffer strips with other plantings and so what are the limits and guidelines for doing that so it's a it's a right-of-way ordinance and what can happen and what shouldn't happen there so there'll be discussion of that uh tomorrow as well twelve o'clock to two o'clock okay thank you uh thank you chris um it's about pollinators um thanks we um pollinator worker first off did review the chapter 40.

so i don't see anything novel to present there but what i will do and we don't have time to have a vote on this you know before march 31st but i'm going to send it out to all the commissioners so they can review it make some comments and we'll just stick with what's in the public record for uh 2021 unless there are some changes and then i'll see what i can do about uh getting those out at a later time okay i i don't see any other way of dealing with this so um are there any so let's see any questions or comments about the reports um then we'll move on to the report from staff gail and you have before all right thank you um i got two updates of the office of sustainability and innovations and u of m trees we are collaborating on the climate action movie night and this is going to be held on april 15th at 7 00 pm um at elbow field uh we'll have a performance by kai five then after that performance we'll jump into the movie and after the movie we'll have a panel discussion then also uh earth day this year we're working on that right now under leadership of susan westhoff and leslie science nature center um earth day is actually going to be celebrated uh by the city on april 24th at 1 pm at the leslie science in nature so this year it'll be in person those are my two updates okay and when was the date for the elbow field event uh april uh 15th that's a friday and um it'll be outdoors and then uh we're encouraging everybody to bring blankets you know you can do picnic style or whatnot but it'll be a good event and a good collaboration between the city and uofl well that's wonderful so oh the other thing i noticed galen is that the green fair has been scheduled i think the annual it used to be called the mayor's green field yes um i'm not sure that date off hand though i think it's in late april as well um but i will uh i will check with that um so i would encourage everybody to look at the uh at the city's website uh to find out when the green fair is coming on and i think um you know for the for the uh the last one was held in september i believe it was or it might have been around the first of october on main street and um we had a table for that event and um um commissioners a few of our commissioners i attended that and chris vandenbroeck uh luna oriole attended that as well and um i believe yong wen zhang as well and uh we had uh i think it's a good opportunity for the commission you know to uh you know to to be there to let residents give residents an opportunity to ask questions of us and to see what kind of work we're doing so i'm hoping to have a table for that but i may be out of town myself so i will um i will be circulating other emails to try to find volunteers and most of the the table itself was uh donated by uh you know by uh by osi but um um i'll keep you all posted on that um lisa you have your hand raised green fair is friday june 10th from 6 00 to 9 00 pm that's right it's june 10th that's good that gives us some more time so um [Music] okay so um [Music] so i got confused because i will be out of town then too and that's actually going on april 24th and i'll also be out of town on june 10th so um so there um right thank you again um so in terms of action items i don't think we have any to review at this time um so the next item are on our agendas items for the next agenda are there any topics people would like to discuss or put on the agenda um let's see hopefully we might get some so just email me your suggestions about uh what to schedule for our next meeting we have a few others uh that are involved but i think uh i think tiffany uh was was going to present this the city's um forestry plan but she had to postpone that until april so that's the only item i know of which is currently on the agenda okay for for our april meeting um the next scheduled meeting is april let's see here i think it is april 24th 28th i think oh you're right yep it's april 28th so the next scheduled meeting is april 28th at 7 00 pm um so the next item on our agenda is public commentary uh this is the second opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 1-888-788-0099-477-853-5247 and enter meeting id 989-285-11637 [Music] uh this is an opportunity for you to speak for up to three minutes so this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and the video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sound so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and be patient there is a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection is established so um do we have anybody on the line as yet galen [Music] there's no one on the line okay well we'll wait 30 minutes and then um and then we will adjourn give me 30 seconds right i mean 30 seconds i've been on my computer i've been on my computer since six o'clock this morning i'm getting a little rattled so uh probably we just want to make a minor correction i technically didn't go to the mayor's fair last time so i couldn't take credit for that oh that's right i'm sorry yeah you're good hopefully i make it this time okay great that would be wonderful so um [Music] let's see i think 30 seconds have passed oh yeah is there anybody on the line there's no one on the line all right well thank you galen so i declare this meeting adjourned at um at 9 12.

49 and then 21 staff members were um released due to budget cuts the district still hasn't recovered from that um and the goal was to to keep us in line with districts that are more more in line with districts similar to us in the state when we look at staff member to student ratios administrator to staff ratios and things like that we are below the average meaning we have less administrators per teacher we have less teachers per student and the big reason for that is because this district was unfairly underfunded for decades and it it wasn't this board of education it wasn't any past board of education that made that happen it was the state of new jersey directly dealing with state aid but thankfully we are finally getting the state aid that we have deserved for many years and although we are not expecting to be fully funded until next year we did get an additional 12 million dollars in state aid this year which was music to my ears until our business administrator showed me where that money had to go and so anyway we presented a budget to the finance committee that called for a tax increase and the finance committee with all due respect said to the administration we really don't want to do that we don't want to raise taxes um no matter how little it will cost we don't think it's a good time to be raising taxes um we don't disagree that you need these positions and these members can speak for themselves but it's just not the time to raise taxes so the the committee charged the administration with presenting a zero percent budget excuse me and i want to be clear i respect the board of education's role in the budget process board of education does three major things three very very important things one they hire a superintendent you did well you wanna make sure you're still paying attention two you hold the purse strings now you tell me zero percent i present zero percent and three you make policy and policy dictates everything else we do so we went back we balanced the budget and the resolution that's on the agenda tonight is a zero percent tax levy increase and what that means without getting into the details that you'll get we'll get into in the public presentation on may 5th is that it's a status quo budget with the exception of we are able to have the ability to fund six new positions for the district which we are going to put towards security we're going to hire six new security positions for our secondary schools next year the district is set to become fully funded and you know what upsets me is that you know i thought when we saw the numbers we're getting 12 million this year i'm like oh don't we're good we're going to be able to get these positions that we should have always had without raising taxes but i asked mr mr uchi because i've had people say to me well danny how come you can't do these things you're getting 12 million dollars so i asked mr usee to provide to to prepare a quick one-slide uh demonstration of where that extra 12 million dollars is going because i think the board really needs to see this mike sure dr armpit perfect yeah it's pretty small but um yeah so as dr robertosi said this is extremely brief and it's it is simplified but it's it's that way so it could be easily you know comprehended and uh just to put it out there without going into the full budget when we go into that on the public hearing on may 5th so we had a state aid increase of 12 million 756 000 so you ask like where on the top like off the top going from the 2122 budget to the 2223 budget where does that go if no other revenues are increased in the district which the main revenues obviously of our district are is the state aid and tax levy so right off the top we have to budget what the state tells us to budget when it comes to the projected enrollment of charter school um so that number that two and a half million is an increase from current year until next year and that's coupled with their projected enrollment and also the increase in state aid does go has a piece in the charter school realm as well because they are public schools um the pcti votec budget actually did have a small decrease very minor decrease ood means out of district out of district private schools which is all special education tuition-based private schools that had a large increase um 1.6 million and that and they are state-certified rates as well it's not it's not something the district negotiates with a a private school they're state certified through the child's iep and they they they tell us they have to go to that school which because it's the best learning environment and then the tuition is state certified next salary increases for 22.23 so this year a lot of our collective bargaining contracts were up and we settled all our contracts so to give just the raises from this year going to next year it's about four million dollars for the staff next now this is still being negotiated but at current time from now until we vote on the final budget we're projecting a health benefit increase which is our medical our health i'm sorry our medical our dental our prescription um and any other um things that come along with that increase of about four million dollars so where you see we got 12 million dollars if no other revenue sources increased our bottom line appropriation increase is about is over 12 million dollars so we're showing about 600 000 of um money we could budget elsewhere and we decided as administration to try to build that security team we're looking for does that do a pretty good idea that's exactly what uh thank you uh miss ducey i just wanted the board and the public to see that because i don't want people think well you know you got 12 million dollars and you're you're you're asking for more so i just wanted people to to understand that now and and i want to be clear we're not in the predicate predicament we're in because of anything this board has done or anything a previous board has done we are in this predicament because our district was underfunded in the state formula by the state of new jersey for many many years and we're finally getting to where we should have been for decades of funding decades of funding and it's just a shame because it's just what would have been had we been funded fully all those years and this board has been very fiscally conservative and the public should know that my two years as a superintendent this board introduced two zero percent budgets the year before i came was a point eight percent increase so this board is very conscientious of the taxpayers we understand new jersey has the highest property tax rates in the country and we understand that most of that goes to your local schools so i just wanted to make sure that the discussion that was had in um committee also got out to the board there will probably be minutes from that meeting that will be read and then perhaps if there's any questions we should do that before the vote on the preliminary budget and that concludes my report mr president thank you thank you dr rubitozzi uh just have a few announcements again there's many things that are coming up in the district um so um i'm asking everyone to please uh look on our internet on our web page uh to the peach jar and you'll see uh flyers that have been submitted from just about every school that are having some type of fundraiser going on um i did like i did want to make note of a scholarship that's available seniors planning to attend college and major in education the grants are available online on the clifton schools district website under community and the scholarship is in the name of a past board member who i had the opportunity to work with the marie haycomb scholarship for future educators it was established in 2009 by the clifton education foundation and the family of marielle haycom in her memory marie hakem dedicated her entire life to the field of education a scholarship in the amount of one thousand dollars will be applied towards tuition awarded to a graduating senior from clifton high school this scholarship is supported by the income family and anyone else interested in making a donation towards the scholarship would be appreciated the scholarship is administered by the foundation so clifton seniors the scholarship is out there and available to you so please take advantage of it if you're going to college and majoring in education so again please check our website uh for many many events going on from athletics to the arts um tricky trays and uh bless you and many other things happening so please go out and support our schools many of them are having fundraisers so we ask that you all if you can to take one of the uh the fundraisers that's available and see if you could support that school we appreciate that very much thank you okay we have first reading of policy uh see we have by excuse me policy trying to read it here policy i don't see a number on this anyone know the number of this one two that can't be our number yeah two four you know it's just two four one five oh five mr smith you want me to read him out yeah we don't have to read the the whole thing but i just want the if you read the policy numbers and yeah uh policy 2415.05 student surveys analysis evaluations examinations one 24314 uh prevention and treatment of sports related concussions two six two two student assessment three two three three political activities five four six zero high school graduation five five four one anti-hazing joint of use of facilities eight four six five bias crimes and bias related acts 9560 administration of school surveys and zero one six seven public participation in board meetings okay next we have uh bylaw zero one uh six seven mr canova you wanna do that one too oh you did simply six seven okay because one was a one was listed as a bylaw that's why i wanted to separate them okay we have no presentations uh to report and we'll go to is there a discussion of uh policies in the first reading right not our first reading usually not okay all right uh board committee reports uh we'll start with uh policy mr abhijava policy committee meeting began at 2 40 p.m excuse me the attendees were president jim smith myself dr lucy danny administrators president dr danny roberts-ozzy and mr ross also the board attorney gutierrez was in attendance the committee recommends adoption of the following policies as per stress as may number 12415.05 student surveys analysis evaluations examinations testing or treatment which is mandated but it was revised number two 243.14 prevention and treatment of sports related concussions and head injuries mandated also was revised number three 2622 student assessment also mandated but revised uh number four three two three three political activities revised eight four six five biased crimes and bias related acts also mandated and revised 9560 administration of schools surveys mandated as well revised the committee recommends adoption the following and mandated policies with the stated changes 5460 high school graduation the credits for graduation in section 8.1 a pages 1 and 2 have been inserted in the policy the census attendance requirements as indicated in policy regulation 5200 has been inserted in section 8.1 point d on page five the optional section on the state seal of by literacy in section d on pages 13 to 15 shall be included in the policy section d point 3 on page 14 shall be amended to indicate that the board of education shall pay the cost of related assessments and transcript signias number two five five four one anti-anti-hazing excuse me is mandated and new the first paragraph shall be amended to indicate that the policy applies to the high school middle schools and elementary schools number three 7540 joint use of facilities it was revised the policy will further be amended to indicate that it applies to the local governing body and the body of county commissioners to the county the committee discussed bylaw zero 167 public participation and board meeting and makes the following recommendations change the word periods to period in paragraph four insert the following language at the end of the second sentence of paragraph four and providing the person's face is visible during their address to the board the second to last sentence of paragraph four shall be changed to read indivisible individuals shall limit the remarks to five minutes on any general matter pertinent to the district number four the words or district security shall be inserted in the rules section of the policy at four point d after law enforcement officers the committee then discussed policy 8860 in regards to memorials there are no recommendations to the board at this time a possible bylaw regarding board member communication with the superintendent of schools and the board secretary slash business administrator was discussed with no recommendation to the board at this time the meeting was adjourned at 4 10 pm but respectfully submitted by mr ross any questions i have one yes misspelled john um for the bylaws zero one six seven we had a lengthy um discussion over multiple meetings that we were going to allow phone call-ins which we do currently allow phone call-ins um with this policy changing too and providing the person's faces visible during their address we're no longer going to be allowing phone call-ins so i'm not sure if the whole board is aware because we did have many rounds of discussion on this day is that we were going to allow phone call in mr president yes if i remember the pilot that that conversation it was uh to the fact that we have to allow people don't we there's some kind of fcc rule or federal rule we had a really long conversation that day about this can um you have to allow people to call in yes we can also require that they have it doesn't have to be just a call and we can require that if it's on remote that there'll be a face so what's the difference between a remote uh being on the computer and a phone call because the phone call you can't put your face on it mr president if i may well i'm speaking not if you're not yes if it's a regular phone call right smartphone you can access um right zoom or whatever some people don't know how to use that technology to do that as well but we um i thought there was a ruling about that i'm not aware of a ruling that requires that it has to be a phone that a phone call has to be permitted so this is a this is legally allowed to tell people they have to show their face so how do you know if they have a smartphone versus a flip phone i don't well that's what i'm saying mr president if i may to answer his password's question yes so i think if i remember correctly the discussion was that anybody can utilize a phone call to call in use their five minutes under a unknown name alias or anything else that they can say but yet come back in here and use another five minutes to talk further if we're gonna say that five minutes should be used in total for an individual or for a resident or for whomever would like to speak at the podium the only way to hold accountability for anybody would be to show their face so this way we know who they are and not fall under a alias name and then come in here and again continue speaking because that would not be fair for the rest of the citizens and the residents that um either are calling in via a zoom with their photo or their video and then coming to the dais so it just holds in accountability for everybody but i mean nobody's prohibiting anybody from not calling in um and again we don't know if there's a flip phone or a smartphone but unfortunately these are the times that we have to come through because there's going to be a problem where and we've gone through in the past where somebody calls in under an unknown alias and did not want to give the information if somebody's got to sign their name and put their address in the book at the dais they should do likewise and there should be a mandate that they do the same as well anyone else madam through you mr president to the attorney i thought that they would they don't have to give their name or their city what is the ruling on that because we we talked about this in to nauseum they do have the person that's speaking doesn't have to give their name right they don't have to give their address okay it's not required and remote access is not required either as long as there is no no longer a public health emergency right but we're granting that because of people with disabilities so what if we have an elderly senior that has a flip phone and that's the only access they have so that's why we we allowed that because we wanted to give access to all you know it's uh accountability is a very big word and it's a harsh word to use because when you have people that don't have access to things how do you how do you know how are you going to differentiate between a flip phone and a small phone i want to know who won i think that this is a question for the board i'm not opposed to no i don't have just the voice that's something that the board wanted to that was the discussion i had um one other question um when we discussed this originally we said that if there was a problem then we would consider removing the uh phone portion which we have not had a problem we barely even have had caller in so like in my view i don't feel like at this point it's worth limiting it because we haven't had an issue the issue that uh mr abuja was talking about was two years ago and it was you know one caller we're very lucky that we haven't had herds of people in our room attacking us but other boards had so i really feel that our public is much more respectful of our process and we don't really need to be limiting them since they've all been behaving themselves mr president yes mr genova so since they have to give their name whether it be on a phone call on a zoom or in person wouldn't that be the way that you tie back somebody to to not have an extra five minutes because um you know in sighting with with with miss vassar and miss belgran i i personally know seniors that do not have computers and do not have smart smart uh devices and i know they have called into a city council meeting so given that why would we restrict it when nothing's ever happened that's been bad we haven't seen anything as as miss beltran said we said that this was going to be a pilot we're going to take a look at it and then reevaluate later i haven't seen anybody really even call in let alone say anything bad on a call so i'm not sure why we're visiting this policy now and making a modification when there's in my eyes no need to if anything we're just limiting now the amount of people that are allowed to they're going to be able to speak if if they choose to someone wants to call in about you know dr robert tosie speaking about how there's a possible zero percent tax increase and if they say they want more more positions and something i don't know but they should have the ability to say that and if they're not here you know we go back back again to what we said originally their parents at home they may have their student on the device at home they're watching the meeting but that student's doing classwork and they would want to call we have it listed on our website from it literally says the number to call so i'm not sure why we're limiting anything at this point okay we'll move on to uh technology uh mr canova so i would i would actually this time make a motion to pull this this line in the revision i'll second that motion so this is first reading right so what what are you asking to change it well first of all the policy we're in the minutes now so we'd have to go back to the policy and we can we can get it changed then are you requesting that it go back to policy are you just requesting that it be changed i mean the rest of the the policy i'm fine with i just want to pull the uh the item number three okay so item number three can go back to policy and review it okay so three back to policy please so that's policy 0167 just so that we're great to be a vote on that no first reading right okay technology excuse me mr president um i didn't get i i think there's something going on because i'm not getting agendas is there a problem with the genders being because we're supposed to get them before meetings start uh or meetings meet there haven't been many meetings that's the problem but these there was three of these me there was three committee reports on this agenda and i didn't get any i think i got one for technology i think that was it so uh we we did i got crucified for one missing one so i'm going to ask that if we're going to comply that compliance be level and fair across the board and that it not be selective to certain committees have to do it and certain committees don't it should be fair across the board thank you okay technology mr kanova technology committee minutes march 8th uh myself mr daley mr paris mr dr robert tosi mr gengaro and mr mountain for president 505-541 first item new boardroom commissioners and admin commented in the new board meeting room that looks great and the scene the screens and other technology work well commissioners commented the quality of the video stream to youtube is perfect but channel 77 and 40 is not as good optimum is running new fiber lines for the board of ed building uplink which should rectify this issue for future meetings it was noted that the auditors presenting via zoom had difficulty hearing the commissioners an additional microphone will be set up for future meetings two device pilot several different commercial books were recently tested to compare brands and sizes and other features touchscreen capability as was discussed and if future budgets allow all new staff and student chromebooks will include this capacity moving forward larger screen models will be available as needed but the 11 inch devices will continue to be standard issue as keyboard size is the same for each model item three board docs all board members all board event suggestion suggestions have been forwarded to board docs development team and they thanked us for the input the district is still exploring the possibility of an additional feedback meeting between board docs and board of ed commissioners item four testing updates access testing for ell students is currently in full swing utilizing student chromebooks start strong assessments were administered this past past fall also on student chromebooks with no major issues this was the first state test without the use of proctor cash and all systems performed well new jersey gpa testing will begin on march 14th and jsla will be conducted in late april for high school students and in may for k through 8 students referendum security projects mr mountain provide an update on security projects phase one of the camera upgrade is moving nicely in walkthroughs our planning are underway for phase two equipment and cabling for the clock strobes and pa system will be up upgrades will be ordered soon as well when in wi-fi upgrades mr mountain noted that several network projects are ongoing behind the scenes when equipment network storage and wi-fi equipment are being upgraded continuously to maintain a modern infrastructure while minimizing downtime for staff and students mr mountain also provided a brief overview for the federal e-rate program and explained reimbursement eligibility for certain services and equipment purchases any questions nope thank you next we have finance vice president daily thank you mr president um finance committee met on march 15 uh president uh where mr aberdravo mr canover miss beltran and myself uh on the administration dr robert tosi mr guerrero mr yusi mr shahida um and mr doctor uh meetings started at 4 15 and and ended at 6 25 items discussed was the 20 20 22 23 budget items of under that category was the charter school increases there was a significant increase of state regulated charter schools tuition and basically that went to one group of charter schools that didn't go to all the charter schools that went to the stake arts and sciences and their related schools second item was a pcti budget there was a slight decrease in the tuition for pcti may also add um we we got 12 billion and they got an increase of what 30 i believe it was 30 million dollars just saying private school budgets a special ed out of district placements uh there was this a significant increase in the tuition for most of the district's special education and private school placements and this is uh obviously dictated by the state we don't control that they regulate those prices capital reserve the committee discussed how much money was in the capital reserve and the administration discussed possible uses for this money for our schools next time charter schools tuition referenced above in the state uh regulated uh is a director from the state and that is based on a per pupil cost and the estimated enrollment if the projections are not met by the charter school a surplus in that account a line can be as seen in next year's budget in other words we have to budget for it if it's if we don't use that money that gets put boosted over and helps us it's actually in in a way a surplus or a credit uh to our final year budget private school tuition for special education schools is state certified as i just noted health insurance committee discussed the increase in medical premiums a very fair renewal increase was given the business office though through the broker negotiated with aetna and reduced the initial proposed increase the broker will continue to work on health benefits in increases until the final budget in may just so the public knows how that works uh they're they the insurance company gives us a projected premium uh our broker negotiates that um most mostly in a down which never negotiates up for us negotiates it down it's really based on claims from the prior year and those claims they have a margin uh of i believe it's a little about 85 is that it mike for for what we projected for next yeah in other words if the claims are million dollars another 13 percent of stuff was added on by the insurance company as a cushion so you know they're not they don't budget zero based on claims right real quick so they look at what our claims were so what aetna had to pay out on our behalf so what we pay aetna every month isn't what they are making because they have to pay claims out so our ratio was pretty good this year i think it was 86 which means 86 cents on every dollar is being paid to a doctor or a hospital which is pretty good but we do we had a high claimance and other things but not to get into the week so how this may change before we get the final budget is that uh the claims are looked at for another about month month and a half and if they've been reduced we can get a further increase in that final number if anybody has any questions i'll be happy to answer them mr daily just for the public i'm sorry mr president through youtube mr daley uh just for the public knows what has been attributed to the slight in the decrease in tuition from bcdi uh it could be the large amount of uh state aid it's it's a little ironic i'll expound on that a little bit it's a little ironic that we have to pay that tuition and yet we get state aid and technically a portion of our state aid goes into the tuition we pay there so they get not only their state aid but they get a piece of our state aid uh when we send uh the tuition bill goes up there is it fair also to say that there's a contribution from the residency committee finding people who don't live in the city but attend the school under a different address and they found that yeah that that would work when we no longer have to pay the tuition for that student to go to pcti so that's x off the account and we get that credit back thank you unfortunately unlike the charter schools we have to wait another year the way that the state has this cycle to get our credit back it's not the next year it's the following year why don't ask me but that's what happens thank you i just wanted the public to understand that thank you mr president um through you to mr daley i think maybe that the next delegates assembly the clifton board of education can write a resolution stating our concerns about the funding to charter schools and that bring up the conversation because the legislative committee for the state of new jersey is starting to get on board with this and there's other districts that are having the same issue so i think that may be a way to get the attention of some people if you bring it to the d.a and then school boards can use that to uh to advocate for us as well because they are not up to the same standards as us they don't have to you know um we are we are held to a higher standard they can do whatever they want they don't have to have people that are certified teaching their children and uh if we're gonna fund it they should be held accountable the same as a district is so that was we one thing that i would like to see in a resolution i would love to sit with you and maybe go over this all right mr president through you uh as everybody knows has been known meanwhile uh i'm in total agreement with that and uh i've done lots of research in the past so i'd be happy to partner with you and anybody else on the board to draft a loose resolution and i think it's being discussed at the at the county level on the same issue the other districts in the in the county uh are also having discussions about this issue and mr president through youtube mr daley and miss basford i agree with ms passport on that excuse me um and i believe also we discussed it at our last last legislative committee meeting with our legislators as well uh in depth as well as our county commissioners of all of our concerns um with funding from the county level um as well as the state level yes mr president um they'll cut off a resolution down to the state is april six so we'll have to probably we won't have enough time to draft something uh for this da we'll have to wait to the 401 uh that gives us some time to actually get it together it you know and then you have to present it to the sub because i'm on the sub resolution committee it comes to us on the six and we vote whether we move it forward or it gets dropped well let's let's um to you again mr president i i think we could get some kind of a draft going in within the next 30 days and then we can collectively partner with whoever else we have to do to uh tighten it up okay so just uh do you understand that i said on the sub-resolution committee if clifton does submit a resolution i have to step off that discussion and when they're finished with it i can get back on i have to abstain because i'm impartial but also to the superintendent and uh president smith i also recommend uh legislative chair that we do give our legislators a heads up that we're doing this so they don't feel like they're blindsided since we have in our corner yeah absolutely and mr president three to mr daily and actually i think just for the public for the knowledge um a two percent increase of tax is a little over two million dollars and the charter schools as you saw the projected is two million dollars so had this been a flat year that we didn't get additional aid we literally would have had to go out to the taxpayers to fund a charter school so i want everybody to realize that what that really means mr smith yes um is this an appropriate time to talk about the preliminary budget at all or wait before we yeah no no just uh just under the minutes of finance you have any questions of that okay seeing none we'll move on to public recognition this portion of the meeting is open to the residents and non-residents of clifton for the purpose of addressing any subject matter pertinent to and or directly related to the operation of the clifton public school district residents and non-residents are requested if in person to sign the register provided for this purpose all speakers are asked to state their names municipality and subject matter before speaking comments are limited to five minutes per person issues raised by members of the public may or may not be responded to by the board all comments will be considered and the response will be forthcoming if and when appropriate your questions may or may not be answered by board members the board asked that members of the public be courteous and mindful of the rights of other individuals when speaking specifically comments regarding students and employees of the board are discouraged and will not be responded to by the board students and employees have specific legal rights afforded by the laws of the state of new jersey the board bears no responsibility nor will it be liable for any comments made by members of the public members of the public should consider their comments in light of the legal rights of those affected or afflicted in their comments and be aware that they are legally responsible and liable for their comments uh residents that are calling in uh please you state your name and municipality and subject matter as well and we'll start with um mr mountain anyone i thought we know we usually do a call-in first yep there are two sorry mr mountain i gave you the wrong that's okay give me the wrong information uh nurse robin oh i gotta switch it if you can hear us it's your turn to speak you have five minutes nurse robin are you there and the other caller is listed as cell city's iphone all right why don't we move to cell city so mr mr president for next time can i just make it a suggestion that we do in person first because we're on a delay anyway so they may not even know at home until the call and whatnot it's a minor delay it says connecting to audio what that means is that they are seeing a screen right now that says how would you like to join with your computer or phone and they're not responding leave this open or i'm sorry yeah we'll in the meantime we'll go to in person and if they come into the chair we'll uh we'll recognize him afterwards all right anyone here wishing to address the board i'm sorry is there a way to mute the people who are there this way they don't talk while in person thanks so is this muted in the in the room mark brunsiak holly street clifton good evening everyone i know we're approaching the fourth marking period spring is here i also know that the curriculum is being finalized for the next school year with this being said in 2020 while millions of children's lives were destroyed by remote learning the groomers at the new jersey department of education updated their learning standards and they need to be implemented with the 2022 2023 school year so among these standards which i'm about to describe exactly from the department of education on their website that this is supposed to be taught to our children by the end of fifth grade that's right our children by the end of fifth grade in comprehensive health and physical education 2.1 personal and mental health by the end of eight grade five among them explain the human sexual development and role of hormones example romantic and sexual feelings masturbation mood swings and timing of pubertal onset this is not at woodrow wilson not at christopher columbus now i know that none of you work for the state department of education although i hope that someone on this board at least send an email about these new standards my questions to you does anyone on this board think it's okay for a grown man to discuss these learning standards that i just described with the 9 10 or 11 year old girl does anyone in the cea i believe i saw someone from the cea tonight or any other members of the njea think it's okay to discuss these learning standards with girls 11 years old or younger in any other setting this person would have to register as a sex offender in fact the u.s department of justice states that sexual grooming occurs in numerous settings among them in institutional settings such as schools moreover that behaviors of these groomers include discussing sexually explicit information under the guise of education were parents ever notified about these changes to the learning standards and if not why not what recourse do parents have to remove these despicable standards and how does anyone involved in these standards still have a job with the department of education and hasn't yet been investigated by the department of justice based on what they describe as as groomers thank you for your time and god bless america [Music] hi good evening gary analic uh i'm on where am i rolling hills road clifton new jersey i'm gonna tell you something now you cannot be it unless you see it let me say it again to you you cannot be it unless you see it now we have something going on at clifton high school now that has not happened there since 2006 we have a championship football team always a championship soccer team championship at um uh what do you call academic uh debate team champion always the arts or championships we have superiority going on at clifton high school that is beyond measure i propose to you tonight in that we get these kids these these champion kids down to the elementary schools so the elementary school kids can see it and be it i think that the kids who are on the football team can go before a school at an assembly and say this is what i did and this is how i did it and a seven and eight eight-year-old kid can see that i could be like this kid that these kids you know we give him an award and we say thank you very much they now need to go to be an example because these kids and i just mentioned a few i mean we have a couple of really championship runners at the high school right now and they are championship runners state championship runners and they're also keeping up their academic standards and they need our kids cannot learn this when they enter high school they need to learn this in the fourth in the fifth and the sixth grade our middle school kids need to know the quality of kids that are at clifton high school before they go to clifton high school what i'm saying is you cannot be it unless you see it and i propose that we show it to these kids that we take these kids out of the high school because these are the best that clifton has and show it to these kids you know in a day of uh you know everything's on online let these kids be the real example of what life is about in academia or whatever i'm going to move on to say our sophomores in high school at that early age we need to reach out to kids who are in college who graduated from clifton high school and talk to these kids about what it's like to apply to and go to college because when they enter their junior year it's too late they're making decisions already so they need to know not from a person who is pushing their own personal college but from the kids who they know from the high school and let's get these kids and i'm sure all these kids would not mind talking let these kids let these sophomore kids know what it's like to apply and go to college bring back kids who have entered the military and let them talk to them about the advantages and disadvantages of going to going into the military and so on and so forth i know we have the academic dinner every year and it's a wonderful dinner and it has changed many people's career minds but i'm telling you that's too late that has to start the the the type of thinking to become an academic or anything in life has to start as you know i'm preaching to the choir has to start early so all i'm saying tonight is i'm coming up to you and saying you cannot be it unless you see it and let's get these kids down there and show our kids the potential they have how they have to be so dedicated to do that let them let them give them examples of the dedication they had and maybe it'll impress these kids to move on to greater things in life because these kids need to see it in order to be it thank you good evening tom whittles president clifton against substance abuse i missed the last meeting but i do want to start by saying i'm happy the board is going to fund project graduation something that i've advocated for for many years 100k i think is a little excessive but that's a conversation for a different day uh what concerns me about all of this now is that there are social media posts floating around asking people to donate to project graduation cash money drop off cash and envelopes to the high school office that's a slippery slope folks think about what happened last year when mr abu drabble stole bracelets now we're going to start delivering cash money to the high school that's a slippery slope number one it puts you know how do you audit it how do you track it and it will certainly hurt people donating because people don't want to donate cash they want to write checks they want to have a record of what they donated asking people through social media to donate cash it's just silly it's not trackable certainly not audible how do you order it how do you know who delivered what how do you know who got the envelopes how do you know who took the envelopes where'd the envelopes go something for you folks are trying to figure out uh at the last meeting i i did well i did watch it i did watch it on the on the live feed on the zoom and uh mr robert dravo spent a lot of time talking about project graduation i guess he's trying to make himself look good play the victim but i just want everybody on this board to know that on march 1st i received a letter from the state department of ethics mr aberdrabbo's case the ethics board has found probable cause and has now moved this case to the attorney general's office they've assigned it and it is going to go before the office of administrative law for a hearing so what mr abu drabba did last year has now been accepted by the board of ethics down in trenton i had the letter and it's namely the alleged violation of njsa 18a colon 12-24 prohibited acts on behalf of the commission please open a file on this contested case and assign an administrative law judge for a hearing everybody that was involved that night at project graduation will be subpoenaed we will have a hearing and we will get to the bottom of whether mr abu drabble should continue to serve on this board or not thank you good evening i hope everybody's doing well my name is lori lallam and i'm the president of the cea there's a couple of things that i want to bring up one the importance of hiring more custodians now i believe they get 15 for a sub rate when you can go to costco and get 30 plus benefits so the people my reps in the district have brought this to me and they said that they're concerned about the cleanliness of the building while they understand that the custodian department is short staffed and we're not here to throw anybody under the bus we're looking out for the kids and for the staff but our buildings are not cleaned we need more custodians the custodians here are working very hard but the schools they're not filling the sanitizer they're not cleaning the boards sweeping the floors the only thing that gets done is our garbage is emptied and that's about it the faculty bathroom is very disgusting the floor is dirty the sink is dirty the supplies are only restocked when we call the office and request it we ran out of toilet paper last friday and during period one on monday there was still no toilet paper the only faculty bathroom aside from the basement is the one on the second floor and there's a lot of teachers at the ccms and they're still using one bathroom besides bathrooms i feel like the buildings as a whole is dirty the walls are dirty the new rubber stair grips are dirty and already are breaking down it just looks bad i feel that the morale is low in the district because the lack of cleanliness and to no fault of the custodians and i want that to be understood but they need more people there is some something that is kind of degrading about being a professional and having to use a dirty bathroom i am sure there are no corporate executive offices with filthy bathrooms for them so that's one thing i really want the board to understand the importance of hiring more people now the other thing has to do with the taxes i contacted the educational law center so whether districts like it or not tax increases are good for the students said david sierra executive director of the educational law center any new money collected through tax hikes will help prevent cuts to staff or academic programs that would loom after reduction in state aid you've got to do something to make sure the resources in the schools don't get cut sierra also cautioned the districts aren't necessarily to blame for not taxing enough in 2009 the state set targets for how much every district should be raising in local tax revenue leaving some districts with a huge gap between their goal and their actual tax revenue is an issue when lawmakers later implement two percent limit on school taxes it became impossible for some districts to reach their target local revenue by not budgeting to the cap now the board of ed is creating a situation where in the near future the district is going to have to ask the taxpayers of clifton to dramatically increase taxes in order to be able to fund schools this is not a position that the people of clifton will like being placed into but the board of end members need to understand how important it is right now in the district there are 30 positions that are still aren't filled there are 12 resignations there are seven retirees there are lack of staff members here in the district and we really need your support and we're looking for it so think about raising the tax don't keep it at zero percent because who knows what's going to happen down the future and down the road thank you very much anyone else wish to address the board all right we'll go back to uh they've both left oh they both left okay motion to close we got a motion to close am i mr abu dravo okay we'll go to um unfinished business any unfinished business does she want me to wait okay so we'll go to uh education administration we have ea one through ea seven i'm so moved so boom might be star second second by mr awad discussion seeing none roll call mr abedrabo yes mr awad yes miss pastor miss beltran yes mr canova yes dr danny yes mr paris yes i'm staying on b1 vice president daley yes president smith yes moshe's carry all right next we have um personnel we have uh p1 through p24 so moved so will my mr abu drabo second second by mr awad do you want me to wait yeah uh discussion we're pulling one from here right i'm not sure um i think it was number two one chief miss passport you want it pulled on anything or you oh no just a second i think when miss bassford and i spoke i think as long as we can have the discussion and executive session later uh on that topic under negotiations that she would that she was okay with it but she's here she can speak first i can speak for myself um i'm not opposed to the positions um this is ties into the budget actually um that um i talked to you dr obatozzi about maintaining our talent and uh i'm seeing and hearing from people in the community that we're losing some of our talent because we're not being fair so that's what i wanted to talk about the rest of the board and i did i did send an email to uh both the president the vice president i cc'd you as well because i won't cc the whole board because it's not appropriate creates a meeting so um i just wanna i just wanna um talk about that about retaining talent and i want to talk about that before we actually submit the budget yes just to be clear because i don't i want to because bespoke can speak eloquently by herself but there's two things you said that i want to clarify when you're talking about losing talent and being fair we're talking about one specific group of people and that is nurses and it's not that the district isn't being fair although some may think that there is and we'll discuss i can't talk about the numbers too much but i can talk in generalities that there is a major shortage of nurses in the state in the country and the basic law of supply and demand is when supply is low what happens the prices prices go up and so yeah when we are lucky to find a nurse that we can that i can recommend to the board to hire they can demand a higher salary today and the unfortunate thing is we have some amazing nurses that currently work in our district that maybe were hired at a time when there wasn't a shortage of nurses maybe their heart were hired on step one and it is unfair to them and i don't and i can understand it when they see somebody who's hired five years later than them who's going to be making as much or in many cases more than them i get it but there are a lot of issues involved in trying to correct that there are of course contractual issues there are union issues there are all sorts of things so there are some things i do want to discuss in executive later under negotiations [Music] and the board and the public should know we are trying to rectify it but it's not something we could wave a magic wand and fix today um so i just wanted to make a clarification thank you if i could just simply add that the administration has been working with the clinton education start again uh what i just wanted to add is that the administration make it clear that the clinton education association has been working with the superintendent has been in discussing this so it's uh there's cooperation as as usual all right roll call please mr abbey drabo yes mr awad yes miss basford yes miss beltran uh yes mr canova yes dr danny yes mr paris yes vice president daley yes president smith yes all right next we have finance and facilities we have f1 through f12 so moved so much mr abhijava i'd like to have some discussion on this yeah uh second by mr rawad discussion mr paris thank you um just pertaining to the preliminary budget and thank you dr robertosi for the the overview and thank you to uh my colleagues on the committee i knew so maybe bear with me a moment but what struck me when i went through this rather voluminous preliminary budget was the fact that i believe the last three years there have been zero increases from the taxpayer side now this is a i'm sure a very unpopular topic that i'm about to raise here but it just draws some concern to me uh going forward and especially in light of what mrs basford just said about uh changing demand and salaries for for replacements uh what ms lallama pointed to as far as the need for some more custodians also the fact that since 09 and 010 it looks like we've lost by necessity to have to cut the budget we've lost instructional people i'm concerned about people that touch the students and although we have uh we certainly have fiscal responsibility but we also have responsibility to our students into our educational system here in town i'm just concerned that going into this this next year we have inflation rates now eight percent primarily just common goods don't even mention fuel at this point we're not making any provisions to get back to this even remotely to this table of organization we had in the past um i mean if administration tells me this is not impactful positions we don't need them they're not really necessary for the commute for the school system i i would understand that but it just seems that we might be on a bit of a dangerous trajectory here that we don't consider any kind of changes especially when it comes to improving instructional staff and making up some of the deficits that have been created in the past i remember when this first decrease came to to clifton it was many years ago when i after i first bought my home and a knock came on my door and one of the state assemblymen were there and looking for for my vote and this was the same state assemblyman who had a year earlier abstained from voting in the state senate and cost our district at the time which was i guess getting close to 30 years ago 11 million dollars you represented our district i said i'm surprised you're at my door any explanation as why you did i said i thought i would never vote for you ever again and he said well it was a moment of honesty from a politician i was kind of pulled in the back room by the governor and the powers to be and said you know do this for us because if you abstain our new formula will pass you really won't feel the effects of it because you've got a ways to go to get reelected and so he abstained from voting even though in this district that he represented it cost us 11 million dollars in our school system and since then i think we've been playing catch-up for many many many years so again i know it's not a popular thing to do i know it's something that many people are against any kind of tax changes whatsoever but if we really need um and the purpose of of the refunding formula is to get us back to where we've been and get us actually even more resources than before i think it's something we should maybe reconsider in this age in this preliminary budget i'd also like to point out that i this data i found online so far out of the 16 communities of passaic county clifton had the lowest per pupil spending of any of them and in the state of other than sorry i have to correct myself prospect park was lower but they have one school one k-8 school that's their entire district and the state average is over twenty two thousand dollars currently per per head per student which we are well below as well um so again i just would like to get some discussion on that um are we really planning here for the future are we really bolstering our our capabilities our instructional capabilities for students in in clifton or are we just kind of treading water at this point because what mr uchi presented showed that really we're just kind of keeping up with costs at this point spell john mr pilot um so all this was discussed in the meeting and jim daley can speak more to us his uh committee and i was only a guest in it um but the issue was that we went out for the referendum this year if we hadn't gone out for the referendum we would have probably been more open to accepting all of the increases that the school district was looking for the problem being if we were to accept everything that was needed and also of the referendum we were looking at a double taxation this year increase so it would have been hitting the public twice in the same exact year for an increase versus you know next year considering it when when the referendum has already been on the books for one year so that was really the consideration that went into it i understand that things are needed now and inflation and everything you know i truly understand everything that and i was actually one of the only people that were for spending a little bit onto the security side of it and not holding firm on the zero percent but you have to consider that we did hit this public for the referendum this year um and without that we probably would have gone for a tax increase at least that was what i took from the meeting uh thank you thank you miss beltran i can see that point of view the referendum passed by two-thirds majority though so the the taxpayers the voters in clifton supported that recognizing the need which is really separate from instructional this is this is purely facilities and infrastructure needs that we've had and that because we've neglected them over maybe not neglected but they've aged okay and they've gotten to the point where we had to replace them over the years a big part of the reason we've got to this point is kind of the budget situations we've had in the past and being able to maintain those systems and replace them so i kind of i'm my concern is more on what's touching the student side what's the instructional side um what we might be short short changing ourselves on at this point and also uh for some fiscal sanity for the future i mean are we really planning um for the growth needs that we have uh again i just i that's my concern trending water at this point and are we setting ourselves up for maybe uh a board a year or two from now having to look at substantial increases um because we're we're really kind of just towing the line at this point mr president if i may mm-hmm yes mr jonathan mr daley mr daley oh um so going on around miss beltran um i was also you know we were both discussing about while the majority says zero percent you know i agree with miss beltran about zero percent and plus security uh at least going to security because we've been talking about that for quite a while but the public is hurting right now the economy is you know i'm gonna say is in shambles and you know looking on the east at the east side of town many families are working really two jobs one parent one parent being at home and for us and i'm gonna say at the district i'm gonna choose my words very carefully because i got reamed out um i use the words dangled bait in front of residents to get them to vote for the referendum right i'm certain people didn't like that but that's how i felt and for us to do that to say hey vote for this and i'll give you this nice shiny neon pen i gave that to you you know vote for it right that's it's unfortunately that's how i feel what happened because in the past couple of years when we haven't gone to zero percent there were some board members who said zero percent it's going to catch up to us and it's catching up to us and i agree with you on that but sometimes when you have people and you dangled a zero percent in front of people to get them to vote for a referendum and as miss beltran mentioned i agree with her double taxing residents who are struggling to make meets end who can't even keep on their you know their lights on because this is the month of when pcg should sends out their shutoff lights because people are so back behind and i've seen a lot of that in my day-to-day job now and where people are struggling and for us to go to them it's easy for you know we live in two side towns here in clifton one who's capable but still some are struggling and the other side of town who people are really struggling and they're going in deeper and honestly you know i lived on this i tell most of my life and i've seen my parents for them you know for us whatever that 30 bucks or whatever it may be for the year to them that's a make or break for them that's a make or break for what they're going to feed their kids if they can keep on their pc g but if their water bills can get shut off if they're even going to stay in their house for rent to me i can't live with that you know unless you give me 15 20 people 10 people up at the podium say no go go go go first of all i'm going to see what side of town they're from because that to me is important that to analyze where we're going to go and how we're going to move forward but they're already getting hit for an increase per household think about what 177 dollars per household at an average uh you know because that's from the referendum i'm willing to look at security because we've been talking that for a long time and it's definitely needed because we need to secure our kids and our and our administrators and our faculty and our teachers that's a that's a we have to have a really deep down search and rough discussion if you know while some of us can afford it others can't and that's what frightens me while i know what you mean about you know supply our district are the best academic person i'm with you 100 on that but we got to fight our battles on that do we wait till next year let's get through this year you know it's like any of us who are looking they're looking at our bills in our house what are we gonna what are we gonna spend on what are we gonna say what are we going to pay next month what are we going to let go and and you know let that balance move over to so that's just that's just my two cents on it president smith yeah thank you mr president um and thank you for your comments mr paris um obviously i think this is my 13th or 14th budget i forget so it's um when i got on this board um administration didn't tell me too much about the budget and a couple years into it i found about the formula and how we were being shortchanged and administration never said a word to me that we were underfunded so when you make me curious i get into it so i found out that we were 50 million dollars shorted every year the taxpayers of the city of clifton the state has this great formula and what you should be paying what you should not taxpayers were overpaying their fair share for not years decades decades in this town because the way it was funded a number of years ago the formula that was in place but was never funded or addressed started to things changed in trenton so now we were starting to get our money next year will be the last year that we could expect that increase and i've also spoken to administration and my other colleagues i said and and joe and i has had this discussion many times the year after the things are are going to be tight you're going to have to do something but i can't for the life of me because this is responsibility that goes all the way ask the taxpayers when they've paid decades of over-funding our school for what they should have been paying for and they've getting a bit of a break here especially it's tough times but we're always going to have tough times we're not general motors we're not a bank we're not here we have a very fixed income more so than individuals uh in terms of school boards all government agencies are do that at least the local government agencies you're fixed to a certain amount of money and you have to adapt yourself that's how you you should go without but you need to be creative and you need to be smart about how you spend your money as well but at this point in time and last year's the next last year that we're going to see a boost in that state aid and then it's going to be flat and you do have to adjust that when we negotiated our contracts we discussed that amongst the negotiation committee and that okay we can afford these things and there was a trade-off and we got all the contracts balanced this took year years to do to get and i think i applaud uh our bargaining groups we worked hand in glove we didn't get everything we wanted they didn't get everything but i think we came to a fair and we were very considerate um and i'll i'll bring out one particular bargaining unit when we negotiated with the secretaries we negotiated a deal but we we saw the board and then recognized that the base salary was way below what it should be after we finished the negotiation we added more money onto that contract with it didn't need their permission to add more money so the bottom salaries would come up we did the best we could so the board recognizes um that we need to be fair to employees and and i've always said the union negotiates for them but there are employees they're not the union's employees and we have a responsibility there to provide as best we can we don't have unlimited resources the best we can but if you really really want to look at what the problem here it's not a case of the taxpayers of clifton need to pay more we have issues like tax abatements which don't out of tax abatements in the state of new jersey which is unaddressed by the state legislature all goes to the municipality except for two percent go to the county it cuts out education so when they move it's not like they get a big break the tax abatement but all the money goes to the municipality that's out of control we pay more the citizens of clifton pay more in the tax levy to support education than the city of jersey city that's outrageous so then we talk about our charter schools and pcti you want to look at budget increases you want to see where our budget increases that's where the bulk of the budget increases come and it robs our students and the taxpayers that that is so out of whack and the state's giving them carp launch for the most part they're starting to pull back a little bit on on charter schools but not nearly enough so we need to hammer that end too we just can't say oh they're not doing anything and taxpayers it's all on you i'm very mindful of the balance we need to to have here you do need to have good education but we also have limited resources and we need to fight much harder to get our fair share on the expense side that's so you just can't look at the revenue you have to look at the expenses and i'll be happy to go over this is i could go on for hours about this but if you saw over the what the last five years what the impact of these charter schools and pcti has on the budget it's ridiculous so um i will i've always fought for that and uh when mr cadoba was on the other side of the podium he was barking about that so we kind of joined forces and uh but it's it's eye-opening when you really look where the money comes from and where it goes to and and there's both sides of that ledger so uh i think the administration does an excellent job we have a reputation doing a hell of a lot more than other districts with less money um and i won't go into who does what but um we need to fight much harder and make our legislators understand that these ridiculous amounts of money that we have to pay for and i just brought out previously with the pcti issue they got close to 30 million whatever they got that they i know they got more than us a lot more than us and we're still paying the tuition over there so the whole thing about how the state handles county vote techs and county magnet schools needs to be addressed that affects us more than what we can raise from the taxpayers here so um and i think uh mr abdullah miss beltran said we went to do that we had the [Music] referendum and we got 12 million i don't know how in god's good conscience i could ask to pay taxpayers for another dime after you've got 12 million dollars and regardless of our needs i don't know how you go and ask somebody for a penny more after they passed a referendum and we got 12 million dollars more in our revenue so i've always looked at our budget especially when we're getting the increases the taxpayers need a break they deserve it they were overpaying for decades and they don't need to over and will be as fair with our with the administration and getting our edu kids educated which our school district does a tremendous job and i applaud everybody who's involved with that but we have to be you can't rob peter to pay paul here either so that's my personal philosophy and i've worked very hard on these budgets over the years and um and i can give you a chart before i was on the board i think for the previous 10 years it was up like 40 uh over over a 10-year period it was ridiculous amount of money and we flatten it out and we still have we don't have everything we need i perfectly understand that but you know you you really really have to balance it especially when we look at the history of what the taxpayers in this city have had to pay for mr rawad was next yes president smith thank you um i just wanted to share something i read and actually have family in the neighboring town next to us their board of education is actually increasing double digits in a time where people honestly are struggling to even get food into their homes something i witnessed one day coming home from work late night wife sends me a text message the baby needs formula i'm a costco guy i like to buy my formula there but i ended up having having to go to walgreens on uh main ave no i'm going in you know rang the button waiting for the lady to open the you know little shelf to give me the formula and my eyes looking at the register i see a mom um after discussing with her because she was struggling to pay you know she just had like a box of you know cereal milk and i think that like the edmonds cookies or whatever they were and it honestly broke my heart that she had her phone out and she was literally taking the prices from what she saw on the aisle was adding up staring at her debit card kind of you could tell she was nervous is her card going to decline or is it not going to decline and i you know thankfully i'm blessed enough to afford that i offered to pay and we stepped outside i just had a discussion with her you know when you can do a good deed i don't like to mention it but you know because we're on this topic i do want to mention it she was saying that literally her and her husband working two jobs obviously you know the jobs are not high paying jobs with the way gas prices are the way i think you know inflation's hitting just left and right honestly like as a person that's able to sustain my living i'm barely keeping up and i have a little one in the house i can speak on i can say majority of the city's probably living paycheck to paycheck at this moment a lot of people are struggling a lot of people don't know what's you know they're living day-to-day bases you don't know what the future is going to come you see many families struggling and look our neighboring town is doubling their taxes and this is an area that's not really you know a well-off wealthy area those people are going to take the hit dramatically thankfully you know i spoke to mr daley many times about the budget the man's a human calculator he knows how to quench his numbers he always has the answers and luckily we were blessed to pass the bond referendum you know the largest in state history that's going to have a positive effect on this district for decades to come we're finally bringing our district into like modern times the way our buildings the bathroom the plumbing a to z everything in there so obviously when the bottom referendum passed inflation was slowly increasing we didn't know it was going to get this bad fast forward look where we are now just to fill up your your car with gas you need a hundred bucks you go to the grocery store you grab two three items you're hitting a couple hundred dollars right there and for someone for anyone that's living on minimum wage or above minimum wage we just got to do the basic math a couple thousand dollars a month just to pay your rent to pay your bsng bill just to get a couple items in the house their paycheck is gone and for us to go knocking on the door saying hey we need a couple hundred more dollars i think that you know for us we have to be have a little empathy but i understand where you're coming from our district does need certain things obviously we are sure on certain aspects but as of now i think we just need to take in consideration where we are as a community and obviously plant like you said we have to plan for the future and i know mike mr shahada the whole business administration they understand you know it's it's very difficult when it comes to specifically finances there's never enough money life in general is always going to get more expensive it's just the way it is sadly that's how new jersey is by the time you know i know many people that got a pay raise they were excited about the pay raise but after inflation it's actually a paid cut in a way you're getting that two three percent pay raise you're excited about but inflation was uh eight almost ten percent now you're technically making less money and on top of that everything got more expensive and god knows what's going to happen you know our state our economy the way it is it's not looking too good right now and we just could only pray for the best and hopefully you know we head into the right direction soon because i don't know how long people can really take this okay who's next mr doctor danny then miss bassford before you speak thank you because i really value this discussion it's really really important and i thank you i just want to make sure that we understand what we're talking about so i just want to ask mr uc if he could tell us we we're throwing around numbers like what is a tax increase so mike what is a one percent tax increase what does that mean to the average person in clifton what's and then obviously we can calculate from there two percent three percent could you just explain what those numbers are sure to go really quick if that's okay um so our tax levy is 134 million dollars one point on that is approximately um 1.3 million so about like two 2.7 million is two percent um from the tax assessor's office a tax point is approximately five hundred fifty thousand dollars the average house in clifton from the tax assessor is a hundred seventy seven thousand five hundred so a one percent um tax levy increase on the average assessed house would be just short of forty three dollars or 350 a month two percent's 85 dollars or seven dollars a month and you can just go from there back up say that one more time because people were missing that say one more time sure tax increase sure yeah a tax increase on the average assessed household from the tax assessor's office one percent would be 43 a year 350 a month a two percent tax levy increase is eighty five dollars annual or seven dollars and change a month thank you and thank you mr smith dr danny okay well i just want to say first of all um we passed the largest referendum and you know just because someone did give you that money you know the taxpayers did approve that it's not like well great here's my wallet and i'm just going to keep giving you out money i work in education i know a lot of people that are educators a lot of people that are administrators and yes there are things that are needed there's the wish list you know if you had all the money in the world there's the things that um you want you need i've been in education for 20 years i've seen a lot of waste of money of taxpayer dollars and i think that you know i mean i'm just to say i think in tight times like this districts have to get creative you know maybe again um you know we've we did one thing right that the board does we hired a great superintendent and now i'm sure he's going to use those great powers that he has and think creatively out of the box you know what because tough times call for those people to stand up and say you know what listen you know maybe we need to get creative we need to think about it the city is you know toying around from what i understand increasing the taxes on that side then you have the referendum and then we increase it okay 44 dollars whatever but you know what you don't ever see oh you know what we're going to decrease your taxes never happens just goes up and up and up and i get it but you know what that doesn't mean that that's the way it has to be because somebody once said people said on the board just because it has it was like this doesn't mean it has to be you know what maybe it's time that the taxpayers who've been paying so much and there are a lot of older people who said yes we understand the structures and we'll pass the referendum we need this to get done yes okay but you know they're living on a fixed income and you know you can't expect to say well you know it's a 44 more and it's this and it's 44 and more and then 44 next year and 44 after and then that and and again i mean it's time to start thinking outside the box um it's interesting and i'm just going to say this not that this would happen here but in japan and just because it was brought up they have one custodian per school one one custodian you know what he cleans the bathroom and he replaces the little towel now i'm not i'm saying but you go into the schools it is immaculate and i know that parents probably wouldn't go for it like cleaning but there's nothing even to clean all this is is like dust they take a little rag at 2 30 they wet it and it's like literally like a machine it moved students move the desk to one side the other students just go along with their little rags then the other students move the desk back and they go and the school is meticulously clean i used to hold a detention and i used to have kids if they wanted to get out earlier they had to erase the desks with any graffiti that was on there you want to know something at the cleanest most spotless room because in terms of desk because the other kids police the kids don't you dare right on that desk because i'll be erasing that and that means i have to stay longer i mean i'm not saying there has to be some phys but maybe you know let's get out let's those kids in japan they had pride for that school there wasn't a rapper there wasn't anything there because they had i'm not saying that that would maybe work here but you know let's get creative maybe you know again we could do something we can a club can start up something about you know i know that a lot of times kids go oh the janitors will pick that up you know well that's why we have them here you know think out of the box tough times call for thinking out of the box and we've always i don't know people on this board a lot of times have said oh it's good to think out of the box let's not just do things the way we always did things i mean joe you know you started to fight a rally and you know what i mean look it got us somewhere so you know we need to start thinking out of the box i mean like you said uh mr daley and miss basford about you know um these schools and the amount of money and charter schools being held to i mean let's think out of the box you know let's be the leaders on that because we can't just keep saying well we need to do and believe me i'm the first one for education but we have a really good education that we provide our students here in clifton there are districts in the state of new jersey that get money thrown at them and they're not they're not good so throwing money is not necessarily let's let's think about this if money needs to go they're fine but again i can't in good conscience right now to have the largest referendum in the past to turn around and say well your taxes will go up on the city side have this referendum thank you very much and here you go a little bonus factor 44 dollars a month or seven dollars a month no like i'm sorry i can't um and that's all thank you you were next yes thank you um so um i have questions about the security personnel that you were referencing on that chart um i'm just going to ask going forward if we ever get a try i couldn't see it um it was all blurry i couldn't see over there i can't see i can't really see so if you could like maybe email us an addendum and we could pull it up on the on the screen that would be helpful because i can't reference it right now and i don't want to put it up there now what are these um positions going to be who are they going to be uh what what are the criteria that's one thing um second lucy speaking to your point maybe it's time that we sit down and sharpen the pencil uh um alan um we're people are hurting um where we work we haven't gotten a raise in three years no match to the 401k a lot of things they they cut everything out i think that maybe we have to go back to the drawing board and start cutting it um we all get phone calls from people i i emailed the president the vice president and uh the superintendent about something i heard and i was upset about it and it's anybody in this room that works in a position and if somebody was to come in earlier you know later than them and be paid more it's hurtful to those people that have been working so hard for us from years and to go back to what these people have done in the last year and and volunteered and did things in our district for our children and our own family members of employees it's hurtful and that's why i wanted to bring it to the attention of the board because there has to be a way we find money for everything here we found money for this beautiful facility right we're finding money for project graduation we're finding this money so why can't we find the money that we need for other things too as well i i think that's where the issue is i'm you know i don't sit on finance i've never been given the opportunity to do that i've never been sitting sit on a lot of different committees um so i would just like to um think that there is something we can do we have we have people in this community that want to donate their time to us we can call them in at certain times just to ask them their expertise on little things but i i'm just i'm i'm having a hard time alan with you as well because i'm i'm afraid i'm afraid we're going to be sucking swamp water in a year if we don't raise it i'm really i'm leaning that way too and uh you know it's i'm hearing four percent lucy on the other side this is what i'm hearing i couldn't make the um the uh budget meeting i wanted to go see it but it's i work on some saturdays so i do extra detail for some people that i help at work and i couldn't get there i wanted to listen to it and it's not televised so we can't we can't hear what's going on that side of the street affects this side of the street this side of the street that's that side street we're basically all one it comes together in one pot so i think that maybe we have to we have to sit back and and you know submit the budget because it has to be due tonight yes it's it's got to go tonight yes it does have to be voted on tonight however between now and may 5th right if the board has a revelation and tells me we want you to cut it five percent or we want to give raise taxes five percent we will be able to do that before may 5th so tonight i do really need you to vote to say yes that mr uzi can submit it but come may 5th we can make changes so my recommendation is because everybody is so passionate about this subject and i know you guys don't like to have special meetings but maybe we need to have a board special meeting about the budget and really dig into it and it has to be in public but maybe that's where everybody can go home get their ideas come back here and have input and maybe we can find a way i you know i i don't want to put any more stress on staff as it is now but i'd like to see maybe we can come up with some other alternatives and i still want my questions answered about the the security i'm i'm not on the committee i just heard that there was going to be six people i just saw that slide tonight so i just like a little bit more information so i can make an informed decision based on what you're telling me thank you okay uh roll call in the group mr abu drabo finance yes uh yes but i'm standing on f10 and f12 mr awad yes miss basford yes and abstain on 10.

and then the first feature is a resource room as well okay ready first resolution is resolved that the clifton board of education accepts the recommendation of the superintendent of schools to grant 12 additional sick days to be paid in 24 half-day increments to employee id 50-2021 2020. oh 2020 yeah i'm sorry we're in 2022. doesn't know what they said i'm sorry i thought i said 20. let's start that over resolve that the clifton board of education accepts the recommendation of the superintendent of schools to grant 12 additional sick days to be paid in 24 half-day increments to employee id number 50-2022 resource room teacher school number 12 effective is it today tomorrow march 25th 2022. motion on the floor second by mr abu dhabi second by mr awad discussion see none roll call mr mr every java mr awad yes misspell miss bassford miss beltran yes mr canova yes mr d uh vice president daley and president smith yes all right next question the next resolution is resolve that the clifton board of education accepts the recommendation of the superintendent of schools to grant 12 additional sick days to be paid in 24 half-day increments to employee id number 51-2022 bsi teacher school number five effective uh march 25th 2022.

So, we will be awarding prizes again this year. If you came just for the prizes, they will be back. Um, and if you didn't receive a ticket or a piece small scrap of paper as you were uh coming in, we still have some Dartmouth High School or Dartmouth Middle School Honor Society volunteers collecting them and they're in here. It's not too late. If you didn't do that, you can still do it now and anyone can put their name in. Um, so be sure you do that. At the very end of the night, you have to be present to win the prize. We will be awarding two Bruins tickets. So, I hope you'll stick around for that. And um I want to also acknowledge uh our judges tonight. So we have three judges. Starting on the end, we have um David Titlebomb who is a member of the Dartmouth Select Board.

And parts we watched were so gallently streaming. And the rockets red glare. The bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say does that star spangled banner and way [Music] for the land of the free and the home of the brave. So, I'll invite Stephen to come up and join us and we'll get this party started. Thank you. All right, welcome everyone. So, the teams have all been schooled in the cafeteria about the rules, but there may be audience members that might not know what we're doing tonight. So, to start, I want to remind everyone to silence your cell phones. And I did hear some rumblings about whether or not you can have cell phones up on the stage and you cannot. So please do not. This team here in particular was asking that question. So don't bring your cell phones up onto the stage.

and we also talked with a transportation engineer cynthia redinger of the city about the um height limits of plants and access to the right of way on sidewalks so um i feel that we are um up to date in terms of of her concerns um there may be some comments or or alterations of our recommendations based on transportation but i think that we have good guidelines that we can use as we move forward into the next thing that i want to talk about which is the webinar we had this tuesday evening on native plants and pollinators we had a great help from galen in getting this organized and getting it out to neighborhood associations and other groups our attendance our registration was something like 80 we had attendance of at least 40 i think close to that um live during the session um we had some great presenters um from the county master rain garden program katie whitachuck brad smith an art professor and dean from the art school presented about his prairie backyard that he had installed and it's beautiful we had a presentation from bob hauser of wild ones the national organization that supports native plants and one of our climate ambassadors matty reif presented on pollinators and the interactions of pollinators and native plants which you heard a lot of in michael koh's presentation tonight we are going to be offering some informal on-site consultations with people on doing some small plantings on their property which on their immediate property and on their lawn extension areas um if they want to we've had a few people respond already and we have provided a survey to those who attended the session and we're we're getting responses um so it was it was kind of fun uh and um yeah there's that's where we are okay thanks kathy you have your hand up um i want to thank rita and uh chapter 40 is something that i've been interested in for over two decades and i i feel that that rita is really changing it from enforcement to encouragement and education which is very important and one of my main issues is that is the sight distance triangle area so that's the the areata intersection and the reason is that people as are coming up to an intersection they tend to stop at the point where they can see down the street the street that's at 90 degrees and if they can't see until after the crosswalk or in the middle of the crosswalk that's where they stop and in some cases they haven't seen that pedestrian that's in the crosswalk or that's walking through there and so it's really important that we have good sight distance and we then enforce having people stop at the stop bar not halfway through the crosstalk so that's my soap box for tonight all right thanks kathy um so the next uh next up is the uh zero waste working group lisa i was looking at john okay okay john happy too yes um a lot of stuff going on and we're very fortunate to have a kind of uh excellent crew working with us on this so the core staff is myself lisa and jenny patoski of city staff but then we have two interns one working on metrics and another working on outreach they're doing excellent work uh already some interesting stuff coming out of the metrics literature review that the intern is doing there and helping us think about how to better capture things that we're already doing so thinking about just like recycling rather than just the metric tons or the pounds that we're collecting what is the value of the materials that we're collecting and how is that contributing more towards a circular economy than just how many pounds or how many tons of something and then we're also kind of really zeroing in on resiliency and equity as the other metrics that we really want to address and kind of approaching in this primarily through a municipal or a county level lens rather than what a lot of the metrics that companies are looking at so that's going well starting to capture some really neat stories from folks who are entrepreneurs and and kind of leading circular economy efforts and have been doing it kind of quietly on their own for decades and wanting to raise that up in the community and we're also working with ctn to produce some short videos about uh what's going on and then we've got a group of c students who really just kind of got through their first semester of putting their work together they'll really start more focused work later in the fall as a part of their year and a half project but we're hoping to keep a couple of them with us through the summer working on the liturgy review and maybe getting some publications or helping us kind of synthesize that work and also on the outreach efforts we also had our first meeting with the state through i2p3 the initiative that we were selected for um i think we're the only there's eight lisa eight ten different communities across the state that are involved in this we're the only one that's really focusing on circular economy but lots of folks are very interested in it so that'll be a platform for us to kind of share things and we've got our fingers crossed that monday we'll finally hear on the small met metrics grant that we submitted last fall it's been put forward for funding that would be ten thousand dollars uh to kind of add some more support to the work um but we don't know yet but we've been waiting since september for that so it's been a while um i think that's it lisa anything to add uh i guess the only thing that i would add is that um with input from numerous staff members um samuel mcmullen and i have decided that the zero waste definite you know the resolution to define zero waste and set goals etc etc will not go forward to city council we have heard loud and clear from staff that it's not helpful to have a resolution um directing them to do something that they're already doing and it's very much not helpful setting goals that they may not be able to make as most other cities have not been able to make their zero waste goals um so i know that a lot of time went into developing the white paper that supports that resolution and i hope that it doesn't feel like that time is wasted because i think people learn things from doing that no thank you it's uh it's remarkable progress thank you so much i'm looking forward to having you having this on the agenda for the main meeting when you're ready to present it to the full commission okay um so let's see and on my part i'll have to say um you know i haven't gotten anything done with the uh with construction and deconstruction uh um but i intend to get something started by may or june i want staff time when staff has more time to help out with it or to be engaged with it um but meanwhile i'm still recruiting people for the court core group and gathering some information and finding allies in other communities here in michigan um so let's see and um that's it for the communities and working groups so the next i'm on the agenda are other commissions on planning commission um update from shannon yeah we made some changes to the unified development code and some of which affected some landscaping things that have some some kind of indirect relationship to this one was on street trees actually and cleaning up some of that language in there and making it a little bit more realistic in terms of how how that's calculated and then also rejiggering how this street tree escrow fund works which was very complicated and sort of opaque and working that all into the into the unified development code in a more seamless way um so that was uh great to see some changes with that and making it easier um and uh we also focused a lot on what our coming work plan is and i kind of hinted at that before and the first thing we're really taking on um hard is uh is parking and um that relates to environmental commission too believe it or not because uh um we're hoping to transition from having parking minimums like you have to have this many parking spaces to parking maximums you can't do more than x amount of parking spaces and all of that um just gives people more it encourages people to have less parking less impervious surface um and to also encourage us to move forward towards um [Music] taking transit more you know getting out of our cars um and and biking and walking and taking transit more so um and then the tc1 zoning i think is going to continue to march down the line too um with uh and we don't know the order but the the zones on consideration are washenaw stadium and plymouth and then there's also talk of you know other potential areas but i would say that those are tc1 and [Music] and parking are the ones that are really coming down the pike and that we are very motivated to move on and we have been we've been doing we've been getting a lot of things um accomplished so i think we're on a roll with that stuff well that's great thank you shannon um so the next is parks advisory hi hey a lot of work been going on in the parks advisory commission um i think first and foremost we had two big retirements the director of parks and and natural areas very recently and so there's work going on to hire the replacements i know one appointment has been made already and that's remy long and i believe he's in the role of natural area preservation um there's going to be some work this summer on a park on the west side of ann arbor called churchill downs um it's partly kind of a natural it's a it's a city park but it's got um a lot of it's undeveloped currently there's going to be some work to accommodate um runoff i think from and um wetlands there's going to be kind of a pond a potentially ephemeral pond that's going to be constructed in there to hold storm water runoff um so there'll be some activity in that park that um will affect the natural area of it um we've done uh the parks departments uh continuously uh recently repaved a big section of the border to border trail that runs through the city uh we just had a presentation on putting a little more attention into the gifts and memorials program that the park has and that the parks department has and how we can make it um a few more options for people and different price points to allow more people to be involved in making donations that are meaningful to the park system which i think will be a really nice um addition an opportunity for people to get involved in in parks in other ways um beyond just hanging out in our beautiful city parks um and also a new subcommittee has been formed also uh that's geared towards a bike recreation within the city and i you know from the parks department standpoint we're more focused on recreational aspects of bicycling but a number of our trails do get used for things like commuting and so i think that does have some bearing on the environmental commission and so we're worth keeping an eye on great well thank you man that sounds great so uh next up is energy commission um edie you have the floor thank you um last meeting we first had a presentation of um solar at city facilities and an overview of design and economics um and with a few minor amendments we wanted to pass a resolution in support of the use of arpa american rescue plan funds to support solar um study projects and move forward with that in alignment of k20 goals there was also another overview of the green rental housing program um which encompasses occupant weatherization appliance efficiency efficiency pathways and efficiency disclosure measures um and i believe this month there have been two public opportunities for comment as osi speaks feedback on that program there was a first reading of a resolution to support this program and that will be considered at a future meeting and we also adopted the workforce housing resolution okay all right thank you edie so um next up is council um anybody uh care to uh present a council update kathy i can say that the um council is gonna vote on the state and eisenhower tc1 rezoning on april 4th so that's exciting um and uh council will also vote on the plans the initial plans not a site plan yet but the pud rezoning for um the y lot and that too is of interest to all of you because it's a it's housing on top literally on top of transit so um and uh not i'm not remembering anything else that's huge of environmental commission interest i don't know kathy do you remember does anything stick out to you no and i apologize yes okay yeah yeah yeah we voted on we voted to approve the city moving forward with um five short term steps one of which is already in process and one long-term step to transition to more locally sourced and plant-based food options not to take options away from anybody but um to recognize that you know right now if you want a plant-based food option in a city vending machine you're probably going to end up with potato chips which i suppose are plant-based in some respect but so um we can do better and it will be cheaper especially if we locally source it and so um that's where we voted on that and there's a beautiful set of recommendations that missy stultz dr stultz wrote up in response to a resolution that elizabeth nelson brought to council in september so that's a terrific project and i'm really happy to see that come to fruition okay thank you kathy and lisa so well let's see the next is the chairs report um so um i want to acknowledge that john caliworks been suggested made some good suggestions to me about how to better manage our meetings so that you know we can get our business done to expedite getting our business done and uh have the meetings um last for two hours about two hours or so so um one is that i think um i'm proposing that you know we we reserve about one hour generally for presentations and new business and then one hour for our generic items on our agenda which so far we've managed to do this today so i'm hoping we can to continue this to to be able to close out around nine o'clock in respect to everybody else's time and um and we should i just want to remind everybody to be mindful during the comment periods that keep your comments brief and to the point as much as possible and that we always have the option to table or refer an item back to a working group you know if we need to have a more extended discussion and uh before bringing it up for a resolution or an ordinance draft or something like that for vote by the full commission um i also want to say uh on another topic um i'm reviving i'm been really very happy to be to tell you that i think the water quality work group is going to be revived and you know we've got a lot of energy behind that and i've recruited a fair number of people so i'm going to schedule a water quality working group meeting sometime before april mid-april and so i will be sending out an announcement when i'm ready when i have the external people that are interested as well people from staff on both the county and city level and with the huron river watershed council so i expect these organizations will be participating in this work group as well so look for my my invitation to a working group meeting for a kickoff for that one um and then also i'd like to remind people that i'm we i've been trying to keep action points but uh what i've decided to do is um move it to the action item tracker so there is an action action item tracker that we've been using sporadically for the last couple of years so i'm going to try to migrate that to a shared google site so it makes it easier to share documents because i personally and many other people on this commission do not have licenses for microsoft word and so um i think having a shared google file system would be very useful to get our work done so i'm going to migrate what i have including the uh um including the action item tracker to google web page that will be shared to all members of the commission for both you and editing privileges okay and then it should be open to the public for reviewing so i'm gonna set that all up myself in the next couple of days um and then um and then i recently a few days ago maybe it was yesterday i got an email from um from the city staff person about our policy agenda yeah um one of the one of the required one of the items that our bylaws is that annually annually we're supposed to be proposing policy agendas to counsel uh this regards um suggestions for how to use the uh the paid lobbyist for the city um to good effect and so the last time we submitted one was in december 2020 which was for the uh we did not get um we're a bit disorganized this year and we did not get this notice it's expected on by march 31st we're supposed to get something to council and uh i've reviewed the last submission and it seems like uh that we did for 2021 and it looks like it's uh you know still germaine for 2022.

all right thank you everybody see you next month you

miss beltran yes mr konova yes i had a question about facilities facilities rentals over the summer i see that we have some listed there is that gonna affect anything we're doing with the referendum no are we working around that okay yes yes so yes dr danny yes mr paris yes vice president daley yes president smith yes motion carries okay we'll now move on to uh board member comments should i do this right miss bashford you're first all right because i have to go to the bathroom again sorry happens when you get old um i just want to thank the children at school five they sent me this very lovely packet um of thank yous from back from dr seuss day i got it last week i just want to thank you very much it was so sweet i actually keep all this stuff i have uh i have like a big big trunk and i and i keep it because you know what when i retire from this job maybe these are the things that i'm going to look back on and these are the moments that i'm going to treasure the most and uh i thank the children and the teachers and the staff effort school 5 for that um i got this in my packet a couple of weeks ago and i forgot to highlight this from uh this is from christopher columbus and it's from i'm sorry the eighth grade of christopher columbus both of them and this is from the seventh grade and this is from the eighth grade these are calendar books from from ccms and i think it's such a great thing that i have i'm bringing one to work and i took it down off my wall but i get to look at the beautiful artwork that some of the children have have made for us we have a lot of talent here in this district and if you um you can peruse this anybody wants to you know hit me up on social media i'll share it with you but it's just gorgeous and i think i want to thank uh i think it's jeff labriola and the staff um that are on here all the children are recognized it's just wonderful i mean every year we get this and these are the perks of the job and i thank him so if somebody can convey my utmost thanks to the staff and the students for this beautiful artwork i just like look at this how talented is that like really come on right okay so there's another thing that um i do on a daily basis i get to talk to students about their finances for going to school and going to uh um to college um this time of year there's a lot of scholarships that go unclaimed a lot so um i was looking at the um the website because i was trying to find a date on of the academic awards and i saw the scholarship page popped up and i remember when i was a hsa mom and i was hearing these kids i don't want to write a paragraph i don't want to fill out an application to some people are a book right some people collect that money they can go away on a special trip that the school is offering them that they don't have the money at home it's money that you don't have to pay back so get down to your local guidance counselor they should be your new bff and and say what do you have available sometimes they're cultural sometimes they're civic sometimes it's because of the color of your eyes it's all different kind of scholarships that it's just maybe take sometimes nobody applies and you're the only one that writes a paragraph and you get awarded that money don't walk run to your nearest guidance your school counselor and get corrected on that all time and and get down there and get that money because it makes a difference in your household especially now with inflation and everybody having all this different um funding issues in their own homes and some people not getting any raises and things like that come on people get down there and get that money it's it's there for the taking there's there's so many different groups in clifton that actually fund the students i'm telling you uh i know my own children did it and it it afforded them to do a couple things on their own that they will always remember um that's probably all i have i just want to thank everybody for speaking another request that i have is um maybe an executive session we can have a little bit more information about the uh the curriculum that the one uh gentleman brought up i'd like to dig into that a little deeper and have a little discussion um because i'm i'm confused about a couple things and i have some concerns as well because basically um the phrase of uh grooming and um i'm it's not sitting right with me i'm a little i'm a little ups i'm a little um disturbed about it but i'd like to discuss that in executive session because i think does it have to be in executives i'm not sure we can talk about that in executive session and by the way grooming is not in the guidelines right that's why i was that's an interpretation that was made by the gentleman okay so maybe we can have that next meeting we can have some uh some guidance on that from somebody from the district to explain to us what the actual curriculum is and uh how it's being delivered and what is being actually you know maybe some samples of how it's being taught like because that word really it just it really it just bothered me so and and obviously that's not a question for me because i don't do curriculum um nor do i play a curriculum director on television but um you understand again i just wanted that to be clear that that word grooming was um is not what was in there no i and i understand that because you know it does get discussed on other levels it's just that there are people out there tonight listening to that and they're saying hey what are you teaching our kids and in other districts there are groups that show up and really hammer the boards on subjects like this as well so before it blossoms into the mushroom cloud can we clear that up as well that's my research if it's okay with mr smith i'd i'd like to ask our curriculum expert to address that tonight briefly she's ready she's always ready she's always ready she's the best she's the brightest she's one of the most brilliant people i've ever known in my entire life and i wouldn't put her on the spot if i didn't think she already knew um i will tell you this before mrs kusalevich speaks this is not um something that we didn't anticipate right this is something that's been talked about um at the state level um issues in the news other boards we do have a couple parent nights planned uh in may where we're going to have form so that we can explain what it really is and what it means for their for your children uh but having said that i think janina if you don't mind could you just give a brief overview of what the new standards are and how they relate to work excuse me mr dr robert as you can if those paranoids if we can attend like i won't sit with anybody because i really want to hear what i want to hear it at that level what the parents are hearing i want to hear what so i can so maybe if the conversation comes from a member of the community i can explain it eloquently like that because i don't want to touch it right now with the 10-foot public because i'm absolutely based on what i'm hearing tonight i think we'll need to do a presentation for the board okay thank you okay so these 2022 these 2020 standards which are being implemented in september of are a revision of the 2014 standards and while some of the changes do appear controversial particularly when you read the news articles or listen to newspapers the standards are still being presented in by our own teachers in a developmentally and age appropriate manner i think what makes people very nervous is that you have medically accurate terminology for biological processes as the forefront and core of this new curriculum medically accurate terminology is utilized but with topics that were already in the 2014 standards and the main goal is promoting health safety and prevention of diseases we will be having those two the first two um presentations in may which are being done by the rutgers university where a lot of this work has been done those will be virtual um there will be a town hall forum online where parents can ask their questions at the same time we are looking at something deeper should it be necessary uh when we get towards august into september our teachers themselves are being trained because this is not an indoctrination this is simply meant to be medically factual terminology utilized to promote health safety and the prevention of disease okay thank you mr canova you're next uh good evening first i just want to congratulate our teacher mr john o'reilly uh that was that was a great story that dr robert tosie shared we all have our teacher that you know made a difference in our life and the fact that he was able to impact not only a current our current clinton high students but also one that's you know up and coming i think that's an amazing feat i was at the strings concert yesterday my daughter participated in it so i'm a little biased and saying that you know it was great but uh i will also add that when she started last year it was during covet and everything was virtual so all the instrumentation was done virtual and then this year parts of it virtual and then you know opened um and just in those couple of years you know they did a great job and and you see all the students that they did an amazing job and to do that in a virtual environment i think is really telling as to how hard they work um and how how much the teachers really care about the kids and they really push them to do their best so that's a testament to the things that we do here um just want to talk for a second a little bit about budget and kind of about that that charter school um issue we were talking about earlier so as i said earlier a two percent increase would cover the the charter school um so if there was a flat budget that would mean that we would have to go out to the taxpayers this year in order to fund that there had been years in the past where we didn't have anything i was on the other side of that podium when i heard about the the issues and and you know worked with funding groups uh we we pulled out billboards and we had billboards around town we you know had marches and rallies and finally they started at least giving us the the funding that we deserve um so yes and that's an unfortunate part of our history that we've gone so many years being underfunded i would say you know maybe close to a billion dollars at this point you know it's been at least 15 years 50 000 or 50 million dollars but now it is moving in the other direction and now that we did receive 12 million dollars i know myself personally when i was talking about getting our referendum done 168 million dollars that i was saying by us doing that that means that the things that we would have had to do this year to fix those things and keep them operational we won't have to do so a lot of money that may have been budgeted for that we won't need so i know we're you know we're redoing all the bathrooms we're doing some auditoriums we're doing all these things all the money that you would have put towards fixing those things and maintaining them in their current condition for the 50-plus years that they've been there we don't have to do so i think there's a little bit of trade-off there um and and as everyone said you know i don't want to you know wait spend a lot of time on this but you know we are in a time right now where everyone's very pushed to the limit on many things on inflation on gas on and people are struggling so for me it's not a no it's a no for now i know these are the things that we need and we need to get there but i in my right mind i could never vote for that to happen at this moment so that's why you know i sided with with the rest of my colleagues um and one thing that our audience member said he said if if you can't see it you can't be it and that resonated with me because i have a lot of college students that come into college and they don't know what they want to do they have an undeclared field of study and i love that idea of showing kids earlier what what what is out there right they go into college and say i want to be a lawyer they'd study this and that and then it doesn't really work out and they change and they do something else until they find their their path the earlier we show them the path the better off they are so i think um dr roberto that's something that we that we could look into that'd be amazing thank you okay dr danny you're next um i'd like to say thank you to all of the speakers congratulations to mr o'reilly uh blessed ramadan though celebrating and um happy birthday to my daughter tara thank you uh next we have mr paris thank you uh congratulations to mr o'reilly for the educator of the year award um i also attended the all city concerts and uh like my colleagues was a fantastic evening they really showcased the talent we have here in clifton um also went to the the play the the pit crew the stage crew the actors the av crew it was just a phenomenal as dr roberto pointed out off-broadway kind of experience i also attended with my granddaughter the breakfast with belle which was one of the best deals on earth uh to be able to have a character breakfast which at disneyland probably would have cost you over a hundred dollars uh i think it cost us ten dollars uh and it was wonderful the act the they were in costume they were in enroll they're fantastic so we really enjoyed it and thank you to uh i believe the stepnesskeys really arranged a lot of that thank you to them um also to mr analytic who spoke earlier i think that's a fantastic idea to use some high school leaders whether they be academic uh or athletic or in the arts as some inspiration to elementary schools maybe that's something that can be done as uh some some um my thinking of auditorium uh presentations also the idea of the college alumni reaching out to to sophomores because there is a lot to be done that they don't realize and it gives them some real world and current experience of how to get into college what it's like and how to help make some of those decisions along the way as far as the the budget goes my inquiry was primarily motivated not from a lack of belief or empathy for the taxpayers i have family and taxpayers that are in similar situations with limited incomes it was really because i wasn't a party to the committee and i didn't see a lot of detail in the minutes and this is a rather large budget to digest and not having known what i don't i didn't know what we gave up i didn't know what the importance might have been of what was given up in this budget to maintain a zero percent increase um so i i appreciate my colleagues comments and their decisions but that was really the inquiry it was really to open that discussion uh and i appreciate your your input on that thank you mr abu jabo thank you mr president uh just bear with me because yep obviously i lost my voice um the things that have happened already uh the old city band old city stringers my colleagues have said were phenomenal i'm sorry to the band but i enjoy the strings a little more um because we i guess we don't get to see them that often uh the palestinian palestinian american community center wanted to give our thanks um to our board members who are attending our superintendent um a lot of our students were clifton students were a part of it um and you know it was great to see them within their own uh realm of clifton high school that you know obviously it's their home the district is their home um to showcase for the community what their their background their culture is all about mr o'reilly to me it's more than a congratulations educator of the year i've gotten to know you over uh the past year and a half or so two years during diversity committee which by the way we need a diversity committee um so we can have that um couple fundraisers coming up hca school eleven mr cupcakes fundraiser uh ends march 30th if you want to reach out to femina parham um couple if you're beefsteak fans and some sort of back normality uh baseball booster club may 21st uh over at the athenia post 7 pm you can reach out to rosa rogers on that the football booster club may 6 7 p.m boys and girls club you can reach out to linda cenary or lindsay sincu lacrosse booster club i believe just finalized last night april 22nd boys and girls club also you can reach out to luncineri or anybody else on the booster club um so talking about really speaking really quick about the east side of town and rough times um and just clifton in general assembly when brady timberlake um and dr robertosi i'm gonna connect you with one of her staff members um they'll be running a program for clifton residents for free produce produce and meat to residents that need it um they're shooting for next week to do that actually they just call me this morning try to connect them some organizations and i did in my own personal um civilian capacity um and i did so and they will be um contacting and partnershiping up with the boys and girls club with um executive director bob foster and as well as executive director ronnie mustafa from the palestine america community center since they're on the east side of lakeview ave and they serve not just the arab community but also the latino community their targets will be the east side of town and anyone that is impacted and is in need in the city of clifton dr robertson as i mentioned i'm going to try to connect you with um with one of the staff members she asked we consistently through the district i told that's not my capacity so i'll connect you via email tomorrow with her so you can handle that aspect um can i continue no okay uh as miss as she said no but dr danny almost said miss danny uh said happy ramadan so it's been a tradition past six years in clifton and i'm thankful to our diverse uh multifaceted community of city of clifton in supporting the the this is the sixth year doing a clifton annual ramadan lighting if anybody has seen it it's the fenus uh which is a lantern on city hall this year it's gonna be march 28th at 6 45 p.m city hall lawn this year um the islamic center for state county will be honoring 2022 muslims in service from education and many of them are clifton residents if not working clifton um from education to public safety to civil advocacy and various things to show the importance of how our clifton residents are um you know serving our community by community i don't mean the muslim community i mean the clifton at large community uh and then the last thing i have is well two things actually sorry um i noticed that we're not going to wrap it up i noticed that excuse me i noticed that um as a recommendation and a reminder for handicap accessibility uh ramps when people are um students are honored that we have some sort of accessibility for either parents or siblings somebody in their families it would be helpful and you know i'll wrap it up there thank you thank you mr awad i am not forgotten today i feel i feel special i love using president smith of course um i just wanted to congratulate um mr o'reilly um you know uh dr danny when you were telling us uh the story of how uh an educator affects a student in such a positive way it just brings me back i think the one teacher that stuck with me from this district i'm not sure if she's still in the district was mrs francisco she was my third grade teacher in school three she was this energetic italian-american woman she had beautiful red curls and you know she just had this energy and it was just so positive just i used i was so excited to go to school just to go to her class because every single day she would pull a surprise from where how when you never knew but you just knew that being in her class it was just going to be memories laughter she was such a great teacher honestly one of the most patient human beings i ever met so i do know how educators do have a positive impact um besides that uh yesterday was my first time going uh i was lucky enough to attend the all city strings concert i was honestly mind blown i just to see the elementary students perform first i i had a difficult time to believe those were elementary students because they sounded like professionals and working your way from the middle school to the high school was just in such crazy times it was so peaceful to listen to that you know that beautiful music that they put and honestly some of the music had nice speech and i was kind of bumping to it i was enjoying it i know they did a song from toy story and for some reason the movie was just playing in my head all night after that to the point where i think i'm going to go watch toy story tonight they did a phenomenal job to the staff to teachers you know i know they spent endless hours and they're trying to you know there's such a short period of time of practice the dedication i think i want my little one hopefully she allows it to probably play the violin um besides that you know just moments like that yesterday just you know having the community all back in the room just felt so weird from the past couple years but you know covered and quarantined just just having the community out just everybody having such a great time it was just positive vibes you know just seeing parents so proud of their children and smiling it kind of felt like we're going back to a normal state hopefully it stays like that we can attend many great events um to uh yeah that's pretty much it i love clifton i love all you guys that's pretty much it you guys have a good night thank you miss beltran okay so i'm just like to say that i'm really happy that we were able to have so many healthy discussions today as a board um we haven't really been able to do that as of late uh probably say for like the last year but tonight we had discussions over like three or four different things and we were all able to go around the room and we were respectful to each other no one shouted out a turn and everyone waited it was so i'm just really proud of everybody including myself that we all you know followed decorum and we were able to have discussions and nobody attacked mr paris even though he had a dissenting opinion uh we all like you know i'm saying historically you know it would have been a little bit more heated but it was like everyone kept their cool and had their own alkaloids i'm not sure accolades i'm not sure it's english second language issue with that word um so i'd also like to thank the speakers from the public for coming now we're starting to get a lot of speakers in the public that are coming to educate us on things that maybe we didn't know was happening like i wasn't aware that the um that uh state policy about sexual education was changing and it hasn't changed in 10 years i think janina said um so i think that was you know he's bringing things to a tension that we we wouldn't normally have been aware of and um to poor mr oozy one day i hope in my lifetime for you that will accept your budget because i know you do a lot of work and you bring it and you're so excited and you're like this is the budget and you come to the last slide and you're like and okay and you always like want to like close out the meeting but unfortunately every single time we just stare back at you like okay well that was a nice show so i don't know if it's gonna happen in my lifetime or your lifetime but i hope for your sake that you do because i know you put a lot of hours into presenting us a budget that's a dream and i hope one day that the economy is doing amazing and we're able to say yes the six percent tax increase is no problem rubber stamp um but until then i appreciate that you work with us when we staunchly say no um and i think that's all i have for tonight i do have something for new business um but that's all i have for board member comments thank you okay mr vice president daily thank you mr president um again first of all congratulations to mr o'reilly and i look forward to seeing him get his award at that's one of my along with graduation and some other things that's i try to attend that i don't think i've missed it unless there was a covid issue but i think i've gone to to your dinner which is always great it's it's a great time for everybody again the [Music] display by at the high school with the play and the uh city band the city orchestra was just phenomenal uh and uh it's it's really a testament to the staff we have here at the clifton board of education from the top to bottom they do such a good job with our students and uh there to be congratulated um we can't give bonuses that's against the law but you deserve we could do some accolades for you folks you do a great job and of course the talent is there and the kids you you as a teacher that's what you bring out you there's a lot of a lot of students have different everybody has something different to offer and what the magic of a teacher is is able to bring that out and i get that in space i absolutely understand that um again thank you to our student representative tiffany today and mr brunswick mr tiffany analick and uh good to see him back here i haven't seen him in a while but uh his his words were very well received by me um just very briefly on the budget um there are those in the public who say oh you ca you've had surpluses and you need to cut cut cut this through that anybody who tells you we need to because you've had a circle you you have to have a surplus to the budget you have to have a cushion that's bad budgeting if you budget to the penny so if something goes off off the rails you're done for it so um there is always a yin and yang and um you know that's our job to make sure you mr yusi doesn't get too enthusiastic about what he puts for it but i know it's it's a lot of hard work and it's a lot of effort and i've been through many of them but there's a balance and i i brought up the business about services because i know there's people in the public oh you got to cut to the penny cut that is ridiculous the administration might not get everything they want but that you folks know how to budget and and um and it's not just that's not a flaw in the process it's it's to be encouraged because that's what you need to do um we've gone up in our we're allowed to do surpluses now of four percent instead of two percent uh of course tech schools county schools were able to do uh six percent we're still not there but that gives us some question too and last item on security the administration is talking about some personnel however i want to remind everybody that in the referendum there's a big component of that referendum is security we all understand what our needs are here and that's why i went in whole hog on the big number you know go big or go home we needed to do it was the right opportunity we needed it was the right opportunity both from fiscally and what we what our needs were so uh i'm not i i far from turning deaf ear to what's needed in this district but there is a time and a way to do everything and there is a big component in in the security which was needed here in that referendum so with that everybody have a good night and leave it to you mr president thank you mr daley uh i think the concerts that the kids held are um were tremendous uh just to put that all together culminating with our wonderful uh mustang band at the first concert um you know it's so proud to see that that is the showcase of the newark northeast the showband um i don't think there's anyone any better than uh our our band and uh mr stefaneski does a great job but i really want to thank the the teachers led by our supervisor jason leshowitz and all the teachers that that were able to put those kids on performance and how great they were um it just was it really makes it worthwhile on being on this board and seeing a program that like that come out so well that you're proud of the programs that you back and you approve going into the budget just briefly um over the years and i can't sit here and and correct those mistakes um but whenever you go to a zero increase at some point that's going to catch up to you um and again knowing let's say we didn't get that increase from the from the state this year we'd be going out asking you for money just for the charter schools after you take that 12 million and you break it down we really only got another 3 million so while 3 million is better than none um but i you know i i kind of always relied on the people that do this day in and day out and rely on them to tell us hey this is what we need to have a thorough and efficient education um and then there's other stuffs that are the wish list the items that hey it'd be nice to have this in our classrooms but it's it's not going to hinder on having a thorough and efficient education um ms kusalevich tremendously explained to us that majority of the items in the budget for the increase are educational items they're educational teachers um esl so much in the educational in the in the um educational teaching area um that's being asked um so mr paris i too uh you know i rely on these people to tell us this is what we need to run an efficient school system and as long as that is not outrageous in its in its numbers um i rely on them and we we always say and we stand up here well we hired a superintendent to do a job and we we like respect his opinion when we hire people and when we do different moves and things like that but then when it comes to the budget we basically are saying well too bad you know we don't rely on you i got to think that this guy is not going to come forward and put a budget together that's going to hurt people and i have to rely on that mr lucy's a number guy again i don't think he's going to present to the board something that's outrageous that um that this board should not be uh looking into so i rely on these guys and at the time that they do not put forward that those type items to us then that's when i get concerned but right now i'm not concerned i think they have legitimate items and issues that maybe could have been corrected four or five budget budgets ago um but at some point when you go to a z you know first of all education is not cheap people it is not cheap and with we all know with a good educational system our property values increase the sales of your house has increased those are all things that you know about and nobody up here on this board wants to hit taxpayers um so we're kind of we're kind of in in a very difficult position we want to offer our kids the very best may not be the elite it may not be school districts that have everything but i think our kids should at least have some of the best our kids deserve that and the public told us that when they went out to the referendum that they believed in those things and again i'm not criticizing previous boards but had they done some of those things over the years we wouldn't have had to go out for 168 million dollar reform so we're coming back with catch up to things um renovating bathrooms that haven't been renovated in a hundred years i mean again if they had taken some bathrooms along the way we wouldn't have been here asking for all the bathrooms to be redone to all the bathrooms to be ada capable so i think this board has to really look hard here to rely on our experts to say this is what we need for a thorough and efficient education and see where that goes i understand people are hurting no one wants to put at any time sitting up here no board member would say yeah i love a tax increase hit him with more you know nobody here wants to do that but we're elected to represent you the people in putting the best possible thorough efficient education for your kids and that's what we have to do by by taking our oath of office so while we're going to look at this budget um while we ask the administration to go back and see where they can cut when i asked miss kusalevich that at the meeting she said you can't those things are those things are needed they should have been in they should have been in years ago they have to start getting implemented now so we have to look at that carefully and um well i know people are hurting um but i also know that this town very much supports education they told us that last year and i just hope that we could all be open-minded um and not just not think of that zero increase uh and rely on these experts to come to us uh because we all just said it we have one of the best superintendents if not the best superintendent and he would not be a best superintendent if he's coming to a board and asking them for outrageous things or outrageous increases that's how i feel um we should be supporting our uh our administrative staff and mr usi and mr shahada to your team for putting together this budget as um um mr paris said i mean it's a huge binder it is a huge budget so to be able to put something like that together your office did a lot of of work on it we appreciate that so i know the sport is going to do the best thing and the right thing and i hope the public will understand that we are going to work hard on this budget um and um miss password i like your idea that uh of of a meeting um but there is a meeting on may 5th but i'm not that's to approve it totally yes okay so may we i'll look at the calendar and we can set up a meeting if people have uh questions on the full budget to to go through that um mr o'reilly again thank you for your great accomplishments um it truly is an honor to have a teacher like you um and to the pack uh they had pac night on saturday and uh thank you very much for the uh the invite and allowing me to see all the great work that they do in their in their organization so thank you one thing i am a little shocked at or not happy about is mr lama when you came up and said the the schools aren't dirty um i've always credited clifton for having a hundred year plus schools and that our schools looked so great that our staff did a tremendous job and look making them look great i don't like when someone comes up to the microphone says our schools are dirty i don't like that and if that means we have to move people around or whatever our schools are not going to be dirty and i assure you that we will look into that that administration will surely look into that and uh schools are going to be clean so um on that note uh we'll move on to uh new business miss uh beltran you said you had an item ah yes i did have an item um so i'm not sure if any of the other board members have uh made this observation but our current committee system doesn't seem to be functioning as it used to um i did a brief count we've only had nine committee meetings in three months some people have only gone to one meeting so that doesn't really to me show the board that's working together with the administration uh to work on issues that are coming up it's it's almost impossible that there's been no personnel issues in three months uh or that there's only been one facilities meeting when we used to meet every two weeks there's been no diversity means been no athletics meeting there's been no personnel no transportation and the we just cancelled a residency meeting because they said there was nothing new to present which is fine and on within the right to say that there's nothing new to present but in the past there's always been these meetings so i'm just wondering if we're better off going to maybe to a committee of a whole so that we all get to participate in some of these discussions because there's some of us like i'm not sure if mr parris i think he might have only gone to one meeting three so he's gone to three meetings and some of us some of the other members have gone to all nine so it's just a little lopsided i think that some board members just because of where they're placed on committees have way more influence than other board members meanwhile we all have the same power so to speak um sorry i open it up to the board members to see if anyone else feels the same way um but i just know historically we used to have a lot more board meetings a lot more committee reports at each meeting yeah so if if you uh remember at the last uh i guess it was about a week ago or week and a half ago i asked everyone uh to submit um a date for their next meeting um and then i was presenting that to administration uh it wasn't it wasn't i think so many people try to accommodate everybody and with schedules and everything you're not going to accommodate everybody and there's plenty of board members that can fill in on committees so you just have to set a date um i think residency and security theirs is always the last week in the month right the last thursday so it's always that at that week and and they've been meeting cons consistently um the others i think they were waiting on dates and waiting for people to get back to them the chairs just have to set dates and that's what i asked uh with that email and if there weren't dates set we set them with administration so um i agree with you there haven't been a lot of meetings um i agree facilities used to meet at least once or twice um i i you know i've been getting comments that well there's nothing to discuss there's no me in a district this size there's nothing to discuss in the committee um not acceptable on my end so uh i've i've spoken to dr robitozzi on this um we will again be asking everyone to set a date um so let's say you want to meet on the second tuesday of every month and we're going to send that out education will meet on the second tuesday of every month this uh security and residency meets on the last thursday of the month so everyone knows that those are the set dates for those committing meetings and if by chance there is nothing to discuss an administration comes and needs to cancel that meeting we can discuss it at that time but at least that meeting is set and even if it's a meeting that lasts a half an hour i just cannot believe in a district this size that there's nothing to discuss on a monthly basis on certain topics yes just to make clear diversity hasn't met because it is run by the administration uh it's not a board it's a it's not a board run committee um it's actually run by the administration so we're waiting on dates from that and i believe mr smith you told me or was it you mr awad told me that athletic was canceled twice because the aed couldn't make it um so we got to figure our way around that as well while i give agree with ms beltran that we need to figure a better way that if an administrator can't make it that we have somebody in their place just like how if a board member can't make it somebody can replace as well but to say that we haven't had certain committee meetings i think it's not fair um to some board members and chairs when not to point fingers but the administration side hasn't been able to come to the table you know i wasn't blaming the board i'm just saying that you know if some people can go to five meetings and then other people have gone to maybe two i don't think that's necessarily fair just because of where we're assigned on committees i mean i was previously assigned to committees that met on a regular basis and now i've been put on committees that don't meet at all which is you know fine but i just feel my position as a board member has been diminished because i'm no longer on these committees um which you know is very upsetting to me that you know for no apparent reason i've been i've been uh replaced or removed so i just felt like if everyone was on all the committees maybe none of us would have this feeling uh especially if there isn't that much to present a committee of a whole meeting might only be like two hours long which is much shorter than our regular meetings that's just you know my opinion if the bulk of the meetings are going to be finance facilities and that's it um you know maybe if we had a committee of a whole it would be a two second presentation from athletics and a two second presentation from residency and then we could go on to the other the other groups that have more to present that's that was just what i was bringing up in new business mr daley yes thank you mr president um there's uh something to be said for and against a committee of the whole when i was president i set up a committee of the whole and basically what it was was one meeting of the month was in essence an agenda meeting uh which you discussed all the issues and then when you went to your regular meeting it was maybe an hour at the best and but just like we had that discussion about the budget today that's when those are you can get into the nitty-gritty details and hear information so uh and when i was a department head in union county i had at the agenda meeting i had to get up and say the department of economic development would have five items or whatever it is and explain what was going on to the entire freeholder board and it works but there's also something to be said for individual committees so i've always had an open mind technically the uh committee of the whole is still in the in the policy it never was changed but you know but you know i think that's something the board should discuss so because there is positive and negatives to both things mr president yes okay so for the person for so what i'm hearing from you and i'm and i'll speak for you and i speak for myself but what i'm hearing is you feel like you're not included that's basically the bottom line right because this is the parent this is parent judy coming out mama judy um dana that has been my life for the last 11 years i don't feel like i'm uh completely a part of this board never did okay i bounced off of policy and i'm going to tell the comm i'm going to tell the community why i was policy chair for about eight years i've never complained to anybody about being on policy i complained that when before dr roberto was here we never moved policies we had 45 or 40 something plus policies that we didn't move i don't know why but you know it was very difficult to work with people that don't but you know get along with you and they think that you have this ulterior motive to pass these policies but they were mandated by the state but we never moved them so unbeknownst to me dr will become tells you come in i have echo i don't know what's going on um he comes in and we get the policy book moved and everything right so i sit on policy and i am a nut but for compliance i really love it okay this year was placed under a certain board member that i do not i can't work with legally i can't work with him my own personal attorney has told me to stay away for obvious reasons okay and i into fairness of the committee i bounced off as much as i loved that work i gave it up for the for the good of the whole right now policies will change and i'll vote according to how i feel they're if they're good enough for the district because i don't look at it as it being a political policy i look at it how does it affect children how does it affect the staff how does it affect the taxpayers how does it affect this board as a whole that's how i pass policy where is it going to be good or bad for the district that's the bottom line okay i couldn't do it i pounced off of education for the same reason so i'm only on one committee i'm on an hsa committee he's not really a committee it's not the robotization committee so i can't set a date because it's i'm under his his leisure so i'm really not involved so i'm taking my time and i'm getting involved more with my state and my county my county um responsibilities and i'm i'm bringing the stuff back to the board like i did tonight county i would prefer com uh committee of the whole i always did because then i would feel like i'm involved in this this board i would feel like i am a part of this board in the decision-making process and that my voice would be heard i asked a question tonight about security i didn't get my answer so i'm gonna have to call the superintendent tomorrow and bother all right i have to make a decision on this budget based on their their their what they're telling me but i don't have the data to make the decision so that's i would prefer committee the whole i think maybe we should even just try it and give it a and give it a go and like the pilot for the people coming in on the tv if it doesn't work we ain't get president smith mr awad yeah i just want to make things clear i understand some board members may have personal issues or personal recommendations from lawyers but if we're able to sit in a room together with a meeting and all be cultural cordial or be respectful for the sake of our district because that's why we're here elected we're not here elected because and we're not going to harm the public because personal beef or personal issues or personal lawyers if we're able to be in a room together and have great discussions from last night i know all our committee meetings are virtual so i don't get how anybody could be uncomfortable being behind the screen i think it's just we can come up with excuses why we don't want to work with other people but at the same time we're only affecting the students and staff and i don't think the students and staff in our district really care what our personal beliefs or issues are with one another they care about getting results because at the end of the day it's the students that get affected and we need to keep that in mind we got to be bigger adults you know sometimes emotions get high totally understand it but all our committees even if we do an all committee that means we're all going to be present in a way so being able to attend that you can attend other committees for other issues it's sometimes we just got to take the higher road because it's for the students that's what we're here for we have the right intentions let's keep the ball going but to come up with any other excuses we're just affecting the students at the end of the day we just gotta always keep that sometimes you know me miss beltram might have disagreements but you know we discuss we talk you know we do our thing at the end of the day me and majority of the board members we always agree that students first district first how can we help our administration and let's keep that on the back of our mind mr smith i felt that the meetings would have been not appropriate for the for the staff to be sitting through argument after martin that's why i bounced off i'm being honest i i did that for a reason because i wanted the meetings to be productive in those committee meetings i'm going to sit there and argue i have a police report filed against me i have a cease and desist letter filed against me by these people would you want to sit in a room and discuss things with them i feel comfortable in the committee of the hole we're doing it now excuse me i'm speaking i have the floor i feel comfortable in this setting because we have an attorney here we have the superintendent here i have committee uh people here as well i feel more comfortable i won't feel comfortable the other way i'm allowed to say that i'm a 62 year old woman who don't feel comfortable being in a committee meeting with certain people what's wrong with that but we're virtual mrs besser so so i'm i'm going to interject if i may hear mr president um because i think that we're we're like going to a different path from the original question the original topic which ms beltran brought under new business which is that she would like the board to return to committee of the hall with all due respect to all of the different opinions so i think we should go back to that conversation so i make a motion that we go back to committee the whole 0-1-6-0 so excuse me one second i miss bastard i'm just taking a look to see because you'd have to yeah you have to have a resolution to go i think you'd have to go have a resolution to go back because there is a board policy or 160 i think you cited it already um to have a committee of the whole you don't i don't know how you went back to just board committees but i suspect that it was with a resolution so i think you need a resolution to go back to the committee of the whole and obviously a board vote a board vote but wouldn't a motion and a second and then discussion uh constitute the creation of a resolution so it would it would but it's a resolution that's not on the agenda so it's one of those if somebody objects then you'd have to have uh two-thirds of a vote of the whole board so just so that we're clear on what the process is mr president yes mr daley this is my suggestion to the board um just simply to go back i think we should sit down as a board and uh on a deliberative matter and i don't think we have the time or effort or energy to do it tonight and discuss just how that would work amongst ourselves like i said i kind of have a i had when i had it i had a kind of a hybrid it was a an agenda meeting and then there was a regular board meeting which we you know there was still a regular board meeting uh and you had sometimes the committees do play a role so i think we need to talk and hash that out and not just i'm not like i said i have a very open mind about the whole thing but i i think we need to have a little fuller discussion just how that would work and uh and if you're okay with that i'm okay with that jim but you have a board member you have two board members that's telling you quite honestly we're being honest right now with each other that we don't feel included that's that's that's a major red flag well i'm not i'm not just disagreeing with that i'm just saying how how do we get and if you're going to move you want to get just not in my opinion just jump on it you need to just think about and maybe shave around the edges and i i don't like i said i'm not totally against the idea and you know when i when i had the chair i did things a little bit differently but everybody every president does the things a little bit differently but i just want the board to everybody needs to understand how it's going to work and and fit in and how we transform into that so i think it takes a little bit more discussion about what the expectations would be and how it's set up and how it's run uh before you know so i'm i'm not against what you're asking for but i think we just need to have a whole fuller discussion a little bit more time where we can focus on that small question with this committee because i see where miss beltran's coming i don't disagree with you i think it's a good idea i never knew something like that could happen that there was a policy but would a would a committee like this be virtual or would it be in person and my second question is it'll be in person i don't care it would run just like this with no votes well just wrong with me just no votes okay i just don't i just don't see the difference where i'm saying if this committee was not to exist and for us to just be in other communities with other people virtually how that differentiates comfort levels but okay mr president uh there are a lot of boards that do committee the whole they do the one meeting they do they do their business meeting and then the next meeting in two weeks is um their work session uh it's very successful because everybody's involved in it everybody has input the work session meeting is very long it's lengthy but it's a designated board meeting it has to be because there's more than five so it has to be a public meeting right so the work session meeting is the same thing as the committee of the whole need and it's right it's a meeting that just like every other meeting there would be public advertising there's advertisement of it you have to have public comment um um and just just just that no action is taken the agenda is set for the next for the regular board meeting so what tends to happen i think somebody said it earlier committee of the whole meeting tends to be pretty long and then the regular board meeting is short okay so we'll put that on resolution for next meeting sure resolution on the next agenda okay okay so it's not going to committee yeah there's no what's the policy it's about policy oh that's true could go to policy yeah we'll go to policy first yeah but let's say a policy wants to look at it and re-revise it or whatever should go to committee first so no resolution yeah no right so until you hear from policy right so mr president um so i understand both sides i'm kind of in the middle on this um i would have questions like i know residency and security a lot of things we talk about isn't necessarily topics for for public consumption so i'd have a lot of questions around things like that or even in technology we talk about security cameras or there's there's always we could have executive okay any anything that is um confidential uh anything that involves students anything that involves personnel anything that involves um security those things there is an executive session and those would be discussed in executives small question um and i'm not advocating one way or the other just i'm just answering questions just uh just clarification maybe president smith or darlese uh if our committees are not public in general just a regular committee meetings that we have instead of having a separate date for a whole committee shouldn't we just do it in executive session have like every meeting and exactly that doesn't work like that oh you can't okay i'm sorry the reason why your committee meetings are not in public is because you don't have a quorum right it's less than a quorum as soon as you have five or more then it has to be in public so there may be some things that you're discussing in committees that you would be able to discuss in public but you don't because it's not a regular meeting it's it's there's not a core there are things that are discussed in certain committees that cannot be discussed in public personnel student issues etc those things you would discuss in executive session all right so we'll send this to policy and we'll come back to the board all right um motion for executive session uh we're going into executive session for uh personnel matters and uh contract matter action may or may not be taken um we estimate uh oh 20 minutes uh it's nothing bad we don't have a so uh between 30 and 45 minutes uh hopefully the board will be back hopefully back out motion to uh executive session by mr abigail seconded by mr awad any objection thank you okay we're good please yeah return from exactly here mr abdullah is here miss bassford miss beltran here mr canova here understanding left mr paris vice president daley president smith here we have a quorum okay the board met an executive session to discuss personnel matters and a contract matter we do have a resolution to present whenever you're so i guess ready have to do it twice so it's going to be 0.50 20 20.

someone by mr abu drabo second by mr rawad discussion seeing none roll call mr abu drabo mr owen yes miss password ms beltran yes mr kenova vice president daley president smith yes motion carries hey motion to adjourn by mr abu drabbo second by mr awad seeing no objection adjourned thank you all goodnight everybody you

David, just raise your hand. Um we have Jim Story here on this end uh deputy chief of uh Dartmouth PD. And we have Dr. Cynthia Marland, a retired director of our DCTV media for the town of Dartmouth who's in our midst tonight. And finally, I want to introduce Dr. Steven Witzig, who is a member of our Dartmouth Education Foundation Advisory Council, and he is so gracious to be willing tonight to be our announcer, and we're grateful to him for for doing that. So, um, before Steven comes up and we get this shindig started, I do want to, um, allow, uh, Harmonics to come out and it is my pleasure to introduce them. They are there are members of harmonics here tonight and they are Dartmouth High School's amazing ac cappella group and they are going to be singing our national anthem. Oh, say can you see by the dawn early light so proudly we held at the twilight last gleaming whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight for the ramp.

It's all it all needs to come from here. Um reminder that there's going to be prizes awarded to those in attendance between the flights. Uh and you must be present to win. All right. So here are the rules. This is a team competition. Each team consists of three members. Between four and five teams will compete at a time in what we call flights. The team members will work together to puzzle out the spelling of each word. Each team will have a dry erase board which with which to write and review its spelling and which to show the answer. The competing teams will have 30 seconds to write an answer on their individual dry erase boards. All teams will show their answers at the end of the Jeopardy jingle or when I call time. When time is up and the answers are displayed, I will give the correct answer and our judges will determine which teams are correct and which teams are incorrect.

so i don't see anything novel to present there but what i will do and we don't have time to have a vote on this you know before march 31st but i'm going to send it out to all the commissioners so they can review it make some comments and we'll just stick with what's in the public record for uh 2021 unless there are some changes and then i'll see what i can do about uh getting those out at a later time okay i i don't see any other way of dealing with this so um are there any so let's see any questions or comments about the reports um then we'll move on to the report from staff gail and you have before all right thank you um i got two updates of the office of sustainability and innovations and u of m trees we are collaborating on the climate action movie night and this is going to be held on april 15th at 7 00 pm um at elbow field uh we'll have a performance by kai five then after that performance we'll jump into the movie and after the movie we'll have a panel discussion then also uh earth day this year we're working on that right now under leadership of susan westhoff and leslie science nature center um earth day is actually going to be celebrated uh by the city on april 24th at 1 pm at the leslie science in nature so this year it'll be in person those are my two updates okay and when was the date for the elbow field event uh april uh 15th that's a friday and um it'll be outdoors and then uh we're encouraging everybody to bring blankets you know you can do picnic style or whatnot but it'll be a good event and a good collaboration between the city and uofl well that's wonderful so oh the other thing i noticed galen is that the green fair has been scheduled i think the annual it used to be called the mayor's green field yes um i'm not sure that date off hand though i think it's in late april as well um but i will uh i will check with that um so i would encourage everybody to look at the uh at the city's website uh to find out when the green fair is coming on and i think um you know for the for the uh the last one was held in september i believe it was or it might have been around the first of october on main street and um we had a table for that event and um um commissioners a few of our commissioners i attended that and chris vandenbroeck uh luna oriole attended that as well and um i believe yong wen zhang as well and uh we had uh i think it's a good opportunity for the commission you know to uh you know to to be there to let residents give residents an opportunity to ask questions of us and to see what kind of work we're doing so i'm hoping to have a table for that but i may be out of town myself so i will um i will be circulating other emails to try to find volunteers and most of the the table itself was uh donated by uh you know by uh by osi but um um i'll keep you all posted on that um lisa you have your hand raised green fair is friday june 10th from 6 00 to 9 00 pm that's right it's june 10th that's good that gives us some more time so um [Music] okay so um [Music] so i got confused because i will be out of town then too and that's actually going on april 24th and i'll also be out of town on june 10th so um so there um right thank you again um so in terms of action items i don't think we have any to review at this time um so the next item are on our agendas items for the next agenda are there any topics people would like to discuss or put on the agenda um let's see hopefully we might get some so just email me your suggestions about uh what to schedule for our next meeting we have a few others uh that are involved but i think uh i think tiffany uh was was going to present this the city's um forestry plan but she had to postpone that until april so that's the only item i know of which is currently on the agenda okay for for our april meeting um the next scheduled meeting is april let's see here i think it is april 24th 28th i think oh you're right yep it's april 28th so the next scheduled meeting is april 28th at 7 00 pm um so the next item on our agenda is public commentary uh this is the second opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 1-888-788-0099-477-853-5247 and enter meeting id 989-285-11637 [Music] uh this is an opportunity for you to speak for up to three minutes so this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and the video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sound so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and be patient there is a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection is established so um do we have anybody on the line as yet galen [Music] there's no one on the line okay well we'll wait 30 minutes and then um and then we will adjourn give me 30 seconds right i mean 30 seconds i've been on my computer i've been on my computer since six o'clock this morning i'm getting a little rattled so uh probably we just want to make a minor correction i technically didn't go to the mayor's fair last time so i couldn't take credit for that oh that's right i'm sorry yeah you're good hopefully i make it this time okay great that would be wonderful so um [Music] let's see i think 30 seconds have passed oh yeah is there anybody on the line there's no one on the line all right well thank you galen so i declare this meeting adjourned at um at 9 12.

and then the first feature is a resource room as well okay ready first resolution is resolved that the clifton board of education accepts the recommendation of the superintendent of schools to grant 12 additional sick days to be paid in 24 half-day increments to employee id 50-2021 2020. oh 2020 yeah i'm sorry we're in 2022. doesn't know what they said i'm sorry i thought i said 20. let's start that over resolve that the clifton board of education accepts the recommendation of the superintendent of schools to grant 12 additional sick days to be paid in 24 half-day increments to employee id number 50-2022 resource room teacher school number 12 effective is it today tomorrow march 25th 2022. motion on the floor second by mr abu dhabi second by mr awad discussion see none roll call mr mr every java mr awad yes misspell miss bassford miss beltran yes mr canova yes mr d uh vice president daley and president smith yes all right next question the next resolution is resolve that the clifton board of education accepts the recommendation of the superintendent of schools to grant 12 additional sick days to be paid in 24 half-day increments to employee id number 51-2022 bsi teacher school number five effective uh march 25th 2022.

And parts we watched were so gallently streaming. And the rockets red glare. The bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say does that star spangled banner and way [Music] for the land of the free and the home of the brave. So, I'll invite Stephen to come up and join us and we'll get this party started. Thank you. All right, welcome everyone. So, the teams have all been schooled in the cafeteria about the rules, but there may be audience members that might not know what we're doing tonight. So, to start, I want to remind everyone to silence your cell phones. And I did hear some rumblings about whether or not you can have cell phones up on the stage and you cannot. So please do not. This team here in particular was asking that question. So don't bring your cell phones up onto the stage.

The teams you'll know if you're if you're incorrect and just you'll just have to be on our system, but we've got some judges here that are going to be watching you. All right. We use the first spelling in the Miriam Webster's online dictionary as the correct answer. Should a team give an incorrect answer, it will lower you will lower flag. When a team subsequently gives a second incorrect answer, it will lower its second flag and turn over the placard. The team is out of the competition, but will remain on the stage for the duration of the flight. The single winner of each flight, the last team with a flag still up will go on to the final competition. There will be five flights and five winners will be competing in the finals. In the championship round, the competition will be double elimination. A team must spell the final word correctly to win.

It's all it all needs to come from here. Um reminder that there's going to be prizes awarded to those in attendance between the flights. Uh and you must be present to win. All right. So here are the rules. This is a team competition. Each team consists of three members. Between four and five teams will compete at a time in what we call flights. The team members will work together to puzzle out the spelling of each word. Each team will have a dry erase board which with which to write and review its spelling and which to show the answer. The competing teams will have 30 seconds to write an answer on their individual dry erase boards. All teams will show their answers at the end of the Jeopardy jingle or when I call time. When time is up and the answers are displayed, I will give the correct answer and our judges will determine which teams are correct and which teams are incorrect.

If the final teams all misspel their final word, another word will be given until there's only one team that has spelled the word correctly, and that team will become the champion, and they will take home the trophy for the year and have their name engraved onto that trophy. Are we ready? All right. So, flight number one, flight number one is sponsored by APC Auto Body. And if the teams from flight number one can make your way to the stage as I will announce you. We've got the A's, B's, and Policies sponsored by Silva Group Insurance Agency. We've got Be Witch was which is a team from Quinn Elementary sponsored by Das Le Palm and Martin CPAs. We've got Cast a Spell, which is a team from Dartmouth High School, sponsored by Lana Finerman. We've got the Cosmic Orthographers, sponsored by the Stone family. And we have the DMS workerbees sponsored by Dr.

The teams you'll know if you're if you're incorrect and just you'll just have to be on our system, but we've got some judges here that are going to be watching you. All right. We use the first spelling in the Miriam Webster's online dictionary as the correct answer. Should a team give an incorrect answer, it will lower you will lower flag. When a team subsequently gives a second incorrect answer, it will lower its second flag and turn over the placard. The team is out of the competition, but will remain on the stage for the duration of the flight. The single winner of each flight, the last team with a flag still up will go on to the final competition. There will be five flights and five winners will be competing in the finals. In the championship round, the competition will be double elimination. A team must spell the final word correctly to win.

John Crayon. So, let's all give the first flight a big round of applause. Okay, we'll do Oh, yes. Yes. All right. So, I have Oh, we've got some traffic cones going up. We should be we should be concerned. So, uh a few uh little housekeeping rules for the for you that are up on the stage. We have water bottles on the stage for you. Please take that water bottle with you when we leave and we will put a whole new set of water bottles on there. In fact, we have a whole team of National Junior Honor Society and Honor Society kids that are going to do that. I'd also like to recognize uh Dr. Doug Rosco. Dr. Doug Rosco is sitting here to my to my left and he is actually um the wizard behind the computer who's going to be uh uh projecting the words for us.

If the final teams all misspel their final word, another word will be given until there's only one team that has spelled the word correctly, and that team will become the champion, and they will take home the trophy for the year and have their name engraved onto that trophy. Are we ready? All right. So, flight number one, flight number one is sponsored by APC Auto Body. And if the teams from flight number one can make your way to the stage as I will announce you. We've got the A's, B's, and Policies sponsored by Silva Group Insurance Agency. We've got Be Witch was which is a team from Quinn Elementary sponsored by Das Le Palm and Martin CPAs. We've got Cast a Spell, which is a team from Dartmouth High School, sponsored by Lana Finerman. We've got the Cosmic Orthographers, sponsored by the Stone family. And we have the DMS workerbees sponsored by Dr.

So let's let's thank Doug for volunteering his time for doing that. All right, are we ready? All right, your first word is breeze. It's a noun, an easy task, something done or carried on without difficulty. Spell breeze. [Music] The spelling of your first word should be a breeze. [Applause] [Music] Breeze. [Music] All right, at this time, show your responses and the judges will Yeah, make sure you hold it up real good and real good and high. There we go. Looks like everybody everybody has that one. All right, nice job, everyone. Yes, we've got some winners already. All right, your second word is gnarly. It's an adjective twisted with or as in with gnars or knots. Spell gnarly. [Music] The gnarly rope at the bottom of the gear bag posed a bit of a problem for the mountain climbers. Gnarly. [Applause] [Music] All right, let's see your responses.

John Crayon. So, let's all give the first flight a big round of applause. Okay, we'll do Oh, yes. Yes. All right. So, I have Oh, we've got some traffic cones going up. We should be we should be concerned. So, uh a few uh little housekeeping rules for the for you that are up on the stage. We have water bottles on the stage for you. Please take that water bottle with you when we leave and we will put a whole new set of water bottles on there. In fact, we have a whole team of National Junior Honor Society and Honor Society kids that are going to do that. I'd also like to recognize uh Dr. Doug Rosco. Dr. Doug Rosco is sitting here to my to my left and he is actually um the wizard behind the computer who's going to be uh uh projecting the words for us.

Hold those up nice and high. Everybody's good. All right. Nicely done. Your your third word is buoy. It's a noun, a distinctively shaped and marked float, sometimes carrying a signal or signals. Spell buoy. [Music] The buoy marked the start of the shipping channel. Buoy [Applause] [Music] That's time. Hold up your answers, everybody. All right, your fourth word is canoodle. It's a verb. Canoodleoodle to caress, fondle, or pet amorously. spell canoodle. [Music] The teenager was embarrassed when she saw her parents canoodle at the town carnival. [Applause] [Music] Canoodle. [Music] All right, let's see your answers for canoodle. Is that a K at the end? Yep. I can't see it from here. Is that a That's a Okay. So, one team on the end. Put a flag down. All right, nicely done everyone. Your your fifth word is dichotomy. It is a noun dichotomy. A division into two parts or kinds.

So let's let's thank Doug for volunteering his time for doing that. All right, are we ready? All right, your first word is breeze. It's a noun, an easy task, something done or carried on without difficulty. Spell breeze. [Music] The spelling of your first word should be a breeze. [Applause] [Music] Breeze. [Music] All right, at this time, show your responses and the judges will Yeah, make sure you hold it up real good and real good and high. There we go. Looks like everybody everybody has that one. All right, nice job, everyone. Yes, we've got some winners already. All right, your second word is gnarly. It's an adjective twisted with or as in with gnars or knots. Spell gnarly. [Music] The gnarly rope at the bottom of the gear bag posed a bit of a problem for the mountain climbers. Gnarly. [Applause] [Music] All right, let's see your responses.

Spell dichotomy. [Music] There is often a dichotomy between what politicians say and what they do. Dichotomy [Applause] [Music] All right, let's see your spellings for dichotomy. D. Yeah. D I C H O T O M Y. So, we've got one one team with the flag. I can't see the far. They're all good. Okay, nice to know. All right, for your sixth word, it is shenanigans. It's a noun. Shenanigans. Mischief or prankishness. Spell shenanigans. [Music] The students pulled all sorts of shenanigans on the substitute teacher. Shenanigans. [Applause] [Music] All right, show us your responses for shenanigans. is s h e n a n i g a ns. So you guys okay I the judges you guys good? Yeah. Okay. All right. We good. On to word seven. Raspberry. It's a noun. Raspberry. The fruit of any of several shrubs belonging to the genus Rubis of the rose family.

Hold those up nice and high. Everybody's good. All right. Nicely done. Your your third word is buoy. It's a noun, a distinctively shaped and marked float, sometimes carrying a signal or signals. Spell buoy. [Music] The buoy marked the start of the shipping channel. Buoy [Applause] [Music] That's time. Hold up your answers, everybody. All right, your fourth word is canoodle. It's a verb. Canoodleoodle to caress, fondle, or pet amorously. spell canoodle. [Music] The teenager was embarrassed when she saw her parents canoodle at the town carnival. [Applause] [Music] Canoodle. [Music] All right, let's see your answers for canoodle. Is that a K at the end? Yep. I can't see it from here. Is that a That's a Okay. So, one team on the end. Put a flag down. All right, nicely done everyone. Your your fifth word is dichotomy. It is a noun dichotomy. A division into two parts or kinds.

Spell raspberry. [Music] The raspberry bushes produced a lot of fruit this year. Raspberry. [Applause] [Music] All right, let's see your responses for Raspberry. R A S P B E R R Y. Oh, we've got the abs and the policies have extinguished their flags. All right, your eighth word is flamus. It's a verb flamus to bewilder. Spell flamus. [Music] The order for a vegan meal may flamux the shelf at the steakhouse. Flamox. [Music] All right, let's see your spellings for Flamox. F L U M M O X All right, moving on to your ninth word. The word is benevolent. It's an adjective. Benevolent characterized by or expressing goodwill or kindly feelings. Spell benevolent. [Music] Benevolent. [Applause] [Music] It's an adjective. The volunteers benevolent smile was welcomed at the senior center. Benevolent. [Music] All right, let's see responses for Benel. BN E V O L E N T.

Spell dichotomy. [Music] There is often a dichotomy between what politicians say and what they do. Dichotomy [Applause] [Music] All right, let's see your spellings for dichotomy. D. Yeah. D I C H O T O M Y. So, we've got one one team with the flag. I can't see the far. They're all good. Okay, nice to know. All right, for your sixth word, it is shenanigans. It's a noun. Shenanigans. Mischief or prankishness. Spell shenanigans. [Music] The students pulled all sorts of shenanigans on the substitute teacher. Shenanigans. [Applause] [Music] All right, show us your responses for shenanigans. is s h e n a n i g a ns. So you guys okay I the judges you guys good? Yeah. Okay. All right. We good. On to word seven. Raspberry. It's a noun. Raspberry. The fruit of any of several shrubs belonging to the genus Rubis of the rose family.

Good. All right. Your 10th word is eczema. It's a noun. Eczema. An inflammatory condition of the skin attended with itching. Spell eczema. [Music] The child was uncomfortable due to the eczema patches all over their body. Eczema. [Applause] [Music] Eczema. [Music] All right, let's see your spellings for eczema. E C Z E M A. All right, and that's it for bewitched. We're down to two teams. Is that correct? Great. All right, for your 11th word, your 11th word is malfeasins. It's a noun. Malfeasins. The performance by a public official of an act that is legally unjustified, harmful, or contrary to law. Spell malfeasins. [Music] The mayor was tried for malfeasins after buying furniture for their home on the town's expense account. Malfeasins [Applause] [Music] now. Oh, it's sent. The mayor was tried for malfeasins after buying furniture for their home on the town's expense account. M A L F E A S A N C E.

Spell raspberry. [Music] The raspberry bushes produced a lot of fruit this year. Raspberry. [Applause] [Music] All right, let's see your responses for Raspberry. R A S P B E R R Y. Oh, we've got the abs and the policies have extinguished their flags. All right, your eighth word is flamus. It's a verb flamus to bewilder. Spell flamus. [Music] The order for a vegan meal may flamux the shelf at the steakhouse. Flamox. [Music] All right, let's see your spellings for Flamox. F L U M M O X All right, moving on to your ninth word. The word is benevolent. It's an adjective. Benevolent characterized by or expressing goodwill or kindly feelings. Spell benevolent. [Music] Benevolent. [Applause] [Music] It's an adjective. The volunteers benevolent smile was welcomed at the senior center. Benevolent. [Music] All right, let's see responses for Benel. BN E V O L E N T.

They missed one. Yep. Oh, both. So, we've got a winner. Which which team is the Great. All right, let's hear it for cosmic orthographers who won flight one in our first in our spelling be. So, as I remind you, please take the water bottles with you. Even if you didn't drink from those, just take those with you. We've got plenty. And now we will do uh our first door prize raffle. Okay. So, you gonna tell me when I'm Okay, everybody. So, we are going to raffle off two swag bags which have been donated by Chris Pereira uh and the Dartmouth Athletic Alumni Association. Um, just want to point out that the swag bags have our current logo on them and the DEF is not taking a position uh either way about whether that logo will remain or not, but the swag bags contain the current logo.

Good. All right. Your 10th word is eczema. It's a noun. Eczema. An inflammatory condition of the skin attended with itching. Spell eczema. [Music] The child was uncomfortable due to the eczema patches all over their body. Eczema. [Applause] [Music] Eczema. [Music] All right, let's see your spellings for eczema. E C Z E M A. All right, and that's it for bewitched. We're down to two teams. Is that correct? Great. All right, for your 11th word, your 11th word is malfeasins. It's a noun. Malfeasins. The performance by a public official of an act that is legally unjustified, harmful, or contrary to law. Spell malfeasins. [Music] The mayor was tried for malfeasins after buying furniture for their home on the town's expense account. Malfeasins [Applause] [Music] now. Oh, it's sent. The mayor was tried for malfeasins after buying furniture for their home on the town's expense account. M A L F E A S A N C E.

Okay. So the first name is Bill Kavanaaugh. Bill Kavanaaugh. Okay. So Janna is bringing that. You can come down actually to collect your prize, but it looks like uh Dr. Souza is going to deliver the swag bag. But you can come forward to collect. Um, and the second name is John Nunes right there. All right, stay tuned. Next flight. All right, are we ready for flight two? Flight two is proudly sponsored by Souza Family Orthodontics. So, we thank them for their sponsorship. And we've got the teams be sustainable from UMass, sponsored by Dr. Mark Milano, the Dental Surgeons of Dartmouth. You guys can all make your way to the stage. DMS's finest sponsored by Dr. Marley Gomes and Chris Pereira. Positively Potter sponsored by doctors John and Peter V. Spellyfish a team from Dlo sponsored by Crowley Weaver Insurance Agency and the Wilkinson family. And we also have the wannabes sponsored by the Bala family.

They missed one. Yep. Oh, both. So, we've got a winner. Which which team is the Great. All right, let's hear it for cosmic orthographers who won flight one in our first in our spelling be. So, as I remind you, please take the water bottles with you. Even if you didn't drink from those, just take those with you. We've got plenty. And now we will do uh our first door prize raffle. Okay. So, you gonna tell me when I'm Okay, everybody. So, we are going to raffle off two swag bags which have been donated by Chris Pereira uh and the Dartmouth Athletic Alumni Association. Um, just want to point out that the swag bags have our current logo on them and the DEF is not taking a position uh either way about whether that logo will remain or not, but the swag bags contain the current logo.

Let's give all this teams a big round of applause as they make their way to the stage. So, I I will remind the teams on the stage after you're after you're leave the stage tonight, take the water bottles with you. And if you when you if you do when you do get eliminated, uh if you could turn your placards down so it'll be make it easier for the judge to see who they need to who they need to um score. Okay, everybody set? All right, your first word for flight 2 is manageable. It's an adjective. Manageable that can be managed, governable, tractable. Spell manageable. [Music] Hopefully this first word is manageable for you. Manageable. [Applause] [Music] All right, hold up your responses for manageable. It is m a n a g e a b l e. Hold it up nice and big. Are we good on the end?