well good evening everyone and welcome to this governance workshop for the azusa unified school district board of education on may 31st 2022 we'll go ahead and call this meeting to order at 5 31 p.m and we will begin with our flag salute um when i do believe that we have eamonn harris here with us yeah go ahead and lead us uh go and take it away okay like right now yes sir oh okay audience please rise put your right hand over your heart ready begin i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all you may be seated thank you so much amen i appreciate it all right then we'll move to roll call item 1.3 uh board member rodriguez pena president board member bo here board member cruz gonzalez president board member adianas i don't think we heard you boardman body honest but you're present present perfect and then i board member gear i'm also present next we'll we will move to 2.0 and specifically 2.1 approval of the agenda is there a motion to approve tonight's agenda make a motion to approve 2.1 by second moved by board member rodriguez pena and second by board member beau any discussion then we will move to a vote uh board member rodriguez pena yes board member beau yes board member cruz gonzalez yeah board member arianis yes and i am also a yes and so the motion passes five to zero moving on to item 3.0 and 3.1 public comment on agenda or non-agenda items this is an opportunity for the public to address the board of education on agenda or non-agenda items individual speakers may be allowed up to three minutes to address the board of education on any agenda or non-agenda items when the public wishes to address the board of education on an agenda item they may fill out a blue card stand at the podium or raise their hand while in zoom attendance the board will take blue card requests first followed in order by speakers at the podium and then those in zoom attendance it does not appear as though we have anyone here that would like to make a public comment in person lika is there anyone online with the hand raised that would like to leave make a comment we have no hands raised no hand raised thank you then we will move to 4.0 general functions and specifically 4.1 our main item on the agenda which is a board governance workshop and i will turn it over to you mr ortega thank you board president um happy to um be here tonight uh per uh board request we went ahead and engaged in the process the csba has laid out in terms of uh board self-evaluation and so i am very excited uh tonight to have dr yo here who's going to help facilitate today's board governance self-evaluation meeting dr yo so much and thank you for inviting me to the district um and stephen is fine so what i wanted to ask if all of you are okay with first name for this session for the gov is that okay so first name all right okay i want to make sure yes all right so um i am cepeda yo and uh i've had the pleasure of working for csba as a consultant for the past six seven years and prior to that i work at universities and colleges working as a faculty member and administrator and so i come to you with experience in at the college level as well as patriot book what i love to do is to travel around and work with different teams and how they can become more effective as uh at what they do i am a former board member i had the pleasure of serving in oak park unified it's a k-12 about around 4 500 students and i i tell you it's a privilege because that's how i felt it was truly a privilege to get to serve the students and the stakeholder in oak park and my biggest job that i'm most proud of is being a mom wonderful young adult her daughter is 22 she just graduated from college with her undergraduate degree and our son bijan is 20 almost 20.
if sports aren't your style but you still want to work out look no further than planet fitness they're allowing teens ages 14 to 19 working to work out for frey this started may 16th but you can still apply and even enter to win a 5 000 scholarship this offer will end in august however so hurry while you still can on wednesday june 1st at 3 30 kate may tech will be facing off against woodstown in the final boys varsity baseball game we're wishing them a good game and hopefully a win all right i think that's going to be it for cat tv news and what a home run it was we never drop the ball on news do we i'm gonna hurt you one of these days marlo your time is numbered what i can't i can't do this anymore do you think i want this do you think i find this funny i i'm sorry and i'm wiley and you're watching cat news [Music] [Applause] [Music] you
[Music] you do my so do so do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] um do [Music] me do [Music] do um do um foreign um foreign [Music] i would like to resume this meeting of the eastern township board of education would you all please rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance of the united states [Music] at this time we're having board member marianne capello read the mission statement thank you mrs ryan the mission of sorry about that folks the mission of the eve shim township school district is to promote excellence in an environment that engages students in meaningful learning experiences in partnership with students dedicated staff families and community the district provides a strong education foundation that will empower our students to achieve their unique potential embrace self-directed lifelong learning develop the skills necessary for appropriate risk taking and responsible decision making respect themselves and others problem solve individually and collaboratively and become contributing members of a diverse global society thank you mrs cappello at this point in time we are going to be moving into presentations dr smith the floor is all yours okay there we go thank you mrs ryan so we would like to let you come if you if i could have board president mrs ryan board vice president mr kenthan come around we want to recognize the team from mes that won first place in the state of new jersey 2022 stock market game for the elementary division we're going to call those students up one at a time to come down and we'll take pictures and then at the end if you know families want to come down and take pictures of all four of them we can do that as well and their teacher mrs mclaughlin i think is here miss walker do you mind coming down too thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it's great that you could be here tonight for this and thank you for doing that work with the kids it's fantastic so first person to come down is adriana de bartolo mayo she's here adriana dewartolomeo [Applause] next up we have nadia alaba right here [Applause] okay thank you and then we have ava gurini [Applause] [Music] [Applause] congratulations and rebecca shapiro [Applause] so why don't we take some pics and families if you want to come down and get some pictures too please so now we're going to move on to public comment just in case anyone is not aware we have two public comment sections the first public comment is for what is on the agenda and the second public comment which happens later in the evening is for anything you wish to discuss the meeting will now be open to the public referencing agenda items only however if your questions pertain to student or personnel items or negotiations we ask that you see the superintendent after the meeting since we do not discuss these matters in public we ask that you limit your comments to three minutes per person it is also crucial please for you to give us your name and address before you speak up and also limit your comments to one time per public comment period is there anyone who wishes to speak mrs ryan before we start if i can say something that i always say after student recognitions which is that the families of those students are welcome to stay for the whole board meeting but if they would like to leave at this point sometimes that scene is another reward of having gotten the award so and we congratulate those families again thank you for coming and being here [Applause] thank you for coming up please state your name thank you good evening my name is brian wiscowitz first vice president for the eve sham township education association i'm speaking here tonight to address our association's concerns about the recent cuts made to the speech therapist program the current budget includes the elimination of another speech therapist position the third in the last three years this will make it extremely difficult for our current speech therapist to meet the needs and the therapy mandates of our students this is a group of students who require special services and they cannot afford these continued cuts if a student with special needs is unable to be appropriately educated in our district the board will be required to pay for that student to receive services in an out of district placement sending a student to an out of district placement costs our district a tremendous amount of money we ask that the board please relieve the strain on our speech therapists their schedules and most importantly on their students by reconsidering these budget cuts thank you [Applause] please state your name address yeah russ bowles president of the evsham township education association i would first like to take a moment to share our concerns regarding the 10-month secretaries in an effort to save money you continue to replace 10-month secretaries with two clerk typists to get out of offering benefits the need for consistency and an uninterrupted relationship between the secretary and student is vital our secretaries especially those on the house level develop relationships with the students that are more of kind of like a house counselor students trust in the secretaries because it's someone they see every day all day for three years not only is this consistency for our students it's consistency for our vice principles and its consistency for our staff you have to stop looking at these positions as numbers on a spreadsheet and start looking at what these people in those positions contribute to the district mr lanzalata at the board of ed meeting earlier this month you asked dr smith if there were eight people losing their jobs dr smith's response was and i quote i appreciate you bringing that up thank you eight positions being eliminated no one losing their job that statement was not true we do have staff members losing their jobs for one of these positions it's the person's second time being let go from the district due to cuts you continue to cut teaching and support staff positions while bolstering central administration by adding another curriculum supervisor there is a pe position that is being cut sidestepping by saying that position was not part of this year's budget doesn't change the fact that someone is losing their job and that that position will not be there come september 1st we have a speech department that's been decimated with cuts currently 14 speech and language pathologists service 730 students you are cutting another position and that person is losing their job again based on current projections we are on track to service more kids next year with less staff this will only hurt our students who need it the most just like when you cut the intervention specialist recent studies show that more students will require speech therapy due to the pandemic is this really the time to cut that position it is your responsibility to make sure they receive these services trying to fix the problem by getting rid of individualized speech sessions and moving them into group sessions is not the answer this will once again only hurt students etea is not saying the curriculum supervisor isn't needed we are simply saying that if you can find 140 000 to add another administrator you can find a similar amount of money to save three professional three professional positions that have a direct impact on district programs and student services i asked the board of ed to re-evaluate these cuts and renew the contracts of those individuals being let go thank you thank you um i just before we continue i would like to you to evaluate your your topic of discussion because the past two speakers that was not on the agenda so we're just going to work on discussing agenda items only and budget concerns were last months i belie i believe the renewal of staff is on the agenda this month renewal of staff yes but yeah i mean again i appreciate this okay and i appreciate the very strong passion the very strong feelings good evening everyone i have not been a meeting in a while it's good to see everybody but i think candidly candidly teaching staff members if a student tried to say well no this fits under that item in your classroom you'd say no i don't really think that's the answer you wouldn't you'd say you're being overly clever and you're trying to do something that should have been addressed at a budget hearing we're not making that budget okay no but but please just let me it's not being clever and this is these are not agenda items so you're making specific references to specific positions that are not on the agenda you're talking about actions that the board has already taken at previous agendas you can you can address it at the end of the meeting personally this position was in the agenda again it's in the agenda it's in there in the agenda they're hiring two clerk typists i appreciate what you're doing and you're talking about positions that aren't being hired those aren't on the agenda they are on the agenda mr donia look at it again without due respect the addendum item says a speech therapist position is being discontinued so how is that not in the agenda i don't understand wait before you continue before you continue anyone at the microphone needs to state their name and address but we do have to take a look at what specifically and i did ask everyone in line to take a look at what they want to reference to make sure that it was specifically on the agenda so just do a little self-check and if it is and we'd be more than happy to hear it now but if not can you wait the second public comment my name is tara talbot i live in westmont new jersey i'm referencing the agenda item that in the addendum that says that a speech therapist position is not being renewed at rice this year i've been a speech therapist working at van zandt for 17 years this january i also began going to rice preschool to help with the large number of new students who started in the program after winter break i'm here to present a statement in solidarity with my fellow therapists to object to the recent budget cut of another speech therapist in our district due to budget cuts over the past three years greater than 1.5 set 1.5 speech therapy positions equating to eight days of speech therapy have already eliminated that's eight days a week um this means the students who were receiving speech therapy services from these therapists including myself had to be absorbed into therapy schedules of our remaining therapists while we as a therapy team worked hard to maintain quality services despite these changes our high caseloads and intense therapy sessions have impacted our provision of services to our students the budget or not the budget but in today's addendum there is a cut to the speech therapy program once again was not in the writing of the budget previously and it didn't specify that a speech therapist would be cut at that time um sorry i'm shaking so much i can't read where i am it didn't specify that the speech there so we cut most of our staff members and parents were unaware that this cut was made even until just a few weeks ago we are here to say that we have great concerns about the decision to cut yet another therapist therapists have accommodated previous budget cuts over the past two years by increasing our caseload sizes greater than ever before being split across schools and even splitting students among therapists and that happened to my students this year we need to be very clear eliminating yet another therapy position puts us at risk if not of not meeting even the basic therapy mandates and legal mandates that we are required to by the students with special needs thank you thank you mrs talbott please state your name address for us mcewan i live on lakeside drive in marlton my colleagues and i are the specialists that guide our students with special needs in growing their skills and reaching their full potential we address speech communication language skills social skills articulation skills augmentative and alternative communication feeding voice disorders and fluency skills among other things we not only work directly with students to improve skills but we work tirelessly with families and the whole special education team to help our students to grow and flourish both at school and at home we perform countless additional duties such as serving as case managers to speech-only students completing evaluations writing reports writing ieps attending meetings providing consultations to staff training staff programming computer devices used for communication facilitating in-class groups and lessons billing for medicaid to get money for the district and other school-wide responsibilities thank you [Applause] my name is melissa mercer i've been a speech therapist at jagger elementary school for over 21 years without an adequate number of therapists our students with special needs are at risk of not getting the recommended and mandated services that they need do they do to the increased special education numbers the increased needs of our students with special needs and the recent effects of the pandemic speech services are more vital than ever the recent cut of another full-time speech therapist means that the remaining speech therapists will need to absorb even more students and we may be unable to provide the recommended and mandated speech services that are part of our students ieps this is of great concern thank you [Applause] name and address please my name is stephanie golden and i live in mount laurel new jersey i've been a speech therapist in district for 14 years we would implore you to recognize the deep price the special education department as a whole has already paid over the past three years with budget cuts in the past three years eshim township school district has eliminated 1.5 speech therapist positions one case manager that has also served as a learning disabilities consultant one learning disabilities teacher and multiple paraprofessionals in our special education program all while our special education programming class sizes are growing the budget for the upcoming school year cut another speech therapy therapy position as well as a health pe teacher who provides adaptive pe classes to our students with special needs it's important for all of us as a school community to recognize the impact these cuts have on all of our students the staff have that have been cut and continue to be cut are the same people who work directly with our neediest students these cuts negatively impact our students with special needs who desperately require a strong special education team they also impact our staff our special needs families and our school community as a whole thank you thank you [Applause] hi good evening please state your name and address please uh denise shira i live in medford and i've been a speech therapist in this district since 2002.
seems like a long time ago was pre-coded and then december 3rd through the 19th we had presentations to all of our building level staff we went to the schools and then starting in 2020 and if you recall 2020 march 13th was that big day of cova but right before that we actually had uh public strategic plan presentations of course we didn't know anything about code at that time but we had one at northfield for the community and then we had one southwood for the community also we continued on and you can see it was a little bit later a lot of things changed from march 13th we shut down different things happened but we started working back into the plan and so september 22nd you can see that we had a strategic plan uh work session again we reviewed it and updated it and then october the school board meeting we have policy analytics come and talk to us about and do a actual presentation on assess value and also tax rates and then in november another school board work session reviewed the strategic plan with our architect mark and co villama so moving forward to 2021 school board work session uh reviewed barton co-villema information i did a swot analysis we'll share some of that here in a little bit and also the board took the tour of the buildings and that was part of the strategic plan also then september 28th um another work session uh updating number four and at the school board meeting it was a recommendation to approve the resolution authorizing appraisals of real estate and then get a little closer to current uh of april 12th of 2022 we had ice miller bond council um talk to us about the controlled project process and referendum presentation mr eric long is with us today but when he came on april 12th that was um virtual so he was on the big screens now he's here in in person so welcome to mr eric bond and then school board meeting also the recommendation to approve the resolution authorizing negotiation and execution of purchase agreement which was done then and so on may 10th of 2022 another uh school board work session update from architect firm and they are martin covillino and then of course just last tuesday was a school board meeting and that was the first preliminary determination hearing so i'm running two screens right now so where we came from i love this slide um because it has a lot of our history so um it's actually on the other wall here you can see all of our board members you can see um that embassy of walrus county board of education in 1959 we became a school corporation that was july 1 of 1959 if you recall back in 1959 uh there were nine different township schools and you can see those people that were involved with that back then i wonder confirming points all right so the history of uh msd of wabash county msd of course was founded 62 years ago from multiple township schools and you can see there 1959 of course 1962 and then four elementary schools were built then from 1965 to 1980.
i would like to call up julie giusti uh sorry presenting the pasca mansa engine company award we would like to call up bria lin pimento [Applause] rick porter who will present the potter school pto scholarship [Applause] and congratulations to all members of the class of 22 um wanna come awards sarah madruga the potter school pto scholarship congratulations good luck to you too thank you the next presenter will present several awards stacey rowe will present the coach charlie career team player scholarship as well as several from the dartmouth youth soccer association [Applause] i guess i'm the first one to speak here all right um so the coach coach charlie korea team player scholarship is in my father's name charlie korea he passed away nine years ago but left a legacy behind him charlie korea was a soccer coach for 25 years he dedicated all of his free time coaching his two daughters my older sister melissa and myself and inspiring many other children along the way he did most of his coaching at dartmouth youth soccer and he coached recreationally in the fall and competitively in the spring in addition my dad coached at the high school level at old rochester regional and assisted henry almeida with the umass dartmouth men's soccer team in his free time he even continued his coaching career at dysa after both of his daughters were out of the system we coached a younger team together and together we made memories on the soccer field and shared lots of those moments with a lot of you guys in this room as well my dad committed his life to the bettering of his own and other people's children's lives through soccer he looked for certain aspects in a player when he chose a team and for this scholarship we asked applicants to describe what they think makes a team player my dad never chose a player solely based on their skills because as many other coaches know it's not just about individual talent but it's also about how an individual player works with a team and performs as a whole our recipient this year was not fortunate enough to have played for my dad however she really understands what it means to be a team player this year's coach charlie korea team player scholarship goes to gabriella santos as she knows what it is to be [Music] okay uh next i'm going to present the dartmouth soccer association scholarship i'm gonna start with the person's name and then i got a little speech okay justin kearney justin has been involved in the dysa program for over 10 years his enthusiasm on the field as a player is matched only by his willingness to volunteer whenever needed including as a junior referee and pitching in with our concession stand operations thanks justin [Applause] okay the next scholarship is the dysa referee scholarship ella has been a referee with the dysa soccer program for three years in addition she has refereed games for the south coast soccer league ella was always willing to pitch in and support where she could and dysa is very thankful to her to have her as part of their referee program thank you ella dysa wishes you the best in the future ellen burcer [Applause] and the last scholarship i'll be presenting is a dysa scholarship that is also part of the vipers association the father luciano pereira memorial scholarship the father luciano pereira dysa scholarship was created to recognize student achievement focusing on the areas of academics community volunteerism and sports his energy and enthusiasm were infectious as his commitment to people of all ages was evident in his passion for sports father pereira knew how important athletics could be in the lives of children and was very active in the cyo catholic youth organization and numerous civic activities dysa has selected kylie decosta as the recipient of the award the next presenter is officer joe vieira presenting the dartmouth police athletic league scholarship [Applause] congratulations class of 22.
so i tell you that that is my biggest most rewarding job and so next to that i would have to say serving the students in oakmark when i was a board member and i tell you that because i understand the balance of being serving in your professions being a mom being a dad being a partner and then serving on the board of education there's so much that goes into it beyond the meetings right the prep work the evaluation that you put that is part of being more effective as a team because you could each individually be the absolute best and i'm sure that you are each of you individually but it's how you work together that can make the board uh effect okay so i want to thank you for taking the time to take the board self-evaluation too i hope that it was easy it i've done it a few times just to see how it feels to be at the receiving end and i found it user friendly i'm open to um suggestions from you and and we'll definitely talk about how we can improve the tool and i'll bring it back to csba as well what i wanted to start with is your board meeting norms i found this section on your or in your handout and what i like to do is if i can ask adrian if i can ask you to read them hearing your back all right listen to the meaning behind each of the norms that you set as i understand it as it means make sure each board member's voice is heard turn off cell phones or set them to vibrate no texting during meeting be present and prepared operate with trust keep confidential items confidential honor time be effective and efficient disagree agreeably stay on task assume good intentions be respectful of others engage in civil discourse keep meetings light with humor put aside personal issues and filter out the business of adults focus on student thank you so what i like to do is to make sure that that's right in front of your mind during your meeting again these are the norms that you selected as a team right you came up with them how many um is is it like ten of them adrian or however many you have about ten about ten yeah okay so um is are there any issues with any of those particular no that you would like to any of you would like to talk about before we even begin uh for and for clarity's sake are you saying is there anyone who has issues with these norms exactly being followed for today okay for this for this particular workshop are there any issues following the norms that you have for your meetings and gabriella if if you have any issues please feel free to unmute and i would very much like if you could turn your camera on if it's possible it creates more of that engagement of that in person feel even though you couldn't be with us physically here if it's possible i understand that sometimes it's not but if you could turn it on that would be wonderful um and i guess having done virtual meetings for now a couple years and now we are going back in person trying to create that in-person feel is really really critical especially for these type of workshops so i do appreciate everyone being here and again gabriela if you can if you can tear not turn on your camera that would be wonderful all right so with that knowing that those are your meeting norms and we're going to follow them today what i'd like you to do is to take a look at the agenda so take a look at the agenda please it's very simple right we are going to talk briefly about core of governance it looks like this is just one page and it has the quotes on it okay so um we are going to briefly talk about core of governance what makes governance effective we are going to then jump right into and and part of understanding core of governance and understanding what is other characteristics of an effective leader and ineffective leader the opposite spectrum as well as a board what are the characteristics of an effective board and also ineffective so we'll do that that's all part of core of governance then we're going to jump right into analysis of your for self-evaluation okay so we'll take a look at that and the rest of the time is going to be on analysis of it anything that jumps out any area you each have the opportunity to take out an area um identify an area that you feel you need to work on as a team okay and then you'll start um discussions about it i will following the workshop i will send you a memo which will summarize your numbers facebook most likely you're not going to remember every detail i will send that to you along with next step what i recommend for how does that all sound okay all right so with that what i want you to reflect on part of the governance core of governance is understanding your own individual why why are you serving on the board of education and by you i mean the board members well as your superintendent right because you form the governance team so what is your why i'm going to give you five minutes write down what comes to mind what comes to your heart okay i really want you to engage i invite you to engage and activate your heart throughout this process okay so what is your why you okay let's go ahead and begin we're going to i'm going to ask you to share i'm going to start each round that you get to share there'll be a lot of sharing tonight i hope that you feel comfortable and and i would think that you feel very comfortable with one another now so after working having worked together as long as you have so we'll begin with the president sharing and every round will go one to your left to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to be the first laundry so if i can start with you and please do remind me if i forget to go to gabriella which is very possible i may forget please do let me know and and i'll make sure that you also get the response as well so adrian what was your what is your why yeah so a couple of things one just simply but i i believe in the students in this community i believe in the the schools and and the programs teachers the educators here in this community um but i also think that there's there has been historically a lot of misrepresentation around who we are and misconception while at the same time there's also been some disconnection between uh all that we are and the ways that perceived and viewed in the community and ways that we can be stronger and so with that just in general i feel uh just in my life uh be a bridge builder and so in this role i've seen myself in the opportunity to uh bridge some of those gaps that exist so whether it's between families and schools um whether it's between the board and the community or whether it's between students and their respective dreams and goals uh i i just i'm honored to serve in the capacity of a bridge build from the sea you're staring all right sabrina thank you i'm sorry i wrote but i don't want to read what i wrote okay um verbatim i think um i wanted to serve because i really felt it was a calling that had been building for over many years and i wasn't quite sure exactly how to plug in um but when i had the opportunity it made sense it made sense because i've always worked in education and i see education as the ability or the pathway for opportunity and i as a first generation college student as a k-12 public school student myself um i really see serving as an honor to use my voice to help amplify the voices in our community um so i'm just one person and i don't speak for myself but i speak for the community and if i just happen to have this opportunity to have a platform it's not my ideas that i want to amplify but it's the feedback and the ideas from the community that i just get share by sitting here um again being that conduit or being that that amplifier is important to me thanks sabrina all right yolanda yes um i run um for office to we represent my community and in the area where i lived there was um not a board member in in the areas where the schools in my in the south side of town will say i also wanted to be a voice for the parents and the student and the staff i um wanted to set an example to my grandchildren and let them know that you know no matter how old you are you can always make changes you know i retired 40 years from the garvey school district before i became a board member at age 61.
just speak up just a little bit thanks i'm denise shaira i live in medford um i have been a speech therapist in district since 2002. it is important to point out that if a student with special needs is unable to be appropriately educated in a public school setting the school district is required to pay for that student to receive their education in an out of district school that can provide specialized services to that student examples of private schools that provide specialized education for students with disabilities include bancroft neural health archway programs kingsway learning center and durand academy sending a student to an out of district school costs our school district a significant amount of money per the state of new jersey department of education the projected 2022-2023 yearly tuition amounts for schools that eastern township school district typically contracts with averages approximately sixty seven thousand four hundred and eighty seven dollars per student per year and extends as high as seventy eight thousand one hundred and eighteen dollars per student per year as you know we have recently helped to meet the budget by bringing more students who are currently who are currently receiving out of district services back to the district by not providing appropriate supports and services for students we are at an exponential risk of having even more students in our special education program requiring an out of district placement thank you [Applause] let's try it out good evening name and address please my name is amanda bernardi i live on nottingham road i have a child in the school district receiving speech services and i've been a speech therapist for 10 years i started the school year working at three schools and now i work at four so i work at manzant de mesa elementary to macy middle and was increased to baylor in january four schools we serve students in our autism program in our multiple disabilities program in our learning disabilities program in our behavioral support program and in our rapidly growing preschool disabled program there are also students who receive in-class resource supports or speech language services within the general education program regardless of the program a child is in the commonality is that each of these students require therapy services that are imperative to their educational functioning another cut to speech services in this district may impact our students and the quality of services that they receive i'm concerned as an employee and as a parent thank you thank you hi good evening hi please state your name and address my name is nicole green i live on old marlton pike i'm a resident of eve sham and also have served as a speech therapist in this district for 12 years and have three children who are currently in our district lastly we would like to address dr smith the cabinet and the eve sham township school district board members we respectfully request tonight that you do not abolish yet another speech therapy position the overall cuts to our special education department and particularly our speech therapy department over the past three years have been significant and are not sustainable given the increase in the special education numbers and the intensity of student needs within the district we cannot absorb another cut to our speech department and continue to provide quality services to our students while we understand that difficult budget cuts are necessary we ask that these budget cuts do not be made at the expense of needed speech services for our students with special needs we ask that you find another way thank you thank you hi good evening please state your name and address my name is eileen mcewen i live on jonquil place here in marlton i recently retired after working for 23 years at jaggard school in the program for children with multiple disabilities i currently volunteer two days a week at jaggard which houses the programs for students with autism and multiple disabilities when i started here in 1996 our program was much smaller with merely a handful of self-contained classes a large percentage of our students with special needs went to private tuition-heavy schools out of district because we could not meet their individual needs here the costs were exorbitant under the leadership of previous directors of special education judy simkin jeff palmer and most recently nicole espenberg our in-district program expanded highly qualified teachers therapists paraprofessionals and other support staff were hired and the neediest students were brought back from the schools that required tuition and were educated here they benefited from learning and receiving services in their hometown in their neighborhood school in programs that met their individual needs they received therapies social programs integration with neurotypical peers and benefited from activities with positive social models none of these things would be possible in a tuition-heavy private placement nor would they be possible without the dedicated highly qualified hard-working staff in even schools again this year the superintendent has suggested cutting staff and services to these neediest of children it is virtually impossible to provide appropriate services to the current students with these additional staffing cuts since cutting two speech and language therapists last year our remaining speech and language therapists are stretched beyond functional limits as they struggle to provide mandated speech and language services traveling to several schools as well as provide required testing of these same students attending meetings with parents and other professionals additionally and most often in the preschool program these same speech and language therapists are required to take intake meetings for new students complete testing and observation of new students and attend additional meetings to present these individual education plans to parents during the current school year there were nearly 40 newly identified preschool students that's 40 children that were not on the rolls on the first day of school in the same 21-22 school year these three-time these three full-time preschool therapists have more than 30 students each with a visiting therapist taking additional students yet the superintendent wants to cut yet another speech pathologist from the rice preschool program district-wide there are currently more than 700 students receiving speech and language services the number of classified students is not going down discontinuation of specialized adapted physical education reading support and speech services will place the district out of compliance with individual education plans parents that pay attention to such things will have the right to file lawsuits against our district if we cannot provide the mandated thorough efficient free and most importantly appropriate education for these students parents also have a right to request out of district placements that do meet the needs of these students thank you please don't be penny wise and pound foolish thank you [Applause] is there anyone else was to speak on agenda items okay seeing none we're going to close this portion of the meeting there will be another public comment section at the end at this point we're going to move forward with the approval of the minutes i need a motion to approve items 6.1 and 6.2 mr canthan second mr lanzalata any questions or comments regarding the minutes okay roll call please mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr fizzycarrow abstain 6-1 yes to 6263 okay mr catherine yes mr lancelata yes miss lee yes mrs ryan um yes but abstain to 6.2 motion carries thank you at this point we're going to move to item 7 superintendents report and administrative items do i have a motion to approve item 7.1 through 7.6 mr fizzicaro second miss capello before we get into questions and comments i'm going to give the floor to dr smith thank you mrs ryan i'd like to start off by reminding of the important things that happen every day every classroom every school students smile they raise their hands and offer ideas they learn as they talk with each other and their teachers even in kindergarten i saw a kindergarten lesson the other day with students sitting across from each other in pairs talking about similarities and differences between baby ducks and baby chicks and they were sorting those similarities and differences into a venn diagram and then they explained the venn diagram to each other and to me kindergarten brilliant our students are eager to learn preschool through grade 8 and have been helped to be that way by their amazing teachers and families at home venn diagrams are in part about finding common ground even among what appears different at the same time our minds and hearts are understandably focused on what happened just a week ago in texas focused on the town of vivaldi's community and rob elementary school among the safety measures here in ibsham township school district that i explained in my message to staff and families last week one very strong deterrent that we have is a school resource officer assigned at each of our school buildings i mentioned that because nationally just 19 percent of elementary school students 45 percent of middle schoolers and 67 percent of high school students attend to school with the school resource officer here in eve sham of students attend school with the school resource officer and in the middle of ongoing losses of state aid totaling nearly eight million dollars over seven years this safety measure is assured for the next three years at least and perhaps beyond through a shared services agreement with our township to split the cost of our sros and i'd like to say thank you again to mayor vesey deputy mayor cooper our town council evesham police and chief miller for our collaboration in this way and many others towards the safety of our students only 19 percent of elementary kids nationally have an sro in their student in their schools lastly in terms of schools i would like to recognize that this month is asian pacific american heritage month here in eastern township school district we recognize and value and lift up all students all persons with respect and appreciation of our different cultures our differences and commonalities our venn diagrams and take actions directed against any person including on the basis of race or ethnicity very seriously the recently released state report that includes all school and district grades and harassment intimidation and bullying is linked on the bottom of our district website home page i'd like to highlight as well that board member anish kanthan is our first asian american board member in our district's history and perhaps the [Applause] and perhaps the first asian american elected official in our town's history i highlighted that last year as well something that significant behooves another shout out in part as it positively positively reflects the gradually increasing diversity of our town which enriches us all those are my superintendent comments thank you word president mrs ryan thank you dr smith any questions or comments regarding the superintendent's report from the board okay i would just like to comment on a couple things 7.2 it's good to see things returning to quote-unquote normal after the covet shut down with the return of so many clubs and activities and that's a testament to our staff so we appreciate getting the kids back to some sort of normalcy and also 7.4 i'm proud of our board of ed and all of our administrative for giving up a saturday to create goals that are important to the district working towards something that's going to be a great thing for everyone in this town so i would like to thank you all for giving up your time and with that if there are no more questions or comments roll call please mr mishindi mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr fizzakero yes mr catherine yes mr lancelata yes miss late yes mrs ryan yes motion carries thank you moving on to item a curriculum instruction can i have a motion to approve items 8.1 through 8.3 miss everhart second mr canthan any questions or comments uh regarding curriculum and instruction from the board no okay roll call please mr mrs capello yes this is ever hart yes mr fizzakero yes mr captain yes mr lancelot yes miss lee yes mrs ryan yes mission carries okay moving to item nine finance and operations i need a motion to approve items nine point one through nine point two four do i have a motion miss capello second mr fizzicaro any questions or comments regarding finance and operations from the board seeing none roll call please mr russian team mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr fizzakero yes mr catherine yes mr lancelata yes miss lee yes mrs ryan yes motion carries item 10 personnel i would like a motion to approve items 10.1 through 10.10 do i have a motion mr canthan second mr fizzicaro thank you any questions or comments regarding personnel from the board mr lanzalata dr smith a couple questions about personnel getting back to the speech therapist position uh how many students would you say approximately uh see a speech therapist and i have a follow-up question as well yeah so i can say when we looked at um so we collect data from different districts you have to when you're cutting eight million uh over seven years in order to be able to navigate and be able to make those reductions those necessary unavoidable painful reductions um in a way that's aligned with our mission right which means spreading them out so we have i'm looking into the spreadsheet while i'm talking to find the number that you're asking for [Music] so we have [Music] currently 85 what i can tell you is we have 85 students per speech therapist right now and we have uh 14 speech therapists okay um so we have it's 730 total students okay what we what we did is when we looked at and again these are these are paint uh painful things to talk about right and i i i go back to last year we cut four million dollars and looking ahead to next year when we project having to cut close to two million dollars with the reduction of this position we would increase from 85 to 91 speech students per speech therapist which puts us just below two other k-8 districts one that is larger than us and there aren't many that are larger than us and one that is just smaller than us thank you yeah any other questions or comments from the board regarding personnel okay roll call please mr vicente mrs capala yes mrs everhart yes mr fizzagaro yes mr catherine yes mr lancelata yes miss lee yes mrs ryan yes motion carries okay moving to item 11 policy i would like a motion to approve items 11.1 through 11.3 do i have a motion miss capello seconded by mr lanzalata i just would like to go on record that most of these policies are mandated um for first and second reading so i just wanted to point that out um but if there are no more questions or comments i'll ask for a roll call please mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr fizzagaro yes mr catherine yes mr lancelata yes miss lee yes mrs ryan yes motion carries okay moving into committee reports do any committee chairs have a report they wish to share community outreach no eastern education foundation marlton rec mr lanzalata anything uh uh just that the eastern education foundation is once again having their golf outing uh next week it's supposed to be the biggest goth outing that they've had so far uh if you are interested in playing or donating please do so uh they're looking for helpers uh they're looking for players uh you know and they're just a great group of men and women who have dedicated uh you know their their time and their energy into supporting our our the students in our district uh if you are interested please go to their website at uh eastern education foundation.org thank you thank you anyone from the since our chairperson for finance operation isn't here mr meegan is anyone from finance wish to share anything upcoming meetings anything like that no okay curriculum instruction no miss ever all right policy the policies are all mandated i have nothing new to report for policy perfect okay um i do have something to say as far as like the pto and pta liaison committee i was just giving everyone else a chance to speak first but i would like to thank all the parents and the pto and the pta members for doing an amazing job honor honoring and recognizing our staff during staff appreciation week the amount of pictures the amount of effort the amount of smiles that went into that week spoke volumes of how our community feels about our teachers so kudos to everyone involved with making our staff feel appreciated every day but especially during that week um i would also like to thank the um pto and pta's president the movie night all the effort that went into planning that and although it was rained out it will be postponed um so keep an ear out for that and i would also like to thank the president of the eastern education foundation scott zielinski for all his work and last but not least our district art show was a huge success thank you to all of our art staff and congratulations to all the students whose work was displayed it was really great to have this event back on so thank you again for everything and that is the end of my report but if anyone else would like to comment question before we close this section okay seeing none moving into old business we don't have any old business and we do not have any new business so now we're going to move into open public comment the meeting will now be open to the public referencing any items of interest however if your questions or comments pertain to litigation student or personnel items or negotiations we ask that you see the superintendent after the meeting since we do not discuss these matters in public we ask that you limit your comments to three minutes per person and also this section is meant for one comment per person i just would like to take it advisement also that three minutes means three minutes or we're going to have to keep a timed limit on public comment which we don't want to do because we want to be able to hear everybody so if you could state your name and address when you come up to the microphone and just keep in mind that this is public comment not public discussion back and forth between the public and the board that would be great so if anyone wished to speak now would be your chance come on up to the microphone good evening please state your name and address please yeah john jenks 39 carlton avenue um recent retired state of new jersey department of environmental protection bureau of technical services chief and uh research scientist and tonight i'd like to discuss or at least i'd like to mention at least our discussion or at least uh what is uh uh ostensibly a crazy um climate discussion and climate change now first of all let me say that i would think that all people that's that's republicans democrats jews christians muslims is hindu all people believe that there is climate change and that's not the issue the issue is what are we going to focus on on climate change don't you think we ought to focus on the big picture and the big picture is what you have in front of you what you have in front of you is a graph that is in virtually every quaternary geological textbook that graph shows you what the climate has been doing over the last uh 20 millennia the 20 millennium and for 10 10 of those millennia the uh sea level that's the ocean level the ocean level has has risen 120 meters now that's in in feet we'd know that as 350 feet and we think that i i personally believe as a ex-teacher and science research scientist that that's what we should be teaching our children our children should know that yes the climate does change it has changed and it will change again in the future and you know what the fact that it's uh the sea level has been rising four or five inches over the last 6 000 years uh is is something that uh you know most people should be aware of and that the sea level has risen 350 feet during a 10 millennial period and instead of beating our children up we're frightening everybody about global change they should understand what global change is and and you can't understand the global change by looking at the maybe two inches or three inches of sea level additional sea level rise that may be caused by human activity in the last 200 years you need to look at the bigger picture and the bigger picture is uh you know the new jersey coastline was 35 miles off atlantic city 12 000 years ago the uh and and i know there's a big concern about the ecosystem and the uh and the fact that the ecosystem has changed and of course it has changed and you know there's the great barrier reef the great barrier reef you know the people are throwing up their hands and saying oh what are we what are we doing here well the great barrier reef was part of the australian land mass 12 000 years ago look on the graph you can see it in front of you and it's in every cenozoic geological textbook the sky is not falling and that's what we should be teaching our children thank you thank you thank you so much [Applause] good evening good evening my name is eric sperazza i'm at 701 mount vernon court last time i came before this board i was filled with wild positivity and excitement about the future of this education system today my wife resigned from her position as a para now i slowly watched the para system get chipped away today we're talking about speech therapists and i want to just give a push back to the emotional intelligence of this board of education today right now we're about to entertain a conversation on grooming in this room now i have an adult daughter that recognizes herself as homosexual open public proud quite frankly the only kind of grooming i could be accused of is maybe too much time at the gym which i don't think our pundits would have a problem with and maybe some voltron cartoons if the next step in the degradation of our emotional intelligence is that my daughter one day can't have a child that says i have two mommies in school without being quote unquote accused of doctrinating indoctrinating other kids then what is the reason for anyone to move to this township going forward the time has come once and for all for all of you to put your kids first i don't know how many of you still have kids in this school system if any but i'm here to tell you the decisions you make in your week-to-week idiosyncratic routine on this board affect the rest of us you need to take a deep look into the emotional intelligence of this board thank you thank you [Applause] [Music] good evening name and address please my name is ryan albright i'm at 582 hotel road i know many of you by name i remember finally my time with mr smith at cherokee i had two topics i wanted to discuss the first one was concerning the cutting of the funding for the speech therapy am i allowed to address that in this period absolutely cutting funding for speech therapy in our schools is as i see it further evidence of a calculated piecemealing of our once stellar special resources program i understand that the topic pandemic which recently hit the grim benchmark of one million american deaths has been hard on everyone but for the love of god you are literally taking the voices away from people who already struggle to speak that is not a metaphor it is literal fact i shouldn't be surprised however because this is the same board that seriously considered taking away the health benefits from paraprofessionals in the middle of said pandemic these are not [Applause] these are not hard choices they're evil on the level of cartoon villains i want to talk about a different kind of evil now though um the evil that has been infesting school boards and local municipalities throughout the country and it's these q anon 1776 christian nationalists who are no different than the taliban in their quest to impose their extremist views at every level of society i'm just going to pause for a second can we have order when someone is at their microphone so we can hear everyone's views okay please excuse me if you're not going to be able to abide by the rules of this board of education and its processes we're going to have to ask that you leave so we can hear everyone please thank you now allow me please to make a point that has been lost in their conspiracy-filled minds there is no cattle of a cable of elite pedophiles in the basement of a pizza shop teaching kids human anatomy and sexual education is not an act of grooming no one is putting anyone in danger by treating lgbt students with dignity you can at the same time treat all students with respect and dignity and keep them safe what these cultists are doing is using the tragedy of sexual assault on a child to advance their hate-filled christian nationalist agenda trans people are not a threat to anyone but they are a threat to trans people to all lgbt people they are a threat to our shared communities and ultimately they are a threat to the very fabric of our society i say this because these kinds of displays as i mentioned before are infesting school boards and municipal governments across the country and because some on this board and their running mates are willing to sit down with them rather than recognize them for the unhinged and dangerous extremists that they are so please don't be fooled by their hysterical rhetoric they are using the indescribably awful situation of sexual assault to advance their own twisted ends in my closing my point is simple good sex ed includes teaching the prevention of sexual misconduct and we need good sex ed it is a part of the human experience and part of a student's academic understanding of their own body as well as vital for their own mental and emotional development okay that's your three minutes please don't let their psychotic and blind hatred control your policy that's your three minutes thank you [Applause] is there anyone else in the audience that would like to speak during public comment good evening name and address please good evening kristen sinclair medford new jersey what a lovely welcome i've received from your community it's really really nice to know i'm a terrorist and that you didn't have the courage to stop him right there i contacted you dr smith about a sexual assault that occurred in your school you didn't call me back you didn't want to answer me you told the parents to get the lawyers involved you couldn't talk to them this is true i have the hip complaints i have the hip complaints about a spanish teacher who sexually assaulted abused another student again you no you let him talk call me a terrorist no i am going to stop please can we have order while someone is stupid microphone i don't hear them i'm talking to you i understand but we're having difficulty hearing you because they're not abiding by the decorum that i'm asking for so i'm asking for order in this meeting so that we can hear all people clearly thank you this is what happens when you put out misinformation that nothing happened when it did then you have gentlemen like this losing their minds because i wear a cross since when is that a terrorist act that is why you need to be clear with the parents about what's happening in schools you can't use the hip process to hide it was every student who was in the spanish teacher's class interviewed to see if they were teased and bullied and when hib was founded was anybody else told like your sro that you're so proud of to watch the bathrooms after the incident occurred no and you know it and i will comment to mrs noel last time who was not reprimanded for speaking out towards us with disrespect my sons will go to a regional school the person you're transferring out of this school could be in my son's school so yes it does affect me i do have an interest in this school dennis megan who's not here tonight is allowed as a public citizen to go to a park in the same place where i am if that makes him a terrorist i'm glad he's not here that's shameful that somebody on the other side would play politics oh speaking of it was so lovely to see your education association here so worried about the students speech impediments that happened as a result of the masking that the njea enforced on them have a great night thank you is there anyone else that is willing to speak need i remind the audience that this is a public meeting and we need to show some decorum so that everyone can be heard let's have some order and some respect for everyone in the room please hi good evening name and address please yeah absolutely my name is annalynne smith i live on third street honestly i just want to say um to everyone here there's a child in this room please have respect for this child i don't care what you guys feel man please just directly to everyone so for you guys too as well please address the fact that there's a child in this room all this extra name calling all the emotions please check it because there's a child present so let's all act like adults and parents and respect this child that's here tonight thank you is there anyone else that would wish to speak good evening name and address please good evening my name is eric simkin i have two children to go to cherokee and i'm gonna i'm gonna pause excuse me i'm sorry there's a gentleman at their microphone that would like to speak during public comment excuse me if this doesn't cease we are going to call recess and i'm going to end public comment it is not okay you've been asked three times now we want to hear everyone so we need the comments from the peanut gallery and the audience to stop please thank you name and address sir my name is eric semkin i live in voorhees uh i don't view any of this stuff really as uh any issue except for parents rights and transparency and a lack of communications between the district and the people that live in the district i recommended last time i haven't heard anything public advisory committees curriculum we have the 2020 learning standards coming uh is it on the website i looked on there for a parent committee from 2015 i believe it's still on the website looking at mathematics we're talking about sexual education in health and pe is one facet and under dei we have gender studies as well and that's what the parents of children are concerned not everybody wants it some people do we have an argument now between the public it's up to you to fix it and solve it opting in to those things not opting out this is impossible it's ingrained in every single piece of legislation i know every policy i know every piece of legislation i'm involved in the legislation i'm testifying there at the senate committees that's how these decisions are made to follow the standards we need transparency and communications thank you anyone else from the audience wish to speak during public comments come on up to the microphone good evening name and address please sure my name is michelle walker my address is 270 greentree road in marlton first i want to say my children are also here and the same decorum that they're asking for was not given when they were working at my child just just come just direct it towards us okay so i would like to start off by saying that i am a disabled veteran a historian a member of the marlton community and a parent american history has not been fully taught correctly in this school district and in this country and the real consequences have been seen tonight specifically in relation to american indigenous people african-american slavery and subsequent impacts asian americans and other migrants who built this country as we've witnessed during public comments at recent board meetings across the nation we have seen examples of what happens when adults do not know or understand our history as a country recent public comments were in my opinion grotesque display of ignorance and homophobia there are people who seem and claim to be protecting children but they're spewing hate this is a direct lack of understanding and unwillingness to do anything for children without a fringe political agenda these types of dangerous comments and attitudes have inspired very real threats of violence against minority communities in this country that we continue to be plagued with today these fringe and hateful comments and groups do not represent martin we they are so small in number that they're forced to bring in non-eve sham residents some of whom are desperately seeking any form of political sound bites we the real residents and parents of eve shem reject any kind of false and homophobic dog whistle ideology stand behind our teachers administrators and most importantly the lgbtq plus community of marlton hates has no home here and we won't stand for it thank you [Applause] anyone else wish to speak come on up to the microphone state your name address good evening my name is ian smith quite frankly the hysteria uh is not needed at all and i can't remember one time i've been at a board meeting about 20 so far in the past couple weeks i haven't heard one word of hatred directed at a board i've heard frustration and i've heard no hatred towards any race gender or sexual preference and i think that as adults we should probably be able to keep that that way we're here to solve problems or at least i hope so i know all of you have a very challenging job you have a lot of unhappy people here tonight we witness a lot of unhappy teachers you guys have hard decisions to make all we ask is that you consider everybody and you consider the fairest solution nobody cares if a child wants to be homosexual or transgender or learn about any of these things all of these parents who i come with are asking for is a common sense approach they should have the ability to say i want my child to opt into this it's not a part of core curriculum it's not math it's not science it's not reading it's not any of the things that are going to propel our kids forward and they should be able to learn it but it just should be an option i'm not here to spread hate and i hope that people here earlier who have hate in their heart can find some sensibility moving forward because division is not the answer thank you thank you anyone else from the public wish to speak come on up to the microphone state your name address philip warren 357 holly road in marlton i hope this board can enforce the address requirements that you make the rest of us do on these folks who say they're from new jersey who don't give an address at all i was here at the last board meeting the former speaker is full we have to watch our language please sir because when this board recessed respectfully it was an overwhelming amount of hate it was an overwhelming amount of transphobia i was sitting in the back and i heard every bit of it and they directed it there and now they're acting all nice and respectful and saying that they're under attack and that's not true the ones who are under attack are the good residents and citizens of this town who trust our school system who know that is a public good that serves the whole community for better or for worse you do a great job and you have every organization has flaws and has moments and has to be accountable but it should not be accountable to fringe extreme self-serving agendas that we keep hearing and by the way opt-in and all these other things they say are common sense are not common sense common sense is embracing the school district voting for good people like yourselves and making sure that it works it does not mean imposing some system where the minority the extreme minority politically speaking gets to dictate what the rest of us have to do so don't heed a word they say don't appease them don't give them a moment of your time do the right thing and keep leading the school district the best way you can thank you [Applause] is there anyone else in the public that would like to speak come on up to the microphone yeah okay if if there's anyone else that like to speak can we just get us some sort of cue like a line going just so we can know how much more time we would like to devote to public comment just just to give us an idea okay i'll be short no that's okay just state your name and address please my name is dave bach um i apologize i actually live in marlton i pay taxes here and i do have a son in the actual school system um so i'm not sure if that's you know proper here i live in 27 burgundy drive and i wanted to thank everybody and this in the school district it's been a very tough couple years my son has thrived in it and that's basically it's been extremely hard you know for everybody you're doing the best they can you know with what's going on it's been great one thing that i really wanted to say tonight is the school board's in a political organization politics are not supposed to be around our kids it doesn't benefit our children the things that you know people screaming at each other does not benefit our kids people coming to get video clips for you know political campaigns does not benefit our kids we are supposed to be keeping politics out of that we're here actually for the kids so i just implore everybody to keep it local keep things with people who actually have legitimate concerns in this town people who have children in the school district pay taxes here not for this political stuff these political theatrics has been going on right now it's a little too much just needs to stop thank you thank you next up good evening hello good evening name and address please marissa elizabeth 307 70.
be interested to know how many people went to some of those township schools here too so how many people went to township schools here don't ask them their ages i know some of these people they get upset if i did that okay where we are today so we have two preschool programs one at metro north elementary the little north of course and southwood elementary little knights the three elementaries metro north elementary shore creek elementary at southwood elementary and of course two of our traditional junior senior high schools northfield junior senior high school and southwest junior senior high school our non-traditional school white's junior senior high school we also have a bridge program that's an online credit recovery program and that's run through white student senior high school and then we do have a collaboration with four other school districts on the other two slides there of wabash miami area program and also heartland career center so the swot analysis that we talked about our strengths and we could probably add a lot more to this but these are just a few assessed valuation is one of our strengths retiring debts last payment of 2023 cash balances and the rainy day fund circuit breaker losses are minimal and student transfers from out of district those are all strengths the opportunities then low tax rate below the median managed tax rate developed debt plan expand out of district transfers and creation of long-range planning some of the weaknesses student capacity in buildings two high school buildings double services 18 buildings facility updates long range facility plan black debt plan and then threats is declining enrollment state legislation funding open enrollment also resistance to facility needs upgrades additional required programming and unexpected growing and growing cost of course code has been one of those examples so what is the challenge a lot of you have seen this before but that projected population decline this graph was provided to us by grilled walnut county and you can actually see then from the census from 2010 to 2020 we lost 1912 residents in wabash county in just those 10 years now you think about 1912 that may not seem like a lot in a large metropolitan area maybe in marion county but for walmart county that's a large percentage kind of take a mental picture of that graph and you can see like around 1980 to mid 80 to mid 80s the population of course of wave counting was at the peak and then if you kind of look at our own student enrollment it's a little harder to understand or look at it exactly as far as the same comparison because some of the ranges that we have are some of the dates that we have of northfield and southwood of just nine through 12 we don't have all of the data but we give you a little bit of comparison so 1976 to 1977 that sounds hard to say those 1976 1977 the population of the two high schools combined in 980.
i know most of you from when you were babies i haven't met any i haven't seen anything you professionally so that's a good thing um on behalf of the dartmouth police don matthews athletic league and chief brian levick again congratulations i'm here to hand out a few scholarships i am a 1980 graduate proud dartmouth indian here it's true and true our first scholarship uh we give out five ones gone to rochester a young lady there one the second one would be emma tatro [Applause] our second one is jacqueline thibodeau [Applause] brian edwards our last scholarship is named after one of our actually my first chief chief manny vamaderus he passed away in 1981. he was really one of the first modern chiefs here for the police department in dartmouth he actually started bringing us into the modern era and that winner of that scholarship is uh bria pimento i knew it i do it [Applause] andrea meneze will present the dartmouth high school pto scholarships [Applause] hello as i look around the gym i see lots of faces that remind me that we're all part of the 2022's village and i feel very honored and privileged to be a part of that village with you our village for the class of 2022.
so i also feel that um it's really important that you set that tone you know even for the community that you know there's always a choice and you should just go out and get it if that's what you want to do all right let's go ahead and go to gabriela can you hear me yes the reason i wanted to run i had i grew up in this district i was a student of this district i worked for the district for the last 20 years and being able to see what changes needed to be made within the district and the necessities of the community of our students the changing necessities that needed to take place um it was important for me to go ahead and be able to have the community that i serve be heard and along with that be able to be a district that is a competitive district in our san gabriel valley you know to attract other students to come to keep our students within this district the passion that i have for education um i've been in education for over 20 years um everything that i do is is for this district you know every job that i get so it's important for me to be able to uh you know to carry that as a school board member and i i heard one of my colleagues say it you know yes we are one vote yes we're 20 of this um of this board but at the same time it's important that we represent our community and the needs of our community and that our community in general feels heard and it's important that you know our superintendent and our cabinet also understand our community so through you know through communication and how they're involved in our community also is um you know with us is important so um i i love serving our community and i see the needs just like since i was a child here i'm a um i come from guadalajara jalisco and i was the esl student so i learned english so i feel very proud to represent this district thank you gabriella i shared that with you as well i was a esl student as well when i moved here my family i didn't share that detail with all of you my family immigrated here back in the 80s late 80s from iran so i was born and raised in iran my native language is farsi or persian so i do share that with you gabriella thank you for sharing all right arturo uh thank you um as a first generation english learner um low socioeconomic [Music] son of immigrant parents and having navigated the k-12 public system like some of you have said that was that inside that that calling ever since i was young to teach to serve uh to inspire uh to connect and so i think that in this role i'm just super humbled uh to be able to serve and uh to to make a difference uh not only for our students but for our community and our staff as well okay i'm going to read mine so i want assistant usc to be a school district where every student graduates college and career ready this means giving students from early childhood education to 12th grade rigorous engaging learning opportunities and enriching learning experiences that provides them with the skills to thrive and are rapidly changing society and economy and society and economy and also teaches them empathy and love for their fellow human beings very important to teach those skills right think about what's missing in the world just think about that for for a moment what is the one thing that you can think of that's missing in this world and then share share with me what do you think is missing one one word if you can just sum it up in one word one ingredient one element that's miss at this point i feel compassion okay so compassion okay what else or do you agree with that yeah i agree and also um empathy you know that's the word i was going to use all right anything else that comes to mind beside those two compassion i was going to use grace but i think it's i mean it's the flip side of that right being understanding but same same idea so what i like you to do is to keep i i heard um compassion empathy and great keep those in front of your mind as we have discussions today those are the elements the ingredients that are really missed in the world and the work that you do the important work that you do how can you bring those elements back those ingredients how can you bring them back into the schools that you serve and the lives of the children that you serve so i'm sorry so compassion empathy and great grace okay yeah thank you and they all go hand in hand i feel like they they do right so um all right so um take a look at the agenda i chose for you three quotes i'll give you a moment just take a look at them before we move into select characteristics of an effective leader so look at the um the quote and if there is one that resonates with you the most go ahead and put a star next to it all right so now what i'd like you to do is you all have post-it notes you have different color post-it notes what you're going to do is pick any color that you like to begin with you're going to come up with just a few characteristics of an effective leader someone that you would consider affecting you all have them you all have to post the note okay so write down on one piece um up to three characteristics of an effective leader someone you would characterize as effective what are their qualities you know when you have them gabriella if you would like to share yours with us or talk to you right can i go last find me sure well however you want to send them in that would be fine thank you so yeah so gabrielle i think the the request was to just text them over into arthur and we'll write them okay sounds good i like what makes this workshop effective is the ability to move around work on charts and i really want us to continue to do that as much as possible i want to make sure you're including that i'm including gabriella so if you can't hear us gabriella please do let me know if you have questions let me know i want to make sure that you feel engaged and included as well what i like to do is to move over to the very first chart and maybe i'll just move the um microphone with me so then they can hear and and so and move to the chart that says characteristics of an effective leader so if you had who had this first color the purpley was that yours okay and what did you have has a vision is a good listener and has an open mind who was the next color so i wrote good listener fair and thoughtful slash deliberate communicator learner builder listener fear and understanding active listener compassionate and honoring of others gabriella do you want to let us know what you wrote what you chose as characteristics of an effective leader or may i read them oh yes please okay so empathetic listener and empower others so what i'd like you to do all of you is take a look at the list take a look at what you chose as characteristics of an effective leader what are some of the common um qualities good listener yeah what else and and how do we listen let's just talk about that for a moment when we are listening to others there are times that we just listen to formulate and respond we agree we're not really listening with our whole sense with all the senses um what i like you to do is try to listen not just with the ears but with your eyes with your heart okay so having said that what's important when you're listening to others as they're speaking as they're sharing yeah so as i said you can even see online i wrote good i started to write good listener and then i i changed my mind and put active uh because i think that not only when you're listening should you listen with you know not just your ears but your heart and other things but but also being willing to to listen as the as what is being said shifts and is nuanced um not hearing one statement and shutting down based off of the first phrase that it is heard but instead really being open to hear everything um and even allowing after somebody communicates something for someone to say no that's not exactly what i what i meant but that's not the best way to say it so let me alter that and allowing that that statement to be altered so i think that it requires some some active action as we are uh listening i think just to add to that like what would be active so for example to adrian's point active could be can you tell me more about that i'm trying to understand or help me understand this piece right here because i'm not sure i'm clear so really being active to really try to understand what that person is trying to to communicate and i also think as much as we're using our own body language is not just listening to the person but also if you're in person looking at them and and um trying to understand what their body language and their tone is saying beyond just the word and i also think you know when you're listening if you don't understand you should have them repeat it or clarify it to be sure that you are listening to the right thing i i think i think no i think you guys covered it all right but i think you know that word active listener implies everything that everyone's describing right now beautiful so i i what i like from all of your share oh gabriella would you like to share with us so we we the one common theme is communication and listening and active listening so do you have anything to add to that thanks for reminding me um what i heard one of my colleagues say the body language and i think it also includes you know the way that we when we speak you know the reaction of others when we're speaking i think it's really important that we're paying attention that we're not on our phones right that we're listening we're active listening looking at that person making sure that we're not making faces if we don't agree with something that person's saying that we we are able to because we're not active listening when we are already having a reaction to what that individual is is saying so i totally agree that active listening is something that our board um needs to work on okay so you actually moved on to what needs to be worked on so we are just for now we are just talking about characteristics of an effective leader and so active listening is one and as you may already know all of you listening is um or actually communication is 93 tonal voice and body language only seven percent is the actual word so really being mindful of our reactions and and um responses body language rolling of the eyes um i invite all of you if you haven't done so to take a look at one of your videos of your one of the tapes of of your recordings of your board meetings take a look and see what you pick up just for yourself make a note and note to self all right so listening and active listening because those are two different things active listening came up that's really important because it begins with that you have to understand the problem before you can come up with a solution right i think it was albert einstein who said if i had 60 minutes to solve a problem i spend the first 55 minutes understanding it and the last five minutes coming up with the solution right really understanding what the problem is so i see that i see being fair on the list thoughtful um what else is there having a vision that that's really important right you need to have a vision you need to know where you're going if you don't know where you're going then you know how do you know when you get there right so having a clear vision really really important honoring others let's see empowering others of course being understanding um and again being a communicator that all of that came up what i'd like you to do now is you're going to think of an effective a highly functioning effective team or board in your case right trustees what are the characteristics of an effective born so come up similar to this write it down on a piece of post-it note gabriella you can think of yours and then arturo thank you so much for helping to write gabriellas and i'm going to collect them as you write those so now think not a leader but a board characteristics of an effective high functioning board better good for us right they say um sitting is the new smoking right supposed to be really bad to just sit for too long so you're not going to sit for too long well i'll help you get your steps in perfect do i have everyone's then are we missing okay thank you very much you're multitasking this evening oh i see a lot of overlap listening is there or let's see communication is there professionalism focus compromising having a common goal really important that's unity of purpose right you're you're here all of you together for one main reason right to serve your student so that's your common goal i agree to disagree effective teams do that all the time you don't always have to agree on everything but you can do so respectfully being prepared how important is that right i remember when i my very first board meeting and i had been going to board meetings for a couple years because i was very active at my pfa parent faculty association i serve as president vice president and so i had been going to board meetings just to understand long before i even decided to run and so i never really appreciated in the audience um how much time it took to prep for each of the meetings and then i went to my very first meeting and back then we had um hard copy packets that were delivered on friday afternoons and that's fine too i'm i like hard copy too because i like to be able you know to to take on places and not depend on technology and the phone running out of charge and all that so from the time i took that packet that weekend everybody knew my family knew i needed to go through the packet come up with my questions ask my questions be prepared and really feel good i wanted to really feel good about my participation and my service on the board and so that was really important so being prepared super super important right it is it is homework right absolutely right right so um what else what else did you want to share um i'd like to open it up i don't know if you want to come up and look but if you had if you set something that you really want to focus on for an effective board you can go ahead and share that any of you so feel free to go and take a look i think we had a lot of commonalities i think it's nice when you're able to look to kind of understand also your quality and what's important how do you determine if a theme is effective so if there is there is yes so this one is on two it's the same color right gabriella thank you for sending in yours would you like to elaborate on yours on which one um well you pick it looks like you pick three of them right there is common goal compromising what's the third one is it about hijacking i want to make sure that it's clear on okay so feel free to to share with your colleague um how is that an important element of affective teams or board well i feel it's important um because there's there's times um i mean i have to give an example is that what you're asking if you'd like to give an example sure um i think it's important when we're you know trying to convey or trying to get a point across that we are you know not interrupted by an individual who or another person who may think that you know may have the answer or is uh going to have a different answer or is ready for the next you know what they were going to say um it's important to hear the other board member out completely um because a lot of the times i feel that we may be you know we're listening but we're so quickly to respond um and we're not listening really you know through and we're so quickly to respond and we're interjecting and we we we go ahead and interject and you know we don't have the patience to actually just stop and listen right we're already assuming what the other person's intention is when in reality we don't know and we should ask you know and not become defensive um and take over and interrupt the other person so i think that's something that we need to work on and not hijack the meeting right from the superintendent or the lawyers so i think what i'm hearing is is active listening right because when we actively listen we're listening to understand not to respond right which is what i see on on most of the post that is active listening or um [Music] communication and all that is is that right yes ma'am okay okay any any other um points that any of you would like to share or if you have questions about one particular characteristic or quality or do you all agree that these are the characteristics of an effective work whether your thought i think to me the one that i really appreciate up here is they agree to disagree because i do think sometimes we as we all said earlier right we don't all come from the same perspective right we that's that's what the value of having five different board members and i do think that sometimes we have we have to be able to individually be responsible for being to agree to disagree with somebody and be okay with um maybe and this gets back to my other one that i that i have done below is be okay with being um maybe things not going the way i want to go because the majority of the board has decided to go a different way i think that's very hard to do for each of us but we each have to be responsible for that i mean i do right so i feel like that's that's a key value of being an effective school board [Music] and just to add to that i think that honestly we do a good job at that because you know we don't always agree and um when we do it's great but when we don't it's not like you know we're mad at each other or we don't um and that's that's one thing i do like but where i put be prepared because i i'm saying that because i'm not sure from where i'm sitting if people are prepared and the reason i'm saying because sometimes i'll see or people are asking questions that i know that are already in the in in our agenda or they may be for i don't know but this is my my impression and they also looking in or do they call superintendent or take on monday and get clarification because what happens when i'm hearing from the community people say oh wow didn't they know that before or did they just get that packet that day like no we all had it on thursday and we're all able to and it had to be like the organization was a big thing for us and the community was wondering like did you did they just they're just asking that question then that they just know it's been you know it's just um uh perception which is very important as sitting in the board and i will echo but you said shiloni uh just the idea of agreeing to disagree the way that uh the way that i chose to phrase that is unity but not conformity and so what does it look like for us to be to still be united as a as a board as as there are decisions that are needing to be made but but that doesn't necessarily mean that we're not able to to disagree or to have nuance but still be unified in the in the midst of of that that nuance um and then just for process clarification but i understand that right now you're asking what are characterized what are the you know great characteristics of are the characteristics of an effective leader what are the characteristics of an effective board and i uh we may be venturing into how we can how we perceive that we may be able to grow and i'm tempted to go there also but i will but i'm looking at you doing maybe that's not there will be space for that later okay so not yet okay this is and thank you for asking that question this is a great segue to get right into the the results of your word self evaluation we we're going to talk about a number of these um qualities that you mentioned and then if there is time at the end then we'll create another list of ineffective leaders and and and board but i want to leave that for last i really want us to deep to um dive deeper into the analysis are you ready for that so but this was a great um conversation and an introduction into that so what i like to do is now gabriella you're going to receive um an email with the results everyone else i have hard copies for you you would be happy to know i have hard copies what i'd like you to what i'd like you to do is when you receive it take a look and see you'll see that there are four colors okay they're color coded green means that uh majority agreed or it's the strength of this board that particular item blue is that it shows that that particular item is in strength for a single majority and then it goes to yellow and red and what we're going to really focus on is identifying the green what you're really good at what you're really strong at as a team this is not individual responses this is all of you as a team and after we have identified the areas of strength you're going to take a look each of you will select one of the red or yellow whichever you prefer areas that you would like to open up for um for discussion and we'll have discussion about it okay so and also for clarity when uh you say this is all of us as a team is that including did you fill this out as well so the five board members as it says it's for self-evaluation so it's just a board just the five members okay so let's take about 10 minutes take a look at the whole evaluation circle an area that's an area of strength for you so just go ahead and circle it it could be one whole item one whole area there are 11 areas 58 questions right 58 pumps and then once you have identified the strength from your point of view of this board you're going to identify two areas each that you really want to talk about and have a discussion about and work on okay so two in the orange or red and one blue or one green one area that you're really proud of that's that's the area i'm not understanding what you want me to do okay um all right so you see that you see the color coding right and the numbers to okay yes so what i like you to do blue or or actually green green means that that particular area or that particular question or prompt is the strength of your team so let's let's find the first green already have an ingredient in here okay so if you don't have any green go to the next color because blue yeah so pick a blue yes and then once you do that just circle the blue that you are most proud of then you're going to move on to yellow and red those are the areas to focus on those are the areas that were identified as areas that you did not agree on and yes peak two each of you will pick two to work on or to discuss or to introduce introduce discuss and and further talk about gabriel are you done selecting the strength of your team as well as the two areas that you like to open up for discussion sure okay all right here's what we're going to do arturo can i ask you to start that'd be okay all right so you have we have two pieces here um what i like to do is you're going to go around i'm going to ask you to share the strength of your team so one of you didn't have any green but one of the blue areas right that that's the strength for majority of you of your um your board so we're going to start with sabrina sabrina what is the what area did you pick which number the strength area that i would like to highlight is number 12 under board culture okay the board treats the superintendent with respect okay so that's number 12.
i'm a resident of yvesham township and unlike a lot of people here i actually have kids that are currently in the district or who recently left the district in listening to conversations about the topic of trans rights i often hear the idea thrown around that there aren't enough of them to justify any consideration of any kind let's think about that according to the cdc the number of high school kids who identify as trans is two percent so translating that to eve sham that's 89 students in the evesham township school district that's 89 students we are saying don't matter at the very least because we know that from anything involving lgbtq youth a significant number of kids hide who they are due to fear being alienated ostracized and bullied so while we're focusing on stats let's focus on the real stats according to the american academy of pediatrics more than half of transgender male teens almost 30 percent of transgender feel female teens and 41.8 percent of teens who don't identify said they have attempted suicide people claim that kids shouldn't be exposed to education regarding gender identity in grade school but according to the children's hospital of philadelphia a child begins to have an innate sense of their gender identity between ages three to five if that child doesn't immediately fit neatly into a check box and many don't that is a long time to sit unsupported in fear and cognizance confusion at a critical critical time in their psychological and emotional development but don't take my word for it take theirs these are the words of an eve sham fifth grader who i know personally imagine that a young girl with a normal life has just come out as lgbtq to her classmates that girl's life has just changed because she has discovered something new about herself but the support she needs is nowhere to be seen the classmates who don't understand give her weird looks the classmates who do just sit in silence even the teacher is confused because the teacher was never taught what lgbtq plus means because of all this the girl who has expected support from her friends sits in awkward silence feeling she isn't normal when debating topics that those with a political agenda seek to weaponize sometimes the most critical thing is forgotten we are talking about kids we are talking about the health safety and well-being of real actual kids who are being threatened each day not by fictional what-if scenarios in the future but the very real dangers of hatred ignorance and homophobia my hope is that the eveshan township school district and its residents will remember that the goal should be to nurture and protect all kids not just the ones that don't engender hate thank you thank you [Applause] good evening name and address please my name is erica ballard i reside at 67 sweet fern court in eve sham i am a lifelong eve sham resident i graduated from bieler elementary demacy middle school and cherokee high school i'm a parent in this district i'm a taxpayer and i have worked with children in the field of behavioral health for 10 years when i was a student here we didn't have any curriculum that discussed same-sex relationships or gender identity despite this i made my first gay friend in this room like many other queer youth she experienced bullying assault and homelessness at the hands of bigoted family members and peers this trend among my friends continued many of us experienced assault intimidation and homelessness due to bigotry despite a lack of curriculum we were always able to find each other we knew how to spot our people we knew what people were safe and what places were safe we did not have the option to opt out of this education we were reminded regularly what people thought of us we knew who we were before we had words for it before we knew there were others and before we had any romantic experience we were always aware of our existence as a simple fact and not a political talking point as children we took on the endless task of educating the people around us so that our world could become safer so we would have one less person harassing us just for existing despite a lack of curriculum all of us remain queer to this day this is because educating people about a variety of identities does not create more people of that identity it reduces the amount of bigots it reduces the amount of violence we will exist no matter what the curriculum says it's your job to protect us and children like us thank you [Applause] good evening hi my name is tracy fox 3 30 over brooklyn marlton i too am a parent of a child who is actually in this district and to hear people coming here from out of town to use an alleged assault to turn this curriculum into something of grooming and anti-trans our kids have had years of heterosexual examples and you know what like the prior speaker said there is a large lgbqt community out there we haven't managed to turn them straight nobody's trying to turn your kids gay we are trying to make the kids that don't consider themselves heterosexual that don't identify with any specific gender that may have two moms or two dads that it is a safe space for all of them concerning opting in or opting out of this curriculum what happens when you opt out is the hatred we see from this group and they are a hate group on their website there was a parent of a 14 year old child who came to her mother to argue with her about why can't you just let these transgender kids be who they are and the mother said where did i go wrong i thought i raised my child better than that that's what happens when you allow people to opt out instead of showing them that we should accept everybody and when people say these children are too young to know what they are i am the aunt of a 12 year old transgender boy who knew from two and a half years old that he was born in the wrong body two and a half no schools indoctrinating him no teachers grooming him this was a child that when my daughter would go out with the grandmother he would go directly to superhero things and my mother-in-law would take my daughter and say bring bring her over there bring her over there but you can't bring the gender out of a child they know who they are they don't need hate groups telling them they don't matter until they're 18 or 21 and when you have teachers talking about this in the classroom they're not saying it's okay but when when their problem is second graders shouldn't be taught about gender identity why if a second grader is old enough to question what they're feeling why should they not be allowed to look at the front of that room and have somebody perhaps put a thought into their head that they realize this is what i'm feeling yes this is it and make it more acceptable so they don't have to wait until they're out of school to feel safe coming out because i am also the aunt of a non-binary nibbling who did not come out as homosexual until they were out of high school and did not come out as non-binary until they were in their twenties and they are now transitioning you do not go through surgery because your parents told you you could be a dinosaur that's three minutes thank you thank you so much good evening good evening um i will not state my name i will tell you that i am the mom of the person that my daughter was actually assaulted here in this school you know who i am you know what happened you called the disinformation you called it a lie this was reported on the tuesday this child stayed in this school until a friday you had this allegation on your desk tuesday wednesday thursday until me and my husband showed up here with a police report and then the police showed up here on a thursday until you took any action the police officer who you say who you're very proud of and you should be he's a retired state trooper he's very well known in this community he's done his job you never reported this to the resource officer as you should have well my daughter's at home crying wondering why no one in this school had her back and me wondering why no one decided to call me nobody cared it was another female student that there's no bouts about that another female said she was going to rape my daughter and nothing was done the second incident happened three days later nothing was done it was reported to you nothing was done my daughter to this day sits home with zero education mr smith this all just got worked out as of today she gets her first session of two hours of education tomorrow at my home because she can't step foot in this school she has been diagnosed with ptsd depression she can't go into the bathroom by herself now and all of you just sit there in silence and call the disinformation i have parents sitting behind me coughing thinking this was a damn joke last month when ian when everyone came here not for political but because he had my back as a parent all of you should be ashamed of yourself my child will never be the same she doesn't deserve to have someone say they're going to rape her and do nothing about it your counselor did nothing i still to this day haven't heard a single word from your counselor to offer her any kind of comfort this was your job as a school and you couldn't even handle that the right way you all should be ashamed of yourself thank you is there anyone else that wishes to speak at this point any questions or comments from the board oh one more oh okay come on up name and address please i'd like to acknowledge the traditional landowners throughout northern america and recognize that continuing connection to the water hold on just a minute can you stand here and this building stands as part of the leading homeland like excuse me respect for the people's past present and future we acknowledge your community i'm going to give you your three minutes but i'm asking you to state your name and address please getting there so like a land acknowledgement is done before you say that that's why i'm doing that so it's getting there we have procedures we just like your name and address for our records my name is my name is um dion and i live at 21 jump street marlton so i actually um came you know i come here all the time and we speak about the land acknowledgement and we talk about you know um since december 2020 collectively dion and members of the school board and like staff have been speaking about uh you know we've shared a lot of correspondence in writing and in person about racial disparities in education and we shared that and we had a really open discussion we've presented solutions for how to address and improve this within our school district sadly we continue to experience defensiveness and roadblocks on your end and we've even submitted a proposal to you with solutions um understanding that schools don't have the resources to comply with things like the amistad law and mandatory indigenous curriculum dion did do all the research we did consult with expert curriculum advisors child specialists and other experts to put together quite a mild proposal we gave that to every single one of you and we haven't really received a response we've also held a diversity book drive to just so our children our children in the school district have access to books that represent them in their school library so we have come to the table and another example sarah like again discussed is implementing a land acknowledgement similar to how i started the land acknowledgement so understand you have processes just like you do the pledge could be nice to have a land acknowledgement to set that example for the students and to lead by example above the nj standards that you all speak very highly of i also just want to say that dion does stand in solidarity with all the children families who were offended and felt disrespected by some of the comments that have been made publicly we stand with the lgbt community we stand with children of color and we definitely want to keep working towards that dion does offer support to those parents and families so please reach out you can find us on our website thank you thank you okay any comments or questions from the word yes ryan before we get to that i was wondering if i could just make a brief comment on some of the allegations that were made tonight the board of education is constrained both based on rules of confidentiality process that it employs laws regarding the adjudication of claims that come before the board to not publicly address those unfortunately it is often considered that by failing to acknowledge or address those somehow some type of tacit admission or silent admission on behalf of the board of education either process wasn't followed or somehow there was a failure in what you've done that could nothing could be further from the case in that regard and while i will not address any specific student matter and quite candidly any lawyer in the state of new jersey would know that i would be prevented from addressing any specific student matter and so it's oftentimes very frustrating for lawyers to come before the board addressing specific student matters knowing that you're not going to be able to address them it's particularly even more galling when they do so and record it for whatever purpose that is but nonetheless this entire means recorded they didn't have to do their own recording they could get it off of youtube and i think the requirement would recognize that the board of education believes that it's following appropriate process it supports its students supports all of the students and offers services that are necessary and in response to any situation the health safety and welfare of all of the students of this board students at that forefront of everything that you do we have numerous conversations uh consistently with your administration in that regard um and in that regard uh that is the number one goal and it is the number one goal that you accomplish with great exceptional uh practice and precision you know every day the every day of the year and in particular the last couple years have been very hard on all communities and all communities i represent but nonetheless you know i didn't i thought it would be inappropriate to allow that to go unaddressed because while you might not be able to say something just because you don't answer a claim doesn't mean that you agree with what's alleged okay any other questions or comments from the board mr lanzalata a few two quick questions the the sex education curriculum that is now is being talked about and discussed tonight and also last month is that a state mandate so the the state sets the standards and the districts write the curriculum that has to align with the standards okay so so we have to teach that that that curriculum we have to teach the standards in all ways okay locally we can determine the curriculum itself we do a great job here we always have in writing our own curriculum you know organically so that it fits with the frameworks that are already in place not taking an off-the-shelf model that seems sutured or superimposed on other off-the-shelf models and creates confusion for kids but rather exactly the opposite where our curriculum is written by our team of in-house experts which are our teachers and curriculum supervisors and it fits in with things we're already doing so it makes sense for kids across that continuum of pre-k through grade eight okay my next question is is if there is a parent that does that believes that their son or daughter is not ready for something in the curriculum are they allowed to opt out when it comes to the health standards they are allowed to opt out um and in fact we have a faq document that's on our district website about the health and pe uh standards and i'll be including information this week that at that faq doc so parents can see but it does talk about that option okay so there are state standards that you can that parents are able to opt their kids out of just for that health health curriculum and that's been the law for years thank you miss everhart i'm a little confused are we in announcements yet or are we still talking about public comment are we in announcements we're still talking about public comment okay and having close public comments thank you would you would you like me to close public comments no okay okay i had not no well you are part of the board panel so yes your comment was part of public comment so yes no i have not closed public comment but i will do so now closing public comment to questions from the board i have an announcement or i guess i wanted to talk a little bit about uh i was i was so excited to uh be a board member again and participate in the reading recovery graduation as the board curriculum chair so it was you know really great to just be back doing what i used to do pre-coding so i just wanted to maybe end the meeting on a very exciting note for what we do for kids uh with our reading recovery program that we are so fortunate to be able to provide in in light of all of these fiscal challenges that we have so i might get a little wordy but it was just so exciting i want to say that we continue to be a leader of the reading recovery opportunity and train other districts so i had an opportunity to see representatives from our own district medford del rand and some other surrounding districts that had teachers there graduating from the program they spent an arduous amount of time learning ways that they can empower kids in their district to read and very exciting to see and hear that one of our previous bueller students was a reading i think i can share this information i don't think i'm violating anything but you know the story was presented to those in attendance that that individual participated in the reading recovery program years ago who has now come back to be a reading recovery teacher learning right here and at the eve location how to be a person who can share literacy with kids in her district okay so full circle really cool to hear that story and the most powerful different thing that i experienced after going to a lot of these graduations over the hundreds of years i've sat here and and loved it was a video or a slideshow of children expressing what having the ability to read has done for them and for me one of the most powerful things i heard was a student say i am able to read the directions at the top of my papers in school i'm able to read what i need to do all by myself very powerful and conversely parents were also asked to express what it was like to have an a reader in their home and a teacher a reader now independently reading in their classroom so moving it was wonderful so thank you to the board and to the district who allows this program to continue because that's where we are making changes for children great job that's it thanks thank you mrs everhart mr canton did you say did you have something to add okay yeah so let's pretend that we ended on mrs everhart's notes but i'll say something but he could pretend that was the end because that was great so first of all i had no idea what the wrap room was when i first started as a board member i don't know how many people do if you well obviously we all know now but if you google wrap room martin you'll see what it is it's a great organization that offers support services for students and i know mr hoffman attends regularly i know mr de blasio from vans and attends there's members from both boards who attend and also community members as well so it was a great organization i went to my first meeting in lieu of another board member last month so i just wanted to shout out the wrap room and all the work that they do um great organization and then i also wanted to shout out i know dr smith had added it in a couple of his friday emails and i'm sure it'll be this friday as well dion in partnership with the township is hosting their juneteenth event again um let's see on june 18th at savage field from 11 to 3.
you can see then it goes down there through 1981 1982 there's a big space there where we don't have some data and then you can start looking at some of our present day classes and actually then if you go all the way down to the last one 2020 2021 is 509 and actually it's not on this graph or on this chart but it's actually 509 again so you do have 509 compared to the 1980 that we had in the same buildings 1976-1977 so student opportunities mr drake is going to share the next two slides hello settle down um relax it'll be a little bit of a conversation yeah let's my name is tim drake i'm chief academic officer and so when we talk about student opportunities um i'll tend to focus more on the academic side but that isn't to shortchange the athletic or even the extracurricular side we're raising whole children not children just to do to take a standardized test or just to do whatever and go to college and so we'll have that big picture in mind but for the next few minutes i'm going to walk down the academic side of it uh i have the last couple years not an audit for our program just to check and see how we're doing as we lose students and as we lose programming everybody just kind of makes assumptions and so rather than just go with those assumptions i went and actually printed out course lists and so i compared our school offerings with other schools our size uh that's roughly a two-way school about 100 kids per class i didn't do some of the bigger schools i didn't do a lot of the smaller schools i just found something that i felt like our community was used to offering students uh and i found um and i have the notes i don't want to put them up here for for a couple of reasons but i have a notes i'm more than willing to meet with anybody to share the specifics about it when it comes to our dual credit and our ap offerings there's always one student in the class we are we are at par if not above what other schools our size offer our pathways again are very much on par with what other schools offer uh if there was one area where i would kind of poke and hope that we could do better it would be in the area of fine arts we don't have a lot in our music and our drama departments mostly because of sizes of choir and sizes of vans so that does present a challenge and so that would be one area i feel like as a district we need to keep trying to be better at and we do i don't think we just accept it but but i think that the audit would show that we are a little bit lacking in that area um on that note um before i get to my specific examples of uh to help you kind of see the programming issues um i took the liberty also trying to pinpoint our size of school that we felt comfortable with people come to wabash county for lots of different reasons i can tell you i'm a marion giant i didn't get any flipped birds or anything bad i appreciate that i absolutely loved it and if you would have asked me a marion if i would have ended up at a small school i'd have said not a chance i thrived in that i enjoyed the atmosphere my wife did not and her family the coopers and pilgrims they loved this area and so before i met her though i went to teach at whites and when i interviewed to teach at whites luke curless was a principal there some of you guys might know the first name when i went in the interview i literally said to them in an interview i understand if you don't hire me i'm only going to be here here another year or two and i'm going to move on that's what i said uh they took a gamble and hired me and here i am this is my 25th year that i just finished here in the district uh because it grows on you right uh the small school town feel and so um i figure we're roughly a two-way school all of us have our different preferences but i think if you look historically we're about 100 kids per class just so you have a frame of reference which so many people don't have anymore northfield high school this year for classification for ihsa for next year has 275 high school students that puts them in a 1a school southwood has 240 that puts them at a 1a score wabash oh sorry if you were to combine the two of them they would be 500 a high school of 515 which would make them in next year's classification a 3a school they would be 3a by 20 students wabash this year using ihsa numbers will be a two-way school because it has 471 high school students so if you were to combine wabash with northfield and southwood you would have a high school of 986 using ihsa numbers which would put them 39 students away from being a 4a school and so i didn't target a 4-day school in my programming because i felt like our community is used to a two-way smaller school field and so all of my audit was based on that all right now to my examples so i came up with two scenarios to help you see what happens as our class sizes get smaller and how that really impacts their offer so i created a fictional person bobby bobby's been a senior who's been in band for forever he goes to heartland we love sending kids to heartland as a matter of fact we send an overwhelming group of kids to ireland both north and south you'll find also that very few of our seniors are in the building full day anymore most of them are either at an internship at a college campus or at heartland and we try hard to drive kids to heart women so those of you from the older days were saying we used to not send kids to heartland because of this that and the other uh that isn't the case you should sit and talk to roger dean and nicole michael and they'll tell you we try to get kids there so bobby uh you can see his schedule he's gonna go to heartland heartland's a three hour commitment and so he'll go there either all morning or all afternoon so in our case we put him there all afternoon and he has to take english and he has to take governor nikon so that gives him one period it's not uncommon for a senior to have a study hall but bobby wants to do band and he likes to do cad um several kids have recently graduated from msd and now the architecture school of ball state which is a highly competitive some of them are even going on a master's working so our cap program is very good but bobby now has a choice and he won't be able to take them both because they won't fit in schedule getting more kids won't alleviate all problems bobbies all have to make decisions homestead high school carmel high school they don't get to take everything so this isn't a silver bullet i'm not saying adding more kids together will solve it i think it will get us to where we're used to to a school giving kids the programming opportunities that they're used to having parents feel like they're going to give their kids that kind of service and so bob is going to have to make that choice because we don't have enough band sections we don't have cad sections to make that work another example if you go to the next line um advanced placement and dual credit so you can see here those are the actual numbers from this year northfield junior 65 senior 63 southwood juniors 59 seniors 48 just that little drop in numbers of students is going to result in a significant lowering of ap classes and dual credits and so as i say here as a chief academic officer what i see is we have a large group of students chasing ap and dual credit classes but what i notice is at one school they're able to access a lot more of them than they are at another school and so we explore options some of our students take classes online some of our teachers drive half day one at one building and a half day in another building and what we find is those are not as effective as having a student in the building or a teacher in the building all day we've explored those uh mr key favor replied earlier to uh march 13th when we went to covent cove would forced us all in march april may to do our best with virtual instruction and it was kind of put a band-aid on it and survived that fall the board decided that we were going to try to get started in the building some parents didn't feel comfortable sending their students to the building so we hired our own teachers we gave them an extra stipend to teach our own students after that at the end of the semester every one of my teachers quit every one of them teachers quit and it isn't because they don't have a heart for kids as a matter of fact i would say they quit because they have a heart for kids they realize that without the relationship of that that they weren't they weren't being as successful as they wanted to be parents most of the parents dropped out of it as well same reason they knew their kids weren't getting the education they wanted and so i would suggest the chief admin officer that our strategy to solve this problem is not through half day teachers driving back and forth nor is it through virtual instruction it's through having a teacher for the building building relationships being with students the number one response on surveys why people pulled out a virtual program the number one response was lack of relationships and so as we talked about in enrollment decreasing this is what we see right we offer everything under the summit wabash the north are sorry southwood and norfolk will offer everything they want everything you want can you get it in a kid's schedule that's the challenge because we can't offer multiple sections to free up the schedule so a student can take one thing that they like and another thing like that like and so so i feel like part of our response to this plan is to try to get a larger critical mass i like to look at mr bowman because that's his phrase a large critical mass so that our students can get the kind of programming that we expect to offer in our kind of community thank you all right thank you dr koon is going to do the next three slides yeah i don't have much of a solid storyline but i'm chris cannon superintendent finance and operations similar background is mr drake even went to a larger high school worked at westfield for eight years which is an extremely large high school came back to got a job in wabash at southwood actually was open to use it as a stepping stone to get back to westfield uh but really fell in love with the community and the opportunities that it allowed for my family not only my family but myself to grow in my experiences so that's what brought me here uh for that now part of this issue is probably my fault because i focus on facilities and operational sides from a day-to-day standpoint and looking at some of the issues that we're running into and needs that we're running into with some of our facilities and how we operate it made sense to kind of look at how some of those things how we could evolve some of those things into fixing other issues that we may have such as enrollment with academic programs and so forth so part of our solution also relates to buildings and so forth so i just gave this at the last meeting it's just a snapshot it's a 30 000 foot view of kind of the the overall cost that we have for specific buildings um those numbers may not mean a whole lot i broke out one of those contain salary benefits because obviously we have individuals that are employed at those building levels and then then you throw into other costs such as maintenance costs utility costs other things that might be building level costs but we also have things that are district level costs that are there because of the buildings that aren't necessarily separated by buildings one example of that would be our insurance for example we spend close to 250 000 in property insurance well it's not tied to a specific building they don't bill us metro north is this much in insurance a district-wide bill so some of that stuff still has to be separated out into the buildings and so that's where you get the b is the building level cost and the d is the district level cost so if you go to the next slide i took some of that information and broke it down a little bit just to get a better sense of some of the things that we're talking about there and the things that i looked at here were maintenance costs and utility costs just pick out a couple examples and base that off of the square footage of the building and student enrollment in the building because on the last slide we saw that our buildings aren't really at full capacity when it comes to the size that they can actually hold as far as students are concerned so if you go to the next one this just kind of same numbers it just makes the graph or the chart a little bit smaller to see but you can look at a few things there and i'm not here to kind of pinpoint necessarily everything uh but you can look at for example utility costs okay if we look at all of our buildings and we look at the cost per square foot as an example you can see shark creek cost our corporation the most square foot when it comes to utility costs maintenance costs you can see that northfield and southwood have higher maintenance costs which you kind of would think that they would because they have larger buildings but when you look at it from a student enrollment standpoint it's significantly higher and mainly because those buildings don't have the number of students that they need to have in there to really justify some of those costs overall and so not going to go like i said i'm not going to go into detail in every little bit of thing there but something to kind of look at and pay attention to when we're talking about efficiencies uh and how our buildings are being used and what they're being used for thank you so what is the solution the same slide as last week build a new high school grades 9-12 currently at northfield and southwestern combined into one new high school the current norfolk and southwest junior senior high buildings would transition into buildings for preschool through 8th grade this would transition to msdwc traditional schools from five buildings into three buildings so student opportunities so maintain and enhance academic offerings consistent course scheduling uh mr drake talked about that a little bit and then doctor truman talked about maintaining enhance i'm sorry maintain and enhance extracurricular offerings uh mr drake also mentioned that a little bit so depending on the interest of our students maintaining and enhancing academic and extracurricular offerings including the arts can be accomplished and so that's one example if we go to the next slide efficiency and staffing will result in increased opportunities and then utility and maintenance costs we'll talk about that a little bit more first of all let me get all my notes to work so what are the increased opportunities so give you a little example um english for example that might not be the best example but for english the indiana state approved course titles and descriptions is a 400 page document it's a pdf 400 page document so we know that teachers and students have different interests and so we also know that that you can look at what they can take for example english 9 for example is pretty much what all of our english 9 students take but there are a lot of different pages i talked about um on that document as far as different uh ideas that you could have so i'm still trying to look at this here mr drake i should have used that as far as running the powerpoint doing all that so another thing is that transfers right now when we talk about efficiencies and staffing results increase opportunities right now we actually take and dr can you explain this a little bit more but we take approximately 13 of our education fund to transfer to the operation fund and the reason for that is when the state of indiana in 2019 changed it to the different funds just the education and operations fund because of putting certain people out of the education fund and putting them into the operations fund the state were put up there earlier you do know that those savings of those efficiencies we would not have to transfer as much money and so those funds then can be used for more opportunities for for our staff also some referendums there's two different types of referendums we have the experts here maybe they can correct me if i'm wrong but we have a construction one which we're talking about tonight but and also the project but we also have an operations an operations referendum is basically for operations so for example to increase possible benefits and salaries of of staff and so in this model of being more efficient it would be an indirect result of being able to provide more of those opportunities so in other words you would not have to have an extra referendum like an operational referendum so those are just a couple examples also we do know that um of our eight um districts that surround us we are the only ones that have the two high schools and so we actually spend more money and more budget and money towards athletics for coaches because we duplicate everything and so here again that would be another opportunity to be more on par with other schools as far as that goes because right now even though we do spend more money than anybody around us it's because that we double everything up and so that makes a difference also just another indirect result of a plan like this would help a lot so again a lot of this goes along with our strategic plan that we'll talk about a little bit more about attracting and retaining students and also staff so possible timeline of the project this has not changed from what we talked about last tuesday so of course when the referendum passes november 8th then we move on to the period where um you can see uh from the architectural drawings would happen also bids and then the estimated time through our through those people would be the groundbreaking of march of 2024.
to the class of 2022 you are a very special class to me i have literally watched you grow up to be the amazing young people that you are today from the sidelines of the football field helping you strap on your helmets to seeing you in your people's parade in the fourth grade to listening to your lip sync concert i can remember a certain cindy lauper song in performance still makes me laugh today and climbing the hundreds of steps of bunker hill in the fifth grade to the crazy sock days of socktober in the middle school to standing on the hill if you know you know the hill while watching and listening to you perform the last run-through of that marching band show of the night watching your talent on the stage to following your academic musical theatrical and all the athletic accomplishments here at the high school and yeah winning spirit week three years out of the four and i have loved every minute of it we are here tonight for one final time on your farewell tour to celebrate all of you and through the generous donations made in memory of loved ones from neto insurance agency apc auto body and attorney jane pino in conjunction with the pto the dartmouth high school pto is happy to be able to award nine scholarships this year to the class of 2022 the class of 2022 has been one of the largest classes but it's not the size and number that makes you all so special it's how much you give back to your high school community and our community at large in dartmouth each student who applied for the pto scholarship was asked to write about why their service to their school community or the town of dartmouth community has been important to them in addition to listing what service they had been a part of and you are all so much a part of our community i would personally like to thank tracy violet and sonya silva for reading through all the applications this year and selecting this year's recipients so please join me in congratulating moniz [Applause] catherine [Applause] quinn brian edwards emma tatro joshua moniz [Applause] kathleen lamothe [Applause] evan garcia molly rio abigail simmons so congratulations to all of you the class of 2022 although your village might not be quite ready to see you go we know that you are ready and we're so proud of you so here's to watching and seeing what great things you all do next [Applause] michael kehoe will present the bryant prescott scholarship fund thank you and congratulations to the class of 2022 this evening on behalf of the bryant prescott scholarship trust it's my privilege to award four scholarships selection process was difficult there were quite a few very very impressive applications bryant prescott was an attorney in new bedford whose desire and that of his families was to advance education and to promote civic activity in other words be productive they recognized that our society depends on a well-educated and active citizenry and i think this evening you'll agree with me that each of the recipients meets that qualification they've showed outstanding academic and personal successes here at dartmouth high school each have shown dedication and perseverance as well as and this is the important part the desire to continue their personal growth and be active members of their community it is my privilege and honor this evening to award a scholarship to evan john garcia [Applause] the next scholarship winner is benjamin george bernice [Applause] the third scholarship winner is joshua charles moniz [Applause] [Music] and the fourth the fourth scholarship winner is christian anthony resendiz [Applause] john bernard and maureen dutra will present the dartmouth girls athletic lead scholarships good evening as current president of the dartmouth girls athletic league i'm proud to be tonight along with maureen dutra our scholarship committee chairperson to present scholarships just a little history the dartmouth girls athletic league was founded in 1974 as the first all-girls athletic league in the country it's expanded over the years to take in field hockey basketball and softball is three of our sports now we consider ourselves to be the feeder program towards the dartmouth high sports program to create to expand and create a better program by working in conjunction with them we also we also work in conjunction with them by having some of the older girls who have been involved with degal to mentor our young and upcoming athletes the league is pleased to be able to give back to the community and these girls by being able to present a large sum of scholarships this year to former participants of degal i would like to thank all the past and present board members volunteers and families friends and most of all the girls who participate in the program and make the out of success it has been for so many years with that said i'm going to turn it over to maureen and she's going to present and tell you how we picked our scholarship applicants thanks john congratulations to all the recipients here tonight including our very own degal winners to be considered applicants must have competed in a minimum of five seasons throughout all of the decal programs we had a competitive pool of applicants this year and an honor and are honored to present to you the following winners eileen boyle congratulations catherine lancaster congrats catherine emma madruga [Applause] congrats emma thank you catherine cherrier congrats catherine ellie cody congrats lily giosa [Applause] congrats lily catherine quinn [Applause] congrats katie nicole sylvain nice job nicole grace rose good job gracie molly rio [Applause] randy medeiros [Applause] congrats and emma tatro congrats emma madden waskowitz will present the david r santos memorial scholarship every year my family awards this scholarship to deserving students in honor of my late uncle who dedicated his life to impacting the lives of children in a positive way every year my family chooses to honor his memory by awarding this scholarship to students who have decided that they are going to impact lives of children in a positive way in their lives in the future so emma tatro sophia montez and kathleen lamothe thank you john nunes will present the club mata durence ss sacramento scholarship [Applause] thank you ma'am on behalf of the club mother and son sacramento i'd like we'd like to offer our best wishes to the class of 2022.
now if just do 12 and then respect for soup or something yeah so did anyone else when we get to you if you selected that item just let us know and we'll go ahead and put a star next to it okay so the first one is number 12 respect for the superintendent yolanda what did you select um i selected number eight board members follow board agreements regarding speak speaking for the board okay so number eight agreements right all right gabriella what did you select as your um the area that you selected as the strength of your board for your board i selected number 19. kind of 1920 go hand in hand board member received timely information board members receive adequate information i think that that's one of the um things that this board has in uh what the superintendent has improved on so timely and adequate information thank you perfect all right and uh dylan what did you pick i picked number nine board member board members keep confidential matters confidential okay so number nine respecting confidentiality right i i also at number nine board members keep confidential matters wonderful okay so for nine we have two okay so number nine we got two okay perfect all right thank you now we are going to go around and you're going to share the first area that you feel you all need to talk about openly transparently and respectfully sabrina question did you want us to share the second highlight the first one first oh just the first one so hopefully by now you have selected the two areas that you feel you need to work on you're going to begin with the first one i'm going to begin with yolanda yolanda what area did you pick remember one of the yellow or red areas that you need okay on the red number seven board members agree on on the role and responsibility of the board and the superintendent so number seven please put roles and responsibilities that's all thank you all right gabriella what did you select number four the board works well together okay thank you all right fellaini what did you pick number 13 the board manages internal conflicts in a productive manner okay all right athen and i also have number 13 the board manages conflict uh internal conflict in a productive manner we got two for that okay okay sabrina same number 13.
dr smith myself mr mclaughlik we were there last year every or almost every um talent show or act at the juneteenth event last year was a former student of our district or current student of our district so when we have these township oriented events i i still think that the greatest thing a society does is raise their children and that's highlighted in that event so we'll see you there next month thank you mr cantham anyone else okay at this point i'm going to ask for a motion to adjourn miss everhart second mr fizzicaro all those in favor i meeting adjourned you
and then they said approximately three years to build high school so that would be an august 2027 start and then of course so the first students would be actually and then we haven't talked about this a lot but uh and then transition to the three schools possibly another one one probably two maybe even three years but possibly the transition to three school corporation would be 20 29 20 30. so there were some questions last time that we had a few of our slides and that's why now so the why now first of all the real estate opportunity that we have also low interest rates also building costs will continue to rise retiring staff and retired debts and so to go over that a little bit more we'll talk about some of this first of all the real estate will allow for additional opportunities in the future we are also working with a design engineer and they continue to project increased building and label labor costs i don't think anybody would not realize that right now i re retired debt this allows for a larger project potential right now of course you saw that earlier that the uh reduced bonds and that debt is in 2023.
the club is the sponsor of the feast of the blessed sacrament and this year we are back finally for our 106th anniversary on august 4th to the 7th each year the club awards scholarships to deserving seniors this year we are awarding 44 1 000 scholarships or a total of forty four thousand dollars okay this brings our total over the years to over one point one million dollars this year we thank you this year you are very proud to award ten one thousand dollar scholarships to the following students molly rio livy friar lauren v c novo [Applause] austin edgecombe emma teatro benjamin meneses [Applause] joshua moniz [Music] evan garcia will kelly and julian paulino rick white will present the gary d barboza memorial athletic scholarship thank you congratulations to class of 2022 it's one of my favorite classes just to let you know love you guys it's been a great four years uh it's my pleasure to award the gary barboza memorial scholarship gary was one of my teammates in high school he was an outstanding lineman one of the toughest people i've ever met led us to the super bowl championship back in the 80s and his daughters nicole and carly barboza set this scholarship up in his memory it's a 500 scholarship and i'm privileged to present it to a student athlete who's given everything over the last four years to dartmouth high school gary was very passionate about football cared deeply about dartmouth high and representing us wherever we went and i know this young man did that for us over the last four years uh he even held off on having major shoulder surgery until our season was over so i knew it meant a little bit so i've known him since he was about four years old means a lot to me and the gary barbosa memorial scholarship goes to patrick crane brian fragger and liz rigo will present the leah e oliver memorial scholarship mr tebow will present the scholarship it's uh my honor to be able to uh present the lea oliver memorial scholarship the lea memorial scholarship is awarded annually to a female who is in the top 25 percent of our class and is majoring in engineering and for those of you um who may not be familiar lee oliva was a fantastic member of the dartmouth high school community who unfortunately fell victim on the september 11th attacks back in 2001 and so this scholarship is awarded in her memory each year and we appreciate the generosity of the oliver family for sure this year the leah e oliver memorial scholarship goes to randy madirus sharon mcdonald and jeremy mcdonald will present the marty mcdonald memorial scholarship my mother decided to leave me alone to this one so thank you for that good good evening my mom and i would like to extend our congratulations to you the class of 2022 and your families it is an honor to be here tonight to present the marty mcdonald scholarship my dad was a son a husband and a father and most importantly a friend to everyone my dad loved teaching english drama and baseball he loved them because he could share his passions with thousands of young people who roam the halls and fields of dhs he inspired his students to be passionate about them as well for 34 years my dad mr mcdonald was dedicated to the students at dhs one of my dad's final wishes was to have a scholarship set up in his name and thank uh and thanks to his friends colleagues former students and former ball players his wish became a reality this year my mother and i decided to award the scholarship to a varsity player who also played jv ball somebody who would have played for coach mcdonald he taught the game of baseball that he loved so much for 23 years the most important lesson he taught his ball players and students was that success doesn't come easily it takes a lot of hard work and when you put a lot of work into something the successful outcome is that much more satisfying throughout my dad's life and teaching career he stressed the importance of students being involved in a variety of activities the 2022 recipient of the marty mcdonald scholarship has chosen to do that throughout his entire four years at dartmouth high school he has used the baseball field to expand his horizons and to cultivate the many friendships he has made over the past four years this this year's recipient of the marty mcdonald scholarship is keegan hummison sharon mcdonald will also present the saint julie's ladies guild scholarship good evening thank you i would like to extend my congratulations to the class of 2022 and your families it's an honor to be here tonight to represent st julie's ladies guild and to present two one thousand dollar scholarships the 2002 recipients of the saint julie's ladies skills scholarships go to luke kanith and catherine miller [Applause] at this time i'd like to call up brian fragger and liz rigo in regards to the leah e oliver memorial scholarship [Applause] good evening i'm brian fraga i was lea oliver's cousin and we're here to present the scholars the scholarship of leah's memory leah was a force of nature that's the best way to describe her she graduated at the top of her class in 1994 she was the recipient of the harvard book award the college club book of wood there were probably too many awards to mention that would take up this whole evening and she went on to attend columbia university in new york city where she afterwards got got several jobs in in the city at startup tech firms she got the job of her of her dreams of her life in at one at the world trade center in downtown new york where she was working on the morning of september 11 2001 and the weeks and months that followed after that that tragic morning our blood today but our family wanted to on alia's memory and we couldn't we couldn't think of a better way to do so than with the scholarship and um before we um presented also wanted to emphasize that leah wasn't just a top-rate scholar a first-rate intellect you know she was fully human she enjoyed life to the fullest and we would encourage you all to do so as well in the years ahead so today we are pleased to present the lea oliver college of award to a young lady at the top of her class as well she will be attending lynn university or renslaw polytech university so which me in wishing well in saying congratulations to randy she madaris up already dr ray knew singh will present the matadore family foundation [Applause] hi and congrats to all of you the class of 2022 as a former dartmouth high graduate myself it is an honor and a joy to be here um to be with you all i barely get to spend time in the states let alone dartmouth and really i'm excited that i had this opportunity to be here with you all i'm here on behalf of the mariada foundation this is a non-profit that my family has set up since 2014 in dartmouth to promote and advance science and education and i'm here today on behalf of the foundation to recognize a graduating senior who has made the greatest strides in their high school academic and extracurricular endeavors and with that i'd just like to say thank you all for organizing this thank you to ms peach for helping us nominate and award uh one of you all and thank you so much to jesse um maruccio for being here and for being our our student our graduate that we'd like to award the maria the medal tonight [Applause] sue benoit and russ benoit will present the dartmouth school music association as well as the robert m silva woodwind scholarship and the bancroft memorial scholarship [Applause] [Music] good evening and congratulations to the class of 2022 russ and i have actually watched most of you grow up from being in the music department and just watching you and listening to you play all these years and it's been an honor that you have done that for us the dsma is a non-profit organization consisting of parents family members friends and alumni and music lovers around the region dedicated to supporting the development of music appreciation and abilities throughout the dartmouth public schools music programs each year the dsma offers a scholarship to seniors who have completed the eligibility requirements throughout their time in the music program this year we are pleased to be awarding the following students a combined total of eight thousand fifty dollars in scholarship funds we would like to honor ryan cleveland [Applause] ashley to jesus lucas dion austin edgecombe [Applause] [Music] thea hayes [Applause] aidan lemaire joshua moniz [Applause] ashton perry [Music] carly richard as rush rudrak [Music] abigail simmons [Music] and sarah taylor [Music] as part of the scholarship program the bancroft family generously donates the bancroft memorial scholarship in memory of paul bancroft who is a strong supporter of the music program this year's recipient is thea hayes the robert m silva scholarship is donated by the silva family robert silva was a dartmouth high graduate who was a member of the music program the scholarship is awarded to a woodwind player who has shown a passion for music is a strong student and has demonstrated leadership skills this year's recipient is josh moniz [Applause] marcia vieira and lauren enochson will present the national honor society scholarships [Applause] good evening being selected for membership in the national honor society is based on four pillars scholarship leadership service and character the students the two students selected by the faculty council were chosen because they exhibited excellent qualities in each of these areas they are evan garcia [Applause] and molly rio i will now introduce rachel chavier our associate principal at dartmouth high school and she will present the following scholarships good evening the albertina g madura scholarship is awarded annually to a deserving member of the senior class who will be continuing their education in the fall this year's recipient of the albertina g madeira scholarship is ella mercer [Applause] each year the dartmouth high school medical careers club partners with the american red cross to host two blood drives after a brief hiatus due to covet 19 the medical careers club was able to once again host a blood drive and as a result we are able to award the american red cross medical careers scholarship to a member of the senior class who went above and beyond to organize a blood drive this year's recipient of the american red cross medical careers scholarship is josh patel the betsy w tabor scholarship is awarded annually to deserving seniors who plan to continue their education in trades music art nursing business or agriculture this year's recipients are aneja lopes aaron mello jenna mello and jordan peckham the buzzards bay rowing club scholarship is awarded to a deserving senior who major in a field related to a career in environmental studies this year's buzzards bay rowing club scholarship is presented to caitlin de silva [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the carlos and mary ventura memorial scholarship is awarded annually to a member of the senior class planning to pursue a degree in the field of education this year's recipient of the carlos and mary ventura memorial scholarship is sophia montez [Applause] the dartmouth educators association scholarship is awarded annually to members of the senior class whose parents are employed by the dartmouth public schools and are active members of the dartmouth educators association this year the dartmouth educators association is pleased to present scholarships to aileen boyle [Applause] emma fernandez evan garcia christian rosendies dylan rosendes molly rio and juliana souza [Music] the dartmouth grange number 162 john h brown jr scholarship is awarded annually to seniors planning to pursue a career that may benefit or help to sustain our agricultural heritage environment or natural resources this year the dartmouth grange number 162 john h brown junior scholarship is prudent is presented to the following seniors kylie decosta [Applause] charles fairfax evan garcia emma gifford [Applause] christian rosendies [Applause] and emma tatro [Applause] [Music] mike martin one of dartmouth high school assistant principal will present the following scholarships to the class of 22.
okay so we got three for that okay so there's definitely some agreeance agreements on what you need to work on at least on the first item let's go to your second item that you chose okay and i am did i start with you yolanda category this is the second the second of what you need to work on yeah we're getting ready all it's okay take your time i'm going to start with you gabriella so the second area of what you feel you all need to work on as a team as a board did you hear me oh no oh i'm sorry number 15 15 board members treat each other with respect okay number 15 board members treat each other with respect for respect among board members thank you all right what do you have number 30 there is a good relationship between how long the board spends on an agenda item and the importance of the item so number 30.
there's some other explanations here we'll go over so one sometimes we talked about tax rate this is the tax rate for 2022 right now people sometimes wonder about our own tax rate so right now 2022 you can see on the far left msd we are the lowest and we typically um compare we typically compare our eight districts that we've ordered okay so we do order all these and so you can just see down the line eastbrook manchester north miami huntington mechanical jump up to peru a dollar thirty two o killed a dollar fifty and while the city of dollar fifty three so of those districts that we um order we are the lowest at this point and you have to also recall uh remember that we are the lowest of the 25th percentile in the state of indiana those 294 corporations so that's where we're right now so why now that is one of the reasons also historical interest rates uh we did not find a chart that goes all the way back into the 70s but anybody that bought a home in the 70s or bought anything in the 70s you're talking about 14 15 16 interest rates i know my wife and i when we purchased our home in 1989 it was 10.875 this is this is more for bonding but yet you can see that we are still in the historical low interest rate era although you can see that there is starting to be a spike so when we go back to why now that is another why now so another question was what have we looked at before this question was brought up and so this was part of our strategic plan that we looked back and we actually had this slide and i think has been posted a lot of different places but this slide back in september to retain all schools maintain and improve all five school buildings and adjust grade levels as needed shuffling grade levels shuffling grade levels as needed to phase out to four to three buildings over time give specific focus on 9 through 12 while maintaining and improving certain buildings and of course build a new high school build a k through our 9 through 12 high school to include phasing into a 3 building district over time while maintaining and improving certain buildings and so going along with those three what if the referendum does not pass so if the referendum fails i know you can read them on read us out loud msdwc will continue to aim at providing the best education for our students looking back at our strategic plan options for the future will include borrowing more money to improve our aging buildings and or reconfigure the current buildings and upgrading them to accommodate one high school so i want to thank laura lange bartles and our team who actually have different ideas and then she ate people to create this it makes it very visually pleasing when we look at this when we when we compare looking at our strategic plan of those four goals and also um what the different options were so retaining those schools really do not meet any of the strategic planning shuffling grade levels okay student achievement that allows more opportunities there so that's what we talked about facilities and technology provides some efficiency not all efficiency but then of course a new high school it goes along with all four of our strategic plans student achievement recruitment retention financial your facilities and technology so strategic plan number four is what we've been highlighting but they're all very important additional opportunities for students facility improvements maintenance and upgrades and building use efficiencies so 62 years after the creation of msdwc see those filament up there in the top left-hand corner we want to propel msd of lawyers county for the next 60 plus years so daisy that goes along with some of the things that you've asked me to provide tonight well now we will now hear from jim elizondo our underwriter about how the proposed project will be financed as well as information about the effect on the typical property taxpayer good evening good evening thanks i would like to take and take us through the next steps of it viewed it as a board and a community site proceed with a project and go through the referendum process what does the size of the project look like how do we propose restructuring and paying the debt and then what does that mean to you as taxpayers uh start with a few assumptions the first bullets just are a reminder that we do have nine different taxi districts so we have a wide variety of taxpayer bills out there the township only unincorporated areas your tax bill will have a county tax a school tax a township tax on it the when you move to the incorporated areas the city portions you then add a city tax on there as well as there may be other little pieces but everybody's tax bill's different so really that assumption is truly just to show that you have a very diverse taxing body next we want to look at the assessed values as we project forward estimated tax impacts and rates we have to base those on some assessed value assumptions so historically over the last 10 years you've grown at about 1.9 per year in 2022 you grew at 5.4 so um we then uh look at what do we project forward you have uh employed policy analytics to do some assessed value projections and review and i know in your timeline of prior meetings they have presented to you but we're actually using their assumptions going forward and that averages about 3.6 per year however their assumptions are very detailed and that there will be years it bounces around so we're following exactly what they laid out as their assumption in our numbers and finally market interest rates i'm using about one and a half percent over the market your graph that you looked at there has that spike that we saw just recently since i was here this is not so just remember we're going to look at conservative interest rates but in the last week we've seen a 50 a 50 basis point chain drop in injury in municipal interest rates now part of that is we've been on an inflation fear now the re recession fears are pushing and our market is volatile as it is 50 basis points in a week is shows you how volatile our market currently is but you know all of a sudden now my assumptions are closer to two percent over the market today but that's not to say a week from now you know the markets look at it differently but that's just to reiterate that historically we are at uh still low interest rates in the taxes that market but we are trying to be conservative in that estimate because tonight after this hearing you will be asked to consider a resolution if you decide to proceed that will set maximums and we want those to be conservative and worst case numbers next one uh the estimate for the projects would be approximately 115 million dollar bond issue of which after you take in the cost of going to the bond markets um we would just say that would generate roughly 113 million 445 000 and that's a again numbers that are in your resolute resolutions they are estimates though there are two other items that will fit into your budget one is capitalized interest capitalized interest is something we put in the budget and in your case it's to smooth the tax is the flexibility to smooth the tax rate in that first year if we don't need it that comes out and can be used to either reduce the borrowing or increase the size of the heart and soft costs of construction and then finally the last piece is about a million two million one million one hundred one million one hundred and seventy thousand uh is cost of issues cost of issuance are truly all the costs involved in going to the bond markets that's underwriting the bonds rating agency reviews attorneys fees title insurance uh survey costs appraisal costs all the things that are involved in the bond issue but that gets us to our total of 115 million and we want to share with you an estimated budget of where that money would go next uh this is a representation of your existing debt service tax rate if you recall or have looked at your tax bills you have two tax-based funds one is the operation fund or is the debt service fund we are looking directly here at the debt service fund because the debt service fund is the fund that you would utilize to pay bonds and debt service and you'll see as has been mentioned that the all of your long-term debt does pay off here fairly soon you'll see the green line um when we started this process in 2019 and then into 2020 we were looking at a historic rate in the debt service fund of right around 29 cents per hundred dollars of assessed value and that's what i've highlighted uh for those four years with the green line in 2022 you had a strong 5.4 assessed value growth which drove down your tax rate because you had your level debts uh payments but the tax rate forced that or the assessed value force that rate down and then we're still projecting in 23 because you're starting this process you're not going to be ready to have new debt in 23 even if you react where to act tonight we are projecting that with current estimates of assessed value growth that that debt service rate could drop even further then if we go to the next slide this is what we would propose a 115 million dollar bond issue would look like in your debt service fund that would shoot horn in right after your other debt is paid off if we go to the next slide we estimate that that is an increase of a little over 54 cents per hundred dollars of assessed value over what you historically were paying 18 in 2018 through 21.
good evening and welcome friends and family the seniors sitting here before you wouldn't be here without you to the class of 2022 congratulations okay you have left your mark and hopefully these four years that you've had at dartmouth okay will always last forever it is my honor to present the following scholarships the first one is the dartmouth middle school pto scholarship is presented annually to a deserving member of the senior class who attended dartmouth middle school this year's recipient of the dartmouth middle school pto scholarship is emma madruga the doctor e dean freitas memorial scholarship is awarded annually to an outstanding student athlete who plans to continue their education in the fall this year's recipient of the dr e dean freitas memorial scholarship is shantae gonzalez the francis and mary howland scholarship is awarded annually to an outstanding student athlete who participated in high school athletics in grades 9 through 12 who plan to continue their education in the fall the francis and mary holland scholarship is awarded to william paradise and emma tatro the grimshaw gudewicz charitable foundation scholarship is awarded annually to deserving seniors the grimshaw guruwicz charitable foundation asks that we share the following with you mr george e grimshaw and miss irene s gurdwich were former residents of dartmouth massachusetts in peterborough new hampshire they grew up in new bedford and attended new bedford high school they spent much of their working careers together establishing and later selling a very successful fastener manufacturing company george and irene devoted their retirement years to charitable activities revolving around education historical preservation medical research and the arts neither george nor irene had much to start with the success came from their hard work and their own efforts as part of their legacy george and irene established a charitable foundation that today carries on their support of various charitable activities it is hoped that the recipients of the numerous scholarships awarded will utilize these scholarships to the fullest and someday have the opportunity to create a similar legacy of their own this year the grimshaw guruwitz charitable foundation scholarship is awarded to the following seniors genevieve shadeed [Applause] mckenna callahar [Applause] randy medeiros [Music] aaron mellow [Applause] jenna mellow ella mercer [Applause] sophia montez [Applause] christian rosendies dylan rosendes molly rio [Applause] [Music] oliver tara dash the james arsenault memorial scholarship is awarded annually to a member of the track team this year's recipient of the james arsenault memorial scholarship is evan garcia mr shea our other assistant principal at dartmouth high school will also present additional scholarships to the class of 2022.