001Okay, thank you everyone. We are out of executive session at 7:31 p.m. and we'll continue on with the agenda. The next item is the pledge of alleg allegiance. If everyone will please stand. Okay, we have a special presentation today. Uh we will get an updated demographic study from Dr. Gri. But before we proceed with that, I will announce the next set of presentations that will be coming up in the next set of board meetings. On May 19th, we'll be presenting the 2025 persons of the year awards. Uh and then on June 9th, we'll have an earlier start, uh which actually means that we'll be going into an executive session starting at 6 PM uh which is also known as a board retreat and then we'll proceed with our normal meeting which will occur at 7:30.
002Uh during this we'll also have uh New Jersey school boards presenting a recap as well as a board self-evaluation and a goal setting. So uh Dr. Dr. Forte, uh, in the hallway you asked what time we should coordinate with, uh, New Jersey school boards about the start time on June 9th. Oh, okay. Our comment was June 19th. Forgive me. So, um, okay. Uh, we'll go ahead and proceed with Dr. Grip's, uh, study. Dr. Grip, thank you for joining us. The floor is yours. Um, can we can we, um, blow up the second slide which says statistical forecasting? Great. Okay. Um, thank you again for taking the time to have me in and uh discuss the the demographic study with your district. The report's about a 100 pages long. So, tonight I'm going to try to
003do my best to encapsulate it in about 20 minutes, which is going to be difficult. I'm not going to go over everything, but wanted to give you a little bit of a background of who we are. Um, we're the company that did the study for you. We provide demographic services for school districts mostly in New York, New Jersey metropolitan area. And we've been doing it for 27 years since 1998. Um we've done probably 200 225 districts in the state of New Jersey alone. Um some more in New York State, Westchester County, and we're the demographer for the New York City public schools since 2006. Almost 20 years with working with the largest school district in the country. Next, please. So I'm the executive director. Um I have a doctorate from Ruckers University in educational statistics
004and measurement. Um my dissertation was actually on coming up with a new model to project school enrollments using multiple regression. That's how I got started in this business. I still publish in the field um both in written form and in conferences and testify as an expert witness in um this particular field in ALJ hearings, administrative law court hearings in the state of New Jersey when school districts want to get a divorce from each other if they're ascending receiving agreement. That's what you have to do. Next, please. So, the purpose of the study is to project enrollments. as you're aware, but there's a lot more to that. And we do project only for a 5-year period because after we get beyond five years, it's really hard to then project your kindergarten counts because you then have
005to estimate kids that hadn't even been born yet. So that's why the DOE says five years. That's as far out as they'll let us go. Other things we looked at, we analyzed the community's population trends. That's your historical and and projected counts in the township. um different demographic characteristics such as race and socioeconomic characteristics, the age structure of the community, birth counts and fertility rates. Then looking at the school district, we examined your historical enrollments districtwide for the last 10 years and by grade configuration, elementary and middle school, and also by race and poverty status. We also determined historical birth counts for each one of your elementary attendance areas, which helps project kindergarten counts in each of those two zones. We computed student yields or children per housing unit by different kinds of housing type,
006single family, town houses, condos, apartments. We also contacted the township planning department to find out about new housing starts and how that would impact the school district. We then compared your school building capacities to the current enrollment and the projected enrollments. We also geocoded your students which basically means put them on a map from two different time time frames 201920 and 202425 to show relative concentrations of where they live. We will not really show you any of those maps tonight because it takes too long to go through everything. And the last thing we did is we projected enrollments on a completely different methodology causing causing called the housing turnover analysis and it's a completely independent analysis compared to the ones that we use um from the DOE and we'll talk more about that later. Next
007please. So this is showing Dville's historical and projected populations. If you look to the left of that vertical black line on the right side of the screen, that's all your populations from 1940 to 2020 through the C from the Census Bureau. And you can see except for that one period in 1990 that the population has been steadily going up. So in 2020, the population is 17,107. In 2050, a third-party organization called the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority thinks the population is only going to grow by about 600 people. I don't think that's going to be the case. I think that number is well underestimated because it was based on data from about 10 years ago. And now that the 2020 census is available, I believe that once they readjust their numbers and their estimates, that
008number is going to go higher. Next, please. So, who are you as a community? Well, the three largest races in Dville are white, Asian, and Hispanic. And since the 2020 since the 2010 census, we noticed that you had an increasing Asian and Hispanic population and a declining white population, but almost 80% white, which is definitely the majority race. The median age is older, much older than that of the states. You can see by about 5 years in terms of a foreignb born population only about 13% of the people here are foreignb born where India and China are the largest sources as you can see that's much lower than that of the state it's a very educated community about 60% of a bachelor's degree or higher which is much higher than the state average um high
009income $163,000 for a median household income again much higher than the state u about 6,800 housing units, which around 84% are one-unit homes. That would be a a single family detached home or maybe an attached townhouse condo. 16.1% of the homes are renter occupied, which is much lower than the state average. And you can also see the median value of an owner occupied unit is around $100,000 more than the state. So real real short, you know, you're you're a wealthier community compared to what the state um is reflecting in their averages. Next, please. Okay. So, this is just showing the three schools in the district um where they're located. Uh next, this is showing the two elementary attendance zones for Lake View and Riverview almost split in half with Lake View on the southern part
010and Riverview in the north. Next, please. So, the school district has what's called a flex zone, which is that area in red, which allows the district administration to move children into one school or the other so that enrollments could be balanced out. Next, please. So, let's talk about your enrollments. When we look at your enrollments, it's always at the same date every year. It's October the 15th because that's the date that you send your enrollments to the state of New Jersey. And so for the 2425 school year back in October, your enrollment was 1738. And what we noticed is that your enrollments really were fairly stable until the last three years. They've been going up. So when we look at the endpoint years, the 1516 year and 2425, which is a 10-year period, that's a
011gain of 108 students over that decade, which is really not that much. Um to project enrollments we use something called the cohort survival ratio method which we'll talk about in a moment. Next please. So if you look at this graph this is showing your enrollments for the district over the last decade. You can see in the last three bars how it's starting to go up. Next please. All right. This is probably the most important graph or chart of the whole night. Um so please stay awake for this one. This is where we break out your enrollments historically for the elementary configuration which is in blue and the middle school which is in red. And if you take a look at the elementary school, it was fairly stable through the 202021 school year before it started
012to increase for the last four consecutive years. And the reason I said to pay attention here is because if you think about it, if the elementary enrollments are increasing historically, eventually it's going to have to catch up and go into the middle school as well. So you can see that the middle school actually was fairly stable up through 1920 before it started declining. But that you can see at the very end in 2425, it's starting to go upward. So it's starting to turn back in the other direction. Next, please. So to project enrollments, we use something called the cohort survival ratio method. And I give you a really simple example. It's the methodology is where we look at the progression rates of students from one grade to the next. And there's 13 possible progressions. They
013start with birth to kindergarten, which is a five-year gap, all the way up. Well, actually in your district is not 13. is only nine because you're only in eighth e eight goal to eighth grade. So there's only nine possible grade progressions and the last one for you would be seventh to 8th. So I give you an example of 100 first graders going in the 2023 24 year becoming 95 second graders. That's 95 over 100 which is n5. So in this little fictitious example this district lost five students in the net which would be outward migration. So if the values are above one, you have inward migration. If they're below one, you have outward migration. Now, we compute these ratios for the last 10 years. And we computed then an average, and that's the average that
014we're going to use on your most current enrollments going forward to project your enrollments. We usually use a five-year trend. All nine of your average ratios were above one. So what does that mean? It means that you have inward migration in the district. people are moving in year overyear. Students who didn't start in the district, you are you having more from other communities coming in somewhere um in those interim years. In 2020, you had two of those survival ratios, which was the first year of the pandemic, which were the lowest value in the last decade. So, we excluded those in our calculations. And as I alluded to a minute ago, we take these average ratios, we apply them to your current enrollments, and that helps project our future enrollment population. Next, so you have a
015phenomena here called negative kindergarten replacement. It's happened in eight of the last nine years, and it ranges from 1 to 61 students per year. A negative kindergarten replacement is simply when the number of entering kindergarten students is less than the number of graduating eighth grade students from the prior year. So let's just say you have 200 eighth graders that are graduating. And to keep the enrollment balanced, you need 200 kindergarten students in the following September, but you're always getting less than that number. Maybe you're getting 175 and you're down 25 students right out of the gate. um we're finding out the magnitude of these negative kindergarten placements are actually lower over time due to these smaller graduating eighth grade classes. So if you go to the next slide, you'll see this is the historical kindergarten
016replacement over time where you actually have positive kindergarten replacement in the last year. Um the values are very small in say the last four or five years. That basically means that the kindergarten incoming class is fairly similar to the outgoing eighth grade cohort. Next, please. So, we just took the graph of the values from that last graph or last chart and we plotted it up against the total enrollment change year-over-year which is in blue. So if you just look in the middle of the screen or like actually let's look in the right of the screen the second from the right there's a negative - 24 that's your negative kindergarten replacement and positive 10 is how many students you actually gained in that year. What we're seeing is that most all of your negative kindergarten replacements
017have been offset by this inward migration of children either reducing the negative kindergarten replacement or causing a net enrollment gain in the district. So that's that's that's related back to that inward migration in the nine average ratios that I mentioned a moment ago. Next. So to project kindergarten students, we use birth rates and we looked at them from the last 12 years. From 2010 to 2022, births were fairly stable in the district before starting to increase. In 2022, there were 194 births, which is 31 greater uh 31 additional births than from 2010, which was 163. That was the greatest number of births in the historical period. So if you go to the next chart, you'll see that at the very end of the slide there, birth rates are starting to go up. So you have
018a bunch of things going on here. You have inward migration, you have greater birth rates, and you also have increasing historical enrollments at the elementary level. It's kind of a perfect storm for increasing enrollments. If we go to the next page, the next chart, you can see I am showing you the number of verts in Dville for each of the years that are shown. How many students come 5 years later? And then we take the ratio, which is really just column 3 divided by two. And you can see outside of that one year at the very top, all of the birth to kindergarten survival ratios are above one. And what does that mean? means that you're gaining children um if children were born in Dville, you're gaining additional children from other communities five years later
019when they all come to kindergarten. That's typical in good districts. You will see um highly highly performing districts will gain kids from other communities because people parents want to have their kids educated in your community. Next, so we did break down the BERS by attendance area. That's a little tricky process. um we have to get birth data from the state at the census block level and then we have to aggregate them by your elementary attendance zones. Although we did have data from them at the township level for 2022, they had so many errors in their data at the block level for 2022, we could not um aggregate them into the two different zones. So this only goes through 2021. But what it shows you is that Lake View consistently has had more births than Riverview.
020And the unknown is just telling us that the state says that a woman had um lived in Dville, had a birth, but we don't know exactly where she lived in the township. Next, please. So our GIS person mapped at the census block level B births in 2010 and the dark blue is where the greatest number of birds occurred back in 2010 which is in the Lake View area in that southwest corner if you can see that. Next please. So if we go to 2021 which is the other endpoint year we use the same scale. We don't have any dark blue zones, but if you notice, we have a lot more blue and aqua than the prior graph, which is telling us that you have gains at the at all these different um census blocks in
021the last 11 years. Next, please. This is just showing in the aggregate over that 11-year period where all the births occur. The darkest blue would be where the greatest number occurred. You can see in both Lake View and Riverview where that would be. Next. So, as a demographer, one of the things we'd like to look at is something called the age sex diagram. An age sex diagram is also known as a population pyramid. And it's the percentage of males on the left in orange and the percentage of females on the right in green in the different age classes in 5-year increments, 35 to 39, 40 to 44, so on and so forth. What this is showing back in 2010 is that the greatest number of people in both males and females was aged 45 to
02249. Notice how few people there are in the 20s and early 30s. Probably because they can't afford to live there. If we advance to the next slide, which is 2020, notice how you're starting to get a little bit more people in the 20s and 30s. And who are your largest groups now? They're the 55 to 59 group because those people aged in place. That's not always the case because of migration. Some some towns have a different age class than you might expect 10 years later, but for you it worked out perfectly that the biggest group is the 55 to 59 age group. Next, please. So, if we look at the changes in the last decade for males and females, where are the biggest decliners? Where are the biggest gainers? Well, the biggest decliners is the
02345 to 49 population, both males and females. And the biggest gainers are 70 to 74. And if we were to aggregate males and females, the changes from that 10-year period, there were gains in every group from 55 to 84, which is a real graying of the population. But there were also sizable declines in the 5 to9 and the 10 to 14 age groups over that 10-year period, which is your elementary and middle school cohorts. And that makes sense because you do have an aging population. You wouldn't expect kids there' be a lot of kids in your community in in the township uh based on this age structure of the community. Next, please. So, we were asked to look at the um enrollments by race for the last six-year period. And really what we see is
024that the white population is the largest race, but it's been fairly stable, about 72 to 74%. Hispanics are the next group and they've been about 10 to 13%. So, really not much has changed racially over the last six years. Next, please. This is showing the race broken down at the school level. And what we're seeing here is that Lake View and Riverview have fairly similar racial distributions. Um Lake View has a larger Asian population and Riverview has a larger white population, but to be honest with you, they're really not very different. And then you can see what Valley View has fairly sim similar to the other two schools obviously and the overall and the blue is just showing the largest race which of course in this case is white. Next, please. So, another thing we
025looked at is your economically disadvantaged student population. What we did see is that there are more economically disadvantaged students in the district currently as opposed to 6 years ago. In 201920, there were only 60 students in the district. That's 3.6%. Now, there's 125, which is 7.2% of the population. A gain of 65 students each year. We looked at at the school level who had um how many economically disadvantaged students in Lake View consistently had a greater number than Riverview for the entire six-year period. And you'll see in the next slide, this is the percentage in just the 24 25 year that the Lake View um school has a much higher percentage than Riverview. But again, these are very small percentages overall. Next. So, we called up the planning and zoning department to find out about
026new housing. There's the potential for more than 500 new housing units in the township, all of which will be multifamily units such as apartments, duplexes, town houses. A lot of this is due to your uh township's agreement, a settlement agreement with the fair share housing center to have affordable housing units built. and all the units will be in the Lake View attendance area. The largest project is Mason Ridge, which is 120 market rate, affordable, and affordable town homes. We did some calculations and of those 527 units, we're projecting 52 children. Uh there's the breakout 34 elementary, excuse me, 18 middle. Of course, there's additional children expected in the high school grades, but we did not consider them as they would not impact your school district directly. Next, please. So, that chart is showing all the
027um six different developments in the Lake View attendance area. I can tell you that's probably incredibly hard to read, but I will tell you that um Enclave at Dville, which is the second one, and the third one, the Meadows at Denville, are both under construction and both have units um that are built and occupied and students in your district. Um the top one, Glenm Commons, when we worked with you about three years ago, um that was approved back in 2018 or 2019. It still has nothing. it still has not moved forward. And then the last one on the page is new Dr. Horton on Thermont Road um is not approved yet, but it's being considered by the planning board. Next, please. So, this map is just showing where all those different projects are located. Next.
028Now, historically, there really wasn't much residential construction in Dendeville. that's only happened in the last couple of years because of the enclave at Dentville and the Meadows at Dville in the Lake View region. You can see that in 23 in the 2023 year and 2024 those units in Lakeville are due to those developments I just mentioned. So Lake View is having way more residential construction than the Riverview zone. Next, please. So, our GIS person took all the addresses of new homes that were constructed or apartments over the last five or six years, put them on the map, and that's where they all are. Next, so one thing we did is computed student yields. Student yields is a fancy name for um children per housing unit. And we computed it by housing type like 1 to
029four family homes which is mostly single family apartments and town houses. And we took your student address database from the school district joined it to the township's property database. And you can see the values here. Um for a single family home you get way more children than in a townhouse or an apartment. Next please. This is just showing you the student yields for all the the different townhouse and condo developments in the township. It shows you the price, the year built, the bedrooms, the number of units, and how many kids are currently residing in those from your school district. And you can see the yields are quite low. Um 0.146 is the overall yield of the developments that are town houses. If we go to the next page, next sheet, this is for apartments. The
030one in red kind of skews all the data. It's pure place which has affordable apartment uh units and it's much much higher for student yields as you can see as compared to the others which are market rate. So when we look at the overall township average uh apartment yield, we usually like to factor out peer place when we look at market rate units. Next. So, looking at home sales in Dville, you can see that um this is looking at it from a 30-year period. You can see that it increased up to um around the 2002 year before it started to decline. And around the time period of 2009 to 2012 was the housing market crash and banking crisis. And when that happened, there were fewer sales. But after that period, you can see the sales
031have increased. You had about 47 sales. I think that's 407 in 2021. That's during the pandemic when things were really hot in the real estate market. But as you can see, in the last couple years, the number of sales have really dropped due to the increase in mortgage interest rates as well as just lower inventories, just not as many homes up for sale. Next. So if we look in the last six years where all those sales occurred, that's in the dark blue. Again, some in the Riverview, some in the Lake View region. Next, so we projected your enrollments for a 5-year period. We had two sets of projections. One we call baseline. That's assuming that all those housing developments that you saw in that prior sheet don't get built, which I don't believe is going
032to happen, but it gives you a scenario of something happens where they don't get built, and then adjusted for housing growth, assuming that all those developments do get constructed. Consider it a worst case scenario. Regardless, enrollments are projected to increase throughout the projection period. In both projections, the baseline is projecting 246 student gain over that period. The adjusted is 277. Next, please. So, this just shows you the enrollment by grade configuration for elementary and middle for baseline and adjusted. And you can see if you just look at the bottom row, the five-year change, you're expecting we're projecting a much bigger gain at the elementary level as opposed to the middle school level. And again, a lot of this has to do with those increasing birth rates and larger elementary cohorts that are moving through the
033system. Next, please. So, this is the capacity analysis, which is showing the capacity of each building. Now, Riverview is a special case because we're showing you the capacity of Riverview without the Riverview annex and with the Riverview annex in comparison to the current enrollment in the 2425 school year, you can see if we con if we do consider the annex, if we compare the current enrollment to the capacity, if you see a value that's in blue and it's positive, it means you have surplus seating. The negative in red would mean you have a shortage and that would be if you do not count the annex. Fast forward five years, if we compare your enrollment to capacity, everything turns to red because of the increasing enrollment projected in the district. Now, this is the projected enrollment
034including all of the new housing. So again, that's your worstcase scenario projected enrollment. Next. So, this is the last thing we did for you. It's a completely independent analysis called a housing turnover analysis. And it's where we um use homes and not students to project enrollments. And we're moving homes um through a cycle of either selling them and returning them to zero years of ownership or moving them up to one more year of ownership. So this is an analysis that was taught um I did not come up with this and some colleagues out in Berkeley Cal Berkeley came up with this. We only did this to the one to four family homes and excluded condos, town houses and age restricted units. In blue it says we should not use these for your yearly enrollment projections
035that you should definitely use the cohort survival ratio methods we talked about earlier. There are three main inputs. One is the housing turnover rates by length of ownership. Number two is the current distribution of homes by length of ownership. And finally, student yields by length of ownership, which we'll go for through all three in a moment next. So to give you a really simple example, what we're doing, we take each home of all the ones in the database that's from the township and we track each home through its life cycle. Um and the data that we get from the town come is has sale dates, sale prices and the year was home was built. We basically have data from the last 30 years. And we follow each year's cohort of homes beginning in 1994 to
036see when they sell. So I give you a very simple example. Let's say you have a home built in 1980 and there's the three sale years for that home, 2002, 8, and 12. It's part of three separate cohorts. The first length of ownership is not 22 years because even though we have uh we only have sale data from 1994 it there could have been a sale in 1988. So we don't know that. So our first length of ownership is six years from 2002 to 2008 four years for the next length of ownership and the current length of ownership from 2012 to 2024 which is the last year we had for data is 12 years. Next. So looking at the length of ownership over time, we computed the average turnover rates for your your property database.
037And what this shows us is that the highest turnover rates happen at low lengths of ownership. One year, two, three, four, five. That's when most homes turn over. Um if you go out to 25 and 20 years or 30 years of ownership, only 1% of the homes are selling. So, this is common. We we've done so many of these for other districts. We find that most people the greatest turnover rates are at lower lengths of ownership. Next, this is just showing the number of homes at each length of ownership in Denville. So, right now, the greatest number of homes is at four years of ownership. And you can see as you go way out 30 years, there's only there's less than a 100 homes owned um at that length of ownership. Next, please. This is
038showing you how many students are in each length of ownership. So what this is showing is that the number of students peak at around 12 or 13 years of ownership for home and then it rapidly drops because now students have graduated out of the district and gone up to the high school. So there's not as many students as you go further out at longer held homes. Next, so how do we project enrollments in this method? It's really fairly straightforward. We take your current length of home ownership distribution, which was two slides ago, and we take your historical turnover rates, which was that graph I showed you. We either advance the homes to one more year of ownership or B, we sell it and have it return back to zero years of ownership. Then we take
039the number of homes at each length of ownership for the next five years and we multiply it by that student yield distribution for each length of ownership just showed to you in the prior slide. And that gets you the number of students each year. And if we show you the next slide, this will show you how many students you get in the next five years from the housing turnover methodology. Now, we added back in students from town houses and condos and apartments, people who lived out of town, plus your prek population. What this is really showing you in this particular scenario is that enrollments are fairly stable until they start declining near the end of the projection period. Um, we did, this is based on your average turnover rates in the township. We did another
040scenario. If we go to the next slide, the green line is your average turnover rates in the township, but the purple line is the maximum turnover rates that have happened in the last 30 years. Now, we don't expect you to have maximum turnover rates for all the lengths of ownership in the next 5 years. But what if we modeled something somewhere in between, which is the line in blue, what would that look like in terms of your housing turnover projections? And if we go to the next slide, that's the results. It shows you um it's a little different. It actually showing more uh stable enrollment for a little bit for the first two or three years and then it starts to decline and the decline is actually a little more than the first scenario. So
041if we go to the next slide, I appreciate your patience. This was a little longer than I thought. Um the this is the summary for tonight's presentation. The enrollments are projected to increase in the district throughout the next 5 years really due to the increasing birth rate, inward migration of students. As I said, the last nine average um um progression ratios have all been above one. And of course, all these new housing units coming online. But what you need to know is that the enrollment gain is not projected to be uniform across the two grade configurations. Most of the gain is projected in the elementary school grades. As these anticipated larger kindergarten cohorts from the larger birth rates, once they start moving through the system, it's going to cause most of the gain to happen
042at that particular level. So, with that, I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Forte and see if anyone has any questions. I just want to make a couple comments. Thank you, Dr. Grip. I think it was uh very informative and um Sandy and I along with Dearis already had a call about this. So it was um it's it's valuable to hear from you for the whole group. Um just a couple notes. One thing is when Dr. Grip was speaking about the annex that does not include the second floor. So it's just the current footprint we have. Now there's a part on slide 32 that Dr. Cullles pointed out about the uh approved housing. We'll we'll I'll talk to Dr. Grip about that because just to make sure we're not confusing the public, we might
043change one of those one of the um like the enclave even though it's south of Route 10. It's in the it south of Route 46. It's in the flex zone which we are making Riverview. And um that was my couple comments. I just wanted to make sure everybody understood that with with the that one slide that where Dr. Dr. Grip was speaking about what it looks like in 5 years. Um, that was not including the second floor of the annex. One other thing, Dr. Grip, when when you and I and Sandy were speaking with you the other day, you said to me something I thought was really important to be said. Now, if you u if you recall, we talked about how you feel pretty confident, right, from your point of view that for the
044next five years, we should be in decent shape. The problem for us sizew space-wise is in the five to 10, six to 10. So I know we had a conversation about we probably need to start looking at some solutions within the next three to four years for that second five years. So between six and 10 years from now is where the main concern lies. Is that is that accurate? Yes. And you know that's again our if we can go to the capacity page um that's probably near if you can advance about 10 slides up I'd like to go over that that that'd be helpful. Keep going right there. So what Dr. Forte is talking about is that with the annex the the number you're seeing there for Riverview the capacity is showing is 542 but
045that's not including the second floor. So if you add the second floor into that equation, um that minus one that you see far to the right, that's only including the first floor, that certainly would turn that number to blue, which mean you would have surplus seating in Riverview. So that's certainly um a consideration. And for Lake View, you do have unhoused students there, but with the flex zone, um you would easily be able to move some of those students over to Riverview. um with respect to Valley View minus 17 is almost imperceptible in terms of being um a shortage of seating because that's spread over three grade levels. You're only talking about roughly about five or six kids in a grade level in numerous sections, I'm sure. So, you wouldn't even really feel that. Um
046as Dr. Forte mentioned, um, we only can go out five years, but if you follow my train of thinking tonight, um, these enrollments, they're going to keep moving through the system. And even with new housing that's coming online, where are most new housing um, going to generate kids? What kind of age groups are we talking about? They usually generate more at the elementary level. So you can expect that they're going to be, you know, causing greater pressure as some of these kids in the 0ero to4 population group, which are not shown on this on this uh chart. Once they start getting a school age, you're going to start seeing some f further pressure down the down the line. That could be years six to 10. Yes, Dr. Grip, I want to thank you for um
047all your hard work here. um the analysis that you put in, the time and the and the thought is tr truly tremendous. It's uh um my brain is spinning a little bit, but that's okay. Uh I think that uh the information that we ask for and the information that we need to move forward is at our fingertips now and I think uh we are very grateful for your work there. So I will open it up to the board for any additional questions that uh individual board members might have. Yeah, if you don't mind, Mr. Kim. Hey, Dr. Grip. Thank uh this is Dino Capello. Uh thank you again. Um like uh James and and Steve said, uh the work here is tremendous. Um I really value that you take in you taken in inputs that
048uh we've in other demographers reports we haven't seen. Um if you don't mind, I'm going to get a little granular for a second. So bear with me. Um looking at slide 36, stu student yields. Uh the way I read this is uh you have one to four family homes detached basically generating 0.484 and then you have towno town houses and condos generating 0.146. Um so the town houses and condos are generating about a third of what a a single family home would generate. Is that that that accurate? That's correct. Yeah. Okay. So then if you go to slide 32. Sorry, I'm just getting back up. I'm just getting back up there. Um, so then my question relates to on the approved and proposed uh housing projects, specifically Mason Ridge and Thurmont Road, you have them
049classified as town houses. So I'm presuming that then they would use the the lower uh uh yield number. Um, so I think the lowest one, if I remember correctly, is is actually apartments. I have to go back to the other slide, but the way we did it for town houses again, if now we're go you you open me up to go into the weeds, so I'm going to go there. Um, what we looked at were some of the units at the Enclave at Dville, the Meadows at Dville, those that are occupied and students who are actually um in the district. We looked at the Forges and Bergkshire Hills. We thought those four um were comparable enough to say this is what the yields will be like in Mason Ridge. So, it wasn't like, yeah, we
050just take the average of the township and that's the yield you're going to get for Mason Ridge. you know, we put a lot more thought into it than that and try to get comparable town houses um in terms of their bedroom distributions and and also ones that are recent because it's also a good reflection of what will come. Got it. Thank you. That that actually helps clarify it. So, I I guess my my basic question still is that Mason Ridge and and uh Mason Ridge, I guess, is the biggest one that has uh 96 four-bedroom units. Thermont Road uh has 34. Um I guess my question to you is is is there anywhere where you're seeing and the reason I ask this is because these are units that are selling anywhere from 800,000 to like
051a million dollars. So my qu or or actually more. So my question to you is is is there anywhere where you're seeing that I guess um behaviors are changing where people are moving families into these into these town houses that may have pre uh previously lived in single family homes but now just can't afford to and now they're so I'm just wondering if you're seeing any indication of that anywhere in your experience. That's a great question. Um I have not seen that kind of motion movement toward that. Um, I have seen some where people who cannot afford to get the single family home might start there first. So, they may not have kids. And that kind of reflects out what I was looking at with the data. Uh, you know, single family home yields are
052about triple that of town houses. But the other thing we should probably also point out is that even if a a townhouse is a threebedroom or a fourbedroom, it used to be in the old days that you would expect them to be filled with kids. It's not that way anymore. Um I worked with uh a team of researchers at Ruckers and down at UPEN and we put together a paper showing student yields over time from 1970 to the present. And what we're finding out is that student yields in these different types of housing units continually are declining um and dropping drastically. We're finding people using that three-bedroom unit not for a child, but it's now an exercise room, it's an office. Um it's all these other multi-purposes that are not used for kids. So to
053your point, I don't have any data on people transitioning from single family to town houses like in what you asked, but I do have information at least anecdotally um that a lot of these are not being filled up with kids because they're they're used for other purposes. Got it. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thanks for the clarification. I think James has a followup. Yeah, I just wanted to uh sorry piggyback off of that question. So, um the how old was that study and does that does do you or your colleagues um have look have you looked at the COA or the affordable housing act that New Jersey has implemented and is enforcing and take into account all these new developments that are going on across the state like are you seeing any kind of trends
054from these new developments that's u enforced by the government these development house developments enforced by the government. Well, yes. Um, so we do look at that. I mean, this is I'm glad you you spend all this time on these slides because this is my favorite one of my favorite things to talk about since I write papers about student yields. Um, the three-bedroom yield for a COA unit apartment, a child, this is according to Ruckers, and again, this is about seven or eight years old. Um, actually, it's a little older now. It's more like 12, is 1.087. 1.087 children per three-bedroom unit. For a market rate unit, it's about8 children. So, it's about 20% lower per market rate. What I can tell you is that the the the distinction between market rate and affordable has maintained
055true over time. In other words, affordables are giving out more kids than a market rate unit. What has changed is the absolute magnitude value of those multipliers. Um the values that I just mentioned from Ruckers. Um I'm not seeing those values anymore in a three-bedroom affordable unit. A lot of times they're lower. And I work with a lot of communities across the state. See, you don't really have that many um units for us to take a look at in terms of comps, but there are you have pure place, but you can see that was around 0.9. Um but you know in overall we're finding out that yields are lower across the board whether it be market rate or affordable because people are delaying births. That's really the biggest thing. Thank you. Any other board members
056with questions? I want to start out with a comment. This is probably maybe the somewhere between eight and 10 demographic studies I've witnessed in presentations and uh Dr. Grippy had done a great job on on all of them. I mean all the data, all the projections and everything have been pretty much right on the money and um you give us a lot more information than we've ever gotten on the previous studies. So, and this is very timely too because we had a uh very robust building and grounds and finance committee meeting recently and um we spent a lot of time probably most of the time discussing the uh expansion opportunities and considerations that we have to do. So, this will certainly be the foundation of of doing that. um including the uh we're using the
057words facility expansion now for um the second floor at uh the annex across the street. So it's uh very very helpful. One question I had though, since when I first joined the board, um, we were pushing to put up a a middle school, which didn't go over too big with the public to begin with for a lot of reasons I'm not going to go into tonight, but um, we had in that time period a super flood here in town and a, uh, recession or slow down in the economy and next thing you know the uh student count started to go down and we had quite a few houses uh re bought out by FEMA and knocked down and turned into uh vacant land. So in all your studies and I'm thinking right now the uh
058recent LA uh fires that they had out there were just uh destroyed communities. Um, have you ever done any studies or any information out there on what the attrition of the population and the school enrollment would be if you had a uh significant variable that uh just damaged a community. Uh you think about the tornadoes in the Midwest and again the fires and also the hurricanes and wind storms in Florida and down the Carolas. Another great question. Um, so this brings us to what the difference is between a projection and a forecast. So we did enrollment projections and a lot of people use the word projection and forecast interchangeably, but in the scientific world they're not the same. A projection is saying that we're going to use all the variables that have happened in the
059past and assume they're going to continue into the future. A forecast is what you're talking about. What happens if there's a pandemic? What if we have um a housing shortage or you know what if we have a change in the migrant policy like we're seeing? So if you throw in all those different variables, what all those whatifs? Um that's a forecast. We don't do that kind of thing because it's just too difficult to really numerically model something like that and it can be all over the map. Um so we're doing a projection which is more or less looking at uh looking in the rear view and seeing how things have occurred historically and projecting that same type of trend going forward. Thank you. You're welcome. Great. Um Dr. Grip, it looks like we have uh
060no further questions. So, on behalf of the Dville School District, I want to thank you for your time and your um analysis here. So, we have a lot of data to start going over and um planning for the future. So, thank you for all your work. You're welcome. Thank you very much. Okay, proceeding on uh with the agenda. Well, the next item will be superintendent comments. Dr. Forte, that was a lot, but I think it was uh informative and um I think it's, you know, something that we really need to do. So, I'm really glad we we did that. Um few uh comments here. I have um the persons of the year will be awarded next week. Our our uh persons of the year will be as a community member Jeff Barnes. Anne Stark Riverview
061secretary is a staff member and our student of the year is Si Mononttoya Canales. And I did have the pleasure of meeting with them or on the phone for one of them and uh all of them were surprised. It was a really nice day. Definitely a top 10 moment for me. So it was uh it was great. So really looking forward to presenting them with their awards on Monday next week. We have people from the PTA and from the uh from the uh foundation coming to help with that. And um we bought some gift cards for them and it should be a nice night. We had a staff appreciation day ne last week for our team. Um we s Dr. Kas, myself, some of the other central office administrators all uh sponsored a day at
062the Denver Bagel store for our staff, which we've been doing for the last few years. It seems like uh it's it's a wellreceived thing. Um don't forget we have a half day on Wednesday. We did we we are doing a pedestrian safety class before it on Wednesday for the middle school. And as usual, I reminded the uh the police in downtown Dville that the um student there will be several students, especially if it's a nice day, walking from Valley View down to um downtown in Gardener. Memorial Day break is May 23 through 27. And the letter went out to the public for fifth grade re-registration. That's the typical thing we do every year. It's in our policy for every student that's a rising sixth grader. they must reregister um to prove residency um every every
063time they go from fifth to sixth grade. And uh that's the superintendent's comments for today. Great. Thank you, Dr. Forte. Assistant superintendent comments. Yes. Kindergarten registration update. As of today, Lake View 71, Riverview 74, 16 students are in the flexible attendance zone with the total registrations at 161. uh correlated to the projections that we just saw today uh was 182. So we're 21 short of that. So we'll see how the next couple of months pan out. Uh the Valley View band concerts tomorrow night at the Valley View gym and NJSLA then View has wrapped up their testing. They're just doing makeups and there are seven more regular testing days for Riverview and Lake View ending May 22nd. That concludes assistant superintendent's report. Thank you, Dr. Cullis. Business administrator comments. Okay, there are no comments. Uh,
064it is now this time to open it up for public questions or comments. So, uh, if you have, uh, a matter regarding the agenda or question for the board, please come up to the microphone, uh, write in your name and address and state your name and address for the board. Uh, and we'll go ahead and honor any questions. If you happen to be online, uh you can go ahead and raise your hand in the um Google Meet and we can uh unmute your phone or unmute your connection and you can make your question and comment there. All right, public comments was open at 8:29. Uh, seeing no one come up to the mic or no one online raising their hand, we'll or uh we'll go ahead and close it at 8:29 p.m. on to old
065business, no action to be taken. Mrs. A Dallas, can you walk us through that, please? I sure can. Um, at the next meeting, myself or someone else will go through the following old business or resolutions for under old business. uh the reports from April 2025, the education reports for April 2025, and the minutes for April 2025. Great. Any questions or comments? Next item is new business action to be taken. Mr. Capello, if you can walk us through personnel, please. I'd be happy to. Uh if there are no objections, um under new business personnel, I would like to move items 1 through 7. Um, I'm going to call out uh change number one uh C for uh Tensky Carol. Uh the hourly rate should be 5673 instead of 37.82 and the uh not to exceed should
066be $170.19 instead of $11346. Everything else remains the same. I'll second. Thank you. Questions or comments? I want to congratulate the teachers who are moving on the salary guide. Congratulations. Roll call, please. Dr. Moore. Yes. Mrs. Zidellis. Yes. Mrs. Asterino. Yes. Mr. Cass. Yes. Mr. Capello. Yes. And Mr. Kim. Yes. Instruction and program. Dr. Moore, if you will, please. Uh, yeah. I'd like to uh move for approval the following resolutions under instruction and program. Under item number one is a uh retroactive um online course transporting students with disabilities event. And for item number two, it's the uh title three consortium purchases for Minehill, Rockaway, Rockaway Burrow, and Riverdale. I'll check. Thank you. Questions or comments? Roll call, please. Dr. Moore, yes. Mrs. Zidellis, yes. Mrs. Asterino, yes. Mr. Cass, yes. Mr. Capello, yes. And Mr.
067him. Yes. Under governance, there is nothing on the agenda. So, we'll proceed with finance. Mrs. Adelis, can you walk us through finance since Mr. Anderson isn't here today? Happy to. Uh, I move to approve the following resolutions under finance. Uh, one be resolved that the board approve the agreement with best of you therapy to provide home instruction, bilingual therapy, monilingual evaluations, bilingual evaluations, speech OTP at the set hourly rates, and two, that the board retroactively approve the following afterchool placements for the 2024 2025 school year as per the students IEP. I'll second. Thank you. Questions or comments? Roll call, please. Dr. Moore, yes. Mrs. Zidellis, yes. Mrs. Asterino, yes. Mr. Cass, yes. Mr. Capello, yes. And Mr. Kim, yes. Under operations, there's nothing for this agenda, so we'll proceed with new business. No action to
068be taken. Mr. Capillo, can you walk us through what we'll be voting on next meeting? Absolutely. Uh, yes. At the next meeting, I or someone else will be moving items under personnel, including new hires resignations. Uh number one, uh we also have uh currently item number two to approve the updated list of staff for the ESY uh Dville Accelerated Learning Academy and the Child Study Team CST for summer 2020 uh sorry 2025. And uh that the uh board will approve a uh leave of absence uh for an employee. Oh, on uh sorry, it said it's in two parts. Um that will uh yeah, receive the uh approve the receipt u receipt of the doctor's letter and approve the leave for the same employee. Any questions or comments? Dr. Moore, can you walk us through IMP,
069please? Sure. uh either myself or someone else at the next meeting. Uh we'll move for approval the following resolutions under instruction and program under uh item number one is uh a workshop uh 2025 New Jersey Association School Business Officials Conference. Item number two is the um approval to uh eliminate the multiple disability special class program at Lake View School. Item number three is to approve the establishment of a learning and language disabilities moderate mild moderate special class program at Lake View. And item number four is that the board would approve the attached list of field trips for 2425. Questions or comments? Uh yeah, I was just wondering if uh uh Dr. Forte or Dr. Cullis could uh mention a little something about the elimination of the multiple disability special class program. Sure. We used to
070have limited options of what a preschool class could be called. So we only had one category and many of our our techniques and students fall really under a learning and language disabilities program. So we are eliminating the class. This class will still be in place but it will be properly uh titled the learning and language disabilities and appropriate curriculum and instruction methodology will be in place for that particular group of students. So the class isn't disappearing but it is renaming and to appropriately allot the uh necessary curriculum needed for these particular students. I also put a folder in the uh next agenda. If you want to look at the board docs, there's explanations of everything in there, too. Thank you for that. Any other questions? Okay. Under governance, uh we'll be voting on three policies.
071Uh policy 5842, equal access of student organizations, which is a new policy. policy 8110, attendance areas, and a revision to policy 0155, the bylaw for board committees. That will be second reading and adoption. We'll also be approving the attached comprehensive equity plan for 20 uh 2025 to 2028 school years and the 202526 comprehensive equity plan statement of insurance. Dr. Forte can uh is that years correct for the comprehensive equity plan? It's a three-year plan. Yes. Okay, great. Thank you. If there are no questions or comments, uh, Mrs. A Dallas, can you walk us through finance? Happy to. Uh, either myself or someone else for we'll walk through the following resolutions under finance. We will discuss the contract awarding the contract for architectural services to EI associates. Um we will discuss the the resolution awarding contract
072for legal services for board attorney. Uh for Clary Jacob Alfie Jacobs uh also we'll just be discussing the resolution to award contract for legal services meth Vessel and Worbble as well as the board ask the board to approve the resolution for contract auditing services for Nova Scot Novasia. Sorry we always say that wrong. We should learn how to say that. Um, as well as discuss the the Denver Township Board of Education approved the award the contract for social behavioral health services with St. Claire's. Um, as well as board of education of the town of Denver to renew, award or permit to expire the contracts previously awarded by the board of education. Um, we will also discuss the ri uh donation of $3,472 from the Riley family um for and the MKHS boys lacrosse team as
073well as approve the the budget for 2025 2026 of 38,84,12 um with the monies being placed in the treasurer of school monies um as stated within the agenda. Uh that's it. Thank you so much. questions or comments. Mr. Cass, operations, please. Right. At the next meeting, we have some items for transportation. I'm going to ask the board to retroactively approve the following school bus emergency evacuation drill. We have it at Lake View May 7th 7:50 a.m. Riverview April 10th at 8 a.m. and at Valley View April 23rd 7:15 a.m. Buildings and grounds. I'm ask going to ask the board to approve the attached service agreement proposal for for the building and automation system from automatic temperature control services in the amount of $12,36. Item 2.2 Two is to approve the attached quote from Hillberg Contracting
074LLC to repair and paint several exterior sections of the Lake View building in the amount of $15,647 to be paid from capital reserve. 2.3 that the dental board of ed approved the attached quote from cash for landscape management for the district landscape maintenance services for the upcoming school year 2025 2026 and on Thursday April 29 2025 attending end the board of vacation received one response to its advertisement seeking quotes for grass cutting and fall spring cleanup for the period of July 1st 2025 through June 30th and that was from Cashman Landscape Management at a quote price of 42,000 at $89.71. And I always when we talk about the maintenance of the grounds here, u we certainly had a big turnaround on the outside of our buildings when Cashman was put on board. These local demo
075residences, I'm sure his daughter is uh out of our school system by now, possibly out of high school, but they do just a phenomenal job and it's uh made our job easier, too. we're not have to worry about it all the time and complain. Thank you, Mr. Cass. Any questions or comments? Okay. Uh, next item on our agenda is for the good of the cause. Committee reports, correspondence, discussion items such as board meeting highlights and other topics germanine to the district. I have my highlights. Um, how's Dr. Gri's presentation? Um, a reminder that the persons of the year will be announced on at the board meeting on May 19th. And also on June 9th, we have the 2425 goals recap and the 2526 goals setting. Sounds good to me. Uh, good of the cause. Um,
076I want to thank all the students for an really excellent uh trips demonstration on Thursday last week. I got some really cool stuff. Um, just a lot of talent and a lot of time and effort put forward by the students and the teachers and the parents of course who all had their Venmos. I noticed it was all parent Venmo, so it's helpful. Um, but I do want to congratulate them on a job well done. I know a number of them sold out of their items um and even were taking orders for more items. So, um they should be really proud of of the accomplishment that they've that they've put forward and the effort that they put forward. Um on Saturday, I was able to attend the delegate assembly for the New Jersey School Board Association.
077I have the handbook here if anybody would like to take a look. Um, we did elect new members for the New Jersey School Board. They'll serve a term of two years. Uh, we did vote uh for three different resolutions. I'm going to go through them really quickly because I know it's late. Um, the first one was a new policy to include intercolastic competition for esports, which I found very interesting. Um, obviously it doesn't really affect us too much. It was about uh carrying a varsity letter for esports in high school. Um, but I did vote for it. Yes. Um the the argument was that you know although these uh students are um you know in a room on a computer, they're still marketing, they're still communicating with each other, there's teamwork involved and these are
078things that these children are able to do um where they're not and they don't need to be an athlete. They don't need to be in a field somewhere. So for them to letter in esports it was in the affirmative. It was a 90% to 10% in the affirmative. So uh the second resolution was for school nur for school nurses. Um it was um uh the issue was that it is difficult to recruit nurses. So they wanted to decrease the amount of education primarily to to get new nurse nurses in. They wouldn't be required to have a bachelor's degree. They could have a nursing degree like an associates and then 15 hours of school um credits, right? Um it was a tough cell in the room. I will tell you that um there were a number
079of individuals there with nursing degrees who who did not agree with this. Um it was fought after, but it was 51 in the affirmative to 49. So it was very close. Um what the concern was that they were watering down the position and not providing enough training for individuals to be in the school. But you know what the important part with this resolution is that it is a resolution. It is a conversation starter. So it is not something that we are writing into policy anytime soon. Um it would have to be approved on a state level. So there's a lot of different steps. This is just literally a conversation starter. So that was the second resolution. And then the third one was um excusing attendance um using um allowing state excused absences for students who
080were going into the trades. When you go into the trades, you have to do uh interview and even testing and usually that's during school hours. Um so rather than have them not have an excused absent for that, we did vote in the affirmative 96% to 4% um for a student to have an excused absence for the trade. And obviously we are K through eight. Our children are not going to trade you know interviews. Um but I think it was an important conversation to have and and and for them to provide that resolution. Um and that is the results of the delegate assembly. Again if you want to take a look I have the handbook here. And um I also will just mention that if we ever want to put in a resolution we do have
081a March date of of entry. So in the future, I did I didn't add it to the governance, but I will add it to the governance calendar so that in the future if we do want to add anything to um start that conversation, we we do that. Thank you, Andrea. I really appreciate you um going to that. So um that was really important. Thank you. Any others? I just wanted to give a quick shout out Saturday at the Riverview PTA through their annual fun fair and it was phenomenal. It was so well organized. The events were great. the carnival games. The kids really had a great time and it was really interesting to see that um so many of the families that attended were parents of incoming students. So they brought their kindergarteners for next
082year to become familiar with the building. Teachers were there doing glitter tattoos. Um so it was just a really really fun day. Great. Thank you. Go ahead. Uh Mr. Cass, I do have something going back to April 23rd. I virtually attended the uh New Jersey Council unfunded mandates presentation at the Garden State Council of Schools and the speaker was Victor R. McDonald who's on the council. So nothing really new or shocking, but he did give a very comprehensive historical overview of what they do and how long they've been around. So it was I'll just highlight a few things. Governor Whitman started this when she was the governor and um it evolved out of requiring the legislature to fund state mandates. You know, they have these mandates as we've all discussed previously and they don't fund
083them. So, it eats up your budget for the municipalities as well as the the various school boards throughout the state. um it's now part of the constitution and they consider themselves the fourth branch of the legislature and they have uh nine members uh six are appointed by the governor. So um Whitman uh lost one of the uh mandates with for radon testing back in 2000. He was requiring mandatory radon testing and not providing funding for it. Uh so that was a a big one. Um 2007, Governor Cororsine wanted to reduce the special education co uh requirements from age four to three that was struck down by the unplanned mandate council. And uh 2012, Governor Christie uh had the anti-bullying legislation. That was another unfunded mandate that didn't didn't fly. So the legislature always has the
084option of funding it. So they do sometimes and they had about 25 challenges in existence. Um so it's a uh I guess it's good thing to have. I don't know how proactive they are going through the bureaucracy but it was an interesting presentation but again nothing earthshattering they had on the front burner. Thank you Mr. Cass. Uh I just want to uh finish this up by saying that uh I just be like maybe two hours before our meeting I sent out the minutes for governance committee. So I apologize to the board members for um delaying that release on the minutes. Uh but to summarize what we discussed during our during our meeting uh back in April we approved a resolution that um challenged the government about the impact of the housing developments that would have
085on school districts. uh and challenge them to try to do better, try to uh help us help the small districts um and to understand what the challenges are with the school districts. Uh and so I I sent out a letter uh email to uh Mr. Andes and Dr. Forte also helped me get a list of legislators. So my next steps are to type a cover letter and to send out that resolution to all the legislators um that that we deem as important uh to hear this. Uh we also during our last meeting in April, we had a brief discussion about HIB. So we continued our conversation during the governance committee and um and we're going to be looking at a few policies with regards to that um and possibly take a look at some letters
086that are being sent out to the public. So any questions feel free to reference the minutes or reach out to any of the committee members regarding those topics. Okay. Uh moving on to um oh before I proceed no other comments or questions u by the board. Great. Uh we'll proceed with the next item on the agenda which is to open it up for public comments uh for a second time. It is 8:50 p.m. and uh open the comment sections is now open for the public. Dr. Ford, do you see anyone online? Okay, seeing no one online and no one coming up to the microphone, we'll close open com open open comments to uh at 8:51 p.m. Uh I believe there's no need for an executive session after this. Correct. So, can I have a motion
087to adjurnn? I'll make the motion to adjurnn. Second. Thank you. All in favor? I. Any nays? Absentions? We are now adjourned at 8:51 p.m. Thank you everyone.