October 9, 2025 - Clifton Board of Education Meeting

001Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the October 9th general meeting of the Clifton Board of Education. Please rise for the flag salute and the pledge of a flag salute and a moment of silence. Thank you. 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. Thank you. Roll call please Mr. Shahada. Ms. Batchford? I'm here. I'm also having Wi-Fi issues. I can't log in. Mr. Brunsiak? Here. Mr. Canova? Dr. Danny? She is present. Mr. Mejia? Here. Ms. Siano? Here. Ms. Suarez? Here. Vice President Santiago? Here. President Paris? Here. We have a quorum. Thank you. The mission of the Clifton School District in an open and reciprocal community partnership is to provide all

002students with a quality education to develop the skills necessary to become literate lifelong learners who are responsible and productive citizens contributing to a democratic society in an ever-changing world. The New Jersey open public meetings law was enacted to ensure the right to the public to have advanced notice of and to attend the meetings of public bodies at which any business affecting their interest is discussed or acted upon. In accordance with the provisions of this act, the Clifton Board of Education has caused notice of this meeting to be publicized by having the date, time, and place thereof posted at the city clerk's office, Clifton Public Library, administration building, Senior Citizen Nutrition Center, on cable TV, in the local press, on the district's website, and mailed to presidents of parent-teacher organizations. This meeting will be recorded in

003accordance with Policy 0168. Is our student representative Jenna here? Welcome. This month's report is... Mr. President, microphone. She needs to turn the microphone on, Mr. President. You're doing great. Start over there. Great. Good evening. My name is Jenna Alnator and to those who I haven't had the pleasure of meeting yet this I'm this year's student representative to the Board of Education This month's report is rather short However, I can say is an indicator that everything has been so far running smoothly Now some updates is that the Student Council Association has been making videos exemplifying the PBSIS school-wide Expectations that has been featured on the morning news in an effort to further the program at CHS The Student Council Association will soon be hosting office hours available to all CHS students to give feedback, comments, and

004concerns. Some upcoming events are Senior Sunrise, which is being held tomorrow at CHS, the Open House on the 21st, the Homecoming Dance and Game held the 24th and the 25th, and the Halloween Extravaganza on the 29th. As of right now, everything has been running smoothly, and we are working to have our busy month of events run smoothly as well. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Jenna. We have some presentations this evening. We will start with an introduction of some very special people. So I welcome Ms. Ragosa. We need to mute. Paul, just give us one second, please. It's on the computer, Matt. All righty. Let's see where we're at here. Good evening, everyone. Let's see. Good thing this is so well. We are very excited to be here today. My name is Paula Raygoza,

005and I'm the PBSIS District Coordinator. And tonight, with Ms. Jessica Tremble, Supervisor K-8, and Ms. Myrta Lopez, Counselor at CHS, we are super thrilled to present the next step in our Team Chewy journey. And if you'll just give me a sec, because I hope I have the right password. Here we go. All right. So we're super thrilled to be here tonight. This is a huge thank you to commissioners, to central office. We are thrilled. So here we go. This is for Ms. Kusilevich and Mr. Gingaro in particular. Not so long ago in a galaxy very close to home. Our galaxy of Clifton, one leader cast a vision. That leader was Mark Gingaro, assistant superintendent of schools. Like a true Jedi master, he foresaw the power of bringing a therapy dog into every school. Guided by

006wisdom and purpose, his vision set in motion what would become one of Clifton's most impactful and inspiring initiatives. At his side was Chewbacca Cooper Duke Barbus J. Charles Major Garrow, also known as Chewy, the original Clifton therapy dog who helped prove that vision could transform classrooms, calm students, keep them in the least restrictive environments, and lift an entire school community. From that spark, the pack grew. Teddy, Kobe, and Solo joined Chewy, expanding the mission and spreading comfort and connections across Clifton. What began with one dog became a movement. This journey has thrived because of the support and belief of the Clifton Board of Education. Thank you. And our central office leadership. Thank you. Tonight, that vision enters its next chapter. We celebrate where we've been, share what we're doing, and proudly welcome the newest members

007of our pack. This is our newest team. And here's where we're going. So where have we been? The journey so far, we've been everywhere. We tried to be really cute with the Star Wars theme. A big nod to one of our fearless leaders. So our pups go everywhere. Kindness challenges, behavior booster events. We teach behavior. We teach academics. The Chewy team is out there. with paws up ready to give high fives whenever and however. Reading Strikes Back, great reading initiatives backed by Chewy approved on MyOn platforms. We also have our pups at the JROTC. We also have our pups building relationships one student at a time. But that's not all. Our pups do many more things like classroom visits, and they carry the notion that the force of gratitude is strong with our staff. Our

008pups are very excited to hear our young learners read to them as well as go out on the path in our Clifton community by visiting mental health, our mental health forums, and or... going with our safety patrol students to Washington, D.C. Not to be too chipper about this, but we must, because the return of the party is real. What Mr. Marc Gingaro and Chewbacca... Cooper, Scooper, I always get it wrong unless I'm reading it. What they have done is impactful beyond what we could have ever imagined. Our therapy program has become a vital support as we've stated before. And so each request for our dog is made through our electronic system, which tracks when, where, and why the dogs are used. This allows us to schedule equitably, capture feedback after visits, and document the positive

009impact on classroom behaviors, on classrooms, individuals, and overall school climate. So during the 24-25 school year team Chewy has made a significant impact across Clifton Public Schools offering meaningful support to students staff and the greater school community our four therapy dogs participated in a variety of activity activities heavily focusing on individual student needs With over 430 visits, these one-on-one sessions often complemented counseling efforts, reading programs, and student support plans. In addition to individual visits, the PUP supported students through 73 small group sessions that focused on social-emotional learning. These groups provided opportunities for students to practice key interpersonal skills, such as using soft hands when interacting with the dogs and taking turns. all while building peer relationships in supportive settings. Team Chewy also made frequent classroom visits where handlers educated students about the role of therapy

010dogs in schools. Staff wellness was another key focus, where the dogs participated in district-wide wellness days, attended team meetings, and made informal visits during preps and lunch periods. And lastly, beyond the classroom, the pups were active in over 40 school events such as career days, student assemblies, and PBSIS pep rallies. The team also made special stops at community focused programs like Touch a Truck, the Girls on the Run, and various sporting events. Whether providing comfort, motivation or simply a friendly tail wag these numbers clearly show that team chewy continues to play a vital role in fostering a warm inclusive and emotionally supportive school environment throughout the district So with nearly 700 visits across the district during the 24-25 school year, the need for additional therapy dogs became clear. The success of cohort one, training with

011Joanna from sit and stay, inspired the launch of a second cohort. This time involving staff members who already have dogs at home. To participate, dogs were required to demonstrate basic obedience skills, such as responding to commands like sit. stay, and come, as well as maintaining calmness and comfort around other dogs and people. The training also introduced the dogs to various medical equipment, including wheelchairs, canes, walkers, and crutches, and focused on mastering multi-step commands, which in turn will prepare them for the official therapy dog responsibilities. following the success of cohort two plans are already underway for cohort three specific details and requirements will be shared in November Joanna will continue as the trainer yet this time around she will guide dogs through a three level program puppy kindergarten, basic obedience, and then the therapy dog training.

012This structured approach will allow dogs to develop essential skills from a young age, ensuring they can follow commands, remain composed in busy environments, and confidently navigate medical equipment. So we're super excited to announce that Clifton Public Schools is launching Team Chewy Spiritware. To make this even more special, we're inviting students to participate in a district-wide art contest. Students are encouraged to submit their own creative designs, whether it's hand-drawn, painted, or digitally crafted, for the chance to have their artwork featured on Spiritware for both staff and students. A big thank you to our talented art department for partnering with Team Chewy to bring this initiative to life. One winner will be selected from each grade level and all submissions are due by Friday, October 24th. Contest details have been shared with families via Peach Jar and

013distributed to staff by email. It's going to be cute. We're pumped. And now it's time for our big reveal. Let's give a warm welcome to our new Team Chewy members who will bring more warmth, comfort, and support to our students and staff. Please put your hands together for Doug, our two-and-a-half-year-old mini golden doodle, his handler, Heather Hall, an inclusion teacher from CHS, and Rocky, our four-year-old pug, and his handler, Megan Fitzpatrick, the AP of School 14. We're thrilled to have Doug and Rocky on board as they join our dedicated team of therapy dogs in supporting the emotional well-being of our students and staff across the district. Let's go. That's fantastic. Very exciting. Very exciting. Yeah, we're taking a picture. Yeah? Yeah. Take two. Okay, thank you. I have no Wi-Fi. I can't get in. I

014did. I did. I did it twice. I did a sign out and everything. Nothing's working. He has it on me. I guess we're not invited. Are we getting in the picture, Mr. Buzio? I guess we should be invited too, right? Hi! Hi! Hi! Okay, ready? Big smile. One, two, three. Hi! Let me do one more. Ready? One more. There we go. We're both, both dogs looking straight. One, two, three. Awesome. I hope you all got the pitbull reference. You know? What's that? Is that what you had to do tonight? Log in and out? No. Sometimes I have to do that. I don't understand. I don't know how this happens. This is the fourth time I'm going in and out. It happened to me like... two meetings and i i started to get one of those

015extra chromebooks that were there yeah i can't circle in it's been doing this since we started if you don't mind i did yeah twice three times four times i couldn't tell you what just happened in the meeting mouse well it's It's hard to follow that up with our board committee reports, but we're going to do it. We'll start with policy. Minutes from our policy committee meeting. Please, Commissioner Suarez. Thank you, President Paris. The policy committee met on September 17th. Present were myself, Vice President Commissioner Santiago, Commissioner Mejia, and President Alan Paris. For administration, Mr. Shahado is present. Policies that were reviewed and discussed, NJAC 6A and 23A, fiscal accountability, efficiency, and budgeting procedures. The lines that were over were Duties of public school accountant was revised. And that was P0173. Item two was P0174, legal

016services, that was revised. Item three, P0177, professional services, was revised. Item 4, P1570, internal controls revised. Item 5, P1620, administrative employment contracts revised. Item 6, P6111, special education Medicaid initiative program revised. Item 7, P6220, budget preparation revised. For general policy and regulation updates, item 1 was P0143, board member election and appointment revised. Item 2, P1636.01, notification of promotion, new job and transfer opportunities, that was new. Item 3. P 1648.15 record-keeping for healthcare settings in school buildings for through COVID-19 that was now abolished item 4 P 2422 Statutory circular, excuse me, statutory curricular requirements revised. Item 5, P5117, inter-district public school choice revised. Item 6, P5339.01, students on protection was new. We also had sign policy. We also discussed sign policy rather. The committee discussed concerns regarding signage and agreed to continue working through the committee

017to identify possible solutions. It was emphasized that board members are not authorized to remove signage as such actions fall outside the scope of their elected responsibilities. For item three, Board of Education leadership roles, the committee discussed establishing a prerequisite of one year of board experience to be eligible to serve as vice president or president. The committee was unanimously in favor of this requirement. And lastly, we discussed formal notice of leadership position. The committee discussed requiring board members interested in leadership roles to submit in writing both a statement of qualification and a letter of interest. The committee will further investigate practices in other districts to guide implementation. And that concludes the report. Thank you. Any questions? Commissioner Brunsiak. Yeah, about the BOE leadership roles. Why not make it two years or three years? Where does the

018one year come from? We're elected by the people by the people of the city, right and then You know the first the Rio at the reorganization meeting we make Somebody makes a motion for somebody to become a president or vice president, right? So where does the one year from I don't understand this why not two years? Why not three years? Yes So it was just brought up in the committee and we just thought one year just to get it here for you guys to discuss It is a board It would fall under a board bylaw so you guys can make it four, five, six years. Tell me what you guys want to do. I mean, it doesn't sound very inclusive at all. That's my issue with this. So if the people, again, if the people

019vote for you, right, if the people vote for you, again, you know, your peers are the ones that are making nominations and voting for leadership over here. It was discussed the reason for that is so. somebody has knowledge of governance and understanding the role of what a board member does, that was the genesis behind it. So it's not trying to be discriminatory towards anybody, it's just- But it absolutely is discriminatory by definition, right? No, I wouldn't say it is. President Paris. Yes, Vice President Santiago. One of the things that was discussed was instead of like two or three years, the one is, as we know, if you don't complete your mandatory training in the first 90 days. They have removed people actually for that. So it's mandatory or else you cannot continue to be a

020board member. So that's the one year, right? It was really thinking about that mandatory training that you need to have in order to be a board member, to continue to be a board member. I just wanted to comment on the one year. But you meet the minimum requirements, you get the governance one in within three months. There's still no issue here, right? So that's my issue here. What do you mean? If you get the training in time, you abide by whatever the rules are of being an elected Board of Education Commissioner, right? Yeah, I guess just for the purpose of this policy that was brought by the board to the committee is. So people whoever it is has that governance training and has an idea of the roles and responsibilities It's not somebody walking in

021on January 2nd this year. I think that's our reorg with no training. No nothing and You know that goes for any district prison Paris. This is one moment. This was a discussion Commissioner run shack. It's not a policy that we're voting on at this point It was a discussion amongst the committee Should we impose some sort of requirement of at least one year experience on the board for somebody to hold an officer position? Rather than having a new board member without any kind of experience in even participating on a board, all of a sudden in a leadership position. It's not policy yet. It was a discussion that we're having We haven't at this point the committee hasn't decided to bring it yet before the board for Implementation as a bylaw for us, but that's where

022at this point President Paris if I could jump in on this one. I agree with mark on this one Commissioner It's discriminatory at its finest. It doesn't really matter if we were elected by the people. If we as the board choose the president, we as the board make that choice, it doesn't matter how many years it is. I don't agree with that policy. So you're going to say somebody that went on city council for six years that decided to come over here and we decided to vote them in as president, they're not going to be qualified, they're not going to go to governance? President Paris, if I may. Go ahead. So city council. City Council and the school board are two totally different entities. You missed my question. Well, you're talking about... If somebody was

023on City Council and they came in... Just because you're on Council doesn't mean that you're experienced, right? You could be the mayor and come here, and if you do not complete your continuing education, mandatory in the first 90 days, you could be elected president and you will be kicked off. Kelly Mitchell, our rep, and we know this, if you don't complete it... you can be kicked off whether you're the president, whether you're the congresswoman before you came here, right? So that's all I wanted to mention. Because when we spoke to the legal about this last time, there's no other districts that do this either. Kelly mentioned that there were some that are also discussing it. Yeah. Again, it's just something that we would be putting on ourselves as a requirement, as a team. If we

024decide this is something how we want to move forward, fine. If not, that's fine as well. Yeah. At this point, again, it's an idea. It's a discussion. Commissioner Suarez. Thank you, President Paris. And I think, you know, the... To continue the point of it being a discussion, I think those are the stipulations that if we decide to move forward that we would make, right? Because in this conversation, I brought up the point, if someone else was a board member in a different district and has moved here, they would have experience or something like Commissioner Canova who had the experience and come up. So that would be up for discussion and points to be made such as yours. As a team, we get to discuss if we even implement something like this, what would be the

025stipulations that we as a team would say, okay, this person could be qualified. I think, you know, and when we met with our representative Kelly a few weeks ago. We all came to the conclusion that when you're elected as a board member and you come in, there's this assumption that you can make so many decisions that we can't, right? I think as a team, we collectively agreed to that. So I think with that understanding, we were all humbled at some point in this position to be like, oh, I can't make these decisions without my eight colleagues ahead of us. So it's just really trying to... Humble, right, the position and understanding of what it is to be a board member, what it is to understand Clifford's Board of Education and the administration. And really just

026a point of discussion. And insofar as it being discriminatory, I'm just curious as to why discriminatory. I think it's discriminatory against people who don't have experience, but aside from that, I don't know how else that would be discriminatory. If you can please clarify that. Mr. President, may I? Yes, Commissioner Besser. I'm sorry, Mr. Hewitt. I just want to quickly touch base about the policy for the banners. I believe we mentioned it before. We were going to reach out to the individual, see what the inappropriate item was on it. Just so that we can go back and review the banners, see what it was. Yeah, that was my only question. If we have a follow-up, because it was supposedly inappropriate. I didn't see it, but I thought somebody said at the last meeting it was like

027a bar or something like that. The fireworks? I wasn't there at the fireworks, I couldn't tell you, but I think that's it. Thank you. The original discussion. I'm sorry. He's working on my computer. I'm kind of flopping in the wind here. I'm not used to paper after all this time. Just read all the old paper. First of all, if you serve on the state level, you have to at least be a certified board member or master board member. You have to have those certifications to actually serve on a higher level. Okay, that's number one. If you're going to go deep into restricting people for being on years, then maybe we should look at certifications as well. If that's what the committee is going to think of because having your certifications is really important because that

028means you have mastered those actual and you have obtained those levels to be in a higher rank. So I think maybe it should go back to committee. I am not for limiting anyone because like Joe, Joe had a gap year. That's what we're going to call it, right, Joe? A gap year? And why not? It was a gap year. What if somebody that was a long time ago wanted to run again and comes back after 10 years? But they're not in tune to all the changes that go on in governance and school board. Thank you, Mr. McCartney. Thank you so much. School board matters. Then you hold that against them as well. I don't think it's appropriate. I don't think you can limit what the voters want. The voters put us here. There's only three

029mechanisms that can take us off. The voters. The SEC and the Commissioner of Education, period. That's who can actually take a board member off. So why would you be limiting somebody that got elected by the people, for the people and of the people, to serving that role? They go 90 days. If they don't go 90 days, then somebody can serve them with papers and tell them to leave. You're of the people. And I agree with Mr. Brunsiak, which is kind of odd right now, but I agree with you. Yeah, it has really nothing to do with the election. to the board. This is the election of a board officer is done by the sitting board members. It's not done by the public. So the question, the discussion really came up around do we want to

030have some kind of minimum requirement or experience. to do that. That has nothing to do with... No, I get it, Mr. President Harris. I want the public to think somehow we are usurping their authority. We're not doing anything with the electing commissioners here. But the board does select its own officers. Right, and some boards rotate the opportunity so everybody gets it. That's one thing they do. Some boards have top vote getter. gets it right away just like the city council does there's all kinds of mechanism all over the state if we sat down and analyzed it we'd be scratching our heads for three years trying to figure it out i just think that it's worked this long why why fix it okay yes commissioner yeah mr president um and i realize it's not a policy

031so i don't want to belabor the issue here but um i don't in my point of view we have nine people up here If it's the choice of those five people that they choose someone that has more experience because that's what they have in their heads that that person sitting in that seat should have, then so be it. If it's just a communication value, then so be it. Those five people, nine were chosen by the people. So of those five, if five rise up and they say whatever it is that is the value that they think they should see in that commissioner, that's what they put there. So I would... i would lean on the side of my colleagues here and say that i don't think we should touch this at all really okay thank

032you anyone else i have one other question um for the revisions on there were there actually revisions to these policies because they say revised i i didn't i didn't get any revisions they were they were all mandatory policies as i recall right um yeah yeah is there any way to see the revisions versus what they were um they're on straw sesame i can get you a copy if need be thank you Yes, Commissioner Brunson. Yeah, regarding this number four, the formal notice, I don't even know what that means. You know, if the president asks for interest in whatever committee and the president assigns it, I'm okay with that. If they don't assign it, we'll build the bridge and get over it. I don't know what this is, formal notice of leadership position. Like, do we

033have to write a dissertation or something? It looks kind of vague, you know? I am qualified for this because so-and-so, you know? I think that was... That was mentioned in the committee and I'm talking way too much, but I guess nobody's going to chime in. So I think, Tony, you want to get this one? You were there. Help me out. Thank you. So this was just saying your interest in a leadership position because oftentimes we all were new. You don't know everybody. You may not know anybody. And so here is submitting your interest to either be president or vice president, not qualifications, but your interest and why so that the board can consider that. Pretty much. Am I right? Again, it was a discussion. Thank you. Commissioner Suarez. Dr. Danny? President Harris? Yes, go right

034ahead. You got the floor, Dr. Danny. Yes, I just want to say that I think, you know, I've been on, you know, the longest with, you know, with Fastford. And, I mean, I have to say that I think, you know, the board is always, I don't think the board would choose somebody who just came on first year. I mean, all the time that I've been there, it hasn't happened. And I do think that, you know, the person, let's say, you know, did have like, you know, a gap of three years or a gap year or something and then came back and they had been a president before. So I don't know if, you know, the one year, I mean, I see where everybody's going with this. But again, like I said, I just don't know

035that. At this time, you know, I would be for limiting because I think we've always worked it out as a board. We've always chosen somebody, and there never was somebody who was, like, first year. And that's all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you. I got one more question. Yes, Commissioner Siena. Thank you. Just to go back to, out of transparency, I'm the one who brought up the idea for the formal leadership position, and it was for what President Paris explained. I know... I remember clearly being here for the first time, trusting the process but not really knowing much about those who were here. So it's really just, and again, this is all in discussion, and if we ever decide to make it a real thing, we as a team get to discuss what

036that looks like, and we get to discuss the process and what's required. So it's really just an idea at this point. But with the intention being for everyone, who is potentially new and we've been lucky the past couple years it's not been a huge turnover just to simply state what would you like and potentially like a sentence or two why it doesn't have to be very elaborate but the intention behind that was to allow for new members to understand who is up and what they're about. Thank you. I don't know. Maybe I'm not getting it. Would you be willing to hold your comment? Oh, presentation time? Yeah, let's do it. We're waiting for timing here. We have a presentation that we skipped because we needed to try to do around 730, so is that okay?

037I'll give you floor time once we get done with that. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Ms. Kusilevich is getting the floor. Mr. Paris, I'll start off and I'm going to turn it over to Ms. Kusilevich, and Mr. Fouts is going to get the technology set up. Good evening, members of the Board of Education and one Clifton community. Tonight, we have a presentation from an organization that we've been working with called Educators Thriving. Through our labor management collaborative, which I believe the entire board is aware of, we had a presentation here in the spring. We began working with this organization whose sole goal is to help educators build sustainable, fulfilling careers through strategies that promote wellness, resilience. And the first thing that we did in order to kind of see where we're at was we did an

038extensive survey last spring. of all of our current staff. And this just wasn't a like Google survey with a few questions. This was an intense scientifically backed survey which Educators Thriving staff will share with you tonight the results of that data. The idea behind the survey was to better understand our staff's experiences, basically to see how we're doing and to identify areas for growth. Tonight, you'll hear what those findings were. You'll hear how those findings are already shaping, how we are working to create a stronger, more supportive environment for our staff. And it's pretty simple to me. When we take care of the people who take care of our kids, our students thrive. So I will ask Janina to do the formal introduction to our special guest tonight. Ms. Kusilevich, thank you. We'd like to

039welcome Dr. Hallie Fox from Educators Thriving. This program... is a joint venture for us with NJEA, NEA, our local CEA, as well as Educators Thriving, in order to really get that heartbeat and pulse of how our educators are doing, and then to be able to provide supports. So with that, I'm going to turn this over to the amazing Dr. Fox. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. confirming that this is visible for everyone in the room good to go dr fox wonderful so i am hallie fox head of research at educators thriving i'm going to be sharing the results of our spring survey data with clifton educators we as an organization exist because we believe that every educator can and should experience well-being and reach their full professional potential and work in a

040system that makes this possible So we work towards that in two main ways. The first is by providing personal development to supplement professional development for educators in a wide range of settings. We have done a few sessions in Clifton specifically district-wide to give them some strategies to manage their own personal well-being. The second thing we do is work with school and system leaders to think about how to make system-wide or site-specific improvements through continuous measurement and strategy related to staff culture and experience. Today I'll be talking about the measurement specifically. When we define educator well-being, what we are talking about is a holistic construct, something that includes both foundational supports and responsive leadership and supportive culture, the things that really contribute to the work environment and the resources available to educators. These two key areas

041explain over 50% of the individual educator workplace well-being experience, so are really important when we're thinking about how people are doing across a site or system. And there are a number of other key individual mindsets and dispositions that are also correlated with high levels of overall workplace well-being, job satisfaction, and retention intentions. Things like being adaptable, having a strong professional growth, orientation, and maintaining that sense of personal well-being alongside professional responsibilities. This tool we developed in partnership with the American Federation of Teachers, and it is entirely educator-generated. So all of the items on our survey we developed through over 100 hours of focus groups with educators in a wide range of roles and regions nationwide. We tested those items statistically to understand what specifically predicts educator well-being, and these are the items that Clifton educators

042participated in during this spring process. As Janina mentioned, this was a partnership between our organization, NEA, NJEA, and Clifton. So we also included a few items around the extent to which staff are experiencing labor and management collaborating, both at the district level and at the school site level specifically. So I'll be giving a high-level overview of the trends that we observed district-wide according to well-being, as well as some of those items around labor and management collaboration. The intent of this tool is to understand that baseline how staff are experiencing their jobs in order to identify evidence-based and feasible priorities to respond to with appropriate site level changes, structural changes, or professional development and gather feedback along the way. We hope that principals and district and union leaders use this tool to continuously drive improvements across

043their systems. This spring we had an outstanding turnout across the district. This was a real effort between district and union leaders to encourage everyone to participate. We heard from nearly 1,500 staff representing 21 different sites and departments and a wide range of roles district-wide. So the results that you will see here are an aggregate. It's an average of all of those nearly 1,500 responses. However, each school site principal and their building representative have a set of their school specific site data but today we'll just be talking about the district-wide trends in general the scale that we use for every item on this survey is from one strongly disagree to six strongly agree and in general higher correlates with higher levels of well-being the exception being depletion this is a leading indicator of burnout and is

044the one area where we would hope to see lower levels of agreement This is an average across each of these key factors for Clifton. Clifton represents this blue circle and our national average from the 24-25 school year is this small white circle. What we observed in every single domain was that Clifton is significantly outpacing educators across the country. Most notably in the category of responsive leadership and supportive culture, our Clifton educators were at least a standard deviation ahead of the national average. That is quite significant. This average of a 5.0 corresponds with nearly every item on the survey, respondents mostly agreeing or strongly agreeing with those statements. Certainly, there are variances in terms of people's direct school site or their role, but in general, this was a really encouraging number to see across an entire

045system. In these other categories, Clifton slightly outpaces our national average and is experiencing similar but slightly lower levels of depletion as compared to other educators. We also asked about overall job satisfaction and job stress on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 indicating low satisfaction or low stress, 10 indicating high satisfaction and high stress. And what we saw was that job satisfaction was significantly outpacing job stress. This is really encouraging. We are not necessarily expecting job stress to be a 1. Education is an incredibly demanding job and tends to have high levels of stress. However, educators are also reporting very high levels of job satisfaction. When we looked at this across roles, we observed that certificated staff, those are predominantly teachers in classroom environments or certified counselors or service providers. reporting slightly lower job satisfaction

046as compared to other roles in the district. However, school site administrators and district administrators are reporting slightly higher stress as compared to other roles in the district. A few bright spots, areas where we saw very high levels of agreement across district and school level data. The first was that the vast majority of educators do plan to stay in Clifton. Nearly 86% agreed or strongly agreed that they plan to work at their school or district for at least five years. There is a very high level of trust at the majority of school sites. 84% agreed or strongly agreed that their administrator has told them they trust me to do my job. and a very high orientation to develop professionally. Over 90% agreed that they continuously try to grow as an educator or professional. We also wanted

047to call out a few areas for exploration. These were items on the survey where we observed notably lower levels of agreement as compared to other items within Clifton's data set. I will share that as compared to national averages, these are still significantly higher than what we see elsewhere. However, within Clifton, these did represent areas where we saw lower levels of agreement. The first was around communication. About half of educators agreed or strongly agreed they get the relevant information they need in time to plan from district leaders. The second was around an indicator of school level psychological safety, the extent to which educators feel that they can share challenges with one another without being judged. Two thirds of staff agreed with that item. And finally, the area around student discipline processes and procedures. Just two-thirds agreed

048that their school processes are fair. A number of short answer responses also indicated that student behavior and support is an area that they want to continue to see progress towards. As I mentioned previously, we also asked about foundational supports. These are resources outside of the individual educator or even the school level climate, but really thinking about the resources available for educators to do their jobs well. These had lower levels of agreement as compared to other areas on the survey. This tends to be the case. None of these items nationally are ones where we see high levels of agreement, but still worth noting. 41% agreed or strongly agreed that they have the staff they need to adequately meet student needs. Even in cases where schools are fully staffed, many educators still share that they would benefit

049from having additional support staff, mental health providers, school counselors, paraeducators, to really allow students to meet their needs. 21% agreed that their compensation is adequate for the work they do. And 36% agreed that the professional development they are offered meets their needs. This is a snapshot of items in the responsive leadership and supportive culture category. As I mentioned, each school site received their own report with their school staff specific data. What I think is really encouraging here is how strongly people agreed with most items on this level of the survey about their school site principles. People are reporting very positive perceptions of leadership and school culture across sites within your district. We also saw very high levels of agreement in terms of equipped educator mindsets and dispositions. While the job is demanding and can be

050stressful, educators are reporting high levels of adaptability, growth orientation, personal well-being, and acceptance. As I mentioned, depletion, although slightly lower than the national average, there are still certainly areas of concern as we think about the degree to which educators feel exhausted or used up by their job. This survey was administered in the spring, so we know that at that point in the year, people tend to report higher levels of exhaustion. However, you can see here the majority of educators are sharing that they are experiencing depletion to some degree. As this was a partnership between NJEA, NEA, Clifton, and Educators Thriving, we also asked about perceptions of labor management collaboration. This included questions about school site level collaboration as well as district-wide collaboration. This has been a strategic effort across the district and what we observed

051in the data was that staff both at their school site and at the district level are perceiving that their representatives and supervisors or administrators are working together on shared goals. This was really encouraging and suggests that there are a lot of structural elements in place that allow collaboration to happen and that staff are perceiving that they are working collaboratively together. We also asked about retention intentions. We observed that the majority of educators do intend to stay in education and within the district. However, when we asked whether or not you agreed if teacher and staff retention is a priority in my district, fewer educators did. We saw a gap in terms of educators' intentions to stay and the degree to which they think retention is a district-wide priority. This is a gap we see across districts,

052and it is smaller in Clifton, however, still worth noting. We looked at a number of subgroups district-wide. Our threshold for sharing subgroup data is at least five or more respondents answering the same way, so that no one could somehow be identified through the survey data. Just sharing a brief overview here when we looked at averages by role categories. We did observe that non-certificated staff, so classified staff, are reporting similar levels of well-being and lower levels of depletion. We also asked everyone to identify how many hours per week they are allotted for collaboration with their colleagues. And what we observed was that as educators reported more hours to collaborate, their well-being improved. So educators reported either zero, one to two hours, or three or more hours. And you can see higher levels of well-being across all

053of these domains and significantly lower levels of depletion, suggesting that when educators have more time to collaborate with one another, their workplace well-being improves. We also asked if you short answer questions to understand a little bit more about the context behind educator experiences. We hosted a few focus groups among educators as well to dig into a few of these key areas. When we asked what do you love or appreciate most about your school or district, these three themes were most widely represented. Making a difference in students' lives, relationships with colleagues, and a number of comments that directly acknowledged and appreciated school site leaders. When we asked what would encourage you to stay, the most frequently cited answer was compensation, followed by student behavior support, support for students with IEPs. There were a number of staff

054who referenced their current schedule, particularly at the elementary level, a desire for greater input on learning opportunities and career growth pathways. and a number of references related to workload and time to actually complete the demands of the job. When we asked what else you would like to share about your experience in the district, a number of individuals specifically referenced the efforts towards labor management collaboration, feeling that it is really making a difference in the work that they do in Clifton. Others referenced desire for more authentic parental and family involvement. administrator visibility having more touch points between central office and school based roles and at a few sites space constraints and facilities were specifically named finally we asked what is one way labor management could be improved at the elementary level scheduling was an ongoing concern

055others recognized that while their district level labor management collaboration is very aligned School site collaboration can vary. Most have very positive perceptions, but did note that sometimes it was different across sites. Others had suggestions around ways to continue to gather staff perspectives. and hoped that information like this survey, for example, was shared back, that there was an opportunity to close the loop. So we are doing just that. We have been sharing the data back with site-level leaders. We had open meetings for educators across the district to hear the results of the survey or watch a recording of the results, and of course, sharing the results publicly here today. Finally, as I mentioned, we looked at labor management collaboration and wanted to share a few of our very brief preliminary results from this particular research study.

056We surveyed five districts nationwide as part of this exploration of labor management collaboration and well-being, and what we observed was that Clifton perceived high levels of collaboration at both the district and site level that were significantly different from those who did not report labor management collaboration at either district or school site level. That correlated to significantly higher levels of job satisfaction, as well as higher likelihood to promote the school or district as a great place to work. We also observed that higher perceptions of labor management collaboration were strongly associated with more positive perceptions of foundational supports, and responsive leadership and supportive culture. This data has lots more in there. We have every question broken down by response categories, as well as additional subgroup information. This will be shared more broadly, and with that, I am

057happy to answer any additional questions that might come up this evening. But thank you for your time and for the participation in this survey. Dr. Fox, Danny Robertuzzi here. I don't know if you can see us. We can see you now. Can you see us? I can't, but I can hear you clearly. Wonderful. Dr. Fox, first of all, thank you for being here tonight and sharing this information with the board and the community. I have a couple statements and a couple questions, and then I would sincerely ask our Board of Education Commissioners to ask any questions you might have about this data. The first comment, so to speak, is just ask, is this accurate to say? What I heard you say, Dr. Fox, was even in the areas where our numbers were a little low,

058where there was low agreement, it was still significantly higher than what's going on nationally, than the national average. Is that accurate to say? Yes, that's correct. And is that a statistical difference? I know in the one area you said it was a standard deviation. I know that's really significant. In the other areas, was it significant? Yes, Clifton is reporting significantly higher levels of responsive leadership and supportive culture, as well as those other key domains. We just released our national 2024-25 well-being report card, which I will make sure you all have in your hands. And you can see where others fell nationally. But when we look across the country, areas that were low in Clifton were significantly higher still than what we see nationwide. That's wonderful news. Dr. Fox, is it true? I didn't hear this

059from you. Somebody told me that when Educators Thriving first ran the data, you thought there might have been a mistake, that you had to run it again because the data looked so good. Is that accurate? Yes, I will share that anecdotally. We do see individual school sites as outliers within districts. So we might have a particular school site within a broader system where they are reporting. very high levels of well-being, responsive leadership, and supportive culture, but I have yet to see a system wide like Clifton where people are reporting that high level of well-being and responsive leadership across so many sites. So I did have to double, triple check. The data that I shared is in fact accurate and it is, Clifton is an outlier. Again, that makes me very happy. And then my question,

060and then I'll be done, I think. How reliable is this data? How reliable is this information? Or is it possible that we got these results by chance? With the numbers of survey respondents that took this, you all had nearly 1,500 educators across your system participate. It is hard to believe that that would be by chance with such high numbers of participation. This was predominantly done during school site meetings, but not all of the data was collected then. Many people took time beyond that meeting to complete the survey or complete it on their own time. We strove for 80% participation across the district and we just about got there. And with that high level of participation, we can feel very confident that people were answering about the ways that they truly feel about their experience in

061Clifton. As leaders, whether that is at the site, district, or union level, you do tend to hear from people who are perhaps frustrated or looking to problem solve. And this survey heard from everyone. So even those who might not necessarily actively participate in decision making or through the labor management collaborative opportunities, we did try to reach as many people across a wide range of roles and every site in your district. I think that's the lesson, Dr. Fox, that I learned from this, that too often I think we focus on what we hear about the negatives and then we kind of forget that it seems that the vast majority of people, while there's certainly a lot of areas where we can improve, it seems that the vast majority of people say this is not a bad

062place to work. So at least that's, and that makes me very, very proud that we're doing something, we're going in the right direction. Dr. Fox, thank you so much. I'm going to turn it over to our Board President, Mr. Paris, to see if the Commissioners have any questions for you. Thank you again. Thank you, Dr. Arpitosio. Thank you, Dr. Fox. Commissioner Mejia. Good evening, Dr. Fox. My name is Richie Mejia. I have a quick question on the participation. I know we clearly saw it was about 1,400. Was that after the melt of the total amount of participants and then the ones who completed the survey completely? Or is that the total amount of surveys that people started? I believe what we have is survey completion. So in our participation by subgroups, we ask subgroups at

063the end of our survey. So it ensures that people are actually getting through the survey in order to respond to those questions. We had close to that number, if not more, complete the demographic section. So I don't have the raw data in front of me, but based on the demographic table here, we have 1,400 people who completed the survey. Could it be that more might have started it but then never completed it? How many people started and didn't complete it? Yes. I can probably try to pull that up. It might take me a moment to do so. Dr. Fox, if you get me that information later, I can share it with Commissioner Mejia. Sure. Thank you very much, Dr. Fox. Commissioner Suarez. Thank you, President Paris, and thank you, Dr. Fox. This is really informative.

064I was just curious if there's any qualitative data to support our quote-unquote good scores and then our concerning scores? Sure. Yeah, we had a lot of people respond to those qualitative short answers. The themes that I referenced are in terms of what you appreciate most, specifically making a difference in students' lives, collaborating with colleagues, and leadership support. a number of comments that specifically acknowledge school site administrators in terms of things that they most appreciated about working in Clifton. That typically does not emerge as a bright spot or something that people directly call out when we ask that question. So when we ask people, you know, what you love most, certainly we expect students, usually we expect to hear something about colleagues. But we definitely don't see people directly acknowledging, my principal makes this a really

065warm and supportive environment. I feel trusted to do my job. They really encourage me to develop. There's just a lot shared in terms of appreciation for administration. The areas of opportunity, the things that we heard people call out definitely aligned with what we saw in terms of some of the lower survey items as well. Things like student behavior support, that was the second most cited area in terms of what would encourage you to stay. A lot of comments just sharing that is continue to evolve in terms of systems and practices, both in terms of responsiveness and discipline, but also mental health and behavioral support that's available. So that did emerge as an area where people are still looking for improvements and want to collaborate along since it directly impacts people's workplace well-being and ability to

066do their jobs. Some of the other items around workload, for example, correlated strongly with high levels of depletion and feeling like there's a lot to do and never quite enough time. So that is the reality of being an educator in our public school systems. And there's also a lot that we can do in terms of supporting people with strategies to help better manage their well-being, manage their time. And we've seen specifically with the data around collaboration, when people have more time to work together, the work might not feel as challenging as it does when you're doing it alone. Thank you, Dr. Fox. And my other comment was just for the community to We've discussed this throughout the year. It's just important to note that our teachers, the need that is coming across that they need

067staff members to be supported so they feel supported as the collaboration piece was really important. 41% of our teachers have said that they don't feel adequately supported. So that means the majority of our teachers would like more support and compensation and that's a little plug for just. thinking about how to best support our educators throughout the district particularly when they need compensation and our time to make moves to do so but thank you so much dr fox thank you anyone on this side of the days well i understand i'm sorry i've been concentrating there i'm flipping here for spreading it around anyone here anyone on this side have any questions I do just have one is this a baseline and then we're gonna now take this and follow this the years of year over year

068to come and start to look at this data and see how it emerges and my other follow-up question to that is if we are going to do that are you taking any of that data and then analyzing it and saying of all the schools when they change this sort of a thing this outcome presented and then share that feedback with all the schools that are involved in this Sure. So we do have a number of district partners that we have worked with over time. So we're using this as an annual indicator of how staff are experiencing their workplace. And in places where we've seen really intentional focus in terms of responding to the data, we have seen shifts over time. This includes at the school site level where principals are using this data to understand

069their staff experience and making Direct changes in the ways in which they gather feedback, provide support to their educators, check in with people, think about decision making structures. When principals take that effort initiative to respond to the data, we've seen significant differences year over year at the school site level and in districts that have done that as well. It depends on the size of the district, of course. In places where we have 15 to 30 schools, there might be opportunities to have more alignment versus places that are larger. But we have seen that when people use this data, respond accordingly, and use that continuous improvement cycle to make change. improvements are possible and Clifton is starting in a very strong foundational place and that takes a lot of effort it's taken a lot of effort

070over time to get to that place and we'll take effort to maintain Commissioner Bastry yes thank you Dr. Fox if you were a school board member what would two priorities be for you for action based on this report what would two priorities be for Clifton based on this report Yes. So I think the two areas in terms of what some things are feasible, some things are out of our control. I think nationally what I'm seeing now are a lot of concerns around compensation and staffing. Some of those things we do not necessarily have a lot of. availability to make many adjustments in terms of what we can compensate given rising costs with health care etc and difficult to find or fill positions even when we have positions that are cut so when I think about

071ways that perhaps there are more opportunities to improve or we can think about existing structures and people within our systems continuing to think about student behavior support really comes to mind I am also a former special education teacher and administrator, so thinking about ways to support those students and educators through more collaboration, both within special education and also across special and general education. Those two areas, they sometimes go hand in hand. The other opportunity that might be worth digging into is thinking about professional development and career growth. People are reporting that Clifton is a great place to work. How do you make sure that continues to be the case so that people are excited to grow professionally and feel like they can do so within the district? So two main areas, student support, really thinking

072about behavior and also students with special needs, and then thinking about professional development and career growth. Thank you. Vice President Santiago. Thank you, President Paris. Dr. Fox, thank you very much for your time and presenting and doing this and the administration. I'm really excited to see this. I've been involved with basically employee engagement surveys, that kind of thing, satisfaction surveys. And we just finished one in our company right now. We're working on action plans. So really great to see this, to take a pulse, see how our employees are feeling, the environment, where we can. where we can improve. But my question is on that on actions. We have this data now, which is great. Is is there a part of this or is this on? I'm sorry, put you on this on the time. Is

073there, you know, action plans that are going to come out of this, um, to to affect change? I'm not sure if I'm the best person to answer. Dr Fox, I can jump in on that. Oh, and then perhaps turn it back over to others who are leading the work in the district. But this project came from the labor management collaboration efforts across the state and so the first step was sharing this with the district-wide collaborative and then replicating that process at the school site level so that school site collaboratives can take their data and think about what specifically they want to act on and change so my understanding is that that is step one was to share the data back, make sure that there is that collaborative structure in place to think about how to

074respond, and making sure that what leaders select as the area of focus actually aligns with what everyone agrees is the area to focus on. And so I think... At the site level, there are definitely similarities with what we're seeing district wide, but there are some differences based on. Age groups, for example, what we're seeing in Pre K versus high school, not necessarily. The same similar, but different, um, and can certainly probably turn in the district to share more about the ways in which this data is informing. Priorities. Dr. Fox, thank you for that. I'll jump in too, just with a broad overview, Mr. Santiago. As a result of this data that we received over the summer, district level we began working immediately with some action plans which actually were closely related to our strategic plan

075of which we have actual goals on the agenda tonight but really the first month of school has been about sharing this data at the sites making sure everybody's getting the same message but As you're kind of alluding to, if we don't do anything with this data, it doesn't do anything. So I can tell you confidently that the plan is to utilize this data to enhance our practices and not rest on our laurels and say, oh, everything's good and we put it away and just keep doing what we're doing. Certainly areas that need to improve. Even as Dr. Fox said, there are some things that are... She didn't use the word impossible, but some people might say impossible to find more money and hire more staff, but maybe there are things we can do if that

076is a significant issue here in Clifton. But in short, action plans, lots of work to be done, and we'll use this data, as Mr. Canova mentioned, kind of as a baseline and go from here. And I hope that a year from now, we'll see improvements in the areas that- hopefully in all areas but at least in the areas that were lower thank you president paris yeah good dr danny yes uh dr faust uh thank you very much um that was comprehensive i did want to ask something about the um the five year that they at least want to say was it um five years like i mean that's Could you expand a little bit more on the, you know, is it everyone that was surveyed was saying five years or more? Do you find that

077to be typically a high number in these surveys that you have done? Sure. So we asked everyone, do you plan to stay in pre-K, 12 education for at least five years? And then do you plan to stay in your school or district for at least five years? And we thought in, you know, in many places, we see that people do intend to stay in education, but perhaps have lower levels of agreement around staying at their school-sited district. And in Clifton, it was nearly identical, suggesting that people want to stay in education and they want to stay in Clifton. This excludes people who said, NA, I will be retiring within the next five years. So people who know that their plan is to exit because of... you know, career transition to retirement. But in general, we

078observed very high percentages in terms of intentions to stay and intentions to stay in the district. We used five years of threshold. This represents a high level of commitment to the profession and organization. We don't have actual retention and attrition data to correlate this with, but retention intentions at least suggest that people do plan to stay and they want to stay in Clifton. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Danny. Ms. Kusilevich has some comments she'd like to make. I just wanted to share how we're already using the data. So on the professional development day at the beginning of the school year, we... had educators providing a presentation on overcoming obstacles and goal setting. We will have two more workshops from them on time management and on conflict resolution and communication, all of

079which were areas that were addressed in the survey. These were all the topics where those were kind of voted on by the staff. which we'll be providing for our staff members as part of a choice option. Additionally, as Dr. Robert Hosey said, each school received their site-based data. Their local building-based labor management collaborative team will be looking at their school-based data and addressing those areas as a school-based collaborative team. Thank you, Ms. Kusilevich. Commissioner Mejia. My final question is going to be, It looks all great and I know we're going to implement that within our school district and finding the elements that we should be tackling. Is it eventually going to hit the IRB? Did our research go through the IRB? Yeah. We are not an academic institution and so this research is optional. It's

080a collaborative between the NEA and Educators Thriving. So our data will not be eligible for submission to a journal publication, for example. Its intended use is really for practitioners, for you all across the district to understand how educators are experiencing well-being. So it will not be used in a formal research publication or submitted. to a peer-reviewed journal article. All righty. Thank you so much. Vice President Santiago. Last question. Dr. Fox, one of the data points that just stuck with me was stress. I think it was satisfaction, and below it was stress. It was like 6.2 or something like that. I don't know if you have the data now. We can get it later on. I'm just curious how that compares to the national average, if that's like a profession thing or where we are in

081that. Yeah, I can certainly share our national average, not at this moment. I don't have it off the top of my head, but we typically see that satisfaction and stress are much closer together. So job stress is higher, satisfaction is lower. Nationally in the 24-25 year, that's what we observed. And in Clifton, we saw higher satisfaction as compared to job stress. So we're not necessarily looking for satisfaction to be at a 10. and stress to be at a one um but we are hoping that satisfaction is higher than stress and that is the case in clifton thank you okay thank you dr fox much appreciated okay i think we are dr fox thank you have a you you dismissed we really appreciate it and i'm sure we'll be seeing you real soon Thank you all.

082I will be there in November for one of those PD sessions. You didn't tell everybody where you're at tonight. Tell everybody where you're phoning in from. I live in Vermont, so just a few hours north of you. But share a time zone. God's country. Thank you, Dr. Fox. Have a great evening. Thank you so much. Thank you. We're going to change our agenda order a little bit this evening, and I apologize to any members of the public who are here for recognition time tonight. We normally like to get to you by 8 o'clock, but... We only had so much of dr. Fox's time here. So we appreciate your patience This portion of the meeting is open to the residents and non-residents of Clifton for the purpose of addressing any subject matter Pertinent to and are

083directly related to the operation of the Clifton public school district Residents and non-residents are requested to sign the register provided for this purpose and to state their names addresses and subject matter Comments are limited to five minutes per person Issues raised by members of the public may or may not be responded to by the board. All comments will be considered and a response will be forthcoming if and when appropriate. The board asked that members of the public be courteous and mindful of the rights of other individuals when speaking. Specifically, comments regarding students and employees of the board are discouraged and will not be responded to by the board. Students and employees have specific legal rights afforded by the laws of New Jersey. The board bears no responsibility, nor will it be liable for any comments

084made by members of the public. Members of the public should consider their comments in light of the legal rights of those affected or identified in their comments and be aware that they are legally responsible and liable for their comments. Matt, do we have anyone online in the waiting room? We do not this evening, Mr. Paris. Thank you. Motion to close. Okay, motion to close by Commissioner Mejia, seconded by Commissioner Runciak. Anyone here would like to approach our table for public recognition? All right. Seeing no one, motion to close. Motion. Second. Motion to close public session by Commissioner Brunciak, seconded by Commissioner Mejia. Okay. We're going to get back to, we're going to go in reverse here a little bit. Ms. Kusilevich has one last presentation for us this evening, so I'm going to give her

085the floor to complete that. Good evening, commissioners. I forgot that I swore to myself I was going to get a podium down here so that when I'm presenting, I could stand. I know the presentation is long. Unfortunately, this is the statutory presentation that must be done a set number of days after state test scores are released. And I had hoped to do so in November, but our November meeting is exactly the next day after the deadline expires. So therefore, we need to do this tonight. However, because the presentation has been shared with all of you, I'm just going to do a very high-level overview of each slide. So hopefully we'll be able to move more quickly than usual. So this is our mandatory overview of our state assessments and as well as our local assessments

086and district highlights. We'll be looking at the NJSLA assessment, the DLM dynamic learning maps, our local assessment data, as well as district actions. NJSLA is a mandatory assessment of language arts and math in grades 3-9 for language arts, 3-10 for math, as well as end-of-course assessments in 8th grade for Algebra 1, as well as Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra 2 for all students. It is assessed on a 5-point scale. And you can see that in language arts, the vast majority of our students perform at levels three, four, and five. We see the same thing for math. Most of our students performing at levels three, four, and five, with a notable exception of algebra two, the majority of our students are levels four and above. And our science data does spread across all four levels. When we

087look at our students comparing them to themselves in each year at each grade in language arts, we tend to see students who stay in Clifton performing and improving their performance year over year. And we see similar performance in math. Here's a link to resources for parents and these were sent to parents together with their individual student reports. The dynamic learning map is an alternative assessment for our most severe special needs students. Only 1.5% of our students can actually count as proficient in this area, even though we may have more than 1% of our students who need to take this alternative assessment. But that's part of the federal regulations under the ESEA Act. This assessment also looks at our most severely challenged students in the areas of language arts math and science. It is a hands-on

088performance based assessment and what we see here is that most of our students are performing in the approaching at target and advanced range. Now this is the information that I think is much more telling because those assessments were one day in time or a short period, a glimpse, a snapshot of student performance under high stress situations. When we look at our local assessment data, we're looking at our student growth, working directly with the curriculum that we're teaching, the instructional tools our students are familiar with, and we can see much more realistic growth. in our student performance. What we see here first is in Language Arts for Kindergarten. This is our Fundations unit test data. At the beginning of the year, only 35% of our students were meeting expectations for kindergarten because the material has not

089yet been taught. We then see a jump after the first unit to 88% of our students, showing that they are reading at what is expected typical grade level for kindergarten. And that growth continues. There's a slight dip when we get to unit three, but we continue by the end of the year. with our students holding steady in the 80 percentile of students reading at grade level. In first grade, we see a bigger jump and students holding steady throughout the school year, where anywhere from 82 to 91 percent of our students are reading as expected in each unit. In grade two, we see the same thing with a slight dip in units four and five as the material gets more complex and students are beginning that process of not so much learning to read, but beginning

090to read to learn. And finally, we see very steady growth holding steady through all of third grade. Our star reading assessment is the assessment that overlaps with foundations starting from second grade through fifth grade. All of the green and blue shows that our students are exhibiting strong foundational reading skills and able to read for literature purposes and reading informational text with fluency. We see similar strengths at both of our middle schools. And when we look at a cohort analysis of the overall growth for our students by the end of the school year, this is year over year. We see our students going from grades two through three, three through four, four through five, and then all grades showing improvement and growth. We see similar at our middle schools. But we pulled out Christopher Columbus specifically

091because they showed a very significant increase at each grade level and all grades in their reading focus this year. But when you look at the full district down below for both middle schools together, you still see that growth, but Columbus really stood out last year. We also measure our students' independent reading. In K-2, our students use the RAS Kids program. Grades 2-8, they're using MyOn and Accelerated Reader. Measuring our student independent reading, last year our students K-8 read 518,558 books. That is a 57,000 book increase over the prior year. One of the things that is supporting this initiative are the book vending machines, which we link to our PBIS reinforcement system. With the expectations that students have paper books in hand and it's through the generosity of the board that we're able to refill those

092vending machines with high interest books for our students. Our main highlights are our structured phonemic awareness instruction program, which meets the new standards that you'll be hearing about with this new legislation on early literacy and that is the Fundations Program. We show steady growth across all grades in K through eight in reading. Our teachers continue to receive support from our literacy coaches. We do structured foundation study groups to support our teaching staff in the ability to provide these interventions as a universal instructional expectation to teach foundational literacy skills. This is our book circulation and you'll see that in elementary and middle school or is it there's a significant increase in book circulation in our media centers from the 23 24 to 24 25 and although the high school had a slight dip we added a

093Vending machine and now a second vending machine up at the high school So students had more access to books just in their own hands not even needing to go to the media center We also see that at the high school level, students do tend to read on their phones or e-books. Now we're moving into our local high school assessments in English language arts. We went from 87% to 88% of our students passing with a 65 or higher on the writing quarterly. In 10th grade, there's a bit of a dip from 90% to 85%. In 11th grade, we held steady at 97% proficiency of students reading, passing the quarterlies. Forgive me, they're not quarterlies. They're now common assessments, whether 65 or higher. And the same in English 4, 12th grade. Some of our highlights in the

094English department at the high school is that on our standardized tests at the high school, our students outpaced the state growth average. We went up by 3% while the state average went down. We're also making a shift at the high school. We're moving from English, a standard English 1, 2, 3, 4, to 10th through 12th grade, having interest-based courses to increase our independent reading and student engagement with topics like sci-fi, literature through film, edge-of-your-seat thrillers and pop culture. And, of course, there's that book vending machine we talked about. You can see here that 9, 11, and 12, we have some steady growth with a little dip in 10th grade, which we're hoping that these interest areas will address this year. Now we shift to math. In math, K through 5, over the course of the

095school year, students showed steady growth at every grade level from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. When we look at a five-year longitudinal growth, we also see steady growth in every grade level, where our students are either maintaining or increasing their overall averages year to year. In grades six through eight, for the school year marking period one through four, we also show steady growth in most areas, and the same with our longitudinal data over the course of five years. Our data for math shows that our students maintain in the early grades, but growth does slow as you get to the middle grades, primarily because the math content gets more complex. In order to address this, last year we piloted a program called Do the Math, which... identifies the data-based gaps

096that students are showing in their math skills and is shifting our BSI program to address those gaps. Our math coaches continue a highlight hour practice program to support our teaching staff. We have increased the touch math multi-sensory math program in more self-contained classes and for more classifications of student. And we continue to leverage our adaptive math, imagine math program. In Algebra 1 at the high school, we went from 53 to 59 percent of our students scoring 65 or better. In Geometry, we did have a dip from 67 down to 46 percent. In Algebra 2, 67 to 68 percent. We believe that these dips are because we shifted from the quarterly construct to What were called common assessments and clearly we need to do some better alignment with our common assessment questions and our pacing guides.

097So that's going to be a project. It was already worked on somewhat this summer and it's going to continue to be a project this year. Among our highlights have been the coaching we've been providing for our staff as well as tutoring for students after school. And when you look in the math department at some of our AP courses, for AP computer science, 73% of our students scored a 3 or higher on computer science principles AP, and 53% scored 3 or higher on computer science A. In NJGPA, our students increased by 7.1%, whereas the state only saw a 3.3% increase. And finally, our scores went up by a four-scale score, while the state only went up by one. We now shift to our Imagine Math data. This is where our students work on an adaptive program

098beginning at the beginning of the school year throughout the year. And you can see it's a very clear and steady growth from the first benchmark to the third in grades K through 8. We have been participating in a study with Imagine Learning for the past three years and the data that has come out shows a strong positive correlation between the use of the Imagine Math program and student achievement on both local and state assessments. That means students who pass 30 Imagine Math lessons are showing an average 10 point increase on NJ SLA over those students who do not pass those lessons. And what did we wind up doing with our Imagine Math? Our students completed 439,000 lessons over 11, almost 12 million problems. You know they for those of you who've been monitoring this over

099the last few years our students earn points that they can either use as avatars or in this gamified program to keep it more engaging but Clifton's kids can also convert those points into charitable donations and last year our students raised four thousand dollars over $4,000 to local and national charities. Instead of using those gamified points just to make it more fun for them, they used it to donate to charity. In science, our biology quarterly results again went from, here we have 72% in the previous school year to 81%, 71% to 83% for biology honors. In chemistry, the shift was 77% to 82%, and in chemistry, it was 82% to 85%. Physics went from 67% to 72%, with physics honors going from 91% to 94%. Our main science highlight is that our mechanical Mustang's first robotics

100team were the tri-state champions in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. We finished ranking number 50 out of 4,500 international robotics teams. Our mechanical Mustangs were semi-finalists at the World Championship in Houston, and Krista Nahas won the first Dean's List Award. In our science AP, we saw a 100% increase in the number of students who took the biology AP, a 60% increase in the number of students taking the environmental science AP, and 80% of our students scored three or higher on the AP chemistry exam. In history, we see the shift from 85 to 71%, 69 to 73%, and 66 to 82%. And our mock trial team had a really great year. Finally, I'm moving into our district actions. In our district actions, we're using this data to improve instruction on a regular basis. As we indicated

101earlier, We made some shifts in curriculum. We saw that it was it's there are some now misalignments which we are now using that data to improve those alignments But the biggest thing that we've been doing over the past couple of years in terms of supporting our students, we know that our students have changed. We know that they are having increasing amounts of anxiety, less ability to focus and attend, and many more challenges with emotional regulation. That is having a direct impact on our classes and on the numbers of special education students across our district. And this is not just a Clifton thing. This is a nationwide phenomenon. So what are we doing to address that? We've spent the last couple of years trying to integrate our multi-tiered system of support. So we have our district

102leadership, our staff, and the labor management collaborative working to create a clear step-by-step model to provide supports to our students. So what does that mean? It means we're taking our tier one, two, and three supports from the... former intervention and referral services for academics, the counseling program for social emotional learning, and our three-tiered positive behavioral supports in schools program into one unified system using the LinkIt platform. The point of this is to simplify the data collection for our teachers so that they can more readily, easily, and quickly identify interventions to support our students in the least restrictive environment of the general education classroom. Our streamlined MTSS, I'm just going to show you some of the examples. We have our interventions. which are universal, so green are universal interventions. That means these are interventions already built

103into everyday instruction that should be servicing 85, it should help be successful for 85% of our students just being in the gen ed class. Then you have about 10 to 15% of our students who need that additional support. That's the secondary tier. That's things like basic skills instruction, working with a reading specialist, and so forth. And finally, we have our tertiary tier interventions. We have an illustration of our specific interventions at the high school. as well as the social-emotional interventions provided by counseling and behavioral interventions done by our counselors. Then we have our positive behavioral supports in schools universal tier, secondary tier, and a summary of all of the interventions that we have available at this time in the district, and that's available on your screen for you to look at. And with that, do

104you have any questions? Thank you, Mr. Gustavovich. Commissioner Brunciak. Yeah, so you got this pilot program. So what is it? You do it at one or two of the grade schools or the middle schools or what? So we have multiple different types of pilots. The do the math one specifically. The do the math pilot was last year that was only at a few schools. But this year we've implemented it district wide. So the pilot was successful. We saw success. So this year we're rolling it out to the entire district. What was used in its place before that, prior to this? So before that, basic skills is going through an evolution. Basic skills has primarily, for about the last 20 years, been primarily inclusion in the general education classroom, usually twice a week for about 20

105or 30 minutes for math. And the teachers would initially just provide support in what was called the one teach, one support model. We slowly shifted. to center based supports so what that meant was when we were in our basic skills classes we made sure that the basic skills teacher for the most part was able to go in during math time, during center time, and the BSI teacher would man a center supporting what's going on in the general classroom. Whatever the topic was that day is the topic they would use. And that was kind of the underpinning philosophy for basic skills so they wouldn't miss what was going on in the class. What we piloted with Do the Math was using this program to target which kids have what kind of a gap. And then group

106those children into that center. And then for a series of 20 to 30 lessons, they would focus on where their gap was when they were in their center. While everyone else was in other centers. So they would still, they wouldn't be missing instruction, but they would be getting something specific to them. So that was the difference. It's a shift of how we're providing the service. and using a specific tool instead of just supporting what was the general topic in math that day or that week. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Suarez was next. Thank you, President Paris, and thank you so much, Ms. Kusevlich. I really appreciate this robust information. And I know you gave district data and our science, and I appreciate that as well, but I was curious about the standardized testing for grades

1075, 8, and 11, and I saw that the majority of our students were at levels 1 and 2 for those grade levels. What do you believe are the contributors for such scores? Well, the assessment definitely changed over the last couple of years. It has shifted much more to a hands-on program. We are working very hard to train and support our teachers in that hands-on phenomenon-based math, science, forgive me. We do need to be looking at aligning our standards a little better and quite honestly finding more time to spend on science. Our focus in recent years has been primarily on the foundational reading skills and on math. And in the elementary schools, we really are not giving enough time to science. With all of the different competing initiatives, that's something that we do need to address.

108Thank you. And that made me think. The focus on math and reading, those are mandates, correct, that you must follow through with. But so is science. And so is science. Yes, it's just that there's a lesser focus on science because the majority of the standardized testing, as you can see, is a yearly focus from third grade basically through 11th, when you're looking at math, on math and language arts. Science is only addressed in those three kind of... Key point years. So we have layered in this hands-on programming through Open SciEd and a few other programs that we're doing, but that's something that we just need to give more focus to. We did finally get a science coach because while language arts and math have one supervisor for K to 8, 1, 9, 12 to provide

109more hands-on support to our teaching staff, math has only had someone. K through 12. Now that we have a science coach, there's some ability to provide additional support to our teachers. But really a lot of it, especially at the elementary level, is time. The day is just so packed and crowded. It's a challenge for our staff. Sure. Thank you. I appreciate that insight. Commissioner Mejia. When it comes to sunsetting English 1, 2, and 3, and 4 to just the names, is it still going to be English technically 1 and then as an umbrella it will feature? Two different course names? Actually, it's the reverse. So English 1 is going to be, remain English 1, like a general broad spectrum overview course. But then for grades 10, 11, 12, they're still looking at the same skills

110that they would get in English 10 or English 11 or English 12, but it's broken down into two half-year courses. The students would, those are just four topics, but there are actually four topics for each grade level. and students can select as they're doing their course request they can pick their interest area they get to pick their top two choices and I believe almost everybody got their top two choices So when they graduate, it will still show that they had their four years, right? They will still have had four full years of English, which is the mandatory requirement for graduation, yes. And it doesn't matter what it's called? It doesn't matter what it's called. Really, we vary the novels anyway. You know, you generally have American literature for a year or two, and you generally

111have British or other English-speaking literature for at least a year or world. perspectives. So this just narrowed that a little bit in terms of the titles used. And we've grouped the titles into areas that were of interest to our students and where our teachers had an interest to teach. So you have increased passion in the teaching. The teachers themselves are rejuvenated instead of having to pick from the same old boring list of books. This also works to address some of the concerns that had been raised over the past few years where I think we've had students come up here coming in to say that our list our reading list is too either Eurocentric or it has too many books by certain subgroups versus others that our reading list is not diverse enough. This allowed students

112to pick and choose where their interests lie and our teachers to teach where their passion is while still meeting those foundational standards that are required for graduation. President Paris. Anyone else? Yes, Vice President Santiago. Thank you, Mr. Kucylevich, for, again, a great presentation and all your knowledge that you share with us. I was just looking at the math highlights, and it mentions free in-person after-school instructional support five days a week for CHS students, algebra to calculus. And there were several mentions of after-school tutoring and programs, things like that. Just wondering if you could share. you know summarize some of those after-school initiatives and like is this like a drop-in office hours or do you reach out to your teacher just what are the different things that we have available sure so built into our budget

113our local budget we do have an after-school drop-in tutoring program that addresses probably about two days a week in grades two through eight as well as some tutoring support after school at the high school Our federal funds helped make that stretch to those five days a week, whether it was through ESSER funding or the ESEA funding and our Title I schools, there were more opportunities. Unfortunately, those funds are being limited. As you know, and as has been mentioned at other meetings and will continue to be mentioned throughout this year, Our federal funds have taken a very significant hit, and some of them, for example, our ESL tutoring that goes on three days a week year-round. For next year that zeroed out in the federal budget So there is a small portion that does exist in

114our local budget and that will continue I hope with the generosity of our commissioners At the same time some of those federal programs where it says five days a week will likely no longer It already is not five days a week this year actually I just want to say I'm really impressed with our accelerated readers almost 510,000 books. And I believe we only have about seven to eight between K-8 students. So that's almost about 68 books per student. So that's just extremely impressive that our students are able to read that many books in a year. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Kusilevich, for a thorough report. Ms. Kusilevich, I also just want to thank you. You are just incredibly knowledgeable about all of this. things that the mandates that are required and everything that goes on

115and I'm just very very I try to tell you all the time but I want to make sure I say it publicly we're so very lucky to have you on our team thank you so much but none of this would be possible without our amazing teachers the supervisors and principals who are were the real content experts I'm just telling you what they did so thank you All right, we're moving back to finish up our board committee minutes. Vice President Santiago, can you please read our Residency, Security, and Technology Committee minutes, please? Sure. Thank you, President Paris. So the Residency, Security, and Technology Committee took place on Wednesday, September 17th, and began at 5.04 p.m. In attendance from administration were Mr. Gingaro, Mr. Docter, Ms. Zanola, and Mr. Mountain. Board of Education members in attendance were

116myself, Commissioner Canova, Commissioner Ciano, and President Paris. Mr. Doctor explained that 20 removals of current students residing outside of the Clifton Public Schools occurred since July 1st, 2025. So those 20 removals ended up being a savings to the district of $362,450 at the per pupil cost to educate a child. Ms. Zanola explained that given the current climate, stricter security procedures will be instituted for events hosted in district buildings. Moving forward, bag searches will become standard practice at events. She also stated that almost all elementary schools are already signed up for the NJ Transit Safety Education Program, which begins in October. Mr. Mountain reviewed the details of the communication sent to the whole board with regards to the Verizon signal near the high school and Verizon's plans for improvement, including a new cell tower being activated

117nearby, an upgrade to another Clifton Tower to alleviate overcrowding, and plans for a new mini tower next to CHS. I just wanted to mention one comment about the NJ Transit safety education program. So there was a... something that came out from the community in terms of safety town which the city used to do which everybody loved and we brought this to committee here and the administration found this NJ Transit program which is free to the district so now 11 schools have signed up and the NJ Transit Department brings sends facilitators they come in they do it no cost and they cover a lot of safety topics for our students so it was great to to see that they identified that the meeting adjourned at 6 10. Thank you any questions Commission master we did get

118a notification of the confidential will we have a chance to discuss that an executive tonight or is that another meeting we do have Any other questions, okay Commissioner Shannon, could you please read the municipal alliance minutes? I still had questions on the other one. Oh, I'm sorry. Go right ahead. An hour and a half goes by. It's forgetful. It's because it was brought up tonight. I don't want to not say what I want to say before I read this. Go right ahead. Okay, so I'm going to go back to that. You have the floor. Oh, yeah, I know, buddy. Don't worry. I did. All right, just to go back to what I wrote down here. So it's actually something that Commissioner Dr. Danny mentioned about her and Judy Bassard when we're talking about the one-year

119thing. They've been here 15 years, never seen it happen before. What's changing now? Why now? It doesn't make any sense. We as a board, once again, choose who we feel. the right person for the job maybe it is somebody that's going to be coming in new I highly doubt that but to take that away that's something that's never happened before to formal notice of leadership required the committee discussed requiring board members interested in leadership roles to submit so leadership roles such as which I don't think a committee chair is really leadership role because you always reach out to us for that and say hey what would you guys like to be part of according to by those appointed by this president absolutely you always reach out to us for that the we we nominate each

120other based on who we feel is best So let's just say, Mark, I want to nominate you. Why do I want to nominate you? Because you're a no-nonsense guy. You tell it like it is. You're a strong leader, right? But you didn't put in your required leadership role. We're volunteers elected by the city. We're not job interviewing. Because that's what it seems like. So that's what I wanted to say on that. Thank you. Municipal Alliance minutes, please. Back to that. Back to that page. Okay. Municipal Alliance met on September 25th. Board members were myself, Vice President Santiago, and President Paris. Administration was Dr. Robert Tozzi, Mr. Shahada, and other attendees were Mr. DiMarzo, Councilman Cologe, Councilwoman Pino, and Councilwoman Cedriculo. Meeting started at 5, ended at 6.20. First topic was traffic control, which was the

121SELA A and B morning drop-off and afternoon dismissal. The Board of Education requested the installation of flashing crosswalk lights near SELA A and B. There is currently no crossing guard or police presence in the area. The request aims to improve safety and reduce speeding during student arrival and dismissal times. Two was additional crossing guard by Main Avenue, the Main Memorial Library area. The city will review the possibility of assigning an additional crossing guard to improve pedestrian safety in that area. Number three was crosswalk signs and pavement markings. The previous city manager stated that all crosswalks near schools would be repainted. The Board of Education will provide an updated list of crosswalks in need of repainting for follow-up. Number four was Clifton High School traffic enforcement drop off and pick up. The city will assign a

122Clifton Police Department officer at Clifton High School during afternoon pick up times to assist with traffic flow and safety. Number five was the on three apartments, a pilot proposal on school impact. The Board of Education requested that any payment in lieu of taxes or pilot program agreements include consultation with the BOE to ensure the district receives its fair share of funding and consideration for school impacts. Number six was the CCMS tunnel improvements. The city will provide the Board of Education with an update on the status of the Christopher Columbus Middle School Tunnel Improvement Project. Number seven was sewage bills. The board and city attorneys are finalizing language for an agreement. A deal is close to completion. Eight was new business. The city manager thanked the BOE for increasing the per diem rate for our city

123crossing guards. The city inquired about the status of Letary Park. Questions were raised regarding the recent reduction in Kelly Services' substitute pay rates. The next meeting is scheduled for December 1st at 5.30 at City Hall. Thank you any questions Yes, Commissioner Bassman. Could you elaborate what status means for Latteri Park? That's a little vague. They were questioning who owns it what we're gonna do with it if there's any plans for it Absolutely. Any other questions? Yeah, just a correction on here. It says that I was present, but I was not. I changed it on mine, but I couldn't save it because I'm not administration. We will correct the minutes accordingly. Thank you for pointing that out. Anything else? Very good. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Next up is adoption of the minutes from our September

12418th and September 27th meetings. Motion to approve the minutes? Motion. Second. Motion by Commissioner Mejia. Seconded by Commissioner Brunsiak. Roll call, Mr. Sciata. I have a discussion. Discussion? I'm sorry. I would like to make a motion to bring the approval of the executive session minutes dated September 18, 2025, to be tabled and referred back to executive session for discussion and correction. Okay. The confidential has to be discussed in executive session. I can't make, I can't. Am I correct to you, President Powers, to the attorney? I can't do that in public, correct? Correct. Thank you. Okay. So no objections? Okay. So we will be excluding. So you're not voting on the executive session minutes at this point. You're voting on the general meeting minutes from September 18th and our board retreat minutes from September 27th. Motion

125to approve those minutes. Okay. Roll call please. Ms. Baskin. Just on the regular minutes for the 27th, yes. Mr. Brunsiak. Yes. Mr. Canova. Abstain on the 18th to the 27th, yes. Dr. Danny. Yes. Mr. Mea. Yes. Mr. Siano. Yes. Ms. Suarez. Yes. Vice President Santiago. Yes. President Paris. Yes. Motion carries. Dr. Arbitosi. Thank you, Mr. Paris. Good evening, esteemed members of our Board of Education, staff, families, and members of the One Clifton Learning Community. I'll be brief tonight because we've had several presentations, but I have two things that I would like to mention. First, I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to every member of our district team for a strong start to the school year. Behind the scenes, a great deal of coordinated planning made that possible. Hiring and onboarding of

126staff, preparing classrooms, updating technology, refining curriculum, organizing professional development for the beginning of the school year. Every staff member, every department contributed to making a smooth and successful opening, and I want to thank our entire team for making that happen. Last thing I have for tonight is a big congratulations to our Board of Education because of your leadership and commitment to student achievement and for your support of administration and staff. It is my distinct pleasure to share with the entire One Clifton community that this board has earned the Carol E. Larson Master Board Certification. What does that mean? Well, it's a very prestigious recognition awarded only to high performing boards. This distinction reflects your dedication to continuous improvement as a individual, but also as a full board. And it shows that you've spent time focusing

127on outcomes that matter to students. Less than 2% of the boards in the state of New Jersey have earned this distinction. So you deserve a big congratulations and a round of applause. Mr. Parris, that concludes my report. Thank you, Dr. Arbatozzi. Any unfinished business? Okay, Commissioner Basford, could you read, please, the expression of condolence? Yes, it's my honor to do so. Whereas on September 19th, the community noted with sorrow the passing of Rosalie Venturelli, and whereas Ms. Venturelli has served the Clifton Board of Education and the children of Clifton faithfully and conscientiously for 24 years. Ms. Venturelli was an elementary school secretary at school one and at school two. Rosalie loved her Italian heritage and was an avid opera fan. It brought her great joy to be surrounded by family, enjoying homemade Italian food, and

128engaging in long conversations. Miss Venturelli will be remembered as a devoted wife, loving mother, loyal friend, and a woman of integrity, warmth, and wit. She will be missed deeply by those who knew her. Be it further resolved that this content of the resolution be noted in its entirely for the official minutes of the Clifton Board of Education for future generations to peruse. Dated October 9th, 2025. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Bassford. Commissioner Mejia, can you please read the proclamation for National Principals Month? Thank you very much, President Paris. Whereas through visionary leadership and tireless pursuit of success to each student, Clifton's principals guide and support their schools each and every day in ways large and small. And have proven to be the key to the thorough and dynamic education that helps ensure a strong and

129prosperous society. And whereas New Jersey's principals established academic tone. missions, and visions for their schools to collaborate with teachers to implement and maintain rigorous curriculum and set ambitious performance goals. And whereas the American Federation of School Administrators, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, and the National Association of Secondary School Principals Dedicate each October as National Principals Month to pay tribute to the nation's principals for their tireless dedication to the student, faculty, and staff of the schools over which they preside. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Clinton Board of Education recognizes and thanks our principals for their service and commitment to our district. Be it further resolved that we urge administrators, teachers, parents, and students, and others from the community to join us in recognizing the dedication and hard work of these individuals. Thank

130you, Commissioner Mejia. Vice President Santiago, can you please read the School Security Specialist Day Proclamation? Yes, my pleasure, President Parris. Whereas the safety and security of students, staff, and visitors is a fundamental priority of the Clifton Board of Education, and whereas school security specialists play a vital role in maintaining a safe and secure learning environment across all schools, allowing students to thrive academically and socially, and whereas these professionals serve not only a... protectors of our buildings but as also as mentors role models and trusted members of our school community whereas school security specialists are trained to respond effectively to emergencies deter threats and foster positive relationships with students family staff and community partners and whereas their vigilance dedication and professionalism contribute daily to the safety and well-being of the entire school district and whereas October

13119th to the 25th, 2025 is recognized nationally as America's Safe Schools Week, a time dedicated to raising awareness about school safety and promoting practices that keep schools secure. And whereas designated October 22nd, 2025 as School Security Specialist Day within America's Safe School Week provides an opportunity to highlight and celebrate the essential role these specialists play in fostering safe learning environments. Now therefore, be it resolved that the Clifton Board of Education hereby proclaims October 22nd as School Security Specialist Day throughout the Clifton School District. Be it further resolved that the Board of Education encourages all students, staff, families, and community members to recognize and express appreciation for the unwavering commitment of school security specialists to the safety and well-being of our schools adopted October 9th, 2025 by Clifton Board of Education. Special shout out to Eddie

132and John here today and all of our specialists for all they do. Thank you so much. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Commissioner Suarez, can you please read that proclamation? You got it. Thank you, President Paris. Whereas Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a worldwide annual campaign in October involving thousands of organizations to highlight the importance of breast cancer awareness, education, and research. And whereas the National Breast Cancer Foundation reports that in 2025, an estimated 316,915 women, And 2,800 men will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. And whereas when detected in its earliest localized stages, the five-year relative survival rate for breast cancer is an impressive 99%. And whereas significant advances in early detection and treatment methods have dramatically improved breast cancer survival rates in recent years. And whereas clinical breast examinations, regular mammograms, and breast

133self-examinations remain critical tools for detecting breast cancer. And whereas the use of mammography in the United States has been credited with doubling the detection of early stage breast cancer. And whereas every October during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we honor those women battling breast cancer along with the families, researchers, and health care providers whose hard work gives hope to those living with breast cancer. And whereas we want to encourage all residents, government agencies, and local businesses to participate in activities that will increase awareness of the fight against breast cancer. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Clifton Board of Education would like to pay tribute to those individuals. their families and friends who have had to struggle with the battle against breast cancer and recognizing the more than 3.8 million breast cancer survivors in the United

134States. I just want to note, there's a point we should add men as well. We honor those men and women battling breast cancer. Thank you, Commissioner Suarez. October is Italian Heritage Month. Commissioner Siano. Thank you, President Barris. Whereas Italian and Italian American Heritage Month is an appropriate time to recognize the enormous contributions the Italian and Italian American people have made to this country and the world throughout our history, including generals, admirals, doctors, philosophers, statesmen, musicians, athletes, and Nobel laureates. Whereas Italian and Italian American Heritage Month is held to salute the Italian and Italian American community and to exhibit appreciation for their culture and their heritage that have immeasurably enriched the lives of the people of this nation and the world. Whereas the strength and success of the United States, the vitality of our communities, and

135the effectiveness of our American society depend, in great measure, upon the distinctive and sterling qualities demonstrated by people of diverse races, heritages, and ethnicities, exemplified by members of the Italian and Italian-American community who share with us their rich and unique heritage. And whereas it is fitting and proper that October of each year be observed as Italian and Italian American Heritage Month throughout the United States. Now therefore be it resolved that in order to recognize the enormous contributions Italian and Italian American people have made to this country and the world throughout our history, the Clifton Board of Education urges the district to observe the month with appropriate events and activities. Thank you, Commissioner Siano. Commissioner Brunciac, can you please read our International Augmentative and Alternative Communication Awareness Month Proclamation? Thank you, Mr. President. Whereas the United

136States Society for Augmentative... and alternative communication has designated the month of October as International Augmentative and Alternative Communication Awareness Month and whereas the United States Society for Alternative and Augmentative Communication defines alternative and augmentative communication as including all forms of communication other than oral speech that are used to express thoughts, needs, wants, and ideas. And whereas the educators and families of Clifton Public Schools work collaboratively to ensure that our classrooms are providing communication practices to effectively facilitate access to the curriculum. And whereas Clifton Public Schools provides our students with highly qualified professionals experienced in determining and implementing the most effective means of communication, including alternative and augmentative communication. for our learners impacted with severe expressive communication disorders. And whereas research supports that there are no prerequisites required for individuals to benefit from alternative and augmentative

137communication access. That alternative and augmentative communication users are presumed competent and given access to tools and instruction to allow learning regardless of diagnosis. And whereas communication in all forms is a basic human right and specifically is protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now therefore be it resolved. Clifton Public Schools joins with the United States Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication, declaring the month of October as international. and alternative communication awareness month in Clifton Public Schools and encourages all community members and Clifton Public Schools staff members to learn more about alternative and augmentative communication highlighting the successes that alternative and augmentative communication users can have in career and life. Thank you Commissioner Brunsiak. All right under education administration I'm seeking a motion to approve items 1 through 10. Motion. Motion by Commissioner Medea. Second. Second

138by Commissioner Suarez. Any discussion? Hearing none, roll call, Mr. Shahada. Ms. Bessert. I'm going to recuse on 7. The rest is yes. Mr. Brunsiak. Yes. Mr. Canova. Yes. Dr. Danny. Yes. Mr. Mejia? Yes. Mr. Siano? Yes. Ms. Suarez? Yes. Vice President Santiago? Yes. President Perez? Yes. Motion carries. Okay, under Section C, Personnel, seeking a motion to approve Items 1 through 29. Motion. Second. Motion by Commissioner Suarez, seconded by Commissioner Mejia. Any discussion? Hearing none roll call Mr. Shachada. Ms. Batesford. Yes abstain on my name only P26 name only. Mr. Brunsiak. Yes. Mr. Canova. Yes. Dr. Danny. Yes. Mr. Mejia. Yes to everything abstain on P26 my name only. Mr. Siano. Yes. Ms. Suarez. Yes abstain on P27. Vice President Santiago. Yes, abstain on p26 my name only and p27 President Paris. Yes, abstain on 26

139my name only and 27 motion carries. Thank you under section D finance facilities Seeking the chair seeks a motion to approve items 1 through 13 motion motion by Commissioner Suarez second second by Commissioner Brunswick any discussion Roll call, please. Mr. Shahada. Ms. Bessard? Yes. Mr. Brunsiak? Yes. Mr. Canova? Yes. Dr. Danny? Yes. Mr. Mejia? Yes. Mr. Siano? Yes. Abstaining on F-13, check 224203. Thank you. Ms. Suarez? Yes. Vice President Santiago? Yes. President Paris? Yes. Motion carries. All right. That brings us to board member comments, and I believe Commissioner Brunsiak, you'll be first this evening. Thank you, Mr. President. Good evening, everyone. I just want to give a quick shout out to President Paris for beasting on us to have the Master Board certification. It's been a lot of work, but I think it's helped us

140significantly more that this is an important election season. I encourage every single eligible voter to make their voice heard and participate in this democratic process. Strong communities depend on informed citizens. who take the time to vote for their preferred leaders. Margaret Carreri, feel better? Saw you here earlier today. I get nervous, I feel bad, so I hope you feel better. Finally, I want to wish Commissioner Ciano a happy birthday, who is celebrating later this month. Thank you everybody for your time, and God bless America. Have a good night. Thank you, Commissioner Bruncia, Commissioner Canova. I keep my comments short tonight. I would also want to wish Mr. Siena a birthday. I didn't know it was this month, so happy birthday. The board retreat, we spoke a lot about data, and we had an abundance amount

141of data today, so it's kind of funny that that worked out that way. But I'm glad to see that the well-being data report was very positive, received very well, a few areas to work on there. And I don't really have much other than that. Thank you. i'm sorry commissioner oh dr danny i'm sorry you're not i didn't see you physically here i forgot you're on there i just want to say mr siano happy birthday i want to say thank you to all the speakers i'd like to say that i went to the maple valley the Maple Valley event that they had last week on Friday. And it was just really great. It was wonderful to see all the children that were having a great time and not only just the children, but the adults as

142well. You saw them, you know, congregating and talking and getting to know everyone. I thought it was just really a great event. I'd like to. say happy Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day for those celebrating for Diwali in October since we won't have a meeting. Hope that all the students have a great Halloween, that they're safe and they enjoy the day. And that's all. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Danny. Commissioner Mejia. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you again, everyone, for coming out tonight. I feel like tonight we had a good, solid turnout, but unfortunately everyone left after our dogs showed up. With that said, I want to start off on a happy note. Again, I was very impressed with our Accelerator Reader numbers, over 500,000 books. That's more than some populations here in the

143state of New Jersey, some cities. So that is truly impressive that they're able to read all those books. I remember vividly going back in time, our teacher encouraging us, you know, keep on reading because you guys are able to get, they're called champ tickets. The more champ tickets you get, the more prizes you could win. And so I was always trying to read as much as I could. But then I remember vividly that there were some kids reading like 30 books a week. And I was like, I can't do 30 books a week. With that said, again, happy birthday, or earlier, late birthday to my right hand right here, Commissioner Siano. With that said, I do like the data that was presented to us today on how we are basically leading in terms of workplace

144development. I believe it would be a great study one day if you guys eventually implement it with another institution that wants to put into the IRB. On another happy note, I haven't checked the score yet, but I hope our girls soccer team ended up winning their senior night today. I know they played earlier around 6 or 7 p.m., so I do hope they win. Knock on wood. I'll check on that later. And then now on the sad note, you know, we honestly heard today during our presentation that. The federal monies have already affected our tutoring as opposed to having tutoring five days a week. It might even be three or four depending on what our monies are looking like. And it makes me very pessimistic on what the future holds in terms of funding, especially

145with everything going on, the costs going up, government changing in the next couple of months as well. It makes you wonder what's going to happen once all the grants are canceled from the DOE and what it's going to be repurposed with. In other news, I am very optimistic about everything else that's going on. I feel like we're going on the right track. Except for the 10th grade, I believe 10th grade English it was, we saw a little decline in there. But besides that, everything else seems like it was going up at a steady 2% to 3%. At the end of the day, like I said, I don't know what the future holds in terms of how our monies are going to look like in the future, but I do hope that our board can keep

146up. I do hope that we will put differences aside, and at the end, they come together in wishing that students have the best opportunity to have the best success, not just here in New Jersey, but when they leave school. I don't want students saying, I wasn't given the same opportunities as a school down in Florida, which I hope doesn't happen. you know, you guys keep up the great work in the months and years to come. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Mejia. Commissioner Siano. Thank you so much. Good evening, everyone. Thank you to Jenna for the student rep report. Thank you for both presentations tonight. It's good to see our district is doing so well. My thanks also go to the team Chewy for introducing our district's newest members. I would have taken both of those

147dogs home. I just need you to know that. My wife would have divorced me, but I would have taken them. I will continue to advocate for a therapy dog in every one of our schools. I believe they offer invaluable support. I was privileged to attend the CASA In Their Shoes exhibit, which aimed to raise awareness and let people know they have options when they feel like there are none. It was a moving and emotional. I'm glad to see something like that in our community. I'm very honored to serve on this board with individuals who want to go above and beyond for our students and community. Although from time to time we have our differences, we're all here for the right reasons, and I was very proud to stand beside all of you as we were

148certified as a master board. Diwali, October 20th, known as the Festival of Lights. I absolutely love Diwali. I typically get invited. It's a great celebration. And for everyone celebrating, I really hope they enjoy that. In recognition of Italian Heritage Month, I was very, has the most Italian Joe on the board, obviously. I wanted to read that. I look forward to the upcoming flag raising and celebrating my heritage. So, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. So, Breast cancer and prostate cancer run in my family. Breast cancer and prostate cancer go hand in hand. If your family is susceptible to one, you're susceptible to the other. So I want to urge everybody to go look into what's called a BRCA test, even though there's no A in it. It's a BRCA gene test. That determines if you

149have an inherited mutation, which will indicate the increased risk for developing certain cancers. You find out you have that, you could start. getting on it right away. So I didn't learn about it until after I went through everything. But it is vital because if you go and you wanted to be checked for prostate cancer, the women in your family will then know if you have this mutation, they are susceptible to breast cancer and vice versa. Very important test. And actually the Clifton Health Department once in a while runs that screening. I encourage everyone to be proactive about their health. I'm looking forward to the upcoming school board workshop to continue my development as a commissioner for our community as We will not meet again before the end of the month. I want to wish all

150the students and parents a safe and enjoyable Halloween Thanks for the birthday wishes October 19th. It's still a far away, but thanks anyway. I'll take them Finally, I really want to wish my parents a happy 55th anniversary, which they celebrated October 4th 55 years, that's no walk in the park sometimes, and they make it look easy. Sometimes. Thank you. Stay safe and be good to each other. Thank you, Commissioner Siano. Commissioner Suarez. Thank you, President Paris. Hello and good evening, everyone. It's so nice to have the year coming along. I was at Maple Valley's Fall Festival and it really was a great event. Shout out to Commissioner Canova for bringing great music. I myself danced a little bit with a couple of friends. And I've heard from parents and kids that I spoke with and

151a great time was had. And as for tonight, I think this has been a great meeting. It was such a joy meeting our new teammates, Rocky and Doug. I am a personal Pug fan, so I was very excited to meet him. And I'm grateful that they get to cheer up our students and staff in the district. They certainly made me joyful. Thank you to Dr. Fox and the team who has worked with her for delivering such a robust and valuable information. I appreciate the tangible suggestions that were given and that we can hopefully implement within our district. It's also a wonderful thing to see how great our district is doing overall. So shout out to the central administration. And of course to Ms. Kucilevich who is so knowledgeable and helpful in breaking down such large

152data points to bite-sized pieces that are easy to... digest thank you for your presentation and i also want to thank the board tonight i appreciate that we're able to have discussions in a respectful manner even though we don't always agree having open and respectful communication about ideas is the whole point of us coming together publicly it gives the community an opportunity to see us talk through ideas suggestions and personal opinions with decorum and respect i look forward to continued discussions on the dais keeping an open space to talk through suggestions, questions, and comments. And happy birthday, Joe. I just also learned that your birthday is this month, so I wish you many more healthy years ahead. And have a great night, everyone. Thank you, Commissioner Suarez. Commissioner Batchford. Thank you. Happy birthday, Joe, on the

15319th. Many more. Many happy returns around the moon. Okay, tonight I want to speak not about any specific matter before this board, but something far greater. I want to talk about the Constitution. the principles that guide every one of us who swears an oath to serve the public. I believe deeply in the importance of standing up for both our own rights and the rights of others. The 14th Amendment guarantees every citizen due process and equal protection under the law. Rights that belong to all of us, not just when it's convenient, but especially when it's difficult. Supporting the Constitution means supporting those protections, even when they apply to someone we may disagree with. When someone asks for help and others turn their back instead, that reveals far more about character than words could ever. True leadership

154is measured not in moments of comfort, but in how we respond with fairness and decency are tested. In my years of public service, I have faced times when I felt intimidated, isolated, and bullied. I have endured challenges and accusations that ultimately found to be without merit. Yet I never afforded my full rights under the 14th Amendment. Those have been moments during my public service when behind closed doors, I felt my first and 14th Amendment rights were disregarded. Moments that reminded me of how vital fairness and due process truly are. And today, I find myself once again standing here not to argue or accuse, but to remind everybody that constitutional rights do not stop at the door of public service. They do not belong to some. And not to others. They belong to all of us

155as human beings and as Americans. Every elected official, every public employee, and every citizen has the right to be treated with fairness, dignity, and respect. And when that doesn't happen, it's just not one person who suffers. It's the integrity of the system that we serve. So tonight I stand for the Constitution, and especially for due process, as a principle that no one should ever be made to feel less. than human in the course of serving their community. Thank you and good night. Thank you, Commissioner Bassford. Vice President Santiago. Thank you, President Paris. I want to make sure I say. As echoing Commissioner Brunsiak, it's so important to vote. We've already seen funds that were paused, that were already allocated to schools, especially ours. It took lawsuits to get those funds back, and when we got

156them, it was like $400,000 less. And as Ms. Kucylevich said... they're already budgeting zero for next year. And again, the title funds we know are for the most vulnerable. We're talking about students with special needs, low-income students. In many cases, those funds actually... pay for a teacher. So it's very important to vote, especially for public education. I had the pleasure of reading in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month to students at school 11. I want to thank them so much for giving me a little piece of their day. It's always... fun to do those. I know we all love those. It's so inspiring. I go see them. They have questions. They're funny. And I just get inspired to keep doing what we do. But thank you to everybody, Principal Waka and everybody at School 11 for

157everything that they did. October 18th. At City Hall, Clifton Little Free Pantries, there is a flag raising in remembrance of Food Insecurity Day, and you can bring donations there. The Italian flag raising is on Monday. You can also bring donations for the Clifton Little Free Pantries there as well. Happy Diwali. Welcome Doug and Rocky. I'm so happy to see our dog program continuing to grow. I really was again excited to see the education thriving presentation. It's really hard to attract teachers and there are less and less people who are entering the profession and when we get them we want to make sure we keep them. So it's really great that we have that data that we can use to try and retain our teachers. Happy National Principals Month. All of our school security specialists, thank

158you for all you do. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Please, please, please, please, please support that. And, yeah, I think that's it. Thank you so much. Have a great night. Thank you, Vice President Santiago. Condolences to the Venturelli family. I just want to... reminds some dates between now and our next board meeting some of the activities that are going on on October 21st there's the CHS open house 6 to 8 p.m. believe that's for all eighth graders and their families it's a great opportunity to learn a lot about our high school and all the opportunities that students are afforded there On the 26th of October is the Halloween parade. Our very own Mustang band will be in the Halloween parade. And also later that evening, there'll be a Clifton Stadium participating in the North

159Jersey Band Festival. So if you've never been to a band festival, you can buy a ticket at the door. You get a chance to hear 18 different high school bands throughout North Jersey. On October 29th, CHS is having their Halloween extravaganza. That's from 6 to 8 p.m. And that's hosted by the CHS clubs, the student council, and athletic teams. And it's for pre-K and elementary school children and their families. You can come in costume. They have games, crafts, and all sorts of fun trick-or-treating. So put that on your calendar. It's a wonderful event. The November 5th to 6th is the NJEA convention. That's our teachers convention here and school will not be in session. That's a Thursday and a Friday. And last but not least, mark your calendars for November 14th. It's the fall play

160at CHS. It'll be 7 p.m. Any new business? Okay, no new business. So we'll move to our addendas, section H. I'm looking for a motion to approve items one through four. Motion. Second. Motion by Commissioner Brunciac, second by Commissioner Suarez. Any discussion? Hearing none, roll call please, Mr. Shahada. Ms. Baskford? Yes. Mr. Brunciac? Yes. Mr. Canova? Yes. Dr. Danny? Yes, mr. Maria. Yes. Mr. Siano. Yes. Miss Suarez. Yes vice president Santiago. Yes president Paris. Yes motion carries motion to adjourn motion I thought we were going exactly there's nothing for executive on our agenda this evening I think what Ms. Miller is saying is you don't have to approve those minutes tonight. If we're not going to an executive for any reason, you don't have to do that tonight. It could wait until next month. If

161the board wants to approve those minutes tonight, then we would have to go into executive session. It's the board's call. I mean, the HIV. Guys, go into executive session. It's your call. If you want to discuss the HIV report, we will go back and discuss the HIV report. But I don't remember ever discussing the HIV report that you can. Why was it on the agenda? It always is. It's on there every month. I just want to be clear. Mrs. Baskford, is Ms. Baskford asking? I made a motion to discuss the minutes because there's inaccuracies in them. And I wanted, before it goes to, it's forgotten about. I want it noted on the record. I wanted the record to reflect something. I'm going to step back because this is not my call. This is the board's

162decision. Yes, out of respect, motion to go to executive. Motion to go to executive session. We will discuss legal personnel matters. Motion to adjourn to executive session by Commissioner Siano, seconded by Commissioner Mejia. Five-minute break. Welcome back, everyone. Roll call, please, Mr. Shahada. I hope so. Mr. McCartney, are we on? Let's just double check. Matt, would you please? We're good. President Paris asked for a roll call coming out of the executive session. Ms. Basford? Here. Mr. Brontiac? Here. Mr. Canova? Here. Dr. Danny is no longer with us. Mr. Mejia? Why do you have to put it like that? My bad, she's alive, she's good. Mr. Siano? Here. Ms. Suarez? Here. Vice President Santiago? Present. President Paris? Here. And I think I glanced over Mr. Mejia because I was interrupted. Mr. Mejia? In the flesh. Okay.

163The chair seeks a motion to approve under G executive session item number two. And in addition to approve the minutes as amended during tonight's executive session, the minutes from our last executive session. Motion. Motion by Commissioner Siano. Second. Second by Commissioner Canova. Roll call, please. Ms. Basterd. I have a question through you, President Paris, to the attorney. Will I be in conflict if I vote for an affirmative for this? Okay, thank you. Vote yes. Mr. Brunsiak? Yes. Mr. Canova? Yes. Mr. Mejia? Yes. Mr. Siano? Yes. Ms. Suarez? Abstain. Vice President Santiago? Yes. President Perez? Yes. Motion carries. Thank you. Motion to adjourn. Motion. Motion by Commissioner Brunsiak. Second. Second by Commissioner Mejia. Have a good evening.