001everyone and thank you all for being here tonight. Um we have um well I'll say an encouraging presentation for you tonight on the budget. So I want to thank you all for being here. I'll say thanks for after but um yeah we're glad to see you all tonight. I'm excited to have you here. Thank you for being here. We did open an executive session um to review beforehand. Um, so that being said, we will start off a student representative. >> Good evening everyone. My name is Walker and I'm the student council secretary this year and I'm pretty sure during the last week of February, we hosted our annual classes showc. We also celebrated Black History Month during that time. There was a lot of success. Many students took part activities during Malaysian study hall to
002celebrate. In addition, the class of 2026 just returned from their school senior trip and there was 111 seniors attending which is a great turnout. And earlier today, juniors completed the NGC assessments in English, language arts, and mathematics. Also, today we had over 30 students attended Ruckers Engineering Day trip where they got to support career paths of engineering which was a really great opportunity. Looking great undercluding our gold match that took place earlier today. We would like to recognize who senior month and Zack Hickman who was selected as our safe driver for the month. And finally, student council is scheduled for April 24th and thank you for your time. Next on agenda is item the public forum. This is the public forum for agenda items. wanted to speak on an agenda. >> Yeah, I did. >>
003Okay, please microphone. Um, your time limit will be five minutes. State your name and address and let us know which agenda item you're speaking to. >> Okay. >> My name is Allen. I7 years ago since I've lived here in town. However, in recent years with the budget, I've watched resources being taken away from very concerning because it seems as though the public doesn't have an opportunity to resources like the district. statements made publicly so thank you Mr. I will um uh say again as I did when we opened say that we're um I'll speak for myself but I think that was probably the board members themselves. Tonight's budget is something that we're um we feel good about as opposed to where we were a year ago. Um there are since December um opportunities every board
004meeting um when budget season starts which is around the December time frame opportunities for the public to um to engage. It's an agenda item um every meeting from December until this most recent meeting. So we thank you for your feedback and would encourage you. >> Thank you very much. >> See no other public members wishing to speak. I will move on to item which is the presentation of the budget over to Dr. All right. Good evening everybody. Everybody hear me? Everybody here can hear good. I'm a walker and a talker so I'm not going to be at the podium so I apologize if my back's to you. For those of you who don't know I'm Dr. Aralo. I'm the new superintendent. I've been here for about 10 weeks. uh and I'm happy to be here
005to be here tonight to think that we have something that is very representative of our school community and something that we can be proud to share uh with you. So without further ado, just to start so that everybody understands while we're working as a district on developing what's going to go in to our budget, it's important that everybody understands sort of frame in New Jersey this year. We had a new governor. The new governor didn't provide budget address until March 10th. Statutoily in New Jersey, the Department of Education has 48 hours to provide state aid to the school district. So, we received our state aid notification at about 11 a.m. on March 12th. And then between March 12th and now, once we had that, we were able to finalize. But if you move forward, we
006have been working on the budget for the last 10 weeks. day and night, morning and noon, looking at everything. So from my perspective, what is important when we're developing a budget, it's not what I it's not what the business administration's goals, and we've operationalized those goals to make them the district's goals. And these are the Operational effectiveness. We want to enhance our operational effectiveness by strengthening team collaboration, improving policy alignment, using data to drive decision making, and ensuring everyone participates in targeted sustained professional training. That is a goal in this budget. Trust in relationships. We want to build trust and strengthen relationships through increased transparency. expanded communication channels and offering meaningful opportunities for authentic engagement with the entire school community. That's a driving force for this budget. Overall effectiveness, we want to improve our overall
007effectiveness by building strong operational structures, implementing a collaborative leadership approach, and offering consistent processes districtwide to support students, staff, and the community. And this budget does that. Outside of our board goals, I think it's critically important to hear from the people on the front lines about what is needed. So, one of the things that we launched when I came on is every staff member in the district on February 16th through the leadership of the buildings spent the day doing a critical reflective process. It's called SCMV. It's a reflection activity to identify successes, challenges, needs, and a future vision. All of that information was then put into a presentation for each building. I got all of those presentations. I use the information from those presentations from the people who are on the ground level, the teachers,
008the pars, the counselors, the administrators, the people who actually know what is needed for our students. That drove our decision board of education goals. What are our people telling us we need to be better for our students? Budget goal number one coming out of those two areas, no reduction of staff. Our goal at the onset was to maintain all current staffing levels districtwide, protect instructional continuity across our grade levels and content areas, preserve support staff that directly serve our students, and maintain quality programming for every student. That was the first goal. Second goal, one of the things that came through from all of what we are hearing is we need additional supports for students who need academic intervention. This budget, one of the goals is attempting to do that. We've heard, we've seen, we know
009that kids need more social and emotional support in our schools, behavioral in our schools. So, one of the goals is that adding social, emotional, and behavioral support in our schools. We've heard that pay to participate fees are a barrier for students to access extracurricular activities. A goal in our budget development process this year was to attempt to find a way to eliminate paytoplay fees. We are always evaluating safety and security. A goal in our budget this year was to attempt to add an additional special law enforcement office to give our total number of SLEOs in the district at three with an SRO overseeing them. So that is a goal that we had in developing this budget because it's important to enhance our security. I spent a couple of nights going out and talking to the
010community, meeting with families, superintendent meet and greets. And over and over and over and over I hear what I heard, we would like more transparent, more open, more frequent communication and more consistent ways in which we are receiving communication. If you have a student who is at one of our schools, a teacher could potentially using class dojo. If you have a if you have a student at another one of our schools, a teacher could potentially be using home room. And if you have a teacher at another one of our schools, teacher could potentially be using Remind. Three different communication methods to communicate. Well, if I'm a parent and I have three students in three different schools and I have to have Remind, I have to have home room. I have to have the other one.
011Not easy. One of the goals of this budget was to build a new website for all of the district and all of the schools and then implement something called pattern swing which is a unified communication platform for all families consistent messaging across our schools multilingual support for diverse families and two-way communication between home and school. So unifying that. So it doesn't matter whether you have a high school student or a preschool student. The communication method moving forward will be parents for all students. Budget goals seven and eight over and over and over in that critical reflection process. What came out was the need for systems and the need for support. One of our goals in building the budget was attempting to implement an online lesson planning tool for our staff. In addition to that for
012our administrators, implementing an online evaluation tool and the benefits of that are it's digital evaluation platform. It's secure. It's audit auditable. It provides us with visibility into what we're doing instructionally. And it will professional work. One of the overwhelming things that I heard is that the playground at Clara Martin needs to be fixed, needs to be prepared. It is not safe. It is not good for our kids. A goal of this budget is to fix that. In addition, a goal of this budget is to fix some of the HBAC here at the high school that is not working properly. Another goal, something that I heard overwhelmingly from families was, "I don't understand why my kindergarten student can get on the bus and go to school at this time, and my prek student who goes to
013the same school has to get on a different bus later." The goal of this budget was to fix that problem for families and to support our students who may increase the numbers in participation in extracurricular or sports activities because we're eliminating fees. A goal of this budget is to attempt to bring back late bus service at the high school and at the middle school. Those were the goals. Our proposed budget is 54,28,312. There's three parts to the budget. There's the general fund, which is your day-to-day district operations. There's the special revenue fund. We get preschool expansion aid that goes into the special revenue fund. This year that aid will be $2,224,125. Then we have debt service. It's just like having a mortgage. We have to repay out our bond and longterm obligations. It's 2 million37900.
014That gives you the total of 54,2083. These are our funding sources. So we 74.03% 3% of our funding comes from local sources, which is property tax. 16.04% of our proposed budget will come from state aid, 4.31% will come from debt service, 4.1% from preschool expansion, 1.09% from federal sources, and 43% from fund balance. And I just want to touch on that fund balance because I think it's important for to have an understanding when districts are developing a budget and they find themselves who have a financial debt in their budget. What a lot of districts will do is they will transfer money out of either capital reserve or maintenance reserve to fill that gap which then puts them in a vulnerable position for a emergency capital project or an emergency maintenance project. We will not do
015that. This budget will not do that. We are only using less than half of 1% of our fund balance to make sure that we are properly funded in the event that we have a need from a capital project or a need from a mission fund. State aid summit. Everybody knows we got roughly $493,000 more in state aid this year than we got last year. We are incredibly thankful for that. But I think everybody also knows that since 2022, 2023, five years, we have lost 1.77 million in state aid. That's a 17 roughly 17% loss in state aid over 5 years. Even with the increase of 500,000, we are still net negative 1,778,9. What are we asking of the taxpayers? We're asking for 2%. Which is what the cap requires us to ask. That levy is
016this. 78 78% of the levy will come from the township. 19% will come from the city. 3% will come from Fieldsboro. So everybody is clear. We don't get to make that determination. We are a regional school district. We put the numbers in. The state pushes the numbers out. So if you want to know why the tax impact is different by municipality, it's because each community has a different total assessed property value and the levy increase results in the different dollar amounts depending on your municipality. So property value city versus township, township versus different rates, but we are staying within that 2% cap debt service. And this is important. In February, thanks to the business administrator and her team, we refinanced our debt. It's like when you see mortgage rates go down, you attempt to refinance.
017We did. By doing that, we save taxpayers $556,000 over the next seven years. So that is an estimated anticipated savings of 75 to $80,000 a year for the taxpayers of the Bordontown Regional School District. Our budget we are proposing to spend 71% on employee salary and benefits. We are proposing to spend 12% on special education, 9% on facilities, 4% on CNI and building supports 3% on transportation, 1% on technology and operations. I am here tonight to tell you that by raising the levy to 2%. We will do all of these things. We will maintain staffing levels throughout the district. We will add academic intervention in the district. We will social, emotional, and behavioral interventionists in the district. We will eliminate pay to play, pay to participate fees for sports and extracurricular activities. We will work
018with the township and city to hire an additional SLEO in the district. We will build a new website and unified district communication. We will implement online lesson plans. We will implement online evaluation systems. We will complete phase one of the Clar Barton playground and we will align the three start time at Peter Mutual and we will bring back late buses at the middle school. That's what this government does. that coming back to the original conversation about the teachers, I would be remiss if I didn't take a second to thank the president and vice president of the teachers association who are here who in my 10 weeks have done nothing but partner with me on any initiative that we've talked about together. We've talked about this. So to the president and vice president of the association,
019I say thank you because your members were critical in our development of what we just presented. But what we presented answers everyone of what the staff, the people on the ground have told us we need instruction. We're maintaining programs and curriculum. We're adding academic interventions. We're improving systems. including a multi-tered system of support. In supports, we're adding behavioral and supports. We're maintaining staffing levels. We're expanding counseling and mental health for resources, new website, unified communication, online lesson plans, online evaluations, eliminating the pay to participate fees, and infrastructure. We're going to do the playground. We're going to improve communication with families, and we're going to enhance security. We are doing this in my opinion in a fiscally responsible way. We are doing what our staff, what our board, and in my opinion what our community demands
020us to do. From my perspective, this is the first step in rebuilding a new foundation for the future of that's our budget. Hopefully, you will support Thank you very much and members of the leadership. Thank you. I'm sure we have other staff members here as well. I know everyone in the district was involved in this budget in some way, shape or form and I really do want to take the opportunity to say thank you to you all. Um the fact that 12 ago. Um the news that was much much different and um the fact that we're saying we're um really pleasing to be able to see. So again, thank you to everyone involved. Are there any questions from the board? Okay, seeing no questions, we will move on to agenda item, which is consent agenda.
021Motion discussions. >> Yes. Thank you. Next on our agenda is item J, the committee reports with one report from the policy committee. >> Thank you. The policy committee met on March 11th and attended myself, Miss Mr. Schnowski, and Dr. Alex. Um, we reviewed a number of things, but primarily first looked at the SBA updates. There are a few policy updates that the SBA is recommending. We put two of them on our agenda to to work through on our next meeting toward just the standard um legal changes. Uh 5127 was just legal legal reference updates. You'll see them on the agenda. I see. So I'm going to thank the for always making sure that our our uh our policies are spotless. So thank you. Um administrative requests. We talked about um expanding and defining what conduct
022undercoming looks like possibly. had regulations um same with a unified student code of conduct and accompanying those regulations and a little bit about our transportation and safety policy which is going to work and bring to us. Um a biggest the biggest biggest part of our discussion was around the upcoming cell phone policy maintenance that are required to be put in place uh for the start of the next school year. So we had some really good discussions. We did take feedback from other board members, Dr. Alabella brought u you know feedback from the school level administrative level and uh we started the process. We hope to have something out to you soon. It's just going to take a little bit of time. There are not sample policies out by the SBA yet. So we've started doing
023just other district policies and you have to take that and make it work because what's right for a different school might not be right for us. So we are in the process of working on that. That is the gist of it. Our next meeting will be on April 29th and uh we do have a schedule of what we plan to review. So, I will send that out to the board to gather any feedback in advance of our meeting like I questions. I'll move on to agenda Kendall discussion. >> Thank you. Any discussion on agenda? >> Yes. >> Any other updates for tonight? Is that all your thunder? >> Uh, that was all my thunder. Uh, but I but I do I I I would be remissed if I also didn't thank the board for your
024leadership as we developed the budget, went through the budget process and the community. Spending time out in the community, engaging with community members, discussing with community members what their needs are, what the concerns are, what the wants are has been incredibly important and valuable for me uh in in not just the development of budget, but understanding the need and the want for increased transparency, for different ways to gather information through more interaction with the school district. And I look forward to continuing to engage in as many meaningful ways with as many people as I can on all issues, not just the budget, but on everything. So, thank you to the community for being part of helping us develop this. We are now on agenda item two items. Any discussion on >> Yes. Thank you. We're
025now on agenda item M personnel with 12 items. >> Thank you. Any discussion on M2? >> Again, like the volunteers I just want to say um congratulations to Mrs. She works her tail over there and she retired. So I'm glad to see that her No further discussion is >> yes >> we're now on agenda item 10 finance items Any discussion on three? >> Yes. Yes, >> you do have one item. >> Thank you. discuss >> you and that brings us to agenda item P our second public comment. So public comment is for any topic to speak about your name, address one person signed up. So we'll be limit the only exception to the name of the address if you are a student. Just school on your way. Sorry, I'm nervous. Um, so I have three
026children and I know we talked about the budget. So this may have been an agenda item, but I wanted to hear what was said about my comment. Um so while you talked about additional in the schools as far as behavior was concerned, what was not mentioned is class size. And while without a teacher being able to assess the need in the classroom due to the fact that they went from having 17 or 18 kids in the classroom to up to 24 25 26 even classrooms I don't know or actually let me question what is your plan and is class size going to be addressed in the budget. >> So we do have a five minute time limit. What I would suggest is if you want to address all your concerns, so don't use the five
027dialogue back and forth with either myself or Dr. >> So thank you for the question. Um for clarification, two things. Number one is we're always class size. Uh so I am currently studying class size across the district, not just in the elementary but in the secondary to see where they currently are. Um I think it's important that when I'm look for me when I'm looking at class size, especially in the elementary, there's two things that I'm looking at. How many kids are in the home and then how many kids are in the core academic instructional box and there's a difference. So So we're looking at that. believe that there's a need to deploy capital in order to address class size to bring them down to a level that I am comfortable with. We will certainly
028do that. Um in the budget though, just for clarity, when I say we're adding academic interventionists, we are increasing staff. We are increasing teachers who are going to provide be providing tiered intervention to our students in our classrooms. We are adding academic staff, certified staff, not a we are adding Some of those teachers could have read specialist certifications, things of that nature. When I'm saying that we're adding behavioral supports or social emotional supports, we are talking about adding a district BCBA. We're talking about bringing in clinicians who can work with our students. We're talking about adding certificated staff members. We're not talking about adding aids. So, in addition to doing that, we are certainly looking at class size to determine what is the new normal for us. But full transparency when we're talking or thinking
029about decision making of deploying capital in that way we have to think about spending in two ways. There is nonreoccurring costs and then there are reoccurring costs. So let's just say for example the decision was made to use the $500,000 that we got in state aid to hire four more teachers because that's what potentially would have gotten us. If next year state aid was cut to $200,000 we would be eliminating three staff members. That was the past sort of up and down that took place here. We don't want to repeat the past. We want to make sure that we are effectively and efficiently managing the finances that we know we have control over, i.e. not state aid aotment and then use that effective budgeting to deploy capital when we need it for things like increasing
030the number of because we will be financially sure that it is not a one-year fix or a two-year fix that we will be able to budget for that staff member to be here for 25 years. That's what we have to look at when we're looking at so making sure that we are being fiscally responsible and financially prudent in our decision making about that. But if you're asking me whether or not I'm concerned about class size, specifically K to 5, I was a preK to 2 principal and I was also a K to 5 principal. So I I am keenly aware of where our class sizes are and I'm looking at all of those things. Is that a commitment that I'm going to ask add staffing at any one of those levels? It is not. But
031if you're asking me whether or not this budget is going to add staff to address academic support, it is. If you're asking whether is going to add behavioral support and social emotional support for our students. It is. And what I would say is that we are in a financial position. If we needed to deploy capital in the future to bring on additional staff members to decrease class sizes because it was detrimental to student success, we would be in a position to do that. >> Follow question. So you said that hiring let's say four teachers would cost our entire additional spending the teachers are going to add the behavioral support would be additional >> yes they would >> well it's very from my perspective right now when I look at what are the critical mass needs
032across the district reding class size is not the first. When I look at critical mass needs across the district, we don't have a fully functioning multi-ter system of support for our students academically, socially or emotionally. The number of kids that need more academic support, more social emotional support, and more behavioral support is increasing exponentially. When I talk to teachers, that is something that every teacher is asking for. So to me, we can't do everything at one time. We have to look at what are the discretionary versus non-discretionary discretionary things, reoccurring, non-reoccurring things that we can do. My professional opinion in this situation is very simple. I believe that right now a critical need is building a multi-ter system of support for our students and having the the people there to provide the intervention because Whether
033or not you have 20 students in a in a class or 18 students in a class is not going to change the number of kids who need academic intervention. Making sure you are fully staffed from an intervention standpoint to actually provide those intervention is what is going to do that. So I am looking at class size. I am looking at class size not home size. I am looking at class size academic discipline size and it is different than size. So when those numbers right exceed what I believe to be effective and efficient we will certainly look to deploy capital if the need arises. >> Do you mind that number? >> Sure. So I can tell you that current the average home room size in grades K to five is 23 students. The average class size
034in language arts K to 5 is 21 students. The average class size in math K to 5 is 21 students. So those are the the actual numbers in those academic disciplines. The home room size may be larger, but all of those students are not staying in those classes for that entire day. So that's current. And then looking at projected year outside of kindergarten, first grade is second, second grade is third, third grade is fourth, fourth grade is fifth. So I know that those numbers will continue and I know what the registrations look like past years and what the registrations look like this year. So that is what is going into the decision. And it's not easy. But if if I add teachers with no support, I still have a whole bunch of kids that don't
035get service. They may have smaller class size, but they don't get any intervention. And that to me would be detrimental to their opportunity for success. I think the first thing that we need to do is have a multi-tered system of support for our students. It has to be appropriately staffed. It has to be appropriately managed. It has to be appropriately. We are not in a position right now to do that. But we will that was your time a few minutes ago, but I would encourage you to if you have more questions um Dr. So please if there's dialogue, please continue. Thank you very much. on the list. See, I will move on to court comment and open the floor to any >> I just have two quick things. First and foremost, obviously, it is very
036easy, well, it is much easier in a year where they're not taking the money away to make to do a budget. Um, but I have to say, you know, this is our first budget under Dr. Afill and I felt uh he deserved um thank you for at least I I'm not speaking for the whole board, but I I kind of think I am uh the communication that we received this year, the feedback that you brought to the table, not just his own opinion, but of other admin, of other staff. Um this was the this is my fourth third or fourth budget season now. This was by far the easiest again. sure that is to me the first one that we actually got money. Um, but the communication piece was amazing. It genuinely felt like it
037was a a district team pulling together and and doing what is best for the district and not um anything else. So, thank you very much for for what you brought to the the table this budget season and and keeping us connected appropriately and um thoroughly. Uh the second thing I just wanted to bring up um I only will be sharing like my the print out of the legislative updates once a month because they are a lot of work. Um but I just wanted to touch base there were two uh items that have officially left the um well one left the health assembly health committee. It was approved on March 9th. It is a bill for vaping awareness. Um if that does go on to pass fully, uh what it will do is uh develop guidelines
038for school districts and institutions of higher education to implement um and facilitate onampus anti- vaping awareness campaigns targeting student populations. Um it's the guideline is to assist school districts, colleges, universities, and equipping students with researchbacked information on the dangers of vaping um to combat the increased use of uh to eat cigarettes and sadly it is not something that our students are immune to. Big thing is is is here and uh what this bill will do if it pass is help give better guidelines and regulations on what districts can do to educate students on the harm of vaping. Um couple other ones passed that were related but not enough to really go into yet. But the other one I found uh interesting uh the assembly uh children families food security committee uh on March 16th voted
039and approved a bill on banning artificial dyes in school food. Um so it actually called out a a number of poor specifically um substances uh to the general prohibition list and it added an additional six substances um uh on top of that. So, it's good to see that we're looking at these these our food, you know, American food system is probably not the biggest. Um, so it's nice to see that uh we're putting these things in place to try to, you know, protect our kids where we can. Um, so again, that passed the uh on the 16th the assembly and where it will go from here, we don't know. But those are the two updates I had for today. Um, for next meeting, we'll have another full update. Thank you. Seeing no other comment, I
040will just uh throw out one small thing to the members of the board. Um we are very well underway with achieving our board goals. One of the next ones that I've selected um for us to tackle is the um learning of the board in the form of a potential board retreat um which will allow us to uh check off a few of our goals that we set for ourselves back. So, please get that information back to me by Friday and I will get us scheduled for a retreat sometime over the summer. Seeing no further discussion or comments, I will ask for a motion to >> thanks. Thank you everyone for being here.