001good evening everybody and welcome to the board of education meeting this evening um i'm just going to start with a reading of our open public meeting law and then we'll do the pledge of allegiance and get to our gym award winners and students of the month so the new jersey open public meetings law was enacted to ensure the right of the public to have advanced notice of and to attend the meetings of public bodies at which time any business affecting their interests is discussed in accordance with the provisions of this act and board of education policy zero 162 the board of education of the borough of bound brook has caused notice of this meeting to be posted in the board office and at bound brook high school and mail their fax to the courier news
002fountain brook borough clerk southbound board of education and any person who is paid who has requested individual notice and paid the requirement fee please under god indivisible with liberty and justice [Music] for my president's comments tonight i'll actually just be brief and apologize for uh being late i'm really excited with all the students of the month here as well as our general award winners these are my favorite meetings of each month so um without further ado i think i'll turn over to dr gallagher to start the proceedings there all right so we're going to start with our students of the month for lamontagne we have dr s congratulations [Applause] congratulations [Applause] okay [Applause] congratulations to jason lopez garcia [Applause] for smallie school we have mr edwards good evening everyone our first recipient goes to lucca
003our next recipient is madeleine gomez [Applause] our next recipient is adriana amor flores [Applause] and our final recipient is isaac orlana that's right [Applause] hello everyone the community middle school is proud to recognize as a student of the month melvin valenzuela [Applause] and the community middle school is also proud to recognize amanda herrera ramirez [Applause] and good evening our first recipient tyler jameson i believe tyler can make it tonight but i will make sure he receives this tomorrow so tyler [Applause] our next recipient gabriella silva [Applause] and last but certainly not least [Applause] for our gem or presentation we'll start with vermont lemon addicts and dr s congratulations to mrs beers this lunchtime recipient this is the year's breakfast each day for a kindergarten student and she brings incredible amount of joy and knowledge is
004always willing to take the lead on school project mrs beard not only has a great support with our staff and students but with our families as well she understands the important role family plays in child education she makes it a point to contact and connect with the parents of her students i want to personally thank mrs beers for the manner in which she puts her students in without everything else this is thank you so much for all the effort well the extent for the month of may is corey heather this is hater thank you for all that you do each and every day for your students you work diligently diligently to make connections with students and the families you're and that you have created a carefully supported environment in your classroom lafayette appreciation appreciates a
005little bit congratulations good evening again our recipient is miss wilson miss wilson is a school psychologist at smallies elementary school she facilitates students and review meetings and evaluation planning mrs wilson demonstrates relevant knowledge and skills regarding the annual reviews and re-evaluation process mrs wilson identifies her students individual needs with staff on a daily basis she understands her responsibility to the school and collaborates with parents and other professionals mrs wilson applies with all njdoe school notification codes his excellent time management skills as evidenced by the manner in which he must schedule required meetings around the numerous amounts of people that must depend on various different means ms wilson ensured that all of the appropriate documents are printed and ready to go for her meetings mrs wilson evaluates and interprets her data on her own evaluations and
006the evaluation results conducted by her colleagues and the cs she has been observed to pilot this data and sharing it with parents in an effort to develop implement or modify strategies and interventions and or programs mrs wilson keeps excellent detail notes and documents all the progress the students on their watch face miss wilson had three interns this year and mentored them along the way she attended the nj asap new jersey association of school psychologists conferences past winter season nationally certified school psychologist karen always willing to talk to her students and is a huge asset to our smalling team thank you mr for everything [Applause] hello again the community middle school is proud to recognize jennifer guerrero as its gem award recipient for the month of may mrs guerrero is the school social worker and member
007of child study team for cms a great deal of miss guerrero's time is spent creating individual educational plans for students in special education assisting families and coordinating planning meetings mrs guerrero works closely with building administrators in order to ensure teachers are well informed and that students needs are met mrs guerrero goes above and beyond in order to assist teachers and facilitate the learning process she coordinates weekly meetings with the special ed team where academic and behavioral concerns can be discussed and collaborative solutions are found throughout the school day ms guerrero makes herself available and will often pause her work in order to intervene with students in crisis mrs ferreira has a calming effect on those around her and even during times of stress mrs guerrero is always smiling at the end of this at the
008end of the school year quickly approaches activities and events such as class trips promotion ceremonies school dances and the like come one after the other mrs guerrero is constantly advocating for her students ensures that they take advantage of every opportunity and communicates with families in order to ensure students middle school experience is all that immoral on behalf of the members of the cms staff i would like to thank jennifer guerrero for her contributions and for always going above and beyond [Applause] high school we have mr smith good evening again uh we are proud to announce mr menendez high school's gym award for the month of may mr menendez is an involved dedicated and caring educator who always goes the extra mile for his students outside of his extremely busy teacher responsibilities he provides tutoring at
009school based chess with students he has been spotted watching cars on saturdays for car washes pulling numerous seasonal plants and whatnot from nurseries in his car for fundraising so many as well as so many others it would be hard to list them all last june he planned to organize and executed a field day for juniors as an alternative to the prom as an opportunity for the upcoming seniors to get together at least once in person and build bonds as a class mr menendez is a wonderful example of a teacher who always goes the extra mile for his students and is well deserving of the title again thank you for your service to the students the gym work for the district goes to terence schnell unfortunately she could not be here but she received this award
010for going above and beyond with all the recruits and the new teachers that we're hiring answering questions on weekends um at night after hours trying to help us recruit the best teachers we can get to the district so our gym of the award for the district is mrs snell um we're going to take a five-minute break and ben begs here who are going to do a quick presentation on our new website and some of the work we've done so far this year so just give us five minutes thank you official communications today we're going to do a presentation on our updated website project and a few other items take it away guys yeah thanks for the introduction dan um yeah so we're both from laura bishop communications um you know we've met a lot of
011you over the school years we've been working with you but there's also some new faces for us so i'm jessica this is ben laura also really wanted to be here tonight but unfortunately he couldn't be here um but we'll go ahead and get started and give you an idea of what we've been working on since we joined the district in september okay so when we first came in in september we heard about all of these amazing things that were going on in the district i mean we saw it tonight right with students in the month month and hearing about gem of the month um and so much more but we we realized that maybe some of that wasn't being captured through storytelling it wasn't you know being put out into the into the news it
012wasn't being captured in kind of the way so we thought about at first like what is the brand for the district and that's where we came up with this idea of bound to astound um and we really felt like that kind of captured that atmosphere of pride and that you know um kind of that long overdue recognition and visibility for the district and so once we were able to establish that brand we've now used that to flow through all these other communication channels so we thought we could start here by showing the um video we worked with the district to make um this is about three four minute video but i think it does a really good job of capturing that bound to us down brand and showing off some of the highlights of the
013district so we can go ahead and watch that first fabric is a small community we want our kids to not only learn the curriculum but to learn life skills students become more independent they become better critical thinkers throughout their time at boundary very fun you have like a lot of freedom it's a new world in here so the bamboo school district is a pre-k to 12 district we're located in somerset county new jersey we're a neighborhood school district meaning that our kids walk to school we don't have business our buildings are broken up by grade level spans so it's not by where you live in the town despite what grade you're in the philosophy i think across every school building is just to be able to educate the whole child we look for opportunities to
014you know really best ourselves in the community so that the kids coming to school feel like it's connection to home our morning meetings start after the kids come in and have breakfast we always like to have a classroom that is kind and respectful so things aren't going well that's how we'll talk about in the morning meeting and sometimes we model it it gives an opportunity for the teachers to just sit with their kids and start the day off on a positive note but another large part of responsive classroom is establishing the rules i have the kids make the rules day one by them making the rules they're going to feel bad when they break it because they're like oh man rule number 30 was mine social emotional learning plays a very important part learning to
015control your emotions learning to help each other they speak to the class about like problems in the classroom let me know if anything's uncomfortable for you guys let me know if anything is good if anything is bad i appreciate the fact that the board of education saw the need for mental health services in this community it is a big undertaking to implement some of these programs but at the end of the day it's completely worth it because it's getting kids linked who would have otherwise been under the radar i know for a fact that brown brook students are capable of a great deal more so many of them are college-bound they have all of the skills necessary to be successful and lead a meaningful life i'm already seeing it now and then drama club gifted
016and talented or the stem ela i really i enjoy writing yeah so you environment to be around if you want to learn different things but i can prepare you i feel like the teachers helped me a lot by getting to the next level like time management stuff like that it helped me a lot our classrooms are all up to date with most current promethean boards in place we were very fortunate that we were able to put a one-to-one device in every student's hand from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade now we also have an engineering lab starting in our grades seven and eight but the texts that we read in english class serve as doors to interact with other cultures and see other viewpoints uh throughout the world and students are learning how to
017do that more naturally by themselves now brown bugs is like a whole different diversity get to meet a whole bunch of different type of people like i have a friend group we all are interested in like different things so whether it's building that homeschool connection whether it is making sure we have enough staff who are bilingual if i had to identify something that i'm most proud of it is just the community that's here and the sense that we build upon that within the school buildings i'm definitely going to miss brownberg high school but i'm very ready for like the next step of my life the lessons i learned about will be a part of my future [Applause] um so we're really happy with how the video turned out i think it's a really good reflection
018of the district and um this is going to be a really important part of the website of course but then also we have we'll be cutting this into shorter segments that we can use in a social media campaign as well so we'll get a lot of leverage uh the other big project we've been working on with the district is of course a website redesign um this is a complete redesign right of everything from the visual to rewriting every single page of the website at this point to make sure that we're having a website that is easy to navigate easy when you're going to it to find what you need making sure it's mobile friendly ada compatible all of these really important things and so i thought we could just go ahead oh and also making
019sure the district news and school news is prominent on the website so we can go ahead and i'll walk you through some of the aspects of the website so you're looking at right now the district site so we've completed two things right now the district site and the small and the smallie site um so the district site um as you can see we've tried to pull in that brand language of our students are bound to astound and really that language flows through every page of the website as you go down on the page um i'm sorry if you could go back up first we have our languages up at the corner there which is very important to have translation we also are prominently have the district's social media there at the top and as you
020go down the page then we thought about having the things that are updated most frequently so that would be your events and announcements at the top news is also something we definitely want to be very high up on the page any kind of district news there congratulating teacher specialist of the year anything like that throughout the year and then as you go on we have the website the mission statement who we are what we stand for if you want to click one of those you can see that each of those opens up with more information about the district and then and then i'm going down and all of this you know is is uh aba compliant so if you see over in the corner there this is an accessibility button that anybody could use to
021change the font size change the color um highlighting you know all of the types of things that you need to have in order to be compliant right with state regulations around this but then also it's just you know good to have this on any website and if you want to go ahead up here as we were thinking about the navigation we really wanted to kind of streamline this so thinking about what are the buckets that people would go to when they come to the website so here you might be a parent or student and very easily you would go there to find your portal to find your lunch venues which we know are very important um to find counseling services thinking about all the things you would need there um and then under district you
022know we've really kind of tried to make it very easy for people to find what they need when they come to the website same with you know a bucket for staff there athletics why don't you go ahead and click on the calendar uh you have your calendar here which you can see it in many different ways so you have your monthly weekly daily views that'll all be populated once the website's live with your different events that are going on and then you want to go over to news as well and then of course displaying um your news stories which are really important to telling the district's brand here um and as you probably saw on the on the front page there focusing we wanted to focus on making this appealing for somebody coming to the
023website so it's pictures of of kids it's you know happy kids in different activities going on in the schools um so i think that that really comes through on the site here and then if you want to go over to swally each of the schools will have um will follow a similar format um and so right now the three elementary schools share one page we have this broken out though that's smalling avaya vermont could all have their own as well as the middle school in high school um and so you can see that they would be able to put their own announcements they would be able to put their own upcoming events um a little bit they have their own news stories and then if you want to go to the top and you can
024go to our school each principal under principal's corner each principal communicates a little bit differently right some might have a video message every week some might have a newsletter so they're able to put that here and then if we want to go back to our school and you can see we are going to feature student of the month gem of the moon in those spaces and if you want to go do parents and students and then clubs activities at the bottom and for the schools that have clubs and activities they'd be able to showcase those here as well okay great and so uh last thursday we did a focus group um with i guess about a dozen members of the bamboo community parents and uh staff and overwhelmingly we heard positive about the website you
025know they liked uh the navigation what we had them do was uh give us the three three different ways that they use three reasons that they usually visit the website um they might have said you know they go there for lunch menus they go further there for the parent portal and so then we had them walk through on this new site how they would get to those locations um and overwhelmingly we heard that they can get to those easier they felt like it was more intuitive they want to be able to watch board meetings they felt like they were able to find the youtube link a little bit easier um so that was important feedback uh we did talk with them about a couple issues that came up around the calendar um integration of the
026calendar the um directory a staff directory we think that those are things that we can address in other ways um maybe not directly on the website here but maybe these are things that could be part of the parent portal or something that is not publicly facing on the website but something that um they can find in the parent portal so that's the website we do have more of a presentation here with some of the other work we've done but i want to just open it up in case there's any questions about the website before we move on one question so you mentioned um some of the concerns that they was raised about the calendar um would you mind sharing what they were sure so uh right now how we have it set up is that
027the calendar is um each school has their own calendar and then the district has their own calendar and we did it that way because the current calendar has everything in it and it was getting a little bit confusing i think to for to have everything all together so that's why we developed it in the way that we did um the feedback we heard was that if there's a parent who has students in two schools they would then sort of have to be bookmarking two different pages to go to or use you know using the calendars of two different pages or that so that was the key and we also talked about you know setting up our rss feeds for those calendars so you know obviously we'd have to do a little bit of training with
028parents at the beginning of the year but being able to download or set up a link between the particular school calendars and their personal calendar so if they wanted two particular schools they could set it up to have it on their own calendar versus us trying to jam everything into one calendar make it a little bit easier and a little less complicated exactly yeah i think that we would have to do that as a new project i don't want to sort of delay you know being able to launch the website because of the development that it would take to do the calendar integration but it's something we could revisit later there's many things like that um you know that we could always look back yes so when i look at the school pages versus the
029district page i've seen obviously the same logo the same colors do we feel that when when a person comes off of the district page into a sub school page that there should be something identifiable more than just the copy where it says welcome to smalling elementary do we think that maybe we need an icon and we need something that's a little stronger so that yeah like or score to lock the masthead in so when people scroll that welcome to smallie stays locked in because i feel like the vibe of and we have so many schools right like i wouldn't want parents to be scrolling through a site and be confused at what school they're at sure so if we lock the masthead in or put something either like i know bridgewater i've mentioned this before
030like bridgewater does it when they all the subschools have a sort of a different vibe or a different color i know as crusaders we probably don't want to do that yes but if we could come up with an identifying logo like a junior crusader or whatever identifies that individual school a little bit better sure i think that could help yeah i think that's a good point lisa what we ran into was that some of the schools do have their own logo yeah and others don't and so um or they don't have a high quality version of it or there were just various things and so that's why i think we went with sort of making it that you know everybody is using the same district logo the same colors which is good for sort of
031you know creating that unity amongst all of the schools in that way but i do think that maybe it's a matter of that welcome to smallie like making that like sticky at the top there so that you know where you are yeah and i think that could be especially important because then could you show it especially here i mean i love i love in that case it's taking you like what happened there we were on smallie but then it takes you back to the position because it doesn't look any different than this exactly so it is really like making that stick at the top i think even if that circular icon if there's a way of pulling like differentiated um lockups for each school even embedding the school name into the laptop so that the
032graphic is a little different i think that would help you know i just worry that parents have kids in multiple schools they're going to be on different school and not really identify the differences real easily sure so any other questions or feedback on the website okay just one suggestion something we're displaying for an audience um that's nice yes that's also a feature with the video we did um a spanish translation of the video that you could pull up subtitles for that as well i think the video is phenomenal like great job on the video i would love to see even more issues of that video like moving forward yes you know sure i think that this will be after after the website launches with the video on there then we can kind of do a
033social media campaign where you'll see clips of that video in various formats yeah really nice job um so we're at a point now where um we will continue to be building out the school pages and we'll be sharing um all the school pages with you um in the next month or so um and then i think we're going to go through training right with the people who need to learn how to use this new system um that'll probably be some of our principles um as well as others and so management strategy because clearly there's a lot of work that goes into mining and defining the good news that we want to you up so that um you know when something comes up that you want to put something on the website you know where this
034should go and you can consult with us about you know where is the best place for this um we want to do this you know in a way that keeps the navigation that we've built here you know keeps this so that people can find things easily in the future yeah yep so there's definitely some training that we can do around that okay so we'll keep going ahead and then i'll tell you about what we've done with the district's social media accounts yeah so we just brought it up it's it's really another opportunity to tie into that new brand um so the district when we joined and started working with everyone was already on facebook and twitter and we weren't posting super regularly and so we wanted to revitalize those accounts make sure that the post
035frequency was um you know on the rise and then in doing so we also started an instagram account as well just to reach a wider audience kind of cast that wider net so we just pulled a few metrics um for you guys to take a look at today but essentially the summary is that things are are going up um and we're seeing a lot of positive trends here so if you look at facebook the average engagement of your typical facebook post is around 122. um that's likes shares um and comments um this is a great sign it really speaks to the ultimate goal of social media engagement interactivity it's a great sign that people are absorbing that new brand you can also see that reach is up significantly from last year we have several posts
036already in these last few months alone that have reached a thousand people or more when you look at twitter twitter groups things a little differently they don't look at average posts but they accumulate uh interaction and engagement so you can see 1400 likes comments and retweets across posts as of late and this is actually a number we had to keep updating as we were putting together this presentation because um it continues to rise um the piece we're really proud of here is the total impression so we're just shy of 20 000 people that are seeing content on twitter and almost 80 of those people are actually seeing it um you know in the last five months or so so we're really seeing a lot of growth on twitter which is fantastic instagram here again this
037is the new platform and we want to preface these numbers here just by saying that uh we're looking at 90 days versus several months that's just how the platform looks at analytics so these numbers are a little skewed here we're going to continue to see growth as we leverage audiences on the other two platforms um and we have really no reason to believe that um anything other than uh rises will continue as we've seen so far and again when a new social media account starts for a district we've seen that it can take up to a year um even a little more of vigilant posting to really get to that full potential so we expect that in the coming months it'll get more on track with the other two platforms so there's a question because
038um all of the posts that we're putting on there uh have the ability to make comments on like watching them yeah we thought that was really important just for that sense of community and engagement i want to hear feedback from everyone and um yeah i think so then i'm going to ask the other half is if there's all of these comments is there someone that reads these comments or like they like yeah we're monitoring all that we monitor your your inbox um as well as comments and overwhelmingly i i don't think i've seen any negative as as you're saying that i'm trying to think back and um everything is overwhelmingly positive at this point and it's not to say in the future that there might be issues that arise and we could look at this
039at that point but once you're done here then that would have to be someone hopefully we're gonna you're gonna have a long-term arrangement with that right okay [Laughter] 1400 likes or comments i mean if you have a thousand comments that's a lot of that's a lot of reading it is but i think lisa makes a good point one of the things we spoke about before we even began to work in earnest was the idea we could use these platforms to actually engage the public so the idea that we could actually get community members who are positive and have the opportunity to help control some of these conversations also results right yes so we have done this um like social media ambassadors maybe is kind of where you're going like kind of creating something where we
040have others who we know in the district are already using social media whether it's teachers or students or that and kind of working with them on them making sure that you know they're it's reciprocal right yeah right your head's absolutely in the right place you don't want to let um you know let positive feedback go unacknowledged right exactly exactly and we'll show you next if you want to go it would be great even to align this to like alumni sorry like left the district to even have you know um what do i want to say um not ambassadors but it like influencers right like if we collect ourselves like district influencers that have gone to school here that loved it here that have nothing but really great things like signing those people out and finding
041those people and getting them to be ambassadors um i think it would be really awesome too whether they went to school here i mean i know that we have a we have a boundary page for alumni that people went to school here in like the 20s and 30s right like there's a huge history in bamboo so if we can even get some of those people need them understand what their experiences were and bad work i think all of that is amazing material to use on social media and that has been if you want to go into we just wanted to show you a couple of uh examples of things that have succeeded so that middle post here is actually what you're referring to um yeah bound for college here so um we can start in
042the middle there now that we're talking about it but um points of pride is a um it's a huge thing worth sharing on social media just like we would share on the website or pitch to the media there's no reason that we can't repurpose that for social media people really engage highly with that and again just like you said here we've done a couple posts featuring graduates that have been accepted to colleges which is a huge deal and it's certainly worth sharing and people have really responded well to that if you look at the left two here we've also done more campaign approaches so this was earlier in the year we featured and welcomed new staff members to the district um this was really a templated approach where we reached out to those new staff
043members for some basic information um including a picture of themselves and that was really the most engaging component of this people really like to see the faces of the people interacting with their children every day we know that parents really engaged highly with this with this series there were a lot of shares and you can see across all three of these posts here right we're really working in the brand again we have that hashtag bound to astound um building that brand recognition on here as well and of course the third column here um no worthy news in the district in this case welcoming dr friedman to the to the district certainly worth sharing um and again this is something that we need to remember that social media while it is an engaging tool we can
044also use it as an interactive and an informative tool and so people who maybe don't look to the website as frequently but are scrolling through social media then can have you know get their news that way because i know sure so if there was anything negative that we you know thought like this is something we would we would immediately you know let dan know um if there was anything that was concerning um i think we have received questions if like through the inbox right on facebook um about massive policies and things like that and we've always just gone to dan it's not just um but like i said we haven't seen any negative comments um at this point and if we did um sometimes the approach is to ignore it if you have to if
045it's not something you can respond to other times you do have to respond um and if things were to ever really get out of control we might consider shutting down comments or that but i just never experienced that on these platforms um so we could i think yeah um and we should mention we use a service um that so every day we're receiving in our inbox um any news out there about the boundary school district with keywords um as well as we're getting like a report about your social media accounts every day so yeah one key component of that is there is a sentiment feature um in those reports that we're receiving so it's kind of like a way of double checking just to see um if the platform itself misses something you know the
046monitoring services is there to help as well that's right are we are we set up with our own social pages to push out for advertising like are we open to instagram advertising or is that something that our account doesn't really cover it's it's something we haven't explored um but we certainly could yeah the capability is there if we decided to to go that route yeah the video when we launched that yeah i'm just wondering if we wanted to you know invest a little bit extra into that post and push it out you may get a really good return on it yeah yeah it is a capability we can do with how it's currently set up um as well we have worked on kind of proactive media pitching here so really taking what are those unique
047programs and unique stories in the district um and sharing them with the news media and so as you can see here um two of the bigger stories that we've been able to place for you one was in new jersey school boards association school leader magazine and that was about the case for in-school mental health services and it's a really nice story about the district's mental health services and how that's kind of a model for other school districts i think it really positioned the district well um in that space and then julia buccini who you saw on our video she's a social worker in the district uh she we worked with her on writing and placing a piece in social work today uh magazine um and then there's also ongoing press releases that were um always
048distributing to more of your local media like my central jersey patch uh rls media um and those might be fundraisers going on at the school or um i think some of the others like uh teachers and teachers of the year and things like that that we just want to get out into the media so that's been really successful as well and then another key communication tool that we've been working with the district on is the newsletter so when we came on we know there was a newsletter a printed newsletter that was sent to uh aldors and we've since worked on a new newsletter titled updates abound which kind of again plays off of that brand and we really aim to include the most engaging content possible so that so far has been a superintendent's message
049um budgeting information um and of course those same success stories that we see pitching to the media on the website again repurposing that just to tie the brand in and make it really cohesive so this is just again a great way to engage the community it is bilingual it's released in english and spanish so it's really important as a communication tool to reach as wide of an audience as you can we know you have a significant spanish-speaking population and so we want to make sure that that population is able to engage and interact with you we've done two issues so far starting first in january i believe and [Music] we worked on just kind of communicating in a clear way through various things so um you know clear and transparent communications will sometimes help with
050writing maybe a letter to the school community or um just you know reading over any communications that are going out so we've helped in other ways with the communications so we look forward to continuing to work together in the future we hope that that is um possible we will you know first step right is launching the website and getting that completed but then we would love to continue working on all these things that we've developed we feel like we've set a really good foundation here with this brand and we just want to keep going with it so we hope that will be the case okay and so i noticed um if you have any other questions i'm happy to keep them yeah yeah thank you so much yesterday [Music] thank you we are now up
051to committee reports uh i believe we postponed both education and governance for this round um i expecting that we'll be able to reschedule those uh between now and the next meeting but i do know that we have updates on both human resources and operations roger's not here tonight so i'll give the operations one uh michelle do you want to talk a little bit about hr no we haven't met as a committee uh our committee has been focused on negotiations and that's nothing that's moving forward and there's really nothing we can discuss yeah i i the only thing that i would say is maybe since the last time we all met as a group maybe for the best of the other board members we've met with the association twice we've been twice totally now right and
052we had additional meetings earlier this evening yes i i yes i met with some of the administrators to get some to clarify some information that we discussed at our meeting okay and then the next scheduled meeting with the association is first week in june right so hopefully before the next quarter meeting we'll have another set of updates to present but you know i think in general the sessions have been going really well so far you know everybody's highly engaged the team that's at the table really is passionate about what they're trying to accomplish on both sides so all positives uh there operations we had another meeting earlier this evening with uh our friends from the borough council uh we talked about a variety of different things uh primarily focused on shared services and how we
053could potentially partner to better effect across both entities but we also got into discussions about our student population as well not only how many students we have in district but how consistent and steady those populations are throughout the tenure uh that they're with us at the school so again i think we're continuing to refine everybody's understanding of the challenges that we face as a district as a community uh how those uh intersect with people of the district in the borough and ultimately i think you know we walked away this time with some tangible action items uh including hopefully the opportunity to plan for um some improvements at the billion or baseball field and to get that restored to a place where we can all be proud of it as a community so generally again i
054think a very positive discussion any other questions or comments about committees or committee meetings i think we're up to item number four open to the public for agenda items dr gallagher do we have any questions online we do not okay anybody from the room okay on to 5.1 which is approval of than these minutes resolve that the boundary board of education approves the minutes for the following meeting uh regular and executive uh may 9th 2022. i have a motion thank you miss muss a second any discussion hearing none can we have a roll call please mr bail yes mr fazio i have to abstain yes mr januzzi yes miss lima yeah mr minhaus yes miss luzon yes and mr dawson yes okay up to 6.1 resolved that the superintendent recommends for approval the resolutions as
055outlined in personnel resolutions under district high school this is 6.2 through 6.13. motion thank you mr defazio a second thank you miss discussion i just wanted to congratulate miss brucia and thank her for her service to our school district and i wish her well in her next chapter what's that any other comments okay hearing none can we have a roll call please mr bail yes mr fazio yes yes mr januzzi yes miss lima very good we are up to section seven resolve that the superintendent recommends for approval the resolutions as outlined in personnel resolutions under middle and elementary schools this is 7.2 through 716. they have a motion motion thank you mrs defazio ii thank you miss muscle discussion the only thing that i'll add or i'll ask that you add dr gallagher for everybody's
056benefit uh you know one of my observations was obviously relative to other agendas there are a high number of resignations uh that are actually on here so i asked dr gallagher to work with his staff and find out where we are comparatively uh to both last year and maybe some prior years so dr gallagher i don't know if you have those stats with you yeah the last two years we've had about 21 resignations this year so far we have 15. got it so generally speaking we're no worse off than we have been in prior years and they all a little bit which i think is a good sign is there any way of finding out board level able to review that yes okay so i think it has been a while though since we saw
057a report do you think we could have one for the next board meeting um again i'll talk to her about it i know you know some of these are pretty fresh you know who has to schedule that but i will talk to her when she returns to the difference yeah i don't think um in the time that i've been on the board i don't think we've ever seen anything that's gonna outline that i think she did a presentation people usually do it at the end of the year once we've kind of got trying to do it in the summer after everything yeah kind of one when the dust doubles yeah okay any other comments about section seven hearing none can we have the vote please mr bail yes mr fazio yes mr zino yes we
058are up to item 8.1 resolve that the boundary board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in education resolutions under district of high school this is just 8.2 bad motion motion thank you mr fazio a second discussion i can't wait to see the work they always do such a nice job the art department yeah yeah okay that and i think this is something that we've done as a community in your past right it definitely makes a difference something else okay can we have a roll call please mr bear yes mr fazio yes mr xeno yes yes it's lima yeah mr minhas yes justin yes and mr dos yes ocean county okay europe did 941 resolve that the boundary board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in educational resolutions under middle and elementary schools this
059is 9.2 and 9.3 discussion all right hearing none can we have a roll call mr bale yes mr fazio yes miss casino yes mr januzzi yes miss lima mr minhaus yes mr munson yes mr dawson yes very good i am 10.1 resolved that the vandenberg board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in policy resolutions under district at high school this is just 10.2 i have a motion motion thank you mrs defazio a second second thank you mr bell discussion i have a question regarding p2416. postnatal accommodations for students is there a way that the board can see what that accommodation is going to look like or do we know i know it's a personal matter but i just would like to see what you know i've worked in a corporate environment where those kind
060of accommodations have been a closet it's not a problem yeah i just want to make sure that it's because i know there are stipulations in that policy that kind of itemize all the things that need to happen so we have a separate um off like a room inside the nurse's office in high school um that you you in perhaps if we had a student doing that that's the room we try to utilize but sometimes unfortunately that room is taken for other issues okay and then you use a conference room or something so we're thinking that it could be a flexible space like it's not an actual like we don't have a space we don't have okay i just want to make sure that that's kind of set up and you know and i have a
061question regarding the first so from the first policy there regarding the safety plan so i was reading what it said but it's a little bit confusing so something about it not no longer being effective to [Music] because it looked like it was specifically for um healthcare right workers but i guess it was adopted in some way again these policies are especially that one in particular is changing because it started with the um the road back plan um with covet and everything else and it kind of has morphed a couple times now into like a more general safety safety plan i i can't remember exactly all the wording that was in there um when i read it on the top of my head but i know it's just another reiteration of that um next move in
062that plan from the state just to give you an example like there was one one iteration where you know we had to have a coded cp uh specialist you know you had a specialist and then then you had a coordinator and you know it's a little little word any other comments or questions but so these two policies are not related to where the level is at right now right that's so cool yeah it's a whole different thing that was it all right can we have a roll call please mr bale yes mr fazio yes mr zeno yes mr januzzi yes it's lima yes mr minhaus yes monson yes and mr dawson yeshua all right we are up to 11.1 results the boundary board of education approves the climate uh the resolutions as outlined in financial
063resolutions this is 11.2 through 11.8 out of motion thank you mrs defazio a second second thank you mr bell um for discussion you know obviously anybody who has questions or comments but i want to point out uh that 11.6 is a little bit different than what we had uh talked about in the past and dr gallagher maybe you just want to give a brief look yes um so we rebidded the hvac project um the initial bid came in at um just north of seven million dollars when we did it at the time so what we did was we broke it down into many different little segments figuring you know we only had so much money of the two or so three money so we wanted to do something we didn't want to lose the money
064we wanted to do something so you broke it down into uh specific buildings and control systems and things like that well lucky for us you know when the bids came in the the total amount of doing all the work was a 5.6 million um we have uh i think we're i think we're looking at probably using about 300 300 000 or so out of this year's savings to actually do the entire project so the good news is we're doing the entire project so uh yeah obviously you know athc systems are a long lead item um so some of this some of this stuff is going to impact us um as we move along through um through school uh you know depending on we're gonna try and do most of the work if we can you
065know during the summer months and things like that but unfortunately sometimes uh you know uh because of the lead item on this you may get uh you know five or six ptac units that come in in october we're gonna have to put them in and i'll do that either second shift or weekend any questions on that item it's a pretty big one okay uh the only other thing i'll say is uh i think it's excellent to see the uh bake sale that's going to happen at the community middle school party led by the students which is always fantastic to see and then the donations that are coming in to help with the outdoor classroom i think will be very very nice or appreciated any other comments on the financial resolutions i have one question on
06611.5 for the custodial services i know we have been having an issue with trying to get some of the services in could you just explain out a little bit more on 11.5 and where we stand as far as who we're going to have staff for the next score is it going to be the same service oh i i can't speak to that right now what we've done is um we rejected the rfps that came in yeah and we actually are going to a bid process so it's a little different okay um we're going to probably you're going to award that at the next board meetings you'll know who your personas will be for july 1. okay again but we i know that there's at least four companies that are going to fit on us so
067you know right now we're just we know there's going to be an increase to it yeah and we know it's going to be a substantial increase to it um just because it seems as though again just a little about that yeah but you know they've all been unionized so you know there's a lot more you know um contracts a lot of obligations that we're going to have to fulfill um or they're going to have to fulfill which the costs get passed on us obviously so um right now we're bracing for about a 500 500 000 increase over what we've already budgeted for the 22-23 school year okay and we still feel that outsourcing that is probably more beneficial than having a custodial staff on site i would never ever kind of say what you just
068said if i could own my own custodial staff i would absolutely do that yeah but unfortunately to bring them back into process even more than that number i just gave you and i just don't think we can physically uh financially handle that um i did have a conversation with the association prior to going up with the rfp about that okay um and again there's just some hurdles we can't get over at this time okay so we're most likely looking at a third party you definitely have a third party okay okay any other questions comments hearing none can we have a world call please mr bail yes mr fazio yes miss casino yes mr januzzi yes miss lima uh we have no other matters to come before the board we are up to new business if
069there's anything that anybody would like to raise or discuss at this time do i have a question of course any updates on transmission rates from daily um i've been sending you those obviously we are in we are in the orange right now however in district our rates are pretty normal um i think perhaps we might have had only nine um so you know again um i will tell you that walking around in a couple of buildings you see more kids wearing masks um of their own choosing obviously um but i thought that was good to see that the kids are taking this seriously and wearing masks again and things like that so um right now i'm not sure there's anything we need to do um just because we are still relatively low considering generally any
070guidance heard anything spoke about anything i think i think at this point in time just reading the team leads a little bit um they want us over so you know i would think that we would probably be looking at what we did kind of this year in terms of that that things really got bad again but other than that i don't see much so on your policy like does it indicate um if you're at a certain level you know i mean i'm going with the master being optional like does it indicate that if we are at a certain level like the state is a certain level the county's at a certain level like do the mask get free for for us as the board decision so it wasn't part of life okay so at this
071time with the board consider like being that it's on on high and orange to have i mean it's great to hear that there are you know students taking it upon themselves to to put on a mask but i'm just saying as in you know support would you have considered being that you are an orange um that the county isn't more you know i mean it's great also we haven't had cases here the district physician and taking guidance from there we we don't really make our own decisions on this because unfortunately for us no one up here has a medical degree so we listen to those who do and if he says it's time then we'll revisit it at that time but up to this point you'd correct me if i'm wrong he said where we
072are is where we should be so if we get more guidance from him that says otherwise then i would definitely you know take note okay so based on that information the person who's advising indicates that right now that even though it's on foreign can yeah maybe you know for the benefit of everybody involved if we can just get an update from the school physician yep i'll take care of it thank you and i wonder if we had that that shock clinic the vaccination clinic if you guys i think we had a pretty good turnout like it was 80 students or so do we want to maybe plan on like a booster clinic or something i mean i'm thinking like local families that aren't out you know can't travel to get their booster shots and their
073coping shots and set up something again in the district um the last one the last one was done by our school physician so i'd have to ask him okay i mean it can't hurt you know especially if the numbers go up and i think just a regular reminder to families to teachers to parents like you know if you need to get a booster we encourage you to get to be up to date on your boosters your second shots so you're fully vaccinated one shot's not gonna you know we don't recommend one shot we recommend keeping up with your boosters and stuff any other comments for new business [Music] okay we are now open to the public for any and all items dr gallagher do we have anybody online um actually we do okay and it's
074a little bit of sad news so i knew this and i was going to bring it up but since miss del conte who normally is a uh yeah normally uh here at our meetings for so many years um she did put one online for us and that is uh to bring attention to on may 21st former maine office secretary joan roberto passed away she worked for the district from 1978 to 2003. she was one of the sweetest and most welcomed welcoming faces at bamberg high school i would like to request the board take a moment of silence to remember her thank you i would agree you know just speaking from my own personal experience mrs roberto was the uh you know the secretary in the main office when i was at school here so always
075a long place in my heart sad news any comments from the room okay uh at this point i think we are up to the executive session um which we are going to get into if i get the numbers correct under numbers one two and three you are correct you can teach me something um all in favor all right you're unmuted we're up to item 16.4 we'll solve the boundary board of education the resolutions as outlined in approval of hiv cases under high school this is 16.2 i have a motion thank you mrs defazio a second second thank you mr powell mr bale yes mr fabio thank you sir 17.1 resolved that the boundary board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in approval of hiv cases under middle and elementary schools this is 17.2 and
07617. have a motion motion thank you mrs defazio a second second thank you mr powell mr bail yes mr fabio yes mr xeno yes mr januzzi at this point we have exhausted the agenda may have a motion to adjourn me thank you mrs defazio a second second thank you mr bell any objections thank you very much have a nice evening all right we're done