001for the pledge of allegiance. 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. >> I'd like to read a quick statement if I may, Mr. Rogers. The New Jersey open public meetings law was enacted to ensure the rights of the public to have advanced notice of and to attend a meeting of public bodies at which any business affecting their interest is discussed or acted upon. In accordance with the provision of this act, the side park board of ed has caused notice of this meeting to be published by having the datetime and place thereof posted in the office of the board of ed and the office of school numbers 345 and 6 and the high
002school on January 13, 2026 and notice forward to reporters of the record January 13, 2026. This is an official meeting. I'd like to take the role if I may. Mrs. Abru >> here. >> Mr. Capano >> here. >> Mrs. Fredo >> here. >> Mr. Garcia >> here. >> Mr. Nrew >> here. >> Dr. Pontiano >> here. >> Mr. Ror, Mr. Russo >> here. >> Mr. Russo. >> Uh, Mr. Bakia >> here. >> And Mr. Yunuzzi is not here. Okay. Mr. Refus. >> Thank you, Mr. Alfano. Thank you board of ed members and Mrs. Calibies. Um before we uh we get started, I would like to give a huge thank you to our custodial staff, um the town, the DPW, the housing authority, anybody else who played a role in the last couple weeks with snow
003removal. Thank you to the parents uh for your patience. Thank you to the building administrators for doing the best that you could given the circumstances that we had uh with Mother Nature. Uh I know having two storms uh the way that we had them and the timing of them was not easy on everyone, but thank you to everyone who helped out in any way possible, whether it was um you know uh doing the actual shoveling, spreading assault, maybe walking a couple extra blocks because uh some areas by your house were not cleared. Um but again, a big thank you to our custodial staff um and Mr. Alfano for for organizing that. I know it was not easy uh given the con conditions of the buildings. Um but again a big thank you. Thank you for
004that. Um, one thing I do want to point out, um, because of the snow, um, and the change to our calendar that was approved, uh, months ago, I would like to recommend, uh, changes for the upcoming calendar to replace a few of the snow days that we had. So, I would like to uh recommend turning March 20th, which was a planned full day professional development day, into a um half-day professional development day. So, we would bring the students in to the buildings in the morning and then in the afternoon, we would have a staff uh professional development day on March 20th. And the second day um that we do need to incorporate back into the calendar. I would like to recommend May 22nd. This is the Friday before Memorial Day. This was a scheduled full
005day off for all staff and students. So I would ask that the board consider having May 22nd be a half day uh for students and staff before the Memorial Day break. Okay. Um, kindergarten and prek registration is going to be up and coming in the next couple weeks. Uh, kindergarten registration has been posted on our social media accounts. It is on the district website. We have sent a blast out to all current parents that we have. So, we do ask that everyone spread the word if they know that friends or family have students um needing to be registered for kindergarten. um those registration or that registration will happen March 9th to March 12th. So anytime during that week um parents should plan on calling school 4 and the uh secretaries at school 4 will be
006able to give you more information on the specifics with the official registration with kindergarten registration. We will have two evening sessions. Um so that is helpful for any of the working families that do need to come in um during the evenings. Applications for prek will be available March 1st. More information will be going out later this week about specifics in terms of prek. Any three-year-old and fouryear-old is eligible um for prek. But in the application process, we will have more information on how those students will be selected. And last but not least, uh we are working on updating our afterare for next year. We are in the early stages of planning not only after care from 3:00 to 6:00 in our elementary school buildings, but also offering a morning care session. So, for those families
007who are looking for morning care, um I would plan on having uh morning care available starting at 7:30 in our elementary schools and that would be paid for on a month-to-month basis and the morning care and afterare would be available any time that school is in session. So it is something that um if you are thinking about child care for September, you can plan on having morning care as an option for uh your son or daughter in any um school in grades kindergarten through fifth grade. Okay? And if there are any changes to the morning care and afterare program that we have, we'll be sure to get that out to the community as quickly as possible. Okay? So, at this time, um, I would ask everyone to turn to page eight, and I'm going to
008turn it over to Dr. Pantiano. We had a very productive uh, policy meeting a couple weeks ago where we did talk about some policies that either needed to be introduced or revised. um we took um everyone's opinions and we went back to the drawing board to make them appropriate for our district. So I would like to turn it over to Dr. Paniano and maybe she can discuss in a little bit more detail about some of these policy updates. >> Yes. First, I'd like to take an opportunity to thank my colleagues on the executive board of the Bergen County School Boards Association because last week I was elected president of Bourbon County and I want to thank them presuming that they will see this at some point in time for their confidence, their confidence in me
009and I look forward to serving the Burbank County organization obviously as well as the Cliffside Park board for the next two years. So, I want to thank them for that. >> Congratulations. AND ONE OF THE first things I get to do is we have our unsung heroes event next week. It's March 4th. All are welcome to attend. It's at Beckton Regional High School at 6 p.m. And what we do is we honor one selected unsung hero from every high school in the county. So obviously Cliffside Park will have a representative there. We will be honoring an unsung hero from Cliffside Park. Hopefully we'll be able to recognize that individual at a future board meeting, but everyone is welcome to attend and that's Spectum Regional Wednesday, March 4th at 6 p.m. It's for all board members
010and anyone who wants to attend. Now, we had some great policy committee meetings and we had some updates. So, I want to kind of give you the summary or the footnotes of the policies because there's several of them. The first one uh 0132 is on executive authority and that basically says the administrative regulations will now have to be board approved before they are official. Generally in the past the superintendent can do that on his or her own but when we update this the superintendent can write or draft the regulations. Usually they come from strame but they will have to have board approval to be in effect which is very important and I thank you for that. Another very important thing this came up from our students tangentially in our last meeting 2365 acceptable use of
011generative artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is here. It's here to stay and is already impacting and in the schools and the plan that I read from the school was excellent. Um, the updated AI policy includes an AI plan and the AI plan outlines how AI will be used, prohibited uses of AI, and consequences for inappropriate use for AI. And what I really love about the plan is before the teacher gives an assignment, they actually have to spell it out to the students if they're allowed to use AI, if they're not allowed to use AI, and in what capacity they can use AI. So it really gives them what the expectation is prior to them, you know, uh, taking on the assignment. So I think that that was excellent. 5111. This is important for us, too. Eligibility
012of resident nonresident students. Employees of the board of ed who do not live in town are not allowed to have their children attend schools. So, anyone who does not live in town and yet is an employee of the board of ed will no longer be able to petition to have their child attend their schools. And we talked many times about the overcrowding situations and so forth. So, this is really, as I said in our meeting prior, putting our cliffside residents and our cliffside students first. So, uh again, employees who don't live in the town can no longer have their children attend school. 5460 high school graduation. The board will cover the costs of the seal of bi literacy. That's an exam and it's really beneficial to us and it's a uh an honor to have
013our students have that seal of by literacy. I believe that we just recognized actually at a recent meeting the students who met that criteria for having biiteracy uh so that we're paying for the cost of that is is important and that's a very good thing to be able to do. 5514 student use of vehicles on school grounds. This becomes important nowadays because we have opened the lunch and as we've opened the lunch first for seniors now for juniors we have to start thinking about cars and we've talked about it from time to time. So students are not allowed to park cars on school property during school hours. Motorized transportation cannot be inside the school building. And our uh our firemen will appreciate this. We have students who could possibly come to school on electric scooters.
014And we all know that if you watch the news, the batteries on electric scooters could be flammable. So, we certainly don't want any motorized transportation brought into the school buildings. We don't want to run the risk of any fire. So, they will not be allowed to be brought inside the school building. And the Cliffside Park water bed is not responsible for lost, damaged, or stolen modes of transportation. So, if somebody brings a skateboard, somebody bring a motorized vehicle, you know, a scooter that folds up or whatever, we're not responsible if something happens to it. Uh 9270 homeschooling and equivalent education outside the school. Homeschooled students have the opportunity to participate in the shared learning program. So, in other words, if they're homeschooled during the day, but they want to take advantage of Burton County Technical
015School, Special Services, possibly even Burton Community College, our program, they still will be able to take advantage of those programs even though they're homeschooled. Very important. 3231 again in the mode of putting side students first. outside coaching in competing school districts. Teachers are not allowed to coach teams in our league at any level. And this includes paid or voluntary positions. And that's very important to us. We want to put our own cliffside students first. And we don't think it's a very good look to have our own teachers coaching against students that they have in the classroom. So this really covers teachers coaching in an hourly which is a finite number of teams an hourly. It doesn't really include the broader burn county or the broader spectrum but we don't think it's very good optics to
016put our children in adversarial positions with their own teachers uh on that one on my back. 4231 outside coaching in competing school districts. And the same thing goes true of our non-eing staff members. Again, we don't want to put our staff members in an adversarial position with their own students. You can't be, you know, uh, supportive and and, uh, you know, kind and compassionate with your student in school and then go against them that night in a competition. So, we think it's in the best interest of our Cliffside Park students to not have their teachers become their competitors. Uh, another very important thing, library materials. I know we've heard a lot about that lately. 2535. This is actually coming out of one of the most recent laws and it's actually part of the budget document.
017One of the things in the budget document is they ask if we have a policy surrounding library materials. Now, Mr. Alfano will be able to say yes when he has to answer that. Uh, and it protects the library books that are currently in school libraries. Only, and this is very important, only community members with a vested interest can petition to have a book or material removed from the library. And the key to this is you have to have a vested interest. So, in other words, we can't have somebody from an organization in California come to Cliffside Park saying, "Please remove this book from the library." It really has to be somebody from the school community to petition to have something removed or even looked at. And that obviously again puts the people of Cliffside Park
018first, the people of our school community first. We shouldn't be able to have outside influences who have no vested interest in our community or our school district coming in. And this is uh part of the law, the Freedom to Read Act. So, I know when you do the budget, you want to do that. And I'm very proud to say because when I got on this board, we had the conversation that's taken several years, but 2624 revises the grading policy and it's a very extensive policy. So I would encourage anybody who really has an interest in the grades to really go online and look at our policy. But the official grading policy is updated for students in grades K through 12. K4 uses standardsbased learning. So basically the students are graded against how they perform against
019each standard in math, science, social studies, etc. Grade five uses ELA, but letter grades are in all the core subjects. And grades 6 to 12 use letter grades. And I believe the new thing is we're introducing plus and minuses because when you have a particular letter grade, that can cover 10, you know, 10 numbers, right? So when you have pluses and minuses, it brings it down to groups of three. So you have a better idea of where you fall when it's in a group of three rather than if it's as wide as 10 different grades. So I think that we really came up with some excellent policy revisions. I think some of them had to be updated some of them by what we needed to uh implement and I thank the committee and the administration
020for their hard work on this. >> Thank you Dr. Caniano. Um are there any other committee reports committee members want to share anything? All right. So at this time um I'll turn it over to Mr. Alano, if there are any topics that you would like to uh to highlight. >> Thank you, Mr. Rus. As we just had our executive work session, we're um our focus over the next couple of weeks is obviously our 2627 budget. Uh working collaboratively with our staff, our board, and all key constituents. The budget will be due to the county and the state March 18th. The state of the state with our new governor has been moved to March 10th, which a day or two later we should get our state aid and that will allow us to finalize our budget
021again to be submitted our tenative budget March 18th to the county and to the state. We'll keep everyone apprised of the movement in regard to meeting that deadline. I also like to take your uh eyes over to page uh 20 resolution number 55. Okay, this essentially frontline education does our absences called ASAP. Handles all absences in our in our school district. And right now we have a very large uh population of employees that fill out time sheets on a daily basis and this will streamline and automate our time sheets for for a 26 27 school year. Um our payroll manager Joanne Mancini takes this much too much of her time um investing in uh paper time sheets. that this is going to kind of automate and make the process a heck of a lot more
022efficient. Like I said, we have a sign a sign significant amount of our staff uh fill out time sheets on a weekly and bi-weekly basis. So, this this is a win-win. You pay now, save a lot of human capital, significant amount of human capital later. The next page, I also like to take your eyes to page 21. >> Page 21. It's resolution 56. Uh we are going out to bid some of our we'll call it exterior site improvements at the Cliffside Pike Park High School. This is probably something uh that we've been aspired to do for for years and haven't had the opportunity. This is essentially going to be redoing our steps, stairs, walkways, and the high school. As you know, if you know, the long steps that go down to Cordage Road, uh it's
023a bit of a challenge in many of our walkways and steps, uh it's a long time coming. So, we're engaging in the open bid process. Uh we should be advertising sometimes in March. Uh we should have the open bid in sometime the early part of the mid part of April and we should have a a bid award sometime the sometime the end of April or early May. I think we will have a pre-construction meetings in in May, early June and then we'll launch the project itself in the end of June. >> So, Mr. You emailed those documents with us today. >> Yeah, I had reviewed the COE application for Mr. after. Well, I I think you were actually one of the key players when they walked. They did the site, Marcos and everybody did the
024site and they did the site visit with land associates. >> I think they were on point, but I wanted to make sure you guys wanted more green. >> Sorry, T. >> Thank you, Mr. C. >> Snow got to get delivered to 500 g tonight. >> Yeah, I'm all set. Don't have any snow there. All right. Uh, >> are there any other board members that have any questions, comments? >> I have a comment. >> Yes. >> I would respectfully request that you revise number 34 to include first reading because for policies we have to do two readings. >> Okay. >> And I think we include the first reading so that >> in the resolution. >> Okay. >> So that uh next month we can do the text. Sure. >> Thank you. Jur 34. >> So, we're
025going to vote on everything except the 34. >> No, we're going to vote on >> it. Just has draft, right? >> We need a first reading. >> First reading. >> Thank you. >> Other than that, questions, comments? >> I'll make a motion to approve the agenda. I'll second it. We have anybody from Mr. Capano. >> I'll second it. >> I'm sorry, Mr. Sistan. Okay. >> So, Mr. Capano for first, Mr. Tvaki for number two. >> Okay, we'll take a vote. Mrs. Abru, >> yes. >> Mr. Capan, >> yes. >> Mrs. Freda, >> yes. >> Mr. Garcia, >> yes. Mr. Nu, >> yes. >> Dr. Pontiano, >> yes. >> Mr. Ror here. Mr. So yes, >> yes, I'm sorry.