001e e e Dr Hayes would like to stand for the pledge all please stand for theed I pledge ALG 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 welcome everybody to the Cliffside Park Board of Education uh meeting this evening February 26 2025 I'd like to start with the roll call Mr Alano please thank you Mr capano I'll just read a quick statement if I may the New Jersey open public meetings law was enacted to ensure the rights of the public to have notice advanced notice of and to attend the meeting of public bodies in which any business affecting their interest is discussed or acted upon in accordance with the provision of this act the clide
002Park Board of edit has caused notice of this meeting to be published by having date time time and place thereof posted in the office of the burough clerk burough Library b Rec Department the office of the Board of Ed the offices of school numbers 3456 in high school on February 19th 2025 and notices were forwarded to the reporters of the record February 19 2025 this is an official meeting I'll take the role now Mr capano please Mrs Abu here Mr capano here Mrs Fredo here Mr garciaa here Mr nadw here Dr Dr pontano here Mr rank cor no Mr Russo here mrakia Mr taraka no and Mr yanui no okay Mr thank you you want one Mr okay at this time I'm going to ask for the superintendent report well good evening and thank you
003Mr President thank you Mr Alano um there are 21 Personnel resolutions tonight vast majority of them we're seeking approve approval for appointments of sub substitute teachers professional development dates leaves of absence and our spring coaching staff however there are two of the 21 which I would like to speak to and uh they involved retirements of two of our long-standing staff members and we are fortunately tonight here with one of their former students from the high school who wants to address both of them resolution number three retirement of Kathleen mulwitz resolution number eight retirement of Janet we definitely want to wish m m was a wonderful retirement they have both served our district integrity and hard work for years sometimes in different schools and they've touched the lives of thousands of kids including me and I
004just want to wish them the best of their retirement and we've been happy to have worked with them and be blessed by them for short time thank you Mr and as far as policy and procedures go there were three investigations this reporting period the findings came back with one standing stood it alleged and two were confirmed in all three investigations there were parental contact made counseling was provided and restor practices will put in place and uh that's it for me Mr President thank you Dr Hayes at this time I'll ask for committee reports any committee reports on the floor I have a couple of reports sure I'm not sure if they're committee reports but I have a few reports to share go ahead Dr P um the Cliffside Park School District submitted an application to
005transition from Early Childhood Program Aid to preschool education aid for the 20 5 26 school year and the application was approved which uh means in short that we will be providing preschool programs for I believe uh Dr Hayes three-year-old and four-year-old so we will be having preschool programs for three-year-olds and four yearolds beginning in the 25 26 school year I would like to thank Mrs marady and Mr Alban for all of their hard work it'll bring in a significant amount of money and it will expand our pool of preschool school children that will be servicing in the district so thank you and congratulations for that and I assume at some point in the future Dr Hayes will be having a presentation on it to share with the community yes uh and always one of my
006favorite reports to do the athletic report so for the winter Athletics the girls basketball finished 7 and 17 which is significant considering they didn't have any seniors on the team uh the boys basketball finished 13 and 12 and the team is the number nine seed in their state sectional bracket and they're playing right now in Warren Hills I don't know if we have an update on the game but we certainly hope that they're doing well uh the boys wrestling finished six and 14 and second in their division Junior Isaiah Rodriguez played second in The njsiaa District tournament and Senior Brian mahz placed third in The njsiaa District Tournament the girls wrestling which I'm sorry I didn't get to see one of their matches but uh completed their inaugural season so congratulations to the girls and
007they came up in the top six in the Bergen County tournament so congratulations and we look for great things out of them to come in the future indoor track season is complete with the team competing at the conference County and Invitational meets in New York and Toms River uh student athletes were successful with many personal bests as they gear up for Spring Track season the boys bowling season in his complete competition cheer finished as BNC division Champions congratulations to the cheerleaders I love seeing them in the athletic report the dance team season is complete with third place at MSU and third place at PV the team will also perform at halftime for various basketball games and the basketball cheer team cheered at home basketball games which was great to see and congratulations to the girls
008bowling they finished their regular season at 14 and2 uh Wendy paluchi and Khloe Balin finished seventh and eth respectively at Bergen County's top 35 uh as the number two seed in the njsiaa north group three sectional bracket the team defeated fairon hackin saac and Colonia advancing to the sectional championship for the first time in school history but were defeated by longtime bowling Powerhouse Woodridge so congratulations to our girls bowling team for doing some so well uh the cphhs Athletics celebrated njsiaa official the preciation week at home basketball games on January 27th and January 30th and Junior Eric I'm going to mispronounce his name Loi is representing the district as the njsi AA student ambassador spring Athletics will begin on March 10th and we wish all of our spring Sports s of very good luck in
009their competitions uh another report that I have to share with the board comes from the curriculum department and uh it comes to me via Mrs calib we had cusac in the district uh doing an evaluation and they shared with us some recommendations on how to make the school district better in the years to come and we are taking those recommendations to Heart and developing an action plan so we should have action plans around chronic absenteeism njsla participation uh in the area of mathematics and possibly we'll have a new sequence for our algebra classes as well as some of our science classes there were recommendations in the area of Middle School honors program which I think our honest program is wonderful and one recommendation comes around the inrs program and I was happy to see this
010because this is something I've brought up several times in the past but there's a need there's a definite need for elementary guidance counselors now we do have Elementary guidance counselors we don't have one Elementary counselor in each building and that's a dedicated position to each one of our elementary schools now as an educator in the absence of Vice principles and vice principles often times are thought of as a disciplinarian or somebody who is reactive I think it's much more important that we have an elementary guidance counselor who can be proactive with students and work on behaviors before behaviors become issues and possibly have groups and so forth for the students so I was very happy to see that we'll probably be moving forward with Elementary guidance counselors in each one of our Elementary uh schools
011for next year I would ask that you know that be considered in next year's budget if we can do that just update you Dr pontano it is in our PCR for our 25 years position control last I am thrilled and I thank you so much on behalf of the elementary schools to know that that's already in the budget and something that we're strongly uh considering obviously if and when the budget is approved because again it's something that really adds a benefit to our students especially at the elementary level um actually this also came up I think Mr tabaka brought it up at our virtual meeting that we had because we were talking about bus evacuation drills and how we needed to do bus evacuation drills for all of our students not just the ones that
012ride the bus on a regular basis and in conversation with Dr Hayes we came to the conclusion that we should have a bus evacuation drill every time a bus leaves on a field trip because often times students who go on field trips do not ride the bus regularly and if you do a bus evacuation drill possibly with a second grader in September and they don't go on a field trip till May they may not remember everything that they did during that bus evacuation drill so we thought it would be prudent and good policy that every time we take students on a trip especially students who aren't on the bus regularly that before they leave for the trip we do a an emergency evacuation drill with the students this way before they leave it's all fresh
013in their minds and I think that you shared that with the principles on Monday very receptive to the idea they were receptive to the idea so we want to make sure that when our students are going on a bus that the emergency procedures are fresh in their memory and in their mind we never want anything to happen but it's good practice that that's something that's done before every trip so I think that we'll be making that a practice and I thank you Dr Hayes for taking that suggestion under consideration and moving forward with it thank you and I think that's all the committee reports that I have thank you anybody else have committee reports I'm just going to touch on a few things on Personnel committee uh as everybody knows uh here on the board
014and for the public the teachers uh contract expires June 30th we've started our uh first meeting of negotiations we've set out the ground rules parameters and we hope to have a an agreement ratified uh uh prior to the expiration of the current contract we're also in the process of uh uh actually closed on Friday uh accepting uh applications and resumés for uh superintendent search Dr Pantano is leading that search uh uh with myself and we're in the process of uh selecting a few candidates for some interviews in reference to finance everybody knows this time of the year uh we start the budget um U Mr alfano started probably about two months ago with all the moving Parts uh that compromised a a 50 million plus uh budget uh a lot of good things uh are
015trying to be added to the budget and we take into consideration the astronomical raises in prescription plans for our uh employees and medical plans uh so uh tomorrow we'll have a better idea as the state implements their uh uh you know allocated numbers to the cities and municipalities here in New Jersey and I want to commend Lu Alano for the last uh 10 12 years you've worked very hard on these budgets and I commend you and we've always come up uh ahead and uh with a a surplus so I just wanted to talk a little bit about that in reference to the building and grounds uh committee uh we are working on our 2025 uh summer projects uh and uh uh Capital Improvement projects for 25 26 our lobby expansion has uh pretty much is
01695% complete I'm happy to report that we met on site uh last week and then on Monday and Tuesday they did some pre-testing of uh fire alarm systems Etc um we do have a temporary Co and I expect that that Lobby will be open on Monday our in-house contractors finishing up some loose ends and while they were uh in there uh the Board of Education under um L's guidance uh and Dr hay decided to uh paint the entire uh stairwells uh on the ground floor there too so about three stairwells are being done and a lot of good things like with any project there's always uh once you open there's some fine tuning but I'm pretty sure uh everybody's going to be happy to see the lobby uh complete the outside work is anticipated to
017be completed in uh early spring summer as we're now soliciting uh proposals and bids for uh the outside uh Paving concrete work and ballards so uh that pretty much wraps up the committee reports um the high school committee report I know we have our representative Valentina I'll turn it over to you um so we have a fundraiser going on for the high school it's going to be going on next week it is uh donating to the food pantry fair viiew and it's basically going to be like Battle of the classes but with buckets and it's going to be with uh quarters so basically half of it or a quarter of it is going to go to their class and then the rest is all going to charity so it's a good way to get the
018students involved and give it locally as well so yeah that's what we have going on the city council yeah also U to the senior class I know it's the time of the year where uh uh you know the scholarship uh applications uh go out so uh I did get an email on that some some great things uh on that so you can share that with your uh you know your student your friends got it yes anything else um that's about it yeah where did I see a picture Rec you no I'm on the CH Team Championship so congratulations so um at this time um I'll ask uh Mr Alano to go over the consent agenda I know uh Dr Hayes did everything on uh Personnel side um and operations but if you can turn it
019over we'll turn it over to you for the finance side of it uh Mr off sure thank you Mr Pano um as you alluded to we are uh working on the budget we're getting to the final stages and some of the key dates obviously meeting with the board which was tonight um we meeting with the municipality tomorrow uh we're looking to have a special meeting uh towards the end of next week of course on the 7th we have to deliver the tentative budget to the county uh right now we don't know all the specifics of the total budget but we going to be somewhere in the $70 million range total budget for uh 2526 we'll have that more buttoned up that we as we get closer to the end of next week and I again
020I'd like to thank the board for all their support uh the business office for all their support and the staff all their support specifically folks like Mr savastano has been a great help during the last uh six to8 weeks i' just like to take your attention to page 15 resolution number 45 this is the first time we've received that and we always like to get grants our our chemistry and biology and science supervisor Mr danho applied for this and we got a $5,000 US EPA environmental grant for $5,000 from Bergen Community College essentially him Mr Dan and Mr Bernstein are going to the uh appoint individuals for this and essentially it was a partnership with Bergen Community College with they called five high need Metro New Jersey schools to fund sustainability design challenges so Mr
021DaNell and Mr Bernstein are working through the process now all the paperwork has been completed so this is pretty neat stuff hopefully this will expand over the years but uh grants like this are very helpful for the obvious reasons of they they're fully funded and they required some incremental knowledge bases for the uh for the students so congratulations to Mr Dano and Mr Bernstein for pursuing that and winning the award I wanted just to bring that to the board and the Public's attention that's pretty much it uh Mr capano okay thank you Mr Alano at this time anybody from the public any comments or uh suggestions now it's the time to come up state your name hi Mr H I have to tell you I'm glad you're here but um I we were expecting you
022next month the board's gonna honor your students next month but come on up Take a Bow and congratulations on all your success thank you this is just below preview um thank you very much for uh in you know letting me be here and speak our students have won uh an invitation to Washington DC they're going to compete in an international engineering challenge I wanted to give this has some personal information the kids have their phone numbers so it's just kind of like for you guys but this is the work they submitted to earn the invitation to Washington DC uh the kids generated that entire booklet of uh CAD designs computer AED designs uh they've done a business plan for how to run a company and they've done a lot of physics calculations on how to
023uh operate the Machinery when are they going to Washington uh May 2 and 3rd well maybe Mr Russo a good friend of Mr Trump president Trump can make some arrangement ah we would we would love that um and then the other thing I was just going to share um I don't know if you guys may be willing to kind of share the news with any business people you know in the area that we are fundraising so I don't know if you might be willing to share those letters with oh thank you sir so I was hoping you might be willing to share those letters with local Business Leaders the kids have actually beat up the math of Cliffside and Fairview so they've already gathered a good amount of donations to go down there um and
024they've just been walking door too knocking on businesses and letting people know of their success so thank you very much and then if you don't mind I'll add in a personal thing just please with the retirement coming up I just want to say what a Joy's always been to work with Ed Meyer and um just his Devotion to his daughter and the kids has always just been very uh heartwarming for me to see so thank you all very much we'll see you next month congratulations you appreciate it anybody else from the public okay at this time I'll ask uh a motion to approve this evening's uh agenda a motion from Mr Russo and we have a second and Mr was number two okay yes thank you very roll call Mr Alano please Mrs Abu yes
025Mr capano yes Mrs Fredo yes Mr Garcia yes Mr Nadu yes Dr pontian I want to say yes and I'm very happy to see number 28 because that was started uh with Richfield a few years ago when I was over there so I'm happy to see that that's continuing the wrestling Co-op oh the co-op yeah um Mr Russo Mr Russo yes sorry Mike if I was mumbling okay Mr capano so moved thank you well before we close I want to thank the public for coming this evening and um do we have to do this or this is part number 21 and um our next meeting Mr alfano is March