001you stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all mr alfano thank you mr roman gene i'd like to read a quick statement if i may the new jersey open public meeting law was enacted to ensure the rights of the public to have advanced notice of and to attend the meeting of public bodies on which any business affecting their interest thrust or act of time in accordance with the provision of this act the cliffside park border that has caused notice of this meeting will be published by having the date time in place there are posted in the office of the borough clerk or the library for the
002rec department the office of performing ed and the offices of school number three four five six and the high school on december may and notice it reported to reporters of the record on december 9th 2021 this is an official meeting omg i'd just like to take the role if i may mrs abreu here mr katana here this is fredo here mr garcia dr pampliano here mr raincourt mr russo mr shelley here mr bhakta here mr yanuzi here okay mr roman gina okay thank you very much i'd like to welcome everyone to our meeting tonight uh just a couple of items i have on my report i just want to make our parents and our staff and community aware of some updated guidelines on our website regarding covert guidelines as you know we follow the recommendations
003set forth by the new jersey department of health and our local health author authority uh laurie lucanic are on our website we do have information regarding students who quarantine when they have to quarantine and who's eligible for virtual learning in the case of quarantining so that information is available for all of our parents on the website we do also have some updates on our covet guidelines as you know the cdc just recently changed their definition of a vaccinated person uh right now in order for them to be considered vaccinated you would have to have the booster so one of the up updates from the new jersey department of health is that effective february 1st all students 12 and up have to have the booster shot to be considered fully vaccinated and that would impact students
004who may or may not have to be quarantined but that information is available on our website and as always if parents have any questions they can contact their building principal or my office but um it is important that you refer to that information and check our website every few days because we do post websites on our agenda tonight we are making some revisions in our school calendar for this school year uh those revisions will be posted tomorrow to our website and an email will also go out to all staff regarding the updates basically what we did is we revised the uh june calendar so that we can allow for an additional three snow days in our calendar you know we've already had one snow day it's um just about the middle of january or a
005little past the middle of january so we want to be prepared as far as uh the rest of the winter is concerned so uh the calendar will be approved by the board tonight the revision and they it'll be posted to our website tomorrow just an upset up update on cusack you know that cusack is where the county comes in and the state to monitor each school district every three years in various areas last week january 19th we went through one module of the monitoring which is called curriculum and instruction i want to publicly thank mrs calabrese and her team for working on the curriculum and instructional part of the monitoring we don't have a any information yet as far as a grade or how we did but i can say we did very very well
006as we expected to do and once we go through the other facets of it which is financial governance operation and personnel then probably by april we'll get an official letter from the state and i'm confident it'll say that we've once again passed monitoring and see you in three years which is right now what the guidelines are i also posted to the website something called speak up where students have a phone number that they can either text or they can call anonymously a hotline and a company referred to as gaggle which we spoke to before would take the information uh if it has to do with a student suicide a fight that's going to occur uh bullying anything that a parent or a student wants to report it's done anonymously and that information is then turned
007over to the school district and then at that point we decide is it necessary for the police to be called in or is this something that we can handle within but it's an opportunity for uh parents and students to report something that might be suspicious or concerning to them i do want to congratulate mr helm who runs our one of our academies up in the high school the stem academy his students received the real world design challenge stage competition championship for new jersey it's a it's a stem competition uh mr um helm and his students did a great job they led new jersey which means the next step now is if covert wasn't here they'd be traveling to washington d.c to compete in the national competition but from what i understand it's going to be
008virtual this year but i do want to publicly congratulate them and uh i'll keep the board apprised of uh other competitions when they compete nationally uh how the students do and when it's going to take place you know the high school has three academies stem uh culinary and humanities which are open to students in grades uh nine through twelve uh and all of our teachers that are involved in that along with mr pinto and his administration do a great job okay at this point um any questions from the community before i look at the consent agenda anything on there no okay so at this time what i would like to any questions from the board okay i'd like to just go over some items in the consent agenda as we do each month page two
009we are approving uh professional development uh some virtual some in person as we do each year for our staff members going out to various um professional development uh programs outside of the district and or it could be virtual based on covert at this time page three uh fourth from the bottom uh teacher aide patty miscochi is teacher-rated school number three uh she's resigning patti's been with us a number of years she's leaving for i believe for another position so i wish her the best of luck we've also received a resignation from zara silver teacher aided school number four who's been with us for a number of years uh effective january 24th 2022. i did skip a couple resolutions that are above that about the fourth resolution down resolution recommended to accept the retirement of suboc
010school nurse at school number six middle school effective june 30th sue has been with us for about 35 years i know she's been a nurse in school five she's been a nurse i believe in school four i believe she was a nurse in the high school and now she's been for the number of last couple of years a nurse in school number six the middle school always done a very nice job for us so i wish sue best of luck in her retirement also resolution to accept the resignation of bridget nunez teacher at school number six effective march 18th bridget is moving on to another district another position bridget has also been with us a number of years in the pre-k program elementary school at number four and number six she's currently the association president
011so i know she'll be resigning that position so we wish bridget best of luck in her new position page four a couple of maternity leaves uh third um resolution down crystal brown uh first grade teacher at school number four will be leaving on or about um may 26th and she'll be returning december 1st of 2022 so we wish crystal the best of luck joanna carnell who's an esl teacher at school number three joanna will be leaving on or about march 28th and she will be returning september 1st so those are positions that we would need to fill uh in a temporary basis skip one the next one um aliki who's a resource room teacher at school number four is also requesting a maternity leave uh on or about may 16th and she will return december
0125th of 2022 right below that anna aceta who's a elementary school teacher at school number four requesting a maternity leave also which will begin on or about september 1st and she will return january 2nd 2023 last resolution on that page marissa simeli who's an english teacher on our middle school is currently on a maternity leave she was supposed to return april 22nd but she uh notified me today that she's going to extend the leave until june 30th the remainder of the school year and she'll return uh september 2022. so good luck to uh all of those people who are who will be getting a maternity leave uh page five you know we have a um a learning loss program as a result of covid where we do tutoring in the morning in the afternoon we've
013been running that program for about a month we added another teacher to school number four samantha strict who's an elementary school teacher so samantha will also be assisting mrs russes uh in morning early morning tutoring bottom of page 5 we have some additional volunteers who will be volunteering in the i don't think it's the fall sport program it should be spring spring spring sports for 2022 some of the people that are listed on this page have worked as volunteers before as per the guidelines all volunteers obviously are fingerprinted and have in most cases a substitute certificate so they'll be working softball middle school baseball page six we are approving some hiv incidents that occurred over the last month you know that a parent or student has a right to ask for an investigation that could
014be possibly bullying related we have a team in each building that does the investigation they come up with a a decision which is passed on to me and as far as confident confidentiality is concerned we are just um indicating that we recommend it or they recommend it to me to confirm the outcome of the bullying investigation there are two resolutions um below those that have to do with a mandated report that we submit to the state every six months this is called violence and vandalism report and also any kind of hiv training that exis that goes on during the school year in your packet tonight um gia gave you a printout of uh the incidents that have occurred uh from september 1st through december 31st this is information that jire enters into the state system
015on a monthly basis and then we report it to the public and we report it to the board twice a year so if you look at the summary sheet on the front real quick it lists our schools and it shows the number of incidents in each school so incidents could be referred to as a fight disagreement between students there's a wide range of definitions for what incidents occur and you can see the number of incidents that we have fortunately are very low two in the high school two in school three one in school four none in school five and three in the middle school and high school and then we also have to the right of that any hiv incidents that were investigated and the hiv trainings that took place and the hiv programs that
016took place within our schools like for example during respect week we do run programs our guidance department for students so i think there's a couple of pages a lot of the information is just repeated but i just wanted to to to mention that and and share that with the board uh we're also approving uh start strong for results in a couple of minutes uh one of our data people from our district angelo alvin will be uh sharing that report with you uh start strong was a test uh really a test that's much different than the new jersey student test that's taken in the spring which was formerly called park but we didn't have it last year because of covert but what the state did is they did test and gave the students an abridged version
017much shorter test in english and mathematics in september and we do have the results of the start strong test that we receive from the state summon some of the results were given to us in october but the official results didn't come to december so um again we're mandated to provide this information to the public and we'll be doing that in a couple of minutes also a resolution to revise the calendar which i spoke about earlier for the 21-22 school year and by the way um in your packet tonight for is just a draft copy of the calendar for next year and i'll be just pointing out one or two things after our meeting tonight but there should be a draft copy in your folder okay mr alfano do you have anything as far as finance
018a couple items mr romagino on the agenda tonight we're approving the december 2021 reports these reports will be electronically sent to the county tomorrow afternoon we are also approving a new 54 passenger bus refreshed in regard to as you know we transport nearly 300 regular and special needs students so that will also be approved tonight we are actively working on as we've introduced to the board over the last couple of meetings some of our capital projects for the summer of 2022. we've got state project numbers for our roof at number six our roof at the high school our office renovation at the high school and we're also working on potentially having our pa systems the new pa systems installed at school number four and school number six to board the rest of those two projects
019and we are starting to work on the preliminary 2020 2022-2023 budget getting our ducks in a row on that directionally right now looks like the governor's address will be february 22nd and two days after that we'll know our state aid we haven't got any direction on where stadium is going to go up down or stay flat so with the original budget inputs we're going to keep the state aid flat year over year and the submission is due march 4th uh to the county that's pretty much it mr ramgino okay uh any questions on the consent agenda from the public or the board before we i ask for a motion to accept i have one question yes on the buildings and grounds it says high school gymnasium march 11 22. so i'm going to guess the
020high school gym is going to be ready i don't know that i think they're just putting in for keeping their fingers crossed it's a possibility but i think they they probably put this in hoping that it might be ready and they might be able to use it but at this time i don't i'm not really sure just to give the board an update on the high school gym as you know uh public service took a long time um the actual hvac unit that the high school never had and now they're going to have climate control air conditioning and heating in the gym took forever on back order and you know the cause of it they the manufacturers that from train said covet etc uh that was finally installed a few months back and then it
021needed to be powered up and public service had to bring in more power uh to the building and they had to install the poll etc and it had to go through certain phases and then you know we were all at the mercy of public service which has been completed uh so we do have power in the building and the other day finally before you turn on this unit you have to have the manufacturer come out and start it and certify it that the contractor installed it the right way and it meets all the specifications as per trains and mandates that was finally done correct uh uh mr alfano they came out mr pano that will be uh commissioned fully on friday this coming friday train will come and do the final they call it commissioning
022of the unit right it's coming from so in the interim uh they started to skim coat the gym floor uh and by skim coating is that as you know the gym was built in 1964 and the floor after so many years settles and it had imperfections in it so it was skim coated but it wasn't skim coated the right way after our building and ground supervisor took a look at it and lan associates there was a discrepancy we had a meeting last week on it and uh the architect and engineer and uh lou uh myself and shiro gave them a mandate said you need to take up this whole entire skim coating process and redo it the right way which means they have to call a company in that comes in with a cement boom
023and do it all in one shot so at this point it's they want to wait till this actual heat inside the building with climate control so it doesn't crack again so those are a little bit of the issues we've had but ultimately we're on top of it and we're going to do it once we're going to do it right so everybody's got to suffer a little bit with when it's going to be completed but i do want to give the board an update this project should have been done in early october everybody knows when you started any type of project of this magnitude there's always hiccups unfortunately we've encountered too many hiccups but uh at the end of the day well we're making a big investment and if it does take uh six or seven
024months longer but we want it done the right way and uh to preserve the the taxpayers dollars so that's where we are if you have any questions i try to answer them as best as i can and i know lou's been involved day in and day out with this entire project did i miss anything lou by any chance no mr kapana you got everything very good thank you any questions or comments from the public or the board i mean my only comment is the last time the gym was done was 1964. so i agree with you if it takes a couple of months in the grand scheme of things where you know building something that's going to probably outlast us all yeah i guess we have to suffer to do it right but it's better
025to do it right than i have to go back and fix things later but dr pantalone it was very disappointing to see that the skim coating process was not done the right way they tried to do it in stages in a gym of that square footage you can't do it in stages you need a professional company with a magnitude of men to come out with these cement trucks that boom the cement in that's already pre-mixed and it just comes in and then you start leveling it off so lan associates uh was stronger on that behalf that so now they're in the process of taking all that stuff up so that's where we are thank you okay so any other questions on the consent agenda motion to accept i'll make a motion mr capano may have
026a second place mr shelly it was a second thank you i'd like to take a vote now if i may uh this is a brew yes mr capano yes mrs fredo yes dr pompliano yes mr shelley yeah yeah are we ready for mr albany yeah i'm gonna present the star strong numbers now okay i'm gonna turn this off so it's not distracting okay you're good to go okay there we go uh yeah there's i think there's a there's a bit of a delay on the on the on the presentation for you guys okay so uh this is very similar to the park or and or njsla presentations that we've done in the past we took this test in october we received some early data very very quickly within a matter of two weeks and we
027uh but we received the official results in december like mr armageno said uh i left some of the slides that are part of the template so that when it gets posted to the website parents can read information on the test the assessments were designed to be administered quickly over a matter of uh 45 minutes in some cases uh it was a given so everybody knows that you're not going to go through every page of these no um tomorrow uh that powerpoint will be on our website for parents to view if they would like to see the pages that you're skipping correct we're just going to go over the district assessment and the demographic analysis that is pretty much it the assessments were given based on prior year standards so students in the fourth grade took
028a star strong assessment based on end of year third grade standards uh fifth grade end of your fourth grade and so on uh the let me skip to this district analysis speech um i'm not sure exactly how long the delay is between what i'm saying and what you're seeing but let's start this strict analysis uh our results our participation numbers were very very very good uh some of our elementary uh yeah uh some of our elementary grades had 100 participation some kids missed very few days we were affected a little bit by quarantine angela yes can you see this can you hear me hello i don't know what happened angela are you there i'm here okay so are you is can you see the participation numbers uh yeah it's not it's it's difficult to see
029so maybe some of the participation numbers you could just read together yeah the participation numbers were very very high we had almost 95 percent as a district and uh across all grade levels we were affected a little bit at the high school level by some quarantines but participation was very very very high uh our i'm going to present more the charts rather than the numbers because it's a little it's a little more pleasing to the guy um our gr our numbers overall were very comparable to state results just read what the colors designate because yes the colors the colors as opposed to the njsla that has uh five different brackets with the top two indicating uh achievement or proficiency rather the the start strong for reasons of speed and expediency they only divide it into
030three brackets the orange bracket means that our students need strong support the yellow bracket means that our students may need some support and the uh the green bracket means that students that less support might be needed meaning that they are proficient in the standards that they have this is the english english ela levels supports the numbers are percentages by the way they're not values of students that took the test so as you can see across ela our students were pretty much on par with state levels mathematics again very very similar nearly identical actually to state levels the the strong support needed levels are high very very high but they're high state-wide um which is which is not it's not great but it's encouraging that we did not as a district we stayed on par with
031with state numbers uh our science numbers are also uh we are assuming the same science numbers for the state are not available so we we don't have access to those we're not required to present comparisons to the state but we figure that it's uh it might be a little encouraging it's tough to see a lot of orange between between us uh so it's encouraging to know that we are not far off from the state and in most cases we're very very even uh the next set the thing i just want to point out is the fact that it's obvious that our ela scores are much better than our math school sports obviously but i think that's a result in talking about an administratively with principals with our supervisors uh don't forget our students some of
032them hadn't been to school for a year and a half they were virtual so we found out as most districts did that doing math virtually was much more of a struggle than obviously doing ela virtually so i think that's why we see uh our math scores uh not our students not scoring as well in math as they did in ela and that's something that we're working on this year now that everyone i was going to i was going to discuss in the breakdown of of what uh of what our numbers mean to us and how we use them we believe effectively the demographic analysis is required to present our male and female students performed fairly evenly uh in mathematics ela and science there is there's no big discrepancies from prior nj sla presentations or njsla
033assessments there's the populations in some of these cases are very small so you can see that asian black hispanic white all students all of those are greater than n meaning that the population number is greater than 10 however they're still small so the numbers are very skewed in our asian and black numbers uh that happens traditionally every every year in every every single njsla park that i have been a part of um same thing this is the ela results by ieps 504s els former els economically disadvantaged non-economic advantage and all students the the happy uh silver lining to these numbers in particular is that our former el students are doing just as well as a general population which is it's a it's a point of pride that our that our esl program uh is working
034so well our students are doing great in comparison to the general population in uh in all numbers in mathematics and science and yelling just pretty great so the uh the star strong narrative we determined this as as as a team going over the scores we expected the ela scores to be considerably higher than math or science in discussions prior to the release of the star strong results we had surmises the story would turn out exactly like they did because of the fact that reading skills suffered less during remote and hybrid instructions than math or science students were still required to read constantly while using google classroom and practice this practice and state overall results indicated the exact same thing in fact their breakdown on the site if you wanted to to check it i highlighted
035it in blue uh showed the exact same thing that we determined prior to receiving our scores back our scores compared favorably with the state our science numbers were a little lower so we do have a lot of work to do but it is encouraging that our genera that our students are keeping up with the state's general population um we've always performed very well in comparison to the state and we're we're keeping up with that tradition so as an additional metric the start strong scores were a welcome addition to our data pool however the reality is that they arrived too late to truly be a primary guidance for our instruction uh the revelation that they provided was that our students were behind but this is something that by mid october we already knew it was already
036painfully obvious to us so instead we determined to use the data as a metric to compare to other to other numbers right to to utilize them in a way that would that would make sense to us um so as all districts uh do you have any questions on what i just said okay okay so as with all school districts across the country uh cliffside park we were heavily affected by the continuing pandemic the most impactful change of the remote and hybrid nature was a lack of data that was the thing that hurt us the most at the start of this year is the fact that we had no state assessments the end-of-year assessments were hit or miss because in some cases students took them remotely students took them in person it was very tough to
037compare students one-to-one so upon returning to in full in-person learning at the start of this year we were determined to find the tool to diagnose our students quickly broadly and effectively and as a district we have settled on utilizing the ixl platform as our primary method of student tracking we utilize the data provided from the platform as one of our multiple measures to gauge student learning we feel very comfortable with the results uh primarily because of the fact that the ixl diagnostic that we gave to our students all students at the start of the year tracked very very closely with the results from the star strong assessment i have sheets and sheets of data on this if anyone wanted to see it but it was important for us to be able to show that the
038data corresponded closely because if the state department of education feels that the star strong assessment is valid as an assessment then the correlation in this case justifies the use of the isl platform as extensively as we have used it this year the diagnostic tool is an interim assessment designed to provide real-time up to minute data on student performance and growth with this tool we've been able to easily see where students are excelling and where and who may need some additional help the diagnostic takes a lot of the difficult work of gauging growth out of the teacher's hands and provides clear concise and very actionable data we've eliminated a lot of additional tools that were put in place during remote learning we felt that practice time in math was being diluted by an excess of platforms
039and we are focused on using less resources more effectively in ela we implemented the fountains and panel level literacy intervention system to help our most needy students the program is an intensive supplementary literacy intervention with a focus on quick and permanent growth that allows our students to exit the program hopefully in 18 weeks so um this is a concerted effort to move away from the title one lifers of the past children that need support year after year after year so we can help more children in the long run and that is um that's pretty much all i have does anyone have any questions anyone have any questions like i had said tomorrow to the website entire powerpoint but being virtual as it is now it's not as easy to see some of the data but
040if any of our teachers community members parents want to sco scroll through some of the data they can do that tomorrow from the website we should also make note that the stock strong assessment was given late september october because the new jersey student learning assessment was canceled last year which was formerly the park um and what the state did is the state needed data from for their reports to the federal government and uh really our students came back some students hadn't been to school in a year and a half and uh to come back and to be tested in an assessment uh was challenging for some students but i think overall as uh mr alban said uh we did very very well this september this spring coming this april and may uh we will once
041again go back to the new jersey student learning assessment where students will be assessed in science ela and math and we'll be back on that regular testing platform where we get tested in the spring so uh angelo thank you very much for taking the time tonight uh take care thank you thank you for having me okay okay good night uh before i call call for uh an adjournment any questions from the community or the board uh our next work session is february 16th our next board meeting is february 23rd and uh as always uh mr alfano will keep uh everybody uh informed of what's been going on if anything occurs between now and then if you could just stay for a few minutes after we adjourn just one or two quick items uh motion to
042adjourn i'll make a motion may i have a second please i second it mrs abreu was the second okay mr roman gino okay thank you very much thank you