Board of Education Meeting

001okay good evening i'd like to welcome everyone to our meeting tonight which we are streaming to the public uh i'd like to first begin by uh standing for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united mr raincourt here mr russo here mr shelley here mr baker i'd just like to read a quick statement if i made mr roman gina the new jersey open public meetings law was enacted to ensure the rights of the public for advanced notice of and to attend the meeting of public bodies which any business affecting their interest is discussed or acted upon in accordance with the provision of this act of course i thought of that has caused notice of this meeting to be published by having the date the time and place thereof posted in

002the offices of the borough club the borough library the voter rec department the office of the board of ed and the purposes of school number three four five six and the high school on january 2021 and notice is reported to reporters of the record january 6 2021 this is an official meeting okay once again i welcome everyone to our meeting uh we do have a short presentation tonight by our high school principal mr pinto who will be with us in a minute but just before that there are a couple of items i would like to uh just make mention of uh monday january i'm sorry tuesday january 19th all of our hybrid students return to class uh we hope we can keep providing both a hybrid environment for students who want to attend school as

003well as a remote student program for students who are at home on tuesday all of our staff after approximately six weeks returned back to the schools um so as i said before we hope that we're able with things that are going on now with kobe kova that we're able to keep our schools open and provide on-site learning for our hybrid students last monday january 11th we started our abbreviated winter sports season in the high school we have basketball both boys and girls that are in process right now and also bowling as you know we've mentioned many times before the state has shifted the schedules because of covered so basketball both boys and girls and bowling started on january 11th february 1st uh indoor track will begin and then after that there will be dates i

004think right now it's march 1st for wrestling and also for volleyball but as time goes on uh if there are any changes in those dates i will let both the board and the public uh know middle school sports uh unfortunately we didn't get the kind of participation for girls basketball and cheering that we thought we would have it's probably due to a number of students being remote and possibly not wanting to participate we are going to make it every effort to provide middle school basketball for boys because there was interest so hopefully we'll be able to feel the schedule for our students because other schools are cutting back on programs primarily for their middle school but we will make every effort to provide a program and i believe that's in the works right now uh

005the last two meetings our board has had some discussions regarding co-oping football with richfield you know over the last couple of years our enrollment in football has decreased and our concern is that if it keeps decreasing we're not going to be able to provide just our cliffside students with a quality program so our board of education and the richfield park board of education are in talks about possibly co-opting which many other districts have done in the past and has turned out to be successful i know the owner of pal state park have had a relationship for a number of years so our attorney uh steve fogerty is drawing up a contract once that contract is drawn up i will share that with our board with the richfield board and uh and then with the public

006so we hope to make a decision by that uh probably by our march meeting if not soon but that is that is a process uh in your folder tonight is a draft calendar for the 2021-22 school year again it's just the draft that um i put together so we could get a projection of what next school year we'll look at look like if you get some time you can look the calendar over if you have questions you can email me or ask questions at the next meeting i'll try to on our next work session so i'll try to approve that calendar at our february meeting and that will give parents and staff and students a look at what to expect for next year okay at this time i would like to any questions so at

007this time i would like to ask if there are any committee reports uh yeah we're hoping any other committee reports okay so at this time uh mr pinto if you are ready okay thank you mr romagino thank you board of education before i begin this and share my screen one minute would you like me to continue now it's better now continue okay i'd like to just recognize our staff today at the high school and uh through the district as many of you might be aware we lost internet service through altis and the staff did an incredible job maintaining instruction using their personal devices and hot spots throughout the district so i just want to recognize the staff for the incredible job they did despite losing service today the second thing i'd like to do is

008uh just so you're all aware uh the class of covid the deluxe edition is available and if you have not yet purchased your copy i strongly encourage you to purchase your copy there's an introduction by congressman pasquale there's also an excerpt from benjamin luterer so we do encourage you to purchase a copy if you haven't the students have been recognized essentially nationally at this point they'll be on cnn uh shortly there's a cnn interview that's running and there's also a nbc news interview that's running with a number of the students it'll be airing shortly so i do uh i just want to recognize the students under the tutelage of mr sean adler for the tremendous work uh because all this money that that goes through the proceeds of these books it goes back to the

009students they will be awarded scholarships uh through this uh through the sales of these purchas of these books so just like to recognize them also at this point i'll share my screen and begin to take you guys through uh some some i want to say initially uh we thought it was very troubling but we're actually very happy because as opposed to reacting to something much later we recognized that we were the first or one of the first to kind of identify a problem and actually become proactive in it and we're going to take you through some lost learning analysis and just make it a little bigger and present okay so lost learning analysis shortly after my return for my leave we noticed at the close of the first marking period that there were some disturbing

010signs amongst populations of our school and we brought these concerns uh to the supervisors to mr romangino to the uh the middle school and we looked at them very closely but before we begin we're going to look at some just some demographics of our population you know who our population of students are uh we're you know half the students are on free and reduced meals or referred to as farm students we have students with special needs um english language learners large percentage of the population households that speak primarily language primary uh other than english all right 73 of our population and that's you know turkish arabic spanish there's enough portuguese those are the major languages and there's a number of other languages approximately 28 languages are spoken in this high school we have a very

011high transient rate one of the highest in the state and the number of students so this is older data our our 1920 data isn't isn't it's available but it's not official yet so once it's official we'll update this but just a little bit of information about the students in our building uh what we noticed was our marking period one failures were higher than normal uh we see a we looked over the course of uh this year all right and they kind of peaked in 2020. we looked back at five years of data and we noticed that they also peaked in 2017 but we attributed that to a quarterly benchmark that we were administering that was uh impacting the uh the failure failure rate much higher than than traditional and so when we looked at and

012we take out this this 2017 we see the trend is somewhere around 500 but it spiked this marking period and this is marking period one failures only all right so we're not looking at across the board we noticed this because we had an increased number of conversations with parents and students regarding their participation and their their their work or lack thereof in school and these these conversations became more uh prevalent and they were happening more often so we decided to look at the data and really really dig down and we saw that there was a 92 percent increase from 2019 to 2020 in the number of failures on report cards this isn't something we're proud of it's not something we want to broadcast but it's something we want to address and in order to address

013it we need to be transparent and we need we need to talk about it so we we looked at the comparison over five years and you can see over a thousand there were over a thousand classes or a thousand failures in the in in various classes so 387 students had a thousand over a thousand failures across these classes these numbers supersede all the other numbers except for 2017 and like we said we identified that as due to our quarterly that was weighed and impacted students students didn't take the quarterly seriously they simply just um you know didn't even take the test basically they opened the screen submitted a bunch of answers it wasn't working the way we wanted to work it so we modified it we adapted to it but we can see the difference

014you know when we lay the numbers out 2015 2006 and 2018 2019 we have a you know that that mean number uh approximately 500 where we're listen we're not happy when students fail but we need to say hey why are so many students struggling right now what what is taking place here um so we we started having these conversations amongst the supervisors at the high school and and with the administrative team at the high school and then the middle school started joining these conversations and then when we looked at the middle school we saw even even greater increases so we brought the middle school on to have this conversation say hey what can we do for our population because we saw these increases you know in uh this is grade eight a six hundred percent

015increase and then we looked at grade six we even started going back even in digging deeper and we looked into grade six and we saw that um uh you know the number just it jumped tremendously over 300 increase uh from last year and and you know there wasn't much of an increase prior to this you know we had a few struggling students in in in in grade six well why sudden are all these students struggling now so we've got to figure out what's going on how can we how can we get how we can't simply continue with these kind of numbers and the the the conversations began okay what can we do uh we can see that we also looked at the honor roll because we reached out to other districts um in bergen county

016and listen we're we're in bergen county but there's two districts in bergen county for being honest and we're being fair there's districts north of route 4 and this district south of root 4 and we reach out to districts similar to our own district with similar demographics and they're all reporting that there's they're seeing these results in the amongst the populations now when we reached out to the the upper bergen county schools north of route 4 they they were they're they were coming back saying no we're actually seeing the difference we're seeing we're seeing students succeeding all right so we said you know let's look at our honor roll and we looked at our honor roll and we saw that the number of high honor roll students was higher than it's ever been before and you

017know the the total number of students on the honor roll didn't really change that much but the high honor roll students are are they're doing they're succeeding they're they have the means to be successful in this environment and when we looked at the actual grades the grade reporting we saw the b and c's b students primarily the the largest decrease in b's across the marking period so it's our average students that are really struggling and i don't say regressing but not uh not meeting the same success as our high performance but our hard performers at the high school when we looked at it they're exceeding the expectations at this point so we looked at the high school failures by grade level we see it's affecting all the students there's fewer seniors in classes so we

018have fewer seniors failing but we do have across the board it's fairly comparable um approximately a third of the students across the board are struggling in this environment and we saw that the 10th graders had the highest at 34 percent uh we looked at the cohorts because we thought that maybe it was just the remote students it wasn't just the remote students it was both the remote students and the students that were on the hybrid schedule the a and b cohort students were also struggling you know anywhere from 25 to 30 percent of them were struggling in their classes so it wasn't just the remote students who aren't logging in it's across the board because the hybrid students when they're not in school they're struggling to log on and they're struggling to stay engaged also

019now we looked at the failures across the departments and math is traditionally the hardest subject and when we have these conversations learning math online remotely is very very difficult and the math teachers are struggling but what we really saw that was really interesting was you know the number of failures in social studies or the number of students failing in social studies and financial literacy classes those aren't four-year requirements uh there's fewer students in those classes and we started having these conversations with instructors so it this data gave us the opportunity to go into classrooms and speak with the instructors where we're seeing this why is this happening in your class what what's what's the reason are the students not logging on are the students not submitting work are the students um uh you know is

020it the way we're we're we're instructing our students at this point so while initially we saw this as hey what are we gonna do we can't have all these kids fail it led to very very positive conversations and it led to somewhat of a culture change here amongst the high school and amongst the middle school i can't really speak for the middle school but i could speak for the high school because it opened up the discussion and where we know this is occurring in schools throughout the county only recently are schools in the county starting to say hey what are you doing we're noticing this what are you doing because quite honestly this is something districts don't want to talk about i i want to thank mr romagino for giving me the opportunity to share

021with you guys and you know even even meeting with the middle school and being part of those conversations to say how can we address this how can we fix this because this is a unprecedented time students are being asked to do things they've never been asked to do teachers are being asked to do things they've never been asked to do and quite frankly we don't have the capacity no school has the capacity and this isn't just a bergen county problem this is a national problem usa today has reported on it stanford university is conducting a ton of research on this right now and publishing that research it was recently in the um not the record but uh northjersey.com recently uh uh highlighted this i've seen it on the news so this is learning loss is

022something that we're talking about and it's something that we need to recognize and something we need to address so we looked at the special ed in the l population and we see that you know school-wide the l population versus the school-wide population is approximately 30 of that population so there's not really a difference between the special ed pro is a little bit higher but the ells and the school-wide population the general population it's it's very similar so it's not a subgroup it's it's across the board uh we looked at the attendance and we noticed that the attendance is down and this is something that i take very uh uh dear to me this is very dear to me uh the attendance i work very hard at maintaining our attendance our chronic absenteeism i'm happy to

023say has been low the state average has been below the state average since i've come on board because it's something we've targeted we've identified it and we've continued to attack it and and really encourage students uh and and help them understand the value of being here the greatest predicament of or predictor for student success is student attendance if students are in school students will succeed so our goal is to get them in school we've noticed that our attendance is down right now and we we started to ask why is our attendance then why is this drop all the kids have to do is log in what's going on exactly here are they not logging in is it something that we're doing so we looked at all these data points and we saw the guidance feedback

024we asked the guy the guidance department you know what are you getting from your meetings with parents you're you're reaching out to kids you're reaching out to parents what is going on uh the parents are shocked you know the kids are always on the computer but they don't know what the kids are on exactly you know the kids are on netflix they're distracted they're they're gaming they're on youtube um parents are off to work in our population of students they're required to watch their younger siblings and it's disruptive many of them are sharing devices many of them you know are working on interrupted internet or wi-fi um students have expressed the counselors there's just too much work they're overwhelmed they're in school for a number of hours a day and then they're given work after

025school so they're just on the computer constantly and it's it's stressful for them um they're developing you know some students have reported you know some headaches so we've limited that time uh students feel that the level of work is so unintendable they've basically just given up and this is something we call learned helplessness and it's once students develop learned helplessness it's it's really difficult to get them beyond that learned helplessness so you know we it's something that you know we've had these conversations with our staff and and we're going to talk more about that but you know make setting goals for the students and you know making sure that you know we're not overloading the students because the students are coming back telling us that they feel overloaded um and that the parents are telling

026us they're on the computer all day and something's not adding up and we we need to find a balance between screen time academics and personal life for these students as mr roman gino said earlier um athletics was post you know athletic seasons have been shortened you know you're looking at uh you know intramurals to make available to the students uh we're looking at um you know outdoor workouts for these students having difficulty fielding middle school teams because of student participation or other school districts just not running programs not being able to set up a schedule so really you know the students they're struggling through this and it's really you know layering this additional work on top of them you know isn't isn't beneficial so we've got to figure out some way to make this balance

027and then the family loss and you know that's where um there's just there's there's so much i guess familiar uh familiar um and i can't see my screen for issues that they're uh that they're facing whether it's lost work eviction child care uh some of our stories that we that we hear from these students it's they're truly heartbreaking so you know and the staff who's grading them don't necessarily know this so we we have to figure out a way to make this work and convey this and set up some modifications for students and that's really what all this data led to so we looked at a few different things we looked at at the district level what can we immediately do to effect change what can we do what district decisions or policies that we're

028currently running that kind of you know can we can pivot on we can be flexible on and and how can we do it without you know you know changing everything so we looked at our you know these policy changes that we can can make to maybe instructional you know remote instruction uh we revisit our instructional routines and had to have had a lot of conversations with our staff about instruction appropriate instruction during this time um yeah and and for different courses you know you're gonna you know the the ap population advanced policemen population they need to understand that you know there's a test that they're preparing for there's going to be work there and it's some of the other places where we have to have these conversations where you know it it's it's the work

029that you're you're provide that staff is providing versus the work that um students that that's truly meaningful and that's actually attainable by the students under these conditions and you know how is project we're looking at project-based learning what projects seem to be working and what projects are you struggling are teachers struggling getting feedback back from kids uh we brought in our supervisors our child study teams our guidance for very specific approaches and we'll talk about those shortly and lastly there's some items that we need to explore as we go down the road and revisit and those include bridge programs over the summer what grants are available to us to combat learning loss and those are things that we need to continue to explore and have more conversations and look at this data at the end

030of marking period two and at the end of marketing period three as we move through the school year which we plan to do in the next few weeks as market period 2 closes so some district decisions and policy changes that we've made was the mailing of the progress reports this is very simple mail products reports mail marketing period 2 report cards and portal letters it's the 21st century we expect everyone to be able to access all this information online it's simply they don't not everybody does i'm a parent i struggle to you know go into my students my child's real-time portal and follow how he's doing so you know what getting something tangible whether the product report is commending the student or the progress report is calling for um a you know a conference that's

031necessary or something they're getting something tangible and this was an easy fix and this is something mr roman gino was you know was all behind start mailing them so we we're we're in the process of doing i i believe our our third mailing at this point maybe second mailing at this point um because we sent out the progress reports oh we're putting the portal letters in with the report card so it's it's two mailings for this uh we found that a number of students are working so we we've to help them with the work especially with that shift to that full remote schedule um creating an asynchronous option if the student is is completing the work in a timely fashion and if the accommodation is is requested and justified so that asynchronous option while while

032it's not the the answer for everyone for certain students it is the answer for the students that are the only income uh right now in their household or one of two incomes or or or you know for the student that has to work because they got a surgery and they have medical bills the asynchronous option is the answer and as long as we can confirm that we're doing that um the cameras off does not result in attendance policy so this is something that we we thought was the best idea oh the students just have to have the cameras on if the cameras are on the um uh the students marked present they'll be present for instruction very simple you log on camera's on you're present our students weren't turning the cameras on and there was

033battles battles in classrooms of attorney camera on turning a lot of lost instruction time and we have this tool goguardian we didn't know a lot about go guardian when we developed this policy at the beginning of the year we know a lot more about goguardian now we can use goguardian to monitor the students to filter the websites that the students have access to and at this point my staff is using goguardi and they whether the kid has the camera on or not bill guardian is a tool that they can use to see what that kid is doing where that kid is engaged is he engaged in the actual assignment or is he engaged in something else and then we're increasing social media newsletter and mailing so we this is something that coming from the building

034my uh coming from the building principle i have to commit to ensuring that more social media goes out uh highlighting our student successes a newsletter goes out that we're hoping to get out by the end of uh marking period two and the mailings as discussed earlier so these are something some things that we're committed to and these were some district decisions and policies that were quite easy to change and we think have already had you know some results some immediate results specifically for that asynchronous population and that that camera penalty that was kind of you know really detrimental in hindsight but at the time in august we thought it was the best idea and many other districts cameras got to be on we didn't have golgari we didn't know the knowledge behind goguardian so we

035revisited our instructional routines also um we're requiring failure comments for all failures it's very simple this is something we we always ask but something we're reinforcing with our staff is that there's comments specific comments as to why students are failing on the progress report and on the report card record and make available lessons of new material this is something else that we've we've really emphasized with the staff and there's increasing emphasis that new material when new instruction takes place it needs to be recorded because some students need to revisit it and they cannot come back to class for extra credit or for extra help at the end of the day so this needs to be available conference more with students we lost breakout rooms for uh for a short time and it's really this conference

036conferencing ability where we're seeing this teachers have the most success with their students when they can devote that one-on-one time with the students aside from other students give critical feedback in a setting that is personal that's where we're seeing positive returns with our students so this emphasis on using breakout rooms you know having these conversations with the student like you would when you're in school this is the answer it's something that google introduced at some point in the fall we lost it temporarily it's back now so we have a large number of staff that's using this conference room and conferencing ability and really that's where we get that that interpersonal connection that we weren't getting in these meets uh the ability to remain flexible i am arresting students uh who are struggling and who do

037not who do attend class so if students are not attending class there's a there's a disengagement we're making house calls to those students i'm knocking on doors to the students that don't report to class guidance gives me a list i go out i knock on their doors you know the kids smile when they see me because you know somebody cares about them that's what we're realizing that kids just they're so depressed they just want somebody to care about them and it's little things like that knocking on the doors telling the kid hey listen we can we can get through this but we need you to do your part you know we've identified a number of students that need mentoring not nearly as many students as we like but we've identified students that you know are

038responding to mentoring so we've created a mentoring program um with peers and adults and they're uh you know we have you know a handful of students right now but you know something we push out every week and we have student response we're utilizing the pass fail specifically in our ell population it's something we found out we can do three years ago the state kind of gave some guidance on ell populations and that we could use a pass fail prior to that we weren't using a pass fail districts a lot of districts do not use the pass fail they had they're actually you know questioning the validity of the pass fail the state is saying hey use the pass fail specifically with this population of struggling ell students so something we've re-emphasized with our staff that

039hey we have this option the student's coming the student's trying the state says they have a we to score which is a one to a 3.5 we can use this option let's use this option um for these students and it's really you know it we're following the state guidance in that the instructors need to use goguardian plain and simple so we've put out a bunch of trainings on goguardian we plan on doing some more trainings next week uh for our staff because we have to use goguardian the cameras on was not working so the goguardian function does work students who choose not to use goguardian we're getting on their their parents we're telling them they have to do this uh we're i've been to two houses so far kids that refuse to use goguardian and

040tell them essentially if you choose not to use go guardian the next conversation has to be with you know re revoking your technology privileges because this is a district tool that's on every district chromebook we need you to use the chromebook and make sure you're signed in uh to using it and there's some things that we can do we can give assessments on the chromebook and essentially forces the students to use those the chromebooks that we've we've we've granted them to ensure this and ensure there's no cheating so goguardian has some tremendous um capability a student cannot receive a failure from mark and period two unless communication is documented in real time this is huge for so whatever reason in this remote environment uh teachers not being in school students not being in school there

041was a big disconnect between the kids in the in the and this this instructional staff and we essentially said we need you to call home i i sat the staff down in a in a meeting and said we i need you to call home i need you to make me make contact with parents you need to try and you need to document it in real time so that when when you do it and it's documented guidance can follow up i can follow up if it goes up the road to mr roman gino he can see that you know a number of attempts were made we have to make every attempt to help these kids so uh we did this and within the first two weeks of just having the staff make phone calls for their

042struggling students and we said listen you have an hour lunch you actually had long you have an hour and 20 minute lunch take you know five of your kids that are struggling the most each day and just call home and call home try to get the parent on the phone and if it doesn't work just document the line doesn't work or notify somebody the dot line doesn't work we'll we'll figure out the right number and within two weeks of doing this we've seen a 70 increase in our attendance so just by making phone calls um by the teachers making phone calls and the kids kind of bought into it we'd follow up with some phone calls and kids were like yeah i talked to mrs so-and-so i talked to mr so-and-so yeah no i'm going

043to start going to class so the teeth the the fact that the teachers showed a level of interest in the kids the kids responded and lastly instructional staff was hesitant about calling we provided some uh some options um use google voice you can use the google me to make the phone call you can do star six seven so there were some apprehensions about making those phone calls from their personal devices um and and and you know not being in the building but we were able to work around that uh our supervisor cst and guidance at the supervisory level they started to have these specific conversations with um areas that we identified high rates of failure and why is it lack of engagement is it students not showing up what's going on i'm going to help

044you we have our supervisors going to meet pulling kids out meeting kids individually and having them log in to go guardian and show me why you can't get onto goguardian you know having these conversations with kids identifying the staff that are having success and allowing them to share so we've gone back into our department meetings and given them opportunities to share and to share out and say hey what's working for me what this didn't work for me so i tried this and that's having positive results we've actually seen a level of writing in this remote uh era that's higher from our student population that's that we've had before they're they're they're producing meaningful works across the board in in our english department and we're noticing it because we're having these professional conversations about what's working

045and this conferencing with the students uh the cst and guidance they'll continue to assess assist with the differentiating for students and showing that they're that the teachers are adhering to them cst is advocates for these uh these students so they they you know they need to provide some input and some guidance for some of our instructional staff and what is appropriate accommodations during this time because nothing's normal right now and lastly the guidance also they're involved with meetings with supervisors students uh uh administrators so you know they're they're on the phones they're calling the kids they're updating records they're notifying me which kids need house visits and then there's there's some things that we need to continue to talk about uh this development of a growth mindset and this is something we're sharing with the

046kids that if they get back to work and they produce that you know we'll explore overriding that marking period one failure you know if they demonstrate growth over the course of oh the the school year project-based assignments what is working as i said earlier conferencing with students seems to be working um you know breaking down research assignments into very specific tasks works when you do it correctly and when you pre when you conference with students mentoring opportunities for staff and students the staff wants to help the kids it's you know the kids that we need to identify which ones need the most help and then you know so this is ongoing it's something we started with ongoing and it's instructors really finding success and what is working this has been very difficult for instructors our

047staff essentially learned you know how to conduct a class online within a matter of weeks last spring and they continue to learn things because the technology continues to change and they continue to adapt and not everything works all the time and it's important that they share what's worked how they're getting their students to engage why are their students engaging and my students not engaging so this is this opportunity has led to a lot of professional conversation and then still to come is you know if we do have a higher than normal failure rate at the close of the school year how are we going to address it are we going to you know if our failure rates at the middle school continue to be as high as they were in the first market are we

048going to socially promote these students are we going to have a bridge program over the summer are we going to have uh you know not a not a not a summer school but a true bridge program to make up for this learning loss those are conversations that we have to have um and you know hopefully after mark and period two we can have those you know those conversations as we'll have a better idea of are we truly having success or success or is the immediate results superficial so that's all i have so i'll stop the share and i don't know mr romangino if there's any questions or you want me to stick around for questions later well let's take some questions now can you hear me i can hear you yes i have a lot

049of questions about the data but i'm not going to far need looking at 2020 first question series are you comparing these 2019 first law opportunities in america together but my most profound question is why did it take the pandemic to accomplish because the things that i have seen on the screen tonight has been going on for my 30 years of education where is your school improvement panel that should have been looking at this for a year why is it generally away from the csu supervisor and excitement department to be immediately having professional conversations i really have a concern that it takes a pandemic for this to be done because i was asking if they tell them that foreign for the last 30 years because i will praise the kindergarten being that the kindergarten teachers have

050been conferencing with the students since they were five years old so why doesn't that happen at the high school level through the part so i'm sorry mr romagino can you restate that i had a real hard time hearing that question can you hear now i can hear you [Music] before make sure can you hear us larry i can hear that yes okay i have a question about the data first of all when you're looking at 2020 are you looking at only the first martin period of 2020 compared to the first marking period of 2019 or are you looking at end of the year scores in 2019 and if this if your end of the year scores in 2019 were better we were in a pandemic situation and teachers were not taught how to teach remotely

051and yet the scores were higher in the spring of 2019 they are on the fall of 2020. i'm not sure about that data but data aside which i have a lot of questions about how you compare your data and how you're drawing your assumptions all data aside i'm looking at the instructional strategies that you're using and my question is why haven't you been looking at this all along with your school improvement panel and where are your professional learning communities that should be having these conversations and why hasn't this been taking place in cliffside all along because what i see from the child study team from guidance and so forth is just what's in their job description and as far as mentoring caring about students and conferencing with students that's been going on in the elementary

052schools at least for the last 10 years that i could see because they were conferencing with kids in kindergarten so why hasn't this been happening in cliffside park high school all along why did it take a pandemic to start having conversations and what kind of conversations are you having around assessment and how assessments need to change to adapt to remote learning and also project-based learning with all due respect has been around for the last 20 to 30 years why hasn't cliffside ever entertained project-based learning and dealing with students learning styles before and also with all due respect i do believe kids are being penalized for not having cameras on and not participating all right so there's a number of questions there the first one is the data question is and i'm i'm going to try

053to answer this there's a lot of questions going on here but the first question i'm going to tell you is marking period 1 data is compared to last was compared to the last five years marking period one data that's what we looked at all right so market period one data did not does not compare to end of failures for fourth marking period the fourth marking period or the school data from last year is severely skewed and it's skewed because we were working through a pandemic and it's skewed across the board in cliffside park it's skewed across the board in other districts unless you can quantify other districts i have to disagree with you with other districts because i've asked the question and other districts aren't finding the exact same problem so we're going to have

054to agree to disagree on that well i i quite honestly i i don't know what you'd like me to tell you other than that we've identified that our students are struggling and that we're taking a proactive approach don't disagree that the students are struggling but why didn't you identify that in june after we went went through march april may and june they weren't struggling in march april may and june where you had the summer to plan for some of these things well i think we did plan and we we actually planned quite extensively and we recognized that our plan that we planned for for really i don't want to say june but we were allowed to start planning in july because that's when the guidance came out but in july and august when we did

055plan like many other districts we thought our plan was in place and our students were going to be able to be successful in the plan that we put forward just like many other districts we're finding ourselves the need to pivot somewhat and to re-evaluate our plan and re-evaluate how we provide instruction during this remote period so we had a plan in place we thought the plan was was was a great plan and it was very similar to many other districts plans and like many other districts we have recognized that our plan needs to be revisited and we identified it with the board because i don't recall seeing a plan for instruction shared with the board i don't know about instruction specifically but i'm not talking about the reopening plan this is clearly about instruction and

056assessment and failures what i wanted what i do want to say and i and mr pinto just to interrupt you i don't think anybody anticipated in august that we were going to have the number of students opting for remote that we do and i was anticipating 70 percent of the kids in 30 of the kids out it's now turned out to be maybe forty percent of the kids and sixty percent of the kids out and i think the number of students who are out and who are remote has caused a lot of um stress uh changes in instruction uh the staff have been in and out because of coving and i think all of that impacts instruction and i honestly think that the whole process on kids themselves has really been too much and our

057type of student who doesn't always have as much support from parents uh because the parents are out working or as mr pintos said there are older siblings who are home the parent goes off to work so i'm a high school student i have to be on the computer but i also have to watch my fourth grade sister and see what he or she is doing that she has done so i think we have different challenges than cliffside that other districts do have well i was going to say with all due respect there are a lot of districts that have that exact same situation and i actually think it's unfair to characterize the kids by saying our kids are this way there are plenty of esl kids special needs kids and so forth that can be

058very successful and possibly what i didn't see in any of this is how you looked at the assessments and how the assessments have changed to adapt to what you're both identifying as struggling situations of students because obviously giving a paper and pencil assessment the same way you would do in a classroom wouldn't be appropriate or as appropriate in a remote setting but again my concern really goes back to what i've seen thus far is not anything new or isn't anything that i wouldn't consider to have been good quality instruction all along quite frankly i'm very disappointed to hear that there isn't any mentoring going on or that the guidance department doesn't meet with the parents and it took a pandemic to do that i think that well no the guys department has always met with

059the parents the increased need and that's where we're that's what we're trying to emphasize here there's just an increase you know where all day long the guidance staff the administration is meeting with parents where this not necessarily was the case prior to this because we can we had students in class we're and it's just something else that i want to make you guys aware is that you know we had a plan in place and then the remote option was was was offered you know our plan was in place and then so we adapted our plan in the summer we adapted our plan to include this remote option so as we were developing the plan the guidelines for the plan were changing and you know in you know by no means whatsoever we don't assess using

060paper and pencil at the high school we use electronic-based assessments well listen electronic-based assessments to me is just a glorified version of paper and pencil that's being done on a computer i'm talking about project true project based assessments that's what i'm saying i mean that's been decades that's not a new con you know that's not a new concept so entering kids is not a new concept caring about kids is not a new concept getting involved with kids or giving elves pass fail isn't a new concept so my question is why haven't these things been done all along i mean with all due respect i haven't seen anything that you know inrs intervention and referral services for a child study team getting involved and advocating for students that's their job why why is that new or

061for because of a pandemic it's not new per se because of the pandemic it's the circumstances that we're living in and adapting this and re-emphasizing the need to real to really address these concerns of the students we're you're absolutely right there's a pandemic why'd it take a pandemic to uh to address this we're not we're not saying we're creating anything new what we're saying is the need to do this at a higher level there needs to be a team emphasis so we looked at everybody and we re um how do we say this we we reevaluated what we're doing and that we need to do we need to ensure that we're doing this quite honestly i would say that you need to ensure doing it pandemic or not well regardless we did not identify this

062prior to the pandemic and you know we're this is how we're choosing to address it at this point surely we'll be open to suggestions but project-based learning it's listen we're it's not so much using project-based learning it's using project-based learning which which has been taking place here since i was in the classroom and before but it's project-based learning and making it meaningful so that we're engaging the students who are remote because project-based learning for remote students is different than project-based learning for when you have students present in class and that's what we're emphasizing and that's what we're trying to address and that's why these professional conversations are having and we're simply saying we identified it and we're providing an opportunity to have these conversations as to how we're going to make this better for this

063population how we're going to help this population find some success because right now or initially they're struggling and they're struggling at all levels not just here um in high school but we identified it here in high school and we're not afraid to talk about it and we're open to your suggestions but i made the suggestion last year that the guidance counselors should be running groups with some of the kids at lunch time because i actually take you know offense to the fact that you think that this situation with the pandemic only affects certain populations of students students can have very high grades and still be affected by this so you can't just say well only a particular group needs support i think all students need support but i also believe that the state new jersey

064department of education put in things like professional learning communities years ago so the teachers would be having conversations around topics such as the ones we're talking about project-based learning has been something that's been around for years and years and years and the school improvement panel like when did the school improvement panel convene to have conversations about this i think they should convene last march to be having conversations about this i mean i'm happy that you're doing this but i'm a little disappointed because what i'm seeing to me is something that should be happening in a high school and in every school every day of the week irregardless of a pandemic i think it is i don't think you should you know we should say now because we're in a pandemic students need mentoring i started

065teaching in the 80s and students needed mentoring in the 80s and we know that having a caring adult in a child's life is going to make a difference it shouldn't take a pandemic to make us realize that and quite frankly i'm sitting in a room with two educators who i firmly believe know this because in 1978 when mr shelley was my teacher those teachers cared about us so it's not something that it takes a pandemic to say hey you know what we should be mentoring kids and caring about them and showing them that we're caring adults in their lives i don't know i don't think that mr pinto or anyone has suggested that the teachers have done less than what they are expected to do at any point 10 years ago and for the 15

066years preceding that when i was in guidance guidance counselors regularly spoke to by phone contacted students went around the building which is much more difficult obviously today right spoke the students spoke to parents and did all the things that mr pinto was speaking about enhancing that's what i hear mr pinto talking about enhancing what is already being done so to suggest for my 15 years that it wasn't being done i take offense to that i take defense of the way it's being presented as if this is something that's new and this is what we're doing now in response to a pandemic i don't think mr pinto has presented this as new he has as i have said already presented it as an enhancement and none of us none of us educators and i'm assuming you

067included ever took a course when we were taking courses in college on how to deal with the pandemic well this is what you do you see you'll have some kids who are virtual no we never we this is all brand new territory so i think we have to give all of ourselves boards of education teachers administrators the whole list of everybody who works from us including the people who served lunches look this is new territory we're going to learn together how to do this that's what my sense would be that's that's not what i take from the presentation so we'll have to agree to disagree on that right because see to me this is being presented as hey we're in a pandemic and these are the new ideas that we have and to me they

068shouldn't be new i think that we owe them to all of our students for a long time inrs should be happening for a long time what are we doing to go above and beyond what the inrs committee does how are we you know identifying strategies that are successful and not successful what are we doing to help teachers share best practices what's what's been done in those respects what does your school improvement panel have to say what are your professional learning committees working on so the school improvement panel it's it's a great name for a uh for a committee but their responsibility is not to actually provide improvement for the school their responsibility is to ensure that the evaluation process is followed and schedule professional development so we do have those conversations about professional development and

069they are engaged in the professional development that we have they also have an option to evaluate but we don't that needs to be negotiated where they can go in and evaluate we don't necessarily do that so um the school improvement panel while it sounds like a great concept it's really just to as a watchdog or to ensure that the evaluation process process is handled correctly um we do have our uh our pandemic responsive and we do have these conversations some of these conversations in the pandemic response team um you know a lot of that has been shifted to um the protocols that we have in in the school not so much the instructional process but ensuring that we're following the guidelines presented whether it's from the state or from our opening plan uh we do

070have we we provide we've dedicated our our department at the time to having these conversations uh quite honestly and i i by no means want this to sound that i've reinvented the wheel here it's just a greater emphasis it's really to re-look at what we've been doing and how are we doing it how can we do it more effectively and quite honestly the goal is to help help students i'm not here to criticize the guidance department i'm actually grateful for the amount of work that they have done they do run meetings during lunch time there's a number of meetings that are run during lunch they're running meetings after school not after school but um in that one o'clock period they they run meetings there's there's mentoring meetings there's support group meetings there's uh meetings for

071ell there's meetings for struggling students there's meetings for new new americans so we are doing a lot of these things i'd be happy to discuss them with you and share them with you um but by no means am i saying that we're reinventing the wheel it's a commitment to these to ensure that the students are receiving the services that they need in this time because quite frankly you know as much as i don't say practice that we had in the spring this spring everybody worked really hard and we tried really hard and once april came around we lost students in cliffside park i know for a fact districts throughout bergen county lost students and the state didn't provide us answers students were not held responsible quite honestly because there was a pandemic and a lot

072of students were honestly given a free pass but they learned that they could you know not be engaged and not participate in remote instruction and we identified that we knew that because that was part of our discussions in our planning that we cannot continue and we thought september october that we hit it out of the park and then once those progress reports came in we started to recognize hey there's a problem here students are struggling students are not reporting and we started to have these conversations and we shared them with mr romagino we we brought in the middle school and we plan to look at this data again and if you have a better suggestion on how we should pull the data i'd be open to hearing it but the bottom line is we know

073our students are struggling right now and we're working really really hard to get them engaged and just by doing re-emphasizing these simple things we've seen increased engagement and that's what i'm hoping to share with the board and to encourage you know and make you not encourage but make you guys aware that hey we're you know i'm open to doing things differently and doing things better and you know i love the opportunity to to hear the suggestions that you have well i would like to know what you're going to do differently and what you're going to do better and i'd also like you to come back to the board after the next marking period to evaluate how the strategies that you've put forth are working because i'd like to see how you know they're impacting the

074students grades and the failures because i'm concerned about the failures but i'm also concerned about the assessments because i think if we're in a pandemic assessments have to change and there needs to be conversations around how we assess students so i'm looking forward to the next presentation where you can have some quantifiable data linking the strategy that you're putting forth to hopefully an increase in grades because you want the strategies you're putting forth to increase the grades right i mean that's the that was the whole beginning of it the failure rate uh we want to see we want to see the students achieve success yes we do we do we don't want to continue down this path and you'll come find ourselves in in in june where we still have we've had students struggle and

075quite honestly you know the idea of this growth mindset you know just developing that idea with with the kids this is a conversation that quite honestly i welcome the board to have and and you know take a look at our our our our grading policy and and you know a number of districts have shifted away from four quarters of uh uh four quarters and a final grade where there's just one semester grade at the end of a semester or or what the the grades kind of reboot in january and there's a final grade that the kid that the kids are measured from january through uh uh through june very progressive high schools have taken that approach and that's something i'd be open to discussing but it's really this this concept that that we cannot allow

076the kids to continue down this path that we have to look as instructors and as administrators what we're doing how we're doing it and do it differently and that's all i'm trying to state is that we've identified a problem we said hey it can't work the way we're doing it and we're going to pivot and we've we've got to address it and we've got to be more active about it we can't kind of sit back and say hey they're adults they're young adults they need to make these decisions uh and some of them are very simple so some are very simple just engaging the community more and that's something that we've we've really tried to make an effort and we'll continue to make an effort to do well see that's where i'm getting confused with

077the verbiage because you say we're pivoting to these strategies but then mr shelley's saying we're doing these strategies all along so i don't understand if you're pivoting to them or if you're doing them all along that's where i'm kind of getting lost because i feel like there are things that you've been done all along as far as putting comments i'll go a stretch further when i taught i put positive comments and negative comments and if the kid was getting an a i still gave them a comment you know because kids need feedback and and we give painfully little feedback i find computer based assessments takes away the teachers ability to give feedback to students because frank quite frankly sometimes all the kids ever get is a number grade this is what you got and they

078never know what they got right what they got wrong or if they didn't understand something because they're never really given that information at least from what i see that's one of the reasons we're encouraging them to use the breakout rooms to provide that feedback directly to the students in a timely fashion and that's that's one of the examples and quite honestly when we're talking about pivot there's a number of things that we are pivoting we are our our policy our instructional policy regarding the cameras which was shared with you know the middle school i mean the middle school had the same policy cameras got to be on and that's something that we pivoted from once we recognized we had go guardian some of these other things you're right no we they've been in place for

079a very long time and you know they're not meant to be critical of anybody but there's a re-emphasis of it as as as our staff has turned over some things were lost some things um might have fell by the wayside some things might not have been done the same way and it's really just we've got to look at what we're doing and ensure that we're doing these things and in some cases we might need to need we might need to do them a little bit more and that's quite honestly what we're trying to do here i i think you should look at what you're doing and do it more and i give a lot of credit to the people who are doing it and have been doing it i would if i can just leave

080you one thing ask you to look at how you're assessing students because you can be doing everything right and everything wonderful and if you're using a traditional old-fashioned assessment that you may use when students are sitting in front of you that may not translate to remote and it could not using proper assessments in this type of a situation could wipe away all of the good that you're trying to do in the other areas because you're not looking at assessments you know because i i would like to believe that the child study team has been and continues to advocate for their students so you know again pivoting not pivoting i don't really understand that i think that that's something that should have been done i would hope it's being done but if you're still seeing the

081failure rate then it's something else and i think that you really have to get into what is causing the failure rate and sometimes the conversation needs to be around assessment and i apologize for taking up so much time but i am on the board of education for education and we rarely get to have these conversations so i thank you for coming tonight and giving this presentation and showing us the failure rate because a lot of times when we get the presentation on standardized testing it's really through rose-colored glasses so i invite you personally to come back to subsequent meetings and show us how the strategies that you're using are making improvements i i'll also bring for you guys i i usually do it in november but our ap scores this year were the highest uh

082they've been in a very long time in a number of subjects i'll also include the ap scores from the spring um uh when i come back because i did not do that presentation in november nor as i asked but uh i'm sure mr romagino shared them but i'll show you the the yearly data for the ap scores so that is something that we're proud of here thank you mr roman are there any more questions mr romagino anyone else anything for mr okay thank you thank you good evening okay so at this time i'd like to look at the consent agenda which i believe you have a copy of in your folder uh just just a brief agenda tonight uh page two we are approving uh some of our staff members taking some virtual um professional

083development conferences at the top we have two bus drivers one we are approving as a new part-time bus driver and right below that a second resolution to accept the resignation of one of our drivers uh effective january 15th a little bit further down rama venetia who was a high school social studies teacher had requested an unpaid um lead for the week of january 4th we are rescinding that since we were virtual a little further down ken russo who is a high school english teacher remember last month we approved some staff members as per contract to work with students in the intramural program uh we left off king's name he will be working with students uh athletes uh top of page three we are rescinding the appointments for two middle school coaches uh vicki bucko and

084susannah pesa and as i mentioned at the beginning of the meeting that's due to a lack of interest in those two sports for this year and i'm pretty confident that next year hopefully with things getting back to normal uh that we will have full participation uh in all of our programs whether it be co-curricular or athletic a little bit further down we are um adjusting the salary of lunches as for new jersey state law uh governor murphy put into effect that the minimum wage uh effective january first for 12 so we are adjusting it for all lunch aids and policies and procedures on page five uh we are approving the vandalism and violence uh report and harassing report which we do is do each year and due to um the fact that we've been uh

085primarily remote for many many of our students there are no reported incidents of either so we are reporting none to the state that's why there is not a report in the folder uh because there were no reasons and that's a report that goes from july 1st to december 31st and then we will start again january 1st of june 30th so we're just approving that uh mr pinto if you have anything under finance yes we both got views um just a couple quick guys was throwing gino uh towards the end of the agenda there's uh four resolutions for uh the audit uh that'll be uploading to the repository of the state uh tomorrow uh the very last resolution is a resolution for the gym upgrade and mr cappano reference that's going to get the project application

086going to the department of education um mr capano mentioned the retaining wall and the gym upgrade the audit package as i mentioned we're going to be uploading to the state in the board's folders there's the amr the orders manager report in the capper which is the larger report that really goes through each and every sub-fund in great detail that's in the board packets and we are starting the preliminary uh due diligence on the budget we receive the guidelines and the software from the state and we have a county uh asbo meeting tomorrow with the county ba going through some of the uh initial minutiae when we got to getting the uh budget process for 21 22 kicked off that's pretty much it mr machine we usually get some numbers from the state regarding state aid

087after the governor the state of the state that's specific to state aid is february 23rd and then usually 48 hours later that that's the tricky part mr shelly about the budget you get the state eight figures so late in the process and you make an assumption that based on your trends over the last several years you've got to get incrementally flat or incrementally higher state aid if that's either wrong to the good or to the bad you're kind of reshuffling the deck right at the last minute but it looks like the governor's state of the state will happen february 23rd that's a tentative date and usually 48 hours later we get the state agent i'll keep you posted i thought i heard him say something else yeah it wasn't it wasn't what they call the

088state of the state where he gets into uh state aid and topics such as that that's going to be definitely obviously interesting this year given the economy yes and we've got no direction uh from from anyone in regards to what they expect we're going to probably make an assumption that it's going to be flat year over year but you're right who knows okay but we'll keep everyone posted that's it okay i do have two questions uh for two members of our community that are watching the program tonight as we screen it uh the first question is why would the notification communication system change as of january 1st it is unnecessary and bothersome for emergency contacts to bring receiving calls so that is something we will look at i didn't realize that we did move to

089a new swiftreach system where not only do we send out phone calls but we also send out a follow-up text message uh so we will have mr savastano look at that and see if we cannot send it to emergency contact so we understand that usually an emergency person who doesn't necessarily have to receive those uh the second question is actually a personnel matter has been brought to my attention that art uh is cancelled indefinitely uh art is not canceled indefinitely we are looking for a replacement teacher um if the parent that asked that question would like to call my office tomorrow i'll be more than happy to discuss that further but we are looking for a substitute uh our teacher for our elementary school and that will probably begin uh monday but we were short

090this week we didn't anticipate the staff member being absent and we were not able to find a substitute in this covenant environment that could fill in but um that's where we're at right now so we will find a replacement for elementary law we are in the process of doing that uh those are the only two questions i have and again if any parents at any time have questions they can call my office uh if i'm not available i'll get back to them before the end of that school day so feel free to do that so at this time anybody have any questions on the consent agenda motion to accept what's that mr number one may have a second if i may please mr kapano thank you i'll take a vote now mr debrew mr capano

091mr fredo mr garcia dr penguiano mr raincourt mr russo mr shelley yes sir so noted thank you okay our next board meeting um is february 24th i'm not sure at that time that the public will be uh allowed to attend at some point back in november the governor allowed small group meetings then uh he changed course and we are not allowing the public at this time that's why we're streaming it but if things do change for february 24th where we can have public attend uh we will post that information to our website but our next meeting is february 24th so if there are no other questions motion to adjourn mr raincourt