May 5, 2022 - Clifton Board of Education Meeting

001[Music] so where's [Music] buddy uh [Music] under god justice for all [Music] uh [Music] necessary [Music] in the world is [Music] center organizations holak you you did save a child's life so thank you [Applause] kenny marion i wish i could give you a phone congratulations you're welcome to say a few words you probably already knew your mom take a picture and then do one more week you know you you wake up every day as an educator you know your day is never going to be like the day before i would have um experience that day it was very scary i'm very grateful that my actions brought a child home i only did my job and i did it the way that i only hope my children's teachers and educators would act so thank you very

002much for the acknowledgment um i didn't need it but i i am grateful because i do understand um thank you [Applause] yeah we could have roll roll call please mr abba drabo absolutely yes mr awad yes miss basford yes miss beltran yes mr canova yes mr paris yes vice president daley yes president smith yes motion carries okay we're next going to um move to recognition and award presentations uh miss rigosa for the pbsis as a district coordinator [Music] good evening everyone thank you for the opportunity to showcase yet another wonderful and talented uh pbsis team and school uh 17. tonight we're going to recognize school 16 top cap readers program so let's take a look at what that means oh and before i begin um i just want to wish all the educators former and

003current happy teacher appreciation week month year career everything in between thank you you are all greatly appreciated at school 17 all grade bands have a differentiated approach um to motivate and incentivize students in order to achieve their literacy goals let's take a look at what that means at kin in kindergarten and first grade the goal is to get three golden tickets and in order to achieve that golden ticket students have to read four books and parents have to sign off on it now the really cool part about this is that um staff had the ability or they had the advantage to display those goals being met however they wanted for their classroom for their grade band so we have some first graders reading make smart cookies while others swimming to success displaying fish to get

004their goals up on the board in second grade we see that their goal was to read 25 or more books on the my on electronic reading platform and so again we see the differentiated way or the the creative ways in which the staff at school 17 displayed the school's success some kids were reaching for the stars and landed many stars of achievement while others were planting seeds of growth and their flowers all along the way kids were also incentivized with the my on reading program by receiving key chains just to help them reach their goal and in a moment we'll see what those goals look like what those uh what those merits look like now for third and fifth grade students had to reach all three accelerated reading goals and they needed to learn to

005earn all their points have average of 85 percent or higher on quizzes and read within their zone of a proximal development right not only were they able to display their goals on their boards but they were also able to keep track of it electronically on their accelerated reader uh reader uh platform for the older kids this was particularly incentivizing because it showed them where they were and it it just it was really really cool for them to be able to do that on their own so once they reach once the top cats reach their goals what are they what are they aiming for right let's take a look at what they did goals were met every marking period so every marking paired kids that achieve those goals had access to different activity days they included

006making gingerbread houses doing scratch art having game dates and they also had one of my favorites that was they made bookmarks to keep track of where they were reading as a district we have the district-wide movie licensing and school 17 definitely took this and ran with it and so one of the events was that kids got to participate in the movie event most recently the the last marking period showed top cap bingo and let's take a look at what that is and what kids earned this pre this past marking period you worked super super hard and read over 25 books okay [Music] and first grade you read 15 books books so everybody give yourselves a round of applause [Applause] what else does reading all those books do for you who knows raise your hand what

007does it she said do what else does reading all those books do [Music] get you smarter one more what does reading all those [Music] to be a better reader the most perfect answers were given today so because of all your hard work and because of all your reading you get to enjoy the day with us and what a day they had they had an amazing time together played bingo celebrating their success what we see next is the top cap book vending machine this is the most exciting piece for for i think for all of us as you'll see in a moment dr kropanek and the literacy coaches christian missoula and nicole perchala along with school 17 administration got together and thought of yet another creative way to incentivize and to promote literacy in at school

00817. what that looks like is the following [Music] students at school 17 had the ability to earn a recommendation from a staff member in order to have access to the reading vending machine they got access by displaying pro-social behaviors and following the school-wide expectations or their jaguar pillars this is an amazing amazing amazing piece to the literacy and engaging students academically while utilizing the multi-tiered system of support or pbis in our district president smith dr robertosi would you be so kind as to help us recognize school 17 staff and administration the pbsis team with certificates of appreciation and recognition [Applause] mr matos mrs zakorski [Applause] [Music] uh miss jennifer zack [Applause] ms nelke [Applause] miss polk miss siciliano [Applause] miss mccormack [Applause] dr kropanek [Applause] super uh miss perchala [Applause] is aaron here miss totino

009[Applause] and miss mazur [Applause] yeah i think maybe if we can just sort of center ourselves in here that would be awesome thank you maybe a few up there and a few down there and we should be good yeah yeah beautiful thank you thank you [Applause] so okay um miss rigosa it is uh you do a tremendous job with this program and it's so great to see you hear about the great faculty and you see their names but to see their faces and see them here tonight this is uh this is the highlight of our meeting at least mine so we thank you all for the the great job and work that you do go downhill from it's all down here um while um well i'm sure all of you uh would love to stay

010here uh the entire evening with us and you're more than welcome to stay the entire evening with us but any of the reward uh recipients if you like to exit at this time run while you can i would i'd go now feel free to go or feel free to stay uh just telling you you're able to do that go um and if it's okay uh so we don't uh antagonize andrew any longer uh if we let andrew give his report so that he may leave if he wishes thank you andrew well good evening everyone a few things not too much for this meeting uh there are a few upcoming visual and performing arts events hilton high school the first is next week on the 11th which is the choir concert the day after on the

01112th at 7 p.m is the dance honor society uh ceremony uh week following on the 18th is opus which is mustang band spring concert again at 7 pm and then lastly on the 26th is the orchestra concert but something very very cool and exciting happening next week on next friday is the first passaic county teen arts festival this is something that other counties across the state have been hosting for many years this is the first year that passaic county is actually getting one going so this is an incredible opportunity for us and other schools in state county to go and meet during the school day for different clinics classes um different the chance to play for adjudicators i always that's what the win ensemble at clifton is doing i know orchestra as i know choir

012is and it's just very exciting to be able to do something like this now uh coming up in the next few weeks is the academic awards dinner i bring this up because it's exciting this is the first one since spring 2019 and as a senior my second one uh just very excited to have it back to be able to recognize across all four grade levels at the high school the outstanding academics we have upcoming in our spring varsity sports uh boys tennis had a match today at four against john f kennedy high school and patterson the next match is next tuesday on the 10th at 4 15 p.m at bergen county tech softball's next game is this friday against burton county tech girls lacrosse also played today but they played premise catholic at 6 p.m

013just about an hour ago their next is this monday against state county tech boys lacrosse has their next game this saturday home against promise catholic the big north conference championship for outdoor track is tomorrow the 6th here at clifton stadium starting at 3 p.m baseball is playing in the varsity county championship this saturday the 7th at 2 p.m at nash park and boys volleyball is playing tomorrow the 6th against bergen county tech at 4 30. there are a few upcoming plans and events that student council association is planning that i'd just like to talk about the first is our project graduation snap raise snap raise is a fundraising platform that a bunch of organizations high school have been using more and more regularly and now we're using it it's a very simple fundraiser uh that

014we put together for their senior class advisors mrs carafan and mr vidello to raise money for project graduation i may be wrong about this but i believe that links for this website to donate money are available on almost all of the local facebook groups for clifton and clifton residents unfortunately they don't have a search option to just search clifton high school and get to it but if you can get to those links we would greatly appreciate any donations to help make project graduation feasible next is something that the sophomore class officers are planning and they're trying to get chs involved with the pulsara project which is a non-profit group that buys hand woven posers from central american artists to raise money to assist central american communities in a multitude of ways including but not limited

015to scholarships secondary education funding and funding for environmental initiatives it's a great program we've never really gotten involved with before so we're very excited to now be getting involved with it uh lastly we're approaching the school year especially for seniors like myself we have a ton of ideas that we're working on to try to make the industry as great as possible but one of the things essay is doing to really plan for the year ahead is revising the sca constitution and membership criteria for some positions which may in turn affect the student representative next year if anything changes regarding criteria or the responsibilities of the student representative i will be sure to report them the following meeting two more just miscellaneous things i just like to throw in uh national decision day for seniors was

016just behind us so i want to take the opportunity to just congratulate all clifton seniors to finalize their higher education plans for next year it fills me with great pride to see so many of my friends and peers just go to amazing places in the fall and lastly i recognize the budget for the upcoming school years being finalized tonight i will not be making exact statements on specific items instead i just implore you to make sure that all decisions are in the best interest of students here in clifton thank you and goody good night [Applause] yes andrew where did you decide to go to school if you don't mind sharing yeah excellent [Applause] uh andrew i again thank you i know we missed you for a few meetings but we're glad that you're back and

017i know your time is winding down with us so uh we truly appreciate the time and effort that you've put into uh giving these reports to the board members uh for being here and if you're not here to make sure that representative was always here so we thank you and appreciate that and as always you're welcome to leave at your leisure when you wish all right we'll move to adoption of minutes adoption motion moved by um mr abu drabo second second by mr awad discussion uh it says regular minutes it's i only have an executive session you have to click that little thing i did the same thing under recommended action where it says view minutes oh it's right there yeah i did the same thing i'm gonna have to have stain i didn't read

018them okay roll call please mr abba drabo yes we're sending on executive mr awad yes miss bashford i'm going to abstain on regular and yes on executive miss beltran yes mr canova yes mr paris yes vice president daley yes president smith yes motion carries um superintendent's report dr robitozi thank you mr smith good evening commissioners members of the community faculty and staff in attendance good to see you my report will be very brief tonight because we have two uh formal presentations on the new health standards and of course the budget proposal i just want to say happy teacher appreciation week to the people who work so hard in our district to um they're just the backbone of our district they do everything they can to help our kids um our kids love them they love

019our kids and our teachers we just have some of the most fantastic teachers that i've ever seen i just want to read a little bit from the the message that i sent my teachers of appreciation this week and i used a quote from robert frost that he once said i am not a teacher but an awakener and as i reflected on the past school year i was continually amazed by our unbelievably talented staff they faced considerable challenges including welcoming back students who for more than half of them almost 60 percent of our students had not been in the classroom full-time in almost two years and of course they handled every obstacle we threw at them with grace and ease supporting your students as they reacclimated to full-time school learning environment while helping them emotionally and

020academically took patience dedication and understanding which are truly the hallmarks of a great educator at a time when public education is once again under scrutiny i'm hard pressed to find any other profession that requires the innovation flexibility and determination as public school teachers and as aristotle once said teaching is the most noble profession i am a teacher in my heart i applaud you and i appreciate you this week and every week and i know we don't say it enough but you are all very very much appreciated our teachers [Applause] next week wednesday may 11th is nurse appreciation week and i'm going to send them a nice letter too our nurses i mean geez i could go on and on about our nurses but you know dealing with what we've had to deal with running schools

021during a global pandemic contact tracing doing things that we were never expected to do thank you to our nurses who have gone above and beyond who have been more than nurses who have been mothers who have been counselors who have been first aid who have done just a little bit of everything thank you to our nurses and i will thank you more formally um in a letter so mr smith that concludes my report tonight because uh we do have two presentations so i'm short and sweet thank you dr robitozzi um i just asked that um again i don't want to go through every single one of them but they're very important um events coming up for the students so if you go to our website and you go to the peach jar flyers you'll see

022events that are coming up from uh tricky trays to beefstakes to uh the opus uh uh the marching band is holding a car wash for the next three saturdays um sports camps that are happening over the summer uh the band's big beefsteak uh on june 10th so there's a lot of great things happening for clifton students so i ask that you please go on to our website and view the the flyers on peach jar to get all the information about the activities happening for our students and we ask that you all in the best that you could go out and support clifton students we will move on from that uh so next we have first reading of policy uh 0 167 public participation in board meetings so next we have the presentations of reports from

023administration advisory committees and special uh committees doctor thank you mr smith uh first presentation tonight uh will be mrs kusalevich our assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction along with uh mr colturi our supervisor of physical education and health for our district um they'll be doing a presentation on the comprehensive health and physical education standards overview as they're getting prepared for this presentation i'm going to make just a couple general statements that i really hope people take to heart there has been a lot of discussion a lot of misinformation a lot of talk about the new health standards that are going to be implemented in the public schools next school year and i want every parent and every member of our community and every commissioner here to know that i believe in this district believes that

024a parent has the right to help direct the educational upbringing of their children absolutely has that right all i ask is that before you make any decisions you make sure that you're making an informed decision based on facts based on information from reliable sources and based on the correct information if after tonight's presentation and if after our couple of parent and community presentations that we have at the end of may if you say to me or to our teachers i'm still not comfortable with my children learning this standard or the way you're going to teach the curriculum to the standard then we will respect that without question i just ask that you listen commissioners if you have questions after the presentation of course please feel free to ask questions and of course the public is

025welcome to comment during open public at this time miss kusalevich and miss turi thank you good evening commissioners and administration it's a pleasure to be back here again with you today um ms turi and i are going to be presenting some more details about the comprehensive health and physical education standards as they've been updated for 2020 samantha it's not moving it moved earlier okay while we work on our technical difficulties i'll just get started so this evening we're going to be covering um the new jersey student learning standards updated for 2020 for comprehensive health and physical education then we're going to be looking at some of the new jersey legislative mandates that have impacted instruction the changes to the comprehensive health and physical education standards are how they differ from 2014 as well as local

026decision making and curriculum development and finally we're going to talk about parental options and information sessions that are coming up but before we begin i would really like to address some of these misconceptions that dr robert tosi was mentioning there have been a number of misconceptions that have been shared on social media that have been in the news and that have also been presented here at our own board meeting we have had concerned parents rightly concerned sharing lessons that we actually as a curricular team struggled to identify where they came from because they were things that we had never seen they were not on the state website they were not linked to anything that we were working with with the core content standards now the lessons that were presented came from a different organization out

027of washington dc the lessons that were shared came from a company called advocates for youth which is also known as rights respect and responsibility or the three r's and were related to videos from amaze.org but i would like to begin by saying that clifton will not be using the lessons from advocacy for youth or the videos that were discussed from amaze.org a school district has to implement the standards but the doe does not force us to use or mandate that we use specific curriculum they don't mandate that we use specific materials we will not be using the materials that were shared previously because they are not in our opinion developmentally appropriate for our students all clifton lessons will be developed by our professionals they will be locally developed and age and grade developmentally appropriate for

028our students it's our clifton teachers who are going to be working on this right now our teachers will be receiving training from now through the summer on these new standards and they're working on collecting materials and developing these lessons you're going to see some of the examples that are developmentally and age-appropriate that we will be sharing we're actually going to share with you a few youtube videos to see how the district is interpreting our local interpretation and application of these standards to our curriculum and the lessons that will be developed by our professionals remember our teachers are professionals many of them are parents many of them are also clifton parents so we want everyone to understand that our primary goal is the mental and physical health and safety of our students disease prevention fostering respect

029for ourselves and others and understanding and acceptance of those other than ourselves now we were talking about some legislative statutes so the standards right now appear to be very different from the previous standard but not when you look at legislation the state over many years passes legislative agendas which then trickle down into the school district so there are many pieces of law that wind up being taught in the classroom and eventually catch up into the standards and that's basically what's happening here in 2020 so prior to 2014 these statutes were already being taught in the classroom mostly in our health and physical education curriculum but also some of these being cross content so i'm going to go over some of those prior to 2014 we've been teaching primarily abstinence accident and fire prevention breast self-examination

030bullying prevention cpr and aed instruction cancer awareness dating violence education domestic violence education drugs alcohol tobacco controlled substances and anabolic steroid use prevention gang violence prevention lyme disease prevention organ donation sexual assault prevention suicide prevention since 2019 legislation on consent mental health the new jersey south haven infant protection act sexting sexual abuse and assault awareness and prevention education have all been taught in our classrooms in our comprehensive health and physical education classes so some of the topics that are brought that were brought up at the past meetings are just a tiny sliver of the many many many topics that we teach in our health and phys ed classes some other legislation impacts all curricular areas like holocaust education the amistad law the contributions of lgbtq and individuals with disabilities law these are all laws that

031then apply in the classroom but not as a subject rather as a theme so one example would be the contributions of lgbt and individuals with disabilities when you're in a science class you want to talk about people who are famous scientists so when you get to physics and you're talking about physics you might mention stephen hawking as a person within with disabilities who is also a prominent physicist related to the topic you're teaching that legit that piece of legislation is as simple as that so these influences have been here for many many years and we're just seeing the standards catch up to what we've already been teaching in our classrooms now we're going to start looking specifically at the updates the new pieces or changes in the 2020 comprehensive health and phys ed standards and

032the first thing we're looking at is grades k through 2 which is what was referenced at a previous board meeting nicole thank you janina good evening commissioners i didn't think i needed one with a phys ed voice but that's okay it's for the tv good evening commissioners and central administration administration in the first standard that you see here we're discussing how individuals make their own choices about how to express themselves we have chosen a developmentally appropriate video to demonstrate one of the examples our clifton developed in a lesson small business owners know they've got to be prepared for anything [Music] hi friends today we'll be reading it's okay to be different we are all different do you know each and every person is different it's true if everyone looked and acted the same how would

033we know who was who some kids love to swim and some like to hike some like to dance and some love to bike we are all different some kids love the color blue and some adore yellow maybe pink is your favorite color like this little fellow some kids love to build towers out of blocks some kids enjoy wearing different colored socks we are all different some kids have blonde hair and light colored skin some kids have dark hair and dark colored skin some kids are big and some kids are small some kids are short and others are tall we are all different some kids are great at science and math other kids choose a whole nother path perhaps playing sports or music is their thing some kids play an instrument while others can sing we

034are all different some kids wear glasses that help them to see some kids talk with an accent that's different from me some kids get to ride in cool looking chairs they take the ramp while others take the stairs we are all different some kids have glasses crutches wheelchairs and slings but it's never okay to make fun of these things even though we don't all look act or sound alike one thing is true every child is an individual a person like you you should always be kind to those who are different from you because to them you are different too remember it's okay to be different it's okay to be you you were made to be different you were me to be you [Music] the second standard is to discuss the range of ways people express

035their gender and how gender role stereotypes may limit behavior as a mother of four children two boys and two girls i have taught my children that they can be whatever they want to be this is the approach we are taking by keeping in mind the developmentally appropriate lesson for grade two the following video is another to demonstrate the clifton developed lesson all aboard for global goals hello it's me thomas i've been on a big world adventure i learned what an amazing place the world is and how important it is that we take care of it today i want to talk about how girls and boys should be given the same chance some people think that girls can't do the same jobs as boys and treat girls as if they are weak but i've seen that

036this isn't true i've been on a world adventure and seen all sorts of engines and people doing different types of work gordon is one of the biggest and strongest engines on sodor but he's not the only one that can pull the express rebecca's just as big and strong as he is and their great friends mavis works at the quarry pulling cars of heavy stone paxton is really good at that too on sodor bell and flynn work well together putting out fires and i used to think i was the only number one blue tank engine until i met hong may if girls and boys aren't given the same opportunities then they may not get the chance to do something they're good at that's not fair but when boys and girls work as equals they could be

037the best they could be and do amazing things see you next time the next standard we're addressing healthy ways for friends to express feelings for and to one another this is simply a hug a high five a fist bump a thumbs up that's as limited as it will be the next standard is to demonstrate healthy ways to respond to disagreements or conflicts with others for example leave the conflict talk to a trusted adult tell a sibling or a peer the next standard is listing medically accurate names for body parts including the genitals we are limiting this to penis testes vagina and vulva defining reproduction by second grade it's as simple as creating a living organism plants animals and humans all reproduce this lesson would likely transition to how a parent would care for their offspring

038for example hunting gathering nourishing clothing providing shelter etc [Applause] and now we move to grade five the social and sexual health standards for grade five do include a change in the previous 2014 standards students learned a lesson about factors that contribute to a healthy relationship within a family that's now been moved from sixth grade down to fifth and the focus is on interpersonal communication nicole in fifth grade we're also bringing back describing gender role stereotypes and their potential impact to self and others once again a video that was developed by clifton selected by clifton selected by clifton excuse me to help writing's not that easy but grammarly can help this sentence isn't it afternoon we're going to draw people doing different jobs and the first job we're going to draw is a firefighter have a

039thing in your head what a fireplace what's your firefighter called mine's called firefighter gary firefighter my advice he's big and strong he's got a big helmet on that's brilliant isn't it next we're gonna draw a surgeon have you thought of a name for your surgeon he gave you medicine that's his ambulance okay next we're going to draw a fighter pilot yes this is his jet plane he rescues people he likes to do stunts in the air and stuff okay now who would like to meet these people for real [Music] dressed up my name's tamzin and i'm a surgeon in the nhs my name's lauren and i'm a pilot in the royal air force my name's lucy i'm a firefighter in the london fire brigade so who wants to know how to do an operation we

040put this in here can you hear that yeah it's really good yeah [Music] the next standard is differentiating between sexual orientation and gender identity clifton plans to limit this lesson to definitions only for example for grade five gender identity is how you feel sexual orientation is who you love since terms evolve over time and contexts these definitions will be updated accordingly to pending njdoe review of these standards and now we're moving into the personal growth and development standard all of the standards that are listed on this page are taught in just one or maybe two lessons out of the 20 health lessons that students have already been participating in grade 5. the standards have been updated but the content has been addressed at this grade level for years this is that lesson where maybe 15

041or 20 years ago boys would go into one room girls would go into the other room that's exactly what we're teaching the topics that are included are your human reproduction puberty the role of hormones and identifying trusted adults to talk to this used to be done separately now it's being done together that's really the main difference the main focus of the lessons will be that students may at this point in time in their life experience different feelings see that their bodies are changing notice and feel different emotions and that they should speak to a trusted adult one of the standards clarifies who trusted adults are these include family members caregivers school staff and health care professionals the goal of that of that whole standard is for our students to know that they should be going

042to their parents with many of these questions now we're moving on to grade eight the majority of the content on this list of updated standards has already been in the curriculum human sexuality topics always begin with abstinence we teach abstinence first here in grade 8 we see minor changes to the standards for example we have taught that vaginal and oral sex can lead to contracting sexually transmitted infections and diseases as well as lead to pregnancy anal sex has been added as there are misconceptions by young people as young as sixth grade that this is a safe method of sex our focus is on health to prevent stis stds and unwanted pregnancy the community and health services support standards that are part of the eighth grade curriculum speak to state and federal laws such as consent

043internet and social media safety sexual harassment and abuse prevention the prevention of human trafficking and testing and treatment options for stis and stds these topics at the end of eighth grade then lead into the high school curriculum these are the current clifton high school topics listed in the syllabi in grade nine we have abstinence reproduction and sexuality sexually transmitted diseases family planning pregnancy tobacco drug use consent education and alcohol abuse in grade 10 our driver safety organ donation and once again consent education grade 11 resume writing interview skills consent education aed cpr in grade 12 first aid healthy relationships and dating breast sulk silk self exam and testicular self exam suicide and depression and lgbtq plus as we look at the high school standards we see that they have they have been redefined and made

044more specific so we have a number of changes on the next three slides but the majority of the content is still the same content that was taught in the 2014 standards and the standards prior to that going all the way back to the 90s the topics that used to be taught through legislation have now been listed in here as their own standards so the legislation that we spoke about earlier that goes back and predates even 2014 standards has now been incorporated into the different strands but the content has been taught since prior to 2014 all social and sexual health lessons start from respect consent abstinence and medically accurate terminology we then move into lessons on pregnancy and parenting and a unit on community health services and support nicole thank you in conclusion we are offering

045you options and the information sessions that we have available please note that the standards presented are not being implemented until september 2022. all njsls subjects are mandatory but parents will have the option to opt out of selected lessons an opt-out letter will be posted to the website in august of 2022 with very specific instructions on how to submit if this is the choice that you are making i cannot encourage you enough to attend the parent information sessions that we have broken down in two grade bands grades k through five will be on may 19th from 6 pm to 7 30 and grade 6 through 12 will be on may 24th from 6 to 7 pm the links will be provided in a blackboard announcement if you have any questions after this evening please feel free

046to call me at 973-470-2 or email me at entouri cliftonschools.net this entire presentation will be posted to the website so you will have an opportunity to look at the links that we have in the presentation and if you have any questions please that's what i'm here for utilize that contact information and get in touch with me thank you very much for your time i truly appreciate it thank you that's right i just well i'm gonna actually sign out i'm gonna actually get right sign out okay questions from board members yes mr krabs so um equity equality who we are as individuals is important to teach our kids as they get older and understand what the world is about society's about but i think the biggest question i i have my own problems with legislators in

047terms of how they're spinning this and it's going to delve into some questions i have in terms of mandatory curriculum teachings and district choice style of structure and curriculum teachings so some legislators have been putting out there and i've been pretty vocal with them on my own terms i'll speak on behalf of the board because i personally relate to a lot of them and that many might now go from okay well this is what we're doing as doe and legislators in terms of down in trenton to now they're back peddling and saying these are options and it's upon the district's choice in terms of structure and curriculum how true is that i need i i just want the people to know so structure the standards have always have been a mandate since 1996 so districts

048are required to teach content according to certain standards at certain grade bands that they've evolved over the years but they those are just the standards or the goal of the lesson districts all along have been able to choose their own curricular materials write their own curriculum create their own lessons the state of new jersey has not ever promoted or mandated a specific curriculum they're actually prohibited from recommending specific texts to us so our local curricular committees work very hard on this and that's one of the reasons why you see so many names for summer work and after school curricular revisions because a very large portion of this work is done by our local teachers they still have to meet a standard that standard is also looked at under nj cusack but as long as we

049meet the points that are in there we really should be fine so then if i may just one more question president smith so which goes into my second fold of this question which is if the clifton school district is deciding to choose how they go about the structure of this curriculum correct so during these sessions that you're going to have these q and a's what's the chances and possibilities to you know for parents and stakeholders in this city to understand what truly the mindset of this curriculum is going to be whether it's a skeleton outline or whatever it may be what choice of words you're going to use i'm going to be honest i was taking down looking notes you know to see down at end of grade 2 if my child is in grade

0502 and i really want to teach them about the birds and bees i want them i want them to learn from home what is what in terminology and absolutely you will be teaching your child about the birds and the bees because we are not teaching them about the birds and the bees in grade two well when you simply four words that are part of their body and it could be as simple as head shoulders knees toes penis or vagina i see i disagree i absolutely disagree because those words that that and i'm not gonna repeat them because i'm affordable member here and the kids are probably watching and again goes listen people may disagree with me but as a parent every parent has a right to teach what they want to their kids and we're

051offering we are offering an opt-out so if that's if that's a lesson that you do not want your child to be a part of you may opt out of that lesson it's literally going to be family life in elementary school meets one day per week per grade and it's half a year there are it's a total of 20 lessons and if that if that's a two-second part of what your body parts are if that's a two-second part of one lesson that's going to be a lot and there are a myriad of other topics that they still need to cover it's one tiny spoke and a very big wheel of what's covered in elementary school they do recycling they do community what what it means to be a community member what your future career may want

052to be there are so many other facets to what they learned grades k through five that if this one lesson you would like to be opted out of that's not a problem and and on the website currently right now if you look on the phys ed website i have listed every single resource there that my teachers use for the curriculum kidshealth.org for elementary school teen health and wellness for grades 6 through 12. those have always been as long as i've been sitting in the chair i'm sitting in those have always been listed there for parents to look at the resource on the website i've never hidden that from anybody i'm gonna say is i have a lot of emotions about this and to be honest i'm just gonna hold keep to myself for now and

053give my other colleagues the opportunity to speak [Music] okay any other questions from board members yeah i just want to piggyback what my colleague said i just got so much emotions running through me and honestly it was i just feel very uncomfortable that a second grader personally um you know i come from a conservative background and i know that's just my belief but i feel like with today's society and with the way things are just happening so fast everything to be honest with you everything's so sexualized nowadays when it comes to music to just just on a day-to-day basis and i i feel like you know it starts off with just teaching you know a second grader about excuse my language penis and vaginas and then in a couple of years later they're going to

054add something else to something else and personally we keep telling parents you know talk to your kids you know a a mother a father you know it doesn't matter who the parent is we're telling these parents you know teach your kids to guide your kids but at the same time it's i know they're not forced and they have the choice to opt out or not but you know looking around our city it's just i feel from what i've heard from many people a lot of people are kind of literally mind blown like is honestly i can't put my words together tonight because i'm just i just feel very uncomfortable honestly uh so i'm just gonna keep it at that i'm just scratching my head right now um i'll probably discuss this once i could kind

055of think straight but i'm totally against this i'm sorry it's just i don't i'm just going to speak for my conscience and i know i'm going to get a lot of backlash but you know what i'm in this position to speak how i feel and wow that's all i've got to say any other questions from board members yes mr president um my question is around that the academic freedom so we saw some of these videos here is this going to be the specific content that's going to be used you know and and wording that you were choosing to use instead of here is it this this the specific guidelines and sort of the holy bible that they're following or are they allowed to go off track and and speak ad-lib and speak really to how

056they want to teach these these our teachers do have the freedom to teach at the same time our teachers are required to follow our local curriculum the entire physical education department is working together on developing these lessons the majority of these lessons have already been taught and implemented in clifton public schools for well over a decade these stan the sex education standards in fifth grade have been there since 1996 and it predates that because i remember that conversation in the 80s so these are lessons that have been oh that have always been there this is this is not hijacking a curriculum this is a sliver of a full comprehensive health and physical education program we're talking about in fifth grade one maybe two lessons in we tried we the reason we shared those videos with

057you is we're not going with these amaze.org videos we're going with videos that we as a district feel are more developmentally appropriate that's why we showed you those examples so that our parents can see the direction that we're going with this and the lessons that we're looking at and i understand that i'm not talking about historical i'm just talking about in general so what you presented tonight a teacher can look at that and have their own interpretation and present something to the students that's not what we saw tonight our teachers are all being trained and they're developing the curriculum together especially at the elementary our teachers do tend to follow the pacing very closely pretty much across all of our elementary contents and classrooms i would find it highly unlikely that there would be any

058major divergence at the elementary school you do have more independence from that perspective at the high school but even at the high school level especially you know the court the new nj cusack and the standards do guide us in certain directions we can then develop our own lessons and curriculum and our teachers do need to be following the curriculum that we present could a video change could a resource change sure can a conversation go a different way in a high school because of student questions at the high school level or at the middle school level yes that is possible okay any other board members vice president daley um yeah first of all thank you very much for the presentation um i'm still a bit concerned my concern i listened to when when i was in

059high school we had sex education and everything else but it was a little different and for a high schooler than in elementary school and i can understand how parents are apprehensive especially in the elementary i mean you've told us that this has been part of the standards for quite some time however at this for some reason um i don't know if it's pr people are spinning things um that it's this has been in there for a while for quite some time but obviously it's front and center now and i think much more people are aware the one issue i'm and i i think the parents have a right to a definite right to feel what they especially in the elementary school of how this is approached uh and if a parent feels uncomfortable my my

060one thing about the opt-out is i'm not sure how the parents are aware what's there and if they say oh i miss my opportunity to opt out i don't know if there's more appropriate that there's an opt-in especially in the elementary school level and i can understand a lot of parents concerns and how to do that now every every parent isn't the same how they bring their child along and help them they mature this is all personal amongst the family and everybody has their own way of doing that um but i'm just a little bit more concerned especially in the elementary school that a parent may not be aware of the opt-out issue or when the curriculum is being taught and they've all of a sudden the parents aware that something's happened or the child's

061been taught and is upset about that so that that notice information is a concern of mine so to address the beginning part of your question or statement the k to two pieces are that the k to two pieces are a little different from what they were before at the same time the district is choosing to go in a direction that is i think more aligned with age and developmentally appropriate markers we i hope that we were able to share show that with the videos that we chose as examples of the type of lesson that would be taught in terms of the opt-out and communication with parents elementary parents do tend to be much more involved than our high school parents and and even sometimes middle school each of our teachers each of the health and

062phys ed teachers has their own google classroom the opt-out information and the lessons being taught will be posted in that google classroom at the elementary level it's only 20 lessons total per year per grade and these topics in the k-2 span might be one or two lessons total out of k to two overall and in grade five it'll be one or i'm sorry in in kindergarten caded two it's going to be one lesson and in case um three to five at the end of fifth grade there will be one or two lessons this will be clearly posted in the google classroom the opt out will be available already in august but prior to those lessons being taught we will make sure that all of our teachers send a blast out through our real-time notification system

063and through that this lesson will be being taught so that we can make sure that our parents are aware of this option just just one quick follow-up as the state definitely said the only way you can is an opt-out and not an opt-in especially for the elementary what's what's the state well according to njpsa the state doesn't even want an opt out and we're providing one so there's that no i understand that thank you for that mr president i might have some more comments down the line but uh as far as the uh uh roy and and and and mr kuslevich i thank them for that yeah ms gutierrez can uh answer a part of your question there mr dilly there's a well for everybody there's a state statute that provides the ability to opt

064out of certain curriculum um and of course i can't find the number right this second but i will before the end of the night we actually have it in our opt-out letter which unfortunately i don't have with me but it is specific to um concern religious concerns exactly morally sincere religious belief or conscience i'll find it but it's opting out not opting in and it is clearly inaudible and it's clearly in our opt-out letter that entire statute is actually cited in the letter that we're still developing that will be posted okay anyone else miss password yeah i have a couple of questions these two sessions that are going to happen through you um mr president the superintendent to the staff um i don't know why i have such a quebec um they're going to be

065an hour and a half like is it going to be the same type of demonstration or are you going to actually show an actual lesson being uh happening because i would i'm going to try to make one of these nights it's going to be the same thing on both nights right this way we're going to or is it going to be two different subjects it will be band appropriate so okay through five will be the first night six through twelve will be the second and it's a it's a question and answer night for parents to attend as well i i was able to ask questions that evening personally i think that i would like to make a request for the hsa committee that we um repeat this presentation to the hsa parents so we can

066get their uh input in on it and also i'd like to see an actual lesson and i it's gonna be people may take this the wrong way i would like to see the more offensive lessons or that people are having problems being taught because i have to tell you as a parent age-appropriate terminology was taught from the very beginning of my children's lives i was taught that by my sister who was nine years old and then 47 years a nurse to talk about the appropriate body type so there is no misconception in the child's development that was number one as you can see i think i did a pretty good job keep raising my children because of course you know nicknames were were afforded but i would like to see the tougher lesson as a

067board member i would really like to see if we could see that so i can be more familiar and then answer questions when people stop me at the store but i will i would feel comfortable knowing how it was going to be delivered so at these two sessions these are more focused on the changes to the standards themselves we were planning further sessions in um in august once our teachers pull everything together now mind you like i said the majority of this is already being taught um so we can give a sample of that matches some of these prior to um maybe we can do that at this hsa meeting that is being requested if that is something that um dr robert tozie would like to organize with you um so how we're currently teaching

068um some of these lessons can definitely be shared um i think the thing we were really trying to highlight was seriously the video that the two videos that we we selected to show the three that we showed are really along the lines of the majority of what that lesson would look like because my concern is that there there is the misconception out there that these sessions are going to be dedicated to these things in length like you said they're going to be taught very quickly so i would feel more comfortable seeing a a an example of of a lesson on one of the the more intense subject matter so i can myself make the judgment because we have to vote on this curriculum come july i believe it is am i wrong don't we vote

069on the curriculum in the summer uh we re-adopt we typically at the in may we re-adopt all of our curriculum guides and we're going to hold off our um comprehensive health and phys ed guide until august okay so i would like if we could get some sample i'm trying not to put pressure on anybody or put more work but i think there there is a lot of misconception and for ordering me to make an informed decision when i have to vote on this that i would like to see it and i don't know if it could be a public meeting but i think that we should open it to the public as well but i really want to get the hsa parents involved in this as well because it's going to affect their children and

070some of some of the people that have been very outspoken no longer parents and they have grandchildren i understand that but i just want to give everybody more of an opportunity to actually see the content of what they're going to see like you go preview a movie right and you try to find out or you're going to go see a broadway show i'm not trying to discredit this in any way but i would i want to see it actually before i vote on it i can't i can't do it otherwise and since some of these are truly just vocabulary changes um some of these lessons are still are already going on because this has been in the current content standards um we can see if we can find a snippet or maybe you know record

071a teacher teaching if they're willing to be recorded or just get their written lesson plan president smith yes did you uh miss gutierrez could you give us the uh statute please thank you new jersey statutes annotated 18a colon 35-4.7 reads exclusion of pupils from programs statement of parent any child whose parent or guardian presents to the school principal a signed statement that any part of the instructions in health family life education or sex education is in conflict with his conscience or sincerely held moral or religious beliefs shall be excused from that portion of the course where such instruction is being given and no penalties as to credit or graduation shall result there from so i'm not sure how you're going to do the actual opt-out but it's really it's actually in the statement that went

072out to every parent on monday letter that went out so that it stated very clearly that there will be alternative lessons that will be mutually agreed upon and the child will be put in an alternative location excellent and that statute has been around since 1979. president smith okay and let's just give everyone a chance does anyone else wish to question this yes i had a couple questions oh thank you um was the um the notification sent down multiple languages yes it was okay so i'm gonna confirm that um my other i also agree with uh mr daily that i think it should be an opt in i remember being an opt-in when i was growing up i don't know why i remember that but i remember it a forum going i went to catholic school

073fifth grade so maybe it was different but there was a form that went home and then you had to return it back signed in order to go to the lesson and i remember the parents being there and again that's catholic school so that's a totally different situation but maybe having that as an option of having the parents the ability to be in the classroom or you know it was done not during classroom time i remember it was done like either after school or during a lunch it was like done separately so that the parents could be there also um just so that you know everyone kind of knows what's going on also i think previewing the lesson plan would be also um you know beneficial to the parents and also to us to be able

074to properly vote on it because there are terms here that are obviously were not discussed you know gender identity even when i was you know it's only 15 years ago i was 15 years old um those things weren't really discussed back then so i don't even know what would be presented on those types of subjects um so i think it would be beneficial for us to see the second grade the fifth grade you know sixth grade and beyond i feel is you know they're more on the internet they're more out there they you know they've seen it they you know it's they're gonna be more prepared to receive lessons like that even though you're never gonna get over the awkwardness of the words that have been um said here today unfortunately just the way our

075society is um but i think if we were able to see a lesson plan as well as the parents being able to see the actual lesson plans can be presented i i don't really like that the teachers may not go off rubric i you know i i would like them to have to present exactly something um and not be able to have even a little bit of leeway of what they could do just because i know from my experience of having friends their teachers some of them have very different views than others so you might get you know 10 different presentations and all those kids are going to wind up in the same middle school with 10 different versions of the same story so that's just my opinion on that anyone else that has not

076spoken yet okay um mr albert job thank you so i remember back in fifth grade where and this is also you know talking about what was already being taught and i've heard that phrase many of times tonight um and listen i'm not taking away from anything from your presentation i appreciate both you you're both very well good educators you care about our district but my concern is this right is that in fifth grade i remember a school one i was sitting there and yes they separate us in classrooms or male here female there and they would talk about gender parts and et cetera why are we going from separate to mix is my first question and then my second question is while yes this has been taught let's say in fifth grade but now we're

077bringing it down a notch to second grade and i think that's like the biggest concern i don't remember learning this in second grade not in third grade and not in fourth grade i think my first introduction was in fifth grade and it's a very sensitive topic and it's a very sensitive issues and i get it and i understand it right but the big it's going to go back to the original question which why are we going to a mixed class rather than keeping it separate the way it's just the way it is we're still we're still teaching what's what where's what right in that aspect um nicole can you just share with us how long we've been teaching the in the mixed class i'm older than you and i don't ever remember being separated it

078was the school nurse that actually taught the lesson because we did not have health specific educators in elementary school it was the nurse that came in and i don't remember being removed and i graduated high school in 1991. so i know i know i'm older than you and i don't remember being separated and if they did that in the school you were in again i can't speak to that i went to school 11 christopher columbus and clifton high school i was never separated so i don't know if they did that in your school maybe that's a decision i can't speak to that because i was i i was in school myself at that time so if that's a decision that the school nurse made at that time in your school but i i was never

079where i was separated so then let me play devil's advocate with the opt-out so first saying people are going to opt out i'm assuming by that notion we're going at a low percentage 20 maybe opt out what do we do with those kids a right b what if it's the other way around where 80 actually opt out how do we how do we work with that that's b and then c can we see what the uh what the opt out questionnaire or how it's worded or what topic issues parents would want to opt out what that looks like so all of this is still being developed we are drafting the letter once we draft the letter we share it with dr robert tosi we can't finalize every indiv every single piece of the exact list

080of lessons until we finish with the curriculum however the majority of what exists is going to be in there we can share samples as has been requested we will obviously be bringing this up again now hopefully with the hsa presidents um and then with some sample lessons that we can share with the board as well as the sample um of what the uh the draft of what the opt-out letter is going to look like we've had an opt-out letter in the past it was how frequently do you think it's used the opt-out letter that we had in the past maybe in all total we've had about ten that have come back over the last eight years that i've been in this position ten letters that have probably come back asking for a child to be

081opted out of a singular lesson on the old opt-out letter there was listed topics that were covered and parents could circle yes no yes no yes no whatever they wanted and they would return it parents were also at that time if they chose all yes we kept all those they could they were in the school with the family life teacher and if a child a parent opted a child out they would go to either the media center or to maybe sit with the counselor at the school counselor's office and given an alternative assignment from the lesson let's say previous so that they had knowledge of what the previous lesson is so let's say in kindergarten it was sharing and and they didn't want their child in the next lesson they would be given a lesson

082on sharing because they already had previous build knowledge and now that we have our chromebooks they can be referring back to an activity that would be that could be posted in the chromebook and we can have um alternative lessons available um based on those prior lessons so that we don't even have to go scrounging for a lesson this is a piece that our teachers can do this summer um in preparation for opt out of certain topics yes thank you um i don't think it needs to be said that everybody here understands this and i first of all i want to commend my team for an outstanding presentation i feel like they're having to defend the state of new jersey and that's not their job what they're what they're doing um what they're doing is taking

083lemons and making lemonade for lack of a better word so i trust like it's our teachers that are developing these lessons i trust our teachers are going to create lessons that you would be very comfortable having your own children in their classroom and i don't mind sharing that i don't mind having one of our teachers come in and do a lesson with us actually some of us could use some lessons like sharing and caring and right i'm joking so no we can do that we can absolutely do that but i want you to i want you to just i want you to i think we've earned some trust here um and i think that you you trust our teachers to come up with lessons janine mentioned earlier a lot of our teachers are parents right

084even the ones that aren't treat the children in clifton as if they were their own children and they're not going to do anything that they think is going to harm them and yeah we can all see how some of these standards may be yeah it looks it looks really at first glance to be could be very controversial we're going to minimize the chance that there's any controversy in the classroom and then at the end of the day if a parent still isn't sure we're going to allow you know we're required to allow but we're going to make that an easy process that's not going to be i'm not going to make that difficult for a parent so so thank you guys for a great presentation um and all these questions here this is these are

085questions that the community has and and we respect that we respect that and hopefully we're able to answer some of them and we'll answer more in the future i'm sure there'll be some public comments and we're happy to hear that um and we'll adjust if necessary so thank you guys thank you thank you know i think uh dr robertosi hit uh you know hit it right on the uh the head is our legislators are elected to work for the people so [Music] we are not supposed to have legislators and i'm not pinpointing any particular legislator but legislators in general that are not involved in this everyday uh aspect of teaching many of the uh people that sit on the state board no defense miss gutierrez but many of them are lawyers a lot of them

086do not have education background many of them have not ever been in a classroom so i think it's a very strong point that the legislators should be listening to us the people you that know what goes on in your children's lives this board who has to make decisions for all of the schools the legislators need to know that they cannot just sit back and make these rules and guidelines and we're supposed to just accept them they have to understand that we have concerns we have questions and they have to listen to them and i know there are it has nothing to do with um our wonderful teachers that if asked to do a job they do that job wholeheartedly that's their profession but they shouldn't have to be put into that position just because a

087legislator feels that they're making the decision for you and for uh our local clifton board of education so i think that is going to be a continual a conversation that we need to have with our legislators i know it is on the agenda for the next legislative meeting and i think if we stand firm with that we know what our teachers can do we know our teachers do a great job but someone else shouldn't be making those decisions and tying their hands whether whichever way your opinion is they should not be making that for our kids and for our town so i i applaud you all for your um your concern in this matter and um i think and hope that you have direction uh mr abu jabba for the legislative meeting for questions and

088concerns you might have and we'll ask the public to please email the board of any topics or questions that you wish to have us bring up with the legislators and we will uh we will do that so um when when does that mean i was gonna ask you if i can say so we're having a legislative meeting with our uh um some giblin senator nia gill and someone with timberlake on may 24th at 10 a.m um that is going to be a committee meeting please feel free to email the board president and the superintendent any questions you may have so we can put that on the agenda um at the end we gotta hold our feet to the fire we hold the state to defeat the fire and they can't keep trickling down saying it's

089the district's choice and and putting on on our educators so if you have any questions please feel free to email us and we will be sure to put on the agenda and and board members as well please get your uh questions uh to uh mr abu dravo uh to bring up at this meeting um this is this is important as many issues are but if we don't let them know how we feel and what our cares and concerns are it'll just be another procedure for them and we can't let that happen so please get your questions and your comments into us and we will sure to address those um at this meeting so thank you all and thank you to uh miss kusalevich and ms torre for uh uh a very difficult subject but trying

090to bring us all with the um the uh the proper information and make your your own judgment from that so we we truly credit you for uh for the great job that you do in uh and as you have been doing for many years uh we we truly appreciate it and thank you for that okay the next part uh mr lucy i believe you're up sir just let the public know there will be a presentation on the budget and then there'll be a public portion uh to any questions that you have on the budget only so after the conclusion of the presentation any questions that you have on the budget only will take place after the presentation yeah there's not too many but first one thank you okay good evening president smith vice president daley

091commissioners members of the public public attending the meeting and everyone uh streaming the meeting on youtube i'm mike yuzi the district's business administrator quickly i would like to introduce dr robertosi superintendent of schools mr congero assistant superintendent of schools ms kusalewitz assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction and mr shahada our assistant business administrator this is the public hearing on the final budget tonight the board will have a resolution presented to them to approve the submission of the 2223 budget to the county office i always like to start this presentation with a quick snapshot of the school's district district's operations to try to put into perspective how large of a district we are the clifton board of education has 23 facilities consisting of 14 elementary schools within annex two preschools the clifton early learner academies two

092middle schools an extremely large high school and the the administration building a transportation garage and the stadium on a daily basis we transport over 2 200 students in district with 57 buses and vans and the district employs over sixteen hundred full-time employees and has ten thousand nine hundred fifty four students on role we have thirty different sports which is two more than last year fifty forced teams eighty three coaches two athletic trainers with over 250 student athletes there are also over 150 co-curricular activities and clubs throughout the district the district has and will follow this budget schedule for the department of education the preliminary budget was approved by the board at the march 16 board meeting my office submitted the preliminary budget to the county office shortly after on march 21st and it was approved

093by the county office on april 6. the budget was advertised in the record on tuesday may 3rd the public hearing on the final budget is obviously tonight with the final budget being due to the county no later than may 14th also the user-friendly budget will be posted on the front page of the district's website which is required to be posted within 48 hours of this meeting now i'll go over the highlights of the budget the main highlights on the revenue side the budget calls for no tax levy increase from the 2122 budget year into next year 22-23 we do have a state aid increase of 12 of over 12 million dollars or 22.27 percent the significant state aid increase is caused by the districts the district being underfunded or under budget adequacy since the inception

094of the state funding formula back in 2009 or 10. since 2018 the state has been equalizing the formula to fund state aid to underfunded districts by taking from over-funded districts so we have we were underfunded so we're finally getting back to where we should be the district plans to be fully funded by next year which will eventually result in flat state aid in future budgets the budget maintains its full unassigned fund balance which is essentially a surplus account this is usually capped at two percent uh of our actual expenses by the state but with the covid waiver districts maintain a four percent for this year the budget calls for using excess surplus from the 2021 fiscal year of 1.2 million because of additional extra extraordinary aid funds claimed by the district and reimbursed by the

095state to us this is caused by unbudgeted revenue from the 2021 year statutorily needing to be added to the revenues in the 2223 budget and lastly on the revenue side would be stemi or the special education medicaid initiative of 350 000 and miscellaneous revenues of 890 which consists of interest facility rentals school fines insurance dividends prior year refunds etc on the appropriations side the budget maintains all current staffing and program with the addition of six security staff members for a pilot program at the middle and high school level there is budgeted 126 special education out of district placements in private schools and county special service schools and 753 students at the vo tech pcti the only change from the preliminary budget approval and this presentation on the final budget is one additional capital project from

096the preliminary to tonight which i'll go over on another side and that's all with a withdrawal from capital reserve and has nothing to do with tax levy one of the biggest increases in any budget area is the increase the charter school tuition which comes directly from the department of education of of almost 2.5 million dollars or 26 from the current year and i'm gonna go into a five-year trend analysis later in the presentation um on the charter schools so while the district received a significant increase in state aid there's also a significant increase in charter school tuition taken right off the top and finally budgeted salaries and employee health benefits that are contractual through collective bargaining our district's total balance budget is 265 million four hundred twenty eight thousand six hundred ninety six dollars which

097is comprised of the general fund that contains the operating budget and the capital budget the special revenues which are federal grants and state entitlements the district receives there is a very significant increase in the special revenues and that is because of the coven 19 pandemic federal grants that we received the three major grants that were received were the coronavirus aid relief and economic security act or cares the elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund or esser and the american rescue plan which we're just receiving now or arp and lastly debt service which does include the recently passed referendum and i'll go more into that on another slide here's an overview of the general fund revenue sources with a comparison to the current budget as i stated before the tax levy has no increase from the

098current year and stands at 134 million state aid increased by 22 percent extraordinary aid is budgeted significantly higher from the current year to a more actual number because of the district's initiative to claim as many special education costs as possible which is then reimbursed by the state we are not using any fund balance or surplus but we are using that excess surplus i was talking about of 1.2 million because of the extra uh the additional extraordinary aid from prior year the budgeted withdrawal from capital reserve the three projects i'll go over and also the miscellaneous revenues and medic that has not changed and the medicaid reimbursement which is just an estimate from the state and just to note 64 of the district's total revenues is funded by the local tax levy and while 32 percent

099is funded by the state so a majority is funded by the local tax limit here is an overview of the general fund appropriations broken down in major categories of the budget i won't go through every line however everything is relatively consistent with the current year with the exception of the major increase to the charter school budget line item and the projected charter school enrollment budget comes directly from the department of education with the release of the state aid numbers um you'll notice some other increases on lines and that is mostly salary and benefit projections there is one decrease shown on the maintenance and facilities budget line that is because the district accomplished a lot of one-time projects this current budget [Music] however that budget line is not being cut by any means we are budgeting

100an increase if you netted out those one-time projects we did this year for inflation purposes for normal maintenance and custodial activities for 22-23 also to put the total budget into perspective salaries and employee benefits consist of almost 78 of the total operating budget therefore there's not much room for discretionary spending after all tuitions are accounted for tuition salaries and benefits are accounted for now i'll go over a five-year trend of our major revenue sources being the tax levy and state aid and then on the following side i'll show the five year trend of the charter school enrollments for the past three years and four years including 2223 the board has prevent presented a um zero percent tax levy increase and for six years the board has presented less than a one percent tax levy increase

101and has never gone over the two percent cap um two percent tax levy cap since it's been instituted by the state when it comes to state aid the district has seen significant increases over the past five budgets including next year's budget 22-23 the increases in state aid as i said come from the state trying to equalize the state funding reform act or safra formula because clifton has been so significantly underfunded since the state formula's state funding formula's inception clifton would receive approximately 75 million dollars in state aid instead of the 67 million dollars we're receiving um if the staffer formula was fully funded here's a five-year trend of the charter school budget which is based on enrollment 20 to 23 budget numbers are projections approved by the department of education that the charter schools apply

102for that the district is required to budget for for compliance purposes the actual enrollment counts are realized during october 15th assa audit or application for state school aid at that time the budget numbers increase or decrease during the school year typically the projected enrollment numbers are much higher than the actual enrollment numbers after the asusa audit over the past five years the charter school has had a dr has had drastic enrollment increases approved by the state with the budget increasing from 5.5 million to 11.7 million or 459 students to 779 students here are the capital projects planned for 2223 the locally funded projects through the capital reserve include the banfield and tennis court renovation at the high school a hallway and led renovation at the high school and the new the the new pro the

103new addition from the preliminary budget to tonight is a project we're looking into to put more parking at school 14. and that'll be funded through capital reserve other projects funded by the covid grants mostly esther at the moment include window replacements at school one two three four five thirteen and exterior egress store replacement replacements at ccms here's a snapshot overview of our special revenue budget it consists of state non-public entitlements and all federal grants the district receives and for budgetary purposes state and federal grants anticipate a 15 reduction from the current year uh one important thing to note the district has completely transitioned from the federally funded preschool expansion grant to the state funded preschool education aid the preschool education aid or the pea line requires a general fund contribution you see on this slide

104and that's in order to receive the preschool aid the general fund contribution is a budget line that already existed prior to even needing to transfer it into special revenue and that is for special education preschool inclusion students that were already being taught here by law this also includes the kovid grants as well um sr2 was approximately 11 million and the amount budgeted here the 6 million shown was the what was left over from and the 6 million is mainly going to those window projects i just explained briefly i'll go over how each grant supports specific district programs that serve various specialized populations of students the non-public state entitlements so this the state funnels funds through us to our non-public schools and it supports textbooks nursing services security and technology the perkins grant is for vocational

105education and that supports our high school career marketing academy title 1 provides instructional remediation and extended day week and year programs to all title 1 schools title 2 supports teacher preparation training and effective instruction in the classroom title iii provides after-school and summer programs to over 600 english language learners title iv supports social emotional learning through professional development idea basic and preschool supports over two thousand clifton students with special needs and this includes private school tuition support uh our 21st century grant which is the clifton's minds in motion program provides after school and summer programs to over 200 students at school 4 12 and 17. the preschool education aid which provides fully inclusive three and four-year-old preschool for sick for over 600 students and our climate grant which is the pbasis program it's a federal

106grant aiding the district's implementation and enhancement of all pbsis initiatives throughout the district here's an overview of the debt service for 2223 the debt service tax levy is increasing by nearly 10 million dollars um from 2122 and that's solely because of the referendum that was passed the only existing bond is the sealab project for 894 thousand eight hundred dollars but and that's set to mature in twenty four twenty five the referendum bond will hit this budget with a local tax impact of nearly seven million dollars and state aid that we're all excited about of nearly three million dollars and uh the referendum is set to mature in 45-46 lastly this slide would have explained the tax impact of the budget um but the board is putting forth the budget with a zero percent tax levy

107to clifton taxpayers therefore there's not much to discuss um there will be no increase for school related uh local taxes from 21 22 to 22 23 and lastly as always it's a great day to be mustang and i'll answer any questions or comments um from the board members okay board members have any questions for uh mr roosie president smith mr abhijava thank you sorry mr you mentioned from 1923 um the board performed a zero percent tax increase is have we looked at what possibly next year would look like i know it's hard to look at your ah year in advance and i always ask you these year in advance questions but what do we what do we picture next year would look like at this zero percent um for 22 23 or future budgets 22

10823. we're maintaining our our budget as 21 22 we're maintaining all staff and programs and everything um so it would it would look as it does now so a year from now when we're back at this juncture again here at a board meeting what do we look like that the administration would put and maybe this is for the superintendent would look like a possible tax increase if needed since in the past couple years we haven't bumped up at all mike if you don't mind uh just please do you're my money guy but this is important uh stuff that i just i have to say this this board has been very very fiscally responsible and the taxpayers should be very very thankful for that five years though of zero percent at some point there comes a

109reckoning even with the additional state aid that we've been getting conservative conservatively a year from now we're going to have to at least go to two percent to maintain just to maintain because you understand we're going zero percent this year um while the cost of everything has gone up while salaries have increased due to contractual obligations that are well deserved but we're going to zero and the state aid that we got thank god they owe us that money they owe us a lot more um but a lot of that got taken off the top from charter school from you know just the cost of everything even our our referendum money isn't worth what we got a year and a half actually a year ago april 20th what we got a year ago isn't worth a

110year later um what it was so and it's no secret i've said it publicly we asked for two percent this year and i respect the majority of the board's decision that that's not something this board wants to do and the board that's the board's job right the board hires the superintendent the board watches the purse strings next year it's gonna be a minimum two percent mike if you disagree or you think something else please say so no i don't disagree at all but the one thing we do have to keep in mind is we got addition we were only thinking we were going to get around 7 million in extra state aid this year and if that happened we'd be looking at two percent anyways but i get whatever the state did with their formula

111they gave us extra funds for being under adequacy but we still are only going to be capped at that around 75 million so we're looking at anywhere from only three and a half to seven million in increasing state aid next year and then we're gonna and then it's either gonna be seven million and we're gonna be tapped out or it's gonna be half of that and then half of that and then it's gonna be fully funded can you explain to the public what it means that if money goes up in terms of charter schools since the superintendent mentioned it at a 26.78 if the money's set aside for these charter schools and they don't fully use it what happens it can be appropriated elsewhere so it'll come back to the district yes okay sorry i

112have a few questions um for capital projects 2223 because we just came off a referendum vote can you explain the difference between capital projects and the referendum to the public understands um well the referendum was voted on for specific projects very specific projects even though it's a very large scope for our referendum but the capital reserve is set aside every year that the board sets aside and we have discretion of what to prioritize for locally funded projects so in our in past legislative meetings and we discussed um and we know throughout the state mandatory preschool um in a couple years what does that look like for our district in terms of facilities honestly janine might be able to answer that question better or dr robert tozie no problem turning it over to janine anytime miss

113kusalevich the question was um mandatory preschool universal preschool for not only new jersey but well not in clifton but across the state of new jersey what does facilities look like and how you know what does that picture look like basically so we're expected because we receive p e a aid which is the preschool expansion aid from the state right now that covers the vast majority of our preschool as well as the rental property that we're already using and contracts with other outside providers we are expected by receiving that money to on a yearly basis keep increasing the number of classrooms to serve preschool students until we fulfill the full universe of all three and four-year-old students right now we're getting close to meeting the needs of clifton's four-year-olds but we're still not fully universal and

114we're just scraping the surface of meeting the needs of the three-year-olds so at minimum even after a proposal that is being explored now to add another rental facility even after that rental facility it's looking like we're going to need somewhere in the vicinity of 30 more classrooms to be able to serve every eligible clifton three and four year old and we do not have any rooms left in any of our schools at this time thank you mr sludge and last question i'm sorry um mr uchi so obviously you know we have health insurance that we provide to our staff and obviously you know the needs and what is needed have we looked at the difference between and is there a savings the difference between health insurance what we currently have and maybe mr daley the

115vice president can uh discuss this and what an in house insurance may look like at providing the needs that our staff need that you know the staff is looking for in our needs through our union through our administration um is there a save if we ever if we ever decide to look at an in-house insurance i'm not 100 sure i understand your question we do have private insurance so oh you sell filters yourself so because oh it was looked at this i apologize it was looked at this year um but because of the panda the the unknown of the pandemic it wasn't it wasn't advised by our bro our medical broker to look at self-insurance this year however they did explain to the our the finest committee and myself that they are going to pursue

116it next year to see if it could save the district money thank you mr um mr president i'd just like to head on to that uh miss uc is correct but the the issue is raised with our and insurance broker medical insurance broker i guess for the last two but the the risk and exposure is um the committee's decided twice that the the exposure the risk is a little too high because something um let me back up a minute your your the way that insurance is priced is based on claims that were submitted uh through the prior year so that's really what's reflected in your increase or decrease or keeping the insurance rate flat so that's a simplistic way of looking at it however when you do have insurance it's just that we're covered if

117they they go through you know a lot of claims for that prior year they're all covered there's no additional financial exposure for that particular year of the rates may go up the following year but you're you're covered if you if you're fully self-insured then you run the risk of if something catastrophic or or extra arises in the terms of claims then then we've got to come up with the money so we might have to deal into our surplus or things like that so the committee's discussed this we've had open discussions with our insurance broker about this and um and we've decided to protect our the worst case scenario for lack of a better description i hopefully answered some of your questions there you did i mean listen many of these questions that i asked is

118something you know things we've discussed in the past but obviously this sport has always been very as transparent as possible to the public and that's what i just want to make sure tonight was completed so thank you absolutely thank you president smith um i just wanted to piggyback on miss kusalevich um i know about the whole pre-k thing and i know we discussed it in facilities i just want the public to understand basically i know we're eyeing a couple of maybe future properties i don't want to state anything yet just crossing our fingers hoping well but obviously if we don't pursue other properties and god forbid a charter school was to come pick it up if you could just explain the difference of obviously we're going to have to budget to operate the school under

119our own district compared to the cost that is it going to be more or less if a charter school is to take on to it that way the public understands if tax increase was to happen at least it's going to happen to the benefit of our district instead of a different a charter school coming in taking over and basically taking more money out of our pockets and we're not benefiting for our students in the district if you kind of explain you know per cost i guess it depends um maybe miss kuchalev could talk after me but so it would be so if if a charter school happened to take it and they had the enrollment um we would have to fund that through our budget um also if a charter school took it or rented

120it before us and they did have the enrollment we still have to meet our preschool universe regardless so we would have to figure out something else anyways um yeah anything to add or yeah mike i think you're right but i think just even to make it more simpler you saw with the additional state aid we got this year two and a half million came off the top to charter schools instead of that money going to a charter school if we utilize that to rent a facility for and listen they're all kids and like i say our kids their kids whatever but for clifton public school students we get the facility and we get the kids instead of giving it to somebody else so i don't know if i explained that well enough but that's a

121very very simple explanation the charter school projects that we're going to have this many students next year and whatever that magic number that they project where they get it from we don't know the state not only tells us we have the budget for it but it takes it off the top we never see that money doesn't even comes right off the state aid and then maybe a year later mike when when they reconcile the books after the october 15 student count if their projection was off we'll get a refund but it doesn't help us during the budget process when we have to plan with what money uh we have do you need anything no that was perfect and spot on yeah mr smith yeah just just the pho okay just to follow up on the

122charter school uh one of the problems is it was kind of alluded to here but the state just drops it on there is very very little transparency from the department of education how they allocate how they approve these charters how they increase the number of students it's it's it's like almost pulling out of a hat there's no hearings there's no uh sharing of information with this with the district who's paying for it that's our money uh whether it comes from the state uh that's our money that we're entitled to use so that that's a big problem that needs to be addressed down in trenton so we don't have these uh wild shots coming out of blue you know when we're starting to put our budget together and oh by the way you got another 500

123students 200 students when how did you come up with it is there is there a need my my personal thing is i think the clifton district provides a great education why are they providing if we're substandard i can understand the role of a charter school and a charter school is supposed to be locally driven and we have the major charter school in the state of new jersey is a conglomerate so that's these are all problems that go into it so i i just want i i know you folks understand it but i want to explain that to the folks in the public that it's um it's really almost like russian roulette here in terms of budgeting mr paris thank you mr smith um thank you mr uchi for a really thorough presentation this evening i'm

124going to bring it back to a topic that i they brought up the last couple of meetings i think it's wonderful that as taxpayers for the third year in a row we're not going to see any kind of school tax levy increase i think that's that's wonderful to do and i think it's quite an achievement considering we're in an eight plus percent inflation environment we know that according to mr uchi a couple meetings ago that the vast majority of our additional state aid has already been taken up just in operating costs with salary increases contractual increases as well as insurance etc our council recently i know they haven't been as fortunate they've had to increase property taxes they voted for over a three percent increase this year so my comments here tonight are really not

125along the lines of maintaining uh zero tax increases so i think we have a higher calling here and according to our our ethics code the second ethics code that we took an oath on is we will make decisions in terms of the educational welfare of children and seek to develop and maintain public schools that maintain that meet the individual needs of all children regardless of their ability race creed sex or social standing in the last couple meetings i inquired about the original budget proposal that dr robert tony robertosi mentioned had been revised and changed and i was curious to understand what resources were proposed especially student-facing ones that we're not seeing in next year's budget and thankfully last week i asked again and i did get a summary of the positions that were originally proposed

126and there were 58 positions proposed including the six security positions that we have added to the budget here but here are some that i i think we should be aware that seem to me to be very impactful to students two english second language educators an academic coach for bilingual elementary teachers a preschool disabled instructor an elementary reading specialist an elementary resource room inclusion instructor two middle school resource room instructors two high school resource room instructors one speech therapist the social worker for the child study team two elementary counselors and two nurses the remainder of those 58 positions were elementary grade level teachers media specialists custodial maintenance staff and some additional security positions perhaps some of these 58 positions were nice to haves i just find it difficult to understand that not even one of these

127requested resources that i just listed which are focused on some of the most needful students in our district didn't make it into the budget and i'm also concerned that that time is not on our side here and in the not too distant future we're going to impose even larger demands on our taxpayers i know it's late in the game here but i with this with this understanding this is this is my rationale i'm not going to be supporting the budget tonight because i don't think we're providing what we need to our students and i think we're setting ourselves up for some rather significant increases in the not so distant future [Applause] anyone else have questions on the budget board members okay seeing none we will then um okay we're going to go to public recognition

128this will be public recognition for the budget only this portion of the meeting is open to the residents and non-residents of clifton for the purpose of addressing any matter relevant to the budget residents and residents are requested if in person to sign the register provided for this purpose all speakers are asked to state their names municipality in which they live and subject matter before speaking comments are limited to five minutes per person issues raised by members of the public may or may not be responded to by the board all comments will be considered and a response will be forthcoming if and when appropriate your questions may or may not be answered by board members the board asks the members of the public be courteous and mindful of the rights of other individuals when speaking specifically

129comments regarding students and employees of the board are discouraged and will not be responded to by the board students and employees have specific legal rights afforded by the laws of the state of new jersey the board bears no responsibility nor will be liable for any comments made by members of the public members of the public should consider their comments and letting these legal rights of those affected or identified in their comments and be aware that they are legally responsible and liable for their comments so anyone that wishes to address the board on budget items please come to the podium good evening everybody my name is john o'reilly and i'm a social studies teacher at clifton high school i have had the honor and the privilege of serving the clifton community over the past eight years

130and strongly believe that clifton is one of the most community oriented cities in the state of new jersey and i've also had the pleasure of speaking with hundreds of clifton residents throughout my time and within each of them there lies a spirit of mustang pride and a strong belief in the one clifton motto i've been watching the board meeting since we went remote during the pandemic in the year 2020 and i saw that same clifton spirit at those board meetings by both members of the board as the community as a whole numerous board members have shared respect and admiration for the staff and students that were struggling to get by during those difficult times the students face so many challenges adapting to the changes brought by the pandemic and you and the states and the

131federal government made sure that they had the resources and opportunities they needed to get through it your sympathy and support in these times of struggle we needed you gave to us and we truly lived out the one clifton motto words were thrown around like heroes selfless hard-working and dedicated were spoken by each member of the board about the custodians the secretaries the administrators the teachers the paraprofessionals the counselors and the child study teams as well as the nurses that each of those people went beyond the call of duty to meet the needs of the students during the pandemic again we did this because we believe in one clifton but clifton educators and all educational staff have done this since the very beginning the admiration and appreciation for both students and public school staff was appreciated

132and needed at the time but words do not outweigh actions in terms of their magnitude a couple of board meetings ago i listened to the discussion each of you had about whether or not to raise taxes to benefit instruction throughout the district many that were opposed cited the difficulties of the times imposed by inflation the pandemic and of course passing the referendum and these are of course all true every american citizen is feeling the weight of social and economic challenges and i recognize that some may be feeling it more than others i also recorrect i also recognize that the referendum was necessary because money constraints that have been imposed for the past 10 plus years have made it difficult for us to maintain our schools in needed areas especially foundation what is hard for me

133to reconcile is the previous hesitations by the board of education in raising taxes even by a minimal amount that i have witnessed throughout my time in the clifton public schools district those in district claim law that these policies go back long before i even came to the school district we have watched through these 10 plus years of enormous restrictions cutbacks roadblocks for both staff and students many of our daily resources classroom supplies and other essential materials are outdated in limited supply or stretch beyond capacity we have lost numerous field trips and extracurricular opportunities that benefit the students because not everything can be done in a 45-minute classroom i know that funding issue by the state government has restricted clifton's growth but many schools throughout new jersey have felt those effects and are still calling upon

134their community members for financial support and political action against this unjust state funding according to the reports made by dr robertosi and mr uchi at previous board meetings the average taxpayer will pay less money a month on public education with a one percent tax increase less than a gallon of gas in today's climate that is a price that any parent would jump on if it meant substantially helping their children and their peers a two percent tax increase is a bit more than a gallon of gas but again considering the expense of utilities rent mortgages and rising city taxes this is less than a drop in a bucket that will mean the future of our kids success as well as the safety and well-being of our staff if the staff and the students are going to

135succeed collectively we need to fund and i call upon you to be courageous today and to choose a two percent tax increase because we are one clifton and our staff and our students deserve it thank you have a wonderful day hi my name is dr lori mccoy i'm a clifton resident a parent of two clifton school students one's at the elementary school and another at the middle school and i teach chemistry at clinton i have been there for 14 years i want to begin by recognizing my chemistry students when we started the year they quickly learned that i have let's just say lofty expectations um i told my very high achieving um high anxiety students that there would come a time when they would struggle um and when they did that i wanted them to

136ask questions um every day i challenge them to think about their what their calculations mean to question how they can alter and experiment to get better results and most importantly to look at their errors not as failures but as opportunities for growth these kids have come so far and i'm proud of each and every one of them so tonight i'm here um not only for my students and for my children um but for all of the kids who call clifton home i'm asking our board members to consider what message a zero percent increase sends to our students do you truly believe that they are worth nothing instead of looking um have you thought about the impact that this decision will make long term instead of looking at the dollar value of what this is going

137to cost me out of my pocket think about what a zero percent increase in the budget really costs our students how soon does our district look more like patterson where buildings are falling apart and staffing shortages are so great and students are truly struggling on a daily basis then a district like montclair who let's be straight they've pretty much fund everything um what our students have to do without so that our board can say that they didn't raise taxes the kids in clifton are certainly worth more than the bare minimum and i hope that as a school board you see that as well thank you good afternoon good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is dr phillip gasel i'm your life skills teacher at clifton high school and i'm also the vice president of the

138cea um as some of you know i spent four terms on the board of education in nutley i spent three terms as president i was very involved i feel your pain and your frustration but what you're missing sometimes you're too close to an issue to be able to see what's really happening you just passed the most historically expensive referendum in the state of new jersey by a two to one margin it's never been done before that should tell you a couple of things and what i see is this the citizens of clifton are eager to invest in education they're willing and they prove that they they are they're interested in education so you're you're of two percent budget which will cost about on average fourteen dollars per household the average household is something i think

139people would be able to accept in the city of clifton to not and i don't want to speak technicalities with you we understand each other by going with a zero budget every year what you're actually doing is shrinking your budget you know it i know it we all know it and you do it for certain reasons but now those reasons are no longer valid the people in clifton are willing to invest in education i think it would be irresponsible to not put that two percent increase in this year you could always change it you could always audit it but to put that forward with this vote would send a powerful message and another thing that this tells me this referendum is that the people of clifton trust you they trusted you enough to pass a

140historic referendum and they will trust you enough if you go to them and say we need two percent in our budget which is about fourteen dollars per household the average property in clifton sometimes like i said when you're too close to something you're a little too cautious you can't really see what the rip but the big picture is citizens of clifton have a lot of faith and trust in this board and in this administration they just demonstrated that to you so let's take a leap of faith maybe and expand our budget by two percent it'll go a long long way thank you [Applause] good evening i'm going to keep this short my name is rob marmasteen i'm an inclusion special ed teacher at clifton high school i teach 11th grade u.s history 2 right now

141i'm also the founder and the head coach of the clifton high school esports team club whichever one you want to refer to it as i'm going to keep this fairly short i have a lot of faith in you guys the community has a lot of faith in you guys zero percent is unacceptable two percent minimum has to be where we start for less than it would cost the family in this town on average to go see dr strange this weekend they could fund the education system further in this town to continue reducing the budget means there's less people like me who want to continue to do more for this community outside of our outside to do i picked up a team i established and created something to give more than 40 kids every year for

142the past three years now two two years something to do after school i built a small community that they didn't have before within their community something they never had a lot of these kids have never seen a soccer field a football field a baseball field these kids don't do that we gave them a place to do something and the community must be to understand that if they refuse to participate in funding the school program they will feel the pain of their property values going down for decades to come lower education leads to an increase in crime if you help to fund the program and the programs at the school you help to fund a better community all throughout the town that's all i have to say thank you [Applause] good evening president smith vice president

143daily commissioners administrators and others in attendance my name is elias ragsdale i serve as president of the clifton student union and wanted to talk about the budget from a student point of view the board of education has a history of not raising taxes and as you know new jersey state law caps the amount a school district can raise taxes from the previous year's levy at two percent in the city of paterson for the past 30 years they've barely raised taxes and they're one of the most underfunded by local property taxes by tens of millions of dollars and now they're preparing on voting for an 11 tax increase i understand that paterson is a much larger school district but the issue of not raising taxes for a long period of time and then hitting a roadblock

144is something that we should all be careful of and please do not forget that inflation is a reality prices are increasing significantly and although right now i believe there will apparently be no program cuts will there be an issue down the road as a student i'd want the board to be absolutely sure that extracurriculars will not be limited to budget issues and i'd want due to budget issues and i'd want this board to be sure that we don't miss out on academic or support opportunities due to this budget and tax issue we've been rel we've been underfunded by the state in the past and to rely on them without a safety plan may be a mistake in the future um i ask that you truly think about the decision that you make and the effects

145that it will have on the teachers custodians nurses secretaries counselors and especially students thank you good evening my name is paul rivera i'm a high i'm a clifton high school math teacher the first message i heard at this meeting was for students of clifton to be literate lifelong learners i think that's a great message and it should be a goal not just here but across every community in the country i teach ells math i have four sometimes five different languages running in my classroom at a time my class size was 28 students 28 students with four or five different languages crammed in a room before we were able to hire another teacher and split the classes it was a lot to deal with but we do what we do because it's the best for our

146kids without being able to split that class we need we need the funds in order to be able to do things like that to split our classes it's hard to predict how many ells we have coming in into the high school each year and we need to be able to be flexible how do we know if we're going to need extra classes this year in order to make these class sizes attainable for our students to achieve everything that they are capable of in order to achieve the goal of making lifelong literate learners a community needs to commit to being lifelong supporters of students financially with the two percent increase six dollar seven dollars and sixteen cents a month is what i've seen as the projected tax increase and sixteen cents pooled over the community comes

147to over two point six million dollars this can truly make a difference in supporting our students i'm in full support of a budget increase and for the sake of our students so should you as andrew said earlier we hope the decision you make on the budget tonight is in the best interest of the students [Applause] hi everybody my name is jean carlos gonzalez i'm a long time clifton resident i also work at a clinton high school as a history teacher um i attended school 12 christopher columbus and clifton high school class of 2005. all i could say is based on information provided here by the teachers the students and the board of ed members we want the best for our students i doesn't matter if you're a red tie or a blue tie i think

148we could all unite together and say that our kids deserve the best right now unfortunately for our town and many other towns here we have unfortunate shortage of janitors custodial staff at times nurses at times teachers and although we are offering positions and they're available there's been a lot of feedback saying it's not enough that you're offering certain money and our towns are more competitive so we're going to go somewhere else this is our chance to give them a a brighter future and i hope you'll make the wise choice thank you for your time [Applause] good evening everybody i'm shannon sculla i'm an english teacher at clifton high school i've been in the district for 19 years i just want to say a few things i love clifton i never grew up there but it's

149become part of me i have the best colleagues ever and they showed up tonight [Applause] they showed up tonight because they love our students they are dedicated and they believe in our students and they want only the best for them so i say raising the budget is an investment in our schools our students and our community and our teachers it's only going to make clifton better and make us more one you've had faith in us to do our job and to be with those students and to guide them every day have faith in what we're asking you do tonight let us take the first step together tonight for that better future for our students now it's my turn all right good evening to everyone my name is lori lallam and i'm the president of the

150cea it is crucial in clifton's public k-12 schools continue to hire the best staff offer the best programs for all the children in this community so they can thrive and become an integral part of this community why this will improve the value of all the property owners in clifton many passionate home buyers feel that school quality for the education of their children is where they will put down roots it also echoes data from the national association of realtors showing that 26 percent of recent home buyers were influenced by the quality of their school district when selecting a neighborhood among buyers ages 30 to 39 that jumped to 46 followed by 36 percent from ages 22 to 29. as a homeowner you'd like to know all about the factors that impact your property value and your

151school district is a big one clifton is a big one if your house falls within the boundaries of a great district you'll likely be able to sell it for more than you were in an average one because of increased buyer demand local funding is drawn from property taxes since property taxes are calculated as a percent of property value higher property values translate to more tax revenue to give to schools which in turn helps to pay for teachers paraprofessionals child study teams speech therapists occupational and physical therapists kindergarten aides counselors nurses custodians grounds and maintenance security secretary supervisors vice principals principals administrators directors important educational programs and textbooks according to the clifton board of ed comprehensive annual financial report ending june 30 2019 economic condition and outlook the clifton taxpayers continue to be the primary source

152of funding for the clifton public school district to utilize in providing a thorough and efficient education for all of its students addressing their many diversified needs these needs include special ed bilingual esls at-risk programs vocational programs develop developing and implementing future budgets will become more difficult if the following current factors remain in place not funding up to the two percent we need an increase a tax increase of one percent is three dollars and 58 cents a month i throw that away once a week at least on stuff that i don't really need to buy a tax increase of two percent is dollars and sixteen cents i'm sorry i think our students and our faculty and our staff is worth that let's be realistic why don't the children staff in this district deserve better don't your

153kids as we heard the march 24th board of ed meeting regarding the zero tax increase through the superintendent's report dr robertosi commented about the district being underfunded in the past which resulted in cuts that affected staff and spoke about the board of education's role in the budget process dr robert tosi noted that tonight's budget resolution has a zero tax levy increase mr daley under commissioner's comments rehashed the same ideas to keep it at zero percent same thing according to the june 6 2020 article from north jersey dot com if the board were to propose a one or two point tax increase school revenue would increase by 550 to 1.1 million the goal according to the superintendent of schools dr robertosi said is not to cut staff or programs it's a significant nut robertosi said but

154we can't let it impact our human capital daily said the district will also need the aid it gives to the county's vote tech school and the various charter schools and i disdain the charter schools that's not a secret the children and staff in this district deserve a budget with increase in taxes we need to stop living in the past and not to continue to punish them for something that occurred in the past seniors are frozen when it comes to property taxes almost up there if mr usey as the business administrator is thought of as a professional why aren't you listening to him as well as dr robert tosie don't forget we are here for one thing and that is for our kids in this community and not our agendas or political aspirations thank you and

155have a good night anyone else wish to address the board seeing none motion to close second yeah we'll do that next we're just going to close the in person yeah that's all right motion to close the in person second no you're making the second second uh now we'll go to could you check yeah see if there's anyone for the budget only bear with me on this somehow it's just sign me up okay uh i don't know if this signed me out of this meeting or what my apologies all right you want to work on that we could uh i we can come back to it uh once you get it back up and running oh actually we have to wait because yep we're adopting next here you are ugh i may have lost everybody in

156the waiting room they'll have to what's up there we go okay all right um this for those of you that are in the waiting room these comments are for on the budget only i'm going to be admitting tova into the room hi can you hear us [Music] ms felder can you hear us we can't hear you sorry hold on you have to unmute yourself please she's not muted uh maybe mr mcconney can come in here and help us with this is he is he around here honey yeah yeah oh this is not on the budget okay is that a real background all right it is very good i don't know um actually can okay this is uh to address the board on budget okay you have the floor you have five minutes go ahead can

157we just do a sound check oh sorry do a sound check if you can just can you you're you're muted ms zara could you just say hello to us when you yeah you must be still muted we can't hear you uh let me call eric because i'm not sure why this is we see you can't hear you but that didn't change they had their they had their um could you give us another sound check give us another hello no no that's not it all right i'm sorry i'm plugging the wrong thing yeah i don't think it's them though because now that's two yep though um is the um it doesn't make sense i'll try this person too all right um caller 973-715-8531 we're going to try to admit you into the room sorry it's on

158the screen hello caller can you uh can you hear us hello caller can you hear us nope guess not try pulling hdmi all right try it okay and that's a phone call once it wouldn't matter caller can you hear us there we go hold on hello try again there we go hold on hello caller can you hear us there you go leave hdmi out yeah you get no signal go ahead can you hear us hi is it me here talking to him yes and this is on the budget only the mr yes absolutely if you could just state your name and your municipality please sure good evening my name is linda white and i'm from clifton um i'm sorry i cannot be in person with you this evening or with my fellow educators who were

159so eloquent this evening and have my support okay so to begin let me introduce myself my name is linda white i'm a lifelong resident clifton have lived here more than 60 years i'm a proud paraprofessional employed by the clifton school district and i currently serve as the vice president of the clifton education association my comments tonight are about the budget over the more than 25 years that i have worked in the clifton school system and during the years my children were educated in the district i've seen the negative effects of underfunding the district the minimal two percent tax increase dr robert tosie and mr uchi have presented is important for keeping the school district running at its best dr robert tosi and mr uchi were hired for their expertise and experience they know how to

160run the business that is the clifton school district it is important to approve the budget with the tax increase they originally presented to you when taxpayers approved the referendum last april i believe they show they know the importance of investing in our schools even when it means a tax increase people may grumble about tax increases but they ultimately understand the need for them they understand the need for quality school system for their children and i'm sorry both they understand the importance of a quality school system both for their children's education and for their property values not increasing the budget which extremely detrimental to the district we in clifton always hear that senior citizens cannot afford a tax increase this is not a reason not to provide the necessary and needed funding but the good news

161is senior citizens can qualify for a property tax free so a property tax increase would no longer be a concern for those listening who are a senior citizen or no one please look into the property tax freeze in closing i'm asking board members to trust dr robert cosey and mr uchi please provide them and our schools with the full funding needed to provide the programs and resources necessary for quality education for clifton students and to build a strong school system for the benefit of our residents thank you so much for your time have a good evening thank you all right miss arik can you hear us now can you hear us participant qualified otherwise just press help i think you're your computer's muted on yours but we should be able to hear you now yeah

162i'm going to try plugging this back in are we good to go yes we're good to go you uh just state your name municipality and uh you have five minutes all right hung up on the phone line hi my name is andrea aura i'm a clifton school teacher at school 12 i'm also the clifton education association's pride chair i first want to just say since it is teachers appreciation week i would like to recognize all our teachers and staffs and colleagues for doing an amazing job throughout the years and also especially during our pride events i'd like to say with the budget we have supplemented with our pride events to the school and community with programs like family game night at workshops addressing key issues to community outreach to the tune of over six thousand

163dollars and that's with our ca staff volunteering their time imagine what can happen if you do increase the budget even with two percent the possibilities are endless what our staff can do to the community in clifton i hope that you guys would reconsider the zero percent um budget that we have right now because i would like to read to you your philosophy give me one second i apologize for delay because i did have it up take your time uh the philosophy says the clifton board of education firmly believes that is the inherent right of every child enrolled in public schools to receive a sound education rooted in equal opportunity and delivered in an environment which ensures physical and mental security that is amazing words and this increase can help out every child in clifton and

164will follow our one clifton slogan i hope you reconsider on the increase for our budget and hopes that everyone on the board really looks back because mr paris did go through a list of needed positions we do need in clifton and without this increase it'll be a shame what could possibilities we are missing out and we might be falling behind and be great to catch above the curve before we do fall behind thank you thank you [Applause] all right um i think ms felder said that she was commenting on the next portion so i'll admit her scene on motion clothes second okay motion to close uh by mr abu dravo seconded by mr awad okay uh 13 adoption of the 2223 final budget i have a motion by mr dale vice president second second by

165mr awad discussion mr president if i may mr abhijava thank you this is what i want to see past meetings we haven't seen this um i want to make a motion to bump it up two percent um because honestly [Applause] president smith not all second up enough for nothing not for nothing it's not about the 50 teachers well it always is yes but and it's not about stats about who lives in clifton and teaches in clifton to me if this was last meeting i would feel the same exact way to see folks up here and talk to us and tell us what this video dr cassell i have a lot of respect for you okay mr riley we've worked on diversity i have a lot of respect for you dr mccoy i've met her in

166the past during during soccer and elias too we've worked with him during um sydney new jersey it's student committee so on that on that case i want to bump it up two percent i want to make a motion bump into two percent there's already a motion yeah mrs smith is already in motion on the floor um to pass the 22-23 budget smith okay we're under discussion for that yes mr vice president smith um i take great exception to what i hear tonight um i've been on this board 13 years like 13 or 14 budgets i've done i have a long history of supporting i was on the forefront of every capital project including the referendum [Music] we've kept the budget the taxpayers of this town were consistently over funding paying more than their fair share

167there's a narrative out here tonight that says there's a zero increase in the budget that is a hundred percent false you've had 7.5 million dollar increase in the budget just from state aid plus other projects from other portions of aid to say that there's a zero increase if you look at the budgets the budgets not the tax increase if you look at the budgets they've increased significantly every year i've supported all the positions that mr tardallo and mr robertosi has provided asked us for that he needs this he needs this supervisor he needs this in in in in our maintenance whatever he needs fine but there's no blank check we are not a corporation here we are not a fortune 500 company we are made up of taxpayers the taxpayers have a say in this

168as well i'm not unsupportive we'd like you can't have everything you want the government can't have everything you want and this is where this is going we have more than enough money we've have clap when i got on board there was zero money in the capital budget we've done windows stadiums you name it capital improvements over the past 13 years and to think and to put out the narrative that you're being shortchanged is ridiculous so i fought very hard both for the district and for the taxpayers there is more than enough money to do what we need to do it's not perfect it's not the panacea but to put out a narrative and especially since we've been giving very nice raises in your collective bargaining agreements they've been fairly negotiated you've gotten a substantial amount

169of money that would not have been there unless we have fought for the state money where were you folks when we were only getting 25 million and not the 50 million where are you about the tax abatements that the city of clifton gives to property owners on different projects which give nothing did nothing to the to education where are you when you're down there fighting with trenton about the charter schools and the way pcti is funded these it it's money it's a money is a holistic thing it's not just a two percent increase it's not a one percent increase it's not a ten percent increase it's an entire budget you have a 200 million dollar plus budget up here this is the highest budget we've ever had in the history of this city for the

170board of education when i saw it on there we were about uh i was 30. uh i would say there was about 170 million back in the day so you there's been large increases in the budget and i understand what the administration's asking us for but like unfortunately we can't have a planning check to get everything we need there's decisions that have to be made our buildings are not come running crumbling we've spent a lot of money tens of millions of dollars plus the referendum we've spent i would say uh mr yusik can give you an exact number but i say somewhere between 30 and uh 20 and 30 million dollars in buildings over over the last 10 years out of the capital improvement budget and that was came from surplus money that was not

171spent in the budget you don't when you do a budget you don't do a zero percent increase there's zero percent to the bear to the bones when you budget you always budget enough in there whether whatever line item you put it in to have a cushion so you don't run short we have not run short we now have we were limited to a two percent uh surplus now we were allowed to do four percent the county schools are allowed six percent why so we do have money i don't i don't see that there's uh especially on the capital side anything for seen in the next year that requires the two percent that's not going to make a difference it's not going to make a difference i'm sorry it's it's kind of very hurtful because i

172fought so hard for so many capital projects get everybody a fair wage the best we can under the circumstances and now you just want after a seven million seven million dollar revenue in the operating budget seven and a half million dollars more and you say oh we need another two percent why not five percent why not ten percent i'm sorry do you have to have a balance in this community and i'm not unsub sympathetic to what our superintendent he's doing a great job you folks are doing a great job but you just can't go pick pockets just because it's it's a number that makes that has some some cachet to it so in future years we're going to have to do different things and i've spoken to my co my colleagues know i've spoken to

173them in our committee meetings that that's going to change just that the gravy train that from trenton isn't going to last forever there's going to become a time where we're going to have to do raise taxes but this is not the year this is not the year president smith if i may since we're talking about this particular motion so i asked two questions because i i was on the fence coming at this meeting it took me between last meeting this means to really think about as a taxpayer and as a board member as a taxpayer i don't want to see my taxes go up but as a board member i had to ask two questions earlier to mr uchi which was from 1920 from 19 to 23 we've raised zero percent and i asked them

174how would we how would we look next year and he said and so dr robert told me at least two percent my fear that at least two percent is not gonna be at least two percent it's gonna have to be more than that mr uchi how much how much did you and and the administration originally proposed when we went to the finance committee we were looking at anywhere between two and a four percent increase with the the positions that mr paris um commented on okay so to me i had a four percent to know but at a two percent and when i asked mr the numbers is at listen 85 annually yeah and i made a big stink last time about not raising taxes for taxpayers but as a board member i have a we

175also have a duty to this district and we talk about boots on the ground if our boots are on the ground are telling us we need more money at two percent i'm gonna listen yeah there's some taxpayers who don't have kids in the district but you know what at the end of the day i can live with it i have a duty to taxpayers yes but we are board of education members in this school district and at 85 dollars annually i'm i can go home and sleep comfortably tonight out of two percent mr president mr president kite okay who was that me and mr daley mr daley i'm sorry mr wagon um i i saw someone move over there so i don't know what what i thought someone else wanted to speak oh sorry ramadan

176trying to fix my sleep schedule so i was on the fence about a tax increase uh but after our last facilities meeting and seeing basically you know with the pre-k and you know projects in the future are coming forward i my mind started to change and looking over the budget and honestly tonight our teachers really did influence and seeing the public speak i was always against it up until now i do have a change of heart i do believe we need we should raise the tax increase uh i know she mentioned in the past two to four percent i am comfortable with a two percent i would prefer a three percent just to be in the middle um if my math is correct there should be like a hundred dollars and change annually maybe one

177two one twenty eight i did 126 okay yeah so i'm i'm 100 behind a two percent increase um i would open a discussion for a three percent but i'm fine with two i think you know we're always saying that we want people involved and to people to voice our opinions and to people to come to these meetings and i seen an entire army come out tonight and you know uh one of the gentlemen i i'm sorry i mispronounced your name uh i think it was riley you know uh you're you made very valid points and honestly just hearing everybody's uh discussions i i do fully uh you know i fully support a two percent increase minimum okay further discussing miss password did you have something thank you so um i write down what people say

178key words because i have to look at them visual learner right crucial critical faith in teachers investment wise choice rainy day best interests of the students safety plan what our students are worth that one kind of really sits with me more than anything invest in our children we do what we do the people of clifton are willing to invest in our children and alan thank you for breaking it down for me i waited for that i know you were working on it last meeting and the last one is children are worth better a colon 12-21 24-1 couldn't agree with you anymore i'm not going to support it either [Applause] mr president sorry mr conover um so i also i'm not only a board member i also have two daughters in the district soon to be

179three when she's of age um and being a board member and being on finance and even being a part of the whole rally when we were underfunded and going to the state and trying to get money i understand the situation that we're in um and i think the pictures being painted here a little bit differently um and i just want to quote some numbers here so everyone understands because when you look at a budget you need to look at the full budget imagine imagine having not only a salary but also some stocks and options and then your parents also giving you money if your parents gave you a certain set of money every year let's say two percent in this case but then this year the stocks and options gave you a 10 fold increase

180would you then go back to your parents and ask them for that two percent still just because you're allowed to just because you can doesn't necessarily mean you should right so let me give you some numbers here from 19 to 20 we had five million in state aid so instead of the two and a half percent we would have gotten or two and a half million dollars we would have gotten by going to two percent we had a five million state aid which is double of what a two percent increase would be 20 to 21 we got 2.6 increase so we didn't go to the 2.6 million increase 21 to 22 we got a 12 million dollar increase so instead of taking that two percent 2.6 million dollars we get a 12 million dollar increase

18120 to 23 this year we got a 12 million dollar increase so instead of taking that two and a half percent we get a 12 million dollar increase which if you calculate 21 to 22 we were at 196 million now we're at 209 which would have been a 10 increase we're giving you a 10 increase in this budget so to say that we're not giving you two percent we're not we're giving you 10. we're giving you five times the amount that you had last year so i don't i i just don't understand that the other side of the argument is saying that we're not funding students and what the student's worth i would love to give my daughter everything i would love to give her a ferrari a million dollar house you know a built-in

182pool that's not where what we're afforded to do we have a couple hats here as as commissioners which is one is for for the students and of course again my daughters are in these schools and i sympathize with you i understand it's tough i know covert was tough i know going through all these things is tough but we've given you the increases in your salary across all bargaining units we've given you increases in your in the budget overall and with the state aid offsetting we don't have to go out to taxpayers and clobber them on the head at a time as we said when inflation is 8 10 so even if the information is eight percent this is a ten percent increase based off of last year's number so i understand and i'm sympathetic with

183the fact that when you you're asking to go to the two percent and again i want to put all these programs in place and i said it last meeting and i'll say it again the answer is not no the answer is no for now for me i can't see going to another two percent giving that we're already giving a 12 million dollar increase this year so that's my take on it sorry thank you anyone else mr smith mr paris yes uh mr canelo mr uchi two meetings ago detailed out the increase that we got from the state and if my memory serves me right it was all it was over 12 million dollars but what was left after basic operational cost increases these were things beyond anyone's control these were contractual obligations increases for charter

184school etc there was 660 000 left wasn't a 10 percent increase really going too instructional to the classroom to to resources that are facing students the issue i brought up is i see a list here albeit large large requests for 58 positions but digging down inside there i have a hard time in my head rationalizing especially the special ed elementary special reading specialists counselors speech therapists social workers these to me serve the most vulnerable part of our student community um and i think and with all due respect to mr daley i think you've done a wonderful job in previous sports over the years to to be so fiscally responsible but in addition to that fiscal responsibility we have a responsibility according to our own code of ethics to really provide for our our students and

185i just i just see something between no changes no increases and i maybe if i saw a few of these positions in there i'd say okay there's been some discussion on this topic there's zero zero of these positions have been added uh so i think there's i think we're creating gaps here and i also think in the future we are go and everybody's mentioned this including mr uchi that we will have increases in the future and we may exacerbate those increases they may be much larger than a two percent i don't know what the right magic number is but i do know that this budget does not serve to get us back even to where we were years ago and the kind of cuts we've had to make make and i think we're doing a

186disservice to our to our students especially our most vulnerable in-need students anyone else wish to address i'm looking around the room and i'm i got to think this out but there's eight of us here if the vote goes four four split what happens to the budget okay but we have a deadline of the ninth correct so what happens tell me explain the process we're not leaving here until we vote on that well well explain what would happen next hmm mr president yes i think i think i think council if if there if there is if we don't pass a budget i think it's left up to uh the county superintendent is that correct but we are here and it's our job and our duty to vote so we should at least hash it out go

187as many rounds as possible bring your sleeping bag and hash it out tonight why should the county superintendent get involved then what's on purpose all right so i have council looking into um we do have an option for board members to attend virtually i don't know what lucy's situation is um if there was a situation where we needed her vote virtually if she'd be able to do that i don't know i don't know why she's not here so i can't answer that we're just looking for the legalities of it let's call the question now all right so you have um the adoption of the uh budget which shows a zero percent increase before we go to roll call i have been as dr robitosi knows even as of today we had the discussion um i

188often felt from when the budget was presented um that i you know that i could have been the only yes vote to go to a higher percentage then hearing mr paris uh you know state his strong opinions to it um i'm not so much set on a percentage i just didn't and again i'm not looking at any other boards in the previous years but i think this the the board of education for the last four years went to a zero percent increase um and i i wholeheartedly hear what mr daley's saying um i have some problems that the board took to tonight um we we passed a preliminary budget we gave no direction um other than mr paris uh of that the board was interested in going to anything um other than that i however

189did voice that to the superintendent from the beginning that i felt it was not um i felt it was not um safe for this board to not have an increase um that yes all those positions are very important that maybe the district maybe the superintendent and mr usee doesn't present all of those items but there could be some i wanted to see what it would look like at you know so i was always kind of at two percent but what as mr awad said well what did three percent how many of those positions do we bring back for three percent how many of those positions are great positions but we could get away with you know implementing them next year so while i was always in favor of some percentage increase i just felt and

190i and i will continue to to go that route i just feel right now for the superintendent the business the business administrator and chairman of the finance committee that this board did not give any further direction the i believe the superintendent would have had a proposal here tonight with a two percent or a three percent but the uh my maybe i'm wrong i'm i thought the board wanted the superintendent to present a zero percent increase so and again i was against that i was against it from the beginning that doesn't change my stance i'm just trying to understand why when we did the preliminary budget that we didn't give direction to these two gentlemen so even with that being said [Music] with all that mr paris mentioned on the original proposal that wasn't a two

191percent increase all those all those items would probably be about a four percent increase am i correct yes that's correct and um there was also a two percent proposal too right which the board turned down correct so while those positions are very important and i agree with that but are we presented with you know what's that gonna cost is that five percent and what does five percent equate to can we if we're looking at two percent and again i said i'm in favor of it from the beginning what do we get from that list at two percent how many of those items how many of those teachers can we get with the two percent so i think the board needs to know that up front um and if you're asking for that whole list what

192what percentage would that be president smith just to piggyback on why some board members have changed well since that meeting until now we had committee meetings and honestly what turned the table for me 180 was the facilities committee when mrs kusalevich dr danny when we were discussing about you know pre-k and you know a lot of items and it was a long meeting i think it was like a three-hour committee meeting basically you know my feelings have changed and i was leading more towards the tax increase on that because if we decide to go zero percent next year or the following year let's be honest realistically we might have to increase dramatically it's not gonna be a two or a four it's you know if i'm not mistaken we might need to go like what

193i'm searching correct me for wrong like eight percent or six percent no i'm not disagreeing when you have every right to change and all i'm saying is wouldn't have been better to let the superintendent and the business trader know tonight to present two percent and then that would have been what we were voting on that's all i'm asked that's all i'm making the statement of my stance has never changed so that's not the issue here i'm just saying i think it would have been easier on the public it would have been easier on these two guys if they came forward and said hey this is what we want we can settle on uh two percent we can settle on the three percent whatever the number might be and there's people that are against any increase

194and i respect that that opinion and again i wasn't on the previous boards and last year was a different situation with coven but going to five years without a zero and again i hear what mr canova said it's it's not it's not a true number however as mr paris said many of those things i think are warranted we rely on these two gentlemen to run our district and they came to us and said this is what we need to run a thorough and efficient education so while we have an obligation to the taxpayers two percent allows us at least the two percent allows us that we don't um have to go to the tech to the taxpayer for approval on that um so again i don't know where the board wants to go with this

195we you know we can turn this down if that's what you wish to go but what number do we have to be at to get those items on that list and what number do we have to be at that if we're compromising that's all point of order i called the question so we should vote on this and then come up with an additional discussion on if we want to go for an increase yes after just a double check we're voting on a two percent not a three right now no we're voting on to approve the budget voting on the budget now hold the question on the budget that's on the agenda i'm calling the question i want to vote on it and then you can have another motion and then have another discussion after everyone

196got to speak on this on this topic then we'll call the question yes okay give me a roll call please the motion on the agenda the zero percent yes mr drabo no mr awad no miss bassford no miss beltran yes mr konova yes mr paris no vice president daley yes president smith no [Applause] mr smith yes smith i'd like to make a motion to have a discussion in considering going two percent second okay motion on the floor to increase the budget by two percent also second by miss bassford okay discussion uh administration if you could give us a and a little clarification what two percent looks like it's can we know what it's going to go towards because but that's the point can we qualify so administration can work on this and this way no

197we're ready yeah it was ready a while ago miss bass for the only reason why we're ready is because this is what we presented in in finance committee we we presented a two percent and a four percent um dr robitazi i'm not in finance so i don't know what was presented and that goes to the committee of the whole we don't get to hear anything so next time we have a discussion like this with finances it would be good to the rest of the board to know what was presented so we can all digest that information board minute was that in the minutes maybe not as specific as yeah probably not as detailed you know and every board member has an opportunity to ask the chairman of finance and the superintendent and the business trader

198any questions they have on it so um things going on tonight so so a 2 increase and and remember this money could be moved in between positions but a two percent increase would get us a new physical education teacher which is needed at clifton high school our class sizes are way over where they should be and that came in an audit from our schedule auditor there are safety concerns there will give us an additional esl teacher it would give us one academic coach it would give us one elementary reading teacher one elementary self-contained one middle school uh resource are our agenda resource room thank you resource room high school two high school special education teachers [Music] not that two nurses one elementary counselor and then as has come up here in the past with the

199cleanliness of our buildings and getting work orders done the goal was to get four additional custodians four additional maintenance uh staff members and then this would get us eight security members right now with our zero we were able to get six so this would be eight and that would be um four uh security at the high school and two at each middle school so can i can i repeat really can i repeat really quick i got 26 did i do my math wrong no because you have the eight you have the six yeah the a goes to all right right correct thank you thank you hey danny hey any other discussion so you said esl academic coach elementary reading teacher self-contained uh middle school resource two high schools sped two nurses one elementary counselor four

200custodians four maintenance and eight security members i mean two extra only and again these are round numbers this is you know the average salary guesstimating the benefits package that they're choosing so you know this is it could be you might be able to get an additional position might be less than one position but it's about 21 positions all right mr usey uh off the top of your head an estimated uh increase of the average taxpayer 85 annually and 7.16 monthly did you repeat that right i mean yes this is separate from the referendum this is the general fund um a two percent would be 85 annually seven dollars and change a month yeah how much was the referendum was approximately 205 i have a question yes if it goes to the if we don't vote

201on this tonight and it goes to the county can they cut it even further or do they they leave it the way you originally because i have no experience with that ever happening i've been a superintendent in 10 years i don't judy i don't think they would cut okay i don't know for sure but but i wouldn't see them as cutting so listen i feel like i'm at a negotiation we're at two percent we're at four we're at four four for one and a half percent can we get an extra vote mr president the whole point of the the administration was hoping these listen i just want to explain one thing right these positions i understand that the budget did increase this year we've mentioned over and over again that this district was underfunded for

202many many years when you compare any district our size with another district in the state our administrative to student ratio is below average our teacher to student ratio is below average that means we would have had many more teachers and more administrators over the years had we been properly funded but mr daley is right the taxpayers were picking up that extra but we were never fully staffed so you're saying to go up no we're at 5 30 oh if we were going to go through this exercise um i i would have done a much deeper dive with the administration i'd want to look at the whole org chart uh maybe or not not only the org chart but the the expenditures maybe we can move some money from one place to the other to do

203it off the cuff like this is totally unacceptable to me and i still believe firmly believe that the increase in the budget you know again it's it's not it's not about uh you have to make decisions and where do you put your money and how do you allocate it so i would have looked at this budget in an entirely different way uh but i just again as mr konova said you got a large increase the the the fact that we've here and the only one that's coming out here the the people that have come out here i haven't heard one word from one taxpayer everybody who spoke here is uh affiliated with the uh collective partying the union here so that's that's everybody who's i didn't hear from one citizen that's not dr mccoy excuse

204me he has the floor go ahead so that's troubling but i would i would have uh asked the administration a lot more questions about how we can achieve those goals uh we kind of shorted it that's oh i'll admit that i didn't go into it but um i'm still i'm still at this point this time and if we have to spend money you're you're you're banking money you're it's not even in the budget with the line item mr wade you mentioned that oh we might have to get some buildings not one diamond that you're talking about is going to go to in any line item that goes to purchase or lease a building so i i and i fully understand i've i've shared that with everybody that i know that there's a point in time

205that we're going to have to do that i don't think this is the year that we have to do that okay any other discussion yeah so i have a question so we mentioned our ratio is lower than other schools what is our ratio in respect to the average and how many associates is is that different uh what i was talking about mr conover was our administrative costs and our administrative costs compared to other districts our size are much below the average i think mike has a more exact number that he's told me in the past but it's it's a year old because we don't have the new number yeah that's right i don't know exactly the per like administrator two people on the top of my head but we're i think we're in the bottom

206five of administrative costs of k-12 districts of our size so for me that's new information right but so to understand that that means that other districts obviously have more staff compared to their students right the higher ratio but how many staff members would we need student facing student touching that would get us to where we need to be we would need several more years of of at least two percent to make up but because mr konov what are you talking about is you're making up for many years of underfunding but the compounding of that right the base never got larger the base and so you know we're trying to make maybe we never get caught up you know so right now we have about 10 500 students something like that right 10 9 i think

207it was right so what is what is that average number what is the number we need to be at what to one meaning number of staff to students no i'm talking about teachers i'm talking about people who interact with teachers with with students on a daily basis and help them achieve their goals in learning is that we're referring to i could tell you if you want to talk about ideal student to teacher ratio yes should be fifteen to one and what are we yeah fifteen classrooms um fifty excuse me fifteen students per teacher and what are we at now nowhere near that uh to give you an exact number if anybody can help me out i don't know but we're in um danny only only preschool is at 15 to 1 because it is required

208to be so um depending on grade span we're looking at some of our primary grades are probably in that 22 but when you get up to the middle in high school you're talking 24 plus but if you're asking me the perfect world what is the ideal class size it's 15. 15 is the ideal class size that's why it's 15 in pre-k but it's it's 15 throughout and i'm not saying we need to get to 15 but we do have classes that are 28 29 30 students see that's what i'm saying sorry so this metric is a new metric to me i'm saying if that's the average we need to be at then and that's new information for me so if we want to have a 15 to 1 ratio if that's the average and that's

209best for students and they succeed and we're going to see their their academic progress increase and that's what we should be doing i'm not afraid to go to bangkok and take it all but it depends so that's why i'm saying that the the people who interact with the students every day and for for their learning for their progress for the academics if we had a 15 to 1 ratio that would make us the school we want to be and what is that number so if we wanted to budget something like that what would that look like i mean how many teachers tens of millions of dollars a teacher oh yeah in general costs a hundred thousand dollars i know people say well teachers don't make that much money salary we're gonna say sixty thousand dollars

210benefit package if you know we're estimating if you're getting family benefits is 35 40 000. an average employee and i'm saying an average if it's 60 it could be 65.70 and that so let's say an employee costs a hundred thousand dollars to make the math easy a one percent increase on our budget is how much mike well one point three million probably ten earlier that's thirteen teachers we have sixteen hundreds that we're not even making a dent this year these twenty thank you if you give us these twenty 21 staff members we're asking for but we're not making a dent yet but it's but we're getting there and and that was the point at why why we wanted at least a two percent dr danny is there yes yeah i just wanted to piggyback so

211you're telling me the average class size right now is about 28 to 1. about about oh that's high i'm gonna say if you take the average in our district right now we're probably 26 25 okay 26. well i know a lot of people i've said this in the past was one of the main reasons why i left this district at a younger age when i was in seventh grade and i was fortunate for my parents to put me in private school was one of those many reasons those that was high classroom size fun fact my graduating class and my school was 22 people the average classroom size was nine people so my graduation ceremony was a whopping 30 minutes valedictorian speech 22 people one time on stage and we left but i was blessed with

212a father that worked extra hours and was hard to pull me through that a lot of students are not fortunate a lot of situations are but we should at least strive to get to that number 15. i know it's a long jump but it's the effort that we got we gotta at least kind of put that as a goal and head to that direction but that's something that could be discussed on a long term basis hopefully yes miss belchon um so me and jokingover are doing math over here um how many teachers front-facing do we have because we're trying to figure because the math figures out that we need 700 teachers but we have 700 teachers so i'm trying to figure out where we're going wrong to not get to a lower ratio i'm not

213sure what your question is okay so how many teachers do we have in district total approximately we have 1600 full-time staff of those certificated i don't know how many because we separated by certificated staff okay but classroom teachers 700 yeah so the 11 thousand divided by fifteen comes out to that number yes so i'm just trying to figure out what they're doing classes that are mandated to be smaller though but that's why that's why that number isn't quite accurate you have special education classrooms you have some you have yeah so that's why i think we we want to know what the true number is guys i'm not i wasn't i mean i know i know we had a finance committee meeting for three hours where we presented our plan and you guys told us you

214wanted a zero if i had known tonight that we were gonna i would have had a whole presentation for you so i think it just in the future if we're gonna talk next year about going to bangkok or whatever we i won't be here but whoever sitting here will have to say no i mean you know what i'm prepared but what we were numbers so i'm answering why don't we why don't we just set another meeting for this before the ninth or whatever date it is that we need to submit this budget as an emergency meeting but listen guys we presented we presented a two percent we presented a four what i'm saying now me personally i really want to go on the agenda you voted i may want to go to bank cap right

215now is what i'm saying based on this conversation i don't even want to go to two percent now because i want to be competitive against the other schools that are out there so if that metric is what what is the competitive number you're going to need jesus to come down you're going to need a long list of things it's not just you know enough higher or 700 people we're going to put 700 we can't no we have 700 is what we're saying is the difference 30 people yeah but how efficient is that i mean this is a bigger game plan it's not something you're just going to write teachers i understand but we're under discussion yes mr smith yes mr paris we're not going to get to you know nirvana that's for sure but there

216are some facts that are true right we know that our class sizes are larger than average and the math that you've done doesn't take into account special needs classes where you can't put 30 autistic students in a classroom right so these numbers you can't just do that that kind of math you have to kind of look at um and that's why that's why the ratios are what doctor roberto is mentioning we also know and you can google this because i did a couple of meetings ago that in passaic county other than prospects park we pay we spend less per student than any other passaic county municipality and prospect park has one school that's a k-8 school so it's not even a good comparison so we know we're fiscally very responsible and thanks to mr daley

217and preceding boards but we're at this point where we we need to start making a den in this mountain if we want to get to we're close to nirvana right um i don't think we're going to make it in one big big lump here but the point is we need to start um so i'm not asking for nirvana i'm asking for average nirvana would be to the right of the bell curve what we're saying is we're to the left and what i'm saying is to get to the middle which is average which is nowhere near nirvana what is that going to take and unfortunately we're just not prepared for that question because we prepared for zero percent budget and and here we are which is why i'm saying maybe we need a day or two

218to figure this out i guess we could go to two percent now i know we have the votes for that but i almost feel like we're that's not satisfying to me now knowing this information and we do have the option of going to bank capital all right uh discussion any other discussion on the motion all right seeing no other discussion the motion i'm sorry if we went to bank cap how many positions we get oh god like student basis so it's probably what six or eight percent so i'm looking off the same thing mr paris is looking at so it would be 58 positions 25 are classroom teachers support staff would be one nurses counselors custodians it would be eight custodians maintenance four support staff a full security team of 16 25 actual instructional in

219the classroom teachers two more assistant principals for our larger elementaries i'm sorry 29 teach uh instructional teachers don't see the lister so we're going from 2 to possibly an eight percent that's stuck ah four oh okay all right so if we motion on the floor is two percent we're under discussion for the two percent yeah just just for clarification um i believe if you wanted to go with bank cap you do eight percent if we're gonna go to the two percent we're gonna lose not all of the bank cap like two percent are gonna expire that's correct and then uh after if you did the eight now i'm just talking academically if you did the eight percent now you do you're back to two percent that's the following yeah super quick what the bank have

220to talk about is years the district doesn't go to two percent the years years were zero the state gives you a three year leeway to go to go over two percent without going to the public because of going to zero percent or lower than two percent so once those three years expire the fourth year hits you can never get that going to zero again so we're at that point where we went to zero in 1920 and we could use that two percent to go over to over the typical two percent without a vote but that will be expiring after this year if we so if we went to four percent we would that wouldn't expire and we would use it if we go to just two percent you have to go to the 22 23

2212 before you use bank cap [Music] that was presented in the original presentation yes it was can you just one more time just read out what we would get at four percent sorry if you can for everybody so this between the soup yes closer to six but yes so between the superintendents and working with all the whole entire administration and staff we have two physical education two bilingual two assistant principals one esl coach district wide then for special education another secretary for the child study team to travel to all the buildings another preschool disabled classroom teacher a reading specialist teacher at the elementary level a rece one resource elementary teacher two middle school resource teachers two high school resource teachers a speech therapist a social worker certified elementary staff then that could be just it's

222just classroom teachers to media specialists that that was going to be determined on mrs kucilewicz's needs and her vision two more nurses two counselors four custodians four maintenance um this is a full bore 16 um security team that would be throughout the district not just the secondary level and then a supervisor of that security team i'm not sure how we would do it to be able to have the option of voting on the two different options to move the first one that we're on and then make another motion for whatever we should do after that so right now the two's on the floor two is on the table yes so it'll be two percent and another motion for another two on top if the two percent would fail that's too much listen i get it

223you lose the bank cap but let's talk about four percent four percent you're talking about 171.76 cents then you talk about 207 for referendum then you talk about on top of that three percent from the city i understand but were you exactly what you said before the money isn't relevant not i get it listen listen listen listen we went from eating at mcdonald's going to having a steak now because my assumptions jump in once my association is realistic though was that we were on average on par and we were giving a 10 increase in this year with new money so i was like okay that's pretty good i don't know why everybody's complaining here now new information says we're not even at average so why wouldn't we go to take that bank cap joe going

224from a honda to a maybach over and we're not analogy in five minutes but that's not true that's not true you're going from the old the old duster 86 duster to a honda we're going to average now is what i'm trying to say or closer to the average that we could get all right here we go we're going to um vote on the motion for two percent tax increase on the 22 23 budget roll call please mr abedrabo two percent yes mr two percent yes miss password yes miss beltran no mr canova yes mr paris yes vice president daley no president smith yes motion carries [Applause] all right next to uh board committee reports okay we'll start with um diversity and inclusion committee mr abu drabbo thank you for uh president smith diversity committee diversity

225inclusion committee excuse me minutes of april 19 2022 meeting that diversity inclusion committee began at 1 pm attendees were myself board commissioner dana beltran administrators assistant superintendent janina kucilovic principal ahmed hamda rodriguez teachers please if you want to celebrate go out in the hallway john o'reilly jackie turk courtney terry students i will not say the initials topic discussion was number one surveying in the middle school students regarding diversity inclusion topics was discussed a survey was created will be reviewed by assistant superintendent janine kusalevich the survey will be compared to a pbsis survey that is scheduled to be shared in june the committee discussed how these servers would be used after they were completed number two the committee discussed different aspects of how curriculum can be enriched the addition of literature to the english department as

226well as the history department was discussed number three the committee discussed the importance of holding different workshops for the staff miss the llama and mrs kusalevich will work collaboratively to discuss different workshops that can be held in dates to hold them number four the committee discussed where awareness amongst and how we can better utilize them to bring awareness of diversity inclusion topics excuse me these months can be better used to celebrate students and staff to different backgrounds and abilities around the district and number five the meeting adjourned at 202 pm committee terrified my job and dr albertosa will work collaboratively to determine the date of the next diversity inclusion committee meeting any questions on the report seeing none next we'll go on to technology mr canova sure uh technology president was jim smith dana beltran

227mr jim daley uh mr allen paris administration president dr robert tosi mr jangaro mr mountain meantime 506-533 items of discussion facts line conversions mr mountain updated the committee that the aging copper pots p plano old telephone service lines used for the district fax machines have been failing at a very high rate and the phone companies are struggling to maintain them administration plans to review district facts usage and consolidate wherever possible and shift all faxing services to an internet cloud-based platform over the summer with a goal to have new and system new system up and running for the start of school in september out of two referendum security projects mr mountain provide an update on the security projects cabling has begun at chs and should commence at the two middle schools soon as well the last

228of the equipment orders for network equipment clocks pa systems and strobes have been finalized in installation schedule we plan to minimize disruption to students and staff as soon as shipment of status is known three new products update mr mountain updated the committee about two new products being tested for future use five promethean brand branded interactive whiteboards are currently used in use at chs compared to the smart branded boards the district has used in the past lightspeed classrooms management systems is being piloted in the middle schools to assist teachers in managing students chromebooks during class time item four winning wi-fi upgrades mr mountain provided uh updated the committee about the coming switch in win wide area network providers optimum light path has recently won the clip the bid for clifton via the federal e-rate process and

229we'll be building out connectivity to all of our buildings clifton it will move to the new system once it's complete and fully tested to everyone's satisfaction long-term cost savings are minimal but long-term reliability and cost savings in the future budget years will remain more significant any questions on technology seeing none facilities mr awad facilities meeting met on april 26 2022 i was president okay we'll just uh mr daley was president mr abu drabo president smith dr robertosi mr gianguero uchi shahada maldon oh marcion kuslevich mr watkins costello and cro uh meeting started at 2 p.m ended around 4 p.m items that were discussed was the referendum update mr marcion has been meeting with epic and o'hara to lay out scope of work and uh phasing for the suburb the first bid will be going out

230soon awaiting the state comptroller to approve bid before it can be advertised the second item discussed was tennis court and marching band renovation a bid came under budget budget was a million and the bid came at 1.95 million uh third item discussed vacant buildings for rent and sale vacant buildings were discussed as a rental for the upcoming school year and beyond committee agreed to uh to begin negotiations for the vacant school buildings a fourth item was school 14 paving school 14 is in need of extra parking spaces teachers parking on the streets street is narrow and if one accident occurs it derails the whole school day arrival and dismissal the district architects are developing a planned budget for the community to consider another item discussed with school six parking maintenance team will park in the

231stadium once the paving project is complete to give the administration building more spots for the staff awaiting asphalt company to have the material dependent on the weather update on which employees use time clocks only maintenance and custodians use the time machine other departments have other methods of tracking time this was addressed and settled in uh mediation which vehicles have a gps and who monitors and how often all district vehicles have gps and are monitored when an incident report is reported director of buildings and grounds has access to the maintenance vehicles and the supervisor of transportation has access to the buses in the vans bus depot update the administration is looking for a permanent or satellite bus depot to house the buses uh ninth item was discussed was facilities budget facilities budget is the same as

23221 22 school year with inflation increases obviously scratch that one finally was landscaping for ccms uh director of the buildings and grounds contracted with a company to put down the safe organic pesticides down to maintain the softball fields next meeting was also discussed to be held on may 10th which is in a couple days thank you any questions seeing non-education special education mr paris the education and special education committee uh met on april 21st at 3 p.m president were dr danny chairperson uh myself dr robert tosi uh miss kusalevich mr jingaro uh ms rotolo ms turi and uh a guest uh miss ragosa comprehensive health and physical education standards were discussed by ms kusalevich and mrs turi they gave a comprehensive update of the new comprehensive health and physical education standards describing the specific additions

233to the 2021 standards many of the changes from the 2014 standards were items already taught as a result of state legislative legislative mandates such as contribution of lb lgbtq plus and persons with disabilities the lessons that have been shared at boe meetings by concerned citizens or from an organization called advocacy advocacy for kids these lessons are not mandated nor promoted by the new jersey department of education and will not be utilized in clifton our own teachers will be creating the curricular lessons taught the new standards and locally developed lessons will be rolled out in an age and developmentally appropriate manner parent information sessions will be held on may 19th for k to 5 and may 24th for 6 to 12. links will be shared with the community health and physical education staff are receiving training

234in june and throughout the summer to support this initiative uh special education update from ms rotolo indicated that the last s-e-p-a-g meeting was held on 4-6-222 with span and a workshop empowering facilities scpag is always looking for new parent members so please reach out if you're interested in joining she shared that ongoing training for different schools continues to be conducted with our resident nurtured heart trainer miss linda chavez ms rotolo reported that there is a poac walk on june 12th this year please come out to support our students and staff we're currently working on implementing enhanced goals and objectives and progress reporting training will be offered to teachers during the summer the summer programs such as extended school year and covid learning support will run at schools 14 and 16 this summer we are still

235in need of paraprofessionals and teachers if anyone is interested ms rotolo reported on class sizes and budget requests she also shared that the district has applied for the innovations and special education award and is waiting to hear back from the new jersey school board association soon uh pb sis climate survey district-wide uh via miss kusalevich and mrs ragosa they shared information about a pbsis climate survey which will be shared with staff students and families this spring the survey collects opinion data to gauge people's perceptions about district programs and then summer programs mrs kuslev shared that many programs will be available for clifton students this summer using both e-s-e-a title and esther funds among programs offered are k-5 title one and title three programs at schools twelve and seventeen summer academic students supported school two middle

236school academy and six to twelve ell programs at ccms esy and cls at schools 14 and 16. paid programs include the northern regional commission credit recovery summer school and the iswe program both held at woodrow wilson preschool expansion ms kusalevich updated the committee about preschool expansion state peg funds require that the district continue to add classrooms to meet the full universe of three and four-year-old students since our schools are at capacity the district is exploring using peg funds to lease another site st john canty is one site under consideration contracts with local service providers that meet state criteria are also being evaluated over the next several years at least 30 more classrooms will be needed to fulfill all preschool needs calendar focus group ms kusalevich in response to community requests the committee discussed creating a

237calendar focus group under the guidance of dr robert tosi a group made up of board members staff local community members including religious leaders will review religious and cultural holidays such as columbus day juneteenth and the date for eid among many others this group will make recommendations for prioritizing days off while still meeting the mandatory 180 days in school between september 1st and june 30th each year in school observations of holidays will also be discussed esther and ese a funded pilot of increased summer student contact rates uh was discussed by mrs kusalevich the contractual rate for summary teaching has remained the same for over 20 years due to the lack of staff available to teach and provide related services to students the district will pilot a temporary increase in the summer hourly rates for teachers and

238nursing staff working directly with children a resolution piloting this temporary increase for this summer only will be on the board's agenda recommending an increase to teachers and counselors working in summer school programs nurses in summer school and nurses for registration to be paid fifty dollars per hour power professionals twenty dollars an hour and administrators fifty five dollars per hour the program will be reevaluated at the end of the summer all other summer curricular professional development file and schedule revision work will remain at the contractal contractual rate of 35 dollars per hour meeting was adjourned at four o'clock respectfully submitted by miss kusalevich any questions uh just more informational president smith um in regards to calendar focus groups for aidel which is the celebration end of ramadan actually in the policy it says that um the

239advice from the islamic center for state county will be taken from them it's the last line of the policy that was made a couple years ago okay all right next we'll move on to public recognition everything that i read before for the budget public recognition is in effect you have five minutes if you please state your name and municipality and subject matter is there anyone in the we'll do the uh we'll do the tova left zoomers hungry there's no talking please across to the to the board yeah that's it's not appropriate at all excuse me excuse me that's unacceptable sir i have that you cannot have that in the room sir it is it is please it is very inappropriate absolutely excuse me sir sir excuse me if you cannot control yourself we're going to

240ask you to leave [Music] can we let them let's first this meeting is timed out and i have to restart the whole thing over with we got to re-evaluate this whole situation yeah without a doubt without a doubt good evening everybody mark prince yeah clifton new jersey i want to discuss tonight the the new eighth grade sex education standards and i want parents to understand that these standards are to be learned before end of the eighth grade that means they could appear anywhere before that grade and if everyone is focused over focused about what happens in the fifth grade and the second grade standards however the standards that are really inappropriate happen by the eighth grade which really means that your child can see this at any time in middle school i can tell you

241that many of the new standard the standards are inappropriate for likely 99 of kids that age moreover that these things that these are the things that shouldn't be in middle school at all the school is there to teach your kid the science of human reproduction now tips and tricks on how to get off and when to decide to have sex if you want your kid to decide these things in a public forum like a classroom then knock yourself out however i don't think any of this should be in group lessons without a permission slip to opt in there's a short list of what i believe to be inappropriate for middle school this is verbatim from the education standards define define vaginal anal and oral sex describe pregnancy testing the signs of pregnancy and pregnancy options

242including parenting abortion and adoption identify prenatal practices that support a healthy pregnancy and identify where to find medically accurate source of information about prenatal care identify resources to assist with parenting analyze the similarities and differences between friendships romantic relationships and sexual relationships aka booty calls identify factors that are important in deciding whether and whether and when to engage in sexual behaviors identify factors that can affect the ability to give or perceive consent to sexual activity and this is first 8th 7th and 6th graders sex trafficking discussion with with with the middle schoolers it seems over the top inappropriate you throw all the info on them about the about vaginal anal oral sex and all kinds of stds now you want to burden them with human trafficking and child porn schools even go as far as

243discussing sexual consent law with sixth graders which seems all kinds of inappropriate the standards and lessons even go into family planning which seems seriously out outside the scope of what's to be learned in sixth grade i urge parents to familiar self so familiar so to familiar familiarize yourself with the standards and uh continuously ask the board of ed on how they will delive how they will deliver these materials to the students in your community and even this week some of the extremists at the new jersey department of education have refused to ask the state board of education to actually review the 2020 sex education standards as directed by governor phil murphy this was just a couple of days ago that's so far as i'm aware of and i just want to commend mr abu drabble

244and mr awad what they said earlier about the second grade standards that is the norm that is a norm for a lot of parents feel like that so thank you for that and to the to the commissioners i urge you to draft and issue a resolution announcing these extremists and and wholly inappropriate education standards and request the removal and notify our state legislator later governor murphy's office and the new jersey department of education thank you all for your time and god bless america have a good night everybody uh al dubois clifton so it seemed a few minutes ago maybe i got a a little out of line so i apologize if i offended anyone um however if you're sitting out here and it's not the first meeting that i've come to which i don't really

245want to come to meetings but you have dialogue that should be discussed uh in other areas not in front of us with items that what i just seen use approve about a budget when you come and you're going to vote on a budget and then you're just throwing numbers out four percent two percent three percent how many hirings that seems to be pathetic and i don't mean no disrespect but it's i don't know how it goes like that but it seems like a lot of your meetings are run like that and it's it's sad um so what i'm presenting tonight which is follow-up of what mark here said which he says pretty much a lot of the facts that are out there um you know it's like i have a little hope in anything because

246you don't get resp although i have to say mr smith you did send me your response back and i do appreciate that so i do apologize to you for that i was i'm tired and i was grateful for your response back so thank you just on another note today is a national day of prayer so on this day president biden puts out a proclamation for national day of prayer and he recognizes the healing power of prayer throughout history prayer has been an anchor for countless americans searching for strength and wisdom in times of struggling and sharing hope and gratitude in seasons of joy in public reflection reflections on life's many blessings and in a quiet moments during life's most difficult trials americans of nearly every background of fate have turned to prayer for comfort and

247inspiration prayer is a sacred right protected by free speech and religious liberty enshrined in our constitution and it continues to lift our spirits as we navigate the challenges of our time and he puts out a proclamation this day today he calls upon the citizens of our nation to give thanks in accordance with their own fates and consciences for our many freedoms and blessings and invites all in people of faith to join me in asking him for god's continued guidance mercy and protection in the year of our lord 2022. so biden's proclamation talks about the importance of prayer he mentions god and he mentions the year of our lord what i've noticed in the school and all this sex education stuff there's no mention of god no mention of family life no mention of different roles

248they're trying to indoctrinate and groom children that's why they want to put them all together male and female to not acknowledge that a man is a man and a woman's a woman period there's talk about gender hormones gender dysphoria is something we keep building on and to keep saying well we had these standards five years ago 10 years ago it's it's out of control now it's way out of control and we're not reflecting on god we're not reflecting the year of our lord which president biden's mentioning here we're not reflecting that a woman a man can't have a child a man can breastfeed a child and a man is not a mother only a woman could be a mother and you know they could do their hormones or whatever they want to do but it's

249it's not there no matter how much they try to destroy now maybe someday they will i don't know but as of right now but by indoctrinating our children to not know the role of a man and woman and whether they're confused and they got to find themselves someday and who's the trusted adult or not is getting into areas that's really dangerous and i you know their presentation was fine i know it's difficult but somewhere we need board members to take action and just say you've gone too far and we have to be extremely prudent i don't understand why sex education standards can't be given to a parent and they sign off on it whatever grade you want them to saying yes i taught and checked off check off i taught them this i taught them

250that i refused to teach this and there'd be a check off and now you'd have the documentation and if a parent was confused in the topic request to have a a group gathering maybe in the auditorium if you had enough people to say okay come on in we're going to do it all together well now you got the parents there watching because the things you're you're indoctrinating them with is very dangerous things and it's gone beyond the years ago and maybe we were negligent maybe you know an error came in that we just ignored it ignored it ignored it but now it's hitting to the point where it's beyond control so um i ask you to consider the day of prayer you might even want to consider having some kind of chaplain on staff when

251i went to college can you give me when i went to college there was a chaplain priest in uh suny university in new york who was there to help people and you can have it from different faiths but at least there would be some kind of guidance based on the ten commandments thank you thank you mr smith i apologize and any of the board members i offend that i apologize thank you for your apology marsha miller clifton we are the parents the caregivers the taxpayers and we no longer allow you to divide us by race and to undo what martin luther king jr stood for when he prayed that we would one day be judged on the content of our character rather than the color of our skin these are our children and we pay

252you to create a safe healthy learning environment where teachers can academically equip and prepare their fragile and impressionable minds so that they may grow to contribute both individually and as a whole in society conversely it is our job to raise them with the american family values that we know and love kindness respect honesty and generosity to all people regardless of race and gender moreover we will no longer allow educators to push vulgar explicit and highly developmentally inappropriate sexual agenda that exploits our children these updated sex ed guidelines are nothing short of an over attempt to hyper sexualize our youth grooming them and making them increasingly susceptible to sex trafficking child pornography and innumerable other disturbing psychological issues that are now rife in society as a direct result of these damaging influences we will furthermore hold

253accountable these principles teachers and counselors that choose to project their personal beliefs and political opinions into the classroom either directly or indirectly we now i'm sorry we are not asking you to stop this freight train we are demanding that you turn it around today not tomorrow not six months from now but today we have been asleep at the wheel for far too long but rest assured we are now wide awake and you will no longer hold captive the minds of our precious children henceforth our schools will no longer be a breeding ground for hatred masked by politically correct buzzwords like equity inclusion and diversity it's game over the indoctrination must stop now i have a few questions one what materials are being used to teach the mandated abstinence sex education number two it's a three-parter

254what books are in the school libraries what books are being used by the students regarding crt and sex education and what books are being ordered for the new sex ed standards and number three what is your policy for transgender students are parents informed when the child identifies as the opposite sex i will leave you with a personal story over 25 years ago it was identified that pornographic books were in the clifton children library i was part of a group of clifton residents that opposed the books and brought it to the town council's attention they took our request under advisement and agreed to remove the books out of the children's library even under the threat of the aclu won then and we will again win to protect the betterment of our children thank you anyone else

255wish to address the board cnn emotionally closed such and closed mr robert was sent by mr uh somebody else uh yeah please mr awad i don't think there's anyone else in here portova we may have to call her yeah i don't think there's anybody else on that case close the zoomers second okay uh commissioner comments uh today good question i wanted to get out of here oh wait a minute hold on hold on oh that's me said one participant it was me it was me that's all you you can't speak anymore yeah can i can't i adjust it a little bit you need to let the agenda all right since i can't switch over those unfinished business we have none [Music] expression for those we did we do that one already no next question yeah

256expression of condolence number 17 uh miss password do you mind reading that whereas may 1st 2022 the community noted with sorrow the passing of susan honaki and whereas miss honaki has served the board of education and the children of clifton faithfully conscientiously as a resp highly respected bus aide for 14 years now therefore be it resolved that this resolution be forwarded to her bereaved family to serve as an expression of the great regard in which miss honaki was held by the board of education the administration employees and the pupils of the clifton public schools and be it further resolved that the content of this resolution be noted in its entirety in the official minutes of the clipton board of education for future generations to peruse dated may 5 2022 mr awad miss bassford yes ms

257meltron yes mr canova yes mr paris yes vice president daley yes president smith yes um i'm sorry uh that our teachers are gone for the next one but we have a motion on um ea ii teacher appreciation week motion something by mr abhijava second by mr awad uh anyone mr kanoa mr beltran would you like to read that anybody turnover uh whereas teachers mold the citizens through guidance and education and whereas teachers encounter students in widely different differentiating background rounds and this popped up and whereas our country's future depends on providing quality education to all students and whereas teachers spend countless hours preparing lessons evaluating progress counseling and coaching students and performing community service and whereas our community recognizes and supports its teachers in educating the children of this community now therefore it be resolved

258that the clinton board of education claims may 2nd 22 to be a teacher appreciation week and be it further resolved at the clifton board of edge strongly encourages all members of our community to join with it personally expressing appreciation for our teachers and for what they do in dedication and devotion to the to their work a motion by mr canova second second mr alberta yes president smith yes next ea uh mr oberdrama would you like to read for the nurses thank you president smith national school nurse day whereas students are the future and by by investing them today we're ensuring our world for tomorrow and whereas families deserve to feel confident that their children will be cared for when they are at school and whereas all students have the right have a right to have

259their physical and mental health needs safely met while in the school setting and whereas students today face more complex and life-threatening health problems requiring care in school and whereas the kova 19 pandemic has emphasized the essential role school nurses play in student health and academic success and whereas school nurses have served a critical role in improving public health and ensuring students academic success for more than 100 years and whereas school nurses address the home and community factors that impact students health and where our school nurses act as a liaison to school community families and health care providers on behalf of children's health by promoting wellness and improving health outcomes for our nation's children and whereas school nurses support the health and educational success of children and youth by providing access to care when children's cognitive

260development is at its peak and where our school nurses are members of the school-based teams to address the school population and where school nurses undertake understand the link between health and learning and are in a position to make positive difference for each for children every day therefore be it resolved that the national association of school nurses celebrates and acknowledges the accomplishments of school nurses everywhere and their efforts of meeting the needs of today's students by improving the delivery of healthcare in our schools and offers gratitude for the nation's school nurses and who contribute to our local communities by helping students stay healthy in school and ready to learn and keep keeping parents and guardians at work not just on this national school nurse day but every opportunity throughout the year now therefore i phil murphy

261governor new jersey do hereby proclaim wednesday may 11th as school nurse day in new jersey and commend its objective observances second by mr paris discussion seeing non-roll call yes yes mr have a job mr awad miss bassford yes miss beltran yes mr canova mr paris yes vice president daley yes president smith yes what carries if we could have uh the rest of the group that's ea4 through ea-12 motioned by mr abu drabble second by mr awad discussion i have won ea uh seven the policy number zero one five five was i asked at the last meeting to pull it until we got an advisory opinion from the school ethics commission i did we get an advisory opinion back from them about having non-lay people on committees no i don't have anything where is it okay

262so i'm asking for that to be pulled until we get a decision sorry what item number seven but i want to pull just yeah i had to ask last meeting for that to be pulled until we got a decision yeah miss uh uh guterres you weren't here last meeting so uh we asked you to get a uh a decision from uh we were billed for it on on the um on the claims list so so i guess there's work being done on it the advisory opinion me a yes all right so we're going to we don't have anything back yet okay enough so we're going to pull it for that okay all right so the the rest of the group so zero five is being pulled right correct no just just guess about number seven

263the one policy i'm sorry roll call please mr abbado mr awad miss passport yes with pulling that one for policy thank you it's beltran yes mr conovo yes mr paris uh yes abstain on item eight mr uh vice president daley yes president smith yes motion's carrick all right next we have uh p1 motion through p50 second motion by mr aberdrabble second by mr awad discussion seeing none roll call yes mr abdrabbo mr awad yes but i'm abstaining on p47 and 49. miss bassford yes p-47 my name only miss beltran yes mr canova yes mr paris uh yes abstain on uh c15 and 47 my name only vice president daley yes and president smith yes emotions carry all right next we have f1 through f10 motion by mr adrava second by mr awad discussion uh yes

264i have something for discussion yes um so be on the claims list on the um the agl uh bill um on if everyone wants to open it up um there's a question here that we paid for it says research read board members simultaneous candidacy for re-election and city council i was wondering where that question originated who is the one on the board who asked it and why it was asked because that to me it seems to be a personal question not one that would have any relation to the running of the board got it um yes i don't remember specifically who asked me but it would have had to have been either the board president or the superintendent of schools one of the two would there be some sort of um email records of that

265or something because this is very much a personal question that's being used that uh school funds are being used to answer i don't know that it's important it's i mean because what i just want to know that it's a person someone running for their in office of like affect the board in any way no i think uh where this came from and and mr abu drabba mr casper had reported back to us that a new law had been put into place that you can't run for another position while you hold the position we investigated and found that to be incorrect so we were getting we asked to get clarification on that yeah because this actually says simultaneous candidacy for re-election and city council which there's only three of us that would be eligible up to

266ask that question right and it wasn't any of us who asked it so i'm just trying to figure out who asked this because it was an expensive question it was a 500 question the note has to be adjusted it wasn't simultaneously was it the note that has to be adjusted or was the question was that the actual question that was asked and it was asked for somebody who's not currently sitting on the board i don't know my recollection is not that it was asked about somebody that was not sitting on the board the question was the question was more of a gen if i recall correctly because it was a while ago now was whether or not somebody could be could be sitting on the board and also run for an elected office at the

267same time exactly that's always been done because you'd be running for re-election always no running for an elected office not on the board but that's always been done pino for an example okay i got that i know you just mentioned someone's name who's running the rumors is running for two offices you mentioned casper i didn't mention osprey what does that have to do with anything because i'm wondering if you used our legal funds to ask questions so if you have that information then come forward that's absolutely ridiculous well i'm going to open a question don't worry add a board may you can open whatever you want we're going to a board member who was representing this board at county school boards came back and reported to us if you were paying attention he wasn't on

268the board in march he i don't care when he that's when the question came up because he reported back that you did that it was a new law that you couldn't be on both but how did he report bargain march dnf i may about a year and a half ago he did come back from school boards or from i think was a county or something and he stated in one of his committee reports and we can go back and look at the committee reports where he said that i guess it was a legislator or somebody at that point said you cannot run for office while no you have to leave the board at a certain time for another office which was absolutely wrong so i that was that's what i think the inquiry was about

269to see if mr casper actually reported it wrong or at the time when he was a board member and i think that's when the question came about in march because there's also another question on the bill uh it seems like the next day possibly a follow-up question that says consider issues related to board member council conflict so it seems like there's two separate questions that were asked one being that question and then one being if you can run for both at the same time no it wasn't two separate questions it was the same question it just so happens to be that we had we considered the issues two separate two of us were talked about it two of us looked into it it's not that it was two separate days or two separate questions but

270you think this this this line item is appropriate for the board to pay for because it has nothing to do with the running of the school district that's why i'm trying to understand it seems like a person who wants to run should ask their own election attorney or ask the county not so much our board using our funds okay i get that i understand that that's your position what all i'm saying is that it's something that would affect a member of the board of a city member of the board and that's why the question was asked of me i have a question if there's an issue i have a question um a while back i had asked for permission to speak to the attorney now see this is bringing up a lot of different issues

271if a question like this why doesn't the questions go in an email so there is an actual paper trail of where they're coming from because there's a lot of there's a lot of conference questions on here from the board attorney to the president and the vice president now what if i wanted to find out what you talked about because i'm allowed to because you're giving business you're using our taxpayer dollars to give uh is this nothing to do with miss gutierrez this has to do with the process right if i want to find out what the question was because i had i had my i'm on here there's a bunch of people on here it's just odd to me that there is no initials put there i'd like to know who asked that question as

272well so where i i asked mr usee today where is the log that we're supposed to have when somebody accesses the um board attorney and there is no log i'm being told that the bills are the log now we had a really big discussion a couple months ago about a log and all these things so i'm i'm gonna ask if anybody poses a question why isn't in writing so i always send it to you in writing because i want to have i want to form a paper trail but why isn't in writing because now there's a question from miss beltran about this and she she has some valid points is why is this being discussed because i actually went to somebody that actually ran for two boards and got his the legal opinion he was

273given by his board attorney and it's jeff fisher from north halden imagine manchester regional and the answer is that somebody can't run for two boards sign of two positions simultaneously because when they sign the oath at the end of the petition they are stating that they are qualified to hold office when they sign the second oath for another elected position they are not being truthful since they can't hold any two elected positions simultaneously um that he said to me in like two minutes but that was an opinion he got because he he got thrown off on one board uh he used to be president of school boards association he's also a current board member for 40 years in held and if you want to look him up he was at the county meeting on monday

274i asked him after i saw this and um he gave me that answer my question is why don't we have a paper trail about what the questions are asked because if we want to know what is discussed legally we should be allowed to find out what the what's going on other boards discuss with their their colleagues what's discussed and what's going on and what they find out legally i have to tell you tonight with the finance and with the budget and i said to the business administrator if i would have this is unclear but if i would have only stayed on the claims list please okay we're not getting the information we need to get and that's why i want to go to the committee okay so so just so that we're clear so that

275we're clear on the bill if i put uh i i i'm very i do my very best to make sure that if i am speaking to a someone other than the superintendent the business and minister well i write down when i talk to the superintendent or the business administrator or the board president but if i'm speaking to any any board member other than that i will put the name of the person and i'll put you know per the board president because board members are not supposed to be calling me without permission from the board president as to everything being put in email very often it's it's a phone call it's not an email so you know that's that's just the way it is with respect to so if if i don't put down who asked

276the question it's because it came from either the superintendent's office or from the bus for the business administrator or the board president not from anyone else so just to answer your question i did not do legal research on behalf of or for any former board member i don't think you did on purpose but possibly the question might have come from outside that i wouldn't and then was forwarded to you just that's what i'm just trying to investigate because there isn't of the three people that are up for re-election it didn't come from us okay so it's just a little bit strange that this question would come up about running for re-election and city council when there's only three seats that could have possibly had that problem one two and three and all three of us

277say that it isn't our question so i'm just trying to get to it who asked this question because obviously it was a pretty intense question it was a three three hour and ten minute question so i don't know if there was a report written that was given to the board or anything i believe i wrote something i wrote a letter okay yeah because it wasn't sent to everyone else so we're just i'm personally trying to get to the bottom of who asked for this because you said if you didn't say it but did the administration ask for this did not so that's what we're trying to figure out where this question originated they're saying it's from possibly from when mr casper was on the board but that was three months before this question was asked

278so i'm just you know i don't know if anyone else has any comments yeah what does it make sense to me is if the question isn't relevant to the times why are we even asking it and spending money to an attorney to ask the question all right if somebody's not a sitting member on a board why would he ever have to know whether or not he could run this had nothing this if i recall correctly it was not this had nothing to do with mr casper okay so that's not what it was told to me so let's say it didn't let's say didn't none of us are in that situation so so why would we spend money to find out an answer to a question that is useless to us to know the information for

279okay that's not a question for me to answer i don't know then who asked the question that's the i think that's the question is who asked the question the board president asked me to research this and i did okay so so mr smith can you speak to why we asked that question being that it doesn't affect anyone yeah it it did affect somebody that's all i'm going to leave it at you cannot just leave it like that yeah i don't think there's a clue we're nine members why wouldn't we know the situation if we don't need to go to executive to speak and i'm fine with that was a board member asked to speak to the attorney about that issue a sitting board member on this board then it's not listed there so so and

280you know who that board member person's not being is then why am i being listed i don't remember if i spoke to you i don't remember who i saw you can't have two rules it's either got to be everybody gets listed or nobody gets listed and i think it's fair for everybody on this board that has to approve this bill as a collective whole to know who's asking questions because then this is how we judge to see if somebody's accessing the attorney i don't remember i don't i don't recall speaking to someone so if i speak to somebody i put it on the bill so then she come off the bill because we have no idea who this was requested by if it was even requested by us we have no proof of anything for

281this for this question i understand you you did the work but it didn't come from the board as far as we're concerned because no one's fessing up to being the question asking mr smith just finished saying he's the one that asked me the question he just finished saying that it was a request of someone else who's on the board if it's going to be an issue we can take it off the bill i'm not going to i'm not going to quibble over three hours we're going to have a good relationship with his name and then we'll submit it next meeting okay what are we doing we're asking a valid question we're asking who did who author you authorized it so who contacted you uh it's a valid question to tax if we're spending taxpayer money

282again the taxpayers if we're questioning this where are the stewards of the taxpayer dollars we have a fiduciary obligation to make sure that every dollar is spent appropriately what is the problem with knowing who you you mentioned mr casper that's off the table so who's just we just want to know who it is and why is it all in in march because to me it's unethical and it's it's it's very violationable period i i really beg to differ i i have not done anything no no not you no not you i'm saying that my question so listen i it is 11 42 p.m and you guys are tired and you have a you know i'm not i'm not i'm not suggesting that you stop it what i'm saying is i can review the bill and

283remove that piece and then we can move on or review it and get back to us with who you spoke to i think it should be removed because we're covering something up if he doesn't haven't she doesn't have an answer for you okay you know what maybe i can call the office of compliance and let them look into it she just told you she doesn't know from her notes of who she spoke to what you do is what i don't understand i authorize the person to contact them not what the what the content of the discussion was you call me numerous times you want to speak to the attorney and i authorize it i back it up with an email all the time in writing so i have a paper trail the lease even knows

284i even back up the question in an email i am very very methodical about that because in case any one of my colleagues want to ask what i'm looking into they can say to me where it is and i send them the email you're supposed to know this we have the right to ask the question on who is this about because it like missed beltran said there's three people running mr daly miss beltran their positions are up this election cycle so who asked the question because it's it's starting to get really ugly and i'm starting to get really concerned that something appropriate went on yeah so what i'll i'll go back and i'll that's the same i'll go back and i'll look at my records so can we pull this for executive then is that

285what we need to do i mean what i'm saying is i don't have access this is the one that that i approved so she has to find out who well you could tell us an executive who you proved okay next she has this item because it's nothing to do with it's not i will review my records she will review her records and see who she spoke to there's nothing pertaining to a legal matter it's not employment or a legal matter i will review my records and then i'll get back to you she's on this she's pulling that bill till she can review her records and she will get back to us and who she's supposed to every one of these other ones has who she spoke to also while you're at a poll the one

286i guess says consider issue related to board member and council conflict does that have a name next to it i'll look at all of it no that one doesn't either and then um i have another question about this um all right so let's just make sure which ones we're pulling okay the one above it it said uh review legal issues related to board policies and board member qualification if we could just get um more like details about what board member qualifications were being investigated okay so those three yeah i have no idea who those are all right roll call on the wrist mr abedrabo yes obtaining an f10 yes i'm gonna abstain at 10 because all this i don't know what's going on miss password yes and i'm abstaining on 10 as well why are

287you just you're obtaining your higher list of bills by the way on the check yeah yeah yeah and uh yeah so i was standing on just what caused the camera sorry the agl invoice for me because my name's listed okay same with me i'm just upstanding i'm the ones that were just watching yes thank you for the clarification because you don't want to stand on the whole claims list miss beltran yes i'm standing on agl's uh checks in the claims as well as the egl uh invoice mr canova yes with the partial uh abstention mr paris yes with samus vice president daley yes president smith yes motion carries except for the ag elbow yes the agl bill on the claims list on that yes all right next we have board member comments let's see which

288and mr parish you're up first oh yeah it's late and um i don't know who's watching anyway at this point so uh happy teacher appreciation week and um get your car washed by the band on saturday uh next we have uh mr abu drabo uh let me develop on that really quick ban car wash every saturday may 7 14 21 and 28 from 8 30 to noon beef steak fundraisers coming up football baseball and band thank you to all our teachers all our nurses and congrats to all ca excellence in education legislative meeting may 24th at 10 a.m and policy meeting may 9th standing meeting at 3 p.m send me any information you guys have and also congrats to ramana about being the boys and girls club member of the year uh mr wade you're

289next no comments tonight miss belcher on your next i would just like to um wish all the teachers a good teacher appreciation week as well as the nurses um we do appreciate everything that you uh you've done and i hope that in the future when we come to the budget discussions that all the comments that were made tonight come in emails earlier in the budget process so that maybe we can try and you know we can try and consider them earlier in the process and make it a little bit smoother for everybody including the administration that's all i'd say uh thank you um thank you to miss hoholic for um your bravery and your expertise in first aid happy teachers appreciation week happy nurses uh week to all the nurses out there thank you for

290what you do and happy mother's day to all the moms in the district the state new jersey the country in the world thank you uh mr uh canova yes thank you to miss hoholic for uh saving a student's life um that's something that you know you live with forever knowing that uh that student's alive because of you um and and in my hours you're a hero for that um thank you to our to our teachers to our nurses uh happy appreciation week for for both of you um and i'll just keep my comments short and ended at that thank you vice president daley uh noting the hour i have no comments um we i have no comments we have uh nothing for executive so motion to adjourn no we have new business we have new

291business oh i'm sorry geez trying to get i thought we had something for executive no no what are you doing what are you doing oh um we can do it next time if it's not presented yes i was told there was no stop pressing from our side if it's if it's pressing information you want there was a facilities issue with some legal bills it's not pressing from our side if you could if you could wait till the 19th it's okay with us mr shahada you have the information if we need it mr shahada has the information if we want to go on to executives i was just told there was nothing for you thank you just two minutes ago i just asked i didn't have anything for personnel and i asked mike there's nothing so

292there's nothing for executives i got two mothers three mothers [Music] i have one item for my business oh that's the pads he said he can wait till the next meeting absolutely can wait i mean that's all yeah we did have something but wait um [Music] you want to go to executive session for it i i that's why i asked before yes because i just so under new business all right so we'll move on exactly where you passed we're going to new business new business i have a yes mr canola i have a motion that i would like to go to four percent not two percent i don't want to leave money on the table knowing that we're below the bell curve of average in the uh in the state for the amount of associates we

293have what's the motion i want to go to four percent not two percent it's not even discussed it's not a new item no it's already it's that would be the new item smith i think procedurally you'd have to res because you can't amend an action you already took on during the same meeting so you'd at worst you'd have to rescind the other i don't even think you could do that no it's not it's not a new item it's already been discussed about i ran into that they did it in the city of newark once was out well you can certainly have a short discussion here and look around and all right so quick stroke who would be for going for four percent so we don't leave the other two percent on the table i would

294i i think there's a legality issue to uh need a two-thirds vote to actually put it on exactly um can i suspend the bylaws oh my gosh i just want to know if is there for even five does this even matter to extend the meeting at twelve seven minutes does this matter all right knowing that we're below the bill do i have do i have five did it even care so there is a uh a motion on the floor to present new business that was not uh previously done so a two-thirds majority would allow that to happen so uh roll call and allowing the motion under new business so two-thirds of 18. there's only eight people here there's nine okay okay all right so you need six votes uh to uh redo this roll call

295please this is just to allow the new business okay if he doesn't have six then it doesn't even go to new business to allow two-thirds majority to allow this new business mr abedraba no mr awad no miss bassford yes miss beltran yes mr canola yes mr paris no because he already decided it vice president daley no sorry president samantha no motion fails all right motion to adjourn mr 27 million dollars