January 21, 2021 - Clifton Board of Education Meeting

001the meeting streaming live sign is up okay guys we're live we are live all right let me send this out to uh samantha the meeting streaming live sign is up okay guys we're live we are live [Music] thanks huh somebody has the live stream on in the background and we're hearing feedback big time hello hey joe d how's everything how's everybody good joe good to see you happy new year happy new year [Music] for those of you who've just joined us we are live we're just waiting for the link to go out and for those of you who just joined us uh eric mountain could not be with us tonight jeff horn is filling in at the last minute uh we are very confident he'll do a good job but if we do have any

002technical difficulties we'll just be patient i thought you could say just blame him [Laughter] blame the superintendent that's the easiest thing to do um could jeff reset my password for board docs i emailed eric earlier today but um he didn't get back to me but he was out of office already that's a very good question jeff do you have access to that i do not okay okay i'll just um it's okay i read it from the public version i'll just follow along from that version okay i was gonna say i don't think i can i think he's the only one hey dane it's jim um i had trouble also what happened i've you put in forgot password and then asked if you remember your previous password um when they ask for that it it gets

003it up you can try okay i'll give it a shot thanks yeah it was really weird good evening everyone it was really weird mine wasn't working until literally like maybe i was calling eric i didn't know he was out it just worked randomly for me it wasn't i i typed in the same password 30 times it wasn't working eventually okay thanks yeah i'll keep trying jeff if you see derelict gutierrez please let her in she's our board attorney okay [Music] hi everybody hey frank hi frank we are live how is everybody very good good i got well i gotta make everybody laugh then i gotta i got a special mask for uh christmas so i went into school today and i wear my mask i love that by the way the cheshire cat yeah so

004the small kids go your smile is too scary so my sixth grader today goes you need to brush your teeth [Laughter] jeff please let chelsea spell in that's our board attorney okay once again for those who just joining us on the dais mr mountain could not be with us tonight mr horn's filling in at the last minute okay we're very confident in his abilities but if we do have any technical difficulties we'll just we'll figure it out thank you can anybody confirm for me that the live stream is working i see it working and just remember if you do have the live stream on in the background please have that muted [Music] we're missing any board members looks like everyone's here we just are waiting for renee and sherry it looks like it's a fall

005house today mike i think renee and sherry are just um watching the live stream i don't know that they're participating oh oh okay i think i think that's right okay uh derelice i don't see the release abdullah is here if you change your view you can see everybody i did oh and i see her at the bottom i'm here when i speak does it light up the yellow box oh there you are okay now hello how are you well thanks and you i'm okay thank you yeah so jeff the only other person would be a chris langheart a slang heart okay i'll keep my eyes open there's i don't see that name at this point jeff were you able to type into the waiting room to leave a message uh i figured that out what

006what did you want me to say again sorry just to remind people that if if they just want to watch the meeting they can tune into the live stream via the link that went out that's on our website the really only reason for anybody to be in the waiting room is if they're part of the meeting or they were going to participate in public comment later on gotcha i'll send that out now thank you jeff you're welcome danny we're going to run through the entire presentation and then there'll be questions after not not during the presentation right uh that's what that's what i i would i would request from from the board members unless there's a you know a simple easy clarification question if somebody has um but will certainly leave time for questions and

007answers okay however you want to do it come okay we could be open okay and joe once we start rodney will share the presentation on his screen i will introduce it and then i'll introduce you to take over okay sounds good you're gonna give an intro in terms of the need i'll give an intro yeah great i don't see kevin dwyer i just texted him i just see him come in now there we go is there a rene janowitz is that someone that goes in there yes we can let renee in renee janowitz okay this is kevin i'm gonna go on mute if you if you need me thanks kevin uh mr who see anyone else or or dr robertos anyone else we're waiting for otherwise we will start mr smith we are ready to

008go very good welcome everyone to the regular board of education meeting thursday january 21st 2021 if we could have a um fall please rise and we'll have our pledge of allegiance and a moment of silence i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you everyone mr uc roll call mr abba drabo here mr awad here miss bassford here miss beltran here mr canova here mr daley here miss danny here mr casper here mr smith here leave a quorum thank you mr casper would you read our uh mission statement please okay now i'm off me here we go the mission of the clifton school district in an open and reciprocal community partnership

009is to provide all students with a quality education to develop the skills necessary to become literate lifelong learners who are responsible and productive citizens contributing to a democratic society in an ever-changing world thank you the open public meetings act the new jersey open public meetings law was enacted to ensure the right to the public to have advanced notice of and to attend the meetings of public bodies at which any business affecting their interests is discussed or acted upon in accordance with the provisions of this act the clifton board of education has caused notice of this meeting to be publicized by having the date time and place thereof posted at the city clerk's office clifton public library administration building senior citizen nutrition center on cable tv in the local press on the district's website and mailed

010to presidents of parent teacher organizations the meeting will be tape recorded in accordance with our policy zero one six eight okay we'll move on to uh adoption of minutes of uh december the third song moved so many bites bassford second by mr casper any discussion roll call mr abby drabo yes mr wad yes miss bassford yes miss beltran yes mr canova yes mr daley yes miss danny yes mr casper yes mr smith yes okay uh adoption of the uh minutes of the january seventh uh meeting the motion by ms basford second by mr casper any discussion uh i have an amendment mr smith yes mr vice president abu drabo um i was going through the minutes i noticed just for records purposes um when it came to voting for third round for president i did

011not uh i don't think that's mining that should be on there i think it was for us who mr awad who is the one who voted for you uh mr russia do you see that correction i'll i'll clarify and correct it if it's incorrect thank you mr um president through you to mr um uh mr awad um he voted on the december third minutes he should abstain he wasn't present at our meeting as a board member i mean technically he could vote yes just because he could uh he could agree with that agree to them after reading he recommended it to you all right any other discussion on january 7th seeing non-motion i mean uh roco yeah an issue i'm sorry let me have an issue with the minutes yeah uh i'd like to have

012the uh minutes adjusted to know that i um withdrew my uh uh didn't accept the nomination that was made that's not in the minutes okay mister i can make that change of course yep thank you any other changes or discussion seeing none rockwell mr avadrabo oh i said yes mr owad yeah miss basford yes miss beltran yes mr canova yes mr daley yes for those that it's included miss danny yes mr casper yes with the amendments mr smith yes uh communication and announcements we have none uh first reading of policy uh policy number zero one five five under board committees do i have a motion i don't think we need an option yeah um yeah mr daley is correct for first reading we just read it uh would someone like to read this uh board

013meetings the board of education authorizes the creation of committees of board members charged to conduct studies make recommendations to the board and act in advisory capacity committees committees are not authorized to take action on behalf of the board an ad hoc committee may be created and charged at any time by the president or by a majority of the board members president voting president shall appoint members to any committee so created and charged members shall serve until the committee is discharged the ad hoc committee will be automatically discharged upon submission by the ad hoc committee of its final report to the board committee shall consist of no more than four board members one of whom shall be the president vice president or designee who shall serve as an ex-officio member on all board committees the board

014president shall apport appoint a rotational committee member who shall serve as the fourth uh committee member and the president's absent the president may apport one or more interested board members to serve as a rotational committee board member the board reserves the right to meet and work as a committee of the whole in informational discussion and exploratory sessions no official actions shall be taken at these meetings unless so advertised a chairperson shall be appointed by the president committee meetings may be called at any time by the committee chairperson or when meeting is requested by a majority of the members of the committee committee meetings shall not be open to the public except that except that a majority of the committee or the chairperson may open the meeting to the public or invite persons whose knowledge or

015expertise may be useful to the committee with the involvement and facilitation of the superintendent okay presentations and reports uh dr robertosi would you like to take this thank you uh mr president um at this time i'd like to ask rodney rodney if you could put the presentation up and share your screen and then i will introduce our presentation tonight perfect can everybody see the screen yes that's great great well good evening commissioners administration members of the community uh those of us joining via live stream tonight uh this is an incredibly important presentation uh which will impact the future of the city of clifton for decades to come our plans for a bond proposal had to take a backseat to covid a year ago our plan was to have a referendum vote in september of 2020.

016due to circumstances covid and others we decided it wouldn't be a good time but the calendar has kept driving forward and here we are a year later facing the same needs for our schools and facing a two and a half year timeline to meet those needs now finally we see some light at the end of the tunnel we can see the potential for covid to be under control and we need need to return to our plans for some very important improvement projects that lost year now means we're looking at 2024 before we have solved our critical needs involving security efficiency and cost savings so some of these needs that will be discussed tonight in this presentation are security entrances and vestibules at all of our schools modernized bathrooms some of our bathrooms are original to

017our 100 year old buildings brand new heating ventilation and air conditioning systems throughout the entire district new boilers that keep our schools warm many are beyond their useful life and are very inefficient renovations to our middle school auditoriums and other co-curricular facilities these are key pieces of the clifton experience and a source of town pride and accessibility too many of our bathrooms don't meet ada standards the four levels of christopher columbus middle school do not meet ada standards the athletic facilities at woodrow wilson middle school do not meet ada standards so the administration and the board of education went into this planning process with consideration of the entire clifton community what do our students need to learn what do our facilities need to be safe modern and financially efficient and what kind of school quality

018does our community want this proposal is about one clifton with all of its parts working together the cara rubino architects has been very helpful as we evaluated the needs at all of our buildings the firm works with more than 50 public school districts in new jersey at this time i want to introduce joe de cara to tell us more about the comprehensive proposal to solve clifton's most pressing needs and to do that most importantly by capturing the most state funding possible at the conclusion of the presentation we will have time for as many questions as the board members have and of course there will be time for public comment before a formal vote is taken on the resolution tonight to approve the referendum joe i'm going to turn it over to you at this time

019okay thank you very much i also have rodney watkins who's our senior project manager in the firm we also have available kevin dwyer who is our senior mechanical engineer that we use quite often on school projects and we have representation from mcmanum in scotland your bond council and also phoenix advisors to go over any other cost numbers and the bond issue we've as dr robertosi mentioned we've we've been involved with the clifton board of ed as architect of record for approximately 10 years and in that time we've done probably probably about 70 successful projects so we know your facilities very well during that course and time we we've done various studies for the district feasibility and condition reports that over the years have identified many of the items that your superintendent mentioned that are in

020need of of replacement and repair they're extensive but that does not mean that the district has not maintained your facilities they've done an excellent job as indicated some of your schools are about 100 years old they would not have lasted this long if they were not maintained so so when you see the the extent of the improvements uh please do not feel that that this district this district has not maintained the facilities in an excellent manner sometimes things just outlive their normal life structure so we go to the next slide i would like to just go over a general overview of the types of projects that are being planned for the upcoming referendum there are hvac upgrades those are heating ventilating and also includes air conditioning and this is generally been established for air quality

021in addition to that you have several boilers that are in need of a replacement basically due to their age all important security entrances throughout the facility auditorium upgrades the toilet upgrades a weight room expansion at the stadium and toilets and new artificial turf field at woodrow wilson middle school in addition to that there's district-wide technology and security that would be incorporated into the overall referendum next slide please rodney so basically we're we're touching all of this school facilities for hvac upgrades um with the exception of school 17 um which basically um is your newest school was built i believe 2004 and the facility the mechanical system is is okay there compared to the other ones we are though also addressing certain uh additional um upgrades to the filtration system in the mechanical system which i'll

022get into in a little more detail uh we're also doing work at the board office with boilers so if we go to the next slide we've we did an extensive analysis of every school and i'm not going to show every school in this presentation but i wanted to give an example of the due diligence and the matrix that was prepared to identify the need and identify the various solutions in trying to be in an extremely cost-effective manner and also one that would get you eligible for any potential state aid that the state of new jersey would provide uh your community so as you can see from this floor plan there are there are two basic areas one is you have classrooms that have windows in them um and you have a certain type of mechanical

023system that is incorporated to that based on the type of structure this is and then you have the larger spaces like your gyms uh your auditoriums and those have different types of mechanical systems which are known as rooftop units they're big boxes on the on the roof and they provide heating and ventilation within those okay if you go to the next slide rodney um this just shows uh school five and if you go to the next one um this happens to be the middle school so you also have incorporated in this what's called the uh the bms controls those are your building management systems which is your control system for your all your mechanical systems and in the past you have a thermostat and they're not programmable all of the new systems that would be

024incorporated at every facility would have individual control systems that are controlled you can control them online somewhere your facility director can use them they can be programmed to come on and off at any time desired uh run for a certain time and have ultimate control of the systems to also afford exceptional efficiency in its operation so those elements have also been included into the scope and the costing of all the projects next slide rodney so go go back one rodney you know just so what i'd like to do is talk about uh the the typical classroom setup which is the beige areas and those are your now you can go to the next slide so these are these are examples of your typical um classroom with windows on the outside whether they're small big doesn't

025matter and there's two types of systems that we looked at for the replacement um one is and they're both known um generically as unit ventilators and you can have one and you're familiar with some of them if you've been in your rooms there's a horizontal unit ventilator and it sits against the outside wall and if you walk around your building you see louvers below the windows that's where fresh air comes in and mixes with a heating element basically all you have now is a heating element that's heated either through your steam boilers or your hot water boilers and there's a maximum of air that moves through the building in these classrooms that come in heated and then gets exhausted the other type is a vertical unit ventilator and it sits in the corner of the

026room and you can see the the image on the upper right it tends to take less room but there's a larger opening louver that can be installed now you may have noticed that we've um completed not too long ago some science room renovations and in those facilities you have both unit ventilators horizontal and you also have some replacements on the vertical units okay so if we go to the next slide um the unit ventilator uh the the horizontal one um for cooling now in many cases when you're going to replace your unit ventilators or hv heating and ventilating system it's prudent to include the dx coils and the cooling elements so you can increase the air quality that you're trying to gain by providing proper cooling um this is not a luxury anymore this is

027a necessity every school building we designed today has air conditioning in it and a majority of districts have been chipping away at increasing their air quality and providing air conditioning in various ways in their existing facilities so now with the advent of very highly efficient systems you would have the heating system the horizontal unit ventilator and then on the roof you would have a split condenser and there are various types and depending on the building and the system we would design the specific condenser that is appropriate for uh that facility but basically the condenser would be on on the roof with refrigerant lines going to the unit ventilator plus the heating elements hot water or steam to that unit ventilator similar in concept to the system you have but new state-of-the-art equipment that would run

028those systems and those will be tied into individual thermostats in each room which is required by by code for schools and you can control that with some flexibility next slide shows the vertical um unit ventilator and in this system the condenser is in the unit itself so you don't have any rooftop units you can't put these in every uh room because of the architecture of your building uh and the way the louvres are in the windows we do not as architects and as you know members of your community you don't want to degrade the architecture of your buildings uh you have some very nice structures they're old um but well-designed uh and we want to respect the language of the buildings and we want to make sure that when we put any new louvers in

029it doesn't look like it was just added on later and looks looks terrible so so it's very important to incorporate it into the existing language of the design of the buildings next slide rodney now the other type of mechanical unit that we're looking at providing is the uh rooftop units and those serve the large spaces your gymnasiums uh your auditoriums and cafeterias uh these systems are quite large depending on the size of the room they are supported on your steel structure and they are basically ducted through the space providing the supply air conditioned there and also have the exhaust system within it now at this at this point um pre we started this as your superintendent mentioned um pre-coded uh we started working on this i believe it was around october of um and normally

030based on the state-of-the-art codes the code compliant the uh ashrae would require a filtration system of what's called a mirv 8 and that would be both in the unit ventilators and also the rooftop units so now we're post covered and we're in the middle of it ashrae has changed those requirements and have made recommendations uh that the merv filtration system should be increased to a 13 level now we can with the manufacturers uh providing the equipment for the unit ventilators we can reach and obtain filtration using merv 13 on those facil on those areas those applications um anything above that the motor sizes um for the unit ventilators are not capable of overcoming the static pressure of the filters but this meets the recommendation of ashrae in the state of new jersey post covet issues

031now on the rooftop units the manufacturers have been adjusting uh their systems and there's a uh the ductwork that would go into this has a chamber that you can include a hepa filter and the hepa filters are far superior to the merv filters uh it takes out smaller and smaller particles so we were able to um through the you know discussing it with the various manufacturers as these units would be specified new we would increase the capacity or the horsepower of the motors and the drives uh to accommodate that resistance that you would have in pulling the air through those merv filters and those would have to be changed on the on the uh schedule that the manufacturer recommends and there are pre-filters before it so you can kind of keep the hepa filters as

032clean as possible so there's a lot of different techniques and uses that we can do there so the so the important thing is um post culvert we are able to increase the recommend the recommended merv filtration to 13 on the majority of all your classrooms and we are able to increase that on the rooftop units to use to utilize hepa filters it is more expensive but when we develop the cost we also as we explained a while ago we have contingencies that we can utilize to absorb some of these additional figures um so so that is where we're planning on the two major types of units that would accommodate about 90 98 of your uh your individual areas the next slide is is something else that has been used a lot in the last eight

033months in school districts to also increase the i'll call it the efficiency um or effectiveness effectiveness is probably a better word of your filtration system and it's and it's called needlepoint bipolar ionization okay um i'm not a scientist um but basically all that is is that it it um charges the particles in the air and it occurs in nature where you have um flowing air and waterfalls things like that the the particles and the airs get either negatively or positively charged and this does that um in in the unit or in the classroom and what happens is as an example with the phil the filters certain things will go through the filter and some larger elements dust particles other things will get stuck on the filter so let's take virus viruses they're very small if

034their gets charged as as a positive and it will connect to something that's negative so it could connect to dust or a larger particle so the particles get bigger and then what happens is with your merv 13 or your hepa filter it gets blocked out to a degree nothing is 100 but it increases the effectiveness of the filter we would we would include these in the new unit ventilators as the design and as it's specified so there's very little increase in cost if you were going to retrofit existing there would be a cost but when you do it as an order and as part of the process we don't believe at this point there would be any substantial increase in the overall cost and it would be another element to increase the air quality uh

035for your facilities and we we believe in working with our uh energy consultant and our mechanical engineer this would be a proven thing to add uh at this particular time uh and there's no need to go back to the state for any any approvals this is this would be all incorporated okay now one important element is that um do not confuse the ionization this bipolar ionization with um ozone right ozone was kind of looked at years ago but ozone is not good for you this is not ozone at all so please if you've heard things about ozone and health issues you're correct um this is not that at all it's a completely different system um so before someone says oh this is not right we're not sure uh it's a completely different uh completely different

036animal okay this is ionization not not ozone and this system has to comply with what uh one of the testing of ul uh 2928 uh which further describes the function and the uh and the safety protocols of it okay so next next slide um is the uh the boiler upgrades so we're we're replacing boilers at school 2 3 12 15 the middle the two middle schools the high school and the administration building now you you have steam boilers and you also have hot water boilers uh so we we went through uh and we if you go to the next slide rodney um to the the photo to your um to the left is a i believe this one is at the high school and this says you know as you can see it's been maintained

037very well i mean i could show you pictures of other school districts you know everything's rusted out you know terrible shape but it has it has exceeded its life expectancy um and it's time to to prudently plan for the replacement what you don't want to do is have a boiler failure in the middle of the winter and then you're replacing it on an emergency basis which will cost you twice as much to replace so to the to the right is what the new state-of-the-art systems look like if you're going to replace a big we we call we call the one on the the left locomotives because they're almost as big and the newer ones are smaller and they're multiple you may have five of the smaller units to replace one of the bigger ones and

038they cycle one goes on when you need more the next one goes on and then when they fire again they alternate so it gives it gives a longer life to the new units and they're extremely extremely efficient in terms of energy usage right so i'm not showing every school but this is generally what what is being uh planned to be replaced the security entrances uh again recent years is very very very important we are as you can see from the list we're identifying basically all your facilities what's missing is school 17 school 17 has a a secure vestibule in the design already and you also have security at the at the board office uh so we're we're planning on putting security entrances if you go to the next slide um we're just gonna show a

039few of them there's there's two ways to do the security and we've we've kind of explored um practically every possibility in terms of the locations where you want to enter the schools in some cases the the um the design is simple you have enough room in in your vestibule now where we can do minor modifications and provide the contact and the door controls in some cases we have to put exterior additions those exterior conditions can be simple like a vestibule or they're a little more complicated because of the the building itself and the architecture and the respect of how the building would look so in this one we're showing um you know exterior vestibule that um you have a portico already if you go to the next slide um we're basically in filling that and

040put in ada access because part of some of this is also to provide ada access to the new secure vestibules if you go to the next one again this is uh very difficult uh to put in um because we have the existing column the colonnaded in the front uh if you go to the next slide um we prepared a 3d model where the ramp would come in and we place the new vestibule mimicking the window structure and the rhythm of the building within that overall portico without changing too much of the facade the next the next few slides show different areas this is at christopher columbus middle school the access is very limited uh and we would have to place a vestibule with a multiple stop elevator to gain access and this would be the

041security point to get into the building and these are some of the other ones at school eight as an example you have the existing lobby that can be uh used uh without building an addition and then at the top and the back you can see the various locations for this secured vestibule so we just wanted to show you not every school that was designed but show you the examination and the due diligence just to show that we've we've uh looked at every stone in terms of how best to uh place these uh elements both in terms of aesthetics but also more importantly uh the cos the most cost effective manner in maintaining your your needs and this one is relatively easy it's within the existing vestibule at school 14. so go to the next slide

042rounding so your auditorium upgrades we've done a few of these already through your capital budget we would include in the referendum uh school three the middle school uh at the christopher columbus and also woodrow wilson if you go to the next slide uh these are some photographs of the uh the existing facility and then if you um go to the next slide this is an example this is basically a 3d model of similar uh where you replace the flooring the seating uh you paint the walls and you put in new ceilings and lighting you can get a very dramatic different effect of a state-of-the-art auditorium now here as i mentioned you would do this the seats new seats uh flooring wall lighting and ceilings with acoustical uh grade material to enhance the acoustics of the

043of the facility so you also have that has been included in the referendum is the toilet room upgrades and and some of them are original to the building so again 17 is in is in good you know is in good shape so we've we've looked at all of them and the primary reason for this is um one is for uh efficiency but the other one is for ada americans with disability access uh to the to the each toilet room um we call them group toilets because there's more than one toilet in a room uh if you go to the next one these are some examples of the conditions many of the facilities do not meet ada based on the fixtures and these aren't the worst toilets but you could start to see the age and

044the wear just from the normal use of the facilities the next slide is after you um basically do the gutting them out with ada compliant fixtures um very efficient use of materials and what's important too is that these materials are extremely durable and very easily maintained that's a key thing um for because you want these to last another 100 years but also in the renovation is the lighting and also the ventilation and many of the bathrooms you have you don't have ventilation or a very minimal ventilation because years ago all they did was exhaust but you want to increase that like you're doing with the rest of the building you want to provide the proper air changes ventilation and supply so that would also be included in the renovation of the uh of the toilet

045facilities the um the other components um that's included is the um expansion at the stadium uh for toilets and also your uh weight room so these these are photographs of the existing conditions in your existing space now this is common we as your superintendent mentioned we do a tremendous amount of school work in the state of new jersey and as programs develop over the years they have older buildings they use every square foot of the building for particular uses and they find very innovative ways to repurpose spaces and that's normal um is it the most desirable uh no uh it's not but um you have someone i'm sorry someone will pick that up um so if you go to the next slide rodney this is the plan for the expansion so the plan to the

046to the left shows that the track that was redone several years ago the beige area shows the renovation to the um men's and women's toilet which will be similar to the other photos that i showed you and to the to the upper uh right you you have your weight room and the blue is the expansion so we're expanding the weight room and renovating it okay so the next slide shows what that facility would look like this was a very simple addition similar to yours renovated the existing very simple construction but just the use of materials to give a bright safe airy place that you could use for weight training for your sports uh facilities so that's what uh the new project would look like the um the last uh scope of work would be the

047new artificial turf field um at uh woodrow wilson this is a this is a photograph of your existing grass field uh which has limitations because of the extensive use these fields just wear out so obviously when you provide artificial turf field you can use them constantly so you get more utilization from the fields okay uh the next photo shows basically the scope this is the property um you see the baseball diamond the infield outfield would be artificial turf and also fitting in a modified soccer field also artificial turf now included in the scope of work uh would be your um the bleachers the the dugout benches and also a new small field house the field house would include toilets some storage and and place for concessions uh so the next photo shows um the upper

048right shows your your stadium turf field whether it's baseball soccer it's the same but the lower left would show the type of field house that would be planned a very simple structure that would house the elements that i talked about and then throughout the district um there's also security cameras upgrades uh equipment um and upgraded technology infrastructure and that would be uh incorporated at all the schools uh in addition to the uh overall costing of the project is any elements that must be demolished or removed prior to the work that that's being done so the um based on our experience in schools and working uh with a lot of contractors uh and our engineers um we looked at um each of the elements and provided a developed a matrix for the number and the type

049and the intensity of the renovation and developed a total project cost now the the project cost includes not only the hard construction cost but it also includes all of the fees bonding legal fees [Music] construction management fees all of the elements that you need to do this uh it also includes a contingency uh which is proper planning for any unforeseen conditions that may occur especially when you're dealing with buildings of this age so all of those costs based on our years of experience have been incorporated into the overall cost and these elements are required by the state department of education so your total project cost which what we call the referendum cost is 60 168 million dollars and change right and that that's a big number but it's it's um it's interesting all of the

050elements that we now what we have to do is we have to provide our schematic plans to the state department of education for approval prior to the district going out for a referendum now they look at these costs and they look at the scope of work um i i have to say that [Music] as submitted 95 and a half percent of your projects were what they call eligible for funding okay so the state department of education agrees with you that virtually everything you're doing here is eligible for funding on their formula so that gives you some assurance that you're just not doing a lot of things that wouldn't be necessary in department of education's eyes okay now what's what's important to know is that the state um gives you debt service um and that's equivalent

051to approximately a third of the cost so in effect it's an annual appropriation but over the life of this it would be like receiving 54 million dollars almost 55 million dollars a third the state department of education the state of new jersey will pay a third of this overall project cost where if you did these as you have been doing it over the years when you replace a boiler or replace a rooftop unit you're paying for 100 of it through your capital your annual capital budget okay now that is a lot of money sounds like a lot of money um but based on um a 25-year bond um at the current uh bond rate um in a and based on the average assessed home this would be two hundred and three dollars a year or

052approximately seventeen dollars a month and bond council can discuss that in line or you know in addition to this um so those are the those are the costs and those are the um the state aid which is extremely important um we received what's called a preliminary eligible cost from the state and they did not include two elements at uh woodrow wilson uh and the in the stadium project we went back to the state your superintendent wrote a letter and we argued the point that this is educational and they gave us back some of the elements which increased it from 95 and a half to approximately 98 eligible so virtually everything is eligible in this in this program which is important for your community to know that the state agrees with you saying that all of

053these things are needed within your district um now timeline next slide now we have submitted all the applications to the state we have received as i mentioned the preliminary eligible cost they came back and revised it the board accepted it and they sent back your final eligible costs which means you are okay to go out for your referendum this was planned a little earlier uh but with covered everything got pushed back and we're at the point now uh where the next time we could do a referendum is in is in april so i just want to go over very quickly the timeline because that's that's important uh with a successful referendum this april there's a period of time where we have to do the actual construction documents for bidding so we anticipate based on the

054overall scope of what we have to do that we would be able to bid this uh in december of the end of december january of 22 uh with an award um in approximately in january right we would need based on the scope of work and the phasing we would need two almost two full years um to incorporate it where you would have everything completed in our estimation in september of 23 you would have this work completed now that doesn't mean that nothing is completed until that time this project would be phased and it would be designed and phased and sequenced with the understanding that these are occupied buildings and safety is the utmost importance during construction so in the documents not only is it the hardware and the specs and the equipment and everything else

055but it instructs the contractor very specifically when he can access buildings um where he can work where he can't work where he has to do something in the morning and come back in the afternoon or this or that or evening so it's spelled out very logistically so that is a proper and safe environment for your students and if it inconveniences the contractor that's that's the way it is and it needs to be incorporated in the plans so they can price it so be assured that that these things are looked at we've also included in the scope of work a separate independent construction management firm for fees involved in this um that they would be involved not only with us on the site but they're there every day um there's someone on on the site while

056every time there's a contractor on site so that that gives another layer of uh supervision and guidance uh for for for the district so although you see these long timelines we may finish toilets and you use them we may be finishing classrooms with the new unit ventilators and then you just occupy them typically you get a swing space you give up three classrooms they do the work and then those students come back the next three classrooms you find an alternate location they get done and then so it cycles so they daisy chain it and ultimately by the end of uh by september of 23 you should have everything completed so please don't feel that everything is you know in a big uproar there are components that get worked on over time thank you um mr

057dekara for that uh very thorough presentation before we open it up for comments and questions i have to reiterate the importance of the state aid for this proposal every single one of these projects needs to be done now we can do that out of our annual budget it'll take us 20 years or we can do it through a referendum [Music] where the state is going to pick up a third of the funding the state is going to give us 55 million dollars towards these projects and we have been very careful with the school district's budget long before i got here in july 2019 this board has been very conservative with raising the citizens of clifton's taxes last year uh this board and my administration proposed a zero percent tax increase we later were cut 5.3

058million dollars in state aid we had an opportunity to come back and raise taxes and this board did not want to do that the year prior to me coming i believe the taxes were raised point zero eight percent so the point is the bond referendum opens up a door to a new form of income for clifton it will allow us to do projects by september of 2023 that otherwise would take upwards of 20 years or maybe not get done at all new state aid is going to cover one-third of these costs which are all important for safety efficiency and modernization every single one of these projects if we pay for them out of our annual budget we pay a hundred percent but if we use a referendum and a bond to pay for them they

059get done faster and we pay only two thirds so as i said a year ago this board was about to take action to put this bond proposal on the ballot kova delayed that but there's light at the end of the tunnel meanwhile our buildings are getting older now we have a full plan for educating the people of clifton about before the vote on april 20th we want people to understand this referendum we want people to understand why a referendum we want people to understand the the financial aspects of a referendum and why it's such a good deal for the city of clifton the process started with research and consideration it got delayed by covert and now we're picking up that timeline with a board vote tonight to resume the process we do impis and anticipate

060a public forum in the first week of march and there will be a lot of other literature and information on our website beginning tomorrow for anybody who has any questions about this referendum i encourage you to please go to our website there will also be a a place on our website for you to ask questions that will be replied directly to you with the appropriate answer so at this time i'm going to turn the meeting back over to mr smith mr president and if the board members have any questions for either our architects our bond council uh our engineers also here or any other questions for me or the administration thank you okay board members are there any questions or comments we'll uh we could start um at the uh uh mr awad we'll start

061uh with you if you have any questions or comments and we'll just work our way around thank you mr joseph that was a wonderful presentation it was very you know inflation you know it looks really great and hopefully if this referendum does get passed it can improve the quality of education for our students especially our facilities i just had a couple of questions uh for the air duct systems that um you if you know does uh move forward um i know you're talking about the hepa filters and the murph filters um was there ever a chance of you know i have a little mechanical background you know some systems they use um what do you call them like aerologic and honeywell and stuff use like those uv lightings for uh like a filtering to kill

062you know bacterias and they kind of propose quality there was that ever an option to put into the uh the air duct systems like the roof uh top units and for them and the second question was for the gymnasiums and like the bigger uh rooms i know we're using a rooftop system uh for heating and air conditioning uh will those units have some type of humidifier or added humidity to the air because sometimes central air uh when it comes to heat is very dry and you know maybe some kids in our districts have uh certain health conditions or that would kind of uh be affected by from that extremely dry air like bloody noses dry skin or etc stuff like that i was just curious you know you know if these renovations do include those

063and those are just my two buttons yeah the uh the rooftops would have uh would control the humidity uh and it's also related to the proper size of the equipment uh if it's if it's too too large as an example if there's too much tonnage if you're familiar with mechanical systems and it cools the air too fast it won't take the humidity out of it so you'll get very humid spaces so it's the proper design of the tonnage and there is humidification in it in the opposite direction in terms of the uv lighting our engineer can kind of add to this but um we did look at it but you know there are potential problems if if one of the uvs break uh there's there's mercury in that you don't want to have a mercury

064uh release in a school um we uh we specifically did not include it um in that there are other ways to to provide filtration and that those are the ones we selected and that that's primarily the reason why we didn't use that i don't know if you want to add anything kevin um the only thing i would add is that joe is correct you know we look at systems for of various reasons you know obviously cost function and you know long-term maintenance um uv lights need replacing periodically uh they're they're usually nine thousand hours there's eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours in a year so you're gonna be replacing those every year joe uh the the use of safety measures are very stringent with uvs we evaluated the bipolar ionization systems and we like

065those because not only do they also help the filtration they actually put the positive and negative ions into the occupied spaces as opposed to uv you have to get the air drawn through the hvac system to kill the viruses and you know the bipolar they have documented tests that has actually rendered the kovid 19 inoperable so there is information on that online okay mr wodzick good thank you very much okay uh miss bassford next any questions um i'd just like to know if the superintendent can answer this well because of this people in the community that are have questions and they want to know when they're going to be able to weigh in and are you going to have any open public forums for the residents to be able to speak about um their concerns

066absolutely uh mrs basford um so the first thing citizens are going to be anyone with questions can go to our website to see the faqs uh they certainly can attend a board meeting uh and to learn more information but we will also have definitely uh during the first week in march a public forum where we'll review all this and answer any questions and i would venture to assume we'll do that more than we'll do that more than one time plus there will be literature sent out um via social media via blackboard um and i believe there will be a a mailing so we're going to try to get the word out uh as extensively as we possibly can and also on the website somebody will be able to just type in a question via email

067and get a response within a reasonable amount of time so we'll we'll advertise all of that thank you um miss beltran no i think every question i've had has been answered in the previous sessions including this one thank you thank you uh miss uh danny sorry i'm having things with hitting the mute um no thank you um all my questions are answered thank you mr daley uh yes thank you um uh i don't have any questions because i've been through this very thoroughly but i do like to speak a little bit to the public here on this issue um as the superintendent has said we need to do these things the schools and as mr de caro said schools are not falling apart but we have very old systems here 60 70 years old the

068universe been holding together you know they need to be redone they're old they're inefficient so uh on a broader scale this work needs to be done it isn't like oh there's luxury if we don't use the referendum this is the best deal this district can possibly get in moving these improvements forward to do it in an alternative we're going to have to take it directly out of the taxpayers these these things need to be done and if you do this piece meal the economies of buying a piece meal every year things go up we can settle the entire project rather quickly at uh reasonable prices which are out there now also the interest rate besides the one that's a little bit bigger than one-third of the money that we'll get from the state and we

069do not get any other funding from the state unless we do a referendum so if we win lone wolfed it you're paying the whole freight here and it's going to be more expensive because of the individualistic of doing the projects separately and the interest rate let me talk about that um it's it's i think our bond council will tell you it's going to be like in a low two percent um it may be even lower uh i'll give you an example um my son just bought a house as an individual and his interest rate is 2.37 that's not a tax accept rate that that is a taxable rate so when we go out and i'm sure because we have we have an excellent rating here the the financing is going to be highly favorable and

070it's not going to get any better than it is right now um you see that as the federal reserve and everything are keeping the rates virtually at zero at the federal rate so i expect to have a rate around two maybe we might be surprised and be under 2 so the savings to the tax pay payer in doing these projects is going to be incredible you do not have a better opportunity than right now to do this some people some people will also talk about well the air conditioner is luxury and if you listen to mr de caro's presentation we're replacing these ventilators because they are they've passed way past their useful life when you put do the hva when they do the air conditioning component it's part of that you're not doing a whole

071separate uh it's not like the air conditioning is separate it's incorporated into this so you have an economy of purchase here in terms of getting a unit that does both functions now on the on the operational i don't have an exact number but we're going to do windows we'll be replacing energy efficient water heaters the whole nine yards we've already started this stuff and we've been doing it through our capital reserve fund the capital reserve fund is nowhere big enough to attack the entire district those operational savings will also be significant so you not only save on our capital purchase but we'll be able to control our uh operation and maintenance dollars a lot better so those will be uh benefits in our school budget uh i've been on the board i've been on every

072budget since 2009 our overalls as the superintendent says our overall tax increase over those years have been under two percent and recently we've been uh down under one percent and even a zero for last year um that's because we had increased state aid but that's only for our operations we're going to continue to see that but that's going to end soon because uh it's i think we top out in another five years we're supposed to be all get what we're entitled to over the next five years so you don't have a better option than this if you pass it up it's going to cost you a lot more money in your taxes so i think we need to take advantage of this i'm a taxpayer and my hacks are going up but i look at

073it as an investment it's an investment in your city that's going to pay dividends both from the education and the fiscal standpoint and i'll leave my comments alone for that right now thank you mr kenoma my my alphabet skills are not too good here i'm sorry i uh i went to d before i hit c i'm sorry not a problem uh i do have a few questions um based on the covid changes uh i know you presented the bathrooms which we know we definitely need to change is there any way we could ha is that set up for a touchless bathroom i know some bathrooms are where you can there's like double doors where you walk in so you don't have to open any door handles or you don't have to touch anything in the

074bathroom is that set up in this fashion for this project we can put power activated doors in you do have to touch a pad uh because other other than that you have a sensor and the doors will be opening and closing all the time uh so you can put power activated uh doors on it uh and when you walk up to a faucet and put your hands under it uh they can turn on so it's just a matter of specifying that fixture sometimes in schools that can be uh troublesome because kids play with it but it can be done yes okay and you showed two different unit ventilators one was the horizontal one was the vertical and and i know i i i assume the vertical is really more space saving than anything else but

075does it flow the same does it have the same airflow does it turn over the air in the room the same both of them yeah it does um it has the same airflow on it it's slightly different because one is from a low point of view uh the other one uh blows the air from the top and it actually pulls in the return air from the bottom the re we like that unit a lot basically because it does save space in the room um but it's not um it's not acceptable in in some situations uh because the louver is much higher so it's typically put into a window so where it can work we would put that in but where it would um kind of you know upset the architecture or the elevations or you

076would have to cut a big hole um we would use the regular uh horizontal ones so that vertical unit does that do the inverse between winter winter and summer months where it's going to pump the ac out the top and then the heat at the bottom no no no the air flow is the same but it works but it heats and cools and there's a heat pump element in it as well and uh i know you showed the timeline of installs is there any way that we could pull the uni ventilators to the front of that oh yeah well what's going to happen um is that um if you if you think of your you know a whole corridor of classrooms we're not going to shut down a whole wing we're going to get a

077because you're not going to start this right at the summer uh you're going to be starting while school's in place so and we've done a lot of these and what happens is you're going to utilize a space whether it's a gym or whether it's a cafeteria or auditorium and you're going to pull out as many classrooms as you can let's say you can afford to have three classrooms vacant for three days or four days you're going to do the work on those three classrooms from start to finish and then those children will go back into that classroom right and then you're going to take the next three and do that and then the next three and the next three so you're gonna daisy chain we will group those into wings so what will happen you'll

078get three done three dome three done in three weeks you'll have maybe half the wing done and in a month you'll have the whole wing done and that's how you will then finish the job it'll follow through the rest of it and then you'll you'll keep occupying the building as you do the work so that's unless you can say joe i'm going to take this half of the building and move it or put it over here and you and the contractor has free reign to do it he'll get it done a lot faster but that's impractical so it will be done and over the course you may have some schools finished before others just because of the size but the overall timeline will take you know the two the two school years okay depending on

079depending on the work depending on the school i'm sorry depending on the school you might be able to do more than three classrooms at a time maybe just as an example but but during the um during the design we will work very closely with your superintendent and the principals to go through the logistics and come up with a overall master plan on scheduling and that'll be incorporated into the into the specifications and the contractor has to conform to those elements okay and the other thing was the air conditioners now they help with mold issues as well i know we had issues in previous summers where we had mold in certain buildings and certain schools if we if we run those air conditioners at a lower temperature obviously that's going to help with our mold issues

080correct well if you if you have mold you have to remove it what it does is it it it it takes out the uh the humidity in the air so when when designed and run properly um it will it will absorb it'll take out the uh the moisture if it's oversized it'll cool the air down before the moisture comes out and you have to run the unit longer so it's a it's a element of balancing the new control systems and the units so that they run properly in the right sequence but yes when you have air conditioning and heating um you will you eliminate the uh potential for for mold unless there's other elements involved leaks or something else somewhere in the building okay and then just to piggyback off of what uh mr delhi

081said um you know this is something we definitely have to do we've been talking about it for a long time and we all know that right now the the rates to borrow money are very low and based on this money if you take 55 million dollars and you divided by the 25 years of this that service before you come up with 2.2 million dollars so that's 2.2 million additional dollars we're going to have in our district over the next 25 years that's a lot of money that's a whole lot of money you can't pass up a deal like that you're never going to see something like this again and these are things that we would have to do anyway no matter what we're going to have to redo the bathrooms we're going to talk obviously

082about universal leaders now you know we with coven with whatever else is coming in the future we have to future improve our schools and make them safe for people to go i think this is a no-brainer there's also a bill out there now it talks about giving funding back for for ventilators and doing things around around ventilation and the good part about that bill is it also allows for at the moment it allows for if you've done something prior to that signing they're going to give you the money for it so uh for me this is a no-brainer let's get on this now let's get these vendors in now let's get them locked and loaded for the uh for the dates before the rest of the schools go after them and let's just get this

083done it's something we've been talking about for a very long time i think it's now's the time now's the time to shrink thank you mr kanova mr casper uh all of my questions have been answered thank you thank you vice president abu drabo thank you mr smith president smith um i saw in the chat box i believe miss passport had a question and mr white had a question but um uh i was interested actually mr white's question which was how loud are these uh ventilators in the classrooms mr takara they meet all the standards for uh decibel rating uh the uh with the universe the horizontal unit ventilators the condenser is on the roof uh so you have a you have a velocity you have a slight noise in the in the air moving through

084the the vents in the uh the vertical ones the condenser is in the unit itself but it has a cabinet with four inches of sound acoustical insulation uh and uh they're they're when they first came out they were relatively noisy uh they're in probably the fifth generation uh and they they are they're very quiet uh and if you if anybody if any board member wants to actually see them uh and hear them uh we have several schools that have been incorporated in in the area uh that you could take a look at or at least call the superintendent or the business administrator and ask them how they uh how they like it uh but absolutely that's that's an important element uh and they wouldn't get approvals for those systems if it reached a certain decibel

085level for for classrooms and what's the power usage um on these type of machines um i mean i'm assuming you're in 2021 but i don't want to assume that these would be eco-friendly and we talk about gold green between our between our board members in this district and moving forward in 2021 um what's the power usage on these kevin do you have uh do you have that information now um no but um you know like a typical classroom would have probably a four ton unit um we would usually specify a conventional two so it's not going to be running at full capacity all the time the earlier conversation joe had was with the variable refrigerant flow there are some technologies that you can group a number of the unit ventilators together and they uh it's

086exactly what uh what you can call it in first variable refrigerant flow they can match the load much uh closer so they those are seer rated higher than you know your conventional um air conditioners like in your house the fan the fan itself modulates so it's just not one speed you know when it's only needing a certain draw it it reduces and uh volume and then it increases so that saves energy as well okay thank you um and to the public um and my board members can can say this i i was on the fence about this and you know i asked my questions and we've had discussions in the past and i see it i see where the numbers are i see where the percentages are it is time to strike i mean some

087as somebody who went to this district as many others on this board as many of you and the public who have gone to school here imagine how bad the bathrooms were how certain aspects were when you were there now think 10 15 20 30 years later what do you tell kids who are in first grade second grade third grade who are going to be in the high school in upcoming years you know seven eight years now are you gonna say sorry we had the opportunity we're not doing it but at the same time we don't just look at the classrooms clifton has we've always complained in clifton that kids leave the district that they go to tech they go to other places the ones who have money and put money into their districts and not

088you know forget about taking out bonds or referendums we have the opportunity to have a third paid for us with low interest and the reason i i led with that is because when i think about education i think about education in the classroom and on the field now this is not my way to say hey don't forget athletics but you know a lot of a lot of students drive as teens and you know being young and and having working families is sports sports keeps them busy whether it's hockey football baseball soccer softball whatever it may be lacrosse and in order to keep these kids in our district and to keep them engaged and interested in sports they have to do well in the classroom so i fully believe that athletics and classroom go hand in

089hand so why am i saying this because many of you and i'm going to assume this because i've heard this in the past say well we only focus about athletics in this district not about education well this is our chance to do both you know when i played football in the district that locker room was atrocious it was disgusting i don't even want to imagine what it looks like now i would love superintendent roberto to see what that locker room looks like today because from those pictures that we've seen from mr dakira as a parent i wouldn't want my kids stepping in because that's just a lawsuit ready to happen so if a weight falls on somebody and we got to make a little more you know a little more avail to students to be

090able to practice and excel not only mentally but physically as well in the weight room and on the field so i i definitely see where this is going mr dicaro i appreciate the whole presentation um and for answering my questions in the past as well as you dr robert tells yourself i'm definitely a favor and i appreciate it mr smith may i just piggyback on that comment please okay thank you i agree with everything uh that mr agrable just said regarding athletics but it it is more than that because when we talk about the field renovation at woodrow all of our students will use that right we're going to use that for phys ed they're going to use that for field day activities in addition because it's a turf field it can be used all

091year round and it can be used by the community can be used by the clifton recreation department there's going to be a soccer field and a baseball field there's going to be toilets where we have visitors and guests that come to games they have to go into the school building to utilize the restroom which is a security issue um and as for the uh the weight room don't forget the weight room expansion also includes an upgrade to all of the toilets at the stadium and those of you have been to the stadium and have seen what those look like we're just we're repurposing that whole space and it's going to be so that's something you know say you know community toilets but it is something that the entire community will use so it's really not

092just about student athletes it certainly will benefit student athletes but these are things that that will impact the the whole community so i just wanted to to add on to that but i do agree with everything you said and i'm sorry it's mr mr president smith since we didn't move on yet can i just throw one more thing in um because there's in to to jump on the dr robert josie's uh coattail he mentioned her over at woodrow dr roberto can you tell us why we're putting in turf and what's wrong with the woodrow field oh gosh when i first took a tour of the district and uh mr malayhi our athletic director took me to the varsity baseball field i really thought he was joking i i couldn't believe that that was the field

093that our students uh utilized it was in such disrepair it was to me embarrassing to me it was really embarrassing and more than embarrassing it was unsafe uh what the turf field does it it it allows universal use uh all year round with the exception of snow and even when it does snow there's there's a way to remove snow from turf fields but it allows it allows more use right it allows the the community to use it allows our sports teams to use it allows phys ed classes to use it allows to have um field day activities out there so i think that's in that's that's an important piece of this it's not just for one group of people and have we had multiple flooding issues there that delayed sports games and just made the

094render the field useless yeah that's one of the reasons for the the the flip of the field um when the uh when the architects looked at it it's it's going to be better because a light rain there has postponed uh events and games and um so yeah listen to to me this is a this is a win-win for the entire community thank you uh miss bassford you had uh another question yeah um while we're upgrading some things in the classrooms one thing that drives me crazy has driven me crazy and i have addressed with the facility committee for years is that we do not have classrooms when they the janitors are cleaning up at night they're not sensor driven the lighting mechanism is and it drives me crazy when you're driving down colfax avenue and

095you see uh clifton high dr uh lit up like luna park for the younger people that don't know what i'm talking about google it luna park was a very bright um park uh during the turn of the century when they got lights lighting in and i'm old so i could say that but my worry is about if we're gonna if we're gonna worry about stuff like that why can't we go energy efficient with the change of of a light bulb a switch i don't know how how um um cost effective that will be or how expensive it would be but if we're starting to do some upgrades and if we could squeeze that in that would be i've been bob that's been bothering me for years because i don't like we we have them at

096work you walk in a room lights go on lights go off it's and it saves money on our bills and you know we do pay very costly bills for uh different things so i'd like to see that my other question is uh people were all asking me today i was getting phone calls prior to the meeting what other conditions going to be in the classroom when the air conditioners that unit is turned on and we have like a 9 500 degree day will it be comfortable that's what i want to ask because now we don't have that opportunity to have uh um air conditioning and to give the students a learnable atmosphere so uh mr uh through you mr superintendent to uh joe de cara is will it be a comfortable setting for our students

097once those units are installed that's my question thank you oh absolutely i mean what happens is the uh the size how you size the air conditioning unit in any location whether it's in your gyms or whether it's an individual classroom are going to be based on the square footage the volume the height of the ceiling and also the number of occupants because the occupants also produce heat um in in that and more importantly is the air changes the number of students require a certain amount of air changes so based on that that period of time and the amount of air that's moving you have to then size both the heating coil uh and also the air conditioning uh and that's you've heard the engineer mentioned tonnage you have a two ton unit four ton unit

098and typically a 750 square foot room with 24 students in it will require anywhere between three and a half to four tons so that those are sized and that has the capacity to bring to maintain the temperature now if you have a 103 degree day outside will it be warmer than 73 degrees potentially but it's not going to be 90 degrees just like your house you know central air so it'll be it'll be comfortable based on temperature and also humidity okay so my my question then would be to the superintendent is that one when um the occupancy for the rooms uh be that's a key factor because ever you know with uh living beings we take up a lot of space and and my father was an hvac guy for his whole life my brother

099is too so i know everything about tonnage i know about how i take temperature differentials so are we going to give the um are we going to make sure that that information is given to the architecture that has already been supplied to them on the occupancy of each room because i'm really because we do tend at the high school to have bigger classroom sizes and that's where my concern would be to make sure that it's comfortable for the students there as well yeah mrs basford i and mr dicaro correct me if i'm wrong but i believe that all goes into calculations when you did the preliminary studies but then when you actually do the construction plans that's something that you in that you look at right absolutely yeah that's that's the driving force thank you

100mrs bassford another important thing to add to what you're saying is forget the you know 103 degree day on and that might happen in may or june or september um having new heating ventilation and ac in buildings allows us to expand opportunities in the summer and we we also know that when we return to in-person instruction and when life gets back to what we consider some sense of normalcy we're going to want to do some ketchup and we're going to want to run summer programs and we're going to want to expand after school thing so you know having the new hvac is going to help educationally and academically well that that would that was my point because um mr abu dhabi said about the sports and that we focus on the sports but this overall

101with changing these systems will impact every single person that stepped foot now building it's not only the students it's the staff it's the teachers it's every single person and that they will be able to learn in a better environment that's the most important part to me because you all know when those rooms get too hot you're in a setting you cannot think and it's just it's it's horrible condition so i'm very happy and then i'm supporting this as well but those are the questions that i was getting today from a lot of people uh mr wad we'll just uh do a couple more questions here and we'll move on mr wad thank you uh mr um couple questions i know that we're as we go through these renovations and everything uh do these renovations also

102include for example like the framing in the windows because i know a lot of our schools are extremely old and you know uh insulation like these windows you know they're probably worn and torn and you know just tossing in brand new air conditioning and heating systems sometimes you know these old uh not energy efficient windows from 50 60 plus years ago they're not really up to code and because you know as we try to go green and clifton and we want to move forward with all the renovations in general do these include you know the windows uh when it comes to our plumbing our lighting and everything are they eco-friendly like led lights for example in the classrooms uh those all take into consideration when we're doing these uh renovations uh no the lighting is

103not uh the window replacement was not included uh there's you can you can weather strip them but but in terms of the overall scope that was discussed and decided on there was no window replacement or lighting at this time there are other programs you can use for lighting uh retrofit that can be done independently as mr uh uc just said uh you know this referendum is is just some key areas that we feel that that needs to be upgraded but that doesn't mean the district stops uh taking care of our buildings uh we've been upgrading windows in in our buildings for for years uh christopher columbus was done last year um almost every uh school had some type of window uh change over the past 10 years so you know it's not just a referendum

104that's going to deal with this we're still going to do our normal maintenance on buildings you have to it's just that's an excellent point that i was going to to also share just last year we did the brand new windows at christopher columbus a referendum allows us to use our money that we have in capital reserve for other projects like windows like addressing the lighting issues that mrs basford brought up and i don't want to veer off here but mr dicaro at some point we can talk about um you know a plan to do the lighting issues because there are rebates and grants and other things with solar that you could kind of do out there that's not for tonight but but what mr smith is saying he's right it doesn't stop the work of

105what our facility committee does all the time there's a plan to replace windows going two three four years in advance and so um this referendum though we believe i believe fixes the critical needs in our district right now uh mr daley i just had a question he'd like to know uh kevin if you could tell us what the average energy rating of the new hva units would be uh yeah new jersey has ashrae 90.1 is our energy code and we have to follow the strict guidelines for instance anything lower than 6500 h's is approximately five tons that the minimum sear is 14 seer for that and then there's so many other uh you know programs uh not programs pages of every piece of equipment we have to meet those requirements uh you know rooftops uh

106energy recovery units they're they're all in yeah i would say the rooftops are a lower seer um but uh you know that that's what we have to meet the minimum thank you uh mr canon the last question and then i'll just make my mind short and we will move on um so i just have a question a statement so the question i had is are there air tests that we take after installations to ensure we we uh comply with those standards there there are balancing reports that are done after after systems like this uh balancing company comes in uh and they they measure the uh cfm rate uh so yes there's an independent testing lab that that confirms that you meet the cfm rating and the air volume changes in the units okay and and

107the other the other comment i had um i always look to try and have students involved um and especially when there's a way to do some sort of professional development given like something on their resume i was wondering if we have design students would they be able to have some input into like the color or the layout the setup or something in in the school so that they could say you know i i designed that bathroom or i designed that whatever that is the color the layout if that's something we could possibly look into that's a great point we've done that in other districts um we get students involved whether engineering or architecture or interiors we show them what we do and we we give them design charrettes um to get them involved absolutely and

108we we also do programs too um during the construction i mean some people look at the construction as as a big headache but in schools we look at it as an opportunity and we will do programs uh hopefully everybody's back in school at some point in time uh we can do we can do discussions and and uh show students what we do how we do it get them involved almost like a mentoring program rodney watkins did mentoring program for four years over in t-neck exactly that element so we would you know me i love to talk so we we'd love to be involved with your students uh any way we can so i love that idea i love that idea can one of those templates be a picture of dr robert tosie on the wall

109somewhere when you walk in he already put that in the specs okay i uh uh i had some questions but i'm gonna move this along uh we spent a lot of time on this i think tonight dr robertosi wanted to make this an introductory period there are gonna be many more questions from the board many more questions through facilities many more questions from the public when we have open forums we just wanted to get this open presentation out to you to show you where this referendum is going and i know board members will have other questions after tonight and you'll be able to address those uh in the process um i just i just have to make a comment about the uh well first i want to ask you the the elevator at columbus is

110just for the security vestibule there's we're not we're not no no it gains access it gains access to the other floors it's just how we have access we put we put it there right that was my that was my question absolutely yes um just an example uh of why we don't like to get into situations where we don't keep up with our facilities and the the field that woodrow is a prime example when i was on the board back in the board put money into um that field surprisingly enough new drainage system went in um the whole setup of the field was put in and it was supposed to be upgraded along the years and i guess with tax keeping tax increases low and things got put behind and behind well as dr roberto said

111now you're left at uh 2021 with what you see up at woodrow wilson and we as a town deserve better than that our kids deserve better than that our community deserves better than that dr robitosi hit it on the nose when when other teens came to that field they laughed they actually laughed i was there numerous times when they laughed and said this possibly can't be the varsity field and clifton deserves better than that we we are a town that cares about our facilities we care about our kids we care about education we can't let that happen folks we can't let that happen again so there'll be many more opportunities to ask questions and i thank the board for their questions and i thank um uh joe and i thank uh kevin for uh for

112being here and uh answering all the questions and uh we'll be seeing a lot more of you so thank you very much our pleasure thank you uh thank our bond council uh mr smith although we didn't we didn't have any questions for them tonight there there will be some in the future i'm sure of that absolutely our pleasure thank you [Music] um i know you guys would love to to stay for the rest of the meeting you're more than welcome but to leave this is a great opportunity to cut out so thank you for coming tonight thank you thank you thanks thank you uh dr robitazi would you like to address um yes sir you thank you mr president um at this time we're going to move into a discussion and two short presentations on

113return to in-person instruction and covet 19 in the clifton community so at this time it really is my great honor and i i can't tell you how appreciative i am that um clifton's health officer john beagle has joined us tonight and someone who i've grown very very fond of and we've spent a lot of time on zoom meetings over the last year uh lael helwani who is the health uh health and health educator for the clifton board of health i asked them to join us tonight without hesitation uh they said yes and lael is going to just give the board uh in the community who's watching a brief overview of covet 19 in clifton what the status is and what the numbers look like and then i'm going to go into a very brief four

114slide presentation on what the plans are for a return to in-person instruction uh eventually so leal if i can i'll turn it over to you if you could share your screen all right can everybody see that yes okay great one second trying to share my screen but yeah there we go okay okay um so good evening everybody uh as dr robert tosie said my name is lael helwani and i am the health educator for the clifton health department um i actually just want to start by thanking dr robert tozie for well and the board of education as well for allowing us to come and speak about the current situation with covenanting in the city of clifton um so i have put together a couple of slides that sort of gives you a sense of where

115we're at as many of you know we do put out a press release in case information updates twice a week tuesdays and fridays i'll get into that a little bit later in the presentation but the next couple of slides are a snapshot of what the numbers have looked like over the last month uh so how did we do the last month um unfortunately we have had a total of 1457 additional cases and we took the data and we broke it down by age group i did highlight the 0 to 19 age group being that that's probably what we are most concerned with and you can see how it compares to the other age groups so i want to highlight something and it's that the 0 to 19 age group actually did have the second highest

116number of cases in the last month and it's really not too far from the 30 to age group which did have the most cases we're really just talking about a seven case difference as you see in that note in the bottom this does include ten cases that were in the system that were listed as having an unknown age um and the reason for that was because it wasn't immediately clear on the lab results um they weren't properly entered into the system and so we're still in the process of obtaining that information so 10 were left unknown and of course as we have that information we'll we'll update this um so this slide is just kind of a visual of what i just showed you again you can see that 0 to 19 age group is

117not too far off from the 30 to 39 age group which to me is kind of telling um so going back a month you know the 252 cases may not sound like a huge deal but as one of my colleagues mentioned uh you know in a conference earlier uh you have to think about the ripple effect 252 that's the total number of cases that we've had among school age you know school-age children um but you have to think about how many individuals were considered close contacts of these individuals how many individuals were quarantined and then how many went on to become a positive case and the cycle may continue all over again so it's just something to think about you know the ripple effect of this all right so this slide is just showing the

118percentage breakdown for these age groups over the last month so in maroon that's the 0-19 age group which comprised of about 17 percent of cases which is kind of a sizable piece of the pie you know that's about 100 sorry that's about one in six cases and then again you can see how it compares to the other age groups all right so this next slide is just showing you the age breakdown by week um and again you can compare it to the other age groups there's nothing too noteworthy here but you can see a bit of a spike the week of january 4th which we kind of anticipated after the holidays and you kind of see it across some of these other age groups but other than that it has remained steady in terms of

119the number of cases involving this age group per week all right and then you can also see that the week of uh january 18th that you know that's this week we're leaving as tbd uh again for those of you that follow the press release and the case information reports that the health department puts out we typically do it tuesdays and fridays so by tomorrow we'll have a more complete picture all right and then again this is just another visual of what i just talked about all right in the blue is the 0 to 19 age group all right you can compare it across the different age groups and you see that big spike the week of january 4th all right and then for this slide um we essentially got a count of the number of

120daycare or boys and girls club related incidents so we've had about 20 cases that involved a student or a faculty member at a daycare or the boys and girls club eight of these cases involved a student while the other 12 involved a faculty member again it may not sound like a huge deal on the surface but you have to look at the ripple effect as i mentioned before this led to a total of 189 students that were quarantined and 58 total faculty members that were quarantined and again you have to ask yourself how many of these close contacts went on to contract the virus all right so that's all i have with the slides but just to kind of wrap things up i would ask that everyone try to keep the data in mind you

121know the numbers do not lie um i do wish we were in a better place uh but it seems like we have some ways to go at least you know according to the data even with a vaccine out there the cases have not gone away we need to continue to be responsible we need to continue with the mask wearing the social distancing practicing good hand washing you know it's funny because about this time last year i was in some of the schools doing hand washing education for the students using the glitter bug curriculum i don't know if you're familiar with it um and i definitely miss those days i wish we were back you know at those days um but i sort of think you know whether that's stuck with them throughout the pandemic you

122know the inf you know the information they got from the hand washing uh curriculum um just because it gives them a good visual of the importance of hand washing and then just to give you an overview of overall numbers the latest numbers as of tuesday uh we had a total of 7742 cases and very sadly um a total of 193 deaths and you know to us these are not just statistics we have gotten to know these individuals over the last 10 months we've heard their stories as we try to get information about their situations and their stories stick with us you know they resonate with us and i can tell you that some of the stories that i've heard over the last couple months you know involving individuals as young as a few months old

123and as old as a hundred they have impacted me and they've impacted my colleagues uh who have made these calls and continue to make these calls um and so sincerely on behalf of all of us at the health department our hearts do go out to everyone who has been afflicted with the virus those who are suffering the consequences of the virus and those who have lost a loved one and you know we would just urge you to keep being responsible uh keep staying strong and please just keep all of this information uh in mind thank you leo thank you so much um for that data and for your impassioned plea you really are fantastic and you've been such a great asset to our school district um even before this but even more so now during

124the pandemic so i would just ask leia if you and mr beagle can stay on i'm gonna um do a brief presentation and then we're gonna open it up to any questions uh from from the board so i'm gonna share my screen now stand by okay can everybody see my screen okay great so on november 4th um i made what i still consider to be one of the most difficult decisions i've made as a superintendent i made a decision to return all of our schools to virtual instruction and knowing then it was not going to be a popular decision with some of our stakeholders i i know i know that and i made that decision because i felt it was in the best interest of the safety of our students and staff so everything i

125do is under this one clifton guiding principle that we make decisions based on ensuring the health and safety of our students and staff so every decision i make will do that when we close down november 4th i said we would re-evaluate conditions in mid-january so here we are and for the last two weeks um my executive team and i have been meeting with the clifton health department and we've been reviewing the data one thing right let me go back one thing that and maybe it was because of pressure from superintendents who wanted to open schools but the new jersey department of health did revise the guidelines for when to close schools so what you see here on the screen is a couple changes that the highlighted areas are changes so the department of health has

126changed the amount of days that a student or staff member has to be excluded from school from 14 to 10 days except in a region where the level is orange so the region that clifton is in we're in orange so if you are a close contact um you still have to be quarantined for 14 days but the big thing and i point your direction to to the red circle when we opened up october 12th within a week i had to close two schools and then during that next week i had to close another three schools and and one of the primary reasons for that is this guidance here that you see uh two or more cases are identified within 14 days in a school that occur across across multiple classrooms and are not linked to

127exposures outside the school setting and a clear connection between the cases cannot be easily identified so anytime we had two cases in a school that were not connected the guidance previously said school should close that guidance has since been changed to recommendations for whether school closure is indicated will be based on investigation by the local health department so the good news there is when we returned in person instruction it's no longer two cases that will shut us down um it would it would need to be more than that or at the very least the discussion reviewing the data with the health department and making a decision on whether the school should be closed so this is the key chart and this is where this is the chart that really helps me make a decision on

128whether we can return in-person instruction so if i could draw your attention to the november 8th here the week of november 8th that's when we closed down okay we opened up october 12th right around here and the cases were there was still cases in clifton but i felt and the clifton health department felt and my executive team felt that we could handle we could open up schools and we could handle it based on those numbers november 4th comes along and we see the number of cases keeps rising keeps rising so i shut down schools right here and as anticipated the numbers kept going up and up and up and up now remember when i closed schools on november 4th i had to shut down five or maybe six schools already at that point and when

129we would have returned from after that november break more than half of our schools would have been closed based on the number of cases so here we are now mid-january this is last week's data which is higher than when we closed in march much higher than we reopened october 12th much higher than i closed on november 4th and this week's data which is incomplete that's this gray bar this gray bar only consists of data from saturday sunday and monday so we're missing a full four days of data and i think we can reasonably expect that this bar is going to reach close to or exceed last week's data so what does that mean for me this is the key piece of information in addition to that chart that makes me realize we cannot return to

130in-person instruction yet if you look at the number of cases in school-aged children there were 252 cases within the last 30 days when we opened school october 12 one of the data points that we looked at was the number of cases the month prior to that date at that time it was 51 cases so let me say that again october 12th we opened school the month previous we look and there were 51 cases among school-aged children we felt that was a reasonable number that we could open up school and we can do it safely without impacting everyone ladies and gentlemen this number is now for the last month five times that amount five times the amount of cases in school-age children so you could say well half of those students are virtual anyway okay maybe

131that's still going to give us 125 cases and let's say 25 of those maybe aren't in our schools if we had a hundred cases in our school in a month we we couldn't stay open the impact that would have what what ms helwani talked about that ripple effect of how many people would be quarantined you have to multiply that by at least 10 people for every positive case there's at least 10 people that it affects either the students in that classroom and the adults that they come in contact with and that's a conservative number so a hundred cases impacts a thousand students and employees and impacts their family and that's my concern so here's what my here's what my thinking is on the district status at this time the good news is ladies and gentlemen

132we're in process of coordinating with the clifton health department for a mass vaccination of clifton staff the sooner that happens the more um it will be able to facilitate a return to in-person instruction problem is i was hoping and reasonably expecting that this was something that could be done in february as many of you may have learned just last week governor murphy changed the vaccination priorities so teachers um were supposed to be in that second tier of people who were eligible to receive the vaccine and while they're still in that tier the governor took a whole population of people um and move them forward those people who have underlying health conditions and i believe those people over age 65 and mr beagle correct me if i'm wrong so i believe you know a teacher should

133have been included with the first responders the police officers and firefighters are out there every day if if the governor truly wanted schools closed uh schools opened he would have put teachers into that first tier but i understand that people with uh underlying conditions the virus can impact them more so i i can't argue with that but i just wish that teachers would have been included in that first uh that first phase so the case trajectory in clifton is going in the wrong direction when we close on november 4th in the letter that i sent to the community i specifically said to return to in-person learning the local data will need to demonstrate a clear and lasting decrease in covet 19 cases a clear and lasting decrease the data has not shown that in fact

134the data has shown a clear and lasting increase in cases so at this time ladies and gentlemen of the board my recommendation um in consultation with the clifton health department and my executive team but i also want your input tonight is that we keep our schools virtual we reevaluate the health data on march 1st and again if we see that clear and lasting decrease then we reopen and i think from this point on it's got to be a month-to-month uh peak at the data and once we see that clear and lasting decrease then we can reopen schools i want to be clear no one wants these schools open more than me but i can't sleep at night if i'm putting if i feel like i'm putting my staff and my kids in danger and i

135just don't feel it's safe enough yet so it is my hope that this board will support my recommendation and my decision even if you may disagree i just think it's in the best interest of everybody right now to postpone one of the concerns with being in a virtual environment is that our students need support so at this time i'm going to ask mrs kusalevich to discuss some of the supports we've put in place and are going to put in place in the future to support our students who are both remote and hybrid mrs kusalevich thank you dr robert tozie i too echo your sentiments that i would love to have our students back as quickly as possible as safely as possible that being said there is some benefit to being fully remote because we are

136consistent with our instruction classes aren't being popcorn opened and closed and teachers are able to make progress with our students however virtual instruction works very well for many of our students and other students do it need additional support so i'd like to just give you a quick overview on this agenda at this um this meeting there's a list of teachers being appointed um to offer additional online after school programs both for remediation and to add extra hours of support for our ap classes our students even though we're remote are still receiving their basic skills um support and we have skills classes for our upper grade students we have online adaptive math support multiple programs that adjust and modulate based on a student's needs and we have the same with our reading libraries we have online

137online leveled reading libraries that allow students to work at their level and push themselves forward increasing their reading levels at their own pace meeting their specific needs may have the next slide please in addition to these um remote and hybrid supports that we have going now we have plans for the spring and summer to address learning loss may i have the next slide please we are already planning a saturday remediation program either online or in person depending on what the situation will be at the time another thing that we have in this agenda is a resolution applying for a grant to address student learning loss and we are putting plans into place for a new district-wide summer program to address that learning loss this is over and above our existing title one summer remedial program

138which will be planned for this coming summer as well as our title three english language learner program and of course the extended school year for eligible special needs students so as you can see the district continues to work to provide additional support to our students to get through this difficult time and if i can just turn this over to mr gingaro now for a moment thank you very much ms kusalevich to begin i would be remiss if i did not once again publicly recognize and thank alex road the entire pomptonian team and members of our transportation department for their ongoing efforts in providing meals to one clifton learning community to date over one million combinedist and lunch meals have been served to students and families in our community meal distribution program will continue to be

139available our three distribution sites uh both chs and school 17 need to be open from 1 30 to 2 30 and meals at ccms will be offered from 10 o'clock to 11 30 a.m however there is one caveat to the program this uh for the next several months so please be advised that due to the use of the entire clifton high school campus by the the clifton health department as a coveted vaccination site we will only we will be unable to continue with the meal distribution program at chs on wednesdays only as such every monday at chs pomptonian will provide students for the four-day meal package covering days monday through thursday and again with a three-day meal package on friday as per usual to cover the weekends all other sites will continue to remain the

140same we will continue to communicate information specific to the changes and updates of the meal distribution program through our district web page from email blasts and via our social media platforms and please be reminded above all that all of our clifton students are eligible for free meals for the duration of the 2021 clifton school year could we move over to the next slide please dr roberto and and finally our final slide as this part of the presentation is specific to technology support as always if you or your student need tech technology access for remote learning please notify your students building administrator or teacher at any time you can also directly contact our tech team via email at techsupport cliftonschools.net or by phone at student with your 973-779-5357 and our concerns at this time i would

141like to turn the presentation back over to dr robertosi to close out this portion of the meeting thank you mr jingaro i also want to take a moment to recognize our district supervisor of nursing who's joined us tonight uh vicki beck who's been an integral part of of this team and who has led um as in 19 of our district nurses who are volunteering to um vaccinate at the clifton high school vaccination site on wednesdays uh so big shout out to our nurses and to vicki beck who've been volunteering thank you it's our pleasure well you know it's times like these and a national emergency where people really come together so uh mr beagle is there anything you want to share before i open it up to questions from the board members of course of

142course i i do want to echo i want to thank you um the whole board of education for our partnership with this vaccination venture we have we have completed three vaccine um dates and we have a thousand vaccines to individuals um i can't thank vicky and her staff i mean the nursing staff wonderful right in there with you know the cold weather you know it's funny because a lot of people say when i said the first time that opened the windows in the cold right in the wintertime you know we take that seriously and we have performed we're probably one of the only health departments around doing the vaccinations outside because i feel um you know we talked about you were talking about ventilation prior to this and it's a large concern for the staff

143and for the individuals that wait so that's why you know we practice what we preach and when we're doing it outside a little windy up there and if you do notice we are um our tent is going in our uh i call that the mega tent or circus tent will be installed and they're not drilling for oil they're drilling to make it a safe place for our nurses and our people that are getting vaccinated i also want to thank mr doctor and his staff they've been amazing as well working well together and all the departments all the divisions of the the city and we just the partnership is unbelievable and that we have not had one complaint since we started so kudos but like you said our goal is to get vaccines into people and

144we had some disturbing news that this week that we were only getting 300 doses for next week and that's concern we're gonna when we get going we're probably going to do seven to eight hundred sorry vicky uh maybe 800 in a day and if we could do that on a wednesday and some saturdays i think we could really make a difference so we're working diligently diligently to get those vaccines into people and you know for the public look at our website cliftonnj.org for updates and it's really important to register for swift911 those are the phone calls that we will be making uh reverse calls just for any updates regarding vaccines and vaccine distribution and i just want to say how proud i am to work with lea allen's and the other individuals in the health

145department because they're rock stars they're really our rock stars and we just you know we laugh crying everything together but and i have to say i support your decision i think it's the right decision in public health we base our information on data and science and what lael presented tonight is is clifton it's not the county it's not the state it's not the country it's not the world it's the city of clifton so again i support your decision and we will always work together and make it safe for the staff the students and for everyone and anyone that comes into the city of clifton so thank you thanks so much uh mr beagle mr smith at this time uh be happy to answer any questions from uh our commissioners either to me or for the

146the city and to the health department uh any any questions again we'll go uh we'll go in order uh if everyone could just uh ask their questions at uh one time and then we could mr smith uh just so you know they can if if you wanted to they can raise their hands if they wanted to ask a question if that's easier either either way anyone with any questions uh vice president abu dhabi uh thank you president smith through you to the superintendent and his administration um so i'm becoming questions um that grant that miss kuslov stated is that a cost share is that or is that 100 and is that from the state or federal junior you know the details on that unfortunately that is a competitive grant it is state through e-wag but

147it is competitive um i have high hopes that we will receive it but if we do not i'm also working uh with mr uchi to work out through the budget um our proposal um through movement and adjustments in our curricular areas to still be able to run this absent of the grant we need to do more intensive support that is locally funded so that we can address every one of our schools because right now the only summer programs that we do have are for our title 1 schools and our ell or special needs populations we want to be able to address all of the students who have who exhibit learning loss based on our assessments um with our benchmarks and our reading leveling of our students so the reason why i say or federal um

148[Music] i i know you said you're you're pretty confident or you're [Music] more than hopeful that we'll receive it um dr robert tells you we want to reach out through the legislative committee being the chair uh reach out to our state legislators and ask for letters of support um and kind of at least have our 34th district representation weigh in on this i don't think it could hurt okay can we talk later and set up through mr smith president smith you know my next question is through you um dr administration so if wednesday we can't do the food um um [Music] handouts should i say our dissemination of the food at the high school because of the vaccinations i'm not jabbing at the health office i appreciate everything they do uh can we reach out

149to city hall and see if we can utilize um a building on cedaw property like a program swap what we've done uh mr abe drabo is in well first of all on wednesday the other two locations are open so 17 is open as is columbus so anybody can go there but also on monday um they're giving food for the week so instead of giving two meals they're giving four days worth of food uh to the families that come okay which i understand but let's let's play devil's advocate if i may let's look at 17 in columbus is on the east side for four days of food we don't know how big certain folks fridges are um so we don't know if they're even able to do that that high school location may be a um

150a big reliant location for for many people on the other side of clifton so that's why i'm asking this i just want to make sure i i absolutely hear what you're saying i i don't think it's it's been an issue certainly there's been no issues that have been brought to my attention so i think we're solving a problem that doesn't exist okay no that's fine i just i i just want to think this through uh and then working backwards i want to thank miss beck and uh mr beagle of course leia she doesn't she does most of the work anyway um for everything you guys are doing and it's it's phenomenal it's great my mother-in-law who who is in the healthcare profession actually went to take her shot and she said it was seemingly very

151simple um to go through the process and she wanted me to tell you thank you okay are there any other board members have a question mr canova yeah so so i have a few things um as you know i i support the school's opening um if if you look at news articles if you look at things going on around they all say that at this age um kids thankfully aren't necessarily affected by it by covet if they do get a case of it it's not severe we've seen no deaths in clifton in those age groups not that death is the the only ticker we should be looking at obviously we want to look at long-term effects etc but everything i've read i haven't seen anything saying otherwise um economics parents especially single parents that are

152in this situation have multiple kids they can't work or if they do work again like i said at another meeting they may be putting someone in charge who's an older student so you may have someone who's 12 watching someone who's eight let's say is that the best situation i don't know probably not um spread within schools we've said spread within schools has been zero when we did open we didn't have any spread matter of fact when you compared it to the spread outside the schools there's more so if anything i would say maybe this data is misleading and saying that this is data when kids are home because when they're in school i think we're going to see otherwise and we don't have much data on it but when we did have the data it

153was showing that in school spread was less now you have biden calling for schools to reopen he has his 100 day plan he's saying he wants schools to reopen murphy pushing for the same thing many people in politics pushing for the same thing not that i think politics again is the ticker to look at but then you have a school like little foes who's fully open it remains fully open sports that are running in clifton but yeah we're saying we can't open schools so i don't understand some of that um before we're giving the parents the choice we know we have special needs students we have students that have specific learning needs and outcomes we know we have issues with with students on laptops and we're still not opening schools so i think i think

154in that report while the data is accurate i think the data we're missing is what about the increased mental issues and suicides what about the additional uptake we're seeing in uh in our flags and even our own security systems and flags for for kids who are chatting with each other and talking about things that they shouldn't be or what about um even the lunch programs what about parents who are working and again going back to that situation where an older child is watching a younger one they can't get out to go pick up that school lunch and then maybe they don't want to walk from where they are because we're not hosting it at every school i know that when kids were going to school we were giving them lunches every kid was getting lunch

155to go home with whether they wanted it or not so there you're you're absolutely taking care of the kids and if they didn't want it maybe the parents were eating who knows we're in an economic economic time now this you know that's never taken place maybe the parents need that food i don't know um the other the other thing that could be happening is they may be putting these kids in daycares if not in daycares they may be putting them with elders elders we know are higher at risk we know their higher debts there and deaths is the one we want to move away from so if we could keep kids together even if they do spread to each other not as big of an impact if we're they're spreading it to grandma or grandpa

156or or their aunt and uncle that are they happening or watching them or people who are you know maybe unemployed at the time we're taking these kids in to watch them i'm sure there's there's daycares going on right now i'm sure there's all that kind of stuff going on that we're not really seeing because we're not there to see it or to to get data on it but i'm sure a lot of these things are going on we did see that in that list you have a thousand students who have who have uh a positive case one thing that it was either the who or cdc came out with a day or two ago they said that their test looks at 40 cycles in amplification and they said that's too sensitive and they're realizing that

157there's many false positives with that um and if they did have it they're immune to it so those thousand students are actually now immune to getting it again they are immune for a certain amount of time whether that's six months whether that's indefinite whether that's a year it's yet to be seen um but we are seeing that as well so i would go back to we're putting this on the parents we're putting on this on the kids we're saying do you want to come back in this is a choice for you to make i don't think we should be making that decision because we don't know their home we don't know exactly what's going on in their lives and i think honestly this is a disservice by us not going back to school it's a

158huge disservice mr canova you there was a lot that you said there but i just want to address a few things and then if anybody from the health department or my team wants to chime in they certainly can um i hear you i hear everything you're saying but a couple points that i think need to be corrected first of all you can't compare little falls to clifton it's like comparing apples and oranges the social economics the number of parents who who are it's just it's just two different worlds the number of cases in both places are two different worlds but having said that you all you mentioned was students right i didn't hear anything about our staff and i got to worry about our staff too so we do have a number of staff that

159had pre-existing conditions that were able to work remotely for the year but we still have other staff members who we weren't allowed we didn't have the opportunity to give them that accommodation and until it's safe for everybody right how can i justify closing down schools uh november 4th for a certain amount of cases and then opening them up three months later when there's five times as many cases it just doesn't make sense and maybe the virus isn't being spread in schools we only had a three week window to test that out we don't know that for sure i don't i i believe that the schools were relatively safe but as lael discussed earlier it's that ripple right effect hundred cases causes a thousand or more people to have to quarantine for 14 days and bring

160that home so you talk about the economic impact of that also when that's unexpected at least now parents know that they're going to be remote until at least march first so i think that gives some semblance of of a plan that they can work for and and as for the special needs students and and other in early childhood and other students that are more um you know at risk or maybe learning less that that that is an issue and when it's safe to phase those students back in that will be part of the plan we do have a plan in place to phase those students back in but that's not something i would consider until we see a clear and lasting decrease in the numbers um and that's just how i feel now listen i

161respect every single one of these board members and if it was nine zero nine board members telling me danny you're crazy you gotta open up schools i think i would still tell you that i'm not gonna not yet is that john is there anything that you want to add just a few things so um you know you spoke about children being sick um you know we don't get into the specifics but i can guarantee you there were children in the hospital with severe symptoms and again i can't i'm not liberty to speak about it so do we wait for one person or child to get really sick and possibly pass away i don't think we want to do that i don't think we want to take that chance i don't think anybody wants to take

162that chance and i know there's a risk in everything that we do the other thing is vaccines i totally agree it's great to say we need to you know get vaccines to people but our governor changed the rules a little for us which made it a lot more difficult for us to vaccinate the teachers and with that you know with the vaccine being there here um but not for us to give it to uh the individuals that i mean everybody wants to be first in line right everybody thinks they should be first in line and i'm not going to say who i think should be first in line or but i really think that the chief teachers if we really want to get children back to school we need to vaccinate the teachers so when

163i order 300 doses and i receive 100 doses to me it's good to talk that we want to get vaccines to people but give us the vaccines to give to the people so i'm not going to go on but i really you know and i agree there we know as public health professionals we know mental health issues for children and for adults i mean a lot of people are suffering this so i i don't just you know discount that at all but i think with the numbers you know whether somebody's sometimes they're asymptomatic but sometimes they go to the hospital and thankfully we've had no deaths at younger ages but that can change tonight as we've learned with this pandemic more than anything is we could talk about something right now we get off the

164zoo meaning and that can change so that's that's all i have to say so based on what you said then why are we allowing sports to be continued that's so so that's a good point that's not john's decision that's something that um very honestly i i wrestled with and here's what i concluded and you can tell me i'm wrong and maybe i am school you can still do remotely right some people would argue it's not as good i agree but you can still do education remotely sports obviously you can't so that's one second it's a smaller group of people [Music] with strict protocols and safety precautions with staff members who [Music] are volunteering to be there not mandated to be there and third and probably this goes to your point about mental health sports help

165kids right it helps them be more grounded helps them be more healthy and so i'm weighing all these things and i've asked myself how do how do i allow sports and not open schools i've wrestled with that but those other factors kind of outweighed it and i thought well i think we could do it safely and guess what one week into it our girls basketball team is quarantined and that could happen again but it's a it's a small number of people and again you can tell me i'm wrong and like i said maybe i am but that's kind of how i feel i feel like we've taken away so much from kids already um i didn't also want to take that away miss bassford yes thank you uh president smith uh first i want to

166thank john beagle and uh uh leal for their assistance during a very dark time in my life on december 14th i was uh tested positive and it was just a going for a routine surgery checkup i tested positive and thanks to john he he took me off the edge i was so upset not knowing what i had to do i had a quarantine in my basement okay i have family members that have high uh men uh risk of health issues what what did that cause it caused me to be in my basement for two weeks by myself no tv so i got a lot of computer work done but i can understand and my worry is and joe i want you to hear me out on this we have a lot of people that live

167in small apartments that we have multiple families living in these small apartment units i was lucky that i could uh quarantine away from everybody i really was i was lucky that i could get away from my family and stay away from them my i am worried about the mental health uh um um part of it because i think we're gonna see the lasting effects of that for years to come uh people are stressed out and everything and i understand that so um what personally i feel that until the numbers go down i agree with you dr robituzzi but um my also worry is that we've had several parents come on these meetings and express needs for their children having issues so i i don't know what we are doing to to um to um handle

168that um because you everybody knows i like to advocate for special needs i'm really concerned about that so i want to know if we have put other mechanisms janina touched on it briefly that we put that mechanism in place but my worry is that um how do we ensure the safety of the staff okay because it's i don't know i had no symptoms i had absolutely no symptoms and here i was walking around working my side job working at work going to work i shut my department down right i had a test negative twice i went for three tests just to make sure that i was it was all all right before i even went back into the society but being a house quarantining with people there's a food issue there's bathing issues there's separation

169issues and and i just see we have a lot of students our clientele in certain areas and certain homes that don't have the luxury to quarantine the way that i had to do i was lucky nobody else in my house got it i i don't know what happened it could have been a false negative i false positive i don't understand that but that's another issue that i have to worry about and i have to worry about the adult population as of teachers if if we would have if the governor would have changed the um the classification and put the teachers in that first frontline group and we had the vaccinations to give it to it then this would be a totally different conversation but then the other issue is what about the teachers that don't

170want to vaccinate we're going to have to face that as well and they still don't feel comfortable coming back so there's a lot of different moving parts here that i agree with you danny and i support you on this because quarantining two weeks alone it was not a fun time for me mrs basford on the vaccination issue um my philosophy is pretty simple uh it's not something that we would mandate or that i think we even could mandate but once our staff has the ability to get a vaccine whether they choose to or not then it's to me very very safe to come back now i was hoping that was going to be able to happen within the next couple weeks but you heard from mr beagle about the number of doses that are available

171and the fact that teachers aren't even eligible yet so yeah i don't think we're going to be able to make teachers get it but once it's available for them i think it's safe to say we're we're open for business you know still wearing masks still social distancing i think i don't think you're gonna see that go away uh any time soon okay so my other question too is that the the the president biden just reversed uh just um did an executive order about any federally funded federal federal um properties that um have to uh wear masks being that we get federal funding that that require that everybody has to wear a mess regardless at a meeting and everything like that when they're on our property that's my other question too i i completely zoned out

172on what your question was were you asking about wearing masks on school property i'm so sorry i said president biden yesterday signed an executive order talking about uh federal properties happening to have wear masks we get federal funding for our students we get a lot of aid in federal funding so with that being said because we're receiving funding does that make us required to keep that um everybody wearing masks regardless what we're doing on our on our locations as well um [Music] i don't know but i don't know that it matters because it's in our policy that you have to wear a mask so our policy is is good enough to cover that um ms speck did you want to add something to uh miss bassford i saw your hand up no okay um obviously

173this is mr awad you were next yes i just wanted to piggy back off for mr nova and uh dr robert uh you know uh first and foremost uh leon mr beagle thank you for all the hard work you guys have done for our city you know you guys are the heroes here yeah you and your teams you guys are doing great work and you're continuing to do great work and i applaud you guys for everything you're doing uh i just want to pick you back off this whole conversation i it's i don't understand return to school it's a priority for many fans and i respect that but with the climate that we're in i support you know our superintendent's decision not to i just find it difficult for you to rock my head we

174would want our staff and our students to go back to school that we're all seeing what we're all here on the board and you know the guests that are partisan are sitting on a zoom meeting but nobody ever mentioned why wouldn't we leave my example if it's really that safe by example when we go back why are we just gonna ask our staff and our students to ourselves that's the only comment i have to say if it's that safe and that's more of a decision to go back to school we should be the first as you know to lead by example as the leaders in our community and the ones that our decision making about our students our staff you know health and safety if you know anything is going to be real first when

175the climate is safe we should be the first ones but if we know the climate is not safe for certain you know uh groups within our district then we should just you know continue to listen to the science and the data you know the health department and you know working with our superintendent to make it smarter to say it for the majority and honestly for the whole not for just you know certain you know fast sex and that's the only comment i have to say uh before we send anybody back into school we should leave by example and go back to ourselves have some meetings and if it's not safe for us okay uh miss beltran you are up next i just had one question everyone else pretty much covered another question that i had

176um danny do we are sorry mr robertosi um do we have any sort of long-term thought if these numbers don't go down like if this just becomes part of our society i'm sure the government at that point will make a decision on lowering the expectations but you know it's seeming to be we're social distancing we're wearing masks we're sanitizing we're doing everything that we weren't doing in march yet our numbers are not going down and maybe mr beagle can have some more insight into this um but it just seems like we're already doing everything that we possibly could and then it's just not helping us in any way uh miss belgian that's a good question i think for me [Music] once everybody has the opportunity to be vaccinated at least teachers i think once once

177everyone has that opportunity whether they choose to or not um then that i think it's fair to say we're we're open for business and again i don't know when masks go away and when social distancing and all that other stuff goes away but as far as i'm concerned concerned vaccination is a real good start i just want to add not everybody's doing the right thing you know when we christmas holidays or any holiday new year's the contact tracing that we have done we have found that people attended a holiday party and you know i think one party nine out of ten people were sick two of the individuals were hospitalized and we heard that repetitively so i think a lot of people are doing the right thing but definitely not everybody is doing the right

178thing and it's prevalent because of those numbers right if of course anything can happen but if you are wearing your mask properly and how many times were here and work oh i just was eating with the person for a half hour and that's how that spread and that's what happens we let our guard down you work with some people you put you eat lunch with them and um that's what that's how it spreads and the same thing with family uh just because you're related it might be a brother might be a sister if you're going to that person's house and you're eating and you're you know partying with those individuals it you know it spreads that's the community spread and then they go to work and they spread it to those workers and that's what

179we have seen and that's why our numbers are still high and unfortunately it's across the um the whole country i'm sorry oh sure of course um so the other issue is you know when people do test positive not everybody sticks to the full uh you know isolation period um even if they are not showing symptoms you know it's a 10-day isolation period but some people don't necessarily stick to that and then the other thing is close contacts uh some people um either refuse to disclose their close contacts we're seeing a lot of that um you know with with our case investigations um or some people refuse to admit that they are a close contact you know they're feeling fine and they go about their daily activities so that may also be contributing to the numbers

180being where they're at uh miss danny you were up next yes i just want to say that um i support you um dr rotozi as an educator working um and you know i do know that when you go back there's a lot of issues and of course you know ideally um best situation would be to have students in the building and education to be that way but um unfortunately yes it might not spread through contact within the school but you have individuals that come into the school and then as a result you have staff quarantining you have students quarantining and then eventually you just don't have enough substitutes to cover the staff and you have to close and i mean i i would think that you know if i had a child in the district

181and i had to work around that schedule you know to know that okay we're open for two weeks now we're gonna go in we might be closed i mean i in my opinion i can't see that being um positive in terms of the social emotional well-being for students for staff i mean you know you talk about you know kids have to have a regimen and consistency yeah it would be nice it would be nice if you know class would start 7 45 and 3 you know and then they go to their sports and do whatever but i mean it's not what it is and so at least i do think that um in the remote setting at least there's some consistency and i just personally find that um you know you kind of have more

182time believe it or not in the remote setting because there is in this passing time when you have this hybrid model i mean again it's um i'm i'm in it you know and i'm and we just opened up um and you know i the hybrid it's it's it's um it's not like your children are there and and they're learning i mean ever everybody is still going on to the meet and you're you've got students in the classroom which is a little distracting because they're coming in and the students on the meet aren't coming in at the same time yet and they're late and then you have to pause i mean we have to stop like 10 minutes before and they have to clean the desks and yeah they clean their desks and they have to

183clean so then you have to jump off the meet with the other students so i mean it's it's just not an ideal situation and you know again i mean i think to put um you know my personal opinion is again like it was stated here that um you know if teachers are there at the forefront and they're so essential they should have been in that first group and you know to not saying again that again in the perfect world yes uh in person learning the best but this in person learning this the hybrid is just it's it's not the same it's um so for the safety of all i think right now you know with the numbers being so high and again i mean you can't con compare i think you know fair lawn or

184or um you know any of these districts or fairfields or whatever you can't compare to clifton i mean clifton the the numbers are huge and there might be parents who say yes okay we're going to put our students into school because you know in a sense uh we need to work and they need to be somewhere but then if in a few days there's a shutdown what does that parent do now the parent has to scramble to get someone so at least i feel like there's consistency for everybody across the board you know for students for their emotional well-being that okay this is it virtually this is how we're doing it numbers are high for staff um you know i know that it's frustrating for some staff members to have to quarantine then away from

185their family for 12 days um and you know and then you know you have just um parents as well who all of a sudden now because there was an outbreak they have to worry for two weeks what are they going to do with daycare and scramble and then we might be open for three days and then it might happen again i mean who is that good for you know so i mean i just want to say that you know um dr robertosi it's a you know difficult call but you know you obviously um know how this is and you've been an educator and and you can see that um you know this whole thing again ideally in an ideal world it would be nice if everybody was in the classroom and things were as normal

186but it's not so trying i think the consistency of at least staying in the remote while it's like this because it would be back and forth back and forth makes sense and that's all i have to say thank you vice president abu dhabi you were next thank you mr smith superintendent no matter what you do it's your fault so it doesn't matter not gonna ball listen joe i i i get it i want my kids out of this house because they drive me freaking nuts every morning and i want them out of here until three o'clock and not wait till noon and i i can't do a dorm thing especially my younger son but let's be realistic somebody by initials jb from the health office became my personal doctor for the past three weeks okay

187i was tested positive everybody else in my house was not i said what the heck i called him right away and i said hey just letting you know what do i do he did nobody got the results yet i said no outside my house i got tested i'm positive no symptoms everybody around me in the house is not quarantine all right fine got a second test i'm negative got a third test i'm negative what happens if a lot of the latter two tests were false tests and the first one was not now my kids are in this house no symptoms asymptomatic they contract it they go to school and then who knows what really is gonna happen so nobody knows what's going on with these tests nobody knows what this thing is capable of and

188yet nobody wants to believe it i'm not saying that lock these kids up in the house because then i'll move out and they can stay in this house but at the end of the day i'm not going to put others outside this house in harm's way when i came to control what's happening in my own house and we're trying to keep safe with gloves and hand sanitizer and masks in the whole works because we got false positive tests out of three tests i don't know which one is yet which one's right or not but yeah i still quarantined for 10 days because jb told me i had to and i did anyway because you know it's we don't know what this thing's capable of the best thing to do is as we always mentioned the

189ceo of our district from the advanced the advisement of our health officer in this city not little falls not param it's not process park not canada not california not oklahoma this city is saying that we should keep our kids at home for now am i gonna have people saying what the hell are you talking about in a few hours or tomorrow because you make no sense no because at the end of the day i don't care it's not up to us and you know what danny kudos to you if nine of us say yes opening school's up i love that answer that you gave because you know what that shows you don't cater to anybody on this board it's not a bad thing you took the advisement of the specialists in our city i'm not

190knocking anybody down who wants open schools back up joe i'm with you a hundred percent i want these kids back in school it's not helping them mentally it's killing them it's draining especially at the elementary school level but at the end of the day you gotta pick what's worse then being bored and setting him back by ear or god forbid putting them or anybody else in a place we don't want them to be that's why that's how we have to look at it and i rather than taking my cat throne or get thrown across the room and in between class breaks which no i'm not i don't support rather than god forbid i have to rush to them or somebody else to the doctor or hospital thanks danny mr casper you were next dr robert

191terese thank you for keeping the schools closed and thank you um with all your help from the health department because uh when it hits home it's very hard and everyone knows me i like to be out and about so you know me when it hits hard it it it's really tough so um i even had a family member in the hospital myself so i know how bad this can be and um if i were to go back into school myself and affect my students i don't know what i would have done either uh we had just gone back this week after being virtual for two weeks and we already have two cases in my school and i have yet to be notified to see if i have the quarantine so um so it's it's a

192tough decision but it's it's a good decision for now until we see our numbers going down thank you any other board members with question or comment see none dr roberto i just want to ask you to clarify um i know your stance is um about the vaccinations would that be both vaccinations because obviously having just the one wouldn't correct yes absolutely mr smith it's actually more than that it's the first vaccination four weeks later second vaccination and then two weeks after that and john correct me if i'm wrong that's when you're kind of fully immunized so you're talking about a six week six weeks from the day where you get vaccinated correct um miss beck did you want to add to that yes just just to be clear we keep we hear teachers teachers teachers

193we're talking about vaccinating our entire staff not just teachers everybody's in contact with our students and with each other very very good point thank you you're absolutely correct um mr beagle uh lyall and miss beck i i can't emphasize enough um if anyone in the city has not seen the operation that clifton runs and vaccinations um [Music] it's top-notch um john you and your staff have just done a fantastic job uh doing the best that you can and it is so organized um it is so laid out nicely and at the end of the day um you won't find trash around our property they clean everything up and it's just a top-notch operation and i am hoping and praying that our teachers our staff and the residents of clifton very soon get an opportunity to

194drive their car into that new circus tent and get their vaccine so i just wanted to thank you for all that you're doing for the city uh please extend it to your staff and i know uh dr robertosi uh cannot say enough about um your help and um ms beck maybe i'm speaking editor and correct me if i'm wrong but most if not all your nurses volunteer your time is that correct correct so we spend four days a week calling parents following up on cases and one day a week trying to make a difference and get rid of this virus and out in sub-zero temperatures so uh please extend the thanks to your entire uh nursing staff for uh caring enough about clifton and um doing what's right so thank you tremendously uh mr smith

195mr smith if i may this board should be commended because there wasn't when i recommended to the board that we allow this mass vaccination clinic not one person objected everyone knew that this was important for our community and just for the greater good and and also allowing the nurses to do this on wednesdays the board had to allow that to happen i know there are other districts where that would not happen i know there are other districts where they don't have the relationship with the health department where they're going to be able to utilize a school so this board should be commended for you know having some vision and uh and know that you know you're appreciated too what you do matters thank you muted mr smith very good point you know we have to

196remember we are one clifton school district the taxpayers students everyone we are one clifton and and we can work together to make this thing um go away or get better so um i know uh mr beagle would much rather have the entire town vaccinated in the next uh two weeks um unfortunately that's not going to happen and we just have to hold out a little bit longer and i i think it's disgraceful and i hope um that when our legislative committee meets that the governor and the legislature know how disgusting it is that teachers and our staff uh were put down uh lower in a list um they're darn important people and they should not have been put down on on that list so um i hope that we emphasize how upset we are and

197something like that should not ever happen again so that's all i have uh if there's nothing else from uh administration and uh the uh health department uh we thank you so very much for attending our meeting tonight um leal i can see in the background you're still in the office um ten o'clock at night i know she wants to go home so um we thank you tremendously for the time and dedication that you've helped us out tremendously by answering our questions so thank you all thank you guys thank you very much thank you we don't let leia go home hey jb if you if you end up actually do uh drill oil in the east wing parking lot just remember it's hours oh sorry sorry it's superintendents all right okay thank you if you you'd

198like to stay for the rest of the meeting you're more than welcome but i think you want to go home so um it's up to the superintendent what he wants us to do go home and go to sleep okay you say so i'm halfway there okay thank you both have a good night guys stay safe thank you apparently we still have an agenda to get to yes we do um okay next on our agenda is uh board committee reports and uh we should not have any as of yet oh you do i'm sorry i don't see anything on my agenda but very sad i'm sorry it's there sorry i didn't scroll down my bad okay go ahead mr casper okay this is from december 7th from the passaic county school board association the meeting was

199called the order by sixth at 6 35 by miss judas judith basford president of the passaic county school board association uh mr dan sinclair our immediate past president talked about how successful virtual workshop turned out the njsva put together the workshop in a short amount of time and had 6 000 attendees with 140 exhibitors and over 100 presenters mr sinclair explained that in our next delegate assembly we will be voting on our new njsba officers the term will run from 2021 to 2023 and the positions include president vice president for legislation and first vice president miss basford also talked about the nominating committee she will be appointing two members herself and has asked for any other volunteers who would like to be on the committee chris jones our njsba legislative advocate provided an update for

200us the legislation is trying to encourage smaller districts to regionalize but as it is completely voluntary these districts are looking for help in uh feasibility studies there are some districts that are not seeing the savings of chapter 44 fact-finding is currently going on and the legislature is looking into cleaning up chapter 44. there is currently a task force being put together to review the funding formula kathy halawa passaic county field service rep has congratulated our board members who are finishing their terms she also talked about reorganization which is coming up with it occurred this month new board members as well as votes for president and vice president of the boards can be sworn in virtually she announced that there was a training for new board members roles responsibilities and resources which was held on december

20115th from 7 to 8 30. ray penny announced three levels of awards at our meeting vincent harrington from patterson has obtained a new board member uh dr rachel calpeezy from little falls has obtained a certified board member and nancy schwartz from pompton lakes has obtained certified board leader jason della from brown and brown associates prevented on the new health care benefits reform law chapter 44 was passed unanimously by both the house and the senate the biggest slice of the pie is the health benefit plan at 37 percent uh districts that have the sehbp it eliminates all medical plans other than direct 10 and 15 as of january 1st of this year the new jersey educators health plan which took effect as of and the garden state health plan will take effect as of july 1st

202of 2021 non-schb districts can keep locally bargained plans but must offer equivalent plans to the uh the educators health plan as well as the garden state health plan um the nj ehp will roughly save a person forty seven hundred dollars or half of their contribution new hires as of 7 120 or later must be enrolled in that new plan for seven years pre-medical retirees will also be enrolled in the same plan um the savings incurred should be made uh it is suggested that the current savings should be made to future tax levy pay uh payments chapter seven uh section seven of that law uh should save 300 million dollars over three years if it doesn't the new plan team will reconvene to make changes to the law the districts can save uh the projected uh

203savings then there are certain things in the new plan such as pain management services have been capped such as acupuncture at chiropractic at 35 and physical uh physical training at 52 dollars um out of network provider reimbursement is uh two hundred percent of what medicare would allow which is called reasonable and customary uh let's see i don't to bore you too much more uh the net spendable dollars will depend on your paycheck rehol withholdings which ranges from 20 to 35 percent the chapter 44 cleanup bill caps contributions for employees who earn more than 125 000 at the same rate of those who are earning under uh they were waiting on the governor to sign it uh there will be new updates for the garden state health plan which starts uh july 1st of 2021 and

204the garden state health plan offers new jersey only provider networks and payroll deductions that are even lower than the new jersey educators health plan uh if that's all i have on this one is there any questions yeah mr uh mr president yes mr daley make sure i'm i'm not muted here no you're not mr daley you're up okay good um uh i saw miss castro i mean it missed wasn't from mr casper it was from the health the insurance company um i've had preliminary talks with mr uc and um uh we we're going to get into that very shortly our our health benefits costs for next year um right now we believe it's going to require an increase in our allocation of funds into the healthcare plan because the difference between the drop in chapter

20578 and and that and the savings that's projected it does not match up and it looks like it's going to be a negative number we don't have that but i've raised that issue with mr yusi and he is concerned as well uh so as soon as we have that information which hopefully you'll be shortly uh we'll we'll spread that to the board even before we do a budget so but we're looking preliminarily that our health care costs will increase and not decrease uh as a result of this plan thank you any other questions seeing none we have policy miss bassford would you like to yes and uh thank you uh president smith i also want to um address something that happened earlier and i want to go through you to the superintendent when i questioned

206the fact that um and this has nothing to do mr awad i was trying to protect your interest a board member was not present when the original meeting occurred i'm very concerned that he should have abstained i had to go back in my book for robert's rules of order the board must the board member must be president as to witness to verify the meeting minutes are correct not just reading them for of the document so he should have abstained so you're incorrect mr usee uh and um i just wanted to make that because that's our our um bylaws do uh cover us that if we're not it doesn't state in the bylaw because i have the bylaws up here and i i research them during the presentation um and we are covered under robert's rules

207of order and that is a robert rules of order uh technique so i just want everybody to be careful that when you're not present at a meeting you shouldn't be voting on the minutes because you're not witness to them and um i didn't see you on the zoom i don't know if you were watching the zoom but they were verbatim so you really should uh take error on the side of caution okay so the policy committee um met um on december 8th 2002. this is from last year's policy committee the policy committee was uh began at uh 603 attendees were myself uh board members joe kenova frank casper jim smith administration was dr danny robituzzi mark teigen luis ross also president was rachel harrington the committee reviewed bylaw zero one five five which is on

208tonight's agenda board committees to clarify language in the bylaw to insert a mechanism to establish when the work of an ad hoc committee ends it is recommended to add that the language uh to the end of the second paragraph the ad hoc committee will be automatically discharged upon submission by the ad hoc committee of its final report to the board number two the committee reviewed policy five one one one eligibility for resident non-resident students discuss what a discussion was held regarding offering reduced tuition for employees and staff a survey will be sent to the staff to determine interest on such a program the committee will work on language to add to this policy to address the issue and will then present it to the recommendation of the board the meeting adjourned at 6 38 pm

209uh and mr luis ross wrote the um the um the minutes any questions seeing none thank you are there any other minutes no right okay our next uh portion is the uh public recognition this portion of the meeting is open to the citizens of clifton for the purposes of addressing any subject matter pertinent to and directly related to the operation of the clifton school district residents are requested to sign the register oh you won't be doing that um you'll be stating your um your name and your address in the chat if you could if you can't put it in the chat if you would state it subject and your subject matter comments are limited to five minutes per person issued raised by members of the public may or may not be responded by the board

210all comments will be considered and a response will be forthcoming if and when appropriate the board asks that members of the public be courteous and mindful of the rights of other individuals when speaking specifically comments regarding students and employees of the board are discouraged and not and will not be responded to by the board students and employees have specific legal rights afforded by the laws 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 be consider their comments in light of the legal rights of those affected or identified in their comments and be aware that they are legally responsible and liable for their comments um mr um mr usee is there is there somebody in [Music] jeff horn yes

211i can remember his name i'm sorry um mr horn is there anyone in uh we have 12 waiting is it my understanding that we go to the student uh speaker first that's correct okay i will let in max rubin max you should be coming here mr horn if it's easier you can let a few people in at a time and just you know tell them that what order they're going to go in and mute them if i may i'm sorry just as a reminder for the student um not to give their address since they're max uh welcome to uh the board meeting always nice to see you and um the floor is yours um can you hear me we can hear you all right thank you all right um hello board of ed again it's

212max rubin student representative um first of all i would like to thank dr robertosi for deciding to keep the schools closed for another month and ten days until we reevaluate on march first again you know physical safety is always the number one priority and i think you knocked it out of the park with that plan and i'm glad that so many of the board members support you um just a few points i want to bring up during this meeting um so upcoming s.a.t testing at the high school i know a lot of my students a lot of my fellow students had questions about this uh mr doctor informed me that you should definitely register as soon as possible because spots can be filled up quickly the next date at chs is march 13th that's the

213next day you can take your sat after march 13th there's also may 8th and june 5th as of january 12th which was nine days ago there were seats available at chs i'm not completely sure if they're still available but i would just register as soon as possible and then you'll see if they're still available at chs again the dates are march 13th may 8th and june 5th for sat testing i was lucky enough to be chosen for the referendum citizens committee where we're going to be talking about the humongous referendum that was the big presentation at the beginning of the meeting um me and a few other students are going to be involved with the committee and during my last student union meeting since i'm also the president of the student union i asked my

214fellow students to to tell me items they would like me and other members to discuss during the referendum meeting and we actually came up with this big list of possible improvements infrastructure improvements to various schools things that we've observed over the past few years and we think could be improved um and i'm definitely going to mention some of those at the referendum meeting i believe it's january 26th at seven o'clock so i will definitely be there and i have a list ready of things i want to talk about for that meeting two of our csu members um rowan awadala and victoria olive both juniors have volunteered to take part in this summit called activist x academics it's a summit about racial equity within schools across the country it seems like a really good opportunity and

215those two members have volunteered to represent the csu and also just the clifton school district in general um there's going to be many students i think it's from all over the country because there were like different time zones listed for the meeting time so i think the students are all over the country and the summit i believe is going to be february 13th i could be wrong but it's in the middle of february and it just seems like a really good opportunity for our students to participate in it and we're lucky that we have two very intelligent highly motivated students who are both juniors who volunteered to take part in it and i'll have more information when i get more information i'll relay it to you guys um the next question i had and i

216don't think this was mentioned it might have been mentioned and i missed it but when we first opened up for hybrid you know what actually i'm not going to ask this question because we're going to be all virtual anyway so never mind i'll table that question for another time the last thing i wanted to mention is the chs morning show is continuing to make great content to stay up to date on winter sports uh school organizations school meetings clubs anything um just check out the clifton high school tv or chs tv youtube channel and we have the morning show for every single day we've posted this year and we're continuing to provide consistent updates on what's going on in the school district um that's pretty much all i have i'm looking forward to discussing the

217referendum i have a lot of things i want to talk about and i'm excited to talk about it with other students teachers and administrators um this has been a really long meeting and you guys have i i don't know how you do it how you stay this focused i i yeah i would go crazy but um that's awesome that you guys are so dedicated to our education that you're not even getting paid and you're just you know you're you're just you know taking taking one for the team and just you know giving us this opportunity to just i can't even put it into words um i'm kind of just in awe but yeah you guys make this school district what it is and i appreciate that so that's it that's it for my comments for

218tonight max thank you very much did we write that check out to rub i know [Laughter] um before you leave i i just want to make a brief comment if i could um because i don't know if you necessarily always hear our comments after and they may be at midnight or so tonight anyway so um but i i want to credit you and your entire morning crew um i enjoy watching the morning announcements every single day and um for those that don't know um this week is called name uh no name calling week yeah it's supposed to be in the gay straight alliance or gender sexuality alliance i think they're called now against bullying and yes to kindness and uh make people feel included and make people feel welcome did i get that correct um

219yes yes and um i think for next meeting i think you should um do a special uh invite your special friend um that gives the movie and play critics at the morning announcements bring him to the board meeting um i know the board members would uh surely get a kick out of that and uh in this free next meeting uh see if he could attend but really uh congratulations to you and to all the the the staff um that do a great job on those morning announcements i i just think they're great so keep up the good work oh thank you so much that's a sign of me you don't see very often all right that's a good sign okay thank you thank you so much i'll see you guys at the next board event

220meeting thank you have a good night i'm max bye all right next up we have a phone caller starting with uh four one zero if you could uh just state your name and um address for the unless you're a student uh you don't have to do so if you're a parent or taxpayer if you could please just state your name and address for the record go ahead you have the floor hello uh phone number starting 201 410 you have the floor uh you don't have to do so if you're okay we'll go on to the uh next one we have uh phone number starting [Music] if you would state your name and address for the record unless you're a student and you have the floor a phone number that starts with three two seven if

221you can hear me you have the floor all right we'll move on to the next one starts 272 actually not three two seven that's a three nine something oh i'm sorry you're right 973 yes that's me hi um my name is jennifer and it's avondale ave first i would just like to say thank you to mr canova for everything that you stated tonight i really really really appreciate everything that you said um i'm gonna give you a quick personal story and then i have some notes that i took from everybody's comments tonight so my son is nine years old and he is in the fourth grade and thanks to all of this virtual nonsense he is now suffering from panic and anxiety attacks my once happy energetic playful loving silly boy is having panic attacks

222over virtual learning and it is awful to see this and to experience my child who doesn't want to get dressed anymore or get out of bed because he's depressed who starts therapy tomorrow i hope none of you ever have to suffer like my nine-year-old is suffering like many other young children are suffering due to this nonsense now to some of the comments that i heard tonight teachers getting a vaccine teachers made themselves an essential when they decided to not open the doors of the schools those vaccines should be priority to the people that are out and about working with the people not behind a computer screen so i disagree with your comments about teach teachers getting priority until you open those school doors they should not be priority and i'm also sure that it won't

223be mandatory for teachers to get a vaccine so they'll use that as the excuse as to not opening the doors because they don't feel comfortable being vaccinated also specifically to mr abedrabo you stated that your children are bored also and that you can't wait to get them out of the house because you can't handle how loud they are it is not just about boredom these kids are having true mental true mental issues do not minimize these issues because your kids are bored most kids are not just bored but they are actually getting depressed and having true mental issues and your comment was offensive dr robert tosie you said you struggled with having sports being allowed if classes cannot be done in person nothing should be done in person nothing if it is school related it

224should be virtual or in person all or none and i have one more comment teachers are on social media posting pictures of themselves out at family gatherings at parties for the holidays at restaurants eating if they can go out and about and live their lives they can certainly be in a classroom wearing ppe and with all the proper protective equipment that the school spent so much money on they can be in a classroom with all of that if they can be putting themselves out in a restaurant maskless eating thank you for your time thank you next up we have uh brian o on the iphone brian o if you would state your name and address for the record and then you are free to address the board right that is brian o okay nothing from

225brian oh um looks like next we have um chloe popovich chloe you're a student you don't have to state your address go ahead you have the floor chloe good evening i don't understand how you can have winter sports but not enforcing learning we need enforcing learning as a student it's just a free form students are taking classes from all over the united states i have a classmate who is taking class classes from the bahamas every day if sports can meet why can activities meet it's a small group setting it would help the mental health of students who are not in sports thank you have a great evening thank you very much uh next up um it looks like um daniel milo uh i know that's not daniel but if you could just state your name

226and address for the record please and then you're up and just unmute yourself my name is [Music] okay you have the floor you can address the board okay first of all very happy to see a lot of familiar faces and new faces i'm very very happy uh in the middle of this this is a a really happy day for me because uh for i've been actively fighting along with other parents for the renovations are are district buildings mainly aces and proper ventilation in the classrooms i spent five years in the building of my kids school as an hsa president and i witnessed firsthand that even kids protected under the 504 act were being deprived of the proper ac accommodations with the excuse that the buildings were too old but now in front of us is

227finally the possibility to make a real change for the kids and the teachers and the staff i was delighted delighted to learn that our superintendent shares the same concerns regarding the renovations and updating of the buildings and i'm so happy to know that finally our board of education is decided to support this i'm here again and again to urge you to beg you to do everything in your power to provide the kids who are the main reason for having the world of education with proper accommodations with proper ventilation with proper air conditioning goes against this the person has never been in the buildings in may june september or even october to experience that suffocating heat during this pandemic we learn something very clearly we need proper ventilation in our buildings and if the pandemic didn't

228teach us the importance of the ventilation in the classroom then nothing will this is not a luxury we said this so many times again and again but now i know i know that everybody's on board to do this it's time not just to be in favor of this proposal but actively fight to make it happen to make it happen is our obligation as a parent as a resident to make it happen and is your obligation board of education to do everything in your power to make it happen for the kids thank you so much for fighting for this we've been waiting for so so long thank you so much thank you very much uh next is donna popovich please state your address and you have the floor good evening this is donna popowicz i live

229on dale wood road um i i have just a few comments to start with this seemed like a really important meeting and i'm a little surprised that we couldn't get to cub public comment until more than three hours after the meeting started that really seems to me to limit the amount of public who is still available as we all have other commitments in family in jobs putting kids to bed etc this really did seem like an important meeting um it was kind of ironic that the meeting you present us a plan to raise our taxes is the same meeting you tell us that you're not opening schools um that's your choice but here's my question if we can run sports there are a number of extracurricular club activities which meet in small groups if it

230is so important for the emotional social help of our students to meet who are athletes why is it not important for the emotional social health of our students to meet who are not athletes or who are athletes in the academic arena finally um and dr robert tosi and mrs kusalevich i have written you both numerous emails about the quality and i use that word in quotations of education that we are receiving online i am not going to call out teachers or anything that is happening but i am telling you that nothing has changed in one class we are 13 chapters behind we need to cover 13 chapters for an ap test there are things going on that are we need to fix if we are not going to school we need to up the game

231on the online education provided at the high school level when classes are cancelled which they seem to be more frequent than i would like there are no subs i know this is an issue district-wide but that means some weeks my child only meets a class for 30 minutes that's it my daughter who just spoke earlier is taking ap and honors classes it's amazing that classes could only meet once for 30 minutes so if we are not going back until six weeks after they are vaccinated which by my calendar brings us to april then we need to change the way we are using the computers and the online education because it is not effective i encourage you at your next word of ed meeting to please hold the public session in a timely manner the citizens

232of this community should know that they can start this meeting at 7 00 and by 7 30 be able to speak at this rate as mr smith has said i will not be here to hear the commissioner's comments or your responses to my statements have a good evening thank you miss papawich uh next uh looks like lori the llama hi good evening everyone my name is lori lalama and my home address is christopher columbus middle school um so i just i i'm so happy because when i listen to the word merv it makes me smile so i am so excited for that referendum you have no idea so as everybody knows i've been fighting for that for the health and safety of our students so i'm very happy i know that we can work together

233dr robert tosie between the cea because i don't know if andrea is on so we've already discussed it so we can work together and we can bring it to the different schools because i have a large zoom so that would be helpful so we can work together on that and that would be a positive thing for our district i am so happy you have no idea i was doing the happy dance but i don't think you want to see it now um the other thing that i want to bring up is that besides the skills that the kids the content that they're learning as i'm the teacher of the year for 2015 i have my master's in educational technology i'm certified through ucla as an online educator and the kids have learned besides content adapt

234they can adapt to anything they're collaborating they're networking they're thinking outside the box and those are all skills that they're gonna need later on when they get into the high school when they get to college in the workforce those are important skills and and right now the jobs for my middle school kids don't exist yet so the skills that they're learning now during this difficult situation is is a bonus for them in that sense my middle school kids are by 8th graders are ceos of their own theme park so they designed their brochures for advertising they design videos so there's things that they're learning and skills and platforms because when i teach middle school i teach skills for real world so the kids learn a lot of different platforms that they can use later on

235and the other thing i wanted to say is that the entire staff throughout the district have turned on a dime they have turned chaos into something beautiful and new for their students when everything seemed dark the hard work and perseverance brought light this has not been easy but we will strive to do our best for the students of clifton public schools thank you ms lalama next it looks like we have uh lucia hi that's my daughter's account i'm on her oh okay this is the record she of course cherylie caramucci woodrow wilson middle school um was an educator of the year from last year and i've been teaching self-contained special education for the past 19 years i just wanted to take a minute to address specifically uh what the self-detained teachers have been doing and

236what we've been seeing in actual classrooms so while in-person instruction will never take the place of virtual learning i wanted to share with you the really great things that are happening in our self-contained classrooms every teacher regardless of the content area has invested a lot of time and energy and helping students navigate and learn google classrooms and various other online resources we've established new routes teams and returning to school too early and then having to close again we'll disrupt these routines which we know is so important to our population our students are now familiar with the expectations of their online classes and have been comfortable with online learning self-contained classrooms carry out whole group lessons with students as well as small group instruction to help individualize the student's education and provide more one-on-one support and

237we've been doing that through the utilization of breakout rooms um and our wonderful paraprofessionals that work alongside of us so we've been able to really incorporate individualized learning through this virtual platform we also noticed that there's a lot less distractions uh doing this virtually through the breakout rooms than there would be in person my colleagues i have even noticed a decrease in inappropriate behaviors that we normally would see in our regular classrooms one of the biggest changes we've seen is the increased level of independence amongst our students many started the year needing a parent or guardian sitting right next to them to keep them on track and to access their assignments many students have been able to feed the love of support and work independently without assistance students have learned how to read their own

238schedules they've improved computer skills and they've learned lots of different platforms on the computer and these are all life skills that they need in the real world teachers are providing the same exciting lessons through wonderful interactive activities and online learning resources the online and digital lessons have improved students motivation and engagement clifton has dedicated teachers who are working hard in every building to provide the best virtual learning experience possible we want to say thank you to those of you who are using the data and science to keep not only the student safe but the staff as well we did have a couple concerns um i know you guys are addressing the ventilation being that it's extremely cold out right now it would be difficult to be in our rooms with the windows open we will

239have some students that do sensory issues are unable to wear masks appropriately covering both their nose and mouth and we were also concerned about vaccination not being available to us right now and then there's really not a lot of information on the vaccine yet saying if we're vaccinated are we still able to carry that virus into the school and affect the children there or carry it from our students back home to our children at home so we are very grateful that we have a little time here to kind of get some more answers to those things and make everyone a little more comfortable going in the special education teachers of clinton are working very hard to provide the best online experience possible and we are so appreciative of the emails we've received from our students

240family who hear and see what we do on a daily basis and send us kind words of encouragement and support thank you guys thank you very much next up we have mark runciak please state your uh address for the record and uh you have the floor you just have to unmute yourself mark you hear me now we do yes thank you mark brunsiak 20 holly street yeah uh i just want to let everybody know what i think i think this board meeting was the most out of touch board meeting that i've ever been part of since this past august you spent over an hour today talking about floating bonds for over a hundred million dollars to upgrade the schools that have no students in them and you have no date whatsoever that you're going to

241allow them to come back to school not just that it's we're asking to have an option to have our kids go to school that's what we're asking for but you're asking us to float a 100 million plus dollar bond to upgrade schools while you kick the can down the road for when students will actually be able to go to the classroom why can't you kick the referendum down the road too to when the parents who have a choice are allowed to give their give their kids the choice to go in there a caller just called in before she's devastated you heard her her son is devastated she's got to take him to therapy now there's a value to mental wellness as well everybody so that's all i'm asking for i'm asking you to kick the

242can down the road it's so out of touch you're asking people to pay pony up some tax dollars for upgrades for classrooms that have no kids in them how persuasive is that you're talking about the interest rates that were even lower last year the interest rates were lower last year can does anybody have a a crystal ball to say what the interest rates are going to be down the road maybe they'll be the same the same amount right and i think everybody would be fine upgrading all the facilities for a hundred plus million on a bond if you could get a date for the parents who can give their kids the option of learning in school thank you for your time thank you and god bless america thank you mr runciak next up we have

243um michael rogers uh please state your address for the record and you have the floor you're on you're on mute mr rogers i should know better i'm doing this remote learning thing mike rogers clifton high school of social studies department um in a few hours i'll be teaching the great depression and the social cultural political effects that crisis have on people and what you find out and i think dr robert tosi's a fellow social studies teacher in times of crisis which you end up seeing are a lot of the divisions and the faults and the weaknesses of the society that were present well before a pandemic well before an economic crisis and i believe we're starting to see that this evening many teachers uh many people feel that teachers are a major part of this

244problem about going back and all that and i'm really not really going to respond to that years ago i spoke truth to power at a board meeting i've won a lot of awards and have been recognized a lot over the years but years ago i spoke truth to power with regard to someone in administration but the truth to power i want to speak to today is not the administration or the board but the power of public opinion and the public opinion that um teachers and students are not critical to civil society is troublesome to me on january 6th many of my students later in the day after remote learning started to email me about the events that happened at the capitol building and the email started rolling in at eight o'clock i posted on my

245google me that would i would i pulled the students should we have a impromptu meeting and talk about what happened that day at nine o'clock within an hour 54 students responded i'll be there mr rogers they didn't ask for a grade they didn't ask for extra credit they didn't ask why do i have to do it they needed it back at the end of may when unrest unfolded throughout the country due to the incident involving george floyd a similar incident happened and i had one of these nine o'clock impromptu remote learning sessions no extra credit no grading no data just students yearning to be with their teacher if you follow history the greatest lessons in all of history have been done under trees on the top of mountains in caves in cloistered monasteries in laboratories

246in some of the most unique places but what doesn't change is the critical importance of the relationship between teachers and students long after and long before boards of education and administration and data-driven instruction and all these wonderful things there will always be teachers and students as long as there's a civil society i take offense to when people say i don't work hard for a little bit but then i realize i have nothing to prove to anyone but my students teaching is different than all other types of work there's different types of work in this world i worked at kfc i worked at the produce department of shoprite i worked as a landscaper i worked for 10 years as a greenskeeper at a golf course or why going to college and starting my career more importantly

247i've watched my father as a truck driver my mom working in a liquor store and my grandparents and my great uncles working in those factories along the passage river i know what work is we work for our families we work for our loved ones this is important but teaching is a vocation teaching is different than work a vocation is something that you do from the heart it's something that you do for something bigger than yourself so therefore the opinions of some kind of roll off your back when you approach teaching as the vocation as so many of my colleagues do and the thing about one more thing about the classroom is not a part of society it is outside of society it doesn't play by society as rules the things we talk about in the

248classroom the things we learn and discuss in the classroom are designed to help fix that society or to better it to make it more civil more loving compassionate truthful and rational there's only a few places in this world where love and rationalism can co-exist and create and produce great things and that's the classroom no matter what form it takes in a few hours my students again will have great attendance they'll have their readings done and they'll have some good questions for me thank you so much have a good night thank you mr rogers uh next from the cea we have mrs auroch hi how are you good evening everyone thank you um i just want many of you know my name's andrea aura i'm a proud teacher at school 12 and the clifton education association

249pride chair through pride the association has been sponsoring many community events last night we co-sponsored a workshop with a high school key club last week and uh last week we also handed out kindergarten enrichment kits to schools 4 12 15 and 17 and we have many more events scheduled for the rest of the year i want to personally thank all our members of the association for volunteering their time and their talents to help out with these events the feedback i receive from the students and the families of clifton is incredible especially in these days when we aren't able to physically see our students we are still making great connections with our families with these events and the outpouring of support from our families our students and our teachers and our staff has been incredible i

250also want to speak out as a teacher i'm seeing all the hard work and creativity we as teachers are doing well virtual teaching the at-home classrooms that are made the projects to keep our students engaged are great i have the opportunity as my teaching job this year is as an esl teacher to enter different classrooms under google meets and my colleagues as i service some of their students in their classes the assignments that these students are presenting are amazing they're making comic strips to practice their vocabulary creating small videos it's truly giving them an advantage in this ever changing world they're collaborating they're using technology they're working together our minds in motion program after school at school 12 has become virtual this year and the students are loving every minute of it they attend each

251day they're eager to sign up right after school one student even said and we put it up on our twitter i'll quote her right now this is why i love coming to minds of motion all the classes are fun and even when i'm tired after school and don't feel like coming i end up coming and enjoy what we do and i don't want to leave that's a testament to what we are doing right now this is a testament to what the entire staff in clifton has been doing and will continue to do so so i want to thank you all who are doing their best to give the best to our students i hope this referendum passes when it goes up to vote in april because it is what our city needs the clifton education

252pride team where would love to co-host zoom events sessions for the community to have questions and answers just like laurie said we have a zoom account that can hold up to 500 people uh once the dates we can collaborate and send out information in multiple languages and we can put it out to our families and social media accounts but once again thank you for everything have a great night thank you mrs horock we appreciate your comments uh next up is um stephanie langer hello i'm stephanie langner i am both a teacher in clifton as well as a resident i did add my address in the chat there for you i wanted to start by thanking you dr robert tozie for the decision to keep schools closed in for in-person learning until it's safe i think

253while it is valuable to point out the distinctness in clifton's district as a reason to hold off comparisons i think it's also valuable to start zooming out and looking at a bigger picture here the wall street journal just posted an article on january 16th about what's happening internationally with covet and closures have begun being announced in countries like the uk germany ireland austria denmark and netherlands they are some of the countries that were able to reopen very quickly because the pandemic was under control one of those countries was aiming for herd immunity and they've recognized the flaws in those plans so when we see countries that were ahead of us in the first and the second wave starting to make changes it might be valuable to zoom out and see what there is to learn

254from that and i think the data in clifton is personally very scary for me because i happen to be in the age group with the highest number of cases and my students are the age group that has the second highest number of cases and if that's not a cause for concern i'm not really sure what is and i hear the fear and vulnerability in the voices of the parents that chose to speak tonight and i understand what it is like to battle mental health issues and i really have great empathy for you as i'm sure your students parents have as well and as your students teachers have but the reality is seeking support for that is better than losing a life and there is learning going on and i've seen some incredible programs being implemented

255i know at christopher columbus miss vaquel our sac counselor is implementing mindful monday practices to help establish better mental health routines with our students for those that are concerned about this referendum this is what you're looking for you want the kids back in school we need proper ventilation for that you want teachers to go back to the building we should be protected from spreading a virus to your children we need the opportunity to have those vaccines not just to keep ourselves safe but for our students i miss being there with them too but in my google meet the other day one of my students was able to share how over the weekend he got hands-on with engineering unbuilding and rebuilding the parts of his computer those connections are still being made when we talked about

256friction and motion i had a student share a video from going sledding with her family comparing how the speed of their sled changed when she rode with her younger brother or her younger sister because of the changes in in math they also spoke as a family about how friction plays a role i think there's beautiful opportunities here in this moment and just in case any of you missed it i'd like to share just a few lines from amanda gorman's poem at the inauguration yesterday she said we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one there is always light if only we're brave enough to see it if only we're brave enough to be it and i think those of you stepping up and saying let's prioritize the physical health and safety of our students

257and staff you're being the light pushing this referendum forward is being the light and i thank you for that thank you very much uh next up uh says dustin but i believe it's mr kiefer if you uh just state your address you have the floor yeah hi my name's tom kiefer my son is dustin kiefer and he goes to school five but not really he actually goes to school upstairs in my house and sucks and this whole thing is i can't believe how you guys start off by doing a comparison between vertical and horizontal things when the kids aren't even in school we should start off with how the kids are going to get in school a select date mr robert tosie pretty much summed it up from my understanding with the vaccine that's what

258you guys are waiting on so rather than string us along and do march 21st and march this and next month just say hey once everyone gets vaccinated next year let's shoot for september and make a solid plan all the other stuff in that presentation was wonderful i'm not don't don't misconstrue my words that was great the guy the guy joke representing you exactly was talking about and not no no but faith but you're going to tell me at the end of the presentation you're going to show me a chart where i got to pay 200 more in taxes so the kids can part of that could be 40 million dollars for new toilets with my kids going to school upstairs pulling his hair out crying hating life that's that's okay to you guys there's some

259disconnect here where we need to get together and figure this out this is crazy there's parents going mad kids are staying home you you're telling people to pay two extra dollars for a parent i'm lucky i'm lucky that my my wife gets to stay home with the kids what if you have this situation and now you can't go to work and you're working less to stay home with your kids and help them and you're going to raise their raise all this money from tax money for what this whole thing is crazy we need to get the kids back in school we need a plan if you guys hear the code that's fine that that coleman is real but come up with a plan there did this whole you know covering my butt thing let's replant

260for next month next month man we've been waiting it was 14 days it's gonna be a year what what's happening make a solid plan this is what's happening when the numbers get to this when the vaccine comes out what happens this is crazy and it's so frustrating as a parent when my son he loves school so much and now he hates school he hates online learning it's terrible when we have dinner at the at the night the end of the day i'll always say the end of the day well this is my end of the day okay i've dinner with my family we discussed the best and worst things that happened in the day to to celebrate the the the good and to figure out what was bad every day my son is cries and

261says homeschooling is the worst part of my day how does that make me feel when when we're talking about bathroom renovations what is that sense come on guys please man uh it's frustrating it's crazy please i'm sorry this is nuts you guys gotta get the kids back in school come up with a plan please thank you for your time thank you very much uh next up is uh adam badav just state your name excuse me state your address for the record and on meet yourself and you have the floor good evening everybody uh my name is adam bedoff 38th street uh my daughter attends school five um we're in the pandemic now guys i know everybody's frustrated all the parents are frustrated that their kids are at home and um they're having going through a

262boredom and everybody's going through the same stuff everywhere so around the country all around the world so we need to calm down and uh think of how we're gonna approach this and how we're gonna solve this in the district me personally i don't plan on sending my kid to school until september i don't care if the school gets open tomorrow uh till september i don't think it's safe for my kid uh and us because she could go to the school and bring back the virus so we don't know the vaccine even if the teacher gets it the kids aren't getting this still since trial right now for the for the kids so the teacher could be a carrier and the student could get the vac the coveted virus and carry back home and i take

263it to work and everybody gets it just spreads more and more so it's frustrating but we have to deal with it and one other thing the teachers are amazing we're emailing each other we're more interact with the teachers now than we probably would have been if we had physical school she sends an email at ten o'clock at night and uh we're responding back and forth it's like a 24-hour thing right now with the teachers and the communication going on it is frustrating the kids yes they're going through some mental problems we're trying to keep them busy it's not easy for the parents i understand but we just need to live with it and instead of coming back every month and trying to push it back every month let's just push it to september so everybody

264knows that it's in september now instead of going back and forth every month and come in and go in and you know not getting everybody on the same page let's just put a date that's out there in the future and uh let's look at september is what i would think would be the best decision instead of doing this every month and one other thing i had emailed dr uh the superintendent when you first joined the district i believe last year once the school zoo opened i would really like every school in the district to have filtered water in the fountains uh i don't know if you remember the email that i had sent you when you first started but every kid in the district is drinking tap water none of you drink that water at

265your house uh i believe there was a few filters in some fountains everybody drinks bottled water or they have a filter system in their house so we could invest a little more into the schools and uh have every fountain that's tap water filtered that's all i have to say thank you very much thank you mr horn has informed me that there is nobody else left in the uh waiting room see no one else i'd like to close this portion of public meeting by mr casper second by vice president abu drabo [Music] next is [Music] next is uh unfinished business everyone was emailed uh committee reports from me um there may be some uh some adjustment uh but uh everyone should have received their uh their committee re uh assignments via email um just a little

266while ago so if you please look at that and i believe we have um the new jersey school boards [Music] alternate spot still open is that correct is there any board member who is interested in that um otherwise i have to appoint somebody so if you're me if you're interested please let me know uh no you're doing the the the no mr smith i can't do it because besides being a county i sit on several state committees legislative 34th district i'm on the finance committee i'm on the sub-resolution committee for the state of new jersey and i'm also on the county uh association leadership committee so i do not want to go down on a saturday to the d.a and be the state representative i've done that maybe because i didn't say that i said

267you're doing the county for us right right so but i don't want to be the alternate no no no i understand i think you're better off getting one of the newer board members so they could start really getting involved and learn learn it the right way okay if there's no one at this time i will reach out and see if we can get someone to fill that otherwise you're gonna send me down there um okay we'll come back to that again um let's move on to uh resolutions so we have uh under education and administration uh we have uh one through three i have a motion motion by miss danny second second by mr casper discussion i have a question on number two is that a grant through the new company that's doing the grant

268writing um that grant uh while we did go back and forth and they did provide us some assistance that is a grant that's done through the department of educa the new jersey department of education through the e-wag system and only district employees have access to that system so i actually completed that grant on this morning but we did get support what the what the grant writing company did do for us is she um kind of did the coordinating collecting the data from the different supervisors for me and then it was submitted um today because only a district employee could do it but they have been extremely instrumental despite this one grant um they've already shown us so many new grants and applied for a number of uh smaller things that don't require board resolutions that

269they've applied for and done the entire process for us um so i just wanted to share that positive information as well uh thank you mr president through you to the superintendent uh uh maybe every month we can find out like what they've applied for with the dollar amount that we can expect and see you know that we're getting we're getting a good value for the money that we're spending with this company thank you absolutely yes uh this is last month they they're going to be sending me a monthly report and then i'll be sharing that with the board yeah i think mr president mr smith uh that's what we discussed i think um what you mentioned that we were gonna do um but we can discuss that later all right any other discussion seeing none

270roll call mr abedrabo yes mr awad miss ford yes miss beltran yes mr canova yes mr daley yes miss danny yes mr casper yes and mr smith yes uh next next we have under personnel um we have one through 20. uh ocean if i miss uh danny can i hear a second second second by vice president abu drabo discussion seeing none roll call mr abedraba yes with abstain on my name only on p16 [Music] your name right yep correct miss bassford i'm staying on board conferences piece and i'd like just just to uh wish uh theresa evans on uh pete two uh happy retirement you will be sorely missed uh while you were during your tenure in clifton uh you touched a lot of lives and uh to the evans family i know it's been

271a rough go but um i think of you daily thank you mrs beltran yes mr genova yes mr daley yes miss danny yes mr casper yes and abstaining on my name only for p16 and mr smith yes uh next under uh finance and facilities we have one through ten do i have a motion motion motion by itself second second by vice president abu drabo discussion i have a question about uh p5 these attachments are they able to be seen by the general public um because i have a question about that uh i'm i'm looking uh my mr yes yes it's in public yes it's the content of the resolution i would feel more comfortable if the resolute the actual resolution itself had the dollar amount detached to it i know there's an attachment but usually

272when you write a resolution that's the who what when where why and how so i i would really i would feel more comfortable if we put the put the dollar amount in before we voted on this in in the second paragraph um it's the first sentence the final eligible cost for the project approved by the commissioner are 161 million 453 117 is it on the resolution itself because i don't see that on the resolution the resolution says approve a special school district elections to be held is it is it on there am i missing it it's in the box at the top where's his bomb proposal question at the bottom yeah but that's not the resolution that's not what i'm saying i'm my my comment is that when you write a resolution it should have

273the dollar amount because then when people go back to check in they don't check the attachments it just i i i don't feel comfortable supporting that without the amount she means if i may miss bespoke she means where it says recommend actions just basically duplicate that number into the body of the resolution this way just covers everybody is that right mrs password that's 100 correct because we're spending money we're we're authorizing money to be spent when it's an attachment if people can't access the attachment they don't know that we're putting all this money up there so that's why i i'm just i don't like when there's open-ended resolutions i i don't see that it's part of the attachment i see the recommend i see the subject i see the recommended action and it says bond

274council may require there's a colon and then it has the public content right underneath there so i think isn't that the whole resolution or am i not reading yeah it's yeah the yeah the i'm speaking about the resolution that's on the agenda itself i'm asking for the dollar amount to be on the agenda that's what i i we've always put dollar amounts on just each other i understand the attachment is is that all the whole laid out there's a family member uh the laid out um you know information but the resolution should have the dollar amount i'm just that's just me i mean it's an attachment and um it is on the public comment side so it's it's this whole entire like the tab at the top where it says content that's all public yeah

275so why did we add an attachment if you it's just i just had it as as both there's a document and then we put the entire document into the resolution okay got you so the attachment was just um repetitive yeah the attachment is the form that danny or i or both have to sign after we pass this yep uh mr smith i think we have to pull okay can we make a motion to pull five f3 and f4 and vote on it separately it's the wednesday thursday okay um miss bassford did you want um no i wanted them out in the resolution because i don't feel comfortable with it being down in the bottom i just wanted to state in that resolution i just don't understand what the golf is all about with this there's

276a reason i want it in there because when people go to search it they don't go looking for the attachment they look for the actual resolution itself all right mr uh abhidrabo uh you would like to have separate votes on uh three yeah we can't we can't vote at them at the same time i mean it's it's either or oh correct correct yeah there's two two resolutions are we tabling one or tabling both at the moment i i don't think did you say table or you said separate to separate them separately right so we'll just do a separate vote on three and a separate vote on four if we're going to put the resolution amount in five we need to put it in six too so because that was spending money there as well i

277know the attachment's on there but it doesn't oh it does say it sorry it's in the resolution it's hard to read this okay so we are um removing uh three and four from the group and using those as a separate votes uh so for this group we're doing one two five six seven eight and nine and ten um does my motion in second uh agree to that uh amendment was miss danny and uh mr robert miss danny it was miss basford oh do i have it wrong yes you do have it wrong yes i'm okay with it that's all right okay so on the group roll call mr abbey dropper sorry my cursor got stuck uh yes with cooling f3 and f4 and the rest on mr awad yes on all but i have to

278stain on the check number two one three three zero that's why i repeat number two one three three three zero that's devastating on that okay i'll find it miss password um uh yes to the group i'm i'm voting no on check number two zero zero nine eight five and two zero one zero eight eight i'll put it in the chat box so you know okay thank you miss beltran yes mr canova yes mr daley yes miss danny yes mr casper yes mr smith yes motion carries all right so uh motion on uh number three uh designation of meetings for wednesday nights do i have a motion motion motion by miss bassford do i have a second i'll second it i miss beltron any discussion scene none roll call mr abby drabo no mr awad no

279miss bassford yes that's the only night i can make it miss beltran yes mr canova yes mr daley yes miss danny no mr casper no mr smith no that's that's five to four no the motion does not carry all right next is number four designated meetings for thursdays do i have a motion motion by mr vice president abu drabo second second by mr awad discussion seeing none roll call i apologize who motioned uh it was uh mr abu drabba was the motion and second by mr awad gotcha thank you mr abu drabba yes mr awad yes miss password when people needed to be accommodated two years ago we've changed it i asked for accommodation because to my thursday nights is a late night thank you very much for not heeding to a board member i

280vote no beltran no mr canova no mr daley yes miss danny yes mr casper yes mr smith yes it has five votes motion carries okay next is uh board member comments um we normally go uh in alphabetical mr awad would you be comfortable going first or would you rather wait um my comments are gonna be very short uh first and foremost i would like to thank everybody that joins this meeting from the board members staff district teachers uh parents and any students watching uh we do live in hard times um like everyone stated there is a light at the tunnel we are getting there you know this has been a crazy year plus and you know there is a bright side to this future and to our staff to our teachers thank you for all

281the hard work you're doing um hopefully you know in the next few months in the near future we do slowly get back to normal um and uh prayers and our thoughts to you know all our uh essential workers from our doctors our nurses and teachers you know everybody out there doing their part in our community of society uh special uh thank you to uh the clifton health departments john b eagle uh leo uh and the rest of the staff for the hard work you guys are doing you know in tough times our community to stand together and that makes me really proud to be president clifton raised here and uh to a stronger future for our students and our staff to the entire district are you okay thank you mr awad uh miss bassford yes

282good evening everyone um miss uh thank you for all the speakers that came out tonight um to miss popowicz i couldn't agree with you more that we have to be more mindful when we have a an agenda that has two really specific uh impacting um subjects uh i do agree that we do need public comment on those you'll for the referendum you will have your time i'm sure we a lot of people bounced off for the opening of schools um because it does get late um i hear somebody i have i had kickback i don't know what's going on um i just hope people don't stop making noises again like they used to do um it's it's really upsetting this whole covert thing um i i want to urge the parents that um the chief

283operating officer of the clifton public school district makes this decision based on all of all of the people in the district and um we have been very sensitive uh i used to be on the uh education special education committee i am not on that no longer so but i don't i do know that while i was on that we were advocating for the special needs students and the gen ed students and their mental well-being as well we were we were really focusing on that uh so i want the parents to know that dr robituzzi has to make decisions that sometimes are based on the majority and not the minority of people so i want you to all understand that we're trying our best um it's not an easy position that we are in we these

284agendas take a lot of times to go through um the claims list itself uh there was four claims list five claims lists it was really really really annoying so um it just and they were from november and i don't understand why they were held but that's you know that's neither here nor there um mr smith i i want to i i'm getting kicked back and i don't understand what it is i hope you can hear me is there anyone that has their microphone on could you please uh turn it off you know when you have earphones on it hurts your ears when you get that kickback so it's not easy um mr smith i i did have a conversation with you you called me about the board committees and and i told you specifically i

285didn't want to discuss that information i have i have an issue uh discussing board business on the phone especially when it goes everybody everybody's discussing it so and then i have an issue when we get emails that discuss that so i've asked not to be put on those emails i do not want to violate opma okay i asked i asked not to be on those emails and i will continue i also was very specific in my conversation when i told you that i could not sit with a certain board member because i have a legal letter against me on october 14th i was served a cease and desist letter from a law firm from a board member and i cannot serve with that board member as per my personal attorney if you need a letter

286from my attorney i will supply that to you and the board for my protection as a human being and a board member i asked you specifically and you put me on that committee and i thought it was really insensitive of you to do that because not only did i get this at 9 56 tonight when i'm trying to concentrate on a meeting when we have a lot of resolutions to go over but then i got to look at this i think that was that was very inappropriate and also very unprofessional to give board members a list i didn't know what i was on i'm sure everybody else knew what they were on earlier in the day but i didn't know any better you don't have to comment you can you guys can say whatever you

287want after me i know what happened and i know the truth had i know a long time ago what i knew now and what i know things would be different in my world i would have taken different precautions to make sure things were handled correctly i learned that i learned the definition of gaslighting this summer i learned the definition of what real trust is and what real trust isn't and i've learned the true definition of what professionalism is and i'm not seeing it exhibited i have rights to i have a vote like everyone else does on this board long time ago people on this board not all of you tried to hold me down and tried to put me down and what did i do i got busy on another plane i went to the

288county and i went to the state and i learned things and i got involved i am a very well respected board member in the county in the state level i'm on legislative 34 i'm on the finance committee i'm on sub resolution i'm on the county activities leadership committee and whenever dr feinstein calls my phone and asks me a question he gets an answer right away that's respect and i really really really are very hurt that you made me do this tonight if you want me to read the letter out loud i can i can that's my right to do that and i have permission from my attorney to do so it's in record but i don't appreciate when i ask you specifically not to place me on a committee with that person because i have

289to protect myself because i feel that i have to go to my own personal lawyer to get information to protect myself as a board member stop with the games i'm not going to play them i told you very specifically what i needed and i thought you were going to respect my needs and i also thought that other people will respect the fact that when a board member makes a request that they need a certain day for a meeting you would respect that but it's coming from me so i understand that that's the way it's gonna roll it's okay i'm a tough girl i've been through a lot more than you guys think you can put me through there's only one way up from the bottom it's up and it's the top at the end of

290the day do not play games with people because there are other mechanisms to protect them that's all i'm saying thank you thank you who's next uh miss beltron okay um so i just like to start off as um as you guys know i'm obviously for the kids going back into school as soon as possible um i know the risks of covet i've been out here the entire time um unfortunately i lost two employees to it so i understand the risks all too well um and i get there are benefits to doing this school online and mainly that's for the older students i have a real problem with the younger students i grew up having a hard time learning to read and i couldn't imagine having to learn to read online um i had astigmatism and

291my eyes would jump down to the next line and i'd read backwards and i couldn't imagine if i had to stare at a screen deal with that and then try and learn to read so i really hope that we can hope beyond hope to get the elementary kids back in the high school and the middle school i think obviously they have their own struggles but i think they're better equipped to handle the online learning whereas the younger students aren't also the connection issues we had a couple of teachers call in tonight and they had connection issues and i wonder you know how many kids are having to listen to their classes in slo-mo and gaps and things like that if they're calling into a board meeting we can't understand them how are they able to

292do the classes from their home if their wi-fi connection is that weak um hopefully we get some federal mandates biden seems to be um on a real push to get us back into schools in a hundred days he said it a couple of times the last couple of days so hopefully he'll um be able to figure something out that he could help us federally and push some more vaccine out to maybe make this happen sooner because i know some people did the math on the timeline but i don't see the timeline getting us back into school before uh the end of the year which you know maybe we're looking at a september start but i think our administration needs to take a look at prom moving up ceremonies graduation now and start working on that

293if they aren't already to re-envision it and hopefully make it better than it was last year because now we have enough time to prepare for that if we in fact cannot have traditional events maybe we have multiple proms or outdoor proms or something else so that these kids don't lose out the same way that the kids did last year um and that's pretty much it i'd like to thank everyone for staying up late with us and um hope to see everyone in person soon thank you miss beltran mr kanoa all right good evening first of all thank you to all the speakers uh thank you to everyone who had presentations um definitely a lot of information there i know it took a long time to prepare so thank you um so just touching back on

294on the uh the issue of going back to school you know one thing i'm for is is giving people the choice right before we you did say we did give parents a choice we could say that some chose to stay out some some chose to to go in um so for the parents who called in opposition saying they want to keep their kids home you have that choice and you've had that choice it's not worth mandating everyone to come back and i don't i don't even know if that will happen and i'm sure at some point it will it'll be at a later date what i'm advocating for and what i'm talking about is people who want to come back now i realize that there is a group of people out there which is the

295teachers that i know in the beginning they were surveyed so they were given the opportunity to say whether or not they were comfortable with coming in now i don't know to the extent that was but if a new survey needs to go out and survey the teachers and see who's comfortable coming in and make a new plan as to you know how that's going to function and that's what we should do we should do what's in the best interest for the kids and the parents and the community and the teachers um if they feel that in in person learning is better and they feel they learn that better that way in that structure then that's what we should give to them right we're at the end of the day we're a service provider just like

296the one teacher said it all boils down to one thing a teacher and a student and the teachers give the education to the students in any means necessary whatever works for that student um so i think i think us making the decision is wrong i think we should really put the decision decision back in their hands and leave it open um that's what we did before and and again it worked looking at the statistics internal spread was less than external spread so i think we're looking at um looking at stats that they're a little bit skewed but going back to touching on the referendum i know people were tying the referendum saying you know if we don't have a date to go back to school you know we're not we're not going to pass this

297referendum or we shouldn't be going for the referendum and and i would urge them to to think twice because this is the one time that we're gonna have the ability to buy things at you know we go back to this coupon code at 30 33 discount if not more it could be up to 40 even but this is the one opportunity we have these are things we're going to buy anyway we're going to have to do these things uh it just be it's the same thing as you buying things in your house but instead of buying them over a long period of time you're buying in a short period of time and getting a discount so i i would definitely want to turn this down i know you may be passionate about you know going

298back to school but don't let that passion get in the way of this huge discount here and i know it seems like a lot you know adding 200 to taxes but in the long run if we don't need to do those projects that means that we could come out at zero every year we don't have to increase it just like we did this year we don't have to increase the tax right that's so that's always an option that we can take so i urge you even though you may be feeling passionate about this one thing don't let it harm the other please um and danny you know at the end of the day no matter what decision you make i'm gonna support it but i have to at least say my piece right because i

299represent people in this town as well that are calling me and telling me you know why aren't we back in so i think that's the beauty of this board is that we can talk about things we can argue about things but at the end of the day um it's a democracy here right and everybody speaks their mind and at the end of the day things pass or they don't and i appreciate that i appreciate that about not only here but about our nation um and uh that's all i have for tonight thank you mr kenova mr daily uh thank you mr president i know it's been a long night um just a couple of things um first of all about the referendum um and and and the virus um this the virus is a huge

300challenge and we're all the victims there's nobody that's uh putting an agenda foreign for pandemic virus going around um it's very difficult everybody is suffering um [Music] i don't share what what trials i have to go through and if somebody wants to reveal that that's fine but i know in families and friends all over the place they all have challenges from one degree to another so this virus is touching everybody in one form or another um the thing that's really disturbing me at this particular time the governor announced the other day that he's getting a hundred thousand um vaccinations a week if you do a quick math there's nine million people in the state of new jersey if seventy percent get vaccinated that means it would take about a year and a half to the

301exit ate everybody with two shots that's 14 million a little over 14 million shots and we're only getting a 100 000 a week so i hope that the federal government is able to open up the spigot on the uh for the product and this can move a lot faster but um you know we're just gonna since the product is not there and and you look at the summer numbers compared to now they're off the charts they they just exploded and um i know a lot of friends and family members who have caught the virus fortunately nobody has passed but it's a trial and everybody's worried about exposure um myself and my wife have gotten tested many times fortunately we've always been negative but you know you got to be extra cautious at this time and

302um you gotta you know put your head down but move forward so i'm hoping for the best now about the referendum and other things um we would be neglecting our jobs if we just focused on one thing you need to walk and chew many pieces of gum at the same time to run an organization such as this and i know under the superintendent and all the staff here is doing a great job to do that you get yes we would like we would love to set a state's certain but it it is a movable thing this virus it's hiding in the shadows it comes out we don't have a crystal ball and we don't have the product to address it as a as the state at this time so you know there's nothing i mean

303i think we're all doing the very best but in terms of the referendum as mr canova just said yes we have to do multi things at the same time we don't take our eyes off the virus but we have to keep our eyes on everything else this is an extraordinary opportunity that the district has i've heard a lot of people that willing to support it uh my off the cuff's suggestion that is everybody who is involved in the school system got 10 people to vote for this thing we're winners just go out and find 10 people for those who are running form zoom meetings i'll be happy to participate and provide any information um of course we're we get a little bit more information than everybody else but you're going to have a large information

304package about the participation if we did not have these presentations both on the covid and the referendum ahead and we voted on this well what are you doing that's what the first thing people would be saying well what are you doing what are you voting on we don't know anything about this you had an extensive briefing and yes your patience yes the day is long the night is long but that's what we're here for we're going to be here for as long as it takes to get things done right i think the presentations were necessary for the public to know something because you're going to ask a more informed form question especially especially asking questions that you don't know anything about so this is the first cut of an information campaign you'll have many more

305you have many opportunities to respond but tonight they were appropriately placed on the agenda and yes if you want to stay up and listen we're getting more people uh weighing in from public comment than i've ever seen when we were doing in person there'd be two or three people whether it was a budget or anything else show up at a board meeting so people are tuning in and are paying attention from my perspective um [Music] and the last thing i'd like to add at this time i was very happy to see that the superintendent was looking forward to having extra um sessions and classes in the summers or on saturdays um if it's going to happen during the summer and saturdays we can very much talk about that and putting that extra money into the

306budget or finding the money to put in for that uh he knows that i've talked to him many times about that about because no matter how good our uh virtual features are there's no substitute for in classroom and we know as as a matter of common sense that kids learn better in school than virtual that being said we need to support all our students and i mentioned to them several times that i'd be more than willing to support putting money in the budget that allow would allow our teachers to teach either after school hours when we're in session or during the summer or whenever uh the superintendent decides is the appropriate form to do that again i'd like to thank all the speakers and it was a long meeting but that's what we're here for

307you got to stay here and stay with it and take care of the entire business of the board of education thank you all and have a great night thank you mr daley uh uh miss danny uh yes i'll i'll keep it um pretty brief um uh so i wanna thank all the speakers um for coming out and um i think you know like what mr canova said it's it's a democracy and you know what that's the great beauty of it all is you know people weighing in and you know sometimes you make decisions and you make them from a place that you know you think is the right place and you know there'll always be people that are happy and then people that aren't um and you know it's that's just the nature of the

308way things are i mean it would be nice to be able to please everybody but you know that's just somehow sometimes how it is um some people are upset and others aren't um you know and then if you open up schools then um others complain and others are happy and you know hopefully again we can get back to some sort of sense of normalcy because again nothing really beats opening up the classrooms and having the kids be in the classroom as i said um with that being said and you know looking at you know covid and everything i do hope that um everyone you know is taking care of themselves i do feel terrible um for students that you know i think a lot of them are missing the social interaction well i know they

309are you know um being that i am an educator and i have you know taken time to speak to the students in regards to their social emotional wellness and ask them and you know really what they miss is the social interaction being in a classroom and interacting with their peers and you know little little jokes and little things that they do um so you know it's it's you know again it's it's we just wish we could go to normal and everything could be the way it was um and you know individuals that make decisions we might not agree with them we might not like it um you know maybe we can come up with different alternatives or something will happen and and we'll move in a different direction but you know sometimes the decision is

310what it is and we just have to find a way to you know find the rainbow um and um in terms of mr daily what you were saying uh about you know that the presentations were long but you know they did need to be um put out there and because again uh you need to have that discussion you need to have a healthy discussion you need to bring those topics out to the forefront because then individuals will say well you know what are you hiding or why wasn't this out sooner so you know it was a long meeting um you know again very long but you know sometimes there needs to be a long meeting things need to be brought out um and that's um all that i have to say and i just one

311last thing i want to end it is um my daughter's in labor so you know i apologize a bit um i've been kind of uh you know trying to i've been getting text messages from her and everything so it's my first grandchild and i'm super excited and um you know they say that that's so i i'm you know i'm beyond so beyond whatever um so in the midst of all this with covid at least i'm trying to find some like little rainbow and that's all um good night thank you you miss danny mr casper yes um i'm just gonna i would like to say a few thank yous uh before i um finish so i'd first like to thank everyone that put all their time into uh putting our presentations together thank you for everyone

312coming out this evening and spending your evening with us hopefully hopefully we can find a way to open school safely again i'd like to thank all of our dedicated staff and teachers that we have working on a daily basis i'd like to thank our retirees for your long dedication to our our district and uh at the beginning of the month i didn't get to congratulate our students of the month so um congratulations to our high school students of the month thank you everybody thank you mr casper i'm going to keep my uh my comments brief because we're closing close to uh midnight and uh dr robotozi uh i'd like you to have the uh the floor so um first off i just like to thank um my board members for entrusting me with the position

313of president um i will always be a professional president i will always be an honest president i will always give you the truth and uh i will always work with each of you um i will continue to send out emails uh they could be at many different times um i'm actually looking right now to figure a way of doing smoke signal instead of email if people are bothered by that so if we can figure that out i'll get that out to all of you but until then um i can't thank you enough for the uh the encouragement that the majority of the board uh put up on me and vice president abu jabra um oh actually you were supposed to go before me i'm sorry um and um my first meeting so i will always

314give you my best i i may not be perfect all the time i can't tell you how many hours were spent on committees and if any board member doesn't want to sit on a committee very nicely just let me know send an email and i'll remove you off the committee but i reached out to every board member tried to do my very best as president to put members on committees that they were interested in if they told me they were interested in it if not i am not going to cater around to board members who have special requests so if you don't want to serve on a committee you want to put extra burden on on the rest of the board please feel free to let me know and i'll remove you from any and

315all committees that you wish to be removed from um that's a prerogative you have as a board member but i guess until you've st in this chair you don't know how hard it is to fill these committees and mr abu drabo and i spent many hours putting this together and i thank you for your help with that it was done professionally and um so until uh until the smoke signal comes uh you may get an email from me uh again and i look forward to working with all of you and uh thank you for electing me as your president and mr abhidravo as your vice president and mr abu jabra i'm sorry i went before you but please uh the floor is yours thank you um i'm gonna keep it brief um and my brief

316is this is it's not really much about my life and my kids but to the young lady who who spoke on the phone you're right i don't know what's going in your house and many people on this screen here laughed when i said the word boredom because they know code word for boredom that my three-year-old son broke a tv a computer or something with a bat in reality my three-year-old kid who was on iep um has a hip therapy because he's going crazy at home in reality my five-year-old girl just like your nine-year-old probably i can't speak for yourself i can't speak for you but um also has a animal therapy because the person who loves school also hates school and from how you're explaining she too is also seeing a therapist um because not

317that she needs it but because i need to be ahead of the game before she actually really needs it but at the same time with all due respect ma'am and anybody else again you don't know what happens in my house in my real life in my personal life i don't know what happens in your life but i also won't want to talk about it but you want to talk about it more than happy to and i still put people outside this house priority not over my kids but over all well-being i'm taking care of what i need to take care of in this house because these two children are my responsibility and i can take care of it the superintendent all these children in this district are his responsibility when they're when when they're when

318they're in those classrooms and within the school district buildings so again i still stand behind you danny um other than me thank you have a great night okay dr robertos you can uh bring us home you gotta mute yourself first and thank you mr smith in case there was any confusion um there was a public speaker a couple that said they didn't unders that there was no plan to return to in-person instruction i think i was pretty clear on what the plan is the plan is very simple when we see a clear and lasting decrease in the number of cases school will open god i hope that's march first if the numbers go down as much this month as they went up last month we'll be in school on march first so it's not that

319there is no plan that's the plan and uh finally mr konova i appreciate what you said so much um about uh you know respecting maybe having a difference of opinion but at the end of the day we support each other and that's how i feel with this board and i and i thank this board for their support even if we might disagree on something because i have to tell you this we all want what's in the best interests of students and staff and community however there are legitimate disagreements in regards to covet and returning to school about what is in the best interest of those people so we can have legitimate disagreements but at the end of the day support each other and be kind to each other and listen i think the future is

320bright so hang in there i thank you all for your support have a good night thank you dr robitozzi um go to uh new business i have something new business miss basford yes um i see on the i see on the committee list that there's a diversity committee and i i happen to know that they've met twice so my question to you i'm not against the disability uh this diversity committee i'm not even against anything but where are the minutes and how come this board hasn't been apprised of those minutes you can't have a committee of board members go out into a uh some kind of uh committee section and meet in an organized fashion and not report that information back to the board the board is a collective whole of nine people not just

321three so where are those minutes and how come we haven't been they haven't been given to us that's my question okay uh other than questions is there any new business yeah mr smith i do have one item uh mr casper please go first it's just um we had to decide on the date for the ethics training because uh february 16th we have um the referendum meeting and then the 18th is our board meeting that's exactly what what i was going to to bring up uh mr casper so the 16th um the the dates that kathy hello had available were february 16th and february 18th um do we have a board meeting on the 18th uh we do yes we do the next meeting is february 4th and then we have a meeting on the 18th

322okay so um i had completely forgotten that the 16th was a referendum citizens committee there's a board meeting um on that thursday night so it's honestly it's up to the board what night is best for them i will make my schedule work but it might be it might just work in everybody's best interest to to do the ethics training an hour before the regular regularly scheduled board meeting just start the meeting early uh doctor in discussion um with ms hello who's going to be uh facilitating it uh these were two specific dates that she was giving us solely for clifton she has other dates that are available we probably have to piggyback on another board so we may be limited on our time um even if it's not on a board night if it's on

323another night we still would be limited on our time and this being our first ethics training i i really don't want to stifle ourselves uh if we don't have to um so maybe i can reach out to her tomorrow and see if there's other dates available i just don't want to push it out too much further uh one of my goals was to to have that training done as soon as possible and i was glad that we got dates from her right away so let me reach out to her first and then see and then i'll i'll get back to the board any objection from the board i won't discuss that with emails if you're going to give us dates it has to be discussed in public so this way the public can wait in

324on it i'm not going to talk about board business over the phone or in an email so just count me out uh and if you have it the hour before the meeting any other dude there's anything else i'm still speaking i'm speaking this is new business wonder i am still speaking you're speaking i'm still on the new business yes okay good if you have it before the meeting starts i am having a devil over time to get to the meeting so it's not fair to people that can't make it for seven o'clock you have to be mindful of everybody's schedule i just made those comments prior to this please be polite and professional with me you cut me off three times already feel really discriminated against mr smith is there any other new business on

325the floor seeing no other new business we will we don't have any executive session isn't that wonderful so i will entertain a motion to close your clothes by mr vice president second by mr casper any objection have a good night everybody thank you very much everybody good night everyone good night