001you due to the coven 19 health emergency and in order for the board of education to conduct its business this board meeting is being held via video conference and streamed live on youtube on the district website at www.ebnet.org in addition members of the public may provide comment at this meeting through zoom by entering the url into the web browser of your computer or mobile device and entering the meeting id and password upon joining the meeting your participation will be muted to ensure there is no disruption to the business being conducted by the board of education will the secretary please call the role mrs chu here mr sismar here mrs guass here mr hong here mrs lax here mrs reese yes mr simmons here mr winston here president becker here we have a quorum please rise
002to salute the i pledge plaid 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 the new jersey open public meeting law was enacted to ensure the right of the public to have advanced notices of and to attend the meetings of public bodies in accordance with the provisions of this act the east brunswick board of education has caused notice of this meeting to be published at the board of education offices and written notice was also provided to the sentinel the newark star ledger the home news tribune and the municipal clerk of east brunswick all board of education meetings with the exception of executive session discussions or video tape related broadcast individuals who speak at the board's public
003meetings should be aware of these videotaping rules good evening and welcome this is the first time this board has been in this room since march and it feels good to be back welcome home without any further ado we're all anxious to hear the superintendent's report and hear how things have been going in our district dr leski thank you president becker and good evening everyone and and again it is almost seven months to the day since we closed schools in march so it is good to be back together again i want to thank the entire east brunswick community for collaborating with us to ensure we have rapid notifications of close contacts as i've stated previously my messaging our ability to keep our schools safe our ability to keep our schools open is depending on keeping our
004greater school population safe this is especially important if children in your family unit attend non-public schools public schools like ours have different reporting requirements for positive cases of covert 19. so information sharing may not happen immediately or in some cases it may not happen at all if your family is impacted by a close contact or a positive case of coven 19 in an educational setting outside of east brunswick and you have children attending east brunswick schools please let us know immediately obviously there are multiple phases scheduled in our complete recovery process and every week we demonstrate that maintenance of safe teaching and learning environments that means that our next scheduled opportunity to introduce more students to our face-to-face population is achievable our district's esl department welcome families of our english language learners k-7 in a
005google meet online the first week of school our goal is to ensure that all are knowledgeable about how to help their child access google classroom in addition parents and guardians learned how to access interactive ebooks to strengthen our students reading literacy and mr aaron prickett from the our prickett from the east brunswick public library shared how to get a library card and to access library resources the child nutrition team has worked hard to transition the district's traditional school meal service program to the new and improved grab and go meal service all east brunswick school-aged children are eligible to participate all meals are being dispersed at no cost to students families until december 31st students and parents must pre-order their meals and pick them up on tuesdays and fridays at select schools throughout the district please
006visit the child nutrition website for additional details the child nutrition team distributed 5786 meals the first week of school and that number increased to 20 980 meals by week two and is expected to increase going forward thank you to the entire child nutrition team for making a positive impact currently there are 44 students attending our remote learning centers which are operating at three schools before and after school care options are available the early morning program and after school kids programs are operating for those students participating in the hybrid program and there is still space available in both those programs i want to offer congratulations to our finance department on receiving the certificate of achievement for excellence and financial reporting from the governor government finance officers association for the fifth year in a row so special
007thanks to mr juliana to mr crotchfeld mrs roseming for all their hard work and just a few reminders friday september 25th will be a single session for students and staff there will be no afternoon sessions i'll make that clear we are operating on single session days but there is an afternoon component once students get home so on the 25th no afternoon session and on monday september 28th schools will be closed thank you thank you dr valeski now we're up to the good of the cause of the public members of the public may provide comment at this meeting through zoom by entering the following url into your browser your computer or mobile device and entering the meeting id and password in order to be recognized use the chat feature select the zoom meeting host then enter
008and send your name to the host you will be recognized to speak when your name is called and individuals will be invited to speak in the order in which we have received your request the board of education recognizes the value of public comment on educational issues and the importance of allowing members of the public to express themselves on school matters community interest participants will be limited to three minutes duration is there anyone wishing to speak to the board we have no one that has requested to speak no one seeing none i close the public portion moving on to our board of ed agenda as a reminder the minutes were pulled from this evening's agenda so can i please have a motion for item one on the community programs agenda move by susanna second second by
009leewoo is there any discussion all those in favor opposed abstain motion carries moving on to curriculum instruction can i please have a motion for item one moved by todd second by jeff is there any discussion susannah um an associate's degree i'm just wondering if anyone has achieved that or has kind of stated plans to achieve that they actually we actually have students who have stated they have plans to try to achieve that issue but we don't have anybody who has actually achieved it yet but one of the factors that along with more course offerings is the fact that the middlesex county college reduced the cost per uh college credit down this year so it gives a lot more opportunity to families to for their students or their children to uh crew credits under this program
010so we're really excited about this even in this pandemic environment yeah i think it's especially important now with the price being down and making college affordable so i mean thank you i remember being very excited about seeing this um you know created and uh just seeing the number of courses is just really amazing work right yeah i had i had asked dr valesky i did not recall how middlesex county was conducting its classes if they were in person or virtual or hybrid but i wanted to make sure that our kids wouldn't be at any kind of a disadvantage at all and he assured me they wouldn't be um mr becker actually i had a conversation with president mccormick from middlesex county college about five percent of their classes are being offered in person and their
011critical classes uh but most of their their classes are in a remote fashion right now so they're they're dealing with the same situation that we are okay that's good any other discussion all those in favor posed stain motion carries can i please have a motion for items one and two on this evening's facility agenda moved by leewoo second by todd is there any discussion okay see none all those in favor aye opposed abstain motion carries moving on to financial services can i please have a motion for items one through nine todd jeff todd moved by todd second by jeff is there any discussion okay this is roll call the secretary please call the role mrs chu yes mr sismar yes mrs gloss yes mr hong yes mrs lacks yes mrs reese yes mr simmons yes
012mr winston yes president becker yes motion carries moving on to our human resources agenda and there is an addendum that bernie had uh alerted us to can i please have a motion for item number one and the agenda move by todd second second by susanna is there any discussion for the secretary please call the roll this mrs chu yes mr sismar yes mrs gloss yes mr hong yes mrs lacks yes mrs reese yeah mr simmons yes mr winston yes president becker yes motion carries moving on to the staff development can i please have a motion for item one so moved moved by my hearing is deteriorating by the second um is there any discussion actually i had had a question about this that i had again asked in advance but um i thought you guys
013might be interested in the answer i wanted to know if these uh workshops are going to be conducted fully virtually so that any staff can can take part and the answer i received was that they are fully virtual for the year all those in favor aye aye aye opposed staying motion carries on our student services agenda can i please have a motion for items one through three move by leewoo second second by todd is there any discussion okay i have a question actually lou maybe you can answer or dr boleski could you please talk for a minute about the heat acclimation for field hockey and football practices um policy that that came into effect i've been reading a lot about it and i i see the explanation on our agenda but if you could absolutely
014tell us what it it is which is another way to protect our athletes uh so they don't uh go right out and play with their helmets and their shoulder pads on right away the intense heat in the summer this gives them extra time two days to wear just the helmets three days to wear the pads and then after that fifth day allows them to wear everything and their body should have acclimated a little bit better to the heat and into the stress of the helmet and the shoulder pads please remind me it's been a few years since i had a child playing sports in the district isn't there a certain temperature where if the the day hits a certain temperature that a practice and or game would be cancelled so for instance if we have
015one of those free late summer heat waves in september we we actually monitor each practice and each game to make sure i believe it's 96 or 90 it's up there i think it's 96 degrees but uh it's in that range and anything close to that we'll make sure even if it's not above that range we still make sure the athletes are well hydrated they're in shade we check them you know regularly to make sure that they're they're feeling okay we'll also sometimes even shorten the practices to make sure that they're you know well taken care of okay great thank you any other discussion all those in favor oh sorry this is a roll call will the secretary please call the roll mrs chu yes mr sismar yes mrs gloss yes mr hong yes mrs lex
016yes mrs reese yes mr simmons yes mr winston yes president becker yes motion carries moving on to transportation services can i please have a motion for item one move by job second by todd is there any discussion all those in favor opposed same motion carries moving on to committee reports information items and the good of the cause board members just fyi we will be starting up with our regular committees trying to get things back to some kind of a schedule they may not meet with the frequency that they had been and a lot of them may still be done through zoom depending upon the size we have some with like student services or curriculum which can be 30 or 40 people we have others which finance which is could be five or six so but
017those will be starting again your administrative chairs will be reaching out to each of you to set dates for um committee meetings so i don't think we have any committee reports but are there any information items of the good of the cause for the board lori so last friday uh dr cowan had or mayor cohen had um the annual 9 11 tribute um both mrs goss and myself were there and what they did this year that was different was this is the first full class of high school students that have not been that were not born before 9 11. so he held an essay contest where the kids could write essays about their views on it what it's taught the world what their peers have thought about it and what they think will be different
018going forward and there were four girls uh that read their essays i believe there were supposed to be eight my daughter was one of them so i was very proud mom moment but these kids it was pretty amazing they were these four girls wrote and one of the girls actually was really emotional because her father was there and worked that day and so she had grown up in a world where she knew his experience the day but the writing and the insights was just spectacular and you know we weren't um it wasn't something where we see because we're not in school and we're not all together um but i just wanted to make sure that i mention it to you guys it's on i believe news news um maybe tv covered it and it was
019just something and i believe that they actually um printed the young woman whose father was in the trade center they printed her article but if you have a chance just take a look at these because they were so well written and so well thought out and you know it's a strange thing we're going through the pandemic and you realize this is something that our country really came together you know 19 years ago and um it gives you hope for the future generation and i think we're seeing certain similarities in the way that people are coming together now in the wake of the pandemic so i just thought it should be mentioned thank you to mayor cohen for putting that together it was really a nice event thank you lori any other information items of the
020good of the course of the board legal yeah i went to the edf september meeting so by the rep report this sponsored 93 remote learning related grants is a lot of money they are facing some kind of challenge because their donations of financial resources is negative impact by this pandemic but they are still trying very hard to sponsor the grant applications so i'm really proud of that to say that this broadcast has this wonderful ebef organization i give my personal sanctity jack leffy and he and his team are doing really really great job thank you lee wu anyone else seeing none we do have a need for a closed session whereas these uh subjects are within the exceptions to the open public meeting act and are permitted to be discussed in closed session whereas the
021board of education intends to discuss the following matters those items listed in tonight's agenda can i please have a motion for us to go into closed session the late the closed session is estimated to be one hour after which the public meeting of the board shall reconvene and action will not be taken so move mrs becker i believe our student rep is here hi i was just about to say i'm sorry i believe our student rep is here via zoom oh i'm so sorry i didn't know that he was coming tonight hi how are you i i i i wasn't sure whether i should get in now because i was sure um just one moment matt we're in the middle of a motion what what do we do so let's do you're the motion to
022go to closed session i think we can just withdraw that for right now okay let the student rep speak and then what we'll do i will draw the motion for closed session and we're going to have our student rep speak it was appropriate for me to jump in now considering i was online and you were in person but it is a pleasure once again to address you guys uh since the beginning of the school year so now i think it's a little bit more appropriate to provide the student perspective and i'll quickly get into it uh first thing is uh as an online student um i've noticed uh an extreme are not exchanged or the improvements in online schooling have been noticeable especially in comparison to the latter half of last year where teachers were
023kind of forced to make that sudden adaption and i think this is largely attributed to the fact that uh to the widespread usage of microsoft teams and you know i guess the increased familiarity with candace hybrid wise it's a little bit more interesting and considering that you're in school which is great and you get to see your teachers which is also great but it's a little weird when the teacher is mainly speaking to the laptop and not addressing the class and when there's only like two to three other students in the class and sometimes it's just you in the class um depending on the class size but this was the expectations for hybrid that all the students knew that they were getting into when they signed up for it so um that's the benefit of
024hybrid uh quickly i also wanted to mention that east brunswick has been one of the sole people who are one of the sole towns that i provided uh that is acted as a testing center for standardized testing in both psat and the act and uh this is really good for students who feel the need to get in that last and final standardized testing to help their college applications and um also rising juniors who want to try and get it over with early uh since sponsored um ebhs specifically was the only um testing center in like the nearby area a lot of town a lot of people a lot of students from other towns kind of conglomerated in east boundary and it was great that uh ubhs was successfully able to be that a good testing
025center and yeah that's about it uh just a quick shoot just a quick report uh thank you guys for this opportunity thank you thank you so much for coming tonight okay um how about that closed session can i please have a motion to go into closed sessions by jeff is there any discussion all those in favor opposed saying motion carries good night thank you for joining us you