001[Music] good evening everyone uh we've uh just come out of a closed session so we've already had our call to order uh we have a couple of good presentations tonight on the school security and on the proposed referendum so uh i hope you're caffeinated up and all set uh the superintendent like oh of course on the closed session there were some additional topics yes uh just uh noting in box number seven on the the resolution in addition to the items already noted uh the board also discussed uh two matters uh pending matters uh the docket numbers are m-i-d-l-4293-17 and three colon 17 cv-0271 okay thank you um doctor i had a hope like to make some comments good evening everyone i'll have an opportunity to speak in a few moments regarding two presentations but i
002did just want to take a moment to um to wish our teachers a happy teacher appreciation week and and thank them for their service to our community to our students so with that i'll turn it back to tony and we'll have two presentations in a few moments okay and now we have our student uh representative reports good evening board um although i don't have a lot to say tonight um i would like to start out by thanking the entire board as well as my principal dr dauber for giving me the opportunity to serve as a representative from high school north as this is my last meeting as i will be graduating this june so again thank you very much for this opportunity and it was really a pleasure serving on top of that ap started
003this monday and the testing will continue until next friday and additionally the performance camp rolling hills will be performed in the hsn auditorium at 7 p.m may 11th 12th and 19th um and what is interesting about that show is that it is actually a combined cast of high school north and south students thank you good evening everyone this week has been quite crazy for students at south as ap exams have begun and will continue into next week last week was decision day and all the seniors were thrilled to wear their college gear the boys lacrosse team and the girls softball team at south had their senior nights last night and both teams won and last night student council election candidates were also slated as well for the election taking place on friday june 8th and
004the senior prom will also be taking place that friday june 8th and i also just want to say thank you for the opportunity to speak to all of you past this past year and thank you for your time okay and this is your for both of you the last the meeting of the year and on behalf of the board i'd like to thank you uh for coming and informing us of the goings-on and we have uh gifts for you [Applause] all right now doctor i hold we'll uh with the aid of some members of our police departments uh give us a presentation on uh school security well good evening everyone it's my pleasure this evening to be joined by representatives of both plainsboro and west windsor police department um to my right lieutenant fred tavner
005the future chief of plainsboro police department to my direct right chief guy moore uh plainsboro police department and to my left lieutenant mark lee uh from the west windsor plains department also joining us is detective dave joelinski right in the front here from the west windsor plains westminster police department so they'll be joining me through presentation expanding upon some of the slides providing some additional context for the members of the public we've had some previous conversations as a board around school security we also had some conversation and materials went home to families about some of the security practices this evening we're going to specifically talk around the concept of class 3 police officers so just to make sure everyone is on the same page of what that definition is i'll just start with the framing
006that class three police officers were written into code under the governor christie's administration it was in 2016. this came post sandy hook when there was conversations around how do we help schools become safer and what are on a continuum of practices that can be utilized one of the challenges was always cost with respect to sros or school resource officers so i'm going to use that initial of sro several times this evening and the gentleman up here with me might as well so under the provision of the class 3 otherwise known as leo 3 classification on the police side sleo 3. they must be retired new jersey law enforcement officers right they must have been full-time officers and had a separation of three years and physically capable performing position and be less than 65 years old
007under this provision there is a requirement for officers to have 12 months of within the first 12 months of appointment to be an sro or school resource officer trained that's a couple day training protocol it must possess new jersey police training certification and so be credentialed must have training including hiv incidence and through so the harassment intimidation and bullying um and and the big thing from a cost perspective and one of the things that the code did was retired officers um would be employed essentially in an hourly rate without pension or without health care benefits because under the retirement they would have that already provided through the state so it changed changed the conversation around from a cost perspective of employment of retired officers in our schools um additionally it require because you're now bringing
008in police officers instead of private security they then have full police powers so they have a whole different level of investigation of responsibility of credentials with respect to how they can address matters on school grounds critical to all this is they serve under the direction of the chief of police because if there's ever if you're going to have someone directing um officers in coordination of care on school grounds you want them to be directly affiliated with the police department and not with an independent agency and they're authorized to carry a firearm again under the permitting authority of the chief police for each municipality and again i mentioned the last bullet so we're going to go through a series of slides um but i'm going to ask my colleagues up here to jump in and to
009give some context of some of the work that they've done over time they've served in different capacities and chief garfallo had a conflict and couldn't be here tonight but on all the all the upper command structure of our police departments have worked in our schools with our students in partnership with the school district um for years um so i'm going to ask chief of moore to talk a little bit about the next slide okay just to give you a little bit of my background and where i come from in regards to this in this this particular topic i was a former dare officer for 10 years i was actually ran and coordinated the dare program and i started a lot of the many community policing programs and things that we have in plainsboro township now
010west windsor and our departments formally had a lot of programs that were together involved community policing wise and then the townships inevitably got too big and too large for us to do programs together so now our programs are separate but we have programs that are very similar in nature the role of the class iii officers i can tell you it's very similar to some of the things that we do now they would continue to educate students each one of the officers would be certified to teach as a school resource officer in the school teaching for example we teach the dare program currently in the millstone river school rather than having to use a uniformed officer currently from our department we could take that sro make them a dare officer and have the the class three
011officer educate the students in the dare program we also started not just once program dealing with opioid abuses in high school north we could also use the class three officers to do those programs as well so as far as teaching and educating the students and staff my staff currently participates in numerous school drills we participate in fire drills we participate in bomb drills and we participate in active shooter drills and lockdown drills with all the school administrative staff and and dr aderholt um a lot of this can be prevented used to promote crime prevention and talk to the kids about crime prevention in schools and also teaching parents and the community about the kind of community policing things that we do and how we coordinate our efforts together um inevitably being in the school the
012officers can can have a focus of being informal counselors to the students one of the things that i found that when i was in the schools i would frequently have students that would come to me and talk to me about all different sorts of topics because i was viewed as officer friendly in the schools so inevitably that relationship building that goes on between the officer that's in the school and the community policing that goes on is a coordinated effort amongst the staff and inevitably the class iii officer that would be in the school and the other big thing i think to to on this particular side is to talk about the emergency preparedness and crisis intervention that we do um incident management having a class three officer on the premises also brings an officer that
013is capable of performing basic first aid cpr the use of a defrib defibrillator um and crisis management they would also be a critical part of the school's crisis management team as well some of the other core benefits are the increased accessibility between the students the police and the schools rather than having to call the police or call us or the individual departments to the schools um you would have a school resource officer that is there on the premises during the course of the school day and in the case of high school north there was talk of having two separate shifts for high school north the officers can then address and problems immediately rather than potentially having to wait for an officer to actually show up at the school that officer that would be working in
014the schools that class three officer would be committed to yours whatever specific school they are assigned to they can't be taken from the school by the police department to go other handle other calls for service they are only for the school so it's critical that the officers build relationships with the students um and and resources with the teachers and administrators and we help solve problems together the one big thing i wanted to i want to really get the point across is our officers spend time in the schools we do park walk and talks we do area checks on a frequent basis one of the things that i wanted to really get across about the community policing is our officers are we would not just be armed guards in the schools we would be part of
015the school community interacting with the students seeing the students on a daily basis basis befriending the students inevitably becoming a coordinate effort amongst the school community as well that would inevitably be the goal and finally on this slide will be building strategic and multi-agency preventative working sharing intelligence and working with other agencies and having a police presence and profile by the officer being in that school each and every day there is an immediate deterrent to having the uniform in the school for a potential any type of inalienable threat that may enter the school the officer is there as a resource for the students for the staff and anyone else who would seek their advice for their help i think it's important to build on what chief just said is one of the things that is
016sometimes a concern when talking about inserting police into the schools is do they address disciplinary situations that may may occur with a student and the answer that is that's what the administration's role and responsibility is it doesn't change and in fact it would be stressed in our training to both our administrators as well as to class three officers that the way in which disciplinary matters are addressed with students is through the administration not through the police department if a concern was to arise possession of drug paraphernalia a terroristic threat of some nature we would follow the exact procedures that we would do now with respect to reporting the difference is you'd have an officer there on grounds to be able to respond to address something immediately it doesn't take out the need for uh detective
017joelinski's role in the juvenile detectives they're still ultimately going to be brought into the senate the situation and be handed over the the facts or the case or the fact pattern uh to address um so it it's it's an early it's an intervention form but then the officer themselves is not going to be the be all decision maker of police involvement there'll be a conduit in the relationship with with the police department um so we uh uh chief moore mentioned some of these these slides um but i just want to stress and i see lieutenant lee's gonna stress one of them so i'm gonna pass the mic when we first started discussing this with uh chief armor it actually we're talking about earlier back in the in the day when i had dark hair and
018we were actually instructing the students educating back probably 15 at least 15 years ago and doing many of the community policing things that as they had a unit we had a unit that don't exist anymore uh we just as the towns grew and got busier we had to cut back on some of the things that are very important and some of the things were school related detective jalinski is only one person but it seems like there's 10 of him he is called day and night for all different types of situations some of the things that would be able to be handled by one of these school resource officers there the long-term approach with this that dr adelholt is is taking on here is so forward thinking that we absolutely support it and that combination between
019two police departments and the school district is just it's light years ahead of its time as far as this area goes so we absolutely support it the community policing function always exists it's not a program it is something that is a philosophy and it's carried over from our chief chief garafalo i've been doing it for years chief here has been doing it since i can never remember i think we start around the same time and we will continue to do that uh many different facets but the school and our children really that's the most important thing that we're looking at right now is developing those relationships and having that kind of bond with our students and it can start at a very young age and then it graduates all the way up through high school
020so we see this as a great opportunity for both departments and the school district thank you so so we have a just a couple points regarding each sort of the key roles and and both gentlemen have stressed it but the idea of police officer as educator working both with our students our staff advising and emergency preparedness one of the things that some other districts have debated is this concept of private security and sometimes it's looked at as a cost deterrent because maybe it doesn't bring with it some of the same benefit requirements and and that changed really under the class three what districts are starting to debate now between is if you have security and you're paying benefits and you're paying can you offer um police at a very similar cost point but they serve
021some different roles uh within that emergency communication is a component of it private security does not coordinate uh tactical response or coordinated response in terms of crisis or coordination of an incident management at the scene so um if we had and we have eyes on the door and they serve in a very different role think of mall greeters um you know they're there to welcome they're not they may be somewhat of a deterrent but in the big picture they don't necessarily turn away a theft from potentially happening in a store um and the same thing is things can still happen uh in schools um no matter what what program we put in place here but ultimately um the advising and emergency preparedness and crisis management and the coordination is critical things are so time sensitive
022now when it comes to crisis and security response and what we know unfortunately is that incidents used to be columbine was a 40-minute incident virginia tech was a 30 minute or so incident parkland was three minutes right this situation that happened in maryland was 30 seconds um uh two a month and a half ago right so the reality is response time on site is critical and now if and if we heard in the themes of both the presenters their forces have become i'll just say um stretched as the community's grown and the territory has grown and the the amount of shopping and responsibilities has grown the reality is is that there are times when west windsor's officers and you have to look at per shift for how many patrol vehicles are available but there's times
023when robbinsville's police department is closer to a response than a west windsor officer that might be in dealing with a petty threat theft issue out of route 1 at target or one of those stores out there so having the ability to have personnel on site to assist the school and safety of the staff and the students is to us a critical importance in this modern day and age where unfortunately crime and tragedy can happen in any community police officers and formal counselors i've had served the pleasure of being in two communities where we had sros or juvenile detective stations in the schools and the amount of relationship building is critical in order to ensure safety and the amount of information that ultimately gets shared and passed from students to officers that have relationships cannot be
024undersold the amount of parties the amount of potential drug sale or drug arrest the amount of just tips on new products that kids are talking about how things are being used manipulated sold who to be watching who'd be dealing all that kind of stuff it happens in every community so if parents are sitting in the audience or watching on the tv and shocked that i might be saying some of those things for us to be here and not acknowledge that west winds or plainsboro is no different than any community with respect that every community has a uh the potential of of drugs alcohol drug sale distribution um weapons things that stupid students do in the community things that happen on weekends things that happen in the course of a school day and for us to
025say and acknowledge to say that doesn't happen would be lying to this community and in every school community in this nation in this state is susceptible to the to a potential threat i've served many different types of communities as an educational leader and i've seen concerns in all of them whether in their city or suburban um and again i just think that we have to be really careful when we look at parkland sandy hook columbine those are districts that that looked looked somewhat like a westminster plainsburg from a socioeconomic perspective so for us to say or to think potentially not us not here not now um that doesn't necessarily mean that having officers prevents everything from happening but it's it's one aspect in mitigating risk and providing a safe and secure location for our kids
026and our staff i can't underscore community policing enough the idea that we build relationships with students with community with staff now these gentlemen both have shared that there's a good deal of things that happen and that's true i've seen a lieutenant in chief out at science fairs on weekends and come out and evening presentations but we do not have a physical present during the school day in the sense that it's a permanent physical physical presence uh we do have um park in park walk and talks right so the officers stop if they're on patrol uh they might walk into the building say hello it's something we've encouraged it's something that nine years ago when i first arrived was not encouraged we've worked very hard to build relationships over the last nine years with the police
027department so the officers knew that they were welcomed we run drills together we run drills when we're in spring break we've run we bring the dogs in from the county every summer to go through some of our buildings we bring tactical squad teams through to look at our facilities we do tactical drills i've had the pleasure or displeasure to be with attack team with a breach of a classroom for patrol officers on the spring break once where they were shooting off rounds inside the school from a training perspective no students present and it's terrifying to think about what that what that could be like in that scenario we do that coordinated effort but on a daily basis officers do the best they can to come by when they can and when it's available but as
028the officers have shared that does not mean that there is a consistent presence on our at our facilities so some of this would be fulfilling traditional law enforcement roles with the on-campus calls and emergencies and addressing trespasser um scenarios uh we just had a situation the last week where someone at a park was wearing a ski mask and and and it was not on school grounds but it was across the street from school grounds and it was you know we were a step away from lockdown and it was a community member with a ski mask because they were afraid of sunburn playing pokemon go we can't make it up 50 something years old across across from one one of our high schools um with a full-fledged ski mask camouflage not seeing the problem with that
029but you know that that is of concern uh from a school district perspective um so the idea of just having that that threat deterrent on site new jersey safe task force was back in um and and they talked about this idea that sro has performed many functions and much more than armed security guards experience shows that sros can earn trust among student population so that students would otherwise be reluctant to call they would feel comfortable sharing information of suspicious activity before it escalates to violence to that extent schools districts can hire sros and the state should encourage them to do so so that was right out of the task force report now remember the sro model was partially funded back by the cops in school grant and the idea of school resource officers so this
030is different than the traditional sro in that it's class three it's retired so changes again changes that price point to bring to bring trained veteran officers on grounds this is not about building your ticket base to prove your worth to try to this is about coordination of care and relationships on grounds for both students staff and parents and so there's there's plenty of studies out there that point to research to say that sros or class iii officers would deter aggressive behavior and that includes fights threats and bullying and we're very fortunate in our community that the reality of fighting and even of threats is relatively low in the threshold but but then the question always has to become how many is too many and what's what's an acceptable number of fights and the answer that
031has no acceptable number of fights on school grounds um so i think it's also important to just show a quote this is from the president of nasro national association of school resource officers so school resource officers properly trained police officers from the local jurisdiction that are assigned to the school on a full-time basis they're more than let's just put an officer with a gun standing at the door so this is different than the eyes on the door this is about relationship building throughout the day throughout the school in different ways it can look like everything from an officer reading crisscross applesauce in a kindergarten classroom to high fiving we could get off the bus to being out by the playground the idea is that the officers would have the ability to patrol the grounds and
032build and build relations go into classrooms and be present on school grounds to respond yes to respond if something bad was to happen but it also to to prevent things from being happening the preventative aspect can't be under underscore it has to be highlighted here um and i've as i said i've served in as a school administrator of many districts and and um you can stay in touch with individuals after you leave and one of the one such district that i was in had a tragedy prevented because the student made a report to an sro and an arsenal of weapons was found um with a student with a hit list um and it's one of those things that we don't read about later on but it was the relationship of an sro on school grounds
033in a high school that built a relationship that a tip came in that prevented a tragedy and it's a district like us so you want to integrate the officers into that you want to integrate the officers into the safety teams you want to integrate the officers as a member of your faculty and and bring them into the administrative team meetings and whatnot the school security task force was part of a school board's association also post sandy hook see a lot of things were done post sandy hook a lot of conversations happened and things sat there i'm convinced the student walkout movements that have occurred and and the movement that we've seen this last year is because these kids have noticed that nothing happened either in the last five years in this topic um you know
034it's when you think about the students that at the high school age they were middle schoolers when that tragedy occurred and they've seen five years of adults not doing things to protect them you know they've asked a lot of why and they haven't seen a lot of action um so the security task force i mean you look at the kind of things they're saying is you know they're they're suggesting that um we employment of law enforcement's to work with schools and to help with all these other things so we've talked about them right to train students in conflict resolution restorative justice um you know there is some concerns that sometimes raise like what would happen with students with disability for instance that was raised to me by a parent would the officers know um what
035to do if a student with autism was was having a difficult concern it was an escalated state i think it's important just maybe one of the officers because i know we've talked about this i'd like to address that because my wife is actually a special education teacher and one of the things that i really liked that law enforcement has done over the course of the last two or three years is there has been mandated training by all officers in new jersey that we have to do training involving the autistic population the special needs population and just last year in 2017 we actually completed every officer in the state of new jersey by the new jersey attorney general guidelines mandated that every officer go through the full training program to understand how to work with the
036autistic population and special needs population and population dealing with mental health issues so we do have training um maybe to not to the extent of a mental health counselor but we do have training on de-escalation techniques um to help assist with situations and i know we've had numerous individuals autistic individuals in plainsboro that we've had to deal with and our officers do their training experience and education and the things that they've done they've had very positive outcomes with the autistic population so i think that that's a something that we can work towards and continue to enhance our skills in regards to conflict resolution and i think that's something that new jersey has taken a forefront in the role in regards to training and education for police officers and identifying the things that we need to
037do to work with all populations and just uh to frame another point that's been raised is well we have a diverse community could we potentially see a disproportionate number of arrests within populations within our demographics and there's been a lot of work police departments have also done on implicit bias culturally responsiveness and training within respect to that so as lieutenantly to talk about some of the things west windsor has done even before there were any mandates for west windsor we were already out there doing cultural diversity doing autism awareness doing mental health awareness not just for the officers themselves but also for the individuals we may deal with stress affects a lot of people in a lot of ways especially to children we have especially under chief garfield prior to him chief pica we have
038advanced with our cultural diversity i think we have reached out as a matter of fact this coming up weekend the community day for west windsor is being held by the religious leaders of west windsor uh i've been a member of that group as well as chief garafallo uh we have just about every denomination uh imaginable in the group and the beauty of that for us is just for the chaplaincy program we don't have just one chaplain anymore we actually have a database of different denominations if we have an incident that occurs we can reach out to anyone and we will come up with someone that may be of a different faith that we can help with i think that is important and and not to be understated that we are have taken kind of a
039lead on this of recognizing what our population is and being able to help our population out and that includes uh with the school district and we would do the same with the uh class threes the one the one situation with this and i think dr adelholt is touching on which i think is very important is that they're veterans that these are retired officers they have seen a lot of things in their careers that this is not a new officer fresh out of a police academy this this is a seasoned veteran and i know lieutenant tavner is going to talk about the hiring process we're looking at certain aspects of personality that would be the right fit for the school district and actually i'll turn that over i i mentioned this some of this slide already
040uh this was the state chiefs police association chief paducah he's also chief in south brunswick so he's a local chief so he's the chief's chief um and and his quote is as a police chief i want authority and control over any person in the school who is armed police officers are required to have extensive background in training and schools can get them by having an srr program or hiring them an off-duty officer the point again is and i raised it is the board agrees or disagrees with this particular program no recommendation will be coming from the administration to have private security carry carry weapons and they'll never be a recommendation of teachers carry anything other than their lesson plans um so when it comes to this the the can't stress the importance of the training
041that goes involved with someone having the authority and the responsibility and and the duty to carry a weapon and so you know i'm very cautious and cognizant about the concern when when folks suggest that there shouldn't be weapons in schools and i would say that i would agree with that but i'm not talking about a weapon in the school i'm talking about a police officer in the school and that's to me very very different when we're talking about the safety of our children and our staff so with that i'm gonna talk uh have actually lieutenant tavner talk to you about the hiring process and how critical that responsibility relationship is thank you we're very uh fortunate to have two very professional police departments that have very strict hiring standards and those standards would also apply
042to these class three officers we definitely are going to hire if these class 3 officers come to fruition obviously experienced officers that have had a lot of experience most of them 25 years or more they will be they have experience that they've worked with kids throughout their career they have a deep commitment to helping people building positive relationships with students staff and the parents as we discussed earlier we would be these officers would support students following law enforcement responsibilities become an integral part of the school staff working with their crisis response team and and as we've talked with the chiefs and the lieutenants about within within the mou a member end of agreement or understanding we would build a provision that the school administration would be involved with the hiring process even even though that
043the ultimate hiring responsibility lies with the municipality and with the ultimate the chief's recommendation that that this has to be a partnership um we've all known police officers that are tremendous at their jobs and you'd say i don't envision that individual in elementary school i can think of officers that i also would say would be phenomenal in high school but maybe not in elementary or phenomenal in elementary and maybe not so much in high school so personality and relationships matters in this in this process of the vetting process matters now one question that might arise is does the individual have to be formally from westminster or plainsborough police departments the answer that is no under the code they just have to have served as a new jersey law enforcement officer so that includes county that
044includes uh state and that does that include prison as well i believe it does but we have to double check the prison but definitely state county and municipal officers so there there are the opportunity for officers to be hired from throughout the break in service is all about um time away from training and and fitness for duty so there are requirements for officers to have clear medical a psychological as well as certain training requirements so there there are training provisions in the higher end practice that are required by the code um just as a recommendation in the overview there is a uniform memorandum of agreement that this board of education supports each year it's required it comes from the state attorney general as well as the commissioner of education and then goes to the county
045district attorney as well as to the county prosecutor excuse me as well as the county its uh executive superintendent and then ultimately is passed to the local chief and the local superintendent requiring the board of education's uh review approval and then ultimately our signatures those are done every year as an annual process every county prosecutor can make small slight additions and there's one slight addition between middlesex county has the mercer county doesn't but ultimately the memorandum requires an interagency coordination of sharing of information so if we can become aware of something we're responsible for reaching out and if the police department's aware of something they're responsible for reaching out and you know we there are quite a few times that we have conversations late night or early morning i would dare to say weekly we're
046we're involved in a call with one another late night early early morning like 12 15 12 30 in the morning or 5 a.m with a call to just say you know what uh let's we need we need help talking through something we want to let you know something happened a lot of times it's weekend stuff a lot of times it's high school stuff and a lot of times it never comes into the school um but it's still the sharing of information and sometimes unfortunately it's mental health related and sometimes it's actually runaway type situation and missing missing person related um so it's not just you know it's all it's not that it's it's all violence and i don't i don't want folks to think about that but there is sometimes where there's concerns about um
047the whereabouts of a student and we're coordinating on that as well community policing relationship building we stressed it time and time again the members of the safety team threat deterrent from the perspective of the physical uh having having the physical presence is in itself a deterrent threat assessment and response is is a little bit different in our mind than threat deterrent than multi-agency coordination member of the safety team ultimately the recommendation that's in front of the board of education and not for a vote this evening but the recommendation so you know it is to have a class 3 officer in every school k-12 so that's ten officers with the exception of the high schools because of the way that high school is used to have two officers um for a second shift at the high
048schools um because those high schools go off until ten o'clock or so every night um so it would require a two shift schedule at the high school so that would be 12 officers six on each side of town it would require some process so and this is why there's nothing to vote on tonight should the the board move to move in this direction we would then need to work with both municipal governments on the shared surface agreement with both plainsborough and westminster township separately due to their police responsibilities and their authorities chief of moore cannot manage officers that are assigned to west windsor and chief garfallo can't manage officers in plainsboro um we also are a two county system so we also have two different prosecutors involved uh two different municipal governments two different types
049of government structure two different dcpmp centers two different hazmat offices two different you name it we have two different um and but this is what we're used to in that coordination and there's a lot of interagency conversation that happens already with respect to coordinating care for families and students and and so you know if a west windsor student that goes to school at north gets in trouble in north and maybe a plainsboro officer addressing it but if a west winds or student that's in school at north reports a uh abuse of a family member that happened in west windsor it's the west windsor officer even though it's in plainsboro right so it's a matter of like where did the issue happen uh but then there's a coordination because the report may have happened in plainsboro
050but the incident was in west windsor so both departments need to know so there's a lot of coordination constantly around this topic so you go back to the municipal governments there is you know there's going to be process involved in that and i don't pretend to know every step um and there's going to be some sometimes resolutions require multiple meetings um there is also the requirement that a salary would have to be approved on the municipality side so there's different resolutions for that um so there's a salary range there's also a an amendment that has to be done to the police plan so there's a lot of steps uh on on the township side um and then there's the posting of the positions again at the municipal level the hiring process the ultimate approval the
051training and onboarding and if everything went perfect sometime in the fall before the fall is over ideally we would be moving in this process realistically um i don't anticipate if the board was to approve this and the municipal uh governments um agreed we would we would not have officers in place by september this would take you know hopefully by that point we're in the hiring and approval process and we're moving forward and then we would have to figure out which schools at which point as we bring officers on we most likely would start day shift high schools and then phase forward with either day height middle school evening high school you know we're going to have contractors at hawk we might want to think about hawk differently with respect to having having the police presence
052um faster or later than some of the others so we'll have we'll have those kind of conversations in due time but again i i just want to stress that the recommendation from both chiefs and myself would be that we we hire officers for all ten schools for a presence in our schools and our community from a safety standpoint for our staff and our students um yeah absolutely i just want to finish with this because i i know that there's a model for this and the model around new jersey is that's closest to us is if you have should have generate questions about this kind of idea um as you leave the meeting tonight i would i would highly suggest you talk to your colleagues and other boards in north brunswick east brunswick and south brunswick
053because these um this this this sort of places where the model is uh is been used has been used for quite some time and prior even prior to the class three officers being placed in the schools um south brunswick and north brunswick had actually class two officers in the schools the model in to my knowledge talking to all the other chiefs i serve on the middlesex county chiefs association executive board and um in speaking to all the other chiefs that currently have this in place they said that based upon all the steps that they've taken all the ordinances all the resolutions that have been passed the model has been extremely successful thus far and they expect it to continue to be successful in the future so if you should have questions and you have you
054know friends and some of these other boards of education it might be wise to ask them just to see what their interpretation is and see how successful those those agreements have worked out with those other school districts as well and to build on that we we already have the model contract from north brunswick in our possession um so we have those uh templates to work from i was an assistant principal in north brunswick with the sro model um many moons ago but um i we you know i have experienced this from an administrative perspective as an assistant principal working with police um worked in new brunswick not with police though but with security um and but police were there daily um and so we were constantly working with police um there as well in bridgewater
055raritan we had sros so we i've been in touch with the superintendents from the three municipalities that the chief just suggested um and just recently served on a panel with the superintendent of south um east brunswick um they have 71 school security personnel in in with 10 buildings um now interestingly that particular superintendent's uh history and his experience with school security um is such that his son was at virginia tech supposed to be in the building where the shooting happened so from a personal experience standpoint he's very security conscious you know dr russo has talked to the board about his experience 20 some years ago but with a murder in school i've personally taken two weapons off of student in another school district so we we come from places of experience where these things happen
056and unfortunately in our society you know it can happen anywhere like you and like the parents that are in this room i send children to school every day and there's a covenant between the school and the parents that their kids come home each day right i send four kids this year five kids next year to school and i expect that my kids come home each day now putting police alone doesn't guarantee that but it's one measure to try to ensure that it does and and ultimately through the reconnaissance and the information that can be uh provided and our kids are our best resources when it comes to this that by inserting another individual to build relationships our hope is that this provides just another network of safety for and care for our kids so with
057that we're happy to take any questions uh you have the opportunity to talk to the officers directly i would ask the board if they have questions please do so at this time would these i'm sorry would the officers be carrying a gun and with if they are carrying a gun would that be concealed no as prescribed by the law that was written with the class iii they are they will be a uniformed officer it did the uniform might not look like the uniform that you see me in now but they will be carrying a gun the gun will not be concealed it will be on it typically like a gun belt like you see on me right now so it'll be very similar to the uniform that we wear that you see right now except
058it has what they call a class three patch that's actually on the side of the uniform um is it possible that a high school student could grab that gun off the officer oh okay the the the holsters that we carry on our gun they're called level three retention holster i'm not quite sure what windsor carries on their side but there are there's actually two or three different mechanisms that you have to engage to actually get the firearm out of the holster itself so it's not as simple as just grabbing the weapon and pulling it off the officer's side there's two or three active things that you have to do to engage the firearm to get it out of the belt and also officers are trained to you know in regards to self-defense mechanisms where they
059to to be able to defend that firearm on their side so between the defense of the firearm on their side and the other level retention holsters that they have um it's more than likely and i i will say this we're in the school a lot now and um we you know our officers spend time going do the park walk and talks um that's they're they're trained to make sure that they are aware obviously that the firearm is always on their side and to understand that that's why we went to that level three retention holster to be able to perfect protect our firearms to touch on that as well uh the training aspect i think we didn't hit on enough uh the training aspect of use of force would still continue to be through the police
060department's use of force also how to defend yourself would still be through us which i think is a huge advantage yes for the officer i'm sorry the use of force training for the officers but also how to defend themselves uh unarmed defensive tactics these are things that we can still continue to do since they are under our umbrella okay rachel thank you and actually miss hertz asked one of the questions that i had and i wanted to thank you a lot of the questions that i had were in your presentation but could you just give it an idea of just what our students would see like on a daily basis so i i now know what you'll look like as you walk through the schools but just from what you know what can our parents
061expect what can students expect to see of the the uh sro officer or the sros that are in each of the schools what does that look like from uh using detective jalinski again because he is he isn't in and out of the schools probably more than anyone else with our department and he is so well known with with the kids with the school administration he he's like part of the fabric of that of the school community now you're talking about someone who's actually assigned there and someone like him who does get along with the students very very well i mean he is the poster child for the person we're looking for uh as far as dealing with the students and the administration so on a daily basis it would be someone like detective joelinski if
062you don't know him already some i know already do and gerard i know he can attest to they probably talk daily several times a day so he has intimate knowledge of all the schools so that's that's kind of what you're going to be looking at someone who really is part of that fabric and is it similar you know we have eyes on the door now how is that going to work in conjunction with eyes on the door and how you know we see our officers in the front of the schools a lot of times in the beginnings of the day how would the sro work in conjunction with eyes on the door well i i think what we envision is we envision them to be as part of the school community you don't want them
063assigned to specif specifically one area of the building however um just as our officers during the course of the school day now um you know during the beginning of the day frequently you'll see our patrol cars outside of the buildings it's not uncommon to see them out there um they've been indoctrinated into the community into the school community so inevitably i believe you know what i envisioned particularly with this is is that we would become part of school school community in walking the hallways speaking with the students addressing staff concerns participating in emergency preparedness drills as we do now lock down drills participating in the school activities i my myself personally have been called high school north a couple times to speak to classes about the law and the constitution and so i think there
064could be a lot more of those kind of things done when in history classes when they when they get into the law and the constitution they of understanding what police powers are we can become part of the school community in all facets of working with the kids and and become part inevitably part of the education community as well so it's not just being the quote unquote law enforcement or law enforcer it's also being the person that's walking around the building engaging the staff engaging the students and participating in student activities my officers i don't know if you anyone follows our facebook page but my officers just last week participated in venna community middle school where we raised funds for what was it the not just once program not even once opioid program and they were
065inevitably students were there was with people inevitably putting money to throw pies in the face of the officers so on our facebook page it's like a fun thing that we do my officers participate and i know west winds are done as well all sorts of community related activities who would ever think that officers get involved with you know inevitably having pies thrown in their faces and having a lot of fun i call that the relationship building that's the element of things i think that some of the things that that goes unnoticed in the community that we do that's the other thing i i highly encourage you everyone to follow both the west windsor's facebook page playsboro's facebook page we spend a lot of time trying to show the community what we're doing besides just enforcing
066law and doing other things to involve ourselves with the community we believe in community policing we don't just say the word and not follow it up we we truly believe in all those things so my vision for this department and for west windsor as well i'm sure chief garofalo would say the same thing is that we want to become part of the school community in all facets and that's working with the school administration dr adelholt to you know do things together um maybe come up with new programs and things that we can do bring old programs back that we could no longer do we used to do a program called eighth grade connection in the community middle school that we had to drop because of the amount of you know the amount of our calls
067for service going up so there are a myriad of things i think we can do inevitably to work together that inevitably is going to make things it's it's going to enhance the school community relationship and inevitably relationship with the kids and the officers i think especially in today's day and age it's it's extremely important for kids to trust officers okay we've all seen the things that go on outside of you know west windsor plainsburg the things that make the mainline news i think the relationships that we've built with students in our community thus far through the dare program now through not even once program we um at plainsborough just started again we're re-upping our juvenile youth academy something that we stopped doing um several years ago but the point is that that we believe in
068the community policing efforts and we want to continue to do that thank you and just just to build on that and we'll jump to ms ho's question um this is going to require a sort of growing together in this idea but something i i would envision would be that we'd start looking at grade level or building level appropriate for instance you may all recall that back in this back in the fall we had a student hit by a vehicle and that there's some there's some real concern about pedestrian safety even bike safety we could be talking about within our pe programs working with our officers to do bike safety and safe walk safety training from an officer in those programs and that would be very appropriate at a pre k2 or k3 building those kind
069of things don't happen in the greater community in some communities they have like a summer camp that's done where entering kindergartners go to we don't have that in our community there's there's some community education elements that i think we could look at from a police curriculum perspective in all of our schools from a safety perspective and louise i want to make sure we get your question when you talk about the neighboring school districts that have sros i'm curious do they have them at all levels of schools or just the upper levels i believe east brunswick has all levels schools and i believe north brunswick does as well i'm not positive about south brunswick but i do know the in the model that's been used almost amongst those districts it has been extremely successful so far
070okay i know that some members of our community are concerned as carol commented basically about um there being more weapons in the schools have there been incidents where sro's weapons have become a problem no no not that i'm aware of as far as i mean uh first thank you for the opportunity to hear our voices and see our faces and have a working relationship i assure you that um everything that you want to accomplish as the board of education we want to accomplish as the local police departments and i can give an example it's always good to learn by example just this year we had an incident with a bunch of kids with a handgun that made its way onto instagram and i know i spoke with dr adelholt as well as mr dalton uh
071on a saturday morning this incident happened on a friday night at a party it made its way to instagram and uh we went to work throughout the night and into the morning calling each other's uh personal cell phones and through the relationships that i have with the kids i know these kids from fifth grade and a lot of them now are seniors and even graduates so i was able to call some of the kids and kids were able to give us information where we were able to flush this uh it wasn't a handgun it was a bb gun but we were able to flush it out of the community and that just happened in january of this year so um that kind of working relationship that keeps everybody safe is uh something that's very positive
072and something that i want to continue to do um you know with everything that we're looking to accomplish so um hopefully if there's anything if there's any kind of questions or anything i know that i've i've worked with a number of uh individuals on the board as well as in the in the audience here um with the kids in the uh in the community and i want to do everything that you want to do for and with the kids yeah i got a question yeah are we going to put just one officer in each building high school south the pitt area might be more vulnerable to the attacks so i'm going to put two officers there right now the recommendation is to employ one officer during the day at all schools and a second shift
073one officer at both high schools due to the way in which the school is utilized so there would there's no recommendation in front of the board or even in our planning at this point to think in terms of multiple officers um and tell you i believe you're speaking to the pit but it's really the open space classroom section of high school south um and there's been a lot of training done in that particular area um as there's open space in a high school with no walls um so that's that's from a security and tactical response standpoint something that we've worked with the west windsor tactical team tactical response team we've crossed train with the plainsboro attack team we've worked with the mercer county rapid response task force and the county has brought officers in to
074take a look because it's a unique facility design but at this time from a staffing perspective one officer per school okay thank you when will the board be voting on this so when we know that we have um a sense of of the board and the plan would be to have a conversation at committee meetings next tuesday and if we know that there is a consensus to move forward at that point we would then put time and resources into working on the memorandum of agreement with three members of council from the different municipalities in the audience i should say that from a funding standpoint um the we've built within the board of education's budget the cost of the employment of the officers um and that the way this agreement would work would be their the
075individuals get hired by the municipal government as was required by code but the under the agreement there would be a pass-through charge and the billing cycle would have to be to be determined through the agreement but there would be a charge to the school district that then is paid from the district's budget back to the municipality so when we looked at this we did not want a determination to be based on an attempt at trying to figure out how to blend municipal dollars and admissible government dollars with the school board's dollars we saw this as a value add with respect to a continuum and those of you that have been to other presentations on the budget we've also discussed mental health support and additional staffing on that as well so this is not just police
076only we look at this as one aspect of the idea of school safety um as we work on different types of enhancements should the board of education because this would might inevitably be another question should the board of education make a determination not to fund the officers or to fund the percentage of officers and not all officers then the additional dollars goes back to tax relief in the subsequent budget so the dollar or and or they could be utilized for other security enhancements out of the budget so that was it was built that way so we had the dollars available to make an informed decision if the dollars weren't budgeted in we'd be sitting here saying yes to something we want to do but there's no money to do it so the board will vote
077the board would vote once an agreement a memorandum of agreement was created um that would most likely well that requires us to have an agreement in a tentative agreement essentially between the municipal bodies as well so that's going to take some time so first thing we would do is sort of get a sense of the feedback from the board at the next at the next committee meetings on tuesday should we ha next tuesday if we have a sense of a consensus we would then be working with the municipal governments with our attorneys to make sure we work through the agreement and then ultimately as we move through that process we'd be informing the board of where things stand and then ultimately we bring the vote to a board now search with respect to the timing
078that's going to be contingent on the timing with the municipal bodies and we have to work through two different calendars in order to move this forward in a sense to try to have officers in the fall i would anticipate most likely in a july or august meeting okay my other question for the police officers is do you have any statistics on uh sros who are in schools and any accidents that may happen are there any studies about that i i know because things are in the news i don't have specific statistics but every once in a while you'll see a news report on twitter or you'll see a news report about a discharged weapon and usually that happens in which a weapon is utilized not in a safe manner of which they're trained i have
079not heard of any such incident in new jersey those have been in other states where there's different rules and regulations that govern those authorities but usually at the root of it is some form of carelessness with respect to unholstering a weapon in a classroom you hear occasionally about a state that allows teachers to carry and so you do hear the occasional discharge of a firearm in a classroom from a teacher's weapon so is it possible that a weapon has been discharged in a school across this nation that someone can try to pull a report and put it up in peeps and do that sure i'm sure i can find a report tonight that says that there's been a discharged weapon in the school in new jersey i'm unaware of that in the now 20 years
080i've served in as a school as a school educator in new jersey i'm unaware of any such incident um and i've i've worked in two different municipalities and some difficult times i've never seen a weapon drawn in a school ground even in moments of crisis so even with officers present even with crisis underway i've never seen an officer pull a weapon with the duck hunter incident the famed west windsor plains bro duck under incident uh post sandy hook um when we were at the instant command scene uh was there officers in tactical gear and did they at that point have have weapons out absolutely and um and that was because they were searching for an individual with two firearms that was witnessed in this community plainsboro is we have a 40 year history west windsor
081has 40 50 year history in all the time that we've been in the schools we've been doing there for 29 plus years and all the time that our officers have been in the schools um we have 36 sworn west west windsor has 48 work we've never had a discharge in the history of our departments an accidental discharge so i just wanted to make make everyone aware of that one of the things in the children we used to do for back i think we did it back in the day uh second grade mystery day we would spend a whole day at dutch neck at marie's hawk and officers from plainsboro officers from west windsor together in the school all day with the kids and i'll tell you that's one of the things that with the cuts
082with community policing that's one of the things i really want to see come back that is an exciting day for the kids for those who know don edwards detective edwards dink he was huge into the community policing aspect as a juvenile detective when it was a little bit easier to get these things done he's the one who originated that that's something we'd like to bring back uh one of the things when you talk about like the younger kids detective jolinski and i were out there for our youth academy we had a line in our lobby of parents who can't wait to get the kids into our youth academy and that's fifth grade kids dara level and the first lady was there at 6 30 in the morning we weren't taking applications until nine so she
083actually sat in our lobby for two and a half hours waiting to make sure her child got in and i think these are the things that people realize like chief was saying about what we do on facebook and what we're constantly doing with the children we do the things with 7-eleven kids are wearing their helmets they get they get uh a free slurpee one of the officers will give it a little sticker for it and it's these combinations between schools businesses the police departments that long term this is the approach we really want to take it's not a short-term thing and it's something we've been building for years my children still are in the school district went through maurice hawk and i as a parent absolutely want this and and i think maybe just to
084conclude um the one thing that you may have heard is the officers are in our schools that doesn't go away the park walk and talks the attempts for additional officers to come by the community relationship of the patrol officers and the command structure that's on duty would still work to build relationships and still come to the to the schools what we're talking about is have a daily permanent presence on site during the school day as an enhancement above and beyond what's happening already so it doesn't stop detective zilinski's relationship doesn't stop from him coming by and getting to know kids but it does provide him with a colleague employed through the through the police department on site as as an extension of him and the extension of the detective bureau and extension of ultimately the
085police force to serve as a liaison to that school in that school community um and so unless there's any other questions okay can i see one yeah um i would just love at the committee meeting next week if you could be prepared to just give me more examples of what it is that you would have the officers do in the elementary schools because i can picture it in the middle schools and the high schools i get dare but i'm having a little bit more trouble envisioning and it's probably because i don't know about the programs that you used to run in the elementary schools but i'd like just a little bit more information on what you would like to be doing with those officers i will ask the the officers to help me bring that
086to put that together for you what i would say is one of my colleagues will most likely be presenting because i'll be in front of the planning board in plainsboro that evening but we'll make sure that someone's presenting that information okay all right thank you very much officers and thank you all so i'm going to take a moment to switch the slide to a different presentation uh appreciate those of you that stayed for part two the second presentation um i would envision another good hour so uh so so help yourselves to coffee and and juice up because um i'm gonna invite uh mr duthie george doothy our district architect to join me and we're going to talk about um the proposal for a referendum in this community so my thanks to those of you that
087have come out and we're excited to present uh this topic so there's been a discussion for the last um several years about proposals for residential growth i'm not going to go through every development tonight those presentations are on the website it's well documented i'll do some overview highlight slides but we're going to talk about a process that we've gone through we're going to talk about the plan and we're going to talk about proposed projects and i will ask mr duthie to sort of jump in with some specifics as we go and and i'm going to just sort of take this and run with it if there's questions to the board whether it's on an individual slide or towards the end i'm happy to to answer them we've engaged in a multi-year process where we're looking
088at our existing facilities our capacities and our anticipated growth all right so right now what we know is there are significant needs within our district for facility upgrades and our community prides itself on providing academic programs for our students but right now we're stretched with what with some of our schools and some of our programs and some of the conditions and the qualities of some of our facilities needs to be addressed some of our schools are at specific ages where things are aging out or um it's time for upgrades to happen you know our our colleague that was at this table for many years mr shanick used to talk about the idea of depreciable assets and the district has about 240 million dollars worth of depreciable assets when we talk about the actual facility not
089the land but the facility and he talked about a replacement cycle and he used to talk in terms of a 40-year replacement cycle and the idea that if you take 240 million divided by 40 years you'd have about 6 million worth of capital projects per year but even at that clip at 6 million you'd inevitably have projects that and things that are more expensive that you can handle so for instance one project we're going to talk tonight is high school north hvac system the heating ventilation air conditioning system is a 16 million dollar project that needs to be done going through a referendum we get approximately 40 40 of that project funded in other words if we don't do it through a referendum we would lose 6.4 million dollars for the taxpayers uh that we
090can get aid from the from the gov from the state government so there's reasons to do a referendum and to borrow money we're at a tipping point when it comes to our capacities and some pressures within our schools and those of you that were here in march mr duthie and myself as well as the demographer the district dr richard grip did a capacity study and we did a demographic study those are up on the website and you can see the hour presentation that's up on the district website uh both reports are posted under about us uh i think it's under residential growth and they're they're both there um and they're they're good reads and there was intense amount of work and the presentation uh i think helps work to justify some of what we're recommending
091this evening um and then there's this whole idea that's their state aid to help pay for the projects to help fund long-term debt through the purpose of a referendum so the referendum is a mechanism to get dollars with is aspect of aid that comes through a referendum process so we've we've looked at facility condition we've we've looked at capacity enrollment we've done the the demographic study including housing uh housing analysis and we've looked at uh expansion and the need for expansion mr duthie and i spent i spend more time with george and i do most of my family and we've gone building by building met with administration met with staff looked at nooks and crannies of buildings looked at programmatic needs looked at programmatic challenges in order to say and looked at ways to squeeze
092every space out of our facilities we've also done some very creative things with funding and i say creative because most districts cannot and have not been able to utilize capital reserve to do facility expansion the way in which we've been able to employ and one of the things we've been able to do with that and there's been some criticism of it but that criticism is also met with the uh the um idea that has to be that by using reserve we've been able to keep the tax impact flat essentially on the on the debt portion of the budget so we've worked really hard to manage our facilities thinking long term around our debt payments and around at what point we knew that at some point we would be at a tipping point so the idea
093was how many times can you go to this community for a referendum and we wanted to be mindful to the taxpayers we've been able to utilize capital reserve to do the expansion here at village or dare i say the taj the board office as well as growth classrooms and what's often lost is the six classrooms and two additional resource rooms on the first floor so eight classrooms plus the rotpt speech offices child tidy team spaces programs on village as well as the district's offices that you may recall were in four different facilities prior to this as well as forget about the health care concerns for the staff that were in some of those buildings that that is a whole different conversation we were able to just vote on hawk at the last board meeting so
094hawk has now been authorized by this board of education again out of reserve dollars again mindful to the tax base utilizing reserve dollars to do an expansion project and maurice hawk's been just approved we've received state approval we've gone through all the planning board processes we've appointed the contractor we've had our first job meeting this past week and coming to a vote soon town center schools as i just mentioned i'll miss the next uh committee meetings because mr duty and i will be at the dpr meeting is the the uh development uh project review committee every every uh municipality has different acronyms so i believe that's the right acronym uh next week and then we will ultimately be in the planning board in june for town center again out of a reserve action the reserve
095action to hold the money was already allocated in the budget that it was just passed april 24th so there's three project all out to reserve actions by this by this body in order to to address growth and be mindful of the tax base and meet facility needs for this community and ultimately for the kids we serve affordable housing so just big picture um there's a lot of stuff coming so this is all on the west windsor side uh it's a it's a it's one slide two slides that comes out of a previous presentation on capacity so again if you want to see this in its totality please see the capacity study but what you can see here is number of units number of housing obligations assigned to those units and the percentage of housing so
096you often hear about one in four for west windsor well that's not true of every housing type that's already been approved or that's already been in front of the bot the municipal government some of these have been approved outright some of these have been um held on um in the sense that there's a court court approval on like for instance district one transit village has been out there for for um well i've been here nine years now so it's got to be 12 to 14 years court approved at 800 units 12.2 percent affordable housing the only way that changes if there's a sale and the government chooses to and the owner comes to an agreement to change that that's what it is 100 affordable housing units by the court order so that 12.2 percent is
097not 25 that you might hear about so when you look at these projects as well as these projects and you subtalium right there in white it says 2386 units or 498 affordable housing units but you have to keep in mind that when the judge's decision said 1500 units 500 of those units will account for 2400 growth units in west windsor so 500 equals 2400 or 23.86 now any deal with any of those other developers could shift that number a bit but that's what we know of today so we can assume approximately the credits the way the work is approximately 600 or so credits now look that's an estimate and when the township puts forward their ultimate plan they're going to have to account for all the credits and what they submit to the judge so
098that 600 might be 650. so that's 1600 might drop a bit but it's an estimate and i have to work on an estimate of the additional credits and additional growth so what i'm looking at here is 498 plus approximately 600 units is 1098. we just heard it needs to be it needs to be 1500 affordable housing so we can assume there's 402 additional units if in that 402 additional housing units that's one in four or 25 percent west windsor would need to create another hundred somethings townhomes apartments condos single family homes something to meet their housing obligation above and beyond the 2386. so the total estimate we're going with is somewhere around 4000 or 3994 units that have to be built in order to to meet west windsor's affordable housing growth now that's going to
099happen in probably 10 to 12 years 10 to 15 years it's going to be lots of factors of developers and market saturation and how fast things can grow and what happens to the economy you know what new world news changes day to day and how that impacts markets and structures and okay you get it all that kind of good stuff but doesn't it doesn't eliminate this idea that kids are coming houses are coming and the community's coming plus there's plainsboro which has 395 over at market fair plus another 100 on day road so in addition to this four thousand we have 495 approved units over in plainsboro so that's 4500 units in the number 123 arguably best school districts in the state of new jersey one of the top hundred in the united states and
100two of the best communities to live in in the nation i promise you the housing market will get saturated people want to live here and anyone tells me that there's open housing stock there's there's not much open housing stock they fill turnover happens we have we have corporate mobility in our community but the housing stock doesn't stay open for long and we constantly have an influx of students registering so then how many kids is that well your guess is as good as mine but i'm i'm asked to make some guesses right so 3994 units if we assume 0.58 so i'll go right to the middle what's that number represent in west windsor that represents the average apartment yield when you extract out age restricted so when you extract out age restricted housing of our apartment
101yield the average yield for an apartment is 0.58 if we assume that most of the housing stock is apartment because townhomes is actually 0.8 i believe right we're going to get around 2 300 growth students in addition to our current 97 to 9 800 the number's always a moving target but around 9 700 students so you're talking about going to around 12 000 that build out assuming it holds at 0.58 now if it goes to 0.81 and what 0.81 represents is woodstone now why is that number maybe a little unrealistic is because woodstone um not woodstone excuse me princeton terrace princeton terrace princeton terrace at point one princeton terrace is built with no one-bedroom apartments so that number is most likely a little higher than we would see in an apartment yield so and point
102four is like a low end um housing area that has like 25 years of turnover like with one of the communities like 25 years old so even in like a housing community that is an older housing section of our community 0.4 is like the lowest yield we're seeing so if we're wrong and it's not 0.58 you're still looking at 1600 kids just in west windsor and if we're right and it's 0.58 it's 2 300 and if we're wrong and it's bigger than we think it's 3 200. and the difference between being on the low end and being right is the population high school south right 1600 kid difference between 20 1600 and 3200 that's high school south's current population so when you're wrong you're wrong a high school now can you be wrong well this
103district's been wrong before when high school north opened how fast did you build an extension on high school north as soon as we moved in we put the annex on right we built that pretty quick and why because it's really hard to predict this stuff when grover opened grover opened with class sizes in the high 20s because it's really hard to project this stuff so expect expect to be wrong but you have to be ready for the growth for the kids for the staffing needs otherwise what gets impacted is class size and we have that today we have class size demand today 8th grade at grover is over 28 in some classes in upwards of 30 to 32 in some sections because 58th graders moved in this past summer who could predict that right so
104when you have that kind of rapid growth when staffing is what it is and there's no rooms available what it is get what gets impacted is class size and i'm not about to suggest that we should see elementary classes in the high 20s in fact the board's own policy would suggest that that's a bad idea so our goal is to build classrooms in conjunction with or in advance of the growth and one of the things that's problematic and challenging from a school system perspective is developers get approval they get the permit they go we have to jump to regulatory hoops we've been talking about hawk expansion for two and a half years right we've been working on this it will take longer to plan and get it approved than it is to build we've been
105working on this referendum discussion for two and a half years and it's been arduous work to take methodical steps to make sure that we had the best information in in a timely manner to make an informed decision and then the affordable housing decision came in and yes west windsor is going to most likely have to make a decision whether they challenge it or not but let's let's be real for a second if they challenge it in 2015 when they submitted their affordable housing plan in december of 2015 they expected over a thousand units that's the 23.86 that's 2386 or 500 units so if they and it's a little bit more but if if they win and they win it all the way back to what they wanted you're still looking at 2 400 plus another
106495 over in plainsboro but most likely when the judge came in at 1500 remember fair share housing was in 1976 1972 something like that in their their request so even if the judge split the difference between 1500 and a thousand and went to 1250 you're gonna go higher than 2400. just in west windsor so this is what's right on the books you know manila is underway woodstone's in front of the planning board uh tuesday thursday night thursday right tomorrow night thank you linda wednesday night um ellsworth center uh has a sign on the corner this forestall village in plainsboro is always delayed and at some point that's going to go but it's but it's delayed for now um and so that's but that's sending that's sending into wykoff everything else is sending hawk uh village
107um village um maurice hawk village grover south maurice hawk maurice hawk maurice hawk all this stuff is sending a hawk and that's why we're moving fast on going through the process of through capital reserve dollars because it's separate than the referendum and it saves about a year on the process and that's one of the reasons we went the direction we went with hawke his time was of the essence here's our capacity study just an overview slide the far right corner column is really what you want to look at right and you can see the capacities based on uh up to the middle schools those are large capacities all over 100 and so when the number goes over 100 you have to ask yourself well what changed and it all goes back to the definitions if
108an elementary classroom definition was 20 for a k2 building or k3 building if you see capacity over 100 that means the class sizes are over 20. right so that's exactly what is happening here all of our class sizes are in the mid 23 24. yes in kindergarten you see some lower in first grade you see some lower but second grade third grade we're definitely seeing those mid-20s lower to mid-20s so hawk already is the most stretched and remember in order to gain space here at village we're going to have to move the four pre-k classrooms out of here to hawk so that gains the four classrooms growth we expect to need here at village but you get a sense like we have i'll show you a slide on community in a little while community is
109going to go up just uh just around 170 577 kids based on kids that are born and in school district today not based on residential growth based on residents that are here so the plan is looking at a couple different things we're going to look at short term and long term or short term and long term or short term and near term facility needs we're going to look at our current capacity issues we're looking at our enrollment growth due to new housing and we're going to look at these four areas in the referendum we're looking at life safety air quality programmatic needs and short-term and near-term residential growth so those are our four big categories we're gonna we're gonna hit on so short term critical projects like life safety and security indoor environment programmatic spaces
110big picture classrooms arts music dance theater look there is there's a requirement or a recommendation you have dance program it's hard to have a dance program we don't have a dance studio you need a specific type of floor and you need an instructional space the auditorium stage is not such a space right they would be displaced over 30 something days a year due to the way in which the high school auditoriums are used due to testing due to assemblies due to park you know those become testing locations the stage gets used for the plays for months at a time and those stage setups happen so this and it's not a sprung floor which means it's not safe to be dancing on over and over again repetitive dance you need to have specific types so those
111kind of things we want to do but we need space our community values well our community adores science and they should but right now at high school south today we already are out of classrooms next year we don't have enough classrooms so what do you do you use something forgive the term but it's just a a scheduling term of art called the area of refuge right so you put the kids somewhere else and then on lab days you switch them around so they're not in a lab they're in a health science class classroom or a world language classroom and on lab days they switch and we're already doing that at south today based on the population and south is already is only increasing how do you stop that you you restrict electives now i'm not
112going to be the superintendent i've done a lot of things but i'm not the superintendent that's going to go out and suggest that you can't take science after junior year right you can't take two aps in a year first for junior and seniors in science right that's not a winning plan for kids that's not a winning plan for community it's not instructionally sound but that's where we're getting to if we don't do something to address our facilities the only way to stop it is to cut the demand so we have a demand issue it's a good problem but it needs to be addressed based on kids that are in school today technology and robotics yes we built a robotics studio at at north based on need but we didn't build a robotics studio at south
113we built space and we started the process and we put equipment and we put ventilation we put emergency stops and we've done that kind of stuff but it's not big enough the space wasn't intended for robotics so we need to do something both middle schools robotics rooms need upgrading and work our culinary space at both high schools needs complete overhauls their old school old way culinary arts was created think um think domestic cooking versus top chef right i mean it's it's just culinary arts has completely changed but the spaces our kids teach in our 30 are learning is 30 something years old so they're in stations with four and one was washing the dishes why another one is mixing the ingredients it the physical space doesn't allow the instructional learning to happen the way it
114should in our media centers we believe in books we believe in having rich learning environments but our libraries are old and they need to be refurbished and they need new carpets and they need paint and they need some shelving work and all that kind of things i should say this entire presentation will be online tomorrow morning so anyone taking notes please know that this will be out there publicly on the district website tomorrow critical capacity the life safety stuff we're going to get into that but that's some generators and that's that's security vestibules at our front doors and that's the fire alarm systems at eight of our schools that need to be upgraded you know the number of false alarm calls a number of times kids go outside because we have um alarm panels go
115off because the shorts i know our police department sent us warning letters about how many times they have to come out at night because they're not happy about having to respond to yet another time where the alarm goes off in the middle of the night or during the school day and kids are brought outside for no reason by the way that doesn't count as a fire fire drill that's not allowed by code and then there's the whole idea of capacity and construction large editions existing buildings or small additions figuring out what to do and then taking the demographic report that dr griff did the capacity study that we did and then blending that to say this is a plan and then there's a whole how you going to fund it piece which i believe the
116township's going to be really pleased with not like some of our neighboring districts so the planned is a november referendum why in november there's two main reasons one if you do it outside in november you have to pay additional cost right you have to run a special election and there's another 30 to 50 000 because of the two communities to run a special election second thing is you got to sell bonds and so if you do it in december there's not enough time from a state state aid perspective to be processed at the end of the year so november makes much more sense it's 115 million it's a large number it can be a scary number there's rehabilitation and renovations in that but here's what we're planning to do zero tax impact so we're talking
117about 115 million dollar referendum for zero tax impact so the question then becomes how do you do that so there's three ways one is retiring debt and we have money coming off the books in 2022 2026 and 2028. then there's state aid and we're estimating between 20 and 25 percent one of the things the board is being asked to do tonight is to submit the projects to the department of education for the perspective of analyzing the allocation of aid for each project it's a required element to go to referendum it requires board action months in advance of making a determination whether you'll vote for a referendum question so it's just a necessary part of the process voting for that to be submitted to the department of ed tonight is not obligated this does not obligate
118this board of education to bring the question forward in november all it does is authorize the submission for the aid determination from the department which is required to put the referendum question forward and i just want to make sure that everyone's comfortable with that idea that you are not authorizing the project tonight you're authorizing the submission so the department can review the application to determine the aid allocation project by project you guys all right you're all looking up just making sure all right and then the second the third part to this puzzle is utilizing capital reserve the community and some members have questioned the balance it's fair one of the things we're looking at is in order to keep the payment flat and you can see that line that runs right down the middle the
119green represents let me frame this bigger this funding chart is based on the idea of a recommendation from our bond council for two notes followed by bonds over 20 years all right so you see early on in 2020 and 2021 smaller amounts in yellow and then you can see the line going across what many members of the community may not be aware is that we pay our debt at a general fund so we are allowed by law to collect the debt above and beyond two percent because that's money that's been authorized by by this community we have been able over years to move that debt payment into our general fund account and that's been going on somewhat 14 15 years we've been working on that and been able to maintain it so you can see
120in that green line that line that goes across where the green's the highest peak is about 7.7 7.8 million in order for this scenario to work it assumes that the board will continue the 7.8 million dollar payment at a general fund hence the line that goes straight across anything above that line needs to be covered with capital reserve dollars so in other words we will continue to pay the debt portion of the the referendum out of reserves going forward hence the ability to carry a zero uh increase on the debt portion of the of the of the referendum that doesn't mean that we won't still see a tax increase right you always have salaries and benefits and energy costs and transportation and special ed costs that's always going to move up a little bit but
121on the debt portion of the of the of the budget we believe that we can cover the yellow the above the 7.7 line at a capital reserve thereby maintaining a zero therefore there's not a tax spike for the for the community now you can see that there's dips 2022 2026 and 2028. some may argue that if you don't do this referendum the taxpayers would get a tax relief and that this is unnecessary well that's an argument some can make i would make the counter argument that if you don't do this what might feel like temporary relief will get countered by the increase of the yearly taxes and ultimately when the facilities become so diminished you're going to need to do a referendum much more than what we're suggesting at this point because i don't anticipate
122being this the only referendum this is the beginning of growth in our community this will get us through the first thousand students growth but we're projecting in twelve years potentially over two thousand so if you miss this opportunity the only way you can pay for it is by going above the two percent to carry the differential so the board is going to have to make a strategic decision on how to capitalize on expiring debt capital reserve and needs and ultimately funding from the doe for a percentage of project cost that's a lot right there and we haven't talked about a real project yet so before we start diving into some project specifics i just want to take a moment of pause on this particular slide and ask the board members if there's any particular questions
123about the you know how we keep this at zero i have a question um when have have you planned out the timeline of when these additions would be built to line up with when the developments will be built number one and number two when you hire all the teachers and staff for these additional spaces that will increase taxes and have you done an analysis of what the increased tax will be when there is full belt out that you're planning with this referendum so there's there's a lot to that question um with respect to the actual build out of which facility at what which point um the referendum authorizes the expenditure on these buildings because of immediate space constraints at grover community well i should say outside of the referendum hawk is moving outside of the
124referendum the town center is moving that will be bringing forward that um i believe by the time we go through planning board get doe approvals we should probably be um probably be somewhere between august and september separate and apart from the referendum so those projects will be moving at a faster clip than some of the others if the referendum gets approved in november and the board authorizes it first and then if it was to be approved in november then we would be working with uh george and the architects on the scope and sequence of the other five projects community would be the number one project we put forward because those students are in district today south would be another one now as i say that because south has space demands today there is a component
125of packaging projects because you can you can bid multiple projects at the same time one of the reasons you want to do that is contractors have authorized bid thresholds of what they're allowed to do the bigger the project the bigger the developer the bigger the contractor so if you put a three million dollar four million dollar project there's a lot of mom-and-pop construction companies that could apply for that work but if you put a four million dollar project together with a 25 million project they have to have quite the profile portfolio of in order in order to bid that work so and then once you have that developer on then you have to work with them on the scope and sequence of the project so it's with respect to the timeline it's a little complicated
126because it's based on who the contractor is how the work is packaged and quite frankly not all those details have been worked through but we've been thinking about how do you package that with respect to the staffing one it happens a couple of ways one it happens out of the general fund we could because we don't anticipate that 100 of every room is done is is filled in day day one the building opens so you're gonna have some space additions that not that they're sitting empty but they're not 100 utilization in every room day one which is why you're building capacity so some of it's going to happen in the natural component of the building but if growth happens so rapidly that in chris this dr russo is above five percent enrollment growth is when
127you're allowed to go to the sgla for for funding i believe it's three five percent four percent so there's a funding mechanism under the state that says if your enrollment increases and we'll use dr bruce's four percent four percent enrollment increase the board is allowed to authorize a tax increase to the community above and beyond the two percent in allowances and it's called something called an sgla uh spending growth limitation adjustment so there is a mechanism under the law that allows you to expand beyond your two percent uh and allowances so your allowances are usually through bank cap your allowances are through health care a lot adjustments and your allowance is through enrollment growth at a certain clip this board of education has the right today to take additional what 1.2 1.5 million to the
128taxpayers under the sgla today in our in our budget we just approved but we didn't do that because we don't need we didn't need to ask the board the community and the board of education for that authorization we could have done that without a taxpayer vote today um and i just think that that's important because i mean we're looking at how do we manage uh how do we constantly manage the the hit and the taxpayer impact um so there you know there are there are strategic decisions that are made um around this so there are mechanisms that allow for rapid growth for an adjustment but again to your point ultimately that decision goes to the taxpayers um through a pas through a tax increase so one of the reasons that we are so mindful of
129our enrollment projections and working on the staffing ratios with our high schools and our middle schools in particular and ultimately our elementaries and class size is because every staff member costs from the perspective of salary benefits and additional additional whether it's workers comp or other other components of what factors in the total cost of an employee right so have you looked at that and figured out what that number is and how it would affect the typical homeowner it's it's difficult to project that at this time because it's going to be contingent on the on the year to year growth hey dr roosev did you want to jump in time value of money it's going to change the value of the property today and as new ratables come on it could impact attacks but it's so
130it's a little hard to project right now and that's going to be a moving target over time so i it's fair i just don't have all the details to answer that kind of question but what we know is that for every 20 to 25 students you're adding a teacher at the elementary schools for every 100 students you're adding approximately five students five teachers at the middle schools and and five to seven because of electives so you start thinking in terms of that at the middle school in high school um remember and this is the way i i think about um the number of enrollment growth 100 students equals seven course requests all right so 100 students equals 700 courses that need to be signed up for if every student class average at the high school
131was 25 right that would be if we divide 25 into um it's worth um 35 sections worth of class the average high school teacher by contract can teach five sections which means 700 schedule requests with 25 class average equals 35 sections equals five teachers there are seven teachers seven teachers i had it right until the end equals seven teachers so a hundred students growth at the high school in middle school seven teachers growth and so we start have to look at the projections each year and that's why we work with the facilities committee and the finance committee and we work with our teachers and our principals excuse me and our budget managers as our supervisors so hard to look at our staffing ratios there are supervisors in this room that hate those meetings they're martin
132and my favorite meeting when we when we start there and make them justify their growth and so we do that as a matter of practice now for eight nine years since i came in we've started that practice because staffing matters and staffing ratios drive costs and we've been very fiscally prudent when it comes to that staffing to manage the appropriate balance of you want to make sure that you've appropriate staffing but you also have to be fiscally responsible to the taxpayer so i'm going to move us past this slide i'm going to let george talk about life safety as i take a drink of water and get him into this conversation so mr duthie thank you okay slide 21 out of 300 no just kidding no 51. as dave said earlier we have looked at
133a lot of different aspects oh sorry a lot of different oh there it is a lot of different aspects of all of the facilities it's been a process that's been going on for a number of years now uh and we've narrowed down the most and we're not dealing with all of the needs at this time okay i think that it's a measured approach to the things that were felt to be the most critical capital projects and one of those categories is indoor environmental quality and what we've looked at in particular is one very i would say obsolete system common to all of the school buildings and that's the automatic temperature controls so there's going to be a modernization which has already started and i want to say this because this is very very important the
134district has already undertaken many capital projects and has made many improvements to the schools you know there was a rod grant program uh the department of ed had several allocations for allocations there was forty percent in the grant program paid by the state for eligible projects west wings or plainsboro had hundreds of those projects now they weren't all done but the district received a lot of money from the state for those grants and that was money they were able to fund again with local share dollars on hand and many of those types of projects were completed at that time okay so these kinds of things have been ongoing they're constantly assessed by high school north right now millstone river and white cough have been identified as buildings that need not the only buildings that need
135this type of work but the most critical projects at this time the problem with these projects is they're very expensive the good thing about these projects is they're eligible for debt service aid at 40 so if the project is 10 million dollars the state pays four million dollars of that project in the form of debt service eight over the period of the bond which is 20 years usually okay also hvac system upgrades in the classrooms we're talking about classroom upgrades air quality ventilation improvements dehumidification as well as chillers and boilers at high school north systems are simply beyond the useful life building's 20 years old almost millstone river school classrooms and core spaces we're going to be taking care of some of those and again at wykoff school so i'm going to go school by
136school talk about projects show some of the maps talk through this again it will be up on the website tomorrow the board doesn't authorize anything tonight except the submission of the projects of the state so there's time to talk about this so i'm going to go through it at a little bit of a faster clip but here we go high school south eight science classroom edition approximately 25 000 square feet new main entrance if you're at high school south right now you walk into a cafeteria you walk into a commons there is no separation from a safety perspective so we're recommending a new main office and in that edition i'll show you a footprint in a moment four classrooms robotics dance studio in that section of 15 000 square feet the renovation of the existing
137main office because we have a need for a proper child study team office a prop proper guidance office so that whole area has to be redesigned to create space renovation of the early childhood classroom as well as the culinary arts classrooms new media center gutting the media center security vestibule at the school as well as a renovation to the little theater anyone that's been in that little theater knows it's outdated knows the chairs need to go you pull those chairs you need to carpet the whole place new sound system no speaker system paint the place it needs a complete rehab um adding a refurbishing of 800 amb as well as additional robotic space at south so it's a little hard to see but bottom here is the new addition in the sorry it's actually in
138the top here the pointer's not working it's a little hard to see in the gray it's the gray area in the top it might be worth dimming the lights but here we go this section right here would be the new science this would be the new main office in robotics in this in in this area so looking at this a different way thank you mr dalton mr dr russo many assistant superintendents does it take well one's leaving so you know worried about it so superintendent superintendent anyway so we're losing the guy that knows how to work the lights we are [Laughter] there's so top right you can see a space coming off i'm giving up on the pointer because it's not working it's four science classrooms you see that pot of four classrooms top right
139of the purple that would be our new science edition there will be a second floor that mimics it ultimately you can see that dotted area in between that provides a space for a potential growth eight classroom addition first floor second floor so it gives the potential of connection for a future 16 classrooms built into the footprint so it's prepared for future growth should we ever grow larger the media center is in purple there you can see the green classrooms two next to the media center two staggered top left that would be the fourth four classrooms growth above that in blue on the right hand side next to the media center would be a new dance studio to the left the dance studio well right underneath it you can see sort of like a combination of
140blue and orange and yellow there those are changing rooms and office space for the dance staff on the left hand side in orange top left that would be the new main office an entry system with a secure vestibule right there and then you can see going across on the left hand side the three classroom stagger two and one that's 800 a and b with a brand new robotics classroom staggered above it so it gives renovations it gives space for our science classrooms that are desperately needed clot additional classroom growth 12 classrooms plus a dance studio plus robotics it's approximately 14 classrooms total plus renovations uh 14 times the 25 right so it gives you around 350 student growth over at high school south the guidance child study team area is currently current main office it
141guts the existing principal space and the main office outside area where the secretaries are it builds some conference rooms in for parents to have meetings with child study team and guidance and it creates actual offices for child's daily team members that are in old makeshift closets and just the space configurations here is is somewhat insane but it's just what south is used based on staff that's the current um between commons one and commons one in the pit is the main office section in the middle of the building that would be refurbished and gutted the only area that's not in color is the nurse's office so basically that area that's in white there is the existing nurse's office at south can you go back you're saying that that pink area is the current comet that's no
142that's the current main office next to the commons next the yes so it's the current like if you know where the um second floor staff area is that's underneath it right that's the current main office the gu all the walls in the current guidance area through the child study team and the principles area will get ripped out and that whole new area will get reconfigured to fit the number of guidance counselors that we have then the need for our child study team space conference space for meetings for parents with the child study team there's not appropriate facilities for those there's not that's not an ad that's a refurbishing that's a renovation area okay um okay so that's south north security vestibule edition so you see an addition for north and we don't often think of
143what we've talked about for north as an edition but the dance studio is additional square footage so it has to be approved as an addition for the purpose of state submission so it's 2600 it's behind the current theater so it's outside if you're facing the building to the right of the facility the media center renovation the culinary arts renovation and then ieq it stands for indoor air quality uh indoor environmental quality um i guess that'd be iacube and or environmental quality and this is an all complete overhaul new boilers chillers controls electrical upgrades it's 16 million and change for this for this edition for this work the lead time on the units to be produced is something like a year and a half for the manufacturer a year to year and a half by the
144time it's authorized this does not happen fast because its system has to be designed and it has to be specifically built based on the specifications this is a big project north again the dance studio we're looking at north from above the drive is coming from the top in to the staff parking lot across the front you can see to the left-hand side there is a grade area which has some words in it that actually says something like dance studio but i can't read that that's how bad my vision is um so that's the new addition right there on the left-hand side um and then that's the the parking lot on the left and then football field obviously bottom right so it's the left it's the front right when you pull into the school i mean
145you can see it's it's it's basically back of the building changing rooms uh as well as uh facilities for the staff in that in that area it's a curricular program ad a staffing ad when you offer this program it may look like a half and a half like theater has grown up in both schools and then as student interest demands you hire full and if student interest demands a full teacher at both schools we hire a full teacher so ultimately the student course requests drive our master schedule so student interest always drives so whether we hire one or two teachers when we open is going to be completely contingent on student interest thomas grover has some really high class sizes today so we know we need an addition and all the stuff that's happening in
146west windsor feeds to hawk village grover south so the growth that's coming that we know of today in west west windsor is all feeding towards grover security vestibule the renovation of three existing science classrooms so what that means is there are currently not 12 science classrooms at grover nine of the twelve are outfitted for science three of the twelve are not they are just classrooms that have been utilized for science because the building didn't have enough classrooms or science um oriented to begin with so it's the conversion of three to make them proper science rooms a renovation of the current robotics tech lab and then a two-story addition which is an additional nine classrooms and three science rooms that allows for three full teams to be added every team has language arts math science and
147social studies four teachers on a team you need 12 classrooms per team specials go in those classrooms when those rooms are not used for the the the general classrooms are the core classrooms and then also three resource rooms so that is a 15 classroom edition 12 large three small group instruction or smaller for for some of the special ed programming it's about 22 000 square feet of program at grover where does it go you can see they're a little clearer top left it's the addition off the sixth and seventh grade hallways and it connects with an l um and so it goes and it connects the building in the top left corner all right so again um classroom science labs resource rooms media centers and overview and and then sorry and then the you can
148see the classroom layout is basically the four classrooms with two science and then the other floor is five and one i believe five and one to give you the the twelve and then there's some small group resource rooms intermixed in there so you're adding twelve classrooms it's it's twelve general size classroom three resource and renovation of three so it's actually 15 new classrooms plus three renovated classrooms plus the renovated robotics room so technically four renovated rooms community is a monster addition so let me frame this by saying as community middle school has grown up it's had two additions already but it's never had core space edition and we're at that point where we no longer fit in the music space the gym or the cafeteria so you have to expand your core areas in all
149those programs and i have two former one former and one current community middle school principals in the room that could attest that that building is stretched to its max it already has split shift lunches today 20-minute lunch 20 minutes outside the kids come outside and then they go inside inside outside which means in 20 minutes 200 plus students are going through the lunch lines scarfing food and going outside and then the kids that were running outside come in throw their stuff down go through the lines try to eat in 20 minutes and then go to class it's it's a horrible setup it's a setup for indigestion i mean it's it's it's not a way to live long term and we have been ever since i've been here we've had that concern of split shift lunches
150so in order to address the needs at community you need to do something about the gym because you need to do something about the cafeteria you need to do something about the library because you need to do something about the music space so you're impacting four critically and monstrous locations in the school the gym the library the cafeteria and and the music space in addition a renovation of the theater and anyone who's been over a community knows that theater needs some significant work so it also has the renovation of robotics lab and just like grover doesn't have proper science classrooms there are only six designated science classrooms that are appropriately set up for science at community six additional rooms are being used as science rooms that are not meant for science so in this there's
151either the renovation of six or something we're talking about but it has a similar price point is in the addition to make that science classrooms there and just repurpose the existing six science classrooms to general classrooms so some of this is a little bit of a work in progress as we work this through but you're talking about the auditorium renovations a new gym the conversion of the current library to a new music space a brand new library added expansion of the cafeteria by going into the existing gym expanding serving and prep lines relocation of one whole locker room which is currently the girls locker room we get a brand new locker room and the addition of another wing 12 classrooms which includes oh no it's 12 classrooms plus four science classrooms plus small group instruction
152rooms so the total additions are 31 000 square feet and then all the renovations includes pushing out the main office because we need to our child study team doesn't have a proper space they're in like three closets off the main hallway and there's no proper child study team place so any family that goes over there for a meeting with our child study team is in spaces that are not conducive for proper meetings and with this number of students we have to expand our nursing facility so this comes from the demographic report this is based on children that are in district today in a five-year projection you can see an expectation that community is going to not only with our current space constraints and the split shift lunches plus 175 kids based on children that are
153in district today quite frankly this is why you do a demographic report because some of this was blind to us in our numbers and community has to be addressed it's always been a concern but this just absolutely exclamation point made us we had to do something when this when this came out through the report these aren't children that were born and are projected these are kids that are in elementary school now all right so seeing it basically you're going across the top i'm sorry across the bottom um so you can see the bottom road is is grover's mill and you can see where that driveway loop is right there the gray on the bottom left going from left to right um is the new gym a new security entrance the new main office expansion's the
154thin part there then on the to the right in the middle the library jutting out and the 16 classroom section to the right all the way to the right connecting to this two-story wing so basically it goes in the front of the building all the way across it is maximizing the footprint of the facility at the same time addressing the needs of the school what's not shown on this is the renovations in the middle i'll flip to a different slide i see a question is there is that white area over there new and is it connected just by going outdoors to the other building the white on the right is millstone oh okay yeah yeah okay it's just hard to see with the footprint yeah that's millstone to the right it's part of the butterfly
155effect of millstone river this is the same map that's here now with actually an actual layout and what you see in the middle there is the theater it's the theater in uh so you have i'm going left to right in the green the gym and you can see the cafeteria into the gym which is the middle the green to the left and then the middle is the current auditorium with the stage then you have that two sections that are white those are the two music rooms right now then the library is to the right and green that is currently the library that will be repurposed for a music section drop below that straight down in blue you see that big blue square in the middle on the bottom that would be the new library space
156designated hallway connecting to the to the new um 16 classroom edition 8 and 8 above and on the left hand side i skipped that part that's the new gym a new locker room and then a new secure vestibule uh office space and storage area and night lobby one of the challenges in this particular building is that there's no way to secure necessarily use from the rest of the building so we create sort of a boxed off area for those that are coming specifically for the gym and there's a lot of basketball program you said community the gym's larger than now we can actually fit bleachers on both sides and have a proper competition against grover i mean i went through some of the specifics this just gives a little bit bigger one of the other
157challenges here is just logistically the eating stations the the lines which kids go through is not sufficient so it creates expanding serving areas at community this is again the classroom space just a little different detail you can see this again if you're interested more specifics it's important to know that as these plans are here they're preliminary and there's going to be a lot of small changes that happen when we meet with staff because what happens in the process is you bring this the staff members that are impacted by the facility together with the architect with the administration with central administration to go through every area so right now we still have to sit down with the music staff and actually specifically design to their to some of their programmatic needs and we'll have the music
158supervisor we'll have mr doothy and we'll have dr carter and her assistant principals and and some central office representation all in the room and we'll go through it and then we'll talk about and you're going to see tweaks as this goes forward but that's part of the planning process and ultimately as jobs get authorized we'll do more specific presentations about the specific layouts these are all conceptual design layouts and i promise you that over time if we go back and analyze these against what ultimately gets approved in two or two years or three years you're going to say well there's slight tweaks and that's because there's a process that we have to go through and that's very typical and that's completely normal and this is part of the part of the process why cough is
159another facility with tremendous space needs wyckoff is such that every nook and cranny of that building is used and that those nooks and crannies as that building is turning 100 years old that just like dutch neck uh in a year my cough will turn 100 and there's upgrades and facility needs there for instance there's one room for staff bathroom in the entire building so in the renovation we're adding in faculty bathrooms there's lines every day on every prep period for teachers waiting to go to the bathroom students there's once two one male 1 female student bathrooms in that entire building it's in the front right across the main office we need to add another set of bathrooms for that building if we're doing this it would be almost irresponsible not adding facilities for the the
160staff and students security vestibule will be a little challenging to anyone that knows the layout of y cough because but it's most likely going to be on the upper level right where we have on the what right currently is the awning i'm assuming it's going to be up there because then you're on landings and that's very challenging um the indoor environment quality there's control upgrades as mr duty talked about there's hvac there's basement rooms that have no ventilation or poor ventilation in them currently there's classroom upgrades which need steel and roofing and i'm going to say the word asbestos because when you have old buildings it's not illegal or unhealthy to have asbestos but when work is done to facilities that had the original like asbestos tiles and stuff like that you have to do
161a very specific asbestos abatement plan in order to protect that there's no asbestos in the fibers and why not get into the air system so things get taped off and facility has to be shut down and specific cleaning protocols have to be have to happen and there is an asbestos management plan that every building is required to have by code so this is just sometimes a scary word but i want to put it out there that this is very this is ex to be expected in buildings especially older buildings um as you go through renovations so you have to build in the money because it's a the remediation process takes some time and it's costly um a new addition is about 8 400 square feet and it's four kindergarten classrooms and a child study team
162office again a lot of these buildings weren't built like 100 years ago they weren't building a building and saying hey we need a child study team office that didn't exist when wyckoff was was built and when the additions were built they weren't necessarily thinking about the growth of the child study team and services that schools needed some of these services have expanded over time we need to make sure that the staff that works with the children have the appropriate space and and i already mentioned staff and student bathrooms so it's it's i should say it's new staff and student bathroom but it's also renovation of the current staff and student bathrooms so the bathrooms that exist today would be renovated and then there's new sets as well going into this facility and then something that
163wyckoff has none of not one closet for storage every storage closet has been transformed into a staff office so there is no actual building storage except for the um one storage for the on the like the loading dock which is a very small dock for paper and toiletries but the school itself has no place for instructional materials supplies storage this builds a reasonable size storage classroom of 120 square feet something about 200 square feet i believe it is so in wyckoff when we look at enrollment projections we're up about 50 but that's not including like any this is based on vital statistics live birth data but it doesn't necessarily take into effect what's going to happen when princeton terrace goes it's assuming day road but it's not necessarily assuming princeton terrorists not prince and terrorists
164sorry uh prince of fargo princeton forestal i'm getting to the 10 o'clock hour i'm mixing up my princeton's princeton farstoh so again 52 growth you say well that's small but there's zero classrooms open today so if we assume that every grade level might need some form of expansion we have to pick up a space so by adding the 4k what you do is you open up the current three kindergarten so you can have one growth first one growth second one growth third so essentially it gets us from six classroom of every grade to seven classrooms of every grade and it goes from three elementary kindergarten classrooms to four so in other words you can fit the seven sections you might have half a classroom open every day which would ultimately be used by services like
165otp speech would use that overflow space maybe the esl program might use that space but you have other services that are needed for kids that would go into those rooms when that room is not being used it's very rare for rooms to sit vacant and we also then looked at the footprint to say okay if to expand again where so here we are in wyckoff's property wyckoff's like a diamond i mean like a triangle like an arrowhead long across the top and narrows in down down down the sides coming in on like a triangle right so if you can envision this the existing building the original building is the top corner it's and then you have the expansion is that like little addition hallway and then the expansion across the back the section we're building
166off of if you can imagine being inside of wyckoff in the bottom corner is the library so it builds off of the library wing why is this a good area to design you don't impact the parking lot you do not impact the current playground you do not impact the current ball fields it's the easiest location to build with the least disruption to the building so what that hallway looks like as you extend out if we're on the right hand side the top left big square is the library the existing library across the hall from that in orange or some kind of salmon it would be the revised guidance office conference space that current conference space is the current child study team office where three people are it leaves that as a conference space so now
167we have a space for families to meet the guidance counselor families to meet the child study team office and this would be the only conference room in that building there's currently no conference room in that building and then it builds three child st id team offices into the facility across the hallway in yellow there are the student bathrooms up again next to the salmon are the two staff bathrooms and then you see the four growth kindergarten rooms and each kindergarten room by code is required to have a bathroom dutch neck toilet room renovations again 100 year old building those bathrooms need to be renovated at dutch neck as well security vest tubule but because of the um section and how it needs to be designed it's going to go into the room to the left
168which is currently a faculty room like a faculty workspace so it requires the faculty workspace to be redesigned to gain space for the security vestibule to come in so that requires a little bit of a repurposing of that front entrance way bollards are think of those poles by gas station pumps that protect cars from knocking over the gas station it creates a row of those kind of poles across the front if you're at dutch neck right now what separates kids from buses nothing a yellow line so what this does it puts a security line of bollards across the front it requires a little bit of a widening to the left of the current drive that goes in front of the building to get this in it will not take out all the grass it should
169not take out the trees um at least we're trying to preserve the trees it might require cutting back but we're trying to preserve those that tree line we're not going to know that until we're done with all the engineering work and then the media center gets renovated at dutchneck dutch neck is one of the buildings that's had a lot of work done to the hvac system and and the facility over the last couple of years going back ten to five to ten years we've had a lot of work done at dutch neck hawk uh again hawk's got the current rough um project that's going separate than the referendum the only addition to hawk at this point is some work to the ren the media center that was not done inside the referendum town center again
170moving separately then the referendum media center security vestibule those two pieces are separate and apart and then village villages had work done as well media center security vestibule in those two locations as well millstone four five and a half six million dollars worth of hvac work the big project here is hvac media center security but i can't underscore the amount of work that's going to be required here in hvac the heating ventilation air conditioning system and then district upgrades completely fire alarms there are eight buildings that are going to get fire alarm upgrades it's over five million dollars with the cost this stuff costs a lot of money when you have to think about the the wiring and hardware throughout an entire building high school north has had work done grover has worked on in
171the 15 edition in other words this section plus the classrooms we built that that's all up to code anything everything else needs to be rewired across this district a lot of a lot of work there generators south grover community village millstone we did a generator at north a couple years ago because that's where the mdf room is that's the big technology closet the hardware the brain of the district with respect to technology so upgrades the size of the generators at those other schools that does not mean we won't do generators at other schools it means we might do them through another funding mechanism and that's the big picture overview i know george standing here that can answer some specific questions it's a ton of stuff to process we're going to have months of ongoing conversations
172about this work but that is 115 million work for zero tax impact in an hour presentation there will be a tax impact not for the buildings but for the teachers that go in the building i'm specifically talking about the facility in christchurch okay my question is will these additions to various schools look like and blend into the existing schools because with this addition it looks very expensive and unnecessary and that's why residents were upset about this it doesn't really look like a school from the outside so i'm concerned that the additions look like the existing schools well this section in fairness is not the school section so it was going to be it was designed specifically to look like a board office or to look different if you look at the way the school itself
173section was matched and how the way the paving blends through thank you mr dalton and how it blends through and how the stone matches in the design matches that was very intentional in fact that work's been done and i'll let i'll let mr duthie talk about his conceptual design work so this this is a george question well that's a good question i think the best way to answer it is it depends on the site and it depends on we're trying to establish i think an image for west winds or plainsboro and i don't know that this building is actually the right building to be looking at as far as the image for a school because this isn't this was intended to be a different type of building than a school as dave alluded to but
174i think if we look at the proposed addition to maurice hawk elementary school i would like to think of that as being kind of the thinking going behind the design of all of the additions to the schools proposed in the dis in the district it's every building is different in terms of its context its sighting its placement you know the the building that it's attaching to and the image that the school district wishes to convey so a great deal of thought will be done in terms of what those buildings are going to look like not every building is going to look the same i don't see that happening and we'll do a series of design exercises to look at the types of design language and the image that you want to convey for each building
175okay i have a question my other question is um i know there are currently quite a few local dance schools and if we all of a sudden have a dance program in the wwp schools will all those local dance schools be put out of business and is that a good thing well if it follows the tutoring industry it only enhances it so the bigger question is will they want to rent our facilities and and what i would envision that we're going to have to address the facilities use um policy with respect to specific types of facilities and add in to either a way to either rent it or to protect it as an asset and as all these theaters get redesigned i think the same question is going to come to those because where our
176facilities get damaged is with not our students but outside use groups so it's something to be thinking about at the end of the day my concern is not the private companies but ultimately the instructional program for the students and if we look at the requirements under the arts and the recommendation from the department of education is to have a four prong arts program we have three of the four prongs we will never have the fourth prong if we don't address the facilities need so from a curriculum and program standpoint i know we've had community members request dance and we've had no opportunity to bring in dance i've successfully been able to start a dance program in another district in a theater program in another district and to that the board had to create facility we
177created a dance studio that replicated the state theater up in new brunswick and we built a theater program here we've been able to replicate a theater program and design a theater program that's running at both high schools but we do not have the facility for the dance program our recommendation is to create the fourth prong of the arts program and i believe it's something our community will support and have a desire for and so that's why we built it into the referendum to address a missing gap in our program do you have students who are have expressed an interest in that we have students interested if we offered it it will fill and again it's just a matter it's going to the question really is going to be as it builds is it going to
178build two sections in three sections or is it going to build at five sections so the question ultimately be the staffing and so is it one teacher or is it two teachers or is it ultimately capped out with two teachers at each building so it's really going to be driven on student requests but we firmly believe that this would be just another mechanism of meeting one's arts requirement and surprisingly or not there are students that would prefer not to meet their arts requirement through drawing through dance or or through music or through theater but they prefer to meet their art requirement um through dance okay okay louisa oh carol i would just add that my daughter did dance and the girls that do dance in a serious way even a district program would just be
179a tiny portion of the amount of dance they would do because if you're serious about dance you're doing like five classes a week and it's not and we're not in the same realm there um dave i had a question um you mentioned that all of this work would get us about i think capacity for a thousand additional students i have you had an opportunity to take your district classroom capacity chart and update it to show what the new i haven't but i can't okay and and it'll be hard that would be helpful yeah i can definitely do that and then remind me if you could remind us in a footnote i believe the district utilization capacity is some percentage of the maximum capacity that's that's a kind of a tree it's at 85 percent utilization
180rate high school middle school it's 90 units no let me flip that it's 90 utilization rate when you when you redo the chart if you would footnote that so that i don't have to ask you again when i forget no problem okay thank you i know good question and you know the thousand is my estimate doing quick math i think one of the important things is knowing the value of science in our community either renovation or addition it's 24 science classroom in this referendum it's one question so if you're pro science you have to also like culinary arts and you also have to like air at high school north mills millstone in in wyckoff so it's one question one question 115 million zero tax impact on the facilities portion of the debt or we can
181be like we can let the debt expire i let the let the money expire wait a couple years and then crush the taxpayer with a massive tax increase and all you have to do is look in the newspaper at princeton to talk about what the what the yearly impact is going to be on the taxpayer well question in addition to that you could delay it but and spend more later but in the meantime you still have to house the students that show up and meet the instructional programs that they desire absolutely or limit them and tell them they can't have what we want to give them you know what they like and in some of these cases these are children that exist in this district today do you have a an idea in mind of
182how many years it will take to build all these additions in this referendum uh into my next contract no it will take it'll take in all seriousness referendum goes through in 2018 november 2018. um you're at that point you're actively building maurice hawk you're moving towards um bidding out town center at that point those projects will both take about a year and a half um a year and a half to two years for for the full build out between the two projects at the same time you'll start working towards the paperwork process the cons the finalizing of conceptual designs on advanced projects and then start launching for the following summer of summer 19. some of the work moves differently depending on expansion versus versus air quality for instance you're going to want to we're going
183to move on north because of the lead time i'm building that system community or existing children today going to that facility we're going to want to move on community we're going to want to move relatively quick on grover and quite frankly we're going to want to move really quick on south so i would venture guess when those projects get started somewhere between summer 19 from bidding perspective and awarding and mobilizing to summer 20. each project in itself will be two to three years and summers to get that through so we're talking about if all the referendum projects four to five years for full for full build out of all those phasings because the other thing to remember is like community try to think about how you structure that work with kids there and staff there
184when you're talking about the corridors of the cafeteria the music room the theater all those conversions now there's a lot of work that can happen on the outside the expansion of the main office the nurse's office all that you can build that and then break through the wall you can build the two-story expansion you can build the new library in fact you have to build a new library to move the current library out because you can't just put the books in the hallway right you can build the new gym before you convert it so there's certain work that can be done but you have to layer that work over summers for all the interior conversions and so it's going to take a lot of coordination with contractors and architects and site managers because quite frankly
185our building and grounds guys alone can't manage all this um and there's not enough of us to be at every building we don't have the technical expertise we're good but we don't have the technical expertise to talk about all all the intricacies of every hvac unit so we're going to need a lot of timing so i guess soup to nuts every part of this it's probably we're talking four and five years and we'll who will be from an administration point of view uh the point person for all of this there's so many projects that reality is that mr dalton's replacement dr russo and myself will most likely from a central office perspective be assigned to be the point of different projects because we're talking seven when you add in the two moving outside the referendum
186seven facility expansions um so that means seven different job meetings and all that kind of stuff every two weeks we'll probably and then there's all the administration and staff to be mindful and responsible for i would envision the three of us three roles would be splitting up this the point work point-person work to specific projects and we'd look at scope and sequence and timings and all that kind of stuff okay my other question is on high school south you're adding some classrooms did you look at putting those classrooms in what is now the open area to get rid of the whole security problem in the open area yeah like commons one two three you mean or do you mean like the open space area so if you add walls to common to the the open
187space classrooms the five six seven hundred eight uh 800 areas you actually will lose existing classroom space so you'll based on footprint of square footage you'll actually lose rooms not be able to add rooms the other thing is just from a facility well because the walls will take up square footage and hallways are then required and a lot you know there's there's and there's certain code requirements of length of hallways so it actually will eat into the footprint it's a very unique design that i can't imagine the department of ed going for now if this board ever wanted to get into a conversation of repurposing the 567 800 wing you might as well you're gonna have to shut south down for two years to do that work in any steel work you have to do
188in there to any kind of enclosures i've been asked about second floors this guy will tell you anything can be done because he he doesn't think about the price on the front end he thinks about the conceptual design so he's right for for conceptually we can do a lot we can add a second floor we could put up walls the price to do all that and the time to do all that and then where do you physically put the students in the staff during that time period whole different conversation to the point where it's undoable also that however you configure the open space area it doesn't make space for more kids all you're doing is building walls around the existing ones i i i've looked at the size of some of those spaces and you
189will definitely lose classrooms the uh the other thing that happens i know this was discussed in uh when we went to the last renovation you close those off now you have all sorts of ventilation issues to deal with lighting and ventilation you know exiting yeah so there's a lot of corridors that have to be created that eat up space that are currently classrooms spaces now because the whole layout has to be different from movable walls and movable furniture and it's and in very hon we have talked about that um because we looked at we tried to look at every option through this just a clarification question you'd mention about four to five years of build out is there um if we were to do the referendum and if it passed is there a specific time
190frame that you're supposed to spend that money uh is there a requirement whether it's a legal requirement as part of that i see both dr russo and mr duthie shaking their head now so so if a project um was authorized two years from now and it actually took six years to make which look some of these things and and uh tony might be able to recall through the referendum that was done for the south expansion uh that went through in 2006 i came in in 2009 and the the bubble portion of the referendum finished in december of 2009. and that was a 2006 pass in the in that that was one expansion and so now you're layering seven expand well five expansions in the referendum and two outside the referendum the possibility for something to
191delay a year is not on is not uncommon when you're moving that many contractors at that point but you also want to start to authorize the work earlier than later before interest rates start going up and before other things that drive the price is up so there is there is a financial and logistical advantage to moving earlier if you can capture the interest rates at a lower rate too i have a question um are you how are we intending to communicate this to the public i know tonight's meeting and putting it on are you anticipating any sort of public meetings do you have a plan for that yet we're working on what that will look like we have met with one um one company that specifically helps with referendum work quite frankly some of the
192proposals we like and some of the proposals we're going to push back on um some of the things we think we can do ourselves uh you see uh jamie here and and one of the things we've already set up time for is is to start building videos for each building this summer so that we can start getting myself and mr doothy and and the building principles to talk about the facility expansions so we can have videos per building set up because for some members of the community um we you know i did they're going to see it visually they're going to see it on the video and they're only going to be interested in their kids school or where their kids are going for we do anticipate and we're going to be working with the
193pta and ptsa leadership at our we at our next meeting is actually the exec boards for all the different organizations we'll be talking about setting up meetings in the fall and getting on calendars and setting up a series of meetings in the fall quite frankly i'll be asking some members of the board i hope members of the board are interested in presenting and coming out to those because it's not just it wouldn't just just be the superintendent's referendum if this gets voted on it's the board's referendum ultimately and the board needs to be part of the communication and sales pitch and then there's this whole part of i talked to some other districts about about their communication strategy some boards strategy is only to email district parents personally i think that's unfair to district residents
194so in order to then we don't have an email bank to every homeowner so the only way to do that is not only put things up on the web and not only put videos up and we have meetings but actually uh mail things out to homeowners so there are distr there are mailers that need to be done which have cost associated associated with them and that's a that's a logistical issue the board might say you know what we think we should only email but if we email we only then email the emails we have and that means we're not emailing village grant and we're not emailing other and i just personally i just don't think that's fair they have a right to vote as much as they have a right to vote yes as district
195residents and they have a right to be informed because they have a right to vote on this so there'll be a get out the vote campaign because you know we can't say vote yes for no clearly we're bringing this forward so we want to see community support but there's again we think there's a great story here there's existing of programmatic need there's existing space constraints and we know growth is coming due to expiring debt taking advantage of of the the money that comes back through state aid and utilizing reserves and you know we've all heard feedback that our reserve balances are too high this is an opportunity to give that money back to the community in a way to keep their facility debt portion of the re of the of the budget even and and
196we think there's a great story in that so we're addressing growth needs short term and near term we're addressing facility concerns like air quality issues within multiple buildings we're addressing science and arts and robotics and dance and libraries and culinary and classroom needs across this district we're meeting security and life safety needs so again we think there's a great story in this and there's something for every member of this community and if you look at a building like dutch neck or village or hawk which have minimal things in the referendum well your kids are going to go to grover and south or community in north so there's a reason to vote yes through this because your children will be impacted by the by the changes programmatically as well as classroom wise so we're hoping for
197community support through this we're hoping they see the method through the madness and they're hoping they're seeing the multi-year thinking of why we did certain things with certain reserve actions that we have been thinking strategically for years about doing some of this work and this only happens because we work together in partnership because we think about budgets in multi-year because we think about impacts to tax bases because we think about giving a consistency program to our to our kids and so and we do believe there's something for everyone's children in this in this proposal so i'm happy to be done and i'm happy to keep going so you tell me if there's other questions this will not be our last our last presentation on this um and to louise's question the actual structure of what
198presentations will look like to be developed but we know that this is requiring a lot of public meetings and that we'll be working on putting that plan together any other questions from the board thank you all right just under three hours just like i thought all right well thank you for everyone who stayed through the presentation and i believe it goes to public opportunity for congress right and thank you george for being here and helping this out i'm going to leave this mic on for any member of the public okay all right that brings us to our first opportunity for public comment the boredom white's thoughts and reactions on gender items and items of concern from members of the community who are present each participant's asked to give his or her name and address prior
199to making a statement which will be limited to three minutes all statements should be directed to the presiding officer and the public comment period should be limited to will be limited to 60 minutes anyone would like to speak [Music] veronica amino 41 goldstein drive i'm going to start backwards to front our reserves are too high it's because we have been taxed too much since you took office our taxes have never been zero in comparison to victoria neal so that's why our reserves are too high now you also spoke about split lunches in community middle school dutch neck which actually are first to third grade they also have split lunges and i am surprised you did not mention that so that makes me a little uncomfortable now uh it's a shame that the police officers were
200not here because uh mr flores when i wrote on facebook that the school was considering the class three officers you said that no we were planning we had a pony and doggy show here however that was only for the class three officers where are the other considerations that uh the board is taking it there's only class three officers there's nothing else because that would be the word planning and not considering um the other thing that i wanted to know is right now we have these officers they say that they go to the schools they build relationships we still have drug issues we still have alcohol issues we still have bullying issues how efficient have they been with all these building relationships i would like to know what it's called roi return on investment efficiency per
201versus payroll that would give me a good idea if it's worth it or if it's not worth it and the last one is i am all for building relationships holding hands singing kumbaya the way that they said it however one of the officers pointed out that there was an incident in january about a bb gun and that they were able to go through their connections and even other high schoolers that they had already graduated what about privacy issues any of that has been broken any type of privacy issues i would like to know for example what was the outcome because uh this administration is a huge advocate about uh the issues about suicidal thoughts so my thing or my concern would be you have somebody that maybe somebody place a prank on somebody else the
202police officer comes starts to question that person uh he's a cop at the end of the day so therefore has to do whatever the law says all the friendship goes down their door and then that kid was just a prank and then the person that had the prank played on then he becomes depressed then he becomes alienated and then possibly with suicidal thoughts so it's not so black and white maybe because i am a wife of a litigator and i was trained to see the entire picture not only the kumbaya side but we need to have a much better understanding of all this thank you hi my name is reverend tim brown of 2506 pheasant hollow and i am excited about what's happening in this school district and i think it requires a lot of
203responsibility to seize the with every blessing there's a burden and and i am up here because i want us to really embrace that attitude when it comes to school discipline i know that there's a second reading of regulation 5600 pupil discipline code of conduct and i i feel like sometimes i'm i'm john the baptist talking in the wilderness because i i get a sense of what's what's on the horizon and i can't help but think that this this document is just really represents who we are right now but it doesn't mean that that's the way we have to always be and it's punitive rather than restorative the first reference to restoration in this document is for placing a pupil in an appropriate educational environment yes this document emphasizes exclusion over inclusion this document does not
204reinforce positive behavior but highlights negative behavior it does not emphasize the implementation of positive behavioral interventions and support practices used by schools to prevent disciplinary incidents from ever occurring this this document does not include a restorative justice approach to discipline repairing harm through an inclusive process no this document represents a school district that is comfortable with a system known to punish students of color disproportionately i believe that our insistence to proceed with a reactive aversive and exclusionary process for addressing school discipline speaks to the fact that our schools do not operate as a community for all but as transactional institutions instead for some as the principal of june jordan school for equity in san francisco stated you can't restore justice to the community when you haven't created a community to begin with to practice restorative
205justice you have to first build a real community that is worth restoring we cannot restore community if we insist on a process that invites an individual's implicit bias to punish and exclude students unfairly there's nothing in this document that speaks to the fact that a person one individual can punish someone unfairly we cannot restore community if we do not require our teachers and administrators to receive a teacher certification and or bachelor degree program that includes substantial training and cultural competency we cannot restore community if we do not include in the job description for the assistant superintendent for pupil services and planning a responsibility to organize and lead the implementation of a diversity equity and inclusion program one last paragraph we can restore this community if we break tradition and respond to a demand for equitable
206treatment of all students let us not follow the crowd thank you let us join other schools and school districts that have decided to lead you'll get three minutes [Music] thank you very much sure thank you anyone else okay that ends the public comment period uh we're gonna have to have a motion to [Music] well i'll say in an hour hopefully we're not going to use it uh to the meeting could i have a motion to extend the meeting past 10 30. uh carol and dana those in favor say aye aye i'm not even going to ask if anybody's going to say no so we're good until 11 30. okay that brings us to the voting piece the administration can have a motion on items oh just one two three martin and michelle any questions on
207the administration piece i have a comment i think that given reverend brown's passion speech we should reconsider this and look to put in some stipulations that there should be appeals etc or anything that he's concerned about possibly we could add to this to make it more equitable like what you what are you objecting to in the i'm saying i'm saying you're not on the board i think it would be good for like what for for there to be an appeal process mr president if i could to address some of his concerns there actually is a whole separate pupil grievance procedure and process that's outlined in a separate policy that and separate regulation that is in the 5000 section that it that already does exist and i believe also and i'm i know that carter's dr
208carter is here i believe it's also that the appeals process is also laid out in each of the handbooks as well in some of the buildings no sir this is the board meeting and we're at that point you're not a member of the this is this is for the board you can i will speak to you after we could speak after the meeting [Music] so okay right right miss reverend brown the way the board operates it's meetings there's two opportunities for public comment the first one and then there's another one presently right now the board is deliberating amongst itself and then at the conclusion of this session there's a second opportunity for public comment short of that unless the chair of the meeting recognizes a member of the public there's no opportunity for the public
209to dialogue outside of those two areas we have not done that sir at any meetings so i i'm just well no sir no sir the the board has a set policy as to how it relates its meetings if it doesn't do that sir then candidly meetings degenerate into shouting matches and a lack of decorum so the board has worked very hard to maintain order and decorum its meetings and we would ask you to kindly follow that tony i i don't i don't object to just for the other board i don't object to um delaying this to another meeting i would like to understand what he means by restorative justice i would like to do a little research to understand what he's referring to so i don't know if others agree but i don't object to
210postponing this one for another meeting but if somebody has strong feelings let you know let me know i agree with louisa all right there's a motion on the table for these three items does anybody want to amend that motion how would we amend it to amend it item two off right we're talking about two yes so the question is is there a motion on the floor to table item two item two so i believe i i could be so bold in this hearts i believe you're making that motion that motion so there's a discussion now on that motion to table fifth uh the second reading of 5600 right i don't see any reason to do that i'd rather i'll speak first on it uh this is a policy we've gone through uh and i and
211i it's gone through its two readings it's gone through the uh the committee process all the board members have seen it uh i would say we should go forward with it other people can speak and then we'll uh you want to add no i'll jump in and i'll ask uh mr toscano to correct me but and and by all means mr dalton if i remember correctly the department of education has a checklist about what my policy 5600 is required to have as components in its components is a disciplinary system which requires consequences being layered in levels um and and there's a checklist requirement through i believe it's cusack that requires it to look a specific way from the perspective of a checklist disciplinary and this is based on the model policy that comes forward by
212both the school boards association and their policy company as well as strauss esme and their policy company that does not prohibit that there be practices that look at implicit bias that look a culturally responsive training that look at restorative justice now for several meetings now there have been comments made and because this is not the structure for dialogue and there have not been further conversations after the meeting there's a assumption that nothing's been done in this area for the last year mr dalton has been working with the assistant principals on a conversation around restorative justice and restorative practices the administration has been working with dr eddie fergus out of temple university formerly at nyu specifically on the df culturally responsiveness disproportionality and bias we've had trainings through the summer with dr ruja benjamin and implicit
213bias the idea that we're doing nothing in this particular area is quite frankly insulting and it's done without conversation and without knowledge and it does that's not component and this is where reverend brown this is where we this is where this is where we don't have a dialogue unfortunately all right right and this is the part of the meeting where there's not a dialogue but there also hasn't been a conversation after the meeting or in between the meetings either so no well sorry i respect that you have a position on this and you want to be heard but this is not the right form at this point part of the meeting it's just not with respect to the policy the policy matches the requirements established by the state of new jersey for a disciplinary policy
214of policy 5600 every district across the state has this policy the consequences and build it into the chart vary district to district but that does not mean that conversations don't happen with respect to with respect with respect to discipline in schools when consequences are met there's a process that occurs with administrators that have the right in authority under their certificate to issue suspension so that works through the administrative certification as and they have that right when they hold the principal's endorsement and those individuals at the ultimately if it's less than 10 days suspension less than 10 day have the right to issue the suspension without any appeal to this body and that's the way in which the code works it's only when a student's property right 14th amendment right ultimately gets impacted of loss of
215educational program of more than 10 days that it comes to this body so an appeal less than 10 days is not appealable to the board of education so dr adderhall just to echo what you were you're saying so yes the the administrative code does require a code of conduct and has required all school districts in the state of new jersey to adopt a code of conduct and to publish a code of conduct since the 2005 uh revision of the administrative code your citation of the suspension and the appeals process is correct there are detailed procedures that have to be followed for every uh out of school suspension both under 10 school days and above 10 school days and within the administrative code in those provisions there are specific due process rights there are specific uh
216procedural rights that have to be followed and have to be adhered to otherwise any discipline that could be in that could be issued in those types of instances could be appealed and overturned by the commissioner of education so there's multiple layers of appeal multiple layers of protection that are put forth both at the local level and at the state level that can be and guard against any allegations of bias any allegations of inappropriate investigation or any conduct by administration or even a board that is arbitrary capricious or unreasonable so there are layers of appeal there are that are protections that are built in into the administrative code and it doesn't necessarily this is a specific document that is not supposed to encapsulate all of those provisions within the 5 000 policy series and the regulation
217series i believe and i'm going to go off the top of my head there are at least 20 to 30 different policies and regulations each one dealing with a specific area the one here is dealing with the code of conduct that is in the format the template that the department of education is requiring and i believe it is through cusack and i also believe it also is monitored as part of the annual review that is conducted at the start of each school year so it's part of the checklists that the county offices come down and review there's nothing stopping us to pass this now and then anyone interested in amending the policies later can do the research and offer suggestions at a future meeting that's why we that's so can we have a vote on
218our motion well that's any other comment on it okay so the motion right now the vote right now is the table item two yeah table for now yeah so uh [Music] yes okay uh mr john yes uh miss cage yes mr clark no okay so number two is tabled right so now we have a motion on items one and three any question on that we'll start okay there's uh there are no curriculum items can i have a motion on finance items one through 15. rachel and taylor any questions on the finance yes yes except i'm ext abstaining on 6a yes but i'm also abstaining on 6a yes all right a motion on personnel items one and two the green addendum yellow addendum and the other yellow addendum larry daryl and daryl uh rachel and martin
219any questions on the personnel items okay we'll start with wit with miss juliana yes ms krug yes mr whitefield yes mr taylor jean yes protect the old habit sorry yeah can i ask a question at least for this mrs chai she resigned because of the visa issue no no we talked about that we'll talk about that later okay thanks uh miss hertz yes ms ho yes okay passed oh miss cash i i get to vote too ms cash yes mr players yes okay i had it right you still pay [Laughter] all right uh i just want to acknowledge two retirements from tonight's agenda carol reichman is a math teacher at south and she's resigning after 23 years in the district and marion hayer a uh teacher of millstone is retiring after 23 years and mrs
220heyer uh had the pleasure of having my son but that was many years ago and i see that she still survived it and worked another 10 15 years afterwards so congratulations to both of them and i wish them well in the future any liaison reports any new business okay there's a second opportunity for public comment 15 minutes will be provided at the end of the meeting for public comments each participant asked to give his or her name and address prior to making a statement which will be limited to three minutes all statements shall be directed to the presiding officer and the public comment as a total will be limited to 15 minutes anyone okay public comment periods closed can i have a motion to adjourn uh martin and taylor okay those in favor of adjourning
221say aye hi opposed thank you very much [Music] you