001flag to the flag of the United States of America to the stand. The New Jersey open public meeting law was enacted to ensure the right of the public to have advanced advanced notice of and to attend the meeting of public bodies at which any business affecting their interest is discussed or acted upon. In accordance with the provisions of this act, the Cedar Grove Board of Education has caused notice of this meeting to be advertised by having the date, time, and place thereof posted on bulletin boards in the district, published and or transmitted to the Verona Cedar Grove Times newspaper, tap into online news filed with the township clerk, and posted on the district's website. Can I have a roll call, please? >> Board member Grande, >> here. >> Board member Marzullo, >> here. >> Board
002member Pal >> here. Board member Keegan >> here. >> Board President Dara >> here. >> We have a >> Thank you. All right. At this time, I open the meeting for public comment on agenda items only. Seeing that there's nobody's here, I move to close that portion. Move on with the meeting. Um, >> would you like to do your presentation first? You want us to do reports? >> I can jump in. Would you like? >> Yeah, we might as well. Okay. Thank you, Madam President. Okay. Uh, good evening, Sear Grove School Community. Uh, this evening is the annual presentation when we discuss our most recent NJSLA results. And I also like to pair those results with our district goals for the upcoming school year. And then even beyond that, sharing with the community an action
003plan for how we're going to achieve our goals over the course of this upcoming school year. So, behind me, we have a PowerPoint presentation. I'm going to start here. Um, I'll give you a minute for those watching at home and those with us here this evening to orient yourself to that slide. You can see the three columns that are white uh to your left if you're looking at it. Those are our percentage scores of students who met and or exceeded expectations on their language arts ELA NJSLA assessment. So that's on the white side. The on the left is are the in the white boxes. And then when you go to the right, moving left to right across the table in the boxes that are highlighted yellow, that is the number of points, not percentages, but
004the number of points above state averages in just about all cases that where we are as a community scored. So a community like ours here in Senior Grove should consistently be outperforming the state by well over doubledigit averages. So that's one way we go about checking whether we're not are we're not we're on on target with our levels of student achievement or in some cases are there areas of underachievement. A couple things I want to highlight for you. If you look at the first blue hour there blue arrow that's fifth grade from last year and that's a significant jump compared to the prior two years in terms of the degree to which they outpaced state averages by almost 30 points there. and you see where they were just in the prior two years. Uh you
005look at third and fourth grade across our district, both end schools. Those are really the numbers we want to be seeing, almost 30 points above state averages. Later on in my presentation to this evening, I'll talk about another analysis I'm going to do in the winter to give us even more detail about benchmarking our district results with other more like districts to to ours. As you go down though, however, if you look at ninth grade, you see that plus seven, plus 10. That's a concern. That's an area of likely underachievement. And so, one of the things we do as educators is we work with our teachers to provide them more detailed analysis of these results. Uh, one of the resources we'll use are u are reports called evidence statements that gives our educators insight into
006specific standards where our students are outperforming state averages. but what standards where we are either at the same as the state or below the state and then that analysis needs to inform our instruction and ongoing basis. So these are our EL ELA scores over the last three years and you see in general you see some really positive trends and then you see opportunities for continued improvement. I'm now going to switch to math. So this math slide is oriented the exact same way as the ELA slide. uh Cedar Grove scores over the last three years are in the white columns there uh from grades three all the way through geometry and then the points achieved above state averages are to your right in the yellow highlighted columns again let's highlight fifth grade you can really see
007some evidence of impact what I said to our teachers at the start of this school year when they came back from the summer break is one of the things we wanted to look for was evidence of impact this board going back over a year and a half ago, um, in conjunction with the administration made very significant investments in new math curricular resources across all of our grades all the way up to algebra and this year even include geometry. And so we want to look to see if those investments are having the intended impact on student outcomes. And in many cases, you see evidence of impact. You see third, fourth, fifth grade, some real positive trends. I want to now I'm going to jump down now to algebra. So, at the bottom there, and I want
008to draw your attention to under 2025 Cedar Grove scores, I want to draw your attention to the 856. I'm going to spend a couple minutes talking about these numbers. The first number in that column, so the 68, the 91, the 85, those are the percentage of students in eighth grade who either met or exceeded expectations on the algebra assessment. So, those are our high performing eighth grade math students. And generally speaking, you want to be at or above 90% in that area um to make sure that you're capturing and identifying the appropriate students for those advanced placement classes in the middle school and then into high school. But the number that really jumps out to me is that 56 from if you look across 1823 and then that jump to 56 that is the percentage
009of students in 9th grade who are meeting or exceeding expectations on their algebra and JSLA assessment. And that's a very significant bump and it's after we made significant investments in both professional development and new curricular resources um at in those classrooms. And so really want to applaud all of our teachers, but certainly the teachers who really made smart use of our new investments and our new curricular resources. And then you go further across and you see that plus 18. I'd be remiss not to talk about that plus 30. And I know for a fact that teacher made very intentional shifts in her instructional practice. And look at the reward. Look at the benefit. She jumps up almost 30 points above state averages from 60s and 50s to 86. So really positive trends there. A lot
010of things that are on the move. You may be asking yourself, well, what are some areas where we might need some improvement and look for concern? If you look at sixth, seventh, eighth grade area there, generally speaking, based on the amount of point above state averages averages, which is not to the degree you see in the other grade levels, that would generally speaking seem to indicate there's some underachievement there. Uh and so one of the things we need to do when we did the start of the school year is we need to be transparent with our educators about what our results have been and then as I mentioned on the ELA slide uh work in partnership with them to do deeper analysis to understand the true use of these new curricular resources and what shifts
011they need to be making in the classroom but also do that evidence statement standardsbased analysis as well. And that work has already begun. I couldn't be more proud of how our teachers reacted to this analysis at the start of the school year. And we've already calendared specific data meetings in October, November, and February where our teachers will use their professional learning time to focus on this data analysis. So that's an overview of our math achievement over the last three years based on NJSLA results. Here are our science scores. Now, in New Jersey, science is only assessed in grades 5, 8, and 11. Um and generally speaking, you can see some positive trends there with that one blue arrow. That's a nice jump in fifth grade um of PO plus 16 points. But in general, there's
012some underachievement based on these these data points compared to state averages. In science, generally speaking, you tend to see these trends across the state. Uh since the pandemic, science scores have not be rebounding at the degree we would like. We're anticipating new science standards coming out shortly. Uh we did a science audit this summer where we had a professor come in and review our curriculum. Uh we've made some recommendations to our teachers about the results of that and we're also going to be running some job embedded professional development for our middle school science department this throughout this school year so that we can start to make some improvements here. Uh so more work to be done in this area. And so now I'm going to shift. So those are our results. Those are our student
013outcomes. So now we have to sit back and ask ourselves, what are our goals for the upcoming school year? And we have three goals. They're very similar to the goals from a year ago. When I first presented these goals to the community, I talked about the value of multi-year goals so that we have stability in our practices. Our teachers know what to expect and we are not making significant shifts yeartoear toear. We're being consistent with what we say are our priorities. So this first goal is very similar to a year ago. You see the commitment to implementing MTSS fully in our elementary schools in particular. That was done a year ago and we've even increased those resources this school year. So, we're very excited about that. The science healthcare pathway has launched here at the
014high school. Very excited about some of our new science teachers and the overall science department here at the high school making great strides in a short period of time. I mentioned the data meetings and some other things that we're going to launch this school year. Commitment to co-eing professional development. That is also a partnership that we're in the process of launching. So the whole theme of this first goal is student growth and academic achievement. Goal number two continues to focus on communication and public relations. We made a lot of progress this past year as evidenced by our new website, our mobile app. If you haven't yet and you're watching at home, if you haven't yet had a chance to download our mobile app, we encourage you to go to your app store and download that
015app. in the coming weeks and months, we're going to be pushing out a lot more information through push notifications through the mobile app. And so we're really excited about the the shape that's taking. And then the other area here, we had our newsletters that we launched last year. We're going to continue that strategy this year. And then obviously the work we intend to do about educating the community about our referendum initiative in March 2026. A lot of that will focus and align with this goal, the importance of ongoing communication commun uh communication with our community. Goal number three, moving along, the theme of this goal continues to be finance, facilities, and security. Continuing to have a strategic budget in place. We'll be starting our budgeting process for the upcoming school year next year in the
016next couple of weeks. Uh and really when you do that, you want to make sure you're right sizing your district on an annual basis to make sure that as many resources are as possible are flowing to our students. Very excited. You see here the mention of the turf baseball field. That was a goal a year ago and fast forward to today. Construction has broken ground over the last two weeks and we believe that project's on track to be completed before Thanksgiving so that our varsity baseball team will be competing on that field this spring. Very excited about that. And we have made new investments in technology mostly in the area of Prometheium boards in our classrooms and we've made investments here in the high school and we have made purchases for the elementary schools as
017well that should arrive by November. So very excited about these three goals and at the start of my presentation this evening I alluded to an action plan. So tomorrow this entire presentation will be posted on our website. So you'll be able to read this in more detail if you'd like. These three drivers however remain the same as a year ago. Mathcurricular resources, job embedded professional development, MTSS. We think these are very significant investments and priorities and they need to be multi-year priorities to really become expert in them. However, there's some new commitments here in these drivers on goal one. First, we have launched nurture the nurtured heart approach which we're very excited about. We do believe in our in Sierra Grove schools that how we talk about our students um means a lot and says
018a lot and they need to know how much we believe in their greatness and nurtured heart is a structured way to help us capture and honor their greatness and doing so. At the same time, we're measuring that outcome by improved student achievement. So, we're being very explicit here in several different metrics areas that we do want to see some bigger double-digit jumps uh in student achievement specific to some of those middle grades compared to state averages. I mentioned we are going to do some investigation around new ELA curricular resources for the upcom upcoming next school year uh 2627. And then I alluded to this last one here at the bottom left. Um I am committed to doing a deeper analysis in the winter when all the information is public. Um comparing or benchmarking our student
019outcomes with other like and similar districts and we'll be able to do that come the winter when 2025 student outcome data is public for all New Jersey districts. So I'm making a commitment to doing that. And then these other drivers, we talked about the data meetings, uh, launching a new partnership, uh, we talked about the the middle school science curriculum audit. So, that's all well underway and we're, you know, unpacking those results um, in these first weeks of the school year. Goal number two, I talked a lot about the social media campaign for back to school, the newsletters, and then specific, I do want to acknowledge the middle school and their commitment to a very explicit uh behavioral program uh called aim for excellence. And that's really their commitment to nurtured heart. uh so how
020they're giving rewards and making sure they're in a systematic way acknowledging our students for their whether it's acts of kindness um or demonstrating excellence in the classroom. So we're really focusing our energy on the positivity um to reinforce positive student outcomes. And then goal three uh we have here uh the congestion at the end schools the need to solve that by reopening LRP. So that's obviously specifically speaking to the referendum initiative. So, let me close um my uh presentation this evening by saying a few words about the referendum. At the last board meeting, I thanked and acknowledged over 100 community members who came out to my focus groups this past summer. Um and at that time, I committed to presenting a report to the community. And so, I'm glad to share that I've been able
021to present that report to our board this past week. And coming into this week, uh, after tonight's board meeting, we'll be putting that full report up on our website for the community to review. We'll have a referendum page. Um, and you'll be able to read the various comments community members have made about the referendum idea. Uh, the biggest outcome from the focus group specific to the referendum was the general strong consensus uh, of the idea of reopening LRP as a 345 school. So for those that participated in the focus groups, that was the by far the general number one consensus for what they'd like to see happen with a successful referendum. That doesn't necessarily mean that's the consensus in the community as of yet, but right now based on feedback we've gotten, that's significantly impacting
022our planning going forward and thinking about how we structure our referendum initiative in the community. And so much more to come on that in the coming months. Once we receive back our official uh approval letters about our referendum projects, the board and I and other experts in the field will sit down and make an ultimate determination about how we're going to structure our referendum and then we'll educate our community about what's in the referendum and then you'll have the opportunity to vote on that. Um, I believe that's how I'll end my presentation for this evening. And, uh, Madame President, uh, I'll turn it back over to you. Any questions or anything people may have? Okay. >> The next slide, prepare for referendum in a couple of items on that t Yes. for example, developing a
023staff chart presumably that kind of feeds into a budget for >> um conduct a traffic survey. A couple of those items I think might actually have to be done in advance of 26, you know, at least I would be interested in having answers to those questions, understanding that stuff when I'm voting in December, not potentially, you know, it goes outline. >> No, appreciate that. Um, and really, so what's meant by that timeline of March 2026 is those tasks are ideally completed by then. So, we'll be we'll be working towards that. It's it might be some hefty goals there, but I am also of the mind I imagine as I present in front of the community in the coming months, I imagine people are going to ask those questions. And so, we're it's beholden on us
024to have answers. I agree. We'll be working towards that. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> Anybody else have any other questions? >> That's fine. >> Okay. >> Thank you, Peter. >> Thank you. >> Yes, we're going to do the girls. Sorry, girls. I should have done you before the presentation. Um before we get to committees, um we have our student representatives tonight. I'm excited this year that now we're going to have three. Um I'm not sure if all three of you going to be attending each month. Are you going to rotate? >> Beautiful. So um would you like to say anything? You come to the or use this mic here. introduce yourself. >> You'll be facing the camera. >> So, we first wanted to do a short little intro. I'm Sophia Rowski. Um, I'm very
025grateful to be speaking here at the board. A little about me, I'm a senior at Cedar Grove High School. I play as captain of the varsity soccer, basketball, and track teams. And I'm president of the all school council national business honor society. in history club with involvement in other clubs as well. >> Good evening. Um I'm Maggie Tumi. I'm honored to be able to speak here tonight at the board meeting. A little bit about me. I attend school here at Cedar Grove High School as well as being a part of the girls lacrosse team. I'm a captain of the sideline cheer team and I'm also a part of the competition cheer team. I'm involved with several clubs like the pep club school president alongside with Sophia. Um, I'm also a part of the Spanish club,
026Key Club. I'm the president of the Irish Club, and I also created my own club called the Women's Empowerment Club. I love getting involved within my school and community and aiming for change. Hi, I'm Victoria Venola. I'm super excited to be here and help with the board. A little bit about me is I'm a senior here at Cedar Grove High School. Also, I'm a varsity sideline cheer captain and I've been a part of the varsity competition cheer program since freshman year. I am the vice president of all all student council and I'm also the vice president of women's empowerment club and the secretary of the senior class. Along with that, I'm involved in many other clubs inside school and help as the rec department student liaison outside of school. I plan to help as much
027as I can with both the board and recck department. You don't see. >> So, we also wanted to share our goal here attending these meetings every month. Basically, we want to attempt to rework the image of North End, Southounn Memorial Middle School, and the high school among students and parents. And we want to do that basically through highlighting all the good things happening within all of those walls. So, um, when most kids go home and their parents ask them how their school day was, um, most of their kids answers is good or fine or what did you do at school and kids say nothing and you're like, you did nothing at school. Um, so our we want to attempt to rework, sorry, I'm wronging. Um, we want to change that. We want to plan to
028get in touch with each school within the system and create powerpoints that shine light on what's going on across all grade levels through north end, south end, and the middle school. And here at Cedar Grove High School, as seniors at Cedar Grove High School, we want every student to enjoy their time regardless of age. Our plan as the student executives is to create and highlight moments that parents and students can both see from what happened in each school during the week all the way to exciting athletic news. So now if parents still somewhat don't have an answer to their kids saying fine or good, they can go check for themselves and see what's really happening. >> Any questions? >> Yeah, very excited about this. >> Thank you ladies. Oh boy. >> Okay. So, I am
029certainly looking forward to their uh monthly updates. I think that's going to be awesome. All right. So, we have some committees. Uh we'll start with the facilities and Miss Keegan. Miss Um, last week, Mr. Pock and I met with >> Dr. They can hear you, >> Mr. Bannon. Um, about a lot of the work that was done over the course of the summer to prep for the school year. The rod grant update um the rooftop units have been installed and they're currently operating for heat and air circulation at Bose School. Cooling will be enabled once the new electrical components are complete. Um, and the fences around the new transformer pads are expected to start being installed around the 23rd of this month. Unfortunately, during the rooftop installation at South End, there was an opening in
030the roof that was left uncovered um and it happened to rain that night. So, there was water damage to the gym floor. The floor buckled, but repairs were done quickly over Labor Day weekend, and the floor is looking much better. You can tell where it was patched, but it's flat. It's shiny. It's ready to go. Um, other updates, we know that the work on the new baseball field has started. Um, and multi-purpose fields that are a component of that. The old back stop and fencing are currently being removed. So, we're excited to see the progress of that over the coming months, and we're hopeful that it's going to be ready to go for the spring. They're moving pretty quickly. The old clay from the previous field is going to be reused to level out the
031rear field at South End. Um, and then we'll have some extra clay to use around the district at the other fields, too. >> If we could u a vote of uh thanks to Mr. Bannon and his crew for their efforts over the course of the summer to get the schools in the shape that they were in at the start and where they have come and the information he's been able to to get us on this. Just a little bit about, you know, a a a flood on a gym floor is is, you know, it's not like cleaning one out at home. It's a major issue and to get them in to repair it and and allow the facility to be utilized by the school by the start of school was really paramount on his part.
032But they did an excellent job and uh we have to thank Mr. Bandon for all his hard work and the effort that his team put in. >> It's obvious he cares a lot. >> He keeps things running around here. And I I did notice and um Peter maybe you can >> they started doing some work on the the storage >> at the high school. >> They did the maintenance building. >> The maintenance building. >> They're do they're doing repairs there to get it. >> Yes, I saw that today. So >> I know we had somebody from the community spoke about it one of the previous um meetings. Yeah, I can say a few words. >> It was an email by email. Somebody did bring it up. >> Yep. A little bit of background. The concern
033from the community member, perfectly appropriate, was the the ongoing decay of a building that would lead one to believe the district maybe was not making regular investments to upkeep their buildings. The little bit of the backstory there was just because the discussions of a referendum have been going over multiple years. There was a point in time until recently where the rehabilitation of that building was being contemplated as a potential referendum initiative. So once we came what's been super helpful this past year of getting more clarity on referendum once as a district we understood that this was not going to become a referendum project then Mr. Bann and his team took leadership and uh we found some resources to start investing in the repair of that building and the results look really really great and uh
034we couldn't and that was just so the community knows that was all done in-house by our very talented but very small maintenance team and John Bennett. >> Great. Sure. >> Thank you. Thank you. There were were a number of there are a number of projects that are ongoing and are scheduled to be completed throughout the year which we'll report on as we get to those times during the year. >> Great. I'm looking forward to back to school night this week. Right. So, we'll be able to see the insides of the buildings. So, looking forward to that as well. >> All right. Um, we also had a personnel meeting. >> Go ahead. you can speak to it. >> Mr. Door, myself and Dr. T met on some personnel items. The the the bulk of the meeting
035was spent on um an internal interview with our BA candidate that will be presented for approval on tonight's agenda. And uh that and any other items are on the agenda for approval this evening. >> Okay, great. Thank you. All right. Uh, Peter, do you have any other updates or did you include that in your anything else? >> No, I don't have any other updates in terms specific to a report. However, I'm glad you did mention back to school nights. So, just to also um share with the community as they go through the week. There was an intentional shift we made with the calendar this year to bring the back to school nights all into the same week, but the idea was also to make one universal early dismissal day on this Friday. Um and the
036intent behind that was for families with multiple children in different schools. Uh we thought we it would be easier on them and planning for coverage um specific to the early dismissal. So we'll welcome feedback. There we go. I'm back. Uh we'll welcome feedback at the end of the week um at the school level or sending me a note about whether or not this new approach was wellreceived. And then the next month we'll start building next year's calendar. >> Okay. >> Great. Thank you. >> Think it was an outstanding idea. Yes, Dr. T. And it brings a sense of uniformity to the district and uh some real cohesion to the dismissal day for everybody. >> Yes, agreed. Okay. So, let's move some business here under the business administrators report. Can I have a motion for G1
037through G10, please? >> Second. >> Any discussion? Roll call, please. >> Board member Grande, >> yes. >> Board member Marzula, >> yes. >> Board member Pal, >> yes. >> Board member Keegan, >> yes. >> Board President Bar, >> yes. >> Motion passes. >> Thank you. >> Under superintendent report, general administration. Can I have a motion for H1 through H6, please? >> So moved. >> Second. Any discussion? Roll call, please. >> Board member Grande, >> yes. >> Board member Marzula, >> yes. >> Board member Pal, >> yes. >> Board member Keegan, >> yes. >> Board President Zara, >> yes. >> Motion passes. >> Thank you. Under human resources, can I have a motion for I1 through I12 and one additional resolution which I will read now. Be it resolved upon the recommendation of the superintendent that
038the Employment of employee number 33232935 is terminated effective immediately with two weeks severance pay. >> Can I have a motion? >> So moved. Second. >> Any discussion? Roll call, please. >> Board member Grande. >> Yes. >> Board member Marzula. >> Yes. Abstain from I8. >> Yes. Board member Pal. >> Yes. Abstain from I8E and I9. >> Board member Keegan. >> Yes. Abstain from I8E. My name only >> President D. >> Yes. Abstain from I8. My name only. >> Thank you. And we are on uh curriculum and instruction. Can I have a motion for J1? >> So move. >> Any discussion? Second. >> Second. >> Any discussion? >> Roll call, please. >> Board member Grande. >> Yes. >> Board member Marzullo. >> Yes. Board member Pal. >> Yes. >> Board member Keegan. >> Yes. >> Board
039President D. >> Yes. >> Motion passes. >> Thank you. And under special services, a motion for K1 and K2. >> So move. >> Second. >> Any discussion? Roll call, please. >> Board member Grande. >> Yes. >> Board member Marzula? >> Yes. >> Board member Pal? >> Yes. >> Board member Keegan? >> Yes. >> Board President, >> yes. >> Motion passes. >> Thank you. This time I open this portion of the meeting for public comment on any school related items. Seeing that there is nobody here, I move to close this portion um of the meeting. Announcement of future meetings. Our next meeting will be not on here listed. It's not listed. Um I can >> October 15th. Yes. October 15th. Thank you. October 15th at 7:30 at the high school auditorium. Um motion to adjurnn. All
040in favor? I I