001e e e okay two three four yeah we got everybody or not every no well Lo is right here e okay calling the meeting to order here so in accordance with the open public meetings njsa 10 4-6 uh statute adequate notification of this meeting has been provided by advertising in The Courier News and posting notice in the Board of Education Administrative Building uh and district schools and filing notice with the burrow clerk I hereby call to order the regular public meeting Tuesday May 28th 2024 in the Lincoln Middle School cafetorium 400 Den nellan Avenue at 706 pm. this meeting is broadcast live for details check www. thelan schools.org moving to agenda item number two executive session the denalan Board of Education will now adjourn into executive session to discuss items that fall within specific exceptions
002to the open public meetings Act njsa 10 uh 4- 12b the confidential matters discussed by the board during the executive session include items related to individual privacy collecting bar collective bargaining agreements pending or anticipate litigation and Personnel any any discussion that does not need to remain confidential will be made public as soon as it is practical minutes of the executive session will not be disclosed until the need for confidentiality no longer exists all individuals who may be discussed in executive session have been been adequately notified action will take place after the conclusion of the executive session may I have a motion please to move into the executive session move to go to exact second all those in favor I opposed okay we'll see you in about uh 30 minutes e e e I've been tortur
003with that because for inance right now I'm working on my sister's baby shower I'm starting now I gotta be careful now so just in waiting for the results on the 14 the day of my son's graduation I'm like but I'm hoping you know you know what at this point I just want to know if I have something i' rather start you know taking care of myself the proper way than just being sick all the not right guys let's go I mean okay we are back hello hello thank you for your patience so uh at this time I'm going to ask for a motion uh to come back into public move to go back to public second all those in favor I I opposed okay uh at this time we're going to do item number three
004the Pledge of Allegiance the flag's over here I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all will you all please remain standing for a moment of reflection and respect for our troops serving throughout the World our troops who have served and our troops who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of our United States of America thank you going to call the roll I take the you call it I'll call it okay all right roll call uh Mr Anderson present Miss condet present Mr dougen here Dr gendrano present Mrs Howard present Mr saoi present Miss shim here Mrs Shep present Mr Walker here miss fap panti manella here we have a quorum
005okay wonderful moving on to item number five approval of minutes looking for a motion to approve uh the minutes from the May 7th uh 2024 uh board meeting motion to approve second okay open for questions and comments or comments last call okay Mr Ross can you help me with the vote Yes uh Mr Anderson yes Mrs condet yes Mr Dugen yes Dr Jano yes Mrs Howard yes Mr s yes Miss schimp yes Mrs Shep yes Mr Walker yes motion passes okay wonderful moving on to item number six I'll turn this over to Mr Ross thank you so welcome everyone it's so wonderful to see so many staff members here uh in celebration of today's amazing recognition of our educators of the year for the 2023 24 school year we are uh we're celebrating our Educators
006as we do and this is part of a Statewide program to recognize Educators in uh each school district and also Educators uh who are educational services professionals um and so it's a broad category of folks that we have in dellan uh we recognize one uh educator per each school and one ed services professional throughout the district just because of our size um and we're very very excited to have our recipients here it's lovely to see their families and the children and all of you as well um who are here to support so without further Ado I want to introduce Mr Lynch and he will begin uh by recognizing our denalan high school educator of the Year miss Tatiana [Music] [Applause] Jordan good evening everybody I would like to as uh Mr Ross just said uh
007congratulate our recipient uh Teacher of the Year miss Tatiana Jordan come on up Miss Jordan is the ESL teacher at dellan High School uh when years ago when I first got to DHS it was a split position between the high school and the middle school but the program has grown so much over the years we are happy to call her our own middle school has their own uh teacher for ESL at the Middle School uh Miss Franklin they're a great Department uh Miss malanowski down at the elementary school they do a phenomenal job working with our students as they are coming to our country and learning the language uh she has she does more than just teach the students English her room really has become another home for a lot of the students where they're
008not just there during class they are there during their lunch periods uh some of the students even that are seniors come during their lunch period and tutor her classes and help the students as well so she does a phenomenal job with that they've created an organization called Project Connect with our students uh to help students acclimate to dellan high school and an outreach program trying to get their parents involved in the community they've taken trips to different places in and around town and it really has grown to be a great program to really make the students feel included in this new community that they have come to she works tirelessly with the students and with the rest of the staff uh one of the on Thursday last week we had on Friday we had a
009professional development session and one of the questions I asked was what was your favorite part of the year and her answer was working with the third floor staff that uh the other teachers that she is on the floor with and several of them are here tonight working to here to honor her as well and it really is a testament to the hard work she puts in on a daily basis she goes out of her way doing the access testing getting it done in a short amount of time and being as little disruption as possible even though as all the teachers know that's very hard to do but she's really mastered this and done a phenomenal job I'm so happy that her husband and two boys are here as someone who has boys of my own
010I know how they can wear you out and yet on a daily basis she comes usually wide awake with a smile on her face even if some of the boys gave her a tough evening the night before so we are very proud to uh congratulate and have Miss Tatiana Jordan as our teacher of the year [Applause] okay and thank you so much to our partners at the PTO and the DEA for their gifts as well all right next from Lincoln Middle School Miss Allison Egan Mr altmire why don't you to come up all right missan come on down so Lincoln Middle School is proud to announce Mrs Allison Eagan as our teacher of the year at Lincoln middle school for 2024 for those of you who are unaware she is a special education teacher here
011in our district uh she is also taught over at Elementary for a few years before joining us at Lincoln Middle School another fun fact is the fact that she is homegrown Talent so she definitely went through the school system here uh in dellan and one of the major factors and reasons why she is receiving this award tonight is because of her fifth grade science teacher you're welcome Miss Egan all joking aside she is outstanding in the classroom with regards to her instructional practices she makes it extremely fun for the students that she works with and puts them in a position to be successful in the classroom academically she's continuously seeking professional development opportunity she's always actively engaged with regards to whatever we do uh with uh professional development or she looks on her own to
012go out to better herself and her instruction in the classroom she has a positive rapport with both students and staff here in the building along with Administration and the thing that I appreciate the most from her is her team mentality that she brings to our uh our school and what I mean by that is she is willing to jump in and contribute in any way possible to make our school better for our students when they enter the building every day and it could be me hunting her down for a coverage purposes first thing in the morning and she got in the habit of being called upon where it got to the point point where she would stop in on her own and honestly volunteer um her Services which again is very much appreciated here from
013a school stpoint another example of her team mentality is the first week in August or so last year we had an adjustment with our master schedule and she was asked to teach a cycle class for sixth grade students with about three weeks notice and again she took on that challenge and jumped in without hesitation without complaining and did a terrific job this year for our students uh at sixth grade so we are overall extremely fortunate to have her at Lincoln middle school and the district is certainly fortunate to have her working here so congratulations again Mrs Egan well [Applause] deserved e [Applause] all right next from Faber Elementary School the educator of the year is Miss Christina [Applause] scolaro Miss Garo today is a day of Celebration recognition and profound gratitude as we honor one
014of the district's extraordinary Educators this year Miss Christina scalero has been chosen by her colleagues and District families as John P faers 2024 teacher of the year please give a round of applause it is with immense joy that I stand before you to shine a spotlight on a teacher whose dedication passion and unwavering commitment to our students has left an inable mark on our school Community Miss scalero is an exceptional educator who not only embodies the essence of teaching Excellence but exemplifies a spirit of compassion and advocacy her classroom is warm and nurturing environment where her children feel valued supported and empowered to reach their full potential one of the most remarkable aspects of her core values is her unwavering advocacy for students of special needs with boundless empathy and dedication he goes above and
015beyond to ensure that every student regardless of ability or challenges receiv receives the support resources and encouragement they need to thrive and succeed her impact goes far beyond the walls of her class room she's a pillar of Hope inspiration for our entire School Community reminding us that transformative power of education and the importance of embracing diversity equity and inclusion I found out this year that Mr glair is a huge Stevie Nicks fan the lyrics from Stevie Nick song Landslide beautifully captures the essence of Miss kera's influence and dedication to the teaching I won't sing it I'll say it can I sail through the changing ocean tides can I handle the seasons of my life these lyrics speak the resilience ad adaptability and steadfastness that Miss SC embodies as she navigates the everchanging landscape of education
016and the diverse needs of her students year of to year like a ship sailing through turbulent Waters Miss scero faces challenges and uncertainties with Grace determination and unwavering commitment to the students of the D Just As Stevie Nick reflects on her ability to weather life storms Miss Scalera continuously navigates through the changing ocean tides for profession she adapts new methodologies Technologies and students needs while remaining Stead ass and her DED dedication to fostering growth learning and empowerment in her classroom ultimately these lyrics capture the enduring experience of resilience of Miss scalero who serves as a Pillar of Strength guidance inspiration in the lives of her students helping them navigate the seasons of their own lives with courage wisdom and Grace it should also be noted that miss scair is a huge animal person as evidenced
017by her love for her dogs and her numerous Foster dogs her love for Animals trickles down to the classroom each year as our students are taking lizards this year all yeah and not only that but do chicken eggs and they hatch in their classroom so a great animal lover I want to thank Miss scair for dedication devotion the students of fa School Miss scair your contributions to our school Community is immeasurable and we are profoundly grateful for all that you do on behalf of the entire school and the district I extend my heartfelt congratulations and deepest appreciation for your standing service you may continue to inspire all of us with your passion dedication an unwavering commitment to Excellence please give a round of applause to Mr Goo John P fa [Applause] congratulations conratulations we do
018want you to sing are you gonna sing this one we you g to sing it out no come on Ste music but I'm not singing that's just like the just like the Nightwing Doug right Nightwing Doug is that right all right and last but not C certainly but not least our Educational Services professional of the year is Miss Janet Casio come on up Janet I am extremely excited to celebrate this next staff member for Faber School Miss Janet Casio is the Nan school's District's Educational Service professional of the year please give her a round of applause Janet is a kind caring dedicated professional who works tirelessly helping students at favor and has done so for 24 plus years 24 that's impressive miss casio's work eth ethic is second to none she's best ascribed as someone
019who brings fire and compassion and unwavering love for her students each and every day she's a fe she is a she's Fierce and tireless advocate for students who holds them the highest expectations she stretches their belief in their abilities and gives them the resilience they need to face every challenge along their journey to Independence as a power professional educator Janet wears many hats she serves as a mentor motivator and role model for students and provides crucial support to the teachers and administrators alike whether it's lending a listening ear which I quite get often offering a word of encouragement or going above and beyond to ensure every child feels value and supported Janet optimizes the spirit of dedication and service but what truly sets Janet as apart is her ability to see the potential in every
020student and nurture their potential with care and compassion she understands that education is not just about imparting knowledge but about empowering young minds to believe in themselves and their abilities Janet creates a nurturing and inclusive environment where her every student feels safe to learn to grow and Thrive she is a role model and a friend to all you can overhear her encouraging and challenging the students to support so that they learn to reach higher and strive further she honors the idea of working hard and having each student reach their own potential over the course course of each year she develops strong relationships with her students she serves especially those ones she's assigned to she has worked with students have been in crisis and she is there day after day by their side it takes empathy
021support it takes empathy to support students in communicating their emotions patience to help them self-regulate and flexibility to morph into whatever they need at the moment these are the skills Janet possesses Janet shows up every day with enthusiasm passion especially on Wednesdays when you can be heard in the hallways asking the students guess what day it is and in unison the students replied it's hump day these are the moments that really show the connection with Janet to her students Janet has worked at favor for more than 20 years she can tell you from experience that a power professional's work is mentally emotionally and physically taxing but it's the teachers who she has worked with side by side with tell you she has made the mental emotional and physical challenges each year a bit easier because
022of who she is Janet has favor in her blood not only has she worked 25 years and done service for the Dyan community in November she raised a family Dylan and both her boys attended fa school there are two people here tonight that I'm sure looking down from heaven couldn't be prouder their son stevenh who knows the mother's love is unconditional and has no limitations and boundaries to her and her best friend Donna mupus who she continues to honor each and every day by showing commitment to her second to none work ethic Donna would have said to me tenant is about time we honor this woman for Pete's sake The Faculty Administration Community than Ellen wants to thank Miss Casio for devotion and dedication to the students in Ellen and honor her as the educational
023specialist of the Year thank you for your unbelievable love for this community J w so congratulations educators of the Year again thank you principles for your very very kind words and thank you staff members and those of you that were involved in selecting uh your colleagues as the educators of the year for 2324 um really amazing stuff and thank you all we're going to take a short break um so that we can honor the the those who have been recognized um and then we'll return probably about 20 minutes or so from now thank you yeah e e e all right so we're going to re re uh begin the meeting in about three minutes or so re the meeting you good you got did you get some cake or whatever okay good we have everybody
024we have everybody here ready to go are we I don't know and we have everybody all right then okay we have everyone a second no just weird okay good it's not not just me all right okay good okay and we are back so um we're moving on to item number seven uh president's remarks so that would be me so good evening and welcome everyone to our our board meeting so uh we have a lot of you know stuff to touch on uh tonight's I'll keep these remarks brief U first of all again I wanted to extend on behalf of the board to extend congratulations to Miss Jordan Miss Egan Miss Garo Miss Casio for being our educators of the year what an incredible achievement awesome thank you just a few other uh things to mention
025here first um I mentioned at our last board meeting uh back at the beginning of May that that pto's Tricky Tray event was uh quite successful that was held on May May 4th and was very successful I didn't share the amount because I didn't want to spoil the surprise but um you know it was already communicated out to the you know to to the uh PTO the parents uh that through the PTO but just to note that they raised uh for our kids our school schools uh$ 27,39 32 in support awesome congrats to the PTO and all those who helped to make it such a great success um and just uh like I said I'll keep it short lastly it's that time of the year when everything is happening all at once uh as the
026school year starts to starts to wind down we're about two and a half weeks away from wrapping up another great year culminating in DHS graduation uh events have already happened you know like the denelli the uh the band concert for LMS and DHS and prom and there are many events coming up soon uh this month and next that Mr Ross I think will touch on and and um Miss FIP manell will also touch on as well that are on the agenda that are also on our dellan schools.org website what I wanted to say here though is you know please take a moment to appreciate all the little moments from this year that added up to something truly significant and help us celebrate all of our students and their accomplishments and hard work well done students
027I know we're not done yet but just want to you know but uh thanks everyone for your time listening as I said I'll keep it short moving on to Mr Ross for your for the superintendent's report thank you Dr Jano so we're going to start the superintendent's Report with the student report so Sophia take it away I'm sorry if I call for like my voice cracks in the middle of this so to start about two weeks ago is the mic on okay move up closer hello so about two weeks ago the seniors had their senior breakfast thanks to the mom run Mom's running the Project Graduation and a senior cookout the cookout was very successful I put together many games for our seniors to relive their youth we brought out the parachute like the big
028uh colorful parachute it was a lot of fun we played freeze tag and duck duck goose and of course Mr shimko grilled up some delicious hot dogs and hamburgers this really made me see our grade like finally come together it's weird how it takes like the last month of school for all of us to like we get each other now uh the denelli were about two weeks ago and they were very successful the drama club showed off yet again the talent that they have in store and awarded those who have shown leadership skill confidence and more some recipients of awards were Maria Stein with the vocal Achievement Award Ashley kolinsky with the leadership award and me with the Destroyer Award presented by last year's recipient Nolan Horn of course that week also included the AP
029testing which I think everyone as grateful is over I heard some friends say that they felt confident in their scores so I'm hoping for some good ones and after that crazy week the seniors who signed up have now become began practicum and are now off in the real word world working hard before mentioning prom I thought I should mention the assembly held before we were spoken to about being aware and safe on that special night you never know who's out driving or what someone's put in your food and you should always have a plan and someone you trust to know where you are at all times but the prom was so successful and beautiful as ever it really encapsulated our theme of an enchanted Gala the service was amazing and the food was delicious and
030I'm so proud of all the work on the prom committee that the prom committee put in it really paid off and of course the prom King was Nick Chella and the queen was Justine Halco tomorrow night is the spring choir concert the choir and the magicals have been working hard all year for this night and they cannot wait to show what's in store along with the concert is the art show students artwork from throughout the entire school year will be on display in the lunchroom softball has come to a close with a record of 9 to2 the girls fought all season but Rose Chella just being a Freshman is number three on the Central Jersey group one list along with many other achievements throughout the season baseball season closed with a record of 11 to4
031but they won the silver division boys tennis record was 12 to6 that's a crazy season this week is possibly the last week of track season I believe Friday and Saturday they have their sectionals on June 4th is a senior versus faculty basketball game including Mr Alm Mr Lynch and Mr Tobin Miss Johnson and many more of our beloved teachers head-to-head with seniors D Hopper Jake Mana Aiden sangr and much more you don't want to miss out on June 5th is the Powderpuff our Juniors and seniors will be competing against each other will the seniors be the champions again or with the Juniors take the win with the end of the year and graduation coming soon graduates have committed to their colleges and to name a few Alyssa Vargas is going to Stockton University and Nia
032Henry will be attending Syracuse Emily Chi at PACE Maria wall at Yukon and I will be attending tc& J after graduation the graduates will of course be attending Project Graduation a night of fun activities like swimming a hypnotist basketball and much more held at the YMCA in Edison this event is held till 3:00 a.m. to avoid students from drinking or doing various dangerous activities while celebrating after graduation thank you and congratulations on TCNJ right all right thank you Sophia so I'm going to move over to the podium and um Ryan if you wouldn't mind giving me a hand thank you give awesome yeah good good good thanks Ryan um all right so uh it's so nice to see everybody here still this is wonderful um so the uh this presentation is the state of the
033school's address this is something that uh I developed with um the superintendent that I worked with about four or five years ago and when I was in Madison really what the sort of intent of the um the presentation was was to really shine a light on the facts about the district um what people uh may or may not know about certain things and really just try to lay be all of the things that are true about um where we are where our students are and where we need to be going um when I came into the district one of the surprising things uh that I heard immediately was there was very little understanding for example of the size of the Hispanic community in the schools right we had I think uh two sections of ESL
034at the middle school we had classes of 34 um and within probably two months or so we had advertised for an ESL position and then we had brought in an ESL teacher um which allowed uh Miss Franklin to be full-time at the middle school right these are the kinds of things that a presentation like this can can show but it also just gives a general overview of a really broad set of metrics and different information I'm going to War you this is extraordinarily long uh and I'm not being fous it really is extremely long um there are 73 slides I'm not going to go in detail through all 73 of them but I will spend a little bit of time you know on sort of broad Strokes the the presentation is available online so I
035see this sort of um scared look on some of your faces if you want to spend 10 minutes here and then you know look at the presentation and ask me questions about it later that's perfectly okay I get it um but I will try to do this at at a pace that makes some sense so that everybody who's here really can get a meaningful kind of understanding of this so the first thing to do is just you know thank th those who have been involved in this um in our district um there are a couple of folks who have in their signature line this quote from heish Brewer um and it says something like uh school is not school without students right so first and foremost our students who really are kind of like this
036is the entire reason that any of us are here um thank you to them our faculty and staff many of you uh who have been here for many years in the district um for for all the work that you do our administrative team the families that get their kids up every morning and get them to school and help them with their homework and help them prepare for exams and those sorts of things um the board of ed for your tireless volunteerism um you know we spend a lot of time uh talking with the board um and these folks are up here just as volunteers no compensation just you know here to uh to help the community and then we have a wide range of Community Partners the PTO the denell and Public Library uh Miss
037Moore who's right who's here who has who comes to every board meeting just incredibly passionate and diligent and just devoted to the district um we thank you for that yeah we can give her a round of applause she hates being in the Limelight and yet she does such amazing things that she's always in the Limelight so thank you um uh Miss Lopez VZ Terry Albertson who many of you know is super involved in programming as well as being the burough council president now uh the other burough leadership folks folks from the rotary American Legion um and others who Provide support so this really is a team effort so mission statement is here I'm not going to read through it I just sort of took it apart in a way right the mission statement talks about
038essential skills right which is the academic piece and a safe caring and stimulating learning environment right which is really what we call what I call goal two so we got the goal one and the goal two kind of built into the mission statement here are district goals right these are widely available these are you know as part of the budget hearing part of everything that we do we Center the district goals goal one academic success and data use goal two student wellness and school climate goal three construction progress and fiscal health so if you want to leave after this slide here's the takeaway right here are some key takeaways multi-tiered systems of support right this is something that we've been talking about since I arrived in the district we have an incredibly diverse District right
039one of the most div diverse districts in Middle sex County you know certainly across the state what that means is that we have to differentiate the things that we we do the academic supports theal supports we have to build structures and processes that can help different types of students we are not homogeneous by any means we're about 20% multilingual Learners right and we have to make sure that we are helping and supporting differentiated populations many of you know that a lot of our additions this year uh coming up are related to special education and counseling and ESL and that's because we need more supports in those areas right number two surveys and demographics we gave surveys out to all of our stakeholders and what we found was that generally the lived experience of dellan students
040and families is very positive which I think really uh is the is it it reflects the things that you all feel as you walk through the hallways kids are really nice right right kids are are thoughtful for the most part they say hello in the hallway they want to do well by you parents are supportive they are gra grateful for the work that teachers do and that really came through in the demographic surveys um so we have a really strong Foundation to work from number three our academic outputs are very similar to those with a similar uh demographic profile right so when you look at our who are our students in dellan um you know the districts that look like us in terms of who we have here it's very similar in terms of our
041outputs um unfortunately when you take those outputs and you put them into ranking systems or rating systems or real estate systems it doesn't translate to something positive so we have to really try to do our best to outperform uh those those groups in our cohort so here's a District overview right this is extremely small because of the way that Google Slides uh did this but we have uh a large Hispanic population a moderately sized white population um and then we have another sort of breakdown of other racial and ethnic groups um economics we are just about 50% economically disadvantaged that means that families uh and this is again self-reported which is always an Under reporting it means that half of the students that are in denalan public schools come from families that uh make that
042whose income is below a certain uh threshold right so that means that that there's all sorts of different issues that those kids come to school with uh as opposed to their their peers special education uh we are about 14 a half% which is pretty average for uh a size a district of our size very split male and female and home language we have most of our students speak English but there is a significant portion of of students who speak Spanish as their home language we have 1370 students and the district Factor group this is a really important factor uh metric this is a Statewide metric that examines the percentage of economic disadvantage students in your District so we'll talk about I'll show you some slides later on but when you think about the wealthiest place
043you know right Montgomery chadam Milbourne uh those places are called J districts right they're all the way on one side of this of the spectrum right the poorest places that you know right uh Newark Camden Jersey City those are called those would be a districts right and then there's a spectrum of wealth that goes from a to J where J is wealthier so we're de uh here in dellan this is the fourth least affluent of the eight categories so here's our enrollment and as you know enrollment has been increasing right there's a demographic breakdown on the right there's a key also again I'm not going to try to go through all of this in in you know super super fine detail if you notice the percentage of economic disadvantage which is the the third row
044in the group you can see what happens in 21 uh 2021 2122 and then 22 23 um there's a reason for this and this is actually very similar uh to to the way that many districts have reported um if you remember for the last two years um students could have free lunch and breakfast without reporting their income right and so families didn't recognize that there are still other benefits to reporting uh their income and so they just didn't report because their kids were being you know fed meals which is understandable this year we did a really big push to try to get amilies to report we know that if 51% of our families are reporting it's probably 65% of our families in the community that are actually economically disadvantaged but because it's self-reporting we're just
045never going to get to that amount if you look at our Hispanic population uh at Faber here we've we've seen an increase of about 5% uh over the last couple of years and certainly those of you at fa recognize that to be true our overall enrollment at Lincoln middle school is very similar and you can see the similar Trends increase in econom disadvantage increase in the Hispanic population and at Den high school as well and what you notice about all of these graphs is that we're increasing right and if you read through or looked at the enrollment report the demographic report you saw some some pretty interesting Trends which I'll talk about as well um so we did a demographic study because we were trying to figure out really what what we should be looking
046at for 5 years from now and there were two sets of projections done by by the demographer and they they use something called the cohort replacement model so you look at the current year kindergarten students and you look at the number of births six years uh six years later and you see about what the comparison is and what we recognize what what the demographic study showed us that uh we have a significant increase in students uh anticipated and what that means is because we don't have more space anticipated over the next 5 years we have what are called unhoused students meaning we have too many students by the facility standards of the Department of Ed to actually fit them into our building So currently Faber is showing a shortage of seating of 58 students which
047is actually kind of weird because if you're in Faber you know that there aren't it's not brimming with students right we have some rooms that are free during the day and all sorts of things LMS is slightly overc capacity which is again kind of nuts because if you're in LMS you know that it's actually it feels very overc capacity right and the high school actually has additional seating which again doesn't feel quite right but based on the amount of square footage that there is in the building this is what's calculated by 2829 Faber is looking at seeing a a shortage of space that's twice as much as it is right now and the high school is going to have a significant amount of unhoused students so these are the projections four year and five-year projection
048are just how many years they took for the average and so there's slight variation but what you can see is that by 2829 we're looking at either 1473 or 1440 somewhere in that range call it 1450 that's 100 more students or 80 more students than we have right now it also doesn't take into account preschool because with our preschool uh education Aid we're looking at you know another 100 preschool students right so this is a really significant issue for us and we've talked about this in the budget presentation but it's important here chronic absenteeism is a really big isue plaguing you know State uh districts all across the country this is our information compared to the state we're actually doing a little bit better than the state which is nice you can see by population
049where we have a little bit more or a little bit less chronic absenteeism um but we're pretty similar to the state and what's interesting about chronic absenteeism is that preschool students actually count um and if you have had young kids or if you have young kids you know that preschool students are sick all the time um and they stay home a lot because sort of a different tolerance for you know bringing them to school so very high levels of absenteeism for preschool students a little bit high at Kinder garden and then the rest of the grades um you can see sort of the the the district chain Trends against the state we're doing a little bit better than the state but there's always room for improvement recent Aid and Grant Awards so preschool expansion Aid
050last uh this current school year provided us with just under half a million dollars in additional Aid this is not a grant we don't have to apply for this every year this is is now state aid so every year from now on as long as the the the state has money we will receive funding without having to apply for additional preschool Aid next uh next school year our Aid increases to $1.5 million and it will only get higher as we uh create additional uh seats in either in the district if we can add space or in private providers so we're looking at potentially having $3 million or so in additional state aid this is only usable in preschool but it covers preschool teacher salaries uh preschool par professionals it covers um all all of the
051materials the preschool instructional coach the um the social worker that's there as part of that program so it's a really a Monumental and amazing uh objective which is basically Universal preschool for all three and four year olds in Den Allan so if we can achieve that that would be remarkable we've also been very active in trying to get funding through competitive grants and so this is a list of the competitive grants uh and the funding that we've received just in the last 12 months um and the the the first two bullets were actually just this month so in the last two weeks three weeks or so we heard about both of those grants which is wonderful uh professional development partnership Awards we've also been interested in professional learning Partnerships so these are three of the
052Partnerships that we've applied for and been welcomed to um all of which have have really paid off for the folks that have participated at um so this is our sort of effort to try to you know create that Innovation work with Partners get additional funding take some of the burden off of taxpayers Etc all right academics and ass assessment so this is obviously a big part of what we do right we look at outputs uh and you know uh when you think about if you're a parent when you were thinking about buying a house you probably looked at school district rankings or you looked at uh you know as part of a website for a house you said oh that's school is a three out of 10 I never want to send my kid to
053a place like that right this it's totally like it's understandable that folks view uh these systems that way that ranking right which we'll talk more about uh later on in this in this presentation is based largely on academics and assessment as well as some other factors so uh what we have here is basically New Jersey school report uh card which is the school performance report uh puts this out each year there's a data lag so we you know we just saw the 223 data um and you know our staff all of you you've been working with data getting more familiar with data having that comfort of what to do with the data and that's obviously part of our our mission moving forward so I'm going to talk about the assessments that are listed there two
054State tests the the student learning uh assessment the GPA which is a graduation proficiency assessment I ready um AP sat and then some other uh information as well so the njsla is the um the annual standardized test this is required by the federal government um it's now also a part of the state government so we have to test students in grades 3 through 11 and we test them in ela math and science is relatively new um and it's all based on the standards um our outcomes from Spring 2023 are basically in line with districts that look like us so when you think about districts that have the same number of economic disadvantage kids percentage wise our results are similar and actually we we sort of do better in some of those cases um but we
055also know that there's more work for us to do those of you have that have been involved in standards alignment and curriculum rewrites and things like that know that we still have a lot of room to improve which bodess really well for us uh moving forward um so our profession our proficiency rates for federal accountability and this is in the report card we had 37.1% of students proficient overall in ela and we had 25.8% of students proficient overall for math so you know again this is a starting point right we are looking at ways to support staff uh in their understanding of this and you know rebuild the curriculum and the use of data so that we can take these numbers and really um improve them significantly the information below is participation rate which is
056very high which is great um and then the annual Target and then whether we met or did not meet the target so that's here by cohort level right this is if you take third grade students from uh last year or two years ago and then they become fourth grade students the next year how do those kids compare against each other right so that that compares this so the current third grade the sorry the third grade from two years ago right current fifth graders they took the fourth grade assessment last year and you can see that they did a little bit better um move when they moved from third to fourth grade and you can see that these results are there's some that are better some that are worse um the big jump down from Seventh
057to eth grade um you know if you know if you understand kind of the curriculum uh progression here for math uh in seventh grade some students are are skimmed off the top to take Algebra 1 um and then you have the remainder of students who take algebra uh eighth grade math and so that's a very common drop where you have you know every kid in seventh grade but then they split from Algebra 1 uh and and math 8 and so we what we want to do is we want to again we'll look at this year's assessment results and see if we were able to make progress on these cohorts as they move through through the years in ela there's a it's pretty flat except you can see again from third grade to fourth grade there's
058a big jump and often districts see this because third grade is the first year that kids are tested right so if they're not familiar with the test they don't know what it looks like they've never taken it they've never sat for an assessment that long it seems stressful their teachers are stressed out their parents are stressed about it they they get that stress right so our goal with I ready and some of the other things is to get them a little bit more comfortable in first and second grade with that type of assessment so that by third grade they're ready and their results can can really reflect their learning this is the growth part of things so we did have pretty decent growth right 50% is median growth um 50 percentile so you can see
059that districtwide Ela growth was 41 so we we didn't quite hit uh Statewide median but in math we did so we're seeing a little bit of progress there so again some hopes uh for you know for an improved future and you can see the subgroup information here which I won't I won't belabor all right these are the charts that I think are probably the most important um when we think about assessment now it's blurry so it's it's hard to kind of see what this is but if you look at the presentation on your phone or on your computer it's very clear and I'll sort of walk you through this on the x-axis on the bottom right so from left to right it is the percentage of students in the district that are economically disadvantaged so
060to the left of the graph there are zero students who are economically disadvantaged which means it's a wealthy district and to the right of the graph it is the districts that have a very very high percentage of economically disadvantaged students now anybody who knows anything about data analysis can look at this graph and make a very obvious conclusion which is that performance on standardized testing is linked almost entirely to demographics right it couldn't be more obvious in a graph like this uh and actually all of the graphs that'll show you that that that is true so the top left graph uh top left data point is Bernards and then it's Montgomery and then it's mouen and then it's Monroe South Brunswick Bridgewater Ron Etc okay and then to the right it's New Brunswick Perth Amo
061planfield boundbrook North North planfield Etc when you think about dellan you might not know that dellan has about the same amount of economically disadvantaged students as North Brunswick or as South Amboy or as South River or Manville or Union right and these are all of the districts in Middle sex County and most in Union and Somerset K12 districts only right so the point here is to Center the idea it's not that we're doing badly it's that for the students that we have we're doing exactly as we would expect to be doing right and when you look at a graph like this it's very clear that places that are you know much wealthier generally are going to do much better on the standardized assessments now that doesn't mean that we don't keep trying it doesn't mean
062that we don't put systems in but it is to say that we're with our cohort at this point and this is Ela for the njsla here's meth I mean first of all the ELA uh scale goes up to 90% so you can see how much better kids generally do in ela as compared to math but look at how steep that curve is for math right burner Montgomery matachin Monroe again these are the wealthiest districts in the areas and then we have dellan and then we have to the right of us and in fact this is this is perfect what I that sort of axis there where dellan is is to just show you you know to the right we have lower performing to the left we have higher performing right so this is very much
063uh sort of expected based on demographics our science passing rates have been very mixed um and you know again this is this is very new testing we have a lot of work to do still with all of our subject areas science is certainly included in that science teachers have been very actively engaged in uh in in in changing instruction to become more phenomenon based and you know as we learn through the standards we'll see an increase as well but here's our our results and the state results for the last two years and that's the njsla okay the NJ GPA is a graduation assessment this is 11th grade um this is 11th grade uh student this is the graduation Readiness assessment and basically the results are you are graduation ready or you're not graduation ready so
064in DHS from Spring 2023 so last year over 80% of students Dem demonstrated graduation Readiness in ela which is wonderful only about 60% demonstrated Readiness in math so again we performed much better in ela against math but when we look at uh the results across the the county right this is the math result results now look at how high denalan is right so in the 11th grade results for last year dellan students actually outperformed students in Woodbridge and middle sex and the state and sville and piscatway South planfield Oldbridge right so students did very well in math in 11th grade last year which is wonderful um and you can see sort of the trend line again in ela all students across the this cohort and across the state did significantly better in ela than math
065so when we we look at our scores we shouldn't lament that our kids did better in ela than math it's just what happened across the state and so again dellan is is in good is in good company in terms of how it did in terms of the 11th grade scores all right I ready is a different type of assessment this is a nationally normed assessment this is a diagnostic and basically it determines sort of tiered Readiness so are students on grade level are they above grade level or are they below grade level and so there are there are these uh green yellow and red sort of uh metrics that are shown in here results from 23 24 basically showed that students did better between the first and the second assessment but that we all need
066to do a lot better work in terms of the administrative team to get uh this this sort of program run all the way through so we have to make sure that students understand the assessment and its purpose that staff members understand the assessment and its purpose and we don't have results from Spring 2024 but this is what we'll be looking at so with I ready uh this is the first year that we've given it so again this is totally brand new to kids and what you can see I circled two points of interest right from the the uh the the second line of of results it says fall it's actually weird the way that it does it it's diagnostic to and then fall you can see that the number of students that were one or
067two gr uh grade levels below where they were supposed to be dropped from 35% to about 20% right so very very significant Improvement at middle school you can see that that Trend didn't quite work the same way um on the bottom level but on the top level students went from 25% to 31% of AD grade level or above grade level so a significant little jump there out of the students that were tested um this is the grade level piece and really the fourth and and uh fifth grade teachers uh must have really gotten something good going with their kids because there those students especially showed a lot of uh progress uh from the fall to uh the second Diagnostic and then at the middle school the seventh grade uh teachers got good results uh out
068of the students they showed they were able to demonstrate more proficiency same thing in math very similar from about 35% to about 20% of one or two grade levels below um the grade level average and again 15 to about 177% so slight increase for the middle school kids and then by grade level uh first grade students did much better on the second diagnostic than they did at the first uh beginning of the year and then uh fourth and fifth grade again um those students showed really significant growth there which is wonderful and then seventh grade again in terms of math so I'll take a break for a minute thank you for staying this long have a good night good to see you all right advanced placement testing this is a uh Statewide uh national uh
069sorry International assessment of Readiness based on AP curriculum advanced placement curriculum this is internationally benchmarked scores range from one to five high school has nine courses which is a very good number for a a school of 400 kids um we have extremely high participation rate uh as compared to the state which is wonderful um the number of AP students increased a lot uh last year and stayed high again this year um and and we tend to have kids who are enrolled take the assessments which is great our 5-year score average is very mixed um so that means more more work needs to be done generally uh but this is the participation in Spring 2023 right so you can see the number of kids that took each of the courses that we offer right we're working
070on Pathways to try to get more kids to take these courses because we know that they're they're good college preparation level courses um and then this is the participation against the state by demographics and so you can see the blue is the district so when you look at the percentage of of students who are Hispanic or the percentage of students who are black or African-American as compared to the state average it's very high which is great right that means that we're reaching a very broad group of students when we're trying to uh allow people and uh the Open Enrollment into AP courses there's good support for those kids taking those classes so the percentage of students who score three or above which is considered passing you can see that average it's sort of up and
071down over the over the course of the years these are different students so it's hard to compare from one year to the next because it's just different groups of students taking these assessments um and then you can see the information down below we did have uh even more AP students than last year this year we had 80 uh up from 77 and then up from you know 50s and 60s prior to that so we're looking forward to their exam scores those will come out at the beginning of July so good good work here on the AP um overall sat is another important feature of most of these systems of of how schools get ranked and rated um and here's our our our averages this year was the first year where uh we actually uh tested
072all ninth and 10th grade students with the PSAT and that's going to be just something that I will will always have in place so next year our nth and 10th grade students will all take the PSAT again and and again most of this is just about getting kids acclimated to taking some assessment I don't know if you remember taking the SAT but the first time you took it it was like what is this right but as you take it more and more you understand how the test operates you become familiar with it and then you can perform better you can actually show the test you know the demonstrate sort of what you understand so we have our scores here as compared to the state we are below the state uh in our in our averages
073in reading and in math um and the percentage of students who met the Benchmark um you know sort of vary based on the content area we have a lot of work to do in math uh generally and so we can see that reflected in in many of these assessments sort of over and over again um and again that's just systematizing things we've got great staff members we've got really eager folks who want to learn and who are interested um we just have to put in that that program and you know give give the right professional development and support for it so here's SAT Math and by that same metric you can see the very very strong trend line of wealth to uh scores and then here's sat reading and writing and it's very much the
074same so you know these are all the same schools that are being compared uh in all of these types of graphs so you can really get a good sense of of kind of where denell and lines up all right graduation rates we did have a nice increase in graduation rate uh this past year and we're hoping to keep that that high uh this year moving forward so we're we're really the goal is to be above 90% as you know uh because these cohorts are so small if you have two students that don't graduate in a class of you know 100 or whatever it is right the percentages are are very small right uh so districts that have a lot of students can uh have have sort of different leverage with that our graduation rates have
075been relatively high as compared to the state they're they're right about at the state average and obviously we can continue to to work on keeping kids in the district these are the colleges college acceptances that that uh we've been made aware of at this point so we have a lot of students going to New Jersey schools which is exactly what we would expect um and really I think every New Jersey school that I could think of was on this list um some of the County Schools U Middle sex college and then you know TCNJ um as Sophia mentioned uh a lot of students going to ruter and then Drew fdu Etc um and then really a very broad range of of schools Beyond New Jersey so as far west as California or Colorado School of
076Mines as far south as University of Alabama um you know UNLV and then you know schools like Mount Holio which are you know smaller liberal arts colleges that are very selective many of the Sunni schools Penn State um you know Williams College again extremely selective liberal arts school so we have a really broad range of outcomes for students which is really nice all right this isig big big part number three 2024 climate surveys okay uh just brief overview this was a survey that was sent in March to families staff members and students there were aligned questions based on certain content areas so that we could compare perceptions how do students feel about this how do staff members feel about this and how do families feel about this right and we worked on these questions with
077Urban assembly um and they did some of the data analysis which we'll talk about we had good responses we had uh a,2 2 students respond which was great uh we had 104 staff members respond which is 60% or so of our staff and we had 156 families respond which is pretty average for uh for for family member responses for a survey like this we also disaggregated all the student response data so that we could see how you know kids who are white or kids who are black or kids who are Hispanic how they responded to the questions to see if there's any difference in those perceptions so the climate survey family responses and student responses the next two slides are from a zero to one scale uh the third slide's from a one to three
078scale which is just confusing I understand but I couldn't figure out how to do the other one the other way so uh we have our participation here basically higher is better and this is colorcoded so the darker is better um and you can see basically family responses were generally positive across the board um you know they were probably highest AC across the board at denalan high school based on the uh family responses and um you know the weighted average across the board was very good families of Lincoln Middle School parents um you know responded positively just not as positively as the Faber student fa parents or the the high school parents right and this is just information for us to learn about more now these are components right so these are these are um each
079one of these categories is actually like eight questions right and we have the question average but presenting individual question responses is just that's that's too much so the category responses I think are are telling enough they're helpful enough to give a sense and then the admin team and actually the climate teams have reviewed the individual data um to look at some of the responses about you know what what families are thinking the student responses are similar right uh the Faber students did not uh answer questions about their peers middle school and high school kids did you can see that the in this survey the Faber students tended to uh respond most positively about their experience in school which is very much what you would expect from elementary kids um Middle School uh students responded uh
080well to certain things and okay to other things and similar with the high school right so there's definitely uh perceptual things that we need to kind of understand um and again this doesn't mean that there are there are problems in one way or another this is is about perception and so if someone perceives that there's something right then that's something that we have to counter with fact facts and information it doesn't mean that the thing exists so this is the student responses and then here's the demographic breakdown and again this is a different scale this is from 1 to three higher is better so you can see that uh when kids are talking about um school when they're talking about safety there are generally positive results across the board and if you look across the
081categor and I put the number of students there it's still a small number but you can see the results there's not a lot of variation between the demographic groups which means that in general right when when our staff interact with students um you know students are feeling across the board you know supported in the same type of way which is great right some districts have huge differentiation between students of maybe white and Asian students and Black and Hispanic students right we don't have that in denalan which is again it's wonderful because again it's just about the foundation that we have to build on so my takeaways from this really uh the safety piece was overwhelmingly just the the number one uh rated you know piece of the experience um all stakeholder groups indicated uh safety
082was was something that they believed was definitely something that the district was doing well there was a lot of positivity about the way that students and staff members talked about respect um and feeling welcomed in the communities uh families rather and then students in in different demographic groups seem to be experiencing The District in generally similar ways areas for growth we do have perceptual gaps so there are some uh questions and some sub questions where uh maybe parents responded differently than staff members than differently than students so we have to address those to see where the perceptual issue is um students and parents indicated a desire to be more involved in the educational process of the schools which is a good thing I think um it means that folks are invested it means they're interested
083means they want to learn more they want to participate and then student comments indicated a desire for instruction and class assignments to be more engaging and relevant which I would imagine if you asked students in most places they would say they wanted their instruction and class assignments to be more engaging and relevant but again if it's something that students are feeling then it's something we need to be mindful of so how are we instructing are there things that we can be doing differently um you know what are what are some of the reasons that students might feel that way so those are the surveys all right lastly I'm going to just blow through this the rankings and rating system stuff um there's a ton of information here I've already given you a ton of information
084there's uh there's rating systems which are the doe and Great Schools listed here and there's ranking systems which are those three listed there there's an article um that was uh published in school leader magazine um that I authored about this topic this was the um the cover article of the spring 2024 issue it's linked there there's a ton of information on it not related to dellan but just generally so you can talk you know if you're interested in learning more that's there for your reference as well and basically I want to talk about this slide and then just show you some things without talking too much detail right these systems are developed by thirdparty groups to serve their own interests right which often means uh making a profit or selling a service right so there's
085there's some incentive that they have which is different than the incentive that we have as school leaders or as Educators or or School administrators every single one of these systems is different which means that it's really hard to compare one to the other and there's very little consistency between one one and the next so it's hard to know if you were someone who wanted to chase metrics it's hard to know which metrics to chase right because they're all different in some way everything is about creating winners and losers it's everything is about rank order or scoring and so there will always be winners and losers right and so you know that's just built into the system um we know that this influences people who buy homes we know that it influences businesses when they think
086about going into communities so these are real important um factors um and then many of the data pieces that are used are subject to a time lag which could be as much as four years um some places care about these a lot right I was in Madison for five years and they were obsessed with the ratings and they said why why are you you know why are we were 31 in this last year and now we're 33 how could we have dropped so far like what a what a shame right what what are you doing it's educational malpractice and we're like well I mean you know the SAT score average dropped two points you know and in wherever Scotch PLS Fanwood it raised two points right so but people care about this in in real
087ways right um in some places so it's important to understand what these what these are about just because people look at them so we we do a ton of reporting um if you ever see Dave petsinger uh and he's just like huddled in front of his computer staring at stuff it's probably because he's doing an NJ smart report we have five NJ smart reports we have civil rights data collection which is federal the Assa we have all these other reports and there's a lot of public information that basically calls all of this together and makes it available so if you're you know doing a a doctoral thesis or Master's thesis about education you can find all this information it's all public um so we report out all of this stuff and they use these so
088demographics graduation rate you know budget information assessment data Etc they use a lot of it right in different ways which again makes it challenging but there's a ton that's out there all right so NJ dooe is a rating scale from one to 100 um this is uh high school ratings and Elementary ratings are different there's different categories our summative scores for the last three years are shown sh here and what you can see here is that LMS has dropped precipitously um in the summit of school school scores and that's that's reason for concern in some sort of way right we've got to understand how we could have dropped this this much in such a short time right I don't know exactly why it is which particular metric it might be but it's of concern um
089and you can see that the high school and Faber both bounced way back from last year um or from two ago in last year's ratings and we don't know we won't know what next year's what the current year ratings are until in January or February or something like that and by that time it's really hard to make any decisions about it but we will investigate this greatschools.org you may have seen this is another one they use percentile Rank and so it's a it's a rank order uh that gets turned into a rating right so here's the stuff that they use it's all very detailed and then here are our sces so often when you go on a real estate site and you look up a house in dellan and you're like what it's a beautiful
090house I'd really love to live there you know I wonder what the schools are like and you're like oh my God the high school is a three out of 10 it must be terrible there must be violence there must be no learning going on right and it's crazy because having just seen the climate survey results you recognize that the experience of people in the school is totally different than what's shown through these metrics right and that's the part that is so concerning about these types of things it's also one of the things that we have to just be aware of because it's just out there and so you know yes like this is not great this is this seems embarrassing but it is what it is it's just the facts it's just what's there um
091and so there's a lot of things that we have to be aware of that uh that go into this and if we can move the needle on a lot of the the really important things these will just improve just by the nature of things right but again this is what there is at at this point US News you all know um here's their system for k12 and here are the rankings so you saw you know Den Allen High School is a three out of 10 meanwhile in the US News ranking DHS earns a national ranking in the top 40% of of the country totally different right if you're a three out of 10 that means your your your school is terrible or whatever but then you look at this metrics this set set of metrics
092and it's completely different when you look at the order of schools in middlex county and these are high schools only right look at the high schools that dellan is ranked higher than and by how much so yeah JP Stevens maten South Brunswick uh Monroe right those are wealthy districts uh Edison Highland Park you know a couple of those other districts have a little bit more wealth but then if you look at what's below dellan right Oldbridge North Brunswick you know there are a lot of districts again when you compare the two the two rating systems or two any two uh with each other you don't get a lot of consistency right so here's the scorecard and here's the things that they measure how many students took at least one AP exam how many passed at
093least one math reading science proficiency and graduation rate so we know that they care a lot about AP exams which is good because we do well in APS right so again you know this is just trying to give you a flavor of the information that's there Niche is another one very much tied to real estate here are our ratings you know according to Niche our teachers are a C+ right our clubs and activities are a c minus and our sports are a c minus right so again what does this mean what does it actually mean it means very little but it also means that this is something that people are looking at this is something that people are seeing and they're saying oh that's something about dellan they're making some sort of judgment about it
094schooldigger.com is is very much just tied to njsla um and it's just a composite of test scores so School Digger is actually one that is just very simple it just looks at test scores and so it doesn't take into account anything else for Better or For Worse and you can see the five-year comparison um we have you know comparatively uh the test scores in uh Faber make middle school and high school on the njsla have gone down and so since 2018 you can see that overall as compared to all the districts in the state um you know our scores are are suffering a little bit the difference between that you know for let's say Faber is about 44% down to about 30% right so the percentile rank has gone down 14 percentile points which is
095which is significant right so this is an area where we know that by improving you know on our state assessments right we we'll see an improvement here okay so a lot of information um here are the three ke key takeaways I think very much echoed in sort of the way that I've been speaking about this we're a very diverse district and that means that we need a diversity of solutions that have to be very structured and mapped out um and well articulated and well supported both in academic success in terms of PLC work intered system of supports intervention ESL support Etc special education and also on theal side so that perceptions that students feel good about coming to school that they attend school that we have good programs in place to um stop students from
096dropping out and give them the right kind of support uh again the surveys and demographics the lived experience of denalan students and families is good right and that's something that we should capitalize on and then lastly academic outputs as compared to all of that are different and so we do have to be aware of academic outputs right um leveraging the kind of climate that that has been able to be built in the schools um into academic successes this is a slide that's taken directly from the budget presentation so this is all the staff that we're adding this year um we have goal one um information here goal two information goal three and some capital projects uh if you haven't seen this slide if you didn't look at the budget presentation earlier it's there um really
097we're looking at new standards increasing information increasing support for special education instructional coaching uh ESL really trying to support our kids um in a wide variety of areas and support all of you as teachers um in being able to meet the needs of our students um School climate is security seal our in-house support framework for school-based counseling that's going to take over from Thrive goal three we have a lot of facilities pieces that we're working on and then we have a lot of capital projects that we're doing some room Replacements Renovations and then we're looking to also make do some expansion at paper that might alleviate some of the space and then my next steps our next steps really just close this year strong right it has been a uh hard year I would say
098just in terms of all of the initiatives and ideas and programs and I recognize that so we're going to close the year strong um we're going to work to hire excellent new staff members who will join the team and support the district Mission we have curriculum revisions and rewrites in a wide range of content areas and I I'm very thankful to to those of you that were doing that work especially on Friday um with your with your teams and your plc's we're onboarding a new data analytics platform which only the administrators will be using probably for about the first year so that we can better understand that really local data um we have our in in District Wellness counseling model which I mentioned which replaces Thrive we have our uh next steps with regard to
099school climate coaching which is really Urban assembly and sort of their function for next year um and then from my perspective uh really aligning administrator goals and PD plans with our key priorities because what what what I've noticed is I have a a sense of how things should be working and I haven't necessarily been able to articulate that as well as I need to to my admin team and then how that gets translated down to staff and that's something that I need to learn better as a superintendent you know in service of all of you so that's going to be a big thing for next year um and you know we'll we'll definitely have improvements there and then basically just prepare for an amazing year next next year so that's it so thank [Applause] you
100I'm happy to take any questions or comments from the board members first yeah your presentation you were talking about uh one of the slides was about students going off to secondary um uh levels what about other other changes in education so like apprenticeships or trade schools and even enlisting in the military yeah so we have that data uh right now we have two students who have signed on for a military service or through a military uh school um we had of the 100 or thereabouts graduates there were 34 students that were listed as undecided which meant which either means that they actually haven't decided or they hav shared their decision with uh through navian and their school counselor so we're definitely interested in making sure that students get the best outcome for them um and
101you know I know Mr best and Miss markart have been supporting students in that way so that's information that I think you know next year we'll definitely have a little bit cleaner um in terms of the outcomes but we do have some students who uh not listed in that slide but who are who have selected to go into the world of work um we have some military and then we have that that Core group of undecided that we have to sort of learn more about all right I have another question yeah please uh as the environment of Education changes Post Elementary and and in high school uh are we looking to prepare and or gather data on those career paths that don't necessarily involve an a college education but do require high levels of certification
102and or Technical Training yeah so again that there's a there's a report from Naviance and Naviance is the counseling software that's used in most districts in New Jersey um it's fine uh it does what it what it needs to do but students self-report into the program the their their uh objectives post-graduation so we do have some students who who are seeking technical careers um through like a DeVry or something like that those options are we're certainly not limiting that uh by any means and in a population of a town with you know 50% economic disadvantaged where not every parent is college educated professional White Collar Etc there's those those careers options are are are certainly very good ones often um and we know from research that's been recently published that the return on investment of
103technical educations is actually very high as compared to the the ROI on certain Humanities Fields even or certain private colleges or things like that so we're we we track all that information in Naviance and the sort of the goal will be to systematize is how we do that for kids that leads to the third question y so in terms of skilled trade um with a lot of growth in our demographics we have a lot of people who are parents with skilled trades if they're children um get into those skilled trades do we have a measurement of that so it shows like an uplift in in the economic uh platform of of these families probably not I think it's an interesting metric one of the limitations of navian is that it doesn't do a great job
104of tracking kids 5 years out or 10 years out so most of the information that we would learn would be anecdotal um but I think it's a I think it's a really interesting point one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about so obviously those of you who know the high school know that the original plan for uh the wood shop was to turn it into a stem room um when I came in sort of evaluated the community feeling about that you know I spoke with Mr Lynch and we agreed to keep it a wood shop so so we we kept that program alive um and with uh a transition to more structured learning experiences for students at the high school level uh I'm definitely looking at ways to provide more opportunities for
105internships and those types of things Sophia mentioned practicum um which Miss piano does a great job with and if we can get more kids into that and figure out a better structure for that um I think that just opens up you know more doors for students thank you thank you yeah thanks for the questions Mr Anderson uh yes so the climate survey responses um the raw data is great uh but there was a section that showed us in the report that there were open-ended responses and I think that's where we can see the true feelings with people just speaking their own words I was wondering if that could be made as a link if anybody wanted to read through those or if it could just be made available to the board yeah I'm going to
106make that available to the board as we discussed in committee I'm not going to make that available to the public I think there's a there's a a certain trust uh in confidentiality when people write open-ended responses and surveys um you know it's open-end responses and surveys also are self- selected so we already have survey respondents who are self- selected right there's there was 140 120 families who responded or one person in that family responded which means there was 900 who didn't right what you can generally gleam from that information is that those 900 families think things are generally fine if they had extremely strong feelings they're very likely to respond either in the positive or the negative um or there's some some form of communication that's that we're not getting out to them to show
107them the importance of it right which is on our side but definitely the open-ended responses as we discuss will be shared with the board just a comment um throughout the presentation it was uh clear that a lot of uh professional development is going on and a lot of good work is going on to trickle down to support the students and I just want to thank all the staff that's here tonight um all the hard work and efforts that's been put on the initiatives and how hard everybody's working to make sure that the students are supported so um that's been great to see so thank you yeah thank you thank you staff members other questions or comments um yes hi um thank you very well done Mr Ross um I appreciate the breakdown of the data
108not being a a huge fan of numbers myself I think it's it was very important to look at all of the state data um and just you know a comment um in ex as a parent um my own son's taking the I ready and the the linkit all these new tests right their reactions at home were kind of not great right oh we have to take another test da but now that there's some results coming out they're starting to talk about they're Improv M ments throughout the year which I think is really powerful so I think that's an opportunity for the district to continue to um look into because if students can understand data in um not not numbers but words right and they can understand the graph they start to feel um proud of
109themselves and seeing even just a 10% growth you know that was reported at my house and and that he was very proud of his growth so I think once the students start to understand the data in their own words um and and like what they can do in school that's when we're going to really start to see them really proud um to come to school every day yeah thank you yeah and I think you know first year of I ready uh and Link it really sort of across the board we made a lot of mistakes with timing and supports and Clarity and things like that and it just gets it can only get better um you know we had just a massive amount of testing in the month of uh like late April into May
110right it's just too much right and kids don't have the B with for IT staff members don't have the bandwidth for it I get it um so we we are going to adjust windows so it makes more sense test in the third window later that sort of thing um but also with staff members it's the you know uh third grade is when you start State Testing but if you if kids understand the I ready assessment in first grade and they take it three times and they see that growth and they understand they need to take it seriously then they do it again in second grade and their their teacher supporting them and they're seeing that change by the time they get to third grade it's not the first time they're seeing a standardized assessment right
111they're they're actually sort of Masters of it at that point right and so the the goal is to normalize that and also provide IR is amazing because it gives so much data about student strengths and weaknesses and when you're looking at only state assessment data and you see it the following year you can't do anything with your kid so if you're a third grade teacher and then you see their scores in you know August and you're like oh that kid didn't pass that kid's already in fourth grade right but when you see that assessment result immediately and you're like oh that student needs help in vocabulary development like oh I can do that I know how to do that I can intervene so I'm glad to hear that about your experience and and I think
112I think um it's important for a school district to come up with its own um benchmarking various ways to Benchmark student growth because we all know that the state could change their mind any day right which I hope they do um but you know it's much more valuable to look at a series of of tests um even that are teacher created than when the state tried to do start strong and there was 10 questions to assess the students um literacy which we know you can't truly get a feel for what a student can do in 10 questions so you know I think it's it's a um it's a I know it's an arduous task all this testing and looking at the data but it's much more valuable for the staff and the um students and
113the entire District you know I see some teachers here the state takes like a year and a half to get us science data that's not helpful at all um and you want to you want students to learn science today not 18 months from now you know so so it's important that we do our own um work that's independent of the state's decisions definitely thank you any other questions or comments boards members Mr Ross I would just like to add that I I think that's a great presentation um thank you I really enjoyed uh reviewing it before and and seeing it again I think that um for us to go forward we need to understand where we were need to understand where we are I I think that for a while we didn't really have that
114and I think now with this and and your efforts and um efforts of of the teachers um we have greater clarity as to where we stand you know maybe it's not all roses but at least we know where we stand we know where we are compared to other districts we know we have the information now we know now we have a way to to work move forward from that and I think that's a very positive way positive place to be in a positive position to be in for us yeah these things take time it doesn't it's not like a snap of a finger and you know it it it's a it's a change in the way we do things it's a change in the culture it's in the change in the way that we do
115things and it it'll take time but we're going to get there and I'm I think this is a great you know uh push and great start uh in that direction great thank you and thank you for your feedback before about the presentation appreciate it of course can can I just add one more thing yeah please in case the people at niche.com are listening our teachers are not C+ that's crazy okay and I would rank our teachers way higher than the food as ranked on niche.com so you guys are doing an excellent job and I don't want you to look at niche.com all right so I'm going to uh sit I'll turn the projector off I'm happy to entertain any questions from uh members of the audience if you if you'd like um I'll just sit
116you can come up and use the microphone so that you can be heard at home so come on up so you can introduce yourself like you would for public comment but I'm happy to respond to questions Janine mnir uh 219 gerre terce in Den Allen I'm really happy to hear all the positive information about the school district and I'm really happy to hear the 1.5 million that you're getting for the preschool and that you do not have to apply for this every year all the positive work but I did not hear anything about a before Care Program yes and and I I'll address that we we have not come to a conclusion about before care I understand your concerns as you expressed them last meeting um we're working on them and I understand the district
117the economic impact for this has all the families as you reported over and over at the big economic problem we have here in the district our families really really need this I I really want to stress how important this is to make sure this is in program in placed every sing single year and I'm really happy that we'll be addressing this in the future thank you thank you yeah just there it's good put your uh John Osborne 432 First Street not like you really needed a John it's okay uh 73 slides that was quite a comprehensive report um I'm assuming that it's going to be posted on the website it is on the website right now okay because there was a lot of it yes I couldn't even come close to reading totally yeah uh
118a lot of the type was extremely small yes and I'm not the youngest person in the room understood uh just a couple of of uh comments um I noted that there were some glaring omissions primarily three first um was I don't really care what uh USA Today rates middle sex school or denell and I don't really really care what schools.com has to say what I'm interested in is to make sure that children that graduate from the district are happy in their professions enjoy themselves and have a good life and part of that good life might involve something other than College I didn't see any mention of support grants or really anything with respect to Industrial Arts the trades try to find an electrician in denell to do your work try to find a good Carpenter
119that W will be working for you uh in uh in less than 6 months it's very difficult because we've kind of lost track of the trades and while college is great for a lot of kids there's also a lot of kids who are extremely interested in doing things that don't involve college at all trade schools the trades industrial Arts yet not a single mention of that at all a school isn't rated in my opinion on the number of kids it sends the college it's rated on the happiness and fulfillment of the students when they leave the school regardless of whether they go to college or they go into the trades and that's an extremely important thing that not a single word or slide even mentioned second thing is Athletics part of a well-rounded education has
120to do with promoting not only school spirit but also the concept that sitting behind a desk isn't the only thing that a student needs in order to become successful and healthy I'd like to know how many grants were applied for for athletics because there wasn't any mention at least as far as I could see and I sat through the entire presentation and the last thing is the future we have a small district with no real estate and we will have an influx of children in in this District beyond anything that anybody could imagine we have one completed project in town that's 18 acres and we have three other projects that are being completed and I got to tell you that no matter what the developers say about how many school children will be coming out
121and attending to nelon schools I promise you their estimates are incredibly low and we are going to be dealing with classrooms of 35 kids or 40 kids at the high school level because of that and part of what I was hoping to hear tonight were plans for the future because that's part of how the district grows and that's how we maintain success now I don't mean to be overly critical the report was terrific it was really interesting to uh to know how well the schools are doing how much more diverse the community has become and that's extremely important because a good solid diversity in a community uh means that children are experiencing all different kinds of people when they attend school and that there's nothing that can beat that but I think those three things
122were glaring omissions that I noted uh in hearing the presentation and I'd love to hear them addressed thanks sure yeah absolutely Mr osor thank you for your comments so I mean to the first point trades uh you know as I mentioned when Mr saoi asked that question we had 34 students that did not report information about their outcomes for college uh or uh postsecondary I felt like reporting that we had such a large amount of sort of unknowns was not particularly helpful I did answer the question we have two students who did report that they'll be uh uh going to a trade school imediately after graduation um but I imagine of that 34 there's probably more and certainly those who are who uh responded that they were going into the world of work many of
123them may be going directly into a trade and so the information that's gathered through Naviance isn't necessarily the best data for that but as I as I discussed and as you've uh certainly been well aware the uh conversation about the wood shop was a very significant one that I was a huge advocate for uh keeping that part of the Industrial Arts uh program in the High School uh I am you know I have been a very strong advocate of the increase in stem education in the district we have a new stem classroom at Faber we have a full-time stem teacher next year at the middle school we have essentially three stem teachers at um at the high school and what that includes is not just 3D printing but it also includes manufacturing design thinking all
124sorts of things that are related to that I totally agree that it's important outcome uh for the district and certainly when we have more information I'll be happy to share about that um the second item that you mentioned is Athletics and to be completely honest i' never even thought about presenting On Athletics um but I think it it should be in here so I appreciate that the third piece to the Future no real estate or no real plan um you know I so we've been talking about the future for probably about six months or so in terms of the budget conversations and board conversations um we're we're all very aware the board members are all very aware of the future um the reason that we put a demographic study together was to get real information
125about that um the information that came out from the Nell and the uh the other property that's there what's the other property what's the The Crossings yeah was actually very very uh close to the estimates that were provided by the developers um now we don't know what's going to happen with other ones but we know that the demographer did look at those projects in the projections so we we we are aware of that we're also very much aware that we have no space left so we're having conversations all the time about how we can increase space we're working with a an architect Lan Architects we uh we updated our long range facility plan at the last meeting it's actually being submitted this meeting um to uh part of that project includes about a $20 million
126uh potential project which would add 24 classrooms at Faber um which we can't do for five or six years probably because of the impact that it would have on the tax uh burden in the Town based on the initial referendum projects from 23 uh 2003 and then from uh 2019 we also uh are working with Lan on a grant for Universal prek expansion Grant um that's actually on tonight's agenda there's three attachments that are listed that you can certainly take a look at in the operation section the project that we're looking at for that has the state approval that's associated with it it would be an 8 classroom addition essentially where my office is in Faber so it would turn that entire Wing that second floor into eight additional 950 s foot classrooms plus one
127small group instruction classroom and the goal would be to just try to find Space somewhere now if we can't get the grant um if we can't get the state aid that's associated with that what we would do is potentially look to do that eight classroom addition move my office to it doesn't matter where but we would have enough space where there would be eight more classrooms of of uh for kids what we do with those eight classrooms would be a conversation within the school Community would that mean that we would take the sixth graders and bring them back to Faber you know that might be something that we do would it be that we add more preschool classrooms at faor that might be an option as well knowing that we're running out of space at
128the middle school and high school which is on an incredibly tiny postage stamp siiz lot maybe we're going to look at bringing the sixth grade back to Faber and really try to work with outside Partners but that's not yet decided right we don't know yet but we are very very actively looking and planning for the future I appreciate that that's on your mind because that's very much on our mind as well um and uh you know I think the the purpose of the demographic report uh presentation slides was to talk about exactly that um I know it's a concern I know taxes are a concern I know population growth is a concern um I don't live in town but you know the board members have shared all of their feelings about uh all of this
129with me throughout the you know the last year of planning um and I can assure you that it is very much top of mind so I appreciate your comments and I thank you for being here as well I really really do appreciate that does anybody else have any comments that they would like to to ask or questions okay thank you very much all of you for your attention it's 9:45 um I don't know how you've made it this long if you want to bail feel free to bail but uh you know I really appreciate you all staying here um and listening to this uh and I hope you have a safe drive home and and all the rest [Music] Mr Mr Zukowski how's your plant it's doing well all right good excellent yes absolutely it's
130right in the middle of my table thriving have a good night all right so onto um the uh just the the the remainder of my report first of all board members thank you for the opportunity to present that um as I mentioned in um my email to you about it this really is for me it's a labor of love it's just you know trying to get as much out of the out of the district data as possible so I appreciate uh having the opportunity to share you have a comment or oh okay and and I was just going to add thank you for letting us you know take a look and you know be very collaborative in in this process yes absolutely Mr Mr in the um and any for anyone if you go to
131the agenda page it's right under the May 28th uh agenda link um so pleas please feel free to read through it ask any questions that you might have shoot me an email I'm happy to chat about it all right so uh enrollment update uh is available in the agenda we had a slight uh a slight downtick over the last month two students left the district um one in 11th grade we had an increase in 12th grade um increase in second grade but a decre increase in kindergarten so we're pretty much hitting that point in the year where we're pretty flat from June of uh 20123 to now we are up 56 students which includes six additional prek kids but that means 50 students in K12 so uh you've all been feeling the increase it's pretty
132significant so we'll keep an eye on that uh an update on the Middle School assistant principal position so we had 113 completed applications we did 23 screening interviews that was Mr altme Miss drapkin and and I uh during the uh during the week of May 21st last week um and we are planning 8 to 10 second round interviews for next week so we're going to reach out to the candidates that have been selected for that um and we're going to have some staff members involved in the second round as part of the panel so that those folks can provide their feedback as well uh for the candidates um DEA make a difference Monday um happy to report out on again last week uh the recipients or uh the week of May 13th it was the
133school testing coordinators um as we had New Jersey SLA we had the njsla testing so Mary bullar Lisa San Filippo Dennis marker and Lee best um and you know those folks did a really nice job with the testing we had very few issues uh of any sort so kudos to them last week uh Tim McGovern was recognized Mr McGovern is retiring uh this year he has been the physics teacher and he's taught forensics and some other courses as well so congratulations to him as well he'll be missed um preschool for 2425 as U Miss McNair mentioned we are still in conversations about before care and Bridge care that's um something that we're still working out logistics with we hope to have a solution by the July 11th meeting that I can report on um and
134certainly publicly before then uh we have the security Personnel uh job description we did receive feedback on the job description that was not yet incorporated into the one that's on the agenda so we'll be tabling that agenda item so uh Dr jjan if you could just make a note of that um we should have a final version for June 11th which I'll share out to board members for review uh prior to that and that was just feedback that we that we got from the state OEM and another individual uh who does this work that provided some good uh good information for us we have some new hires on today's staff list we have a middle school math teacher and we have a school-based wellness counselor um and we have a lot of other positions that
135are listed on there for summer programming and all sorts of other things um extracurricular activities uh ESL parent class uh is continues um it's going very well um Annie uh my secretary Annie shizak is teaching it um it ends on June 10th and then we'll look at a possible summer summer class and then we'll sort of resurrect this for the fall and try to get more interest as well um and maybe some additional staff members to teach it as well um we're really kneee in testing which we've talked quite about uh quite a bit about AP tests just ended njsla is pretty much wrapped up the final rounds of I and linkit are are also wrapping up so happy to be done with those shortly um I mentioned the expanding access to climate change education
136grant that was accepted last week that provides us $75,000 with those funds we're going to be adding an additional aquaponics setup um and also do some curriculum writing and some uh potential Outdoor Classroom uh set up at Faber as well sohia mentioned many of the events I do want to just um congratulate the band on their concert as well which was the last Tuesday uh we have the Lincoln middle school science fair uh as well which was last Thursday and then this this Thursday coming up we have DHS Awards night we have spring sports awards on June 6th and then we also have this week a couple of Elementary trips uh prek took a a walking trip to uh the theater today second grade's going to turtleback zoo tomorrow and third grade is going to
137Ellis Island on Friday so very exciting times for for the kids uh and then lastly we have uh we just want to report out on the professional development day which was Friday May 25th um we had sort of two two sections of the day the first was really content area articulation in the morning we had really good facilitation by our staff members um and urban assembly worked with our school climate teams in the afternoon we had anal Focus we had uh doggy noses and yoga poses so puppies and yoga which was great in the Faber Courtyard uh tie dying shirts which was led by some of our staff members uh Miss piano brought uh brought her ponies and staff members had the opportunity to do some rides um there was a staff kickball game and
138then there were giveaways as well throughout the day um and I want to thank the um the organizations that provided donations um to staff members on the 25th so elpl Lino which is a wonderful Mexican place here in town melan's hair salon Bub's Boba bar chicken Home Depot and Bridgewater 30 burgers and Mike Subs uh Don Allen Hotel Gabriel's Fountain Trader Joe's and Bridgewater yoga Essence Studio Dunkin Donuts in Middle sex and pones pedals so these are all local groups uh within the community or or certainly their surrounding area that provided gift cards or in-kind types of things um Home Depot provided a number of plants uh which were used as giveaways so thank you to all of our Our Community Partners for their generosity uh towards our staff and with that that's my report
139thank you Mr Ross and again thank you for a great state of the school's address um for those uh just as a reminder all of these materials so for example the state of schools address which you heard tonight uh the demographics report U which was a very comprehensive report was the 40 50 page report about um where are you know the demographics of our town going forward in projections that's all as well as the um budget presentation all of these um rather um comp these comprehensive documents are all available on the website to be able to view on as big a screen as you want at home uh so um they are all there um and with that I'll move on to um item number nine public comments so the board invites public comments on
140agenda items only for members of our community in accordance with board policy 0167 public comment sections are intended to provide an opportunity for members of the public to express themselves on school matters of community interest the board and administration will be taking notes during public comment but will not provide substantive responses to questions or concerns related sorry raised by individual speakers if necessary the superintendent May provide a brief response after the entire public comment period is completed the board appreciates and welcomes feedback from the community but is not at Liberty to engage in back and forth dialogue with members of the public during this portion of the meeting prior to making your public comment please state your name in municipality please note that all statements must be directed to the presiding officer please come to
141the microphone at this time if you'd like to make a comment on agenda items only okay last call okay moving on to item 10 then education uh the education committee report report uh I'll call on and turn the microphone over to Mr Dugen to give the education committee report thank you Dr Jano uh present at the meeting were Miss Howard yourself Mrs Shimp Miss drapkin and Mr Ross the committee met on May 22nd and discussed a number of idence including a wi range of updates from Miss drapkin regarding ongoing curriculum initiatives professional development parent and Community engagement sessions summer programming content articulation meetings and instructional coaching updates on hiring and new positions information about preschool expansion for the 20242 school year information about the results of the district's climate surveys which will be discussed publicly
142in May policies being presented for first reading and a variety of confidential matters thank you thank you Mr dougen so moving on to item 11 uh action items in education uh looking for a motion to approve items 11 a through d as a block motion to approve 11 a through was it d d is in David sorry I'm scrolling d as a block second okay we're open for questions and comments um I will note that just for item D that um these are first readings for um um uh updates to policy questions comments last call okay um Mr Ross could you please call the role yes I got to get used to that Mr Anderson yes Mrs condet yes Mr Dugan yes Dr Jr yes Mrs Howard yes Mr s yes Miss shim yes Mrs
143Shep yes Mr Walker yes motion passes great thank you so much moving on to item number 12 uh personnel and the P Personnel discussion items the Personnel committee report um I'm the uh I'm the committee chair so I'll read out the report here so present at the um Personnel committee meeting were myself uh Mr Anderson uh Mrs and Mr Ross uh we met on May 22nd uh and um we discussed a number of items including uh board meeting approval items which are on uh the agenda this evening uh the hiring process for the Lincoln Middle School assistant principal position uh Staffing and sectioning for the 2024 to 2025 school year uh the job description for the new District security staff member and a number of confidential items and that completes summarizes what we discussed in
144the Personnel committee uh meeting uh last week so moving on to item number 13 Personnel uh action items looking for a motion to approve a through G as a block making note that we're tbling item e which uh Mr Ross had mentioned was the uh desri the job description for the district security officer right e right I I don't know I actually can't even find it on the agenda now is this I'm looking at operations yes item a yes sorry about that okay so yes so again uh looking for approval for 13 a through G uh with uh the understanding that we're going to table item e to next meeting so we're moving a through d and f and g yeah a through D and then f and g motion to approve 13 a through
145d f and g second open for questions and comments or comments okay last call right Mr Ros you please call the rooll Mr Anderson yes Mr Condit yes Mr dougen yes Dr gendrano yes Mrs Howard yes Mr snoi yes Miss schim yes Mrs Shep yes Mr Walker yes motion passes okay wonderful thank you Mr Ross moving on to item number 14 uh discussion uh of operations so the operations committee report I'll turn it over to committee chair uh Mr Walker thank you Dr gendrano the operations committee met on May 22nd at 7 p.m. I was pres at the meeting along with Mr Sono Dr gendrano Mr Ross and Mr Pepe at the meeting we discussed the number of customary approvals that are on the agenda for approval the school security official job description The Proposal
146with Lan Architects examine possible expansions to favor policies for first reading and policy related information concerning vandalism of school property and a variety of confidential matters that's it thank you Mr Walker so at this time looking for a motion to approve 15a through double A as a block yes 27 items motion to approve items a through ablea second open for questions or comments just to clarify for g go ahead this is for us to complete a Grant application that would essentially cover the cost of no not entirely yeah it's a 33 there's a that's a very I was hopeful I know it's great uh there's a there's a $33 million grant that was uh opened up by the state so it would cover a portion of the cost we would still have to come up
147with another significant portion but it would be a much smaller amount of money than going to referendum thank you y any other questions comments okay um Mr Ross could you please call the rooll Y Mr Anderson yes Mrs condet yes Mr Dugen yes Dr gendrano yes yes Mrs Howard yes Mr s yes Miss shim yes Mrs Shep yes Mr Walker yes motion passes okay wonderful so moving on to item uh 16 uh old business is there any uh topic or uh from previous meetings that we'd like to bring back up uh possibly uh you said that you were considering moving sixth grade to favor I said that yeah um I didn't say it was happening I'm saying it's it's in consideration everything is a consideration yeah and then that brings me back to my point
148from last meeting about this uh new VP seems why we need more Administration if we're moving a third of the body to a different building this a good question so there's there would be other changes that would be required for us to kind of go through um in the meantime this is not a move that will will happen in the next year potentially too even um so even if we get this grant we still have to go out to bid we still have to figure out the planning the construction timelines you know summer is when a lot of the subf flooring would have to be built on the Second Story um we might also have to consider that if we build on Second Story of the building we have we might have to rehouse students
149that are on the first floor and that would be incredibly disruptive so there's a lot to this um it's more just if if the question is um it's like a conditional question if there were eight more classrooms at Faber what would you do with them and that's that is the question that'll be a many conversations that we have at this table okay any other items for old [Music] business okay moving along to uh new business any items for new business I just I wanted to mention I think um we have in the agenda a long list of activities that are coming events that are happening in the district soon and I think this Saturday is the Color Run at Faber I don't um didn't make it to the agenda but just a reminder it was
150an awesome event last year and um encourage all people to get out you don't have to run you just have to be willing to be smacked in the face with powder by Mr tenant can we smack him back no oh no just to run if you get out of the way a man but it's a great event and I think it's this Saturday I said I could be convinced if he's going to sing Stevie Nicks I don't know I I know man so any other new business anyone wants to bring up um I did want to just mention I mentioned this last time um so maybe it's old business but um Workshop is coming up in October uh for for the board members so um to start thinking about that Mr Pepe has sent an
151email already for uh interest and uh information uh we do need to if we want to be able to make use of uh the um what do you call it the uh registration as a group um then we would need to file that or submit that by a certain time in June so uh consider that it was a wonderful experience last year I know um about five of us went last year so um it would be great if we could all go and we won't call in a meeting it's okay um but it would be great for us to there's a lot of great learning uh to be had there a lot of connections lot of uh uh things that can be learned uh down there during that during that Workshop um and the other
152thing uh just to mention as well so that's one thing the other thing to mention uh I wanted to mention was that with um you know uh we have graduation and eighth grade promotion as well as graduation coming up on June 13th and June 14th respectively um and uh I I hope to see everybody there at uh uh definitely at high at DHS graduation and hopefully at Lincoln Middle School 8th grade promotion as well so um any other new business that anyone wants to wants to bring [Music] up last call okay um so moving on to item number 18 president's remarks I think I just gave more so I'll stop there um I'll cut cut my you know quit while on my head moving on to number item number 19 public comments so the board
153invites public comment on any issue or topic for members of our community in accordance with board policy 01 67 public comment sections are intended to provide an opportunity for members of the public to express themselves on school matters of community interest the board and administration will be taking notes during public comment but will not provide substantive responses to questions or concerns raised by individual speakers if necessary the superintendent May provide a brief response after the entire public comment period is completed the board appreciates and welcomes feedback from the community but is not at Liberty to engage in a back and forth dialogue with members of the public during this portion of the meeting prior to making your public comment please uh state your name and municipality please note that all statements must be directed to
154the presiding officer please come to the microphone at this time if you'd like to make comments on any issue or topic okay last [Music] call okay so moving on to item 20 uh executive session so the dellan Board of Education will now adjourn into executive session to discuss items that fall within specific exceptions to the open public meetings act C njsa 10 412b the confidential matters discussed by the board during this executive session include items related to individual privacy collective bargaining agreements pending or anticipated litigation and Personnel uh any discussion that does not need to remain confidential will be made public as soon as it is practical minutes of the executive session will not be disclosed until the need for confidentiality no longer exists um all individuals who may be discussed in executive session have
155been adequately adequately notified action will not take place after the conclusion of the executive session so at this time um ask looking for a motion to move into executive session motion second executive flip a coin he made me say motion second got it all right so all those in favor I I opposed okay thank you everyone for sticking with us through till uh oh my goodness oh my God 5 10 6 10 thank you we our next meeting by the way is on June 11th it's only like two weeks away we'll be back here uh same bat Time same bat Channel see you