001Mhm. Fiat? Are we good, Nick? Legit? Okay. All right. Everybody ready? Yes, ladies? Sally? Good. We're good? Everybody good? We're going to start. Okay. All right. Good evening, everybody. Thank you for coming. In accordance with the requirements of the Open Public Meetings Act, Chapter 231, PL 1975 announcement, I wish to announce that the New Jersey Open Public Meetings Law was enacted to ensure the right of the public to have advanced notice of and to attend the meetings of public bodies at which any business affecting their interest is discussed or acted upon. In accordance with the provisions of this act, the School District of the Chathams Board of Education has caused notice of this meeting to be published by having the date, time, and place thereof posted in the Board Administrative Offices, sent to the Clerks
002of Chatham Borough and Chatham Township, the Library of the Chathams, the Chatham Courier, The Daily Record, and the Tap online news. Um Mr. DeQuilla. Us. Ms. Allen. Yes. Mr. Del Sandro. Here. [clears throat] Ms. Peck. Mr. Ryan. Mr. Smith. Here. Ms. Weber. Here. Dr. Zang. Here. And Ms. Ciccarelli. Here. Eight present and accounted for. Perfect. Please join us for the Pledge of Allegiance if you're able to stand. The flag is to my left. What's up? Um I have nothing further to report tonight. We will move on to the administrative reports. Don't go away. Dr. Sortino. Great. Thank you. As a reminder, the district will be closed May 22nd and May 26th for the giveback snowback snow days. Uh TEDx will be held on June 10th. Four CMS students were selected for the New Jersey All-State
003Choir. Congratulations to Annabelle Palmer, Colleen Riley, CC Young, and Tess Nolan. Uh at the next Board of Education meeting, we will recognize the teachers of the year as well as the educational specialists of the year. I look forward to celebrating all of them with you. Congratulations to Roger Rice who won the Morris County Tournament individual title for golf as well as to the entire golf team for winning the Morris County Golf Tournament. Um in the upcoming weeks, our architects are coming to audit the buildings and facilities. They will then make recommendations to the district for what should be included in the upcoming referendum. The CMS trip to Philadelphia was a huge success. Thank you to all the staff and students for doing a great job there. The front hallway at Chatham High School looks wonderful.
004Dr. Walker and the PTO have worked tirelessly on improving it and then in interactive athletic smart so thank you very much. And the annual art show is happening May 18th and 19th from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the Chatham Middle School upper gym. Congratulations to the Chatham High School Academic C team for taking first place at the tournament held at Middletown on Friday. Uh thank you to Mr. Rizzo, who's a weatherman from New Jersey News 12. He came to speak with Mr. Hart's class at the middle school and did a phenomenal job. And congratulations to the 40 student athletes that will continue their athletic careers in college. They have now signed 23 Division 1 athletes and 17 Division 3 athletes at Chatham High School. So, congratulations to all of the athletes, their families, coaches, teachers,
005etc. And Dr. Walker is here to present the report of the graduates. So, if all of you would like to take a seat in the crowd, that'd be great. [laughter] Okay. No problem. Uh good evening. Thank you for having me here tonight. I'm here to to report on the graduating class of the 2000 of 2025. This is our annual report of the graduates. I just want to start off by sharing that this presentation will be on the high school webpage under information about our school. There is a lot of data in this report, so it's meant for two purposes. One for me to report on it tonight and to talk about some of the trends, but it's also a point of reference. There's going to be large amounts of data that are um upcoming graduates
006in the next few years could look at and to help them with their college search process as well. Okay. So first here we have a five-year trend in terms of our four-year, two-year, or other placements for post-secondary education, and you can see that we have a pretty consistent trend line here with the last year's class, 94% of the students continuing on to four-year universities. This next chart shows our GPA bands for the class of 2025, and if you look, the circle is almost perfectly split in half with almost about 50% almost or a little over 50% of our students being above a 4.0, and the remaining students, about 46, 47% being above below a 3.99 and above. So it's about 50/50 split, but the vast majority of the largest chunk of our GPAs fall in
007the three to 3.99 range. This slide points out that regardless of the range of GPAs you're in, um four-year college still remains a viable option for all students, and it was this is a snapshot of students who had below a 3.5 GPA. So those are students falling in the bottom 25% of the class still had an 80% um four-year placement, and I just listed a couple of the schools that these students are had are attending. This is a snapshot of our special education population in that class. So, these are students who graduated with an IEP. And of that group, almost 72% continued on to four-year universities with 9% to two-year, and then 13% other. There is a a sample here of These are schools that these students did matriculate to. Um The These student These
008schools on the list had a number of students matriculate to them, so not just special education population, but you can see that there's some really great options, and I think we're pretty proud of these numbers in general. And keep in mind that other our special education population could also include students who continue on here to our 18- to 21-year-old program, as well as other options such as trade school, employment, gap years, things like that. Okay, so this slide just gives um over a period of time public versus private, and you can see that um there isn't a big gap and and one point in 2024 it sort of hit a break-even point, but it's trending back towards private. So, about 54% of our students chose private schools, and about 46% chose public. This map and
009this diagram represents where they're going. So, 44% of the class stayed in those dark blue regions of the East Coast, and 11% chose to stay in New Jersey. So, about 55% of our students are staying in that Northeast corridor of the country and choosing universities there, colleges there. But, the second largest group is in the South, which is at 23%, and then you can see the other corresponding areas of the country and the percentages. At the bottom of this are the trends or the trend lines for each region and really nothing statistically significant there. They're pretty flat trend lines, but you can really see from the visual of where our kids are heading. Definitely East Coast and majority in the Northeast still. Okay, so in the class of 2025, we processed 3,029 applications for a
010total of 1,612 acceptances. So, that's a a mean acceptance rate of just over 53%. Applications per student, the average was 9.8. So, the average student applied to 9.8 colleges and received a 5.2 acceptance rate. Of these 3,000 applications that went out, 51% of them were early action. Early action has in a November 1st deadline, typically. It's not binding that you have to go to that school, but about just over half those applications were put in by a November 1st deadline. And then about 42% were regular decision or rolling. And then you can see early decision at 5%. Early decision is the binding agreement where you're putting that application in and you're telling the school, "If I get in, I'm absolutely going there." And so, you can see that with about half of our applications being
011early, it definitely puts a strain on our counseling department with 3,000 applications and half of them having to be out and in by November 1st, but they do a really phenomenal job of meeting that demand. We do see a little bit of an increase at the bottom for the class of 2024 had 2,800 applications, 2,830, and a slightly lower acceptance rate. So, we processed more applications, but still a small increase in acceptance rates in the class of 2025. This slide slide just highlights the demand and the growth of the common application. From the year prior, the number of applications to Common App increased 8% for a total of over 10 million applications. So, the Common App is remains the primary method of applying and each year more and more schools are requiring it or embracing
012it. So, it's definitely the number one method for applying to colleges and it seems to be increasing each year at a significant percentage. This chart shows the correlation of number of applications and percentage of acceptance rate. So, very clearly you can see the larger number of schools you apply to the lower acceptance rate that you will see. Um one to four gets you an acceptance rate in the 80th percentile, five to nine just slightly below 80. You know, the one to fours are typically the early decision. Sometimes they're um recruited athletes. They're kind of a specific group, but that real sweet spot seems to be in that five to 14 range in terms of getting a solid return on your of your time and commitment and investment in application fees as well. Okay, so the
013most attended schools in the class of 2025. We have a little bit of a tie here. It's a three-way tie between Syracuse, Pitt, and Virginia Tech. And then you can see the other schools down these these the the most attended school uh students who are attending from that class. These are the schools that received the most applications from Chatham High School students. Rutgers tops this list with 113 students in that class applying. Penn State coming in second. You can see going down to Northeastern with 55 applications. So, I think this slide's important. This These schools This list does change a bit from year to year. One school pops on, one school drops off. But, I think it's important for Chatham students to know and we do discuss this with them that when you apply to
014schools like this, you're you're not just competing against the world, the country, other high schools. You're competing against a significant number of Chatham High School students as well. I just expand upon that list here again as a point of reference for our upcoming students or underclassmen. These are colleges that had 30 or more students apply in that class. So, extend expanding beyond the top 10. These are the most popular in terms of applications here from the class of 2025. Okay, the next couple slides, again a point of reference. This ends it up in our in our school profile as well. These are the schools that the students are attending from the class of 2025. List school and the number of students who have decided to attend there. So, a lot of data here. There's a
015few slides of this. Definitely more of a point of reference. It will be on our website and you can look back at reports of the graduates going back several years in that same page on our website to see if there's any changes or trends. But, these are the schools that the students in the class of 2025 attended in the fall after graduation. It represented 130 just over 130 unique institutions across 30 states and five countries. Okay, these last few slides highlight our programming. This programming comes from our counseling department and our college and career counselor, Ms. Lewis. I do want to point out and thank Ms. Lewis, who is our college career counselor, who helped me put this presentation together, got a lot of the data together for it, and had some ideas on its
016presentation as well. And so, I just want to thank her for her work on this. Our programming consisted of about 120 college rep visits to our college and career center in the fall. Some of the more popular visits are at the top right. These are the ones that had the most students attend here. We also continued with our programming. So, we had our junior college our junior planning night for post-secondary planning. We had a presentation regarding the vocational training programs in Morris County. We had a specific presentation on engineering careers. And we also had a college admissions trend panel, which we had admissions reps come in for a panel discussion to talk about trends in the application process. So, those continued, and we had a couple new additions to that programming this past year. And
017then, we also have our senior specific programs. I want to just highlight that all of our counselors have conferences with the students and the parents at the junior year and senior year. Junior year talking about the college search process, and senior year doing planning the application process. But, we also have a parent presentation, and we also had college funding night presentation on financial aid, as well as our annual alumni return day, which happens every year in December, right before the break, which was a really great successful event again. In addition to these events and presentations, we hosted uh a second year our military and law enforcement um open house. You could see an image there up top. We had representatives from all those organizations here in sort of a career fair and um format in
018the library. It was heavily attended by a significant number of students. And addition to that, we also had information session another day on West Point Military Academy, an information session on gap years, and an information session on County College of Morris. So, these are additional pathways that we highlighted besides traditional college pathways. And we also continue our college entrance exam programming by offering the PSAT 11, the pre-ACT, the PSAT 10, and then SAT school day, which we do. And we also host an ACT exam here on Saturdays in the uh in the fall. And lastly, our counselors are constantly learning. So, when we have 120 reps come to our college and career center, our college counselor, Ms. Lewis, puts together slide decks, information about each school, anything new that they're sharing. So, that's shared with
019each of the counselors. But,