001I'd like to call the meeting to order. >> If we could have a moment of silence, please. Please rise for the flag salute. I pledge algiance 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. In accordance with the provisions of the open public meeting act, a public notice of this meeting has been sent to board members, all district schools, the Herald news, the trends, the record, the messenger, West Milford town hall, the county superintendent office, the board attorney, and cable vision of Warwick, and posted on the district's website. Copies of the board ca board meeting calendar resolution were provided to all local media town hall township library and all district schools. We'll call Mrs. Francisco. >>
002Mr. Bailey, Mr. Sidowitz >> here. >> Mr. Drew >> here. >> Mrs. Dwire >> here. >> Mr. Garino >> here. >> Mrs. Fritz. Mr. Yuber >> here. >> Ms. O'Brien >> here. >> Mrs. Van Dyke >> here. Okay, we're going to need a motion to go into executive sess. Okay, we're going to need a motion to go into executive session. Uh I move that at 7:02 p.m. we go into executive session for the purpose of conducting an HIV parent appeal. The exe executive session minutes will not be released until such time as the privilege or confidentiality is no longer applicable. >> Second. Uh all those in favor I >> any opposed that corrected once and for all privilege of >> it's been or for like six months now >> I think or is >> okay
003or is or confidentiality >> because they can be privileged or confidential That was good. >> Uh Dr. Anamone, your report, please. >> Yes. >> Good evening everybody. Welcome to the June meeting. We have this month to report our 201617 HIV grades from the New Jersey Department of Education. Uh, all eight of our schools did wonderfully. The maximum score per school is a 78. West Mil High School earned a 70 out of 78. Ata received a 75 out of 78. Massip was a 70 out of 78. Maple Road was 77 out of 78. Marshall Hill was 71 out of 78. Paradise Mall was 77 out of 78. Upper Greenwood Lake was 73 and Westbrook was 75. So these scores uh were sent to us by the Department of Ed. This form is on our website if
004anybody wants to take a look at it, but this is for last year 1617. It just takes a little while for the grades to come back to the district. So we're very proud of our our staff all in and we're really focused on teaching and educating the whole child in all of our schools every day of the year. uh monthly progress towards district goals. We are in the process right now of finishing our district goals for 1718 and at the same time looking at our 18/19 action plan for the district goals for next school year. Uh we have some meetings set up over the summer. One of the first things we're going to look at is our scheduling uh students at Macken in the high school. Uh what we're looking to do in the long
005term is increase the number of students in our higher level classes, whether it be an advanced placement or honors level, and we're looking to reduce the number of students in our lower level or lowest level classes in our core subjects. So that's going to be our first point of order for our summer uh meetings administr. >> Thank you. >> Okay. Um Mr. Novak, >> good evening. Thank you. I just was going to uh provide a little um overview of some of our uh summer committees. We have some of of our traditional committees on there and we also have some some new ones. So, I'm just going to briefly go through um some of the things we have on on deck for this summer this >> uh once again we have our um we have hours
006for our educational technology committee. I've spoken about them quite a bit over the years. uh group who really um is the the lifeblood for a lot of the uh initiatives that we have in our our technology program as well as our digital citizenship night. Um this summer they are um going to be tackling the task of um looking at common sense media which is a resource that we we've used quite a bit for our digital citizenship lessons. uh we have taken the steps over the last three years by implementing their digital citizenship curriculum uh throughout our pre preK through uh 12 U program and we have you know worked towards a lot of the values that they they promote. So this summer we have a committee together who's going to look into becoming a common
007sense media certified school district. So um that's a process that we're going to investigate this summer with that committee. So it's very exciting something we've talked about since we started doing digital citizenship. Now we're just um taking a look at it and going to make that uh take that next step hopefully. Um once again we have our uh classroom mindfulness committee. This committee is something that uh we've done uh the last two years. They've worked um primarily in our elementary school settings uh the last the last two years. This year you can see we've added um Serena Laray who is our representative from the high school. So we're looking to um take a look at this K12. We are looking at those um classrooms and areas where we have flexible seating. We're looking at um
008how the regular classroom teacher, not just our counselors, can address um you know, anxiety and and test anxiety and those types of things. So, uh we're we're excited about the work that they can do. Our mentoring committee will be will be meeting once again. uh mentoring committee has been fantastic for um taking a look at our program for our new staff induction uh as well as training our mentors for for our new teachers. So uh you know throughout the state and throughout the school district our district we we you know hire new staff and we assign uh existing veterans experts in their field to mentor our new staff members. So, uh, what we've been able to do starting last year is we provide them a pretty, uh, significant training prior to them working with the
009new staff members. So, they get to, you know, go through the ropes of of, uh, being a mentor and that sort of thing. So, we had we had great success with that this year. We just most recently had our culminating event for our first year teachers which is at the end of kind of a you know a little little potluck um you know we call it the um principal round table where our new staff will come they you know sit in in groups with our administr administrators and they discuss you know their first year and they they get to have a nice sharing and opening of you know this is how their experience was and you know we we kind of get our feedback from them after a year of being through our program. So
010that's given us a lot of information for how we utilize our um new staff induction going forward. Um the other committee I want to point out, so we have a wide range of uh character education committees. It's the first time we've had summer committees for uh for work in all of our schools. The board recently adopted the um wellness and um the well-being well-being goal. Um I can't hold the our goal right now. Um committee is going to look at they're going to be uh taking a look at our our project adventure program that we have in place and looking at those connections with uh social emotional learning and the lessons that that go with that as well as um looking at the district big picture. We've got a lot of great initiatives that are
011going on from school to school and the the goal of having these committees in place for each school is to look at, you know, what's going on well in this school and see if we can replicate it in all of them. So, a little little unifying of the things that we do. One of those uh for example, uh we have a couple schools that have the um you know, the buddy bench initiative going on in the in the ele elementary school playgrounds. That's something we're looking to make a district initiative. That's just a small example of of what these summer hours are going to be for for these committees. >> Elementary >> uh sorry question. >> Oh, sorry, Mr. Novak. Um the past several years we've talked about a grading committee and sometimes we get
012a report about it, sometimes we won't. We don't. I'd like to know the progress on that. I would also know want to know um what direction you're taking to move into a blue ribbon direction. I mean the character education is wonderful, the digital digital citizenship is wonderful but you know we started talking about the importance of the academics too and what are we doing for that? Well, we do we do have the uh secondary creating committee is meeting this summer to finalize some of the work that we've done over the last year and a half. Um we've we have some new leadership as you know in high school. Um we have some um changes to um some things that we thought in terms of we were investigating the um different types of schedules at the
013high school etc. So those are things that play into the work that we're doing with the secondary grading committee. terms of a blue ribbon um committee. That's not something that was that was um in place yet. I'll bring that up in um >> in ed committee. I'll I'll talk specifically to that because it is something that we >> principal Matlo had started that and then we never heard of it again. So I don't know if he started it from Lake or the high school, >> but um >> Right. So we Yeah. So I I'll bring up that committee. There was some um there was some uh investigation in that process. I'll I'll I'll inform the committee about um about that. >> Okay. Good. >> Good. >> Um, elementary homework committee. We had uh our most
014successful um our most successful parent survey to date was the homework committee uh homework survey that went out about a month ago. Uh we had uh about 600 responses in in about a twoe period which doubles the um feedback we've had in any uh previous uh previous survey. So uh we're excited to get work up get working on that. We're taking the uh feedback from that parent survey. We're going to have a good discussion and hopefully not hopefully, we will come out of that meeting with a um policy revision and uh set of guidelines for our um K6 uh K6 elementary homework uh process going forward. Uh we have our reading specialists are going to meet again. they they meet to review all the um many uh ELA initiatives we have especially in our elementary
015schools with the um font discipline reading assessment they take a look at at patterns we have evolved from not just looking at patterns in student reading levels but also looking at how we are grouping our students so we are um looking to see how they're grouping small groups of kids in the classrooms and and identifying those those readings so uh the reading specialists do a great job when they get together so we always like to encourage that um the LA handbook committee, they're going to be uh taking some of the initiatives that we've taken in place with uh readers and writers workshop. We've we've um we're going into year three of our five-year plan for for that particular training with balanced literacy. And the hope from um this committee is that we'll put together a
016handbook that, you know, we can hand to our our new staff, our current staff. These are the expectations that we have throughout our throughout our program with writing portfolio. Again, something that will support the board's goal with board and district goal for our our writing across the curriculum. This is something that supports that because it, you know, ties in directly what we expect in all of our schools, not just one school or the next. So, it's a good a good practice. Um, the last two to point out is the um mathematics placement matrix committee. This is a um this is a new group that's going to be getting together.