BoE Meeting April 29, 2021

001i'll move to return to exec from exec exec session all right we are back in executive uh session uh can we rise for the pledge of allegiance 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 before we get started i just want to make one uh announcement unfortunately helen kirsch had a last-minute personal situation that has prevented her from attending tonight's meeting so she will not be here at this evening approval of minutes uh all in favor of the approval of minutes from the april 8th and april 14 special meetings all in favor yes those will now be part of the public record correspondence donna there are 33 pieces of correspondence on the agenda that's

002what we received as of 12 noon today anything received after that time will be on our next agenda of the 33 pieces of correspondence 29 were comments regarding redistricting and full decay other topics included returning to full day school with lunch and art display at the central office curriculum concerns and support of the bhea staff additionally we receive 25 new oprah requests the purpose of an oprah request is to ask for a specific document not to ask the district to find out information for you so if making an opel request please be ask for a specific document great thanks donna we will move on to our student representatives and i see emily emily good evening how are you tonight good how are you i am well i think tomas was finding the link he should

003be here i don't know if he saw uh we'll find him we'll get him on there but we can certainly start with you perfect alrighty so spring sports are fully in season with all teams up and running baseball has a 4-1 record with a huge win against westfield yesterday softball is 3-1 and has their softball showdown this saturday at 11 against summit chatham and westfield or washington hills my apologies boys lacrosse is playing cranford today and are currently two and two girls lacrosse is three and two both losses were by only two goals boys tennis has their county tournament with a singles match moving on to day two track has had two dual meets with and will be hosting the union county meet the 12th and 13th of may gl tv will be live stream

004streaming this event and then lastly golf playing in the upper division placed sixth in their conference where chris caccamo led the team with 90 and tomas followed with 91. go gio thank you emily thank you tomas good evening how are you after shooting 91 in golf which is quite good by any destination started off well at a 42 but then went downhill with the 49 but i'm looking for better days still very respectable thank you so anyways as the weather steadily improves signaling the end of the school year and beginning of summer it also means that clubs prepare for their final events of the year interact recently made over 1 200 sandwiches from market street mission and will be helping pack and sort food next saturday at the hillside food bank the understanding asian cultures

005club held a meeting last week sharing information on the holiday of ramadan and how to support those celebrating the event given that april's genocide awareness month numerous events were organized to celebrate it mr porak of the highlander newspaper club led a round table discussion what it means to never forget being the grandchild of a holocaust survivor model united nations also celebrated genesis genocide awareness month by organizing events such as the weekly acts of kindness sharing narratives of genocides that have occurred all across the world and hosting and will host a guest speaker greg sarrion a second generation survivor of the armenian genocide who will share the story of his grandmother's struggle to survive the armenian genocide as we transition into may the student ambassadors are helping celebrate staff appreciation month by making mini gifts such

006as soaps and lotions to place in faculty bathrooms lounges and the main office they have also shared a thank you gram google form where students can write thank you message to their teachers lastly gl hilltopper plays have been hard at work on the production of clue a classic comic murder mystery the student actors and mr miceli have been working with gltv and mr moorhees to create a unique video production over zoom they hope to have a play ready for the weekend of may 20th to the 23rd and are discussing additional ways to make the show accessible to the berkeley heights and mountainside communities expect finalized dates and ticketing information soon despite the end of the year closing in students are seizing all the remaining moments to participate in many meaningful events emily tomas thank you

007very much any questions from port vapors for our student representatives yes i have a question so what is your experience so far being back to school every day and particularly emily for the seniors how are you finding it um so i know a lot of the seniors are they they wanna they're itching to get out um because a lot of the classes are like winding down towards the end of the year but they like the chance to be back with their friends in class but they're also i do hear talk about full day everybody all the seniors at least are scared for if that's an option because they don't know if they with the senioritis and everything at the end of the year it's going to be crazy but everybody likes being back in school

008it is a little bit tiring compared to the beginning of the year being home all the time but it's definitely a good thing to be with their friends by the end of the year you know on top of the social interactions i have really valued it as i have a number of ap exams coming up so it allows us to you know to utilize these last few weeks and days to really make the most and especially because there's a lot of materials that just can cannot leave the classroom allows us to you know best prepare for these exams so i'm finding that very helpful great thanks any other questions for board members okay emily thomas thank you very much for uh for joining uh this evening so let's get started with the bulk of our

009discussion tonight good evening we'd like to begin by thanking everyone who has participated in the discussion on full day kindergarten and the proposed realignment of our elementary schools this includes the superintendent and our team that contributed to developing the recommendation the board of education's committees that provide guidance teachers and staff and the many many parents students and residents who have provided feedback in the superintendent's report this evening you will hear her recommendation for full-day kindergarten and the realignment of our elementary school structure dr varley has kept true to her commitment and is recommending the scenario that 64 of parents and 58 percent of teachers indicated was their preference our parent community and teaching staff are in agreement on our path forward the recommendation not only includes the results of the survey it contains a few

010updates transportation is an area where we receive a great deal of feedback transportation and traffic safety are important components of our implementation plan and we are actively addressing them because getting it right is the only option we have a two-part going forward plan to address part transportation part one is a traffic engineering evaluation on the agenda tonight is an external firm who will assess the traffic and pedestrian activity at each school including a field study of roadways driveways observations of the on-site circulation are both drop-off and pick up an analysis of access driveways pickup areas parking areas and pedestrian routes part two will address the safe routes to school component where we'll work directly with the burke heights police department and their traffic safety officers to review walking routes sidewalks paths railroad crossings location of

011crossing guards and other considerations to ensure student safety our goal is to have both the traffic engineering report and the safe routes to school assessment completed by may 31st we want to move expeditiously however we will not rush the data gathering analysis or the presentations of the findings this time frame will allow adequate time to make any and all recommendations and communicate the changes to families before the start of the school year given our highly competent transportation office and our strong and ongoing relationship with the police department we're confident we'll put the required resources in place to ensure that every child is safe walking school when the new structure is implemented to proactively answer a question that will be asked this evening yes we can move forward with a recommendation tonight without having the complete

012transportation and traffic results we have adequate time to perform the analysis make the recommendations that the professionals suggest and communicate to the affected families additionally as discussed at the last town hall meeting where all we will offer subscription busing for those families that wish to pay for the service to ease the transition we'll be offering a one-year subscription busing subsidy to all k-5 families if you have attended the past three public meetings over the past few weeks you would have heard some people voice opposition to the proposed realignment plan they cited everything from how the process was conducted the research behind the recommendation the inability to answer all questions and their view that the board is holding public meeting but isn't truly listening everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion at those same meetings you

013heard fewer people voice their support for the superintendent's recommendation is that because the community is so one-sided against the recommendation no not at all in my role as board president i get to hear feedback from all parents and community residents and much of that comes outside the few hours a month we sit at board meetings both the superintendent and i and sometimes the entire board hear from residents who aren't comfortable speaking at a public meeting nor engaging on social media with the permission of an elementary school parent i'm going to read a letter that was sent to the board that captures quote the side that you don't hear at a public meeting here's the parent letter first i want to thank you all again for your dedication to our schools the way you were spoken

014to over and over and over again was atrocious at each town hall meeting i was left absolutely disgusted these parents think they are speaking for the entire community when in fact they are absolutely not myself along with countless other community members who are silent in fear of being verbally attacked or appalled by the behavior we have seen at these town hall meetings i can only apologize that i don't have the nerve to speak up as a parent i have to face some of these parents every day and their loose cannon behavior is unsettling the misinformation and fear that this group of parents is spreading in the community is horrible i had a parent come to me because she heard that the current fourth grade class was being sent to new providence i only wish more

015people would educate themselves on what is really happening rather than relying on what they are hearing as a side note both of my parents went through redistricting in their towns as elementary age children they were in different areas of the state both said it was not an issue to them at all as children i wanted to share this for perspectives in life full day kindergarten and redistricting are absolutely necessary changes in this town is it a transition for some that is difficult yes is it the right thing for our future yes change is hard but necessary again i urge all of you to choose option four not only do the students of berkeley heights deserve to start fresh in 21 22 instead of dragging this out our community cannot bear to live through this fighting

016for another year and that's the end of the letter in closing we plan to move forward with full day kindergarten because it's the right thing to do it makes sense not to mention so many of you have consistently asked for it as well we agree that announcing an outstanding town like ours should not be one of the 40-plus school districts in the state that do not provide this important benefit to our community change is necessary and we are fully committed to all the stakeholders particularly the teachers and staff parents and guardians and of course the children to ensure that our full-day kindergarten implementation and the realignment of our elementary schools is executed in the most seamless way possible as elected board members our responsibility is to ultimately take an objective view that benefits all the

017students in our community and establishes an optimal learning environment we believe we are doing just that thank you with that i will turn it over to dr varley and the superintendent's report dr varley good evening and thank you all for coming tonight the board of education will be voting on the proposal for full day kindergarten and the necessary realignment of our elementary schools as well as approving the proposed budget for the 21-22 school year the proposed budget includes the addition of full-day kindergarten teachers supplies and other supports it also includes a counselor and a school social worker to support our students and their transition back to what we all hope will be a normal school year in the fall i would like to take a quick moment to respond to the specific question we received

018about fifth graders remaining at woodruff we have examined the numbers and determined that we would need a minimum of 18 students this number is very fluid because it is impacted by special education and support considerations that we cannot know until we see the specific students who choose to remain when we began the proposal for full day kindergarten and realigning the elementary schools we knew it would be a contentious issue we knew that no matter what change we proposed and no matter how we proceeded we knew that there would be people who would be upset knowing that we did our best to produce produce the best possible plan for the children of berkeley heights we also know knew that no matter how meticulously we planned there would be things we did not think of i want

019to thank everyone who gave feedback through our listening sessions your input has been invaluable in making our proposals stronger and more comprehensive we have also listened to you in both these sessions and through all of your emails and worked as best as we can to answer your questions and address your area of concerns while maintaining the integrity of the proposal i am confident that the full-day kindergarten and realignment proposal provides the best educational opportunity for our current and future students before i begin with a presentation i want to take a moment to address the direction and tone that the process has descended to when the board of education tasked me to develop a plan for full day kindergarten it became quickly apparent that the best solution would be to realign the elementary schools and i

020knew it would be contentious people are passionate about their elementary schools i understand that both as a professional educator and as a mother while i understand that people are deeply passionate about the subject what i was unprepared for were the many personal attacks reasonable people can disagree but personal attacks are unnecessary to take the most example of many i have been repeatedly and publicly called a liar the attack is based on emails and response surrounding the traffic study specifically i responded to an email message on april 12th commenting on two discussions i had previously in 2020 with the berkeley heights police department when i worked on and ultimately posted a facebook response i referred to a more recent meeting with the bhpd that occurred on april 14th i apologize i should have been more clear

021that these were two different sets of conversations that occurred at two different times i take full responsibility if this was not clear it would also was not a lie as i have said reasonable people can disagree if you want to disagree with a plan please do so we have used these discussion to make a better proposal if you want to attack me personally to attack the plan you have the right to do so too but it is also uncalled for and it will not make a better proposal and it will not help the district move forward and now i'll turn it over to mr reinstein for the recognition of our volunteers thank you hey thank you dr varley uh one of the things we're gonna do before we get into uh the bulk of the

022discussion tonight is uh do some recognition and i think some people are aware but we have had a group of volunteers who have assisted in in the development of actually the implementation of vaccines so after spending over a year in the lockdown we thought we'd take a few minutes tonight to celebrate several of our community volunteers behind the scenes has been a group of volunteers who have worked tirelessly to secure vaccines for members of our community and equally important for the teachers and staff of the berkeley heights public schools it's my pleasure tonight to thank daniella mcdonald deborah varner saturnia saturnia gia meredith tammy sanders jill chiwala jennifer batista cheryl harris and ritu chandra their efforts have helped vaccinate over 100 teachers and staff this makes everyone safer and brings us one step closer to

023return to a normal school day it's the work of people like you who make this an amazing community that we work in and live in each of these volunteers will be receiving a certificate of recognition from the school board for their work as a volunteer and they certainly have a thanks from the board of education and i might and i'm quite sure from the entire entire berkeley heights community so we'll be reaching out to them they're not obviously here with us at columbia this evening but we did want to take a minute to publicly recognize them i have gotten messages from people who have had had their assistance and the comments just have been uh terrific i know some of them have stayed up through all hours of the night uh in the beginning when

024getting vaccine appointments was much more challenging uh and so certainly for some of our more elder population as well as our teaching staff we're quite thankful so again those i believe it's about 10 10 women we thank you we thank you for that dr brawley okay i will now share my screen okay so um we have present we have our data and i will get ready for that so we took our survey and we ended the survey on april 25th we started the survey on april 15th we had 656 total votes 442 viable votes we eliminated multiple duplicate entries and several for non-registered students 59 percent of the participation and 442 of 751 families we included the incoming pre-k kindergarten and one who are registered if you were not registered in our student information system

025then we did not count your vote that is pre-k kindergarten one and second third and fourth grade were all included the families of all these students we did eliminate duplicates and i sent this information as soon as we closed the survey to two of our tech people and they disseminated the data so out of scenario four by family 64 of our family voted for families voted for scenario four while 36.1 voted for scenario five out of the schools 74.3 percent from mary kay mcmillan voted for scenario four and scenario five received 26 percent of the votes mountain park had 63 percent of the votes for scenario four and 37 percent of the votes for scenario five thomas p hughes 61 percent of the votes were for scenario four and thirty nine percent of the votes

026were for scenario five and then conversely hughes had 65 percent of the votes for scenario five and 35 percent of the votes for scenario four you said hughes you meant to say sorry woodruff hold on okay woodruff i'm sorry conversely woodruff had 65 for scenario five do apologize for our teaching staff 58 we had approximately 81 out of our 120 certificated staff members vote and 58 of those staff members voted for scenario 4 and 30 42 percent voted for scenario five based on the survey feedback from the community and staff in them and in the best interests of the students of berkeley heights public schools the superintendent recommends the creation of two k to two schools william woodruff and mary kay mcmillan and two three to five schools thomas p hughes and mountain park beginning

027in the 21-22 school year also based on the feedback additional changes based on the three past meetings that we have had we are allowing third and fourth grade hugh students living on or off plainfield they will continue to attend hughes in a transition period instead of going to mountain park any new students coming into that area will do the mary kay mcmillan mountain park transition we will be as mr reinstein said we will offer subscription busing for 21.22 to any student who doesn't qualify for state mandated busing and we will offer a 50 subsidy for k-5 students only to ease the transition and then the board of education will review this at the end of the school year also we are doing a transportation study a two-part approach should be completed by may 31st which

028includes mary kay thomas b hughes woodruff and mountain park and if you've been to the middle school or to gl lately you also know that we have some traffic issues in those two areas so we do hope to extend the study after may 31st to those two school buildings so that we can figure out how to better manage our parking lots the traffic engineering evaluation will be an external traffic firm that is on the agenda tonight to assess the traffic and pedestrian activity at each school doing a field study of roadways and driveways observations of on-site circulation at both drop-off and pickup and an analysis of access driveways pickup areas parking areas and pedestrian routes we have been communicating with the bhtpd regarding safe routes to school and we have a meeting with them next

029week to review walking routes path and location of cross crossing guards are there any questions of the board i have one go ahead i had to go go ahead sorry my first question is with the subscription busing i know that there's probably limitations like or the minimums required to actually make it feasible is there a minimum number that we need to achieve so that subscription busting can actually be viable i can't and then i guess second part of that is i know because we used subscription busing at one point and the concern was well if you don't get enough kids on a route or would you not have the bus go that way so i'm just want to understand that okay um as we presented the um kindergarten plans there is busing at every school

030so one of the first things we would do is see if the people who are interested in subscription busing can fit on the buses that are currently scheduled to be at the school and if they don't we would look to contract out buses one of the things we're thinking of doing is both to help parents and because the times will be different at each school so if someone had a child at mary kay and a child at mountain park there would be one bus stop this the bus would pick up both students and drop the um the time for the three to five buildings is first so those students would be dropped off and then they would go to the other school so that would be more efficient and that would be helping families so

031those are the things we're looking at and kelly is prepared to send out an application tomorrow for to determine the interest in the subscription vessel okay and then my other question was more about this survey and i know that individuals overwhelmingly accepted scenario four but i know they're in the surveys my understanding there was no area for comments right so really some of the sentiments that people may have had or have not been captured and there was no real way to capture that so i would just say going forward as we do surveys i think it's really beneficial as we do things to have that availability to have the comment to understand the sentiment not just the selection that's being made so that when we do a survey we have that holistic view of yes

032i selected this but i would prefer not to do this or you know or some other ideas and then the people that are scared to respond because of the loose canon comment that i you know heard from the from you doug in that letter would have that voice and we would have a better holistic view of the sentiment of the community so that was more of just a comment great thanks joy angela okay so my question today was also regarding the blessing so don i know it probably depends on how many people use it but do you have an idea of what that potentially could cost and would it be to family or would it be per child um i mean just an idea okay the number that we have been charging is a thousand

033dollars that's based on both our costs and again we share the costs among everyone so if we have to contract for a bus that cost is being shared amongst everyone and so in the past and for the past few years that we've offered subscription busing that was the cost per per child okay and we're going to offer a 50 discount right yes okay and my other question was um i know we're looking to start have the survey completed by the first are we going to be starting yeah so that as it relates to the traffic engineering evaluation once the board approves of that tonight uh they will start tomorrow in fact and we've had discussions with them pending the board's approval tonight and they will start asap and melissa has had conversations with the police

034department and our expectations to start that portion early next week as well okay thank you other questions from board members robert robert just come off from you did i understand you to say that it's a thousand dollars per child mrs fellows oil uh yes that is the cost that we have been charging that was the cost by the time you the cost of a bus especially a bus that's new to the district can be up to sixty thousand dollars so um to cover the cost of the bus that was the uh rate that we were using what if it's per family and they're going to the same school um we would have we would consider that we'd have to look at the overall cost and the number of students on the bus i agree with

035robert i think we need to take a hard look at that okay you have two kids going to on the same route that seems exorbitant even even with a 50 discount once we get the results of the survey we'll see we'll we can get a better understanding of what the cost is and the number of students and what schools they're going to and when do you when when will we be sending out you said applications i would think we would go out with a survey to determine how extensive um the need is well we thought of that but we thought that first you sent out a survey then you send out an application we wanted the information sooner so we thought we'd just start with the application just one clarification donna's number of 60 000

036is not to purchase a bus it is a bus route it is not the purchase of i understand any other questions from the board oh yes i have a couple of questions on transportation in the traffic engineering um do we currently have crossing guards at our railroad tracks um there is a crossing guard at the railroad track that is on plainfield avenue and that is the only place that where there is a crossing guard at the railroad track so if we needed one on snyder right we would work with the police as we've done in the past the police have been great to work with and they will look at certain situations and recommend if we need a crossing guard to um for safety reasons okay i have a question on paths so we have

037a lot of paths in berkeley heights can you guys hear me or is it you said pat's you said paths like a walking path walking paths oh okay um they sometimes get blocked you know as i go on my my walks they sometimes get blocked particularly over the winter winter by felled trees etc so who's responsible for making sure these paths are walkable and cleared and one of the reasons i'm asking this is because i recently became aware that berkeley heights was awarded a safe streets to transit i think it was four hundred and ten thousand um the town said they were using a good portion of that to improve the sidewalks on plainfield avenue so i don't know if any of that money can be used to clear paths but i do think we

038need to make sure that these paths are walkable and i'm also aware that i believe jane kingsley is working on another major grant which is safe routes to school and would that money be available to make sure these paths are cleared and and improved who who pays for that uh this we when we started with safe routes to schools we did an inventory or a map of all of the paths in town some of them are on school property and some of them are on town property so it's really a joint joint ownership of the paths and some paths are all town some are school up to a certain point and then they become town so we have been working together to try to make repairs to the past okay um thank you sometimes we

039can share services or share vendors so we have been working to improve the paths thank you so i have a one i'm sorry one last question about the crossing guards is there i don't know you may have said this in the past but i do not recall if we have to get more crossing guards that's of cost to the district yes okay cut robert uh miss riley mentioned trees that have fallen which are sort of temporary and unexpected and perhaps long lasting this past winter we got a lot of snow and there's no way to predict it in advance and there's also probably no way to know for sure whether or not and when it's going to be cleared so how do we handle that usually they try to clear the paths the same time

040that they're doing other paving projects i couldn't commit to saying that all of the paths within the town have been cleared i know that the district works really hard to clear the paths that are the school property any other questions from the board okay thank you for that dr roy i assume that concludes your superintendent's report yes that concludes my superintendent's report great thank you now let's go on to liaison reports are there any liaison reports this evening go ahead joy there you go i attended the union county school board association meeting and there was just a lot of discussion about different training opportunities for board members there's a delegate assembly coming up on may 15th spring education support symposium coming early may as well and there will be virtual workshops in october so all

041of these are just educational opportunities for our board members so it's just something for the board to consider in addition there were elections for the union county sba so everyone that was in before was voted in again for the 2021-2023 term um so that was of news um and then there were some board member awards but one of the discussions that was um really interesting to me was a facilitated discussion called the way forward and um planning for the reopening of schools in september um and i know dr varley left and we can talk about i guess part of the i know in the budget we have a line item for like remediation and going forward but um one thing that came out of it is you know where's that plan for our district and

042how are we going to present that and and pull that together so something to think about as well for us going forward and then the other one was just you know there was the budget that governor murphy delivered his annual budget address in february there was 578 million dollars in additional aid and any cuts from the 2021 budget were restored and built upon and then back on schedule to reach full funding by uh 2025 so those are just highlights great thank you thank you joy any other liaison reports from other board members i just have a question about what you just said in terms of reaching full funding does that imply donna that we could get additional state funding uh we wouldn't get it this year or for next year we did get additional safety

043no i know over that i'm talking about next year we should get additional state funding again there was a five-year plan to bring everybody up to where they should be so next year we should again get additional state funding okay the reason i'm asking that is because we're back to where we were maybe about 10 years ago right what i'm hearing is that there may be an opportunity for additional state funding i'll share it with you this would be good thanks um donna facilities report um there are several resolutions on the agenda pertaining to facilities we're approving the use of the gl track for a summer camp uh we're approving the installation of security cameras at the snack shack at gl this is something we've been working on for a long time it will also

044bring increased internet capacity up there which the gl tv crew will be able to take advantage of to film different events where tonight as has been mentioned we're appointing an engineering firm to perform a traffic study at our schools the initial scope is to concentrate on the elementary schools but they will also be completing a traffic study at the middle school and the high school our goal is to optimize the flow into and out of the schools the engineers will look at the schools in relation to the neighborhood streets street access parking and pedestrian accommodations they will observe drop off and pick up and study the impact of this on the surrounding roads and uh we recently had a bid opening for the construction of the classroom toilets at mary kay and woodruff and that

045will be awarding those contracts tonight and this is in preparation for fall day kindergarten i couldn't hear you i'll shut up and what maybe i reason why i still can't hear i have the same question what what is the reason for the camera was there an issue that precipitated the purchase you know we have been looking at this for so long i can remember being at that field one night as it was getting dark and trying to figure out the um internet access so we can event i'm glad to say we can do it now but yes there was an incident of vandalism at the snack shack the doors of the shack were vandalized so we looked at it again and because technology has changed we're able to put cameras up in that area any

046other questions for donna on facilities okay donna thank you very much you know yeah i have a question um if this is kind of forward thinking but you know hopefully we're going to be returning to school in september you know in a normal routine but have i mean we still have covet in our midst most likely and you know there'll be a segment of our student population that's not vaccinated have we started to potentially rethink how lunch will be served from a facility's perspective i mean we we have me turn everything on here but yes i do think it should be on our agenda yes we have had um all of our principals have met with their bhea reps and started examining ways we thought we were hoping to open for full day this year

047it's not looking like we will i am not exactly putting it off my tape plate yet but as of right now it's not looking in that direction so we want to plan for next year so each principal has met with their bhea rep to talk about the lunch plan and what we're hoping is that this plan that we've created this year for limited indoor and with the six feet of distancing next year things will be better we know that pfizer is trying to have their vaccine approved for 12 and up so that will take care of our middle and middle and high school students we then have to really focus on our k to five and how we space them apart um additionally we're working with our food service management company and they are obviously

048changing their process and you know how they will serve lunch so we're thinking about it that's good well now moving to the citizens hearing portion of the meeting to be recognized please ensure that your first and last name is listed on your device and you should use the raise your hand function i will unmute you which will allow you to come off mute address the board although not required we prefer that your camera be turned on as well if you have more than one question please ask them all at the beginning the board recognizes students and staff members right of privacy and therefore encourages all members of the public to address their concerns regarding individual students and or staff members by meeting privately with the appropriate administrative staff member when addressing the board in a

049public forum members of the public should refrain from identifying any student and or staff member by name and are solely responsible for their comments which could be considered defamatory slanderous according to the laws of the state of new jersey each resident will have three minutes to speak given the large number of residents we expect to speak tonight we'll keep that to three minutes it is now 8 20. we will end the citizens hearing no later than approximately 10 o'clock this evening the board has additional business to discuss this evening and we need to complete that business before 11 o'clock due to state law with that we'll begin the citizens hearing the first person is ramya kasturi ramyo hi doug can you hear me hi ken ramy good evening how are you tonight hi i'm doing

050well um thanks for taking my comment i know it's a little off topic from full day kindergarten but i still think that it's a very important topic and it was raised at our last boe town hall and it was regarding the district's d e and i initiatives i just want to say that i encourage all of our boe members to speak up in support of our district's initiative i understand the need to listen to all of our stakeholders and i also understand the desire not to engage in a back and forth during these meetings however boe members remaining silent in response to what we heard last week invites the idea that our de and i goals are open to attack i know that most if not all of you are fully in support of the

051actions taken by our district since last september and chris riley in particular i know you've spoken out several times on this topic so you know just as our brave children and students and our citizens like aaron biddle and pamela stanley and susan pogue have done now is the time for the boe members to speak up and shut down any additional destructive rhetoric on this topic our district's d e and i initiatives are not only the right thing to do but they are also educationally sound and required by new jersey law thanks doug great mom thank you for your comments receiving can i say something i'd like to say something i apologize ramya um just so you know for what it's worth uh i blackened my screen and walked out of the room in protest losing

052sight of the fact that there weren't any people from the public in the room so that wasn't very effective and i assure you that won't ever happen again great thanks chris emily ramos i believe is next emily thanks doug um i want to follow up with what ramya says and speak on my support of let me start my video um support of the district's diversity equity and inclusion initiatives as a parent it's important that my kids go to schools that are safe and accepting of all students my kids want to go to schools where there's no fear of harassment discrimination or bullying and where anxieties and traumas that are caused by events happening in the real world are treated with understanding and sensitivity not ignored or treated as insignificant the creation of this kind of

053inclusive learning environment is done by educators who understand and acknowledge the inequities and biases that still exist in our communities so i applaud the initial steps that the administration and the teaching staff have taken to ensure all students feel safe and free to be themselves and i'm also blown away by the commitment that our students have to this effort they're reading books they're starting clubs they're attending meetings it's inspirational my family will continue to work on this at home doing the fun stuff like learning and celebrating doing this hard stuff acknowledging our privilege being aware of our actions and words and and having tough conversations when needed i know this work is not quick or easy but i'm confident it will lead to a more welcoming school culture and a more supportive learning environment for

054all of our kids i like ramya encourage board members to speak up to share their support and especially speaking out in the face of divisive rhetoric or efforts just to dismantle the good work that our students and teachers are doing thank you for your comments can i make that can i make one comment i mean i agree wholeheartedly that we need to take a stand and make a comment i honestly is stunned and disgusted by what was said at the last meeting but i was speechless maybe that's no excuse but i was and after thought and consideration i definitely you know know that i need to step up and and comment because that comment really affected me personally being an african-american woman in this community and feeling less secure being in this community and no

055one should feel that way so i will do my job and do my part to to support all of the good work that's being done with regards to diversity and equity and inclusion um i'm involved you know on the with with the teachers and what have you and i appreciate all the work that's being done um so i will definitely take that challenge to be more vocal and and emily i i too actually want to apologize i really should have spoken up and and i didn't and um i too will will speak up more in the future because i turn on the community and i see what everybody's doing and i'm very involved and i support you so i too will make more of an effort great thanks chris joy and and angela uh well

056the other point that i'll make is that we will continue to bring our diversity equity and inclusion items to our board meetings we've committed to bring that topic to meetings in the future we have had ones previously where we've had either the task force or our committees in fact i think most recently steve hopkins brought some students to speak so we will continue to that i don't have the future agendas in front of me right now but we have made a commitment to make this a priority and one of the ways we do that is the efforts and the resources we're putting forward and having it at board meetings and and like i said and doug same thing just want to echo what both joy angela and chris said silence was not because of not

057wanting to speak but it was also out of shock and anger and i echo everything everyone just said great next one to speak is todd nashari and todd good evening i want you i don't hear you off mute yet todd okay how about that i got you now great thank you um good evening i have here with me and i'd formally like to present a copy of an ongoing petition with 441 signatures uh from the town who do i hand this to give it to me okay great i'll bring that up shortly um this petition states residents oppose this process unfortunately the process has been falsely characterized as a petition as being against the plan before the plan was developed that is false this petition is a nine-week plan this petition is again against the

058nine-week planning process on changes of this magnitude that has locked out families it reads the current leadership of berkeley heights education has consistently implemented significant changes without resident input this year berkeley heights board of education is moving forward with the redistricting plan that will have significant impact on children the impact will be felt by most if not all families who have children in berkeley heights elementary schools starting in the fall of 2021-2022 school year this position has not been created to prevent full-day kindergarten but to prevent the voice plan to dismantle current neighborhood schools we know them today this year has been fraught with significant changes that children's and families have worked hard in adapting to remote learning separation from their peers and friends lack of stability and normalcy the last thing our children and

059families need is more change that does not incorporate their input as parents of children in our schools we are demanding that the board of ed restart the process incorporating family input from the start pausing any movement forward on this plan which has not been communicated to families with only a few months left of the school year so that's the petition uh and then i also have a few comments um so with that being said what are you going to do uh with the 441 votes more than three percent of the voting public on this petition they're asking for you to pause hopefully you do not disregard it this is the community you serve as elected members the proposal to redistrict the schools has uh as recommended by the superintendent should be rejected by the board

060of end this evening the process is fundamentally fogged you've not been able to cite credible research to back up the plan beyond a school in alaska to see if this really is the best plan for berkeley heights that's not an unreasonable request that you should be able to hopefully do regarding community involvement you say that you've done by holding two town hall meetings those are not a dialogue between community having the first amendment rights of each board member removed and not allowing them to respond it's hard to fathom it is 2021 i appreciate the comments regarding diversity it would be great to hear that about this plan a magnificent or sorry a large magnet change of magnitude additionally regarding the walkability of schools it was quoted initially when this process started that for most students

061we have preserved the ability for them to walk to their neighborhood oriented school frankly this hasn't been preserved for the woodruff area the safety of our children should have been the first thing you started with when considering a plan of this magnitude it's clear and abundantly clear that that did not happen now happening by may 31st but you're voting tonight i'm not sure how that works um do one before the other it doesn't quite make sense the vpd should have done a traffic study prior to presenting the plan uh this seems to be a misstep by the efforts to not have notified the bpt or town council formally you intend to change this town for the foreseeable future as yet another various misstep i really can't understand why if you're so confident in the plan

062then why not have done this um the elected board uh who says they have children's best interests to let this fundamental step be blatantly ignored really seems to be looking the other way while this plan is being pitched i would also like to direct one question to joy young if possible joy are you aware when individuals on the board speak about and compare the hamilton terrorist transition which happened many years ago it happened over a three year period with actual time appropriate transitions for grade levels the school is not uprooted overnight in order to happen over a few weeks and during a pandemic how do you compare these um and why does this process seem to be right now as it relates um look finally find a way for full day kindergarten you have the

063support you don't have the support for redistricting i know some feel it's just a few that are being vocal but there's many who are also very upset who aren't comfortable being vocal as well full day kindergarten and redistricting should have never been combined the board president has stated we only need four classrooms for full day kindergarten let's find them without changing the entire town there are over a thousand units coming into this town there is a real possibility within the next two to three years we will be having this conversation all over again none of us can truly say what exactly is happening with those units and the influx of students holding off on this last comment last comment i understand holding off on this proposal will provide the time for everyone involved to determine

064carefully and thoughtfully what is best for the future of course the community children there was no need for this rush top-down plan i implore the board uh to do the right thing thank you hey todd thank you for your comments do you want to answer that question can you repeat the quote oh my gosh i'm getting an echo uh no no it's true joy i'll i'll repeat the question had to do with the fact that when we redistricted mary kay uh todd stated that it was done over three a three year period in comparison to what we're doing now and can you comment on that i was not aware that it was done over a three year period of time and i'm sure it was longer than the time frame that you're speaking of um

065but i will have comments as we go through the vote later on and at that time you will hear my statement great thanks joy uh good evening hi uh first thank you to the board for for allowing me to speak tonight uh my name is brett sayer and i'm here to talk about something not only extremely close to my heart but something that's become woven into the fabric of this town next tuesday may 4th will be the two-year anniversary of annie young's passing she was a third grader at hughes a student council member a friend to so many a generous and loving soul i knew her as all those things but also as a dynamic athlete on the softball field i had the privilege of coaching annie for six seasons of softball she was a

066star on the team a leader and a competitor all with a sense of humor well beyond her years she loved the sport and was first in line for anything about it whether it was to shake hands after a game or demonstrate a drill in practice annie spent so many nights and weekends playing softball at columbia middle school and she loved every moment of it including some of the final moments of her far too short life it is in her spirit and with the full support of her family and so many other families in our community that i formally ask the board to name the upper softball field at columbia middle school after annie young over the last two years the play for annie mantra has become so much more than any single person hundreds of

067athletes across all sports in berkeley heights continue to don her number 19 on stickers and patches to represent the joy of being able to have fun with your friends through athletics formally dedicating this field for annie would further cement that joyfulness of youth that we all want to see for our children currently while the field does while the field does have a number 19 banner across the backstop and two donated permanent benches it does not have a name is just called upper columbia within our softball program we are asking for the dedication to be formalized so that we can make privately funded improvements to the field in annie's name and memory in just a few months annie should have been moving up to colombia as an incoming sixth grader with my daughter her teammates and

068her friends with the timing of both this and next week's anniversary it would be a beautiful gift to those of us who continue to miss her every day and a beautiful message to all children throughout our community if the members of the board support this formal dedication please speak in favor so that we can permanently honor a member of our community who we will never forget thank you brett thanks very much uh for that um i i have understood before that you know you were her coach and obviously a tremendous loss for our community when it happened uh i will uh we'll take this under advisement uh i will have to figure out the best way for the board to brett understand your request and then for us to uh begin to act i'll act

069on that so thank you and brett i might i might reach out to you uh the next couple of days just to have a little bit better uh dialogue with you uh about about the request and then we'll figure out the best way to engage the board so brett thank you very much for your comments uh the next speaker is michael bazone michael good evening how are you tonight sorry um i am uh doing well thank you i am uh back to uh reiterating some things about uh what what i said last week um as i will still absolutely stand by i'm also happy to hear some people speak about um attacks on them personally i was not personally attacking anybody in my comments last week so um melissa barley i am glad that you

070brought that up about personal attacks and it's unfortunate that people personally attack people so i'm in agreement with you here i also want to reiterate that um uh i believe that the the kindergarten rollout what i see has been great and and finding well so i thank you for doing that because i don't think people thank people enough when they do a good job i still will reiterate that your opinion the opinions that come from you just seem to very uh be very one-sided on issues and it causes division so as people were upset by again the george floyd incident as was i there are still 800 people that are murdered in chicago that bothers me too so why a conversation about one but not the up that i will never understand it seems to

071fit a narrative the diversity should include diversity of fault i don't really particularly care for diversity of skin color because i don't care about people's skin color i'll never ask to assume that a hundred white people would all think alike is racist to assume that a hundred black people would all think alike is racist diversity of thought seems to be not very inclusive and very hypocritical of the people of this town that i saw you can go online and see people that have never spoken to me never reached out to me never cared to talk to me slander and smear my name and show that a lot of people that actually are encouraging the diversity and inclusion group are actually the ones that are the bullies and the bigots i put my face out here

072i put my name out here because i do care about this community it was also another gentleman by the name of elliot i don't even know who that is she told me to please move out of town this is the type of anti-inclusion and anti-diversity that is coming under the mask of what is being pushed i will not go back with those people because i will not stoop to that level [Music] i'm a man of dignity and i hope that everybody else in the same community can do that i'm a very nice gentleman and i will still help you in a time of need regardless of what you've ever said about me but i really would like a diversity of thought because it is being very one-sided and that is my major concern and i

073will finish with this i do not believe that this country or our community is overall a racist country this is a class issue if you want people to get along better as a whole you raise people's socioeconomic status do not believe that as a whole is a race problem it should be a dialogue and i hope diversity of thought is included and welcome thank you michael thank you for your comment i do not agree with your points of view i don't think the diversity of thought in this town is one-sided and i think your views are out of sync with the majority of this community great thanks chris doug grober uh evening can you hear me i can hear you loud and clear good evening okay great good evening uh who's just asking i'll start

074with you oh okay okay good evening um a couple of things but first and foremost i'm presenting copies of an ongoing petition for binding referendum on the issue of redistricting and reconfiguration this petition was evaluated by several attorneys this petition is separate and apart from other petitions on this issue this petition does not seek to halt full day kindergarten this petition seeks to provide the community a voice on the issue of redistricting and reconfiguration as this petition does not put full day kindergarten on referendum the boe can continue to move forward with ft fdk this year i'm assuming i can hand this to you mr weinstein at appropriate time okay uh i want to speak directly to the board okay thank you i want to speak directly to the board members that didn't have a

075chance to speak up that are going to make statements tonight voting tonight and voting no is it does not mean that you're rejecting full day kindergarten and many people understand that um i think pretty much everybody wants full leak in the garden that was never the issue redistricting and reconfiguration was always the issue it was how this was presented on april 8th to the community and everything that you've heard over the last three weeks negative or good this the redistricting and the reconfiguration should be put to a vote by the community we've debated this as a town for years the fairest way to settle this is a vote by the public we've had experts put their recommendations in the community needs their chance to have their input on a fair process um this simply means

076in saying no simply means that you want to listen engage the community with which you represent so i'm simply going to end with this it simply means that to act and to vote you have been charged to do so by the state of new jersey which is carrying out the will of the people of this community says it on your pamphlet i think it's second page that's imperative and important that's not happening tonight and many people agree with that uh thank you great doug thank you for your comments and i'll take that when both of those when you get a chance uh next to speak is charleston tour charles good evening charles just hold on hold on one second thank you thanks doug okay uh charles centore sorry about that charles good evening hi evening

077everyone i'd like to just uh say that uh you know it's very hard to come come out and you know speak you know you know in in this in this uh you know setting but i feel that it's always necessary this speak at the last meeting um so i just want to have some direct questions for uh from mrs varley um can you please share why you chose not to include a comparison of your prior district in florence park where you were superintendent of that utilized the exact same model that has been proposed to the board also did you personally take a look at the state test scores from florin park to compare to our elementary schools and if so can you share your findings if not please explain why also are you aware that

078you are recommending a model that was utilized from your prior district that is time tested a model that is not providing better results than than our current model and i actually did the research and looked at all state test scores is this a proper protocol for a superintendent to recommend the plan that will create negative results also please ask tell me why option three was excluded from the survey when it's on your actual you know agenda in presentation as a viable option because you know when you're taking a survey of someone you know especially it's it's single-sided excluding the uh primarily the witcher community what happens is is you're just you're sort of you're asking them to choose an option four or five it's not really a true survey we would see a lot of

079different results if we actually had people vote on option three to see you know what they say about that and then we could you know use all the data and version together and see what kind of plan we come up with another concern is that you know option three you know it could actually be ended up being the least cost of all options because if you remove the uh bathrooms which i believe you know you don't necessarily have to have bathrooms for state law you can have a bathroom plan or southern escort you know or if it's fairly close to the classroom you can utilize that i believe with um you know within the laws and then the bathrooms could be implemented and ruled out the following school year or thereafter so why is it

080just throwing all the coupling together to sort of make it look like option three is is is the most cost when we could actually have it very viable and keep a one to five model that is very successful in our near neighboring towns more successful than our towns and very comparable why will we ship to something else can you please answer that for me great charles thanks very much those are all your questions um i think for now yes that's it for now that was your last chance that'll be all the questions for tonight so let's uh take those on charles i'll take the last one dr barley i'll come back to talk to you about the ones about florin park charles he answered your question about why scenario three is not included there is

081that scenario three when we talked about it does not physically be uh able to be done when we look at sarah three which is having the one to five at the current three elementary schools that has an additional cost of approximately five hundred thousand dollars for the additional staff as well as given that the elementary schools share a cafeteria and a gymnasium were not able to run those schools and have physical education which is state requirement so although there was a scenario three that was looked at and investigated uh it was not one that was put forward because it's not a viable option for us to do uh coming back uh doctor the first question is uh a comparison uh i'll combine the first two questions a comparison to the model in florence park and

082the state test scores of florin park can you talk a little bit about like like i always first start with reminding people the structure of florin park district that you came from and then talk about the comparison and the state test okay so yes florian park is is organized cater to three to five it is not the reason the only reason we went in this direction sparta where i came with came from before was also pre-k to two they had a separate third grade and then um a four and five school six to eight and nine to twelve and yes florin park's test scores well vastly have been improving are not up to par with berkeley heights but that is not the reasoning behind and i think we've we've gone over the reason reasoning of

083many literature reviews and discussions of why we recommended pre-k to two three to five and six to eight nine to twelve along the great bands and the last question dr valley was uh do you feel that based on the florence park bottle how is it you came to recommend the current model for for berkeley heights in all honesty i think um and i know mr mckinney miss fellazola and all the elementary people who were involved with this miss kopez miss miss corley etc ms gardner we looked at many many different models and when i say we have a very large spreadsheet we have a very large spreadsheet this was first of all which we've talked about many times best practices developmentally appropriate and it also gave us you know a good split between the town

084as far as using snyder as much as we possibly could go down that way don't down that road and it just made the most sense and it was financially achievable great thanks dr next one up is michael lebland michael good evening good evening again um my position on this redistricting has been very clear from the beginning um i'm not a fan of it i don't like the idea of the loss of community schools uh it's not why i moved to the suburbs it's not why i left a large city that ran the large scale programs a couple items i'd like to thank everyone who's been involved with this process um for being the public being involved finally in this process and the board for hearing our voices i hope they've actually been listened to some

085people on the board that i've interacted with have said they've not really listened to the voices and they've made that very clear at the meetings but that's neither here or there second to the parents of berkeley heights you've been involved now and i strongly ask that you stay involved you've seen the sides of education that are more than just you know your kid comes home from school the report card and note in the book bank you need to stay involved you need to hold the district accountable large promises have been made that this redistricting will bring miracles we now need to hold the district accountable for the miracles we're expecting so you need to keep coming these meetings again in september october and follow up and find out how this plan is working to hold

086the school district accountable promises of common planning time common curriculums we'll need to see evidence of that and i will promise at the next and follow meetings i will ask for evidence of those things comparing them to the old ones versus the new ones these are not trade secrets of educators curriculum is public knowledge and i will be asking for the curriculums to see how they've changed from the previous years to next year the district promised us new work we're going to ask for it as a public third i'm sorry let me go to my questions now am i concerned about the data from the traffic survey that survey will not be accurate we have large numbers of people not attending school right now many kids are still learning from home many staff are not

087working so you will see reduced numbers of traffic at the schools so any kind of data collected from these traffic surveys will be invalid uh you still have people not working so computing is not normalized i know my morning commute now is under an hour uh pre-cove and it was over an hour on a regular basis um when things return to normal i know my commute will go back to an hour and a half it will not stay 50 minutes like it's been this year so and then you're going to add in a thousand units on the corner of snyder and hamilton that's going to rearrange traffic there so the data from the traffic survey that is rushed and last minute will not be accurate for september no matter what data it provides second you're

088now asking woodruff area children to cross railroad tracks and snyder avenue twice to get to hughes and they'll have to cross back going home snyder was so dangerous not just a few years ago that the town lobbied to put a traffic light in what additional protection are our children going to have crossing these railroad tracks and crossing at those dangerous intersections there's no light for the hughes so my children will now have to cross there with no light and we all know how well people don't stop for people in crosswalks in this town lastly my final question how is the building building for the bathrooms done prior to an acceptance of this plan how why would you take bids on a project that hasn't been approved yet i don't understand how that works i'd like

089some clarification on both of those issues michael thanks for your questions uh first one regarding your question about uh the traffic study and whether it will be accurate or inaccurate obviously we're all aware that the current environment does not represent where we were pre-covered that said we're still going to do the traffic engineering report but obviously account for whatever the traffic is well i'm sure we will talk to people who work at the school we'll talk to the police officers we have a lot of years of experience we're not just going to look at the traffic one day we've had traffic at each of these schools for years and years that the police department has been involved in so we'll obviously look at the traffic engineer report that we have and of course we'll reflect

090upon the other data we have from years and years and obviously we'll do the best and if traffic changes again in september when it goes back to normal we'll we'll look at it this is not a one and done thing we have worked with the police department for years and years on adjusting traffic and transportation and walking paths to do that second on your question about the railroad tracks i think you might have heard earlier this evening we have a crossing guard at the rail tracks on plainfield if it comes back that the recommendation to put a crossing guard at the railroad tracks on snyder and that's exactly what what we'll do there are crossing guards in the areas of all the schools you mentioned hughes this obviously now the traffic light there we have

091the uh we have kids walking to to hughes school today they do it safely uh and if additional kids are walking to hughes from different places we will analyze that and we will ensure that we have the safety for that um uh donna do you want to talk about the the building bidding process obviously uh to get ahead of that we did um work with our architect to put out on the specs for that and we did we did get the specs back and you mentioned that's on the agenda tonight do you want to talk about how that process works sure um we were considering and we have talked about offering full-day kindergarten prior to it was included in our budget and to be able to get this done in time for september we knew

092that we had to award a contract so that the contractors can go out and get their permits start ordering their parts and everything that they needed to complete the job uh the bid was opened and we have 60 days to award the contract to them in case something didn't get approved we would have had time to not be committed to awarding a contract to them so we were being proactive and getting information getting the contractor on board so that if the plan was approved to move forward we would be able to do that great thanks donna uh lorraine anderson is next lorraine good evening hi uh can you hear me i can hear you loudly i i don't i don't have any questions tonight i just wanted to echo brett sayer's comments tonight about celebrating

093that or commemorating actually the two year anniversary of annabelle's um young's death decks tuesday in hopes that the board can name upper columbia field after her i just wanted to underscore how much she's given to this community even after her short life her legacy has continued to pay it forward through the sharing network and he had donated organs to save the lives of at least five people and also through the annabel forever young foundation they've already awarded two scholarships to some very deserving governor livingston students and it will continue every year it's been a commitment that her family has made and um they're the reason i've known the youngs for 23 years and they're the reason why our family moved to berkeley heights berkeley heights means the world to them the support that they've received

094over the last two years has been overwhelming and they want to do whatever they can to preserve the legacy and the life of their daughter and as brett mentioned many of her classmates who currently visit the garden at hughes that visit her whenever they feel like they miss her are going to colombia next year and it would really be a wonderful place for them to to feel a connection because annie spent so many days and years on that very softball field so i thank you for considering the renaming of upper columbian and hope that you can fulfill this request thank you lorraine thank you uh for your comments i don't have a lot more to share than what i share with brett but i i do appreciate uh you talking about that i know our

095community has come together in a tremendous way in support of the young family i know that just nordy who's not here tonight did a lot to work with with that family and all the things they've done you mentioned the garden brett mentioned the benches so we have and the scholarships you mentioned as well so we have already a number of things uh so thanks for your comments this this evening toya facey i know you're not damian facey because i know damian and you look a lot more like toya facey so toya oh am i on camera okay i can't see my i can't see everything but um i can see you good evening hello good evening um so i just wanted just to take a moment just to make a little bit of a statement

096so much like the earlier comments um very eloquent comments um i did want to say that i do applaud the district for their de and i activities over the last year um i want to go back to the district motto of include inspire and empower and i want to kind of focus on that word include include means all it means all children belong um and i think that that's very important because that is our motto and that is why these de and i initiatives are underway um i would also like to address the comments earlier that the district does not include diversity of thought and i just wanted to point out one thing listening today listening over the last two time town halls the mere fact that people are able to come to a board

097of ed meeting and express their views unfettered shows that the district respects even if they may not agree with differing views so i disagree with that comment that the district is not open to differing views the mere fact that we're all here and we all have different views and everyone is listening and being respectful shows that people are respectful of differing views and the last thing i want to comment on anyone who questions why we have d e and i initiatives in the district i encourage you to listen to the children the children have told us as parents as teachers as administrators that we have issues in the school and it is not always race so i also want to refute that it is being differently abled it's being lgbtq and so anyone who has

098questions about whether or not this is something we need to do i encourage you to listen to the children because they told us this is what we should be doing as a community and that's all i wanted to say thank you guys very much thank you very much for your for your comments this evening as many people know toya is part of the berkeley heights diversity council and we've partnered a lot another element of our other leg of that stool is our partnership with the diversity council that toy is a member of so toya thanks again for your comments this evening uh george's ipad is george devaney george good evening how are you tonight there we go um okay now i can see myself thank you doug um at one of the recent town hall

099meetings that the board of ed uh had as it relates to redistricting um i related my personal experiences as an administrator and that sometimes to be a strong leader also means that you have to take a step backwards to be able to move forward with a plan one that is done together with the experts in the community working together in a collaborative way to produce a result that everyone can be proud of and actually share in the ownership of it tonight the board can demonstrate that type of leadership by voting no on the superintendent's recommended redistricting plan for our schools as time has gone on it seems more and more as if this plan was predetermined and the justification was backed into even worse items such that that had even worse items such as impacts

100on traffic patterns pedestrian state safety have yet to be determined all stakeholders should be at the table from the beginning talking about these and other issues not at the end when the plan is finished these are not items that should be backfilled as an afterthought tonight the board will decide which road to go down you can double down on a predetermined plan that so many people believe is tone deaf to the community and its inputs or you can insist on a new one that takes a step backwards in order to develop a true collaborative effort i ask that you vote no on the recommended plan find a way to implement full day kindergarten while we all work together on redistricting and that's my comment on that um as to i i just want to also

101add uh my sentiments to brett sayer who spoke earlier um you know it's uh i coach a team that's just one i guess one uh age group higher than annie was and i can tell you the impact uh and the feelings that these these girls have still resonates today uh i believe everyone is proud of the 19 that's on the on that backstop um and when brett said that um there were hundreds of berkeley heights athletes that were the berkeley that were the 19 patched including varsity athletes at up at gl um it was an understatement the entire there were entire leagues that were the 19 patch in her memory and she had an impact that was that was far reaching regional it was a regional impact and was far-reaching and i think it would

102be a such a fitting tribute uh to be naming that field after her and i wanted to add my support to that thank you great george thanks for your comments on both uh the proposed realignment and other ones for annie sy said you're next this evening good evening um hi just give me one second hi um good evening everyone um i have a quick question on am i okay where am i going no you're good go right ahead so i see that on our district website we have a code of ethics for boe so is it something that every boe member the elected boe member is supposed to abide by that's my first question and the code of it i think it's number i don't know the number but it says that i'll confine my

103bold action to policy making planning and appraisal and i'll help to frame policies and plans only after the board has consulted those who will be affected by them uh so if you could please answer this question then i have a follow-up question science i've told you before ask all of your questions and it will answer all of your questions yes i understand doug and i said last year last time too like i have looked through your policy book and most of my questions and i hope you can understand it's late for everybody so instead of us going back and forth is there a policy that lim that states that i have to give all my questions up front and i'll give you the same answer that i gave you last week with the way we

104have set this up is you ask all your questions up front and then we'll answer them and as i told you before ask all your questions your time is running okay and so based on this code of ethics that you have for the board of ed isn't this a violation of your code of ethics because um not all the impacted were consulted by this by this plan uh that's being recommended by dr wardly it was also stated early on that we will add town halls if it's determined more time is needed any young thing while i was on oh um it was stated that we'll add town halls if it's determined we need more um i think someone's not on mute so who made the determination that two town halls were enough and i'll also

105request every board member to respond to my questions um if it's possible because there was like a formal vote by board members on superintendent's recommendation and i don't know how it's legal or ethical without the board members discussing publicly the recommendation or voting on it for the survey to be sent to the parents so without when there was a lack of board approval how were the survey options even relevant also there was lack of empirical data for removing option three and i know the argument is that it's called it's costly it costs about half a million dollars per per annum but then when you looked at the i had to i think email dr warley at least seven or eight times to get a cost a side-by-side cost comparison for all the scenarios so i

106just got it like three days ago and if you look at the differences it's not that huge so i think we need a valid answer on why was option three removed also how is it safe to determine that a plan where elementary school kids are expected to cross railroad tracks safe i asked this question to dr warley in an email and the response was our students currently cross railroad tracks i don't think so not at least not in the neighborhoods that we are in by woodruff nobody crosses any railroad tracks so i don't know how tone left can that answer get uh also there was there is a lack of a comprehensive traffic study if if the study was done you would have known that a percentage of kids don't cross railroad tracks at this

107moment especially the 20 of the impacted students in woodruff don't cross any railroad tracks then i asked on the march 18th meeting if the border fed will consider all the options uh before the plan is presented and one of the options that i suggested and i think chris santor also echoed the same thing at the last town hall was did we look at switching back to four k to five neighborhood schools as the original town planners of berkeley heights intended the answer to my question again after multiple uh requests from dr warley was an inaccurate statement in writing saying that yes we made she basic basically dr wadley said that this was considered and it will cost taxpayers six million dollars i want a clarification there was no mention of six million dollars until the

108april 22nd town hall so where is this number coming from we have not heard of this option at all reverting back to four k to five elementary schools and was that even was it even evaluated was side side you can have one more question you're at almost five minutes yeah one more question you have one more question you have one more question and then we'll answer them no no go by the time there was an interruption and you are aware of that you're at five minutes you were interrupted for about 15 seconds and i and i and i stopped ask your last question and then we'll respond and the last um question is when the last transition happened uh from hamilton terrace or mkm when it was considered converted to mkm early childhood center it

109was over a three-year transition period and i'm really thankful to chris riley for actually responding to my email i think she's the one board member who actually responded to my questions and i want to thank her for that but i want to ask her having lived through that transition how does it feel to give the current parents during a global pandemic three weeks why are you cramming it down our throats and because there was a lack of formal board approval formal discussion and removal of options by the doc by the superintendent who's only authorized to recommend she cannot remove options that were presented only the board can make that decision by formal discussion and what how are you guys confident that this plan is right and you're not violating your code of ethics that's it

110thank you great thanks for your questions uh you asked a lot of them let me break those down we'll answer all of them uh the board every board member on our board and the state of new jersey is held by the code of ethics and i'm quite confident we did not violate any items in the code uh in the code of ethics uh your second question was around town hall nobody consulted us how were we consulted for this recommendation so this is this is not a back and forth discussion between you and i okay you answered you asked questions i'm going to answer the questions and that's going to be the end of it if you and i need to have an additional conversation tomorrow we can do that you asked about eight questions we're

111going to answer the eight questions and if there's additional dialogue you and i can have it tomorrow as far as the two town halls where we talked about this plan we realized that there would be a lot of requests for community input we realized that we'd have a a meeting we thought two town halls spread out over the course of two weeks would give people multiple hours to ask questions with which they have and it was it was a decision that that we made as a as a group to uh to do the town halls at the superintendent's recommendation uh in terms of your questions um about about empirical data for scenario three i've answered that question a number of times i know the sheet that you were given i made the comment uh previously

112that there's no material difference between scenario four and scenario five and obviously and you now have the data that backed up exactly what i said that there's a very small difference between sarah four and scenario five and scenario three uh has approximately a five hundred thousand dollar additional cost that not only have i stated multiple times but dr varley put in her email response uh shortly after the first uh meeting uh that we had so the empirical data is certainly there your fourth question was about crossing uh railroad tracks whether it's safe i believe you said that dr varley was tone deaf turns out that we do have people who cross railroad tracks on plainfield we didn't say that we don't have people crossing we have people crossing railroad tracks on snyder we said that

113we do have people crossing road tracks and we are quite well aware that the fact that there would be woodruff kids were just community students who if they were to walk to hughes across the ground tracks so we're not the least bit tone deaf and well aware of how that would has to be addressed in our safe routes to schools in terms of the traffic study i think we've addressed that both in my remarks and dr volley's remarks uh we we will do this traffic engineering evaluation we will get the results of that and we'll make whatever the recommendations that the professionals ask of us uh regarding your fifth question on uh all all the options uh and whether all the options were presented i'll let dr varley talk a little bit about uh the

114four options of k to five uh quite frankly uh the one to five option of scenario three doesn't work because as i explained previously we can we can't share the cafeteria and the auditorium in our current configurations so making that a k to five in our current configurations and the size of our schools wouldn't wouldn't work in terms of uh the six million dollars uh number the six million dollar number comes from our uh from our architect uh we obviously one of the scenarios we had is could we potentially add a wing to uh to the mary kay mcmillan uh school the price tag we got back from the architects was in that range and that's where that number comes from uh in terms of uh dr well i'll ask you to just comment on

115on the last one uh and chris riley uh she also uh so i asked you also to comment a little bit on this this last question as well which i'll ask you to do as well and the question was on the mkm transition that occurred back uh when mkm was done uh it was commented that that happened over the course of three years uh so dr vale i'll start i'll start with you do you have any comments or reflections uh about that and chris i know your your children were part of that transition so i'll ask you to comment as well so i um i don't have absolute information i did text tom long who was a part of the regional district at that time and he doesn't remember it being three years he also

116says that there wasn't a vote to his knowledge now i don't know how exactly he can remember at all but it was through text message just while this was going on so i will let um chris talk from her perspective because she did live it um yeah i did live it and um a neighbor mentioned to me shared with me uh about a week or so ago that there was no community vote on uh on the restructuring of k through one my children were at hughes for k through one excuse me k through five um there was no community vote on the restructuring and the establishment of the mary kay macmillan uh early childhood center i went to helen our resident historian on the board because she's been on the board for i don't know

11730 something years right and i asked her and she told me that first there was de-regionalization of the high school that did go to uh that did go to a vote because it required a referendum due to funding so it went to a uh uh it did the referendum for the de-regionalization went to went to the community for a vote but the establishment of mkm uh did not and that's according to helen so that's all i know um other than i was impacted and i will talk about that in my closing in my in my statement great chris thanks very much and psy thank you for your questions uh i believe this don bernstein is next don hello i'm trying to start the video and okay sorry there you go hi thank you for taking

118my my question i'm going to go quickly um i i just wanted to point out um that again reiterate that i think there's a sense that uh the people speaking out or um the people not speaking out are ones who are in support of the solutions but i also just want to reiterate that there are a lot of people who um are not in support who are also not speaking out um and um i just wanted to also bring up over 450 people participated in the petition brought forth by todd negerin earlier in the meeting um the petition was signed by residents who were saying they do not feel comfortable with the board proceeding with solutions um that have been proposed my question is how many people participated in the survey because i believe that

119that number is smaller than the number who participated in the petition and if the number of people who participated in the petition exceeds the number of people who participated in the survey i think that is an important data point the board should consider when voting this evening thank you great dawn thanks for your your comments uh the answer to your question is there were 442 people um who had viable entries into that that was uh 59 of the people of the families that are voted that's there given that given that the number of people of the petition um i haven't i haven't looked at the position that i got this evening i suspect it comes from people who are in that k-4 population and others that are not so don't don't know that we have

120a comparable number but we'll certainly take a look at the petition and thank you for your questions and comments this evening the next is uh melissa santore melissa good evening good evening can you hear me i can hear you loud and clear melissa hi how are you um thank you for allowing me the time to speak um basically i just wanted to ask a question um regarding um some local you know some different states are exploring um and approving universal pre-k programs um so let's just say that new jersey approves that program has did you consider that when you were um choosing this model like would we have to redistrict the schools again in the future if uh pre-k is mandated by the state of new jersey or becomes universal is that something that's been

121considered by the board of education with this plan as well as does this plan include the increase in population in the township with over a thousand new units coming in that's almost a class size per grade and i know columbia is already a pretty tight squeeze and some students at the high school last year had to eat lunch in the hallway um so was this did this whole plan consider the increase in population in the town of berkeley heights and that's my question great melissa thanks for your two questions thank you i'll deal with the second one first the answer is yes we have uh we do understand exactly which township developments are coming in and approximately the timing as many of them were under construction we had a demographer come in and look at

122a lot of things the things that democrats do and we also fed them all the proposed housing developments at the time that they were so the answer is yes we have done that by by doing this proposed realignment of the schools we do have a better balance so it allows uh for growth which which is the lead into the answer to your second question about universal pre-k should the state mandate like others have to have universal pre-k if you and i would encourage you to go back uh if you can and you go back and look at one of the slides uh look at slide number 20 in the deck that we have which is scenario four and it tells you what the enrollment uh will be at each of our schools uh versus the

123capacity of each of our schools and in both mary kay mcmillan uh and and in woodruff there is capacity for additional students in there and uh and that was done knowing that both the universal pre-k could come our way as well as the expected growth in township so an affirmative yes and yes on both of those questions uh but thanks uh for answering that uh tony knuth is next tony good evening how are you uh good i am wow you hear me i'm sorry about that tony i was on mute i apologize sorry can you hear me i can hear you loud and clear tony perfect because my questions are still kind of on option three i brought this up at the first town hall um and i got the survey as i'm i guess

124one of the best of parents that i have two kids that use right now um and i did not fill the survey out so i did not feel that it was appropriate for me to fill it out when i did not agree with either option um and i guess i wonder about opposite 3-1 the fact that i think you said 59 of the people you sent it to filled it out so there were more non-response answers and there weren't support for option five um and i think there were a lot of other people who felt that same way they didn't feel like they could fill it out appropriately so could you speak to that how you're going to address the 41 of the people who it was sent to who did not respond um also

125with option 3 i believe when we asked about it when i asked about it and other people asked about it in the first town meeting um i believe you stated it was not developmentally appropriate that's why it was not chosen yet tonight you have stated it was not fiscally responsible um so could you just speak a little bit more to that um and maybe i just misremembered or forgot what was said but i thought you said it was not developmentally appropriate and tonight you said it was not fiscally responsible um i've also heard a rumor and maybe you could address this that the construction of the bathrooms at woodruff has already begun i don't know if you can speak to that um and then also we've talked about the railroad junctions and i guess i

126wanted to know if you have any idea how many cases five students currently cross railroad tracks because i don't believe there'd be any students who would be walking over plainfield going to an elementary school i think that would be mostly middle school students going to columbia from the uh garfield neighborhood um so i guess those are kind of my questions or what i'm looking for comments on great tony thanks for your questions this evening uh in terms of uh option three uh you're absolutely correct 41 of the people who were sent the survey did not complete the survey quite frankly we wish that it was higher we obviously sent it out we communicated we sent a revised a reminder survey out i believe on on friday after the second of the town halls to remind

127people to vote so we we actively promoted this as best as we could i i am aware of some people like yourself who have told me that they chose to not vote because they didn't feel there were the options i don't know that there's anything we can specifically do about that other than we encourage people to vote and i'm i'm sorry that they didn't take a chance to vote regarding scenario three uh you did hear me say at a previous town hall that it was not developmentally appropriate uh and so it's it's not just one thing tony so you did hear me say that you are correct uh there are several reasons why scenario three was not a part of the survey one is it was not developmentally appropriate today we have uh four grade

128levels together banding of four grade levels uh scenario three would ban five grade levels together whereas our current approach bands three grade levels together and that was you know that was the point i made about developmentally appropriate fiscal responsibility is another one i talked about the additional 500 000 and then you heard me talk again this evening about the sharing and the ability to use a cafeteria and gymnasium and not be able to conduct gym so there are several reasons why scenario 3 was not included i can tell you emphatically that the woodruff bathrooms have not begun we haven't even accepted bid for anything so that has not occurred donna i'll ask you to comment on the railroad tracks in terms of who are the the students that cross the railroad tracks i think tony's

129comments directly sounds right to me that that it also would include it would include middle school students who did that but can you comment on that uh he is correct it is the middle school students who are crossing the railroad checks to get to columbia great and we don't have any elementary school students who would live north of the railroad tracks people would come to mountain park uh no okay they don't right so tony you're absolutely right uh those students who cross the road tracks are currently middle school students tony thanks again for your questions next up is is dipty tipty good evening hey doug good evening how are you i am very well tonight how are you this evening i'm good thanks thank you for giving me the time to ask a few questions

130um i have a couple of questions for dr warley uh and i have one question for you doug um i'll start with the ones for dr barley so we've heard you know for the past i guess i have heard since 8th of april that the model that we have in our schools today is not developmentally appropriate and that is the reason why you know uh you're recommending that change so my question is how are you going to measure the success of the model that is being proposed the k two two three to five what are the specific parameters that are you that are going to be used to measure the success of this model in berkeley heights and in a few years if there is more research that comes out that says hey now it's

131k to six or k to eight schools that are more developmentally appropriate are we then going to reconfigure these models um the school models again and um do you want me to continue the question for you doug yeah yeah yeah so those are the two questions for that for dr vargas those are those are my questions for dr barley okay and for me yeah and for you i guess my understanding is that boe members typically provide oversight you know to the superintendent you know they provide feedback uh more than an advisory capacity is that a fair understanding okay okay just no no no i'm just asking is that a fair understanding of the role of the boe our role is oversight and governance yes yes okay so i guess time and again you know in

132these town halls we've seen you in the role of sort of the defender of the plan being presented instead of being an objective reviewer you know somebody who's going to ask questions uh poke some holes to say hey is this sound as a solid so how is it okay for you to vote on this plan tonight because you seem to have a bias already made up your mind you know it's it i i'm just wondering out loud how is that okay great thanks for your three questions we'll take a moment of time um let's start with you dr varley the first question was uh if uh we talked about it not being developmentally appropriate what is what are the measures that you'll look for that we can expect to see maybe a year from now

133after this that will know that that this is you know an alignment that has been successful i would say we would probably wouldn't see it in a year from now we know that it takes it takes a couple of years to really see the effects of a big change and but in a couple of years we should be able to look at the data and our student achievement as well as our number of students who are receiving um intervention services we will know if we've been successful if it is um developmentally appropriate and the second the second question was uh what happens if there's a potential better or different developmentally appropriate recommendation years from now what do we have to reconfigure again and obviously that's a hypothetical question because i know that you and your

134team are always looking at educational models but how would you at least address the idea of a hypothetical question about configuration one of the things i've said from the beginning is that generally you don't even if you have best practice research you don't realign schools on a whim you one thing we tried to address here we well many things we tried to address were full day kindergarten and our inequities across the board so if we had to already realign we might as well realign to the best practices and the best model [Music] thanks uh dipty i think your last question was was was from was from me uh and you asked uh you asked me in our roles oversight governance how can i uh how can i be the one who answers uh questions and

135then uh impartially uh vote on votiness and the answer question is quite is quite easy my role as a board member is to provide oversight and governance and to make decisions that are in the best interests of students the easiest way to think about this is that the superintendent and the administration run the schools and the board of ed's job is to make sure that the schools are well-run and that is our job i have the additional job of facilitating uh every one of the board of ed meetings that's the job of the board president been done by me and countless people before me will be done by countless people after me so i have that responsibility that i field all the questions if there are questions that i feel that i know the answer

136to i will answer i will answer them if there are questions that other people on the team or the administration do i i will do that i will ask them appropriately to answer the question that in no way impedes my ability to be impartial and to execute my job to make sure that the schools are well run and provide the oversight and governance that i've been uh sworn to do thanks for your questions the next person doug can i say just say something please i would just like to briefly say i i i've been very involved in this process i feel fully informed so if someone thinks that doug reinstein is making all these decisions that is just you are you are misinformed and i i will make make some statements um later formal statements

137but um as a board member through our committee structures we've been working on this for a while and i've been engaged and i've pushed back and i feel quite informed great thanks chris uh stephanie karpov stephanie good evening how are you tonight hi i'm okay i can't turn on my video for some reason but that's okay if you wait if you just wait about three seconds you'll be able to do it if you want okay it doesn't matter i'll be very quick um just a couple of things one is um i just want to say that i absolutely support all the diversity efforts so please continue to do those um for the town and thank you for everyone who spoke up against um anything that that is not supporting that um second i want to

138say that i support brett and um please support him and all the people who are involved with that in renaming the field for annie and then lastly i just want to lead with the board again to consider that if you think this is the best plan um that you consider rolling it out in a slower motion so that kids can be graduated out of where they are um i know that there have been a lot of comparisons drawn with the mary kay redistricting i know that there are people who feel that that's a fair comparison i just want you to know that if you didn't have small children during covid you don't have any idea how this feels and um that i just think that this can be done just in a slower like less

139jarring way so just please consider that when you vote that's it great stephanie thank you for your comments and i know you've provided additional feedback outside of this so thank you for that as well carol and sarah carolyn good evening how are you tonight hi doug thank you i'm trying to uh turn my video on but if you just wait about three or four seconds it takes a second for us to promote you so so you can do that so if you just wait for a second and there you are great thank you so much hi doug and uh board of ed um i very much just want to echo and appreciate the board considering the requests for annabelle young but as an elected official i do want to ask you a direct question you

140said in your response to lorraine anderson that there were already a number of things to celebrate the life of annie so i want to ask you to please clarify that statement if you would and if i may ask as i just can't imagine that there would ever be a limit to the ways to honor any of the children in our community whose lives were tragically cut too short play for annie is a powerful mantra in berkeley heights and if you ask anyone at at any stage of life from those with young children to those whose children have grown they will respond by saying this dedication is absolutely a no-brainer in a very difficult time in our town's history and i ask you to please clarify your comment if you would sure thanks for coming and

141let me clarify that in no way uh did i imply that there's any maximum level of dedications for the tragic loss of a young child quite the opposite i'm thrilled how the community has responded to annie over the past couple of years i was really pointing out in a positive way that we have benches we have that banner over there we have i think george highlighted how many people are wearing the 19 on their uniforms we have the rock garden issues those are all fabulous dedications to a tragic loss of life so if in any way my comment was taken as to be that that's a maximum number and therefore we can't do that i i apologize that was not my intention at all i don't know how many people knew of the already remembrances

142and dedications that we have my sole goal was just to highlight the fact that we have some already and they're terrific and i also talked about just nordy and what she has done and what the things that she's done at the hugh school that occurred when annie was there were also tremendous i didn't talk about those as well so again carolyn i apologize there was no intention at all uh that i or anybody else would set a maximum uh that in fact i think uh there's been several people uh in addition to yourself and to brett who've commented about that so again i apologize if somehow it was uh done that way it was not my intention so thank you for asking for me to clarify i appreciate the opportunity for that thanks doug thank

143you carolyn next up is jess dramansky jess good evening how are you and just taking a second to get myself off of you there uh thank you doug you know when we started um the conversation today ramya and emily and others during this call uh and i don't know any of them uh but commented about dei uh dee and i uh on at the district and i just wanna lend my support to their remarks um you know i think that that's powerfully important with respect to the other board members uh speaking out i'm happy to hear from them tonight unfortunately the environment that was created on the other town halls was that individual board members weren't going to speak about anything and so when this came up the board members were kind of caught short

144and and didn't speak up and uh i guess what i would say about that is just that it creates at least the appearance of um a brute force way to get through these meetings and that's unfortunate because i do think it's important not not just to respond when doug you have the answer to a factual question but there is great interest in hearing the opinions of the other board members as we all try to work through this process um and so uh you know i i think that on a go forward basis it is important to be able to hear from all the board members i wanted to talk a little bit about um just some of the statistics that we're playing with uh some other people have commented about the survey and the choice

145between uh you know scenario four and scenario five uh to many this was like getting a survey uh the choice between sticking pins in your eyes and swallowing a tarantula and um you know and i and i do think that the statistics really don't offer any meaning given given that those are the choices we've asked we because i've heard other people do this as well i know i have have asked uh on a couple of occasions for statistics that that address the totality of commentary that the board has received on both sides of the issue i think the last time i i mentioned this doug you said you could and would provide those statistics tonight to hear a uh cherry picking of a single letter that um that supports uh the uh this major restructuring

146doesn't really help me statistically uh you know it's it's just an anecdote and it's cherry picked then uh i i didn't find that particularly helpful i um i also want to highlight uh one of the questions that i ask that you did answer is i asked about our peer group districts and who they are you gave me the full list and what their structures are as i looked through that what i noticed is that a majority of our peer group districts house first graders and fifth graders in the same building and eighty percent of those include pre-k and k in those very same buildings so you know if those are the the districts that we like to compare ourselves to i think that those are important ways um to look at it on the contrary

147um about 10 percent of those peer group districts change schools between grades two and three uh one of them is sparta but it is uh you know it it's it uh the the vast majority of of schools don't do that um and in fact the majority of schools uh house first and fifth graders or even pre-k to fifth graders um altogether uh so no questions tonight i guess i would just then uh you know close uh by urging uh the the board members to vote against this uh the unfortunate part of what we've done in conflating full-day kindergarten with this major restructuring is that tonight there becomes no way to vote in favor of full-day kindergarten a program that i think is strongly supported by the community it is strongly supported by me and there's

148simply no way to vote in favor of that while also voting against this major restructuring which has not been shown as being necessary to achieve the goal of full-day thank you for your kindergarten great jess thanks very much for your comments this evening lee timmerman lee welcome back thank you can you hear me i can hear you loud and clear good evening tonight um my question tonight is regarding the area behind the hardware store that is now moving from woodruff for third fourth and fifth graders to mountain park we've made an exception for the area that is next to columbia school and continue to have them go to uh hughes school i'm wondering that we should consider our my suggestion is we consider keeping those kids together as well with their current classmates at woodruff

149and have them go to hugh school as well that that's the only area that's really affected and we're pulling kids apart by school right now i don't know the class size by grade i need to be the other one in columbia it was nine for third graders nine for fourth graders and nine for fifth graders i don't have any idea on the size and what impact that would be on use but i do think it's something that the board should consider as an alternative to keep the current kids behind the high school the rising third fourth and fifth graders with their current classmates at woodruff and going to hughes going forward i think that would help alleviate and transition this plan better so i don't know if you know the counts if they something tell

150the counts or but just at least consider it that's my question greatly thanks very much your question scott i'm going to ask you to keep me honest with with this uh but lee to answer your question let me just make sure i understand your question so you're talking about the rising third and fourth graders who live behind the hardware store who right now go to woodruff who are going to right now transition to mountain park and your quest and your question is your question can they stay at woodruff or is your question can they move to shoes with the other students my question is can i move to hughes with the other students got it okay so the answer to your first question is the number of students the rising third graders are eight woodrow

151students who have moved to mountain park and rising third graders and there's nine woodruff students that would move uh as a rise in fourth graders how about raising fifth graders uh the rising fifth graders number is four uh and again as as we've stated previously the rising fifth graders we've already said can stay at um at woodruff uh so uh so so that's those are the numbers uh uh and uh we will get back to you i don't i don't know that we have an answer right now we have looked at this model many times i think what you're asking is can basically can we add eight more students and eight more rising third graders and nine more rising fourth graders from behind the hardware store and keep keep those woodruff students together with the

152others and go to hughes and we will look at that and we will get back to you and and to the previous point we'll get back to everybody we'll find a way to publish that most likely on our faq document uh to answer that question sound goodly oh do we lucy okay uh great so uh thank you next up is tom farger tom good evening uh good evening thanks doug um i sent in a rather long letter to the board yesterday with some of the research results on great configuration one was a paper from hanover research which did a study on school configuration for attleboro mass school district and they wrote current research does not identify or support one grade configuration as the most effective research into the potential impact of great configurations is generally

153inconclusive with results that are difficult to generalize to the districts however some studies suggest that students perform better at schools with a large larger number of grade levels another frequent finding is that the most effective grade configuration will vary by district based on internal factors such as projected enrollment transportation costs school facilities and community support the decision to reconfigure the yearly grades is typically driven by practical needs such as budget space and school accreditation while schools may see additional benefits as a result of reconfiguration these are not cited as a driver in the decision to change uh another thing came from school administrator journal that goes to all the superintendents many different configurations exist for grade level offerings each school can cite research to support its chosen configuration educators will argue long and hard that

154their configuration is the best um another study was shrewsbury public schools in massachusetts in 2017. they wrote more recent studies cited on the topic suggest that the link between grade level configuration and achievement is specious even for our youngest learners uh i'm not going to read the whole thing so uh i think i'd like to know first whether the board received my letter and every and everybody read it and then i think there's a question uh that you should ask your superintendent what peer-reviewed published studies is she relying on for her claims that a the proposed plan is developmentally appropriate and b all other plans are not developmentally appropriate without that information we cannot evaluate that what she says is correct how could she make such a definitive statements about school configurations in light of

155the reports that i have attached to my letter and uh i hope you read my whole letter and uh that you give consideration to these research reports rather than her unsupported claims thank you great tom thanks for your comment i can assure you that uh all the board members did receive a copy of your of your email which as you indicated had a number of research papers attached to that dr roy do you want to talk about that this has come up before what is the research that you've based your decision on they've talked about peer-reviewed can you talk about what research you've used that backs up your decision yes so we we definitely looked at a great deal of literature reviews and we published most of that there's a lot of that on the

156faqs that is there for your perusal as well as having conversations with with experts in the field of early childhood and elementary what you'll find is most districts don't have the ability to move to a k to two three to five they you kind of get what you get when you arrive there because districts are generally full or they don't have the ability they add on i know a lot of districts to achieve full day kindergarten have added on to their buildings and we don't have to do that because we do have the space so definitely looked at a lot of materials and one of the studies you sent to us i actually have an faqs that supports the pre-k to two three to five model great dr really thank you very much it's now

1579 50. i see one two three four five people who haven't spoke tonight though they're gonna be the last five people who are going to speak tonight as we're approaching 10 o'clock and this other board mrs business so renee cesla indira shah nancy and bolzano stephanie ziar and michelle those will be the last five speakers uh this evening during our public hearing uh renee sisler you're next hopefully renee i got your name right hi good evening everyone um so i have two questions in two comments so the first is um if the super attendance recommended plan is implemented how has the cost for extra cost crossing guards been included or has the cost been included in the 2021 board of education budget how is this assessed without a traffic study and um if not how

158will it be funded the second question is in the spirit of inclusion and diversity how will you handle children that do not wish to get vaccinated against covid19 for personal reasons in coming years um now my two comments my first one i plead with all board of education members to be brave and to speak up we voted for you and we hope that you can help us help your mouthpiece if you do not agree with the plan again our mutual goal is to implement full day kindergarten no one is arguing with that let's just pause and plan accordingly for redistricting when we have a better understanding of the impact to our schools once redevelopment is complete and once the pandemic this awful awful pandemic that continues to torture us every day subsides um and lastly

159i hope that you strongly consider the request by coach sayer carolyn sayre lorraine anderson and coach devaney both of my children play softball and baseball and we're impacted by the loss of annie young her legacy and upper columbia remind them and all of us to always do their best play hard have fun have no regrets and live every second to its fullest because tomorrow's promise to no one thank you renee thank you very much uh for your comments i'll answer the first one i'll let um dr varley answer the second one regarding the recommendation and if there's a need for additional crossing guards uh when we develop our budget uh which we will approve uh this evening it's developed over the course of a couple of months in the early part of the the calendar

160year and gets voted on approved right around now in the march april time frame uh for what we'll do for the next year over the course of once it's approved there are oftentimes ebbs and flows uh in a lot of different areas oftentimes there'll be textbooks that cost a different amount there'll be potentially additional crossing guards there'll be retirements and hiring of new teachers so there's an ebb and flow within our within our budget it is critical that we have the right traffic and transportation study so i can assure you that whatever the additional cost of crossing guards that is recommended we will do that and if we have to adjust another part of the budget we'll absolutely do that the the good news is that you know the cost of crossing guards is not

161you know a significant part of the budget it's very a very part-time uh effort but i can assure you that whatever the recommendation is uh we will have the money for the crossing guards uh dr well the second question was what would we do about vaccinations for students so we currently have students who are not vaccinated who attend school we have there are religious exemptions of students who do not have to be vaccinated so i assume right now the department of health and the cdc have not put out guidance on that i assume it will remain the same for the covet vaccine as well great dr roy thank you much the next is indira shah indira good evening how are you tonight yes hi this is uh i'm indira's husband but uh i tried to

162turn my video on hold on give me one second okay take your time oh it says the host has stopped it so okay it'll it'll take about a second okay sorry no worries no worries uh two requests for uh the board to look at a couple of data one is why do you think every top private school in the country has k-5 in the same building so we're going and then maybe we can look at statistics that says what percentage of public schools in the united states have k-5 in the same building versus dividing k-5 into two schools or two schools as we are proposing so we'll greatly appreciate if the board looks at that data as to every top private school houses all these grades together and what percentage of u.s public schools houses

163these grades together because that's a better way to look at it that's the data driven decision that the board could make versus a recommendation or based on some data but this is factually correct as to what everybody else is doing and secondly it seems like winter families overwhelmingly voted for one option and the other families did not so the request to the board is to consider why woodrow families might be voting differently and as you make your decision take them into consideration as well because otherwise you're splitting the town along the snyder line but you're creating a lot more animosity among the families of the town which place put sports together do a lot of other things together great thanks for your thanks for your two questions uh dr oil let you do the first

164one when you look at top private schools in the country as well as public schools uh a number of them based on you know some levels of data i suggest that there's a great number of k-5s can you comment on that and why again you know why given our school structure and our enrollment while you're recommending the k2 3 to 5. so um we don't have the ability to house k-5 in any of our buildings due to the state requirements for for pe as well as managing our schedule we would have to decrease our interventions and we would have to also decrease our focus on music and art with our specialist classes as well as world language so k to five is not an option for us we had we looked at options that were

165feasible for us to do got it thanks and and the second one that you asked i i really don't want to speculate why woodruff uh families uh voted a a certain way um i have my own personal views about that but i i really don't want to get into the heads of woodrow's families i'll just state you know kind of the obvious uh the the the school configuration at woodruff uh changed more of of change more vis-a-vis mountain park uh and hughes so that is that's just a fact of how we did that but i don't want to speculate or potentially guess what was in the minds of woodrow's parents i don't think it would be appropriate for me to try to speculate on that stephanie my request was that maybe you consider what what

166the woodrow family is okay okay better understood thank you um thank you uh stephanie ziara stephanie good evening hi good evening um i just wanted to just echo the sentiment of this gentleman who spoke earlier about the statistical relevance of the survey input i i want to comment that the design of the survey is biased the target respondents are only sent to the stakeholders which is the current i guess peak a pre-k to fourth grade uh families uh and and the pre-k to three families uh really will have no benefit to scenario five because the sooner the change the better it is for for for those um kids uh in those grades um um you know so so so scenario five um is if we're gonna be only given those two choices really right so

167they're just gonna vote on scenario four so if 20 of that population is impacted by that this redistricting as you laid out and i think roughly if you're going to take just like a a rough average of you know between those grades and you know really it's about 16 percent of the current fourth graders uh who are impacted uh and both are not mutually exclusive we won't really get any majority vote for scenario five even if everyone voted for scenario five so scenario four is really pretty much i think the outcome we would expect to get the majority and i'm not surprised by the vote results quite frankly we've um so my ass is really for the board to seriously consider the input from the many parents who have opposed the plans especially the timing

168of the implementation of such plan and you do have more than uh i think you have like 450 signatures to back that opposition so uh when you vote please uh also take that into consideration and not just from that survey which i believe is biased great thank you stephanie for your comments the last speaker tonight is michelle michelle if you just give us your last name uh and then we'll we'll welcome your comments hi doug it's michelle santora thanks for taking my question hi michelle um so what i heard in the last town hall was that in order to move forward with the recommendation at least 55 percent of families needed to support the plan and so based on my calculations 55 of 751 families would be 413 votes in favor of the proposal and

169if i counted correctly it looked like there were 281 votes in favor of scenario four which would be 37 of families versus the so i'm just wondering why it's now okay to move forward with that recommended plan it it feels like surveys are consistently designed and results manipulated to support your recommendation versus truly capturing what the community wants great was that you was that your only question that's it great uh thanks for your question uh the 55 percent number that i that i mentioned at the april uh eighth meeting uh i was quite clear that it would be 55 of those votes that that came in that were legitimate votes uh we had expectations that everybody who wanted to vote in this who is in their primary stakeholder group uh and we we kept to

170that uh obviously we promoted this and we had you know the number of votes that uh dr rawley shared earlier uh and uh as she actually shared on that in that slide 64 of the people who voted of those 442 votes uh they uh there they indicated that their preference was scenario four so we didn't manipulate the results at all we're consistent to what we said which was that we would uh dr volley would recommend the solution to the board if over 55 percent of the people that voted voted for that so thank you for your question uh nancy and bolzano i think i lost you on you did you missed me okay i uh thank you sorry you fell down on the bottom you gave me a mute but you did you unmuted me

171but then you skipped me i apologize for that nancy you are you are there we found you thank you for that nancy good evening hi can i get the video on because it'll take you a second and you'll you'll get the video um it's saying that it stopped but i'll start talking will it just come on automatically or do i have to it takes a couple of seconds for okay that's fine so i have two comments and one question and i don't have kids in the school system as doug knows i have two that went through the school system and um i'm not gonna i could bring up a lot but i'm gonna make two comments and again in question the first is on diversity i appreciate you all supporting that and i love what

172has gone on in the last year after that horrible um this summer and what we all heard and learned and knew but didn't do anything about so i appreciate what's going on i also want to just say that um systemic racism has impacted black americans more in their ability to economically in the united states i will be posting a video that's really informative and might help people to understand the history of race in america i'll do that right after this meeting so if you really want to learn and you want to have understanding it's a good video and i'll do it in the community um forum so if anyone would like to see that uh the other thing i'd like to say is i am a market research person that's what i do for my

173job and i would suggest before you do any more surveys you have somebody professional looking because the way you set this up as you've heard before having two options and not having a third that says i don't agree with them is not the way you do a survey if you really want to understand what people are thinking and i understand why you did it that way i truly do but you don't understand how many of those people didn't vote because they don't care and how many of those people didn't vote because they have a problem with it and as a learning institution and a learning institution that should be listening to the community that was an error on your part and so next time before you do a survey give me a call call somebody

174in orchid research we've got lots of them in town and do it the right way because it's always going to be seen as biased because it was a biased survey and that came up last time in the meeting and no one brought that up so my other comment or if it's a question now that i have is change is hard there's 20 and you i kept hearing it's only 20. it's only 20 20 of people being impacted in a community in accu in a company in a business anywhere is a lot of people going through change forget about code even if we weren't going through coke but that would be a lot of change you're changing teachers that have worked in school communities now for over 20 30 years you're changing kids and parents and

175everybody and all the relationships are changing and in an environment like work when change happens you proactively have change management in place what are you doing how what have you guys planned to support counselors or to engage and how are you going to help both the teachers and the students through this change next year and have you included that in the cost saver program great nancy thanks for your comments dr i do want to talk about uh what our transition plans are obviously we have existing transition plans that we have before but we obviously need special ones for this because of that absolutely so we have met a couple of times to walk through our next steps in making sure that our students who are a part of the transition are supported whether it be

176by their current principal or by the um by the counseling staff we have also we also are working with the teachers starting next week to start working on what depending on the vote on how that goes tonight to start working on a transition plan for them as well so we do have a plan moving forward we just need to know which way we're moving forward you need incremental just saying yes and as i talked before i mean we will be addressing that from a budget standpoint things have been flow with our budget all the time and obviously we will look at that and make sure that we care for whatever those expenses are and some of those we've already planned for nancy thanks for your question uh with that i will end the citizens hearing

177for this evening thanks to all those who asked questions uh this evening and provided feedback we will continue with our agenda as i mentioned at the outset we would move forward with our remaining agenda items the first agenda item or the next agenda item is the adoption of our proposed 2122 budget and if all board members could come off of the ute right now we'll go through uh our agenda items jordan do you want to motion that one i'll make a motion to move for item a 14. robert do you want to second that yes i second 14a a motion and a second is there any discussion about the budget yes i just have a question i know in the budget there's a statement that's about remediating uh remediation issues for learning um resulting from

178the remote and hybrid learning environment my question is what exactly is that plan again like you had stepped out dr varley but i was in the new jersey school board association meeting yesterday and all these schools were talking about their plans to remediate learning having summer school programs extended school years or just a variety of things that were being considered for the remediation and i was wondering if there's a plan that has has been developed that can be shared is there going to be some sort of extra learning for students that have fallen behind you know for prior to the coming year so i'm going to turn this over to scott and he may not know the ins and outs because i know mary beth has been handling a lot of the k-5 part of

179it but he will have a good handle on what's been what we're doing moving forward so yes we've we've begun the plan for moving out of the hybrid learning environment into recovery mode where we will support identify and support student needs moving forward we have worked with content area supervisors as well as the elementary principals to develop plans for the implementation of benchmarks and assessments to gather data at the conclusion of this year so that we can plan appropriately for the return in september and identify those needs and begin the planning of how we're going to address those gaps upon our return in september we do have our traditional summer programming extended school year programming that most district the districts offer but with the uncertainty of where we would be we didn't extend that programming

180because we weren't sure what we would be able to accomplish and you know and what format that would be we have begun our plans and it is included in the budget that is up for approval today uh for a variety of uh tools that will support that you know in the absence of many of the uh data points that we usually have provided from standardized assessments we need to have some formative assessments that we we have our internal benchmarks but we want to also have some external data points that will help guide us and develop that consistency that we talk about so frequently across different classes different teachers and different schools at the elementary level so we do have a plan we have an outline for presenting that in greater detail going forward but you

181know it is definitely in the works and has been included in this budgeting process and will that plan be presented at a future board meeting has there been a date set to share that we don't have a plan to share it just now okay thank you are there any other questions or comments on the budget okay roll call mr hyman yes mrs young yes mr chinchilly yes mr taquila yes mrs penna miss riley yes mr reinstein yes moving on item number 15 the resolution for the implementation of full day kindergarten i guess i move resolution 15 for the implementation of full day kindergarten i will second motion and a second is there any discussion i think probably there's commentary there will be commentary just so the public is clear so what we'll do right now

182is that each board member will vote on that uh for this recommendation and i believe most of them will be speaking about their thoughts about that so with that roll call we'll do it in the same order donna roll call all right mr hyman doesn't vote ms young so um i am in full support of implementing full-day kindergarten um but i do have concerns with regards to um you know the success of this implementation about bringing people together families and communities and having conversations um and eve like as i mentioned with the budget and the the survey i even had concern about some of the information just how it was gathered um i think we need to really think about a change management process as we move forward you know with this and i really

183think that maybe we should consider postponing a little to gather like really pull together everyone to build bring back the confidence uh among this group um you know until after that survey that the traffic and the studies that we do and some of the other questions that may be outstanding um so i um although i am in full support of implementing full-day kindergarten i would prefer if we put a hold on this and and just took a look and pull together our presentations even more so that the community had confidence has confidence um in us so i'm voting no right now can i ask a question hold up we're in the middle of roll call okay so we'll we'll go in order after joy next okay i i had a question for miss young would

184you say uh can people hear me yes yes when you say postpone you thinking of i think originally there was a pilot program that was supposed to really be taking place again this year i believe for kindergarten are you saying to just do the pilots more or less well no it would just you know maybe get all the traffic information together i know there seems to be just things swirling that can we just like pull it all together and really get the answers and i just feel like there's things come along and then there's holes that are poked and i just want to feel like more solid i just don't feel 100 and if i don't feel 100 i can't say yes okay thank you for that is it okay i will keep my comments

185brief or at least try to our goal of bringing full day kindergarten to berkeley heights is an important one however this is not usually what success looks like among other things i would have preferred that school board meetings to be permitted to have a voice in this conversation particularly when answered or asked a question directly that did happen once never again for us for board members i'm not speaking just about myself in that context i believe the issues and concerns with this process that were raised in public during the board meetings and town halls as well as on our local online news site have already been clearly outlined and so i will not be going to further detail on those specific points however i did want to take a moment to apologize to the members

186of the berkeley heights police department since i am not authorized to speak on behalf of the board as a body my apology is merely a personal one but please know that it is also a sincere one you shouldn't have been placed in that position on a positive note i'm very pleased that we were able to find a way to provide discounted subscription busing at least through the end of next school year i had always been adamantly against our taking away courtesy bussing for our youngest students and i have shared that view consistently with the appropriate persons here tonight even when it has not been well received which i was genuinely surprised um just a moment okay i genuinely appreciate everyone's thoughts and opinions even when they were not always easy for me to read or

187to hear i don't need to either read or read aloud uh things that are easy for me to read as the district moves forward i'm certain of certain that it will be in a positive direction um and also it's important to note that the issues raised earlier by mr leblanc and mr defending regarding regarding our pending traffic study are correct in my opinion i don't have any expertise in that area but i think at some point it's just a matter of common sense and i think we're at that point the common sense point it can't it it doesn't pass the smell test in terms of efficacy and being comprehensive and frankly the 30-day time frame i don't think specifically is sufficient particularly when i imagine the county would have to be involved because certain streets

188including but not limited to plainfield avenue would be involved i don't know that the county is on our our time frame you know we can decide whatever we want here but when you're dependent on others to work together get information it's tougher and hopefully the police department would still be willing to work with us after all that's happened um but i don't know their schedule i don't think i've heard it um and also i should have mentioned this i'd like to apologize to the members of the town council and the mayor who were put in an awkward situation through no fault of their own that's it no sorry yes before i go to my comments i just want to say to joy and robert i respect your opinion i may disagree with it but i

189respect it as fellow board members and i thank you for your honest opinion with that i also want to thank the members of the community for very your input about the proposed changes you know elementary schools excuse me in addition to our listening session i heard from quite a number of community members opinions and feedback about the code changes are wide and ranging i feel it is important to take all of you point into account because as an elected board member it is our responsibility to make decisions that are in the best interest for all of our students in the community overall the community seems to agree with implementing full-day kindergarten in my opinion it is way overdue considering we are one of the few districts in the state to have yet to implement full-day

190kindergarten in order to do this in the most appropriate way and fiscal responsible way i do believe creating the two cohorts mary kay mcmillan mountain park with jeffrey hughes is the best way to go this structure will allow children to stay together for k-5 and then recombine then combine for six through twelve it also allows our school to have a learn to read and read to learn approach to each new school i wanna say a few words of how i came to my decision i came to the listening sessions with an open mind as i wanted to hear from both sides so i can get a true understanding of what people are thinking and feeling after the two hour halls i will agree with joy that i did also think about how do we do

191full day kindergarten and hold on redistricting but then i looked at the presentation again that was given back in the beginning of april specifically side seven showing the current enrollment at our schools i want to repeat the current enrollment numbers in the order it is shown on the slides hughes 266 enrolled capacity of 320 mountain park 244 enrolled capacity of would drift 177 year old capacity of 380. this imbalance did not happen overnight and i felt continuing not to address it did not serve in the best interest of all students as i said in the beginning as board members we are elected to look at look out for the best interest for all our students i know many are asking why now my feeling is that we have been in a state of flux since

192last march i heard that the kids get back to normal and then make the change i do see the argument for that but i also see the argument to say what is normal but if this is going to be and i and i truly hate this term but it does fit the new normal why not do it this fall to get back to the new normal i recognize that moving to this model requires change and i know that can be difficult for some children i do not dismiss this feeling expressed by families that have to have the conversation with their child or children to explain why they are going to a new school in the fall some will be upset some will be anxious about something new some may look at it as a new

193opportunity i look at the overall picture and the benefits of this model that will provide for current and future students in closing i do support the recommendation of superintendent i know this decision may cause disruptions to some families and i am truly sorry for sorry for this i do not diminish the emotions some will be feeling but i am confident with time we will see this see the benefit of this model with that i vote yes for this implementation great thanks mike angela okay so before i read my statement i've also been very involved in this process through our committee structure and i have felt informed throughout the process um so i know that regardless of our decision tonight there will be community members that don't agree this initiative is complex and not everyone can

194necessarily be happy with the outcome i'm comfortable that we have considered all options and aspects of the plan and have taken into account all opportunities community feedback to minimize as much negative impact to families as possible change can be very difficult and it is personal to the families that are impacted we do understand that there have been several public discussions and we have heard many opinions in favor and against certain aspects of the plan we have listened and want to respect the needs of the community i have listened and i have weighed all the points made by concerned members of the community i hope the people can both respect the decisions and the process through which those decisions are made as a small community we do not benefit from the negative and political narrative that

195does not help us serve the students needs my responsibility as an elected member of the board of ed is to take an objective view that benefits all students in our community and establishes the best learning environment for their future taking not only input from the community into consideration but also the expert advice on the administration who have been evaluating a variety of potential scenarios for quite some time before they came to their final recommendation i believe i've done that the full-day kindergarten is a long-awaited and highly supported initiative but it cannot be implemented without rebalancing our school population and addressing the inequities that have grown in our elementary schools over the years this has been evident for years as many of you have consistently asked for linkedin and the board of ed has made several

196public presentations on this subject redistricting will be contentious and difficult part of delivering something for the greater good as part of the mitigation of that concern the district is going to provide subscription busting to families k through 5 at a 50 reduced cost which will be reviewed at the conclusion of one year i am supporting for that kindergarten because i believe it is the right thing to do and it is for the greater good it also long overdue for the board of aid to live around our long-term strategic commitment to implementing full-dependence for our community it is also clear from our survey that the majority of our community is in favor of moving forward with funding for their clinton iran in the fall so my vote is yes in support of the superintendent's recommendation thank

197you thanks angela okay miss riley hey chris chris i'm so sorry i believe changes to the overall grammar school configuration are definitely needed as our school buildings have been increasingly out of balance for some time now and full day kindergarten is long overdue for a system as good as ours through the committee structure of board specifically as a member of the curricula the finance and the facilities committees i have listened to and critically questioned many of the alternatives and challenges to implementing full-day kindergarten that have been shared by the administration over the past many months not six weeks not nine weeks we face challenges related to how to fund it without burdening the taxpayer and how to rebalance the student populations in our four grammar school buildings in a fair and equitable way trying to

198minimize as much change as possible once i realized that we could not implement full-day kindergarten effectively and i say effectively without some degree of redistricting and scenario three required some degree of redistricting i knew this would not be an easy process and i recognize from the start that basically whatever we did to address these challenges would ultimately involve some segment of our community that would need to go through a transition and ultimately be happy unhappy about it now although i accept the argument that there could be other defendable early childhood education models out there i believe that the mary kay macmillan kindergarten through first grade model which has been in place for 23 of the past years and has worked extremely well for this community because it's created a safe and nurturing learning environment for

199our youngest students not only is this model time tested it has generally been viewed both internally and externally as a best practice amongst educators so expanding on that model to include second grade makes a great deal of sense to me and after doing my due diligence in my opinion represents the best pass for path forward and keeping neighborhood children together for six straight years from kindergarten to fifth grade also seems like a very good thing to me from a lot of different perspectives i don't think it's been a perfect process really hard stuff really it rarely is but i'm pretty confident that the overall recommendation is sound i'm very confident that the overall recommendation is sound and the peripheral issues relating to transportation and safe routes i believe are manageable i'm glad to see we're

200doing a traffic study pronto and i look forward to those recommendations in working with the berkeley heights pub police department to implement and we have a very good relationship robert with the berkeley heights police department i also recognize that our traffic situation it's really not very good right now especially in a couple of our schools and common sense tells me that with a more balanced distribution of our student population among our four schools it is likely to help not hinder the current situation but i look forward to the recommendations i'm also glad to see we have committed to providing subscription busing on a subsidized basis in response in response to certain community concerns i wish we could afford courtesy busting across the board but we just can't as as it is very expensive and we

201need those dollars to help cover the annual costs of having a full day program and to be fair to all the residents in our community and frankly too many of our buses are consistently pretty empty and i'm talking pre-coping so at least this is the way we get the busing to the folks that will use it and i think it's great that we're able to help defray some of the costs of these families lastly as i think has been mentioned before 23 years ago i had three young children in the school system and i was directly impacted by redistricting when the mary kay macmillan early childhood center was first established so i do know from my own experience the impact transitions of this kind can have on families of course i am empathetic to those

202of you who will be caught in the crosshairs like i once was all i can offer to you is that in hindsight i felt that the very special mary kay macmillan early childhood center experience was worth it my responsibility tonight which i take very seriously and i've listened very carefully is to support what i think is in the best interest of all of the children in our community for the next 20 years and that is why i'm voting yes tonight to accept the superintendent's recommendation thank you mr weinstein thanks uh i don't know that i have a lot more to add from the perspectives of the other board members who've spoken about the variety of ways that we've talked about this since its inception whether it been the feedback that we've received over the last

203uh month or so the amount of listening that we've done both at these town hall meetings as well as the significant input and feedback we've received via the phone and email i do want to make sure that we address the transportation issues i believe we have a plan to do that i am quite confident in both our team and the teamwork we have with the police department can address those issues we'll address those issues we'll have plenty of time to communicate those issues i should say the resolution of those not the issues the resolution of those uh to to the community i'm glad that we have subscription busing that is something that we heard loud and clear there is no doubt that transportation and busing is is a challenge uh the patterns of where people

204are walking and driving to the patterns of uh parents who are both working there are a lot of challenges that are changing dynamic and i think offer subscription busing is important happy that the board is supporting uh also the subsidy for that we talked quite a bit about rebalancing our schools and the need to do that and providing equity across the board in many different ways i believe that's important i echo chris's comments about empathy i have talked directly to some of the very parents who are in the crosshairs of this some people who have as an example a second and fourth grader at woodruff and who have difficult choices to make and i can only empathize with those choices uh i can talk from the heart and tell you how much work has gone

205in to truly minimizing the number of transitions that we can in fact mr timmerman tonight even gave us another challenge which is is it potential that we can reduce more transitions for those students that he talked about and we'll look at that i could tell you that we've been true to our guiding principles that we started with in terms of how we're going to address this i understand and have spoken to many of the people uh who are who are against this who have reached out to me uh directly i've also spoken to a number of people who are supporting that i am confident in the process that we went through could we have done certain things better of course we could have this is not a perfect process and like any board or any

206organization we learn from this we move on we adjust there's a number of things that we've done you know i sat here in march of last year and never thought we as a board would have to deal with working through a pandemic but we turned a school upside down overnight and i turned every one of our students and teachers into remote learners we didn't get that all right the first the first day but we sure did uh we sure did a great job thanks to our teachers and our teaching staff and our support staff and what we did and we adjusted along the way and i'm quite confident as we work through the final implementation of this we will move forward and we'll make adjustments along the way and i vote yes for supporting the

207superintendent's recommendation doug i'd like to just clarify something i said to be clear my vote is no full day kindergarten at this time i do support full day kindergarten very much but not under this plan i want to be clear okay thank you so the so the the recommendation for the implementation of full day kindergarten uh will pass as as four members voted yes and two members voted no so that resolution passes moving on to item number 16 on the agenda depositories i move item 16. motion in a second any discussion mr hyman i think you skipped me on this one's all right i'm skipping all right this is young yes mr tinchuli yes mr jaquilla yes mrs penna miss riley yes mr einstein yes moving on item 17 newspapers yes i move i am

20817 for official newspapers a second motion to second any discussion mr hyman yes mrs young yes mr chinchuli yes mr taquila yes this is penna yes is riley yes mr reinstein yes item 18 administration yes i'll move items a 18 a and b and mr hyman yes mrs young yes mr chinchuli yes mr taquila yes this is penna it's miss riley yes mr reinstein yes 19 education i'll move education 19 items a through d in a second second motion second any discussion roll call mr hyman yes mrs young yes mr chinchilly yes mr jacqueline yes mrs penna yes miss riley yes mr reinstein yes personnel yes i move personnel items a through f i'm sorry a through g okay a through k you sure i'll second i don't know motion second any discussion roll call

209mr hyman uh yes on items a through e sorry f a through f this is young yes on all items mr chinchuli yes on all items mr taquila yes mrs penna miss riley yes mr reinstein yes item 21 business yes i move items a through y and i'm sure this time and i second that motion uh any discussion roll call mr heinen yes on items a through w mrs young yes on all items mr ken truly yes on all items mr taquila yes mrs penna yes miss riley mr reinstein yes finance 22 but he did bill [Music] mr hyman think i skipped this one as well i got to berkeley heights only oh barely heads on this is young yes mr pinchuli yes mr dipuela yes mrs penna yes miss riley mr reinstein yes is

210there any other business to come before the board tonight not seeing any other business i'll make one final comment before i take a motion to adjourn uh the board and this community has been through a lot over the last several several months there's been a lot of strong opinions uh on both sides of this i think we're a better community for it i think a healthy debate is a good thing and i continue to want the people to advocate for what's best for their children and what they think is best for our overall community so i want to thank all the people as i did my opening remarks about everybody who participated and contributed to this process so i thank you again i think it's one of the things that makes uh this berkeley heights

211public school system as good as it is with that i'll take a motion to adjourn so much we are adjourned and we'll be back at our next meeting i believe on may 13th have a good rest of the night thank you [Music] injury