Feb. 25, 2021 BoE Meeting

001[Music] thank you yes okay this oh god you uh good evening everybody and welcome to our february 25th board of ed meeting uh jordan could you have a motion to return back to our public session second second we are back from our public session i'm sorry my video is not done it is no mine isn't where is mine mike i see you yeah jordan just came out i can't see me shows that it shows him that he's on hey girl yeah i'll see you mine's fixed yep yeah now you're on okay we're good uh wait chris you are not temporarily there you go you're on chris okay could we rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance [Music] and justice for all good evening everybody uh we have we have two topics uh as

002part of the superintendent's report tonight uh the first one is going to be a discussion about our curriculum and the alignment between the berkeley heights curriculum and the mountainside curriculum and then the second one is a combination demonstration uh data management tool that we'll be using uh going forward to help us provide a bit more individualized achievement at both the student level and the cohort level more of what you'll hear about in the superintendent's report now with that uh can i have a motion to approve the february 4th minutes so moved second second [Music] those minutes are now part of our public record donna correspondence uh we had several cars pieces of correspondence related to both uh remote instruction and covid testing and then we had three new oprah requests okay i thank you all

003right we are going to move to the report of our superintendent of our student representatives and let's just make sure we find tomas and um mike scara can you promote both tomas and emily on it now hello what is tomas's last name all right emily i see you you should be able to unmute and turn on your video if you can it should be on i'm not sure if you can see no we can't see you emily can you hear me yeah i can emily haynes can you hear me yeah if you can we can't hear you oh i know i got it all right emily go ahead with your report perfect so the athletic atmosphere of the moment gives everyone some happy news the winter seasons are coming to a close and the third

004season volleyball and wrestling will be starting this monday for current seasons ice hockey has semi-final finals this monday night which will be live streamed the boys basketball team is currently 10-3 with big wins and have their next home game monday as well cheerleaders have been able to attend the basketball games to show off their halftime routines which are also live streams as well they have been able to attend three virtual cheer competitions which th they will be sending their performances in for girls basketball was undefeated until tough rivals with new providence and they are coming up with a great new young team the fencing team has four meets left and have one tonight at cms this is also live streamed on their youtube channel looking forward to the spring season it is planned to be

005as normal as possible for the first month it will be all online until the start of april a new role was inducted where students can now do two sports at once so as the track and lacrosse seasons overlap for late winter and early spring athletes no longer have to worry about choosing between the two and lastly there is now a new rule that allows guardi two guardians per student for indoor home games this gives hopes for all future of sports at gl and returning to normal and also an honorable mention for mr seeger as tomorrow will be his last day trend and student ambassadors had a meeting today to honor him and all that he's done for the high school thank you emily thank you very much thomas okay hello so despite the number of

006virtual days in recent weeks students have learned to not only make the most out of their classes but also their clubs the highlander newspaper club has especially accomplished a lot in the past few weeks last week the club had the discussion with vanity fair writer and journalist david kemp in this fantastic opportunity for students camp shared personal anecdotes from his writing career and fielded questions from students later that week the hard work of the club's writer was shown when numerous writers received awards from the garden state scholastic press association tonight two staff members from the club are joining the new jersey student journalist forum to discuss student journalism and the new voices bill that will help improve student school press censorship other clubs too have been active with both the technology students association and science

007olympiad preparing for state level competitions the understanding asian cultures club held a meeting last week where they discussed asian representation in gl's history curriculum gl's newest club music club will be hosting its first meeting in the coming weeks this club will discuss the cultural significance of music explore the diversity of music and observe a variety of music to expand their musical knowledge lastly bh and geo unfiltered held in a meaningful discussion on sunday where a panel of students of current and foreign students share their experiences as minority students at gl although many had negative experiences students work to develop an action plan on the next steps the district should take to improve students experiences at the school the willingness of students to partake in events like these show the align goals of both the students

008and the board to bring forth a positive change in the student the school's culture great thomas thank you very much uh any questions from board members for either tomas or emily this evening good joy i know during emily during the last meeting you talked about the possibility of caps and gowns not being associated with gender and you're going to start that conversation has there been any progress with that um they haven't brought it back up we haven't had a student advisory meeting to discuss that further it was just an idea implemented to see um how the students felt about it they haven't made any decisions regarding that um okay do i think it'll be changed for this coming year because the cap and gowns are already ordered okay thank you great any other questions for

009board members for or either of our student reps great emily thomas thank you very much moving forward the report of the superintendent dr varley good evening everyone last year there were four inches of snow and this year there's been at least over 35 inches so then i hope by i'm hoping by our march board of education meeting spring will be in the air and we will be finished with the snow as a follow-up at our at the december 21st board meeting numerous people spoke to the board of education about experiences in our building that were not inclusive and accepting as required by law current students concerns have been investigated have to be investigated through the hiv process if a student wishes to report an allegation they may do so through the district anonymous reporting system

010former students and graduates were given the opportunity to file a complaint through our outside counsel at this time we have received no official reports to the outside counsel we urge people to come forward to report anything about events that have made them feel uncomfortable i formal students can file a report at bh former students at cgajlaw.com due to the lack of information we will be closing this investigation soon moving forward to tonight we will be making two very important presentations this evening the first is the lincoln data and benchmarking system and warehousing system our current data system is woefully inadequate it presents limited information to very few people linkit delivers broader and deeper data for every student and most importantly it puts it into the right hands unto the teacher with linkit with linkit teachers

011can look at years worth of academic data across all subject areas on their students and target areas of weaknesses weakness and build remediation and differentiation strategies into their planning additionally building administrators can also review the data check for its implementation and lesson and assessment construction and then more accurately evaluate the effectiveness of the instructor i have used linkit in the past and think it will be a tremendous tool for our teachers and administrators to improve student learning and achievement the second presentation concerns our relationship with mountainside i cannot speak to past efforts of curriculum alignment and articulation but i want to take this opportunity to state that janet walling the superintendent of mountainside and i have had several discussions on the topic and we are both committed to all students entering governor livingston with the

012same academic rigor and curricular experience working closely with mountainside gives their students who become our students the greatest opportunity for success in high school i am excited to build this partnership with our sending district finally at the last meeting we had a brief discussion about full-day kindergarten there is still a lot of work to be done the admin team is working on the proposal and will make a presentation to the board of education soon both the board of education and the administration are committed to fulfilling full-day kindergarten it is now my pleasure to introduce chad marcus from lincoln all right hello everyone and thank you very much dr varley and mr president fellow board members and all members of the berkeley heights community my name is chad marcus and i am the chief academic officer

013from lincoln and i really appreciate the opportunity to share our solution and we are very enthusiastic about entering a partnership with berkeley heights before i get into the demo i just want to confirm that everyone can hear and see me okay perfect wonderful well again thank you so much so just a little bit of context about linkit so we are a new jersey focused company we're very much nationwide we're based in manhattan um but new jersey is our uh largest concentration and real focus we are proud to partner with about 250 new jersey school districts in support of their assessment and data initiatives so tonight very briefly i'd like to share with you some of the ways that we support new jersey education by going over a few reports within a anonymized demo account so

014our goal would be to take data that berkeley heights currently has perhaps spread out across different platforms and spreadsheets throughout the district and put it all in one place so teachers and administrators can use this information to help students continue to succeed and make instructional decisions within the classroom and add both efficiency and insight to the decisions that administrators are making that impact broader numbers of students we'll do that to begin with by syncing with your powerschool student information system so all of the rosters will update every single night to ensure everyone has access to the information that they need and in terms of that access what we want to do is ensure that regardless of a teacher's grade or subject matter they're going to have comprehensive access to all of the students historical data

015so for example if you're an eighth grade social studies teacher certainly you'll be able to access your own eighth grade social studies data but you'll also be able to access the seventh grade social studies and sixth grade social studies as well as the world language ela math attendance social emotional data whatever information is going to help you to make decisions to support children i'm going to dive into our platform here hopefully you can see my screen if you can't just let me know but across the top just want to give you a broad spectrum of the different products and services that we do offer to support education we'll spend most of our time in reporting today to show you how we can drill up and down into the platform but in terms of our intervention

016manager software this is something to help tier students for uh individualized and personalized learning determine eligibility based on transparent eligibility criteria for supplemental programs and help schools roster to create very balanced classes um in addition this is just uh you can just hold on for a second mike scarah can you make sure that we can that everybody on the zoom can share uh see his shared screen right now we're not seeing it i don't see it either he has the ability to do so so you just need to oh there we go there we go all right now you're all set i think i did that before i had the host access my apology so as i was saying reporting is where you can do just that access a variety of online reports for intervention

017managers to support processes like rti and the inrs process but from an assessment standpoint users both teachers and administrators have the ability to create tests across all grades and subjects and those tests can be aligned to new jersey student learning standards as well as topics and skills which make giving feedback to parents and students very very straightforward we also offer a variety of pre-made content in the form of new jersey normed predictive benchmarks and item banks and those tests can be taken certainly on old-fashioned bubble sheets but certainly the great majority of our clientele are using our online test taker to administer tests both in school but securely from home as well but let me dive into the platform here and show you something a little bit more dynamic so here on this screen and

018again everything you're seeing today is of course anonymized data we'll be taking your privacy and security very very seriously but what you can see here is from a uh seventh grade teacher's perspective are the students in the class and what we have are our various multiple measures going back from state assessments from 17 18 to 18 but in this case i think the real decision making power and if you would play along with me here think of this as the beginning of a school year so this seventh grade teacher would be able to see where their new seventh grade students ended the year based on sixth grade standards and you can certainly come in here and look at the individual standards that students uh receive instruction on and whether or not they mastered or are

019still at risk on certain standards but also get a real clear understanding of their readiness to grapple uh with the new grade level standards that they'll be introduced with throughout the course of the year and this can be expanded to introduce other data points and look for correlations between student performance and attendance and any other factor that's going to influence instructional decisions so in addition to the accessibility and putting all this in one place we also really want to connect this to actionable decision making so to show that again i'm going to drill into another report here this is one that is very popular for teachers and i'll make this a little bit bigger for those of you who are viewing this on a smaller screen but what a teacher is able to do is

020and this again is one of our benchmark assessments but if it's a world language teacher or a science teacher certainly their reports would look just like this and here a teacher can see the standards that were assessed on the assessment a very clear description of what those standards are indeed measuring and we are big on reliable and invalid data so rather than assess each stand with a single question we assess the standards consistently with at least three questions and we give teachers the ability to sort this to look at what their lowest performing standard might be within their class and their highest performing standard and one of the things that we really pride ourselves on at lincoln is that we are a team of educators i personally was director of curriculum in north brunswick for

021many years and used this product before joining the lincoln team six years ago and all of the regional account managers one will be assigned to berkeley heights are also former new jersey educators and administrators that have walked in similar shoes and really connect this data with processes to add fidelity to the way this information is used but certainly beyond whole class instruction we want to personalize learning so when you click anywhere on the row here you can see who those students are and you can look that even though this was the highest performing standard in the class and certainly you do see students who answer in this case all four questions correctly or developing nicely answering three but you are still going to have students who are at risk but certainly when you look at

022your lowest performing standards where you would expect to see unfortunately quite a bit of red you're going to see lots of proficiency and these are students who can be great assets in the classroom and be models and explain their thinking to help their peers continue to grow and one of the things that we are also really proud of is the ability to provide feedback that's meaningful for students and parents so very intuitive skill based statements and topic based statements but also being very transparent and providing access to question content because we know that in any time a teacher is administering an assessment it's certainly an investment in time and we want to maximize the return on that investment so here you can see questions that perhaps you need to go over in a whole class

023format but sorting this the other way you can see more successful questions but what's great is when you click on that now you can see those students who are going to receive some additional support to go over the content the learning standards topics and skills but of course efficient access to that content right within the screen and of course being able to see the passage that students had to read and interact with as well as these guidance statements that help students understand why the correct answers are indeed correct and if they did pick an incorrect answer why perhaps that answer was incorrect so they can learn from their mistakes outside of this report just want to go ahead and share one more if i may from our online reporting platform we also want to help

024teachers as they work collaboratively in their professional learning communities and department meetings to have discussions about student work so this is our item analysis report and it's exactly what it sounds like it's an individual analysis of each test question each item on the test and here we're showing lower performing items highlighted in the orange and reddish colors versus more successful items in green colors and if i were this teacher and i look at number 15 and see that this was a low performing item but what really concerns me are 40 of the students in this class were on the same wrong page and had a common misconception and selected the wrong answer so now working collaboratively with their colleagues they can really think about what the root cause of those mistakes were and look to

025see if the students performed at similar low levels on standards and look at the correlation across different item types and sometimes if you see a disconnection and students are doing well on a standard but poorly on an item having conversations about the academic vocabulary the item type that they're they're responding to the overall rigor of the question are great ways for them to make more sense of that information and there are certainly a variety of other reports that we do support to help auto group students for tiered instruction and differentiation the ability to examine test item reliability the correlation between different data points and create custom graphs and tables to help tell the data story perhaps at meetings like this to explain how students are continuing to grow throughout the community but certainly beyond reports

026we also want to share with you today a quick glimpse of what it looks like to take a test on the linkit platform so this is just a quick screenshot but in terms of our online testing platform very secure it constantly auto saves student answers so you're never going to lose any information should there be a power failure or a network outage and it certainly is respectful of any accommodations that students might require as part of their individualized education plan and it's also going to help acclimate students with some of the various test-taking tools they may see on other platforms so this is just one example of our tests but again we offer the full ability to test across all grades all subjects with a diverse style of item types available for your students to

027interact with and finally as i begin to wrap up and i certainly do appreciate everyone's time today but i know there are other items on the agenda as well i do just want to share there is a another side of linkit as well that is not software at all we have a team of data analysts that create custom reports that we call navigator reports that build a narrative and context around the data for administrators and teachers to review collectively and collaborate and discuss uh student trends setting goals uh looking at data through different lenses of equity and instructional efficacy so i'll just share a couple of examples here and please know what you see here does indeed include berkeley heights on the report but berkeley heights has not shared any data with us at this

028point this is based on publicly released data that the department of education has made available for all school districts so one of the reports that our analysts have created is a comparison between your school district and other districts of similar free and reduced lunch and historical dfg status as well as overall union county and the entire state of new jersey this is a really powerful report as this is a big indicator of students readiness for college and career this shows just how significantly higher berkeley heights is performing or are enrolling rather students in an algebra 1 program in the middle school grades and as you can see here from both the table and the chart certainly berkeley heights has a lot to be proud of in this regard additionally we create other reports around your

029benchmark data that are predictive of njsl outcomes so you can start to continue to set goals as well of all of your college and career readiness data now again this is demo data this is not berkeley heights but you can see here how we compare districts ap exam participation and performance to uh district and statewide and national averages and this is again just one of the many samples of reports that we look forward to introducing to berkeley heights in the future um outside of that i did want to just mention that we have about 250 districts that we partner with throughout the state but in terms of our partnerships uh within uh union county i thought it might be helpful to share some of the districts that we uh work with in your county but

030again we work with very large districts very small districts extremely high performing districts and certainly those that are dealing with academic challenges as well so uh at this point i'm happy to respond to any and all questions you might ask but again very much appreciate the opportunity to share our solution with you here today so i'm going to stop sharing my screen and certainly welcome any questions chad thank you very much uh for sharing both the demonstration and how what you do affects a student achievement questions from the board for chad mike go ahead a couple questions one will parents have access for their children's data or is this only for teachers administrators it's a very good question so as part of the core solution you have the option to activate a student and or

031parent portal and that is something that if you wish to share and activate that portal you also have options in terms of what data would uh it could be activated within the portal and how that data would be displayed so certainly that is something you know especially again that investment in time in assessment is something we want kids to have great ownership of the learning process and be able to set goals and track their goals so they can continue to grow and certainly parents are very important stakeholders as well and want to provide districts with tools to keep them informed and as a follow-up to that does this take and maybe this is more for uh the district does it take the place of how the current uh report cards are generated or it's still

032a separate system how does that it's a separate system great uh question jordan uh just just a quick question chad um i i like the piece about the sort of chronological uh student performance year over year um do we have an ability to when we start with students to sort of load in historical or basically when you when you start you basically start from that point and go forward no i appreciate that question so yes we we certainly want to be a data warehouse that looks longitudinally at student performance so typically when a school district gets started with linkit they will load multiple years of historical data so rule of thumb is we can load any and every data point you wish the only rule that we have is that we would need to have

033a student id a numerical student id that can be a state id or a local id from powerschool so we can assure that the data is loaded into that database uh correctly but certainly state scores your psats sats ap attendance or poor car grades our goal is to put all that information at your at your disposal so you can look at that data longitudinally track those trends set goals and of course drill down not only in aggregate but to the individual students so that can be used to impact the instruction they receive thank you great thanks chad any other board members with questions joy oh you're back on mute now you're good now so generally if it's nj sla tests or i guess if we still have nj ask data it would all be rolled

034up through our information systems the teachers wouldn't have to hand manually enter that information now if we wanted to use it for our k-5 with the dras we would have to have a data entry person put that information in there my apologies uh ms young i did not hear your question for whatever reason i think we're good chad okay dr dr velia i have a bit of a piggyback on joy's question what have we been using so far have we been using with all for all this information so i the information that we have is um it's called forecast five analytics and most of that information is public knowledge so it doesn't really get down to the teachers except at the high school level so what i was looking for is something k to 12

035that teachers have access to to look at what billy is doing in eighth grade well what happened with billy in seventh grade and what happened with billy in sixth grade so that we can target where the weakness is and then build upon that to make it a strength okay i have a question so essentially chad this is a this is a data warehouse where you're going to pull from our existing systems that store data i think you said you could do it as frequently as daily every evening i think i thought you're and it's it sounds to me like sounds to me like a lot of your uh these reports are standardized that have been created basically by your software team based upon your knowledge of education and my question is um i know you

036were talking about the ability to customize um you have a team that can create custom reports if say our administrators or our department supervisors or our teachers wanted to do that do they have to go through your team or is there a way for them is there a report writer aspect of this software where you know a a fairly tech savvy um teacher or administrator could go in and cut and call the data the way they want to see it or is it purely standardized and that's that's that's part one of my question and then part two of my question is what does the training and what is the training part of this with our teachers look like in order to help them understand that these are all the fantastic standardized reports that are now

037available to them um and you know they may look at that and say well this is great but we may want to see the data cut a different way and how do we how do we do that can they do that themselves or do they have to go through your organization i know that's a lot no no two very good questions i appreciate them both um first off in terms of the online platform the the where you are able to uh really interact and as much as some of the reports might be standardized they are very flexible and customizable in terms of the way you interact so by standardized you know we have a report that you didn't see today called student history that is designed to look at one student at a time and

038their whole academic uh data portfolio so as much as that might be standardized that it's one student at a time you have the option to just to select which subject areas which tests are included do you want to show the standards do you want to compare those standards to the class the school and the district overall achievement so certainly you know in other reports you're able to sort and filter the data you could look at what programmatic supports the student might receive uh what race or gender the student might have and to sag rate so as much as they're standardized in terms of their potential use cases they certainly are very customizable the custom reports that are offline we call those navigator reports they are customized because they can be responsive to perhaps district goals

039so if you're you're doing some action research or there's a board goal or superintendent goal we can provide metrics to show how students are progressing towards achieving that goal so they are customized based on your needs but they are not dynamic in the way that you could interact with them but you know and while a data savvy person and i'm sure there are many in the district uh could potentially recreate some of those reports you most definitely have the ability to extract any all data that you might need and should you have someone that would like to create their own tables and graphs offline certainly we have many districts that do that but you know again that the benefit of having a team of professional data analysts that are going to produce um highly accurate

040and informative professionally uh formatted uh custom reports that are presentation ready um there's many benefits to that so those individuals can go on to lead with that data rather than spending time to mine for the data and create those reports so i'm happy to answer part two but i want to make sure that you're satisfied with my first one christopher sorry i'm sorry the bottom line is that this empowers our user community by pushing the data down to the into the classroom whereas you're saying from a functional perspective the prior i don't know if it was a data warehouse or software we're using did not have that functional capability it did not it did not give the data to the teachers right so i'm not that's huge thank you thank you um in terms of

041professional development um it's multi-dimensional um first and foremost um we look forward to having an on-site in-person relationship when times are good but as you can imagine right now much of what we do is providing virtual support to our many partner districts but that comes in in many formats as well we have print and video and what we call quick view animated shortcut videos um for every aspect of the platform but those tend to be technical in nature that explain what happens when you push the different buttons on the platform and certainly people need to know that information but beyond the technical training and we we find that most users find the system quite intuitive but beyond the technical training we really want to create intent and purpose around how this data is informing instruction

042and leadership decisions so we create a lot of resources that put the data into that context and i'll give you just a few examples the way that teachers would use the data at the beginning of the year is very different than how they would use it in the middle of the year versus the end of the year so at the beginning of the year we have protocols that will train your staff on to look at historical trends to look at the data that came before them and how that can be used to identify those students that may need opportunities for extra enrichment or certainly extra support or even for those students who are making typical process where of progress rather where are their individual strengths and where are there still opportunities for them to grow

043the middle of the year really tends to focus in on growth not only looking at how scores improve but looking at what specific aspects of your assessment strategy need to be customized to really uh impact some of the goals that you might have set in regards to that baseline data so we're looking at growth and we're looking at growth in the context to how other students in new jersey grew that came from similar academic backgrounds both on the overall test but how they're growing based on their performance and mastery towards achieving mastery on the standards so that's a big focus of growth in the middle of the year as well as looking at their predicted outcomes based on our own new jersey norms one of the benefits of working with so many school districts in

044the state is that we can run correlations between assessments to show that what a score in september or december might mean about what that child is going to do on a test like njsla or other high stakes exams and if we wanted to benchmark ourselves say against those other school districts do we have the flexibility to choose what school districts we want to compare ourselves to it depends on the data set so one of the reports i shared earlier to this evening was looking at publicly available data so that's data that's made available by the department of education um they have the ability to share that data we on the other hand would never share any of our partner districts data as we understood security very seriously that said we do aggregate some of the

045data and we can compare berkeley heights to other districts just like you from a socioeconomic standpoint and socioeconomics tends to be one of the biggest predictors of academic outcomes so that's one of the things we do in terms of helping districts set goals we want to be able to uh allow them to compare themselves to other districts just like them but um you know just kind of going back to that last part of that question the end of the year one of the things we look to support is our articulation both horizontal across a grade level but also vertically one grade higher and one grade lower based on that data so the outcomes that you have this academic year could help to inform the instruction and support that students receive in the following year so

046you're able to continue to build upon those effects thank you when is the district looking to implement the system um we are looking at starting it probably data management over the summer and starting in the fall for the new school year any other final questions for chad chad thank you very much thank you for joining us tonight thank you for uh demonstrating what sounds like a very powerful tool uh for us uh and for answering all of our questions i'm sure we'll be in touch again thanks thanks for joining us this evening thank you for the opportunity to share our solution a great night great thank you next topic dr worley okay we will um mike i sent you a list mr scarole sent you a list of people to promote if you can promote

047janet walling superintendent of mountainside drew ziobro um mary beth kopez and natalie christophuli and then share the presentation whenever they get in here working on it thank you well they're coming janet walling welcome to the berkeley heights board of ed meeting thank you for joining us this evening thank you very much for having me very pleased to finally get to meet everyone and hoping for a time soon when we can actually do this all in person we do the same [Music] all right um i'm assuming since i can't see everyone that everyone has been promoted so i'm going to get started we have since the beginning of july 1st miss walling and i have met several times to just discuss curriculum alignment and how we can partner as two districts who have the same goal

048and our goal is to make sure that the students that come from mountainside are similar with the students from berkeley heights they have the same academic rigor and they are ready to get started in high school mike can you switch screens please and that is basically we want the same educational foundation that's not our only goal however we can also share professional development from one district to the other and we have been doing that at least to my knowledge since 2019 and i'm sure before next screen and i'm going to turn it over to drew and natalie now good evening everyone my name is natalie christofouli and i am the k-8 math specialist for the mountainside school district first i want to thank dr barley mrs walling juicy obro and mary beth kopez for their

049continued support in the collaboration between berkeley heights and mountainside and especially as we continue to work together to develop common goals and program alignment berkeley heights and mountainside have had a common math program in grades k-5 for several years in order to support our program alignment all elementary schools in both districts use the hooten-mifflin harcourt program call go math for grades k-5 this is a resource that supports the implementation of the mathematics curriculum this year our director supervisor specialists and coordinators from both districts strengthened our curriculum by modifying our common scope and sequence due to the hybrid learning models in addition common benchmark assessments are being utilized from go math currently we are working together as a team to evaluate new math programs that will best support both districts our continued collaboration is taking place

050as we look to pilot new math resources for the 2021-2022 school year although we will continue to use the go math program in the coming year each district will pilot these new programs and resources we are very excited about the progress that we have made in grade six to eight mathematics which drew will speak about next we plan to leverage that work in k25 this includes teacher collaboration shared professional development and curriculum revisions i look forward to continuing our collaboration as our goal is to support student success at this time i would like to turn the presentation over to juicy obro supervisor of mathematics okay thank you natalie yep mike if you can go to the next screen for us thank you so much so in the past i worked with the principal of deerfield

051kim richards to coordinate the curriculum in grades 6 through 8. in 2018 i started working with natalie the math specialist over at mountainside school district and we started to collaborate and strengthen our programs by creating some shared professional development two years we started with a focus on the sixth grade curriculum with a team of teachers from both districts meeting and working collaboratively to review and revise the sixth grade curriculum during that time we started to look at both districts professional development we did some need surveys with teachers and we started to develop plans for the 19 2019 2020 school year last year we implemented a series of shared workshops the math modeling workshop brought together teachers from both districts in grades 2 4 and 6 6 through 12 for a series of three workshops focusing

052on helping students model and reason with mathematics we also provided teachers in both districts with the ability to attend additional workshops based on some teacher identified needs such as desmos math stations and using spreadsheets in mathematics for the current year's professional development we collaborated with dennis sheeran to develop some asynchronous and synchronous pd sessions focusing on alternative ways to assess learning in this hybrid environment and providing students with individualized feedback this year marks when both districts have transitioned to algebra 1 for all 8th grade students moving forward we are focusing on the 7th grade curriculum revisions and along with algebra 1. we are also continually assessing the success of students taking algebra 1 and grade 8 and identifying any revisions in other grades to support students success at this point i would like to turn

053it over to mary beth kopez our director of elementary education to talk about ela thank you next slide mike thank you drew good evening everyone thank you for allowing me to be here this evening you've heard about our alignment in mathematics i'm going to speak this evening about our alignment in english language arts our districts work together to ensure that all of the components in english language arts program are aligned and we implement what we call a balanced structured literacy framework that framework encompasses reading writing word study and by word study i mean phonemic awareness and phonics spelling and vocabulary grammar usage and mechanics handwriting and technology literacy also in common we have our ela scope and sequences both districts have a partnership with columbia teachers college for reading and writing workshop training we have

054common benchmarks including founders and panel reading assessments teachers college reading and writing assessments and dibbles which is also a reading assessment we use the same intervention resource which is called fountains and panel level literacy intervention the lli program and we hold articulation meetings across the grade levels to continue to plan out common units now i'd like to introduce mrs walling superintendent of mountainside who will speak to us about social studies helps if i remember to unmute good evening everyone and thank you again for the opportunity to present with you this evening uh social studies is coming a little bit newer to our collaboration and it is building on the strength of the previous math and the language arts aspects of our alignment this year we are working closely with mrs kopez along with administrators and

055staff from mountainside in order to begin to align our k-5 social studies curriculum and units of study to the brand new new jersey state student learning standards that are going to be implemented over the next years we are going to take a look at all of these aspects and figure out how to best update and change out items to help build our knowledge in addition we are both analyzing and piloting various programs for potential adoption in the future our middle school teams over the past few years i've even prior to dr varley and i coming on board these teams have met over these years to discuss and align social studies programs to look at the scope and sequencing and again to ensure that as our children enter ninth grade in governor livingston they are receiving

056similar experiences and similar opportunities to bring them to the doors at the same spot i will turn this back over to dr varley for the next slide so we also have been working together in science mostly great grades k to five all of our administrative teams have worked together from mountainside in berkeley heights working on common non-fiction units of study and making sure that topics are taught such as animals insects weather and space we have the same instruction resources mystery science brain pop and new zla as well as scholastic news and one important fact is that the curriculum writing teams are working together to write and plan together so that we're getting similar scientific instruction happening across both districts in grade six to eight similar activities happened discussing scope and sequence and the curricular resources

057and we worked with deerfield to review their new stem electives to ensure alignment next slide we also have been collaborating together in the areas of special education the berkeley heights director of special services and supervisor of special education continuously will collaborate with the mountainside supervisor of special education we invite each other to both types of professional development in each district and we participate in the iep meetings for transitioning mountainside students invitations to parent training opportunities occur throughout the year and we are both invited across districts and we make sure that we have dialogue about placement decisions for mountainside high school students and out of district placements next slide and now i will turn it over to ms walling for the final slide okay so as you guys can all see um and as we have

058already shared on our previous slides we have a variety of aspects where we already have and where we will continue to collaborate and align our student experiences in order to provide similar exposure and similar opportunities to students from both berkeley heights as well as mountainside these include but absolutely do not limit us to our shared pd opportunities and which we hope to expand upon beyond the math professional development that has already occurred as we go in the future it includes our articulation opportunities with greed and subject level peers in both districts in the past we have also done classroom visitations we had students teachers from our preschool program visit your preschool program last year as an opportunity to see and build upon ideas again the curriculum program alignment which we already identified in the prior

059slides the unpacking of those new social studies standards as we talked about because this will realign a lot of our programming moving forward full day kindergarten in berkeley heights that will provide an in opportunity similar and we will again have opportunities for staff to learn from each other and an additional aspect is the exploration of additional middle school sports shared experiences we this year and years past we do share wrestling as a combined program and prior to the onset of our limitations due to pandemic we our athletic directors had begun conversations about the idea of middle school volleyball so there's a lot of opportunities where our students strengths can work together and we really look forward to the continuation of these bonds and strengthening on both sides with both districts thank you very much miss

060walling and i think the next slide is questions so i will open it up to questions from the board can we have questions more chris um very nice to meet you janet welcome um i think this is the first time um certainly since i've been on the board we've had a collaborative presentation like this and i can tell you it makes me very very happy for those of you who remember jeannie parker jordan she predated you two reps ago this was a real point of passion um to gene and myself because i think institutionalizing this kind of collaboration is which is clear you've done is critical and in the best interests of our kids to share best practices and make sure we're all singing off the same song sheet when we hit ninth grade um

061so that's my comment and i thank you for this this is terrific my question is how often do you meet and compare notes um and um physically either via zoom or whatever get together to um you know update your collaborations you know during the year what does that look like so i can let mary beth and drew talk about and and natalie talk about that because jan and i probably talk daily so um i'm not sure we're a good indicator especially with the weather just saying yes i i can jump in i i can speak to well first of all i have to compliment drew and and natalie and i've done this before but i'll do it again they were two of the first people to reach out to me when i was hired in

062in august um so they immediately wanted to start to collaborate with me and i i can't tell you how much i appreciated um friendly faces and people wanting to reach out and work together so um so i wanted to give a shout out to them uh you know certainly on this then in this venue but also we meet quite regularly the math group meets regularly um the social studies work is starting now starting to do the social studies work moving forward it really depends on the subject area how often we get to meet i can also tell you not only zoom but we we talk pretty regularly just via email as well so it definitely is an ongoing collaboration it continues to grow and because my new position was fairly new i think people are

063learning about me and and learning that that i'm part of that collaborative group as well but it really is a wonderful environment to be in and it's it's so nice to have people to bounce ideas off of because it's very hard doing curriculum curriculum work in asylum so to to have other experts in the air in similar areas and and to have common goals and common visions for our students is really a wonderful experience thank you i think this is terrific other questions from board members jordan hi guys i i'll echo chris's comments just to say that um i've talked to genie about this in the past and it's um i don't say it's long overdue but it's you know it's uh i'm thrilled that it's happening now and and it's obviously it's great to

064see so many people part of the conversation and uh sort of moving from subject to subject to subject um i had two quick questions one um it looks like we um uh grades k to five and then six to eight are covered for each subject except ela i'm just wondering if uh if that's if it's there but not there um so if that's one question and then i guess you know as we look ahead a year two years five years ten what is what does success kind of look like we just had a great presentation about uh metrics um so just curious how we're beyond anecdotally which is is evident already um how from a data perspective we're we're going to see that we've made progress you know at a ninth tenth and forward level

065so i can talk about ela real quick from six through eight we um mountainside has been ahead of us on the teachers college program and they've been a partner school for years before we have and i'm not sure janet can answer how long they've been at partner school so they're a partner school mountainside is a partner school k to eight we right now are only a partner school k to five i do see us trending in the six through eight but um i wanted to start slow and start with k-5 first before we went there so that's the reason there's not six to eight yet there will be six to eight eventually and as far as data points i think if we get to the point where each kid from mountainside and berkeley heights enter

066at the same at least near the same level if you have 300 children in a grade level you're not no one's going to end up all on the same level but within a range of being at the same level of rigor and educational foundation to come into governor livestream that's my idea of success to make sure that we're all on the same page other questions from board members mike i do also want to echo chris and jordan's kind of this is great to see this collaboration two questions also one do you see this rather either be a zoomer in person once you get past uh this pandemic bringing this down to the student level you know eighth grade seventh grade some sort of interactions on that and the other question is if possible in 30

067seconds or less what is this new standards in social studies what is what's that coming down the pike i'll let them talk about the standards in social studies i know we have talked about having the eighth graders from mountainside get together with the eighth graders from berkeley heights and kind of a picnic outdoor fun activity but we've been in the middle of a pandemic right now so we're not going to do that right at this moment um mary beth do you want to address the standards from social studies i'm happy to in june june of the summer 2020 the new jersey department of education put out new standards adopted new social studies standards for k-12 so we presently in the fall started to unpack those standards i can i can tell you that i'm part

068of a consortium with other social studies supervisors directors in the state where we're actually unpacking the standards and really mapping out scope and sequences in this in social studies and then the next step is to find resources to write curriculum that is aligned with the standards and then to find resources to support the instruction so it really is a three-step process the the state put out the standards we unpack the standards and write curriculum with those standards we map them out we put scope and sequences and part of the reason for that is because the standards are written in bands so for example the standards will say by the end of grade two so we have we have to map out what's taught in kindergarten what's tron first what's taught in second then it'll say

069by the end of grade five so we have to map out what's taught in third and fourth and fifth and so on so once we map out those standards we write curriculum to align with the standards and then the last step is to find resources to support the instruction so you said this so the standards came out last year and has to be implemented by this fall in this summer they would they were adopted in the summer so we have to get them written in into the curriculum this year this school year and and just add a little bit at the 612 level some of the things that for example uh integrating the civics you know we've worked we've been working on that and that's part of us being ahead of what was coming out

070and doing those things at the 612 level there's not a lot of dramatic changes um a lot of it is just some uh adjustments to where some things fall it's not a major curriculum revision but the civics is one of the things that was born out of that thank you other questions from board members uh let me just wrap up with my thoughts uh this has been a long time coming we have talked uh in and around this subject for for quite some time when you look at the slides you say oh well they're aligned on this they're aligned on that they're working together on this and that and your first takeaway might be is like well what else is there to do why aren't they doing that well the reality is we weren't like

071that so uh i really want to thank um janet um and melissa for their leadership uh both of them stepped into their roles you know you know relative in a relatively short amount of time both of them have been here a short amount of time this was a priority for both boards communicated to both superintendents and both those superintendents engaged their teams you see mary beth and natalie and drew and others but there are other people uh behind the scenes uh as you as we you heard tonight there are some subjects that we're tackling now starting with math others are coming up in in the future and this can only be good for our district good for our students good for our educators good for our administrators it's just good all across the board so

072uh janet to you and your team a heartfelt thank you for this it continues just to be another way that we partner in our in our relationship which is great uh and melissa thank you of course to you and to our team uh to part of that uh we will come back i'm sure and revisit this at some time in the future to hear all the other good progress that both teams are making and again i think our students are the ones to benefit benefit uh the most from this so again thanks to the whole team thank you thank you very much um and i also just you know as as to share in our march board meeting the berkeley heights team will be joining me to share this presentation with the mountainside board as

073well and i know uh mr reinstein just as you guys were looking forward to it our board and our community is as well so it's very really nice to be able to share how far we've come um prior to both dr varley and i coming on and where we've come to very quickly over the past year and a half so thank you great jenna thank you very much uh doctor does that conclude your report for tonight that concludes the superintendent's report great thank you uh moving on are there any board members with liaison reports for tonight [Music] i have a report from the gl diversity committee the gl diversity committee uh with the generous support of the birthplace education foundation held a literary circle book discussion on trevor noah's autobiography board a crime on february

074the 24th over 58 students staff community members and members of the berkeley hearts diversity council participated in the event after a brief video on the history of apartheid people were split into breakout rooms to discuss the book student leaders directed discussion into the breakout rooms after the breakout rooms the entire group came together and people shared the most impactful things that their groups discussed it was clear that everybody enjoyed the book very much and learned a tremendous amount about apartheid and drew great parallels between south african apartheid and the current state of american race relations after the discussion participants could stay to watch a short video of trivino interviewing his maternal grandmother it was a really great event and brought together so many parts of the community to discuss an interesting book an important topic

075i was unfortunately unable to attend the literary lunch myself due to a conflict which was particularly disappointing for me because although i was born in the united kingdom i actually grew up in south africa during the apartheid era and lived there from the ages of 3 to 24 before i immigrated back to the uk so i love would have loved to be part of the discussion and brought my experiences to the conversation i am however reading the book so that's it tonight that concludes my report thank you very much are there other ways uh robert yes can everyone hear me yes okay a couple of things uh recently the committee met for the uh governor's educational educator of the year award i read a lot of great letters i think everyone should be proud and

076i have a feeling you're going to be seeing some of them before too long legal liaison as i think emily haynes alluded to in her student report there's been a recent executive order by the governor stating that up to two parents or guardians per athlete under the age of 21 will be able to attend indoor or outdoor youth sports practices and competitions no other spectators are permitted and even with parents or guardians indoor youth sporting events may never exceed 35 capacity or 150 people all spectators must follow department of health sports activities guidelines including mask requirements social distancing and staying home when sick school districts will retain the ability to impose stricter guidelines and not allow spectators and also have the discretion on whether and when to implement this policy um interesting another thing from

077trenton on february 19th governor murphy announced that new jersey was applying to the federal government for a waiver that would allow the state to cancel administration of statewide achievement tests this year three days later the federal education department however issued a letter to all state education departments stating that while it will grant some leniency in collecting data quote we're not inviting blanket waivers of assessments so it's a little bit up in the air in terms of clarity but the letter went further to say that the federal department of education encourages states to consider administering a shorter version of statewide assessments offering remote administration and extending the testing window to the greatest extent practicable and lastly i attended the townships environmental commission meeting last week there are no issues directly on point for berkeley heights board

078of education thank you robert thank you chris chris i'm sorry just a quick update on the budget um we had a finance committee meeting um on february 9th and we are getting there as you know it's a multi-month process i think donna starts this in the late fall and we've had several meetings um identifying key initiatives for the 21 22 school year and reviewing the individual departmental budgets we have another meeting coming up in another week or so and then we will finalize the preliminary budget which will be presented to you all on march 18th at that meeting and we will endeavor to get you those materials in advance and if you have any questions you can reach out to me my uh the my committee uh mike and uh doug and and who's who

079else is on and angela and uh you know we can answer any questions in advance of the march 18th uh meeting or you can ask them you know at that meeting but we should be ready i think we're in good shape great thank you chris are there any other liaison reports for tonight um great thank you joy any other finally liaison reports all right moving on facilities report donna with the help of our architects we recently submitted a local government energy audit application the purpose of the audit is to have a third party analyze our current atria equipment and our energy operations and then to recommend energy improvements that can be made they will also recommend possible funding opportunities for these projects the information that we submitted as part of the application included utility bills

080um usage summaries building square footage the next step is to have a physical audit of our buildings it is anticipated that this audit will be conducted in the next several months once the audit is completed and the engineers have reviewed our utility usage and current equipment they will make recommendations for improvements some more to come as we move through this process any questions for donna on the facilities with this program do we have to outlay the money and then we are reimbursed or is the state funding it directly uh there are several ways to do it and they do they will discuss different opportunities there are ones that are direct installs where there is no uh outlay of funding but then there are others where we can outlay the money and then we'll get reimbursed

081a lot of it comes from savings that are generated in other areas um so they'll put all of that together and give us some options okay let me help you with that i'm very familiar with the program good thanks mike great thank you donna we will now move to the citizens hearing portion of the meeting this evening uh to be recognized please ensure that your first and last name are listed on your device and use the raise your hand functionality i will unmute you which allows you to come off mute and address the board 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 our

082staff members by meeting privately with the appropriate administrative staff when addressing the board in a public forum members of the public should refrain from identifying any student and our staff member by name and are solely responsible for their comments which could be considered defamatory or slanderous according to the laws in new jersey each resident will have three minutes uh to speak with that i will open up the citizens hearing for anybody who wants to raise their hand and address the board i see sai bagaravi sai you can unmute oh scy's hand went down uh next i see is tom forger thank you mr president tom good evening welcome i have a few questions about the new position of director of special projects first what is the salary range for this position okay i'm sorry you

083said you had a couple of questions tom well that's that's one yeah but let me before i go on i'd like to get that number the salary range and then i'll give you the rest of it dr ollie you want to answer that question there is no salary attached to that position what it would be attached to someone else's job description there's no salary no salary but how is this this is a new position right is a new position that would be attached to a current position a current title it would go under a current position's job description okay but there's an actual new person to fill the job right it would be one of our existing employees tom think of it as additional responsibilities for a current employee ah well that considerably changes what

084i was going to say my basic point was it seemed to be a duplication of uh duties of existing staff such as the superintendent for example number eight says stays informed about legislation regulations and policies that impact diversity equity and inclusion and number 11 says facilitates the district diversity committee for the superintendent there's also overlap with the high school principal duties such as facilitates the glhs diversity committee and number 18 which develops and monitors a budget related to diversity equity and inclusion programs all of those i thought could be done by the superintendent in collaboration with the building principles i'm pretty sure the duties of the person overlap with existing staff duties and our existing staff can carry them out so what you're telling me is it's not actually a new person it's just going

085to be duties spread around with existing staff is that right that's correct that's correct okay so my heart is overjoyed can i ask a question about the presentation from lincoln the guy from lincoln uh you can i don't know if he's still here but ask your question if we can answer it if we can get back to you as well this is something i'm i'm delighted to see you're doing something like this um i did have a little concern some concern about the privacy of the records i couldn't tell uh where the data was kept and who had access to it so um maybe you want to ask him just how how secure is their system what are the security provisions things like that because these are student records are they off-site are they kept

086with you we can we will make sure that um obviously we're just in the beginning stages as we enter into the implementation of that we have a lot of questions to work through and uh privacy and where this is secured how it's backed up will all be things that we will consider so thanks for your for your coverage thank you thank you all right thank you great thank you um psy i see you back now oops say you there you should be able to unmute psy the uh the microphone is not muted but uh i can't hear anything and saying that i did unmute in the chat um sy do you want to put your question in the chat sorry sorry that we can't hear you it looks like you should be able to speak

087and for us to hear you but for whatever reason we can't hear you i don't see anybody else with their hand raised otherwise i would come back to psy in in a second and as soon as i said that i stand corrected mike leblanc michael good evening good evening i just have a couple items first the question is how much was has been spent on the investigation so far regarding the accusations made a couple months ago uh regarding harassment and issues and all that uh just the second question is on staff vaccination how was the staff both teachers administrators and all berkeley heights staff been progressing with um the vaccination for kovid and then the final question is how is the planning for september beginning to unfold what are the districts plans for september to

088do a full day half day in person fully remote hybrid something because parents need to start making plans now for that particular event for september great three questions doctor well you want to take one or two as far as the investigation i don't think i have a number and donna doesn't either so um i can email you once i find that out um is he still here and i can email you once i find that that information out and the second question was i remember the third one this the second one was on staff vaccinations deaf vaccinations i am not sure if you've listened to the governor but he has pushed back best vaccinations for educators i was on a meeting wednesday when they said that they thought educators would be next in line which

089would probably mean april for vaccinations i do know that some of my staff has been vaccinated but um i don't have the quite the total of them all and then for the last one my hope is that we are back in school full day before the end of this year i know it's a high hope and a high goal but i do have that i am aiming for that and we will see how it turns out as far as next year's concerned we never thought the pandemic was going to last this long and but my goal is to start off september in person in school ready to go all right dr raleigh thank you very much michael thank you for your questions sai i'm going to come back to you one more time and see

090if we can get you back this last time yeah uh hi we got you sai good evening welcome yeah good evening sorry about that uh looks like i need to get a new laptop uh my microphone i kept unmuting and i was talking and i think the microphone wasn't working um so a quick question on the like i was looking i think i wrote to donna um was on the school website i couldn't find a complete budget for the current year so i did request it from her and she was gracious enough to send it to me but can we upload the complete budget instead of the user-friendly budget on our website um so we can you know review it especially with uh this year and then the new budget meeting coming along uh the

091second question was um on the meeting agendas i realized that previously i was able to see the meeting agendas on the website but nowadays i think donna's response was when you post the meeting minutes for a particular for a boe meeting that has been conducted you remove the agenda so any particular reason is there any way that you could keep the meeting agendas on there because uh most of the time more than the meetings i would like to see what was on the agenda for a particular meeting um so and our town council does that um so they have both the minutes and the agendas along for a meeting so it would be more helpful for residences what i think okay so for the for the first one so you're saying you have access the

092user-friendly budget but you want it you want on our website to see this question so there is the user-friendly budget already available you want something different no the user friendly budget is like a pdf uh 10 pages yeah but i was wondering but the actual budget has all the details and it's i think close to it's over 100 pages or close to 100 pages so i was wondering if you could upload that because i i'd like to look into that and see i get like like to get advice about that okay so uh so we'll look at that as far as the meeting agendas go so donna so if i were to look back go in the past you're saying that after the minutes are posted you take down the actual agenda so only the

093meeting state oh only the meeting with the minutes is on the website but not the agenda anymore right we went back uh at least five years and we haven't had we this has been our practice since 2014. is once the minutes go up we take the agenda down okay um i just have a question for you sai what what is in the agenda and i've read the minutes many many times the the minutes typically reflect each of the agenda items if it was a vote or not what is in the agenda that you don't see in the minutes when you go back and look back so sometimes so for example this meeting today's meeting we have attachments and uh i think a couple of additional attachments which are not there in the meeting minutes so

094i think as a general practice usually it's easier for a resident to follow so if somebody is going and reading the minutes for them to understand okay this was this was on the agenda and this is how the people voted or this was the discussion item i just feel that leaving the agendas on tells us like you know it's a it's easier to tie the minutes to the agenda and most of the time i'm like even in the township council website you know if i've missed a meeting it's easier to follow through an agenda than the minutes if if at all i'm interested in what happened on that particular ordinance or a vote that's when i would go to the minutes otherwise i think i i just want to understand the reason behind pulling off

095the agendas for the previous meetings okay we'll look into i mean the the directional answer to that is the minutes have more details than the agendas do so the agenda is already listed as a subset of the meeting so that's been our reasoning all along is that the agenda of course just has the outline once the minutes are there it reflects the vote the discussion whatever it was so i think it was the more detailed one was there and the agenda wasn't needed but let us look at it and from that perspective that you shared and we'll get back to you okay thank you thank you i don't see anybody else's hand raised i'll pause for a couple of seconds just to make sure before closing citizens hearing seeing nobody else i will close the

096citizens hearing and continue with the rest of the of the agenda moving forward with administration yes i'll move items a through f motion a second any discussion okay um there are a couple of policies on the uh agenda item i'm sorry i'm pulling it back up there's one regarding student um communications between students and teaching staff and another one is communications between support staff and students um i think there's a gap i would be best to fill and that would be paraprofessionals um oftentimes those for other people who may not know sometimes we call them teachers aids or you may know them by that name um oftentimes there'll be a one-on-one aide in particular or individual aid most likely supporting special ed where the communication is very important between that aide and the student however

097that would not be uh permitted because they're it's not addressed in these policies under any parameters um the two different policies the the teacher has some some scope and some discretion you know educational matters to obviously communicate by electronic mail with students the support staff really are strictly prohibited unless the superintendent issues permission in writing so i don't think either one of them fit for individual aids teachers aides or paraprofessionals and i think we should add that to the pool or pot of permissions that teaching staff have so i would add the word paraprofessionals there right you go with that oh sorry if you look through um on page three of five of support staff it says under number one all emails between a support staff member and a student must be sent or received

098so they do have the ability to email the students it just has to go through our email system i would have to check back on it again i can't pull that up at the moment but you're considering support staff because we also there was also some discussion is support staff custodians perhaps or secretaries or admins or is paraprofessionals going to be within support staff it could be support staff wouldn't be custodians or it would be paraprofessional secretaries it would be school psychologists anyone who's not a teacher anyone who's not interested is a classroom support person or school building support so they would fault paraprofessionals would fall under support staff and the support staff and i'm sorry i can't pull it up at the moment support staff isn't restrictive in terms of needing your written permission

099no it's all it's number one on page three says it just has to be through our email system okay i'll look at it again okay thank you you're welcome yes yes mr weinstein [Music] education yes i move education's items a and b second promotion discussion mr hyman yes mrs young [Music] mr chinchuli yes mr aquila yes mrs penna yes miss riley mrs kirsch yes mr weinstein yes 16 personnel yes i move uh personnel items a through m [Music] mrs young yes mr chinchilly yes mrs aquila yes mrs penna yes miss riley mrs kirsch yes mr weinstein yes 17 business motion a second any discussion roll call mr hyman yes mrs young mr chinchuli mr tequila yes mrs penna yes miss riley mrs kirsch yes mr weinstein yes item 18 finance [Music] move items a through

100c second second any discussion mr hyman yes mr yeah mrs young mr chinchuli mr taquila yes mrs pena yes miss riley yes mrs kirsch yes mr weinstein yes is there any other business to come before the board this evening yeah i have a question done so this question to dr varley or whomever you think my best answer is so i've been seeing a lot of articles including into our own tap into about the road forward initiative about numerous grants that are available in the state due to the covid and relief funding that's available are we making active applications going after what are we doing on to try and get any of this money available so i think i'm going to turn that over to donna for the ese eser grant [Music] uh we just recently

101received notification that we got money from the second pairs grants we got approximately two hundred and seventy thousand dollars for regular district spending that earmarked for anything specific and then we got two allocations um one of for forty five thousand dollars for learning acceleration and twenty five thousand dollars for mental health and um wellness initiatives this money uh we can go back to expenses from march of 2020 and the time period is through october of 2023 so that is the one grant that we have been become eligible for okay so this is also as it says it almost looks like a round two that this is coming out yes okay we had the first cares grant which we probably spent to 85 of it so far and then this is a second version or the

102second edition of the cares grant okay thank you all right very quick um what happened to the safe routes to school grant do we have any updates on that i know that we have been working towards it i i think things might have slowed down because of the pandemic yeah they uh i have talked to um to gene kingsley who's coordinated with us on the town council and um this uh they're passing on this year so the cycle changed due to the pandemic so typically in the spring is the time that they had done that but their my understanding is that there's no granting this spring and it's a little unclear what their new cycle will be but we are we are still doing all the activities that we have been doing to to qualify

103for our different statuses with the schools and with the walking and with biking and all the things that we are still doing to qualify it's just a little unclear when we're going to have to submit for that grant but we are following up with the with the state and when they do allow for the submissions we absolutely will be uh right there with our with our application any other business before the board yeah i have a question so at the last meeting we had a presentation on diversity uh equity inclusion we had a consultant speak i believe we authorized yes we did we authorized uh we did that expenditure and i've just you know just roughly i wanted to know has that work begun and if not when will it begin and just for people

104listening who weren't on that call it was really uh bringing in someone from the outside to assist us with creating a dei uh strategic plan and creating a task force um for key initiatives going forward so i i'm just curious as to when that work will begin and just very roughly uh dr varley you know when do you think we'll be in a position where we can actually create this task force and kind of get them um started okay so we um at the end of last week or maybe the beginning of this week it's already end of last week we sent out the invitations we had had over 60 people volunteer to be on the task force which we know is great turnout but you can't have 60 people in a task force so

105we went through and made some decisions on 14 individuals and we sent invitations last friday by monday every single person had accepted and our first meeting is march 9th from 7 to 9. so we are moving forward [Music] okay i'm sorry i don't know if everyone could hear me the bottom of page 2 of 5 on policy 4283 the following acceptable protocols for all electronic communications between a support staff member who has been approved by the superintendent or designee to have electronic communications and then we get to the part you referred to about it's got to be through the school system i don't see where you're saying by the superintendent okay uh i see on page two it says the following acceptable protocols for all electronic communications that's teaching staff hold on is it possible

106no this is 283 okay the following we've been approved by the superintendent so that means every paraprofessional has been approved by me to have an email account all of our professionals have an email account already so they have been approved to have that already so you're saying to have electronic communications you mean authorized to have an email account yes not actual communication absolutely absolutely is there a way maybe i can work with donna as policy liaison and we can i i think that's great i'm not sure it's that clear to that refers to email account clearly it sounds like you're authorizing them to communicate okay okay okay just for clarity any other comments questions from the board i will take a motion to adjourn so move we are turned we are back here in two

107weeks for our next meeting on march 4th thank you for attending have a good rest of the night thank you thank you good night