001okay good evening everyone sorry for the little delay we were meeting with the ridge high school student government and as always we have a lot of fun talking to them and they have a lot to say and we need to find more time to meet with them because it's important um okay this is the regular session of the board of education we've already had executive session and we did the salute to the flag in there so at this point we'll have a roll call please mr mclaughlin mr salmon here this is white here miss light here here josiah here ms fox here here madam president thank you um i'll read the statement of public notice this is a regular meeting of the board of education of bernard's township notice of the time and place of
002this meeting was provided and copies of that resolution were forwarded to the official newspapers as designated by the board of education etc etc for those members of the public who are unable to attend our meeting in person there are two live stream links of the meeting posted through the district website www.burnersb the two live stream links are both airing our meeting one is just the backup of the other in case of technical difficulty we very much welcome input from the public there are two times during regular meetings that the public is invited to speak one time is early in the meeting before the board votes when you may speak about any item that is listed on tonight's agenda towards the end of the meeting there is another public forum to address any matter of public
003concern related to the schools when you approach the microphone please state your name and address each statement made by a participant shall be limited to three minutes duration no participant may speak more than once during a given public comment session in order to run efficient meetings and to allow maximum opportunity for members of the public to speak the board reserves the right to set a different time limit for individual comments and or to set an overall time limit for public comments all statements shall be directed to the presiding officer no participant may address or question board members individually as a courtesy to those individuals unable to attend our meetings in person public comment may be made remotely through zoom interested individuals shall navigate to the district webpage www.burnersboe.com and select board of education followed by
004public comment to review the specific instructions or click on the link in this agenda public comments made in person will be processed first then comments via zoom no public comments will be accepted before 7 pm or after the last item on the agenda board forum please understand that public comment portions of our agenda are not structured as question and answer sessions but rather they are offered as opportunities to share your thoughts with the board the board or administration will respond to public comments to the extent possible any board responses to public comment will be generally addressed during board forum or during committee reports however all comments are considered and will be investigated and addressed as appropriate please be courteous and mindful of the rights of others when speaking comments may not be abusive obscene threatening
005or irrelevant please understand that students and employees have specific legal and privacy protections the board is not permitted to respond in public to comments about students and employees please also understand that the board will not be responsible for the content of comments made by members of the public members of the public are cautioned that they are speaking at their own risk and any personally directed statements they make may subject them to legal liability to the affected individual if it is necessary for the board to go into executive session at the end of the meeting we will provide an estimated length of time for the session and whether any action is anticipated to be taken upon returning to public session okay we're up to our student representative gordon lee thank you so with memorial day literally
006one week away ridge is incredibly excited to welcome the unofficial start of summer as ap and standardized testing come to a close students are deep into their final projects and looking forward to these final few weeks the rich forensics team participated in the national speech and debate association's last chance qualifier intended to give deserving students another opportunity to show their skills and qualify for the national speech and debate tournament ridge qualified an additional six students further bolstering the already strong showing on the national stage ridge congratulates all of the students for their grit and determination as well as the teachers parents and support staff for their tireless efforts despite the urge to relax ridge clubs have continued to fundraise for good causes the key club and grow up club will be hosting a henna tattooing
007session on may 25th during lunch with donations going to the world wildlife organization the ridge golf team organized a car wash on saturday to raise money for their team as well all these funds go directly to these organizations and we are very pleased to support them in any way we can outside of fundraising other clubs are certainly not idle either the ridge international dance ensemble held their annual showcase on may 12 and the girls who code club hosted a women in stem panel discussion on may 16th dozens of bridge clubs and sports also showed up for the ridge high school activities fair on may 10 giving rising freshmen a chance to talk with members of these organizations share their contact information and hopefully gain more information for when they have to decide on clubs in
008the fall the fair was incredibly positive and exciting and we hope the eighth graders had as much fun as we did on saturday may 12th the ridge latin program visited the franklin high school for the annual new jersey junior classical league state convention in addition to attending workshops and learning from reenactors professors and other leading experts many students also participated in various academic and athletic contests ridge students took home ribbons in many of these areas ranging from grammar to daily life to hellenic history to tug of war and the ridge upper level curtain team took first place in the 2022 new jersey state kirtaman quiz bowl finals opportunities like these show the immense dedication and passion bridge students have for their classes as well as the sportsmanship instilled the ridge's educational environment the latin program
009thanks the teachers parents and volunteers who worked tirelessly to make this day happen in preparation for next year the ridge student government has already started the election process for class officers additionally i have just met with the school-wide president-elect and the other incoming school-wide officers as part of our annual transition process as i'm sure all of you just heard literally five minutes ago all of them have many wonderful ideas and are very dedicated to improving the school and the student life surrounding it i am incredibly proud of their diligence and work ethic and with just under a month of school left i am sure they will do many great things and i cannot wait to see what they have planned thank you thank you gordon it was wonderful to meet with all the students and
010please tell them we were not trying to rush them out of here but we really did have to start the meeting because we publicly advertised it starting at seven o'clock but we definitely look forward to talking to them more and hearing from them does anyone have any questions for gordon okay thank you very much i don't really have any board president comments just want to invite everyone to the rescheduled bernard's connect meeting that we had to cancel from last week and it is on june 6th right monday june 6th at 7 o'clock in the ridge cafeteria we're hoping to have a big turnout so we had really great conversations at the first burners connect on collaboration and communication and we're looking forward to having this one on technology and instruction and it's a wonderful opportunity
011for parents to come and talk to their children's teachers and other staff members to hear more about what's going on in the classroom so we're really hoping to get a good turnout at that and at this point we are going to go down to sit in the audience for the presentation thank you i didn't know did you have a question oh okay okay all right good evening everyone thanks for being here um we're here tonight to provide you with an update of our progress toward district goal number three i've titled it here career education program evaluation but i'll read the full title of the goal in just a minute i'm joined by this amazing team here so they'll be introduced shortly but i have miss jean o'connell the director of special services stephanie smith who
012are welcome welcoming back from her leave um alison reed and then we have mr john brum along with a team of amazing students who are going to share some of their experiences in one of our programs as a reminder we'll post this presentation to the district website tomorrow for your further review so i'm going to start by giving you a little bit of our journey to this point and what led us to this particular presentation related to this district goal in 2019 the community came together stakeholders students staff administration board members to talk about our strategic to create a strategic plan to create our vision for the future and establish goals that would guide us over the next five years since 2019 the first strand of the plan developing student competencies speaks to meeting the
013needs of all students all learners it covers a lot of ground with many sub goals but you know the language in here is important that we're looking to not only meet the needs of all students right across the entire district but provide them with some more experiential and interdisciplinary learning activities to foster a growth mindset and develop lifelong learners who are most ultimate most specifically prepared for post-secondary plans so college and career readiness is what that speaks to like i said this covers a lot of territory for the purposes of tonight i'm going to focus on sub goal 11b so within strand one this one relates to district goal three that we're currently working on here and it's to increase opportunities for students to explore career college and vocational opportunities so within strand one here
014we're honing in on how we can promote more college and career readiness and increase opportunities for students to have some of those experiences while they're with us there's a multitude of ways in which these experiences are already occurring throughout our program this goal here is about being more intentional more purposeful about providing these opportunities to all students and in an appropriate place for them during their pre-k through 12 plus years with us so this led us to the development of district goals for the school years 2020 21 and 2021-22 so the past two years we had district goal 1 enhancing our ability to spawn to respond to necessary school closures through the development of blended learning programs in an updated long-range technology plan district goal number two strengthening the ability of the staff to promote
015social emotional health and well-being outcomes to staff development previously you've heard about our work in these two areas but district goal three is what we're going to talk about tonight to provide students greater opportunity to understand how their personal strengths and interests align with 21st century career pathways oh look at that i was playing with different animations that's funny did i skip one i think i skipped okay thank you that threw me just a little bit um so we embarked on a program evaluation and we do program evaluations in all of our areas on a pretty much a five-year basis however you know i need to note that the pandemic slowed us down and we're not necessarily on the five-year sequence as we would normally like to be but we have them in ela and
016social studies and science and so forth we embarked on a program evaluation of our college and career readiness our career education programming which is a little different right because it's not just touching it doesn't just touch or affect one department one area one grade band this really transcends all elements of the district it really is in bringing together counseling department initiatives and programming what goes on in our curriculum and our instruction both in the general ed and the special ed population so it really touches upon everywhere in the district and so the purpose of this program evaluation was to look at how we could do it more systemically more integrated in more purposeful ways so that all students benefit from the same great programming so for that reason the three of us mrs smith mrs
017o'connor myself we're going to speak a little bit about some of our current programming that we do already offer and that this program evaluation uh aims to improve upon and build upon i'll take the first couple of bullets um so the first one speaks about the standards the new jersey student learning standards and we currently are responsible for implementing this one standard standard nine which is called which was the were the 2014 standards which have been recently updated but they're called the 21st century life and careers standard the way this particular standard works is it is we are required to implement them throughout our program throughout all of our grade levels and all of our content areas where we infuse what these standards call for and what these standards call for is teaching students about
018a range of things like financial health exploring career paths understanding what the skills jobs and colleges are looking for from problem solving creative thinking collaboration so all of that is woven through the standards or built into the standards and it's our job to weave it through our content areas where it's most appropriate for students where it fits in our other subject areas so this is something that we're already doing throughout our curriculum a couple of other programs we offer for students designed to give them some college and career type experiences one is the dual enrollment courses that we offer i'll speak about this at a later slide but we do this is a way for students to earn college credit a transcript from a college from a course that they're taking at ridge high school
019we also have a senior internship program that we're very proud of and i won't say anything more because we have a lot of people here tonight to speak about that but that's something that we currently offer and are hoping to build upon in the future mrs o'connell we also have sorry we also have what we call our vocational skills work program and that serves our students in district that have disabilities it serves students in the self-contained classes and in our resource room classes skills are taught directly in school and they're also taught in the community at local job sites many of our students in these programs require one-to-one assistance just to learn the prerequisite skills in order to have a job within the community once they're in the community many times they'll also continue to
020need that one-on-one assistance with our job coaches currently in that program right now we have 29 29 students in our postgraduate piece and we have 38 students that are also coming up so that program is continuously growing all right good evening so another opportunity for our students on the career pathways and career preparedness and field experience really is to participate in the somerset county vocational technical high school so votech we have 17 students who are in the votech program 11 of them are shared time and so they're shared between us and the vote campus and then six of them are full-time and so they are on a specific career pathway where that is their full-time school that they attend in addition to that we have exposure to different career pathways through career fairs career days
021different activities this you know we'll get in a little more detail in a few slides from now but this really encompasses the work of many different people across the district at different grade levels and so teachers from elementary on through high school each year it can look different and so we've started to dive into what exactly is done and do a current analysis which i'll get into but again some of the broad examples that we have noticed are career fairs career days where speakers might come in exposure to career pathways in that sense and then various activities that are related to those events additionally interest inventories are popular especially at the high school level sometimes in the middle school level as well but here at ridge high school we have for the past couple of
022years participated in interest inventories typically at the sophomore level it can look different each year but our platform naviance which is our college and career database that we use and software program they have a variety of different learning inventories and self-assessments and career interest profilers that can tell you a little bit more about yourself after you take the assessment and then give you potential pathways that might be a good fit for you and so just having students take those assessments and then helping them to understand what might be their aptitudes their interests and then to go from there so as my colleague john brown likes to say that is a recap of the state of the state and so that's what we would do for a very long time together but that in other words
023is our way of saying our current programming it's a summary of what we have in the district related to career readiness as miss fox mentioned we did convene after we studied where we are with this and really you know discovered our our interest and passion for this area we convened with mrs fox support a career education program evaluation committee so we will give kudos to the committee members their names are up there on the screen some of these folks have been involved with this process for at least two summers and some of the folks up here on the screen will carry the torch forward and carry um continue some of the work moving forward and so you can see here that there are representatives from many of the different schools the different grade levels and
024disciplines uh in subject areas as well via special services counseling and teaching at the elementary middle and high school level or one at a time that's crazy okay so what did we do and what was our our purpose make sure i get through all that okay we as mrs fox mentioned our if i could just say it may be three key points what our purpose was we came together to do oh one too many okay program comparisons so that means looking at different programs um nearby and so keeping it close to home and close to home i really mean in the state of new jersey we looked at 35 different districts what are they doing what are what's the most innovative way that they're doing career readiness you know what's the cutting edge most appealing
025um you know approach that our students might like we've studied that okay that's program comparisons and then we did research best practice so that's more empirical right what is what is what are the um journals and the publications in career development in school counseling and teaching what are they saying about what is best for students at the elementary level what's best for kids who are the middle learner and then for our high schoolers who are preparing more specifically for their post-secondary after ridge life so research best practices and then uh there are program comparisons once we did those two activities our final activity as a group was to discuss reflect and to agree upon come to consensus for what our recommendations are and so our recommendations are going to lead our work for the next
026number of years so whether that's five years you know or so um what we set out as a committee to do we're going to establish what the recommendations are so i'll start off with the research support and best practice we compiled numerous different sources whether it be professional journal publications um research articles and white papers from authoritative bodies naviance act anything related to college and careers there was a point where mr brum and i every week would exchange white papers with each other and just trying to tease out key information that we found relevant to our students and and can help inform our work we some of the examples we included up on the screen there some of them include career planning resources so they might be modules or apps or different activities different programs
027that uh districts engage in and produce the results that we're looking for so students if the goal for students is to you know learn about your top three interests or personality traits your aptitudes and then find you know five different career clusters that might fit you there's a program for that so we would study you know something to that effect if the goal of another program is to just expose you to the 16 federal career clusters you know we would look into into that program and tease out what those best practices were according to the actual research we also expanded that research to the college level and so once we're our students who are living the college level experience right now you have a career center at your college right and so what are they
028doing what is the most cutting edge innovative thing that they're doing where our kids are going to go our seniors are going to be there next year and so we wanted to pull from different resources at the college level to help what they're doing to help students become career ready and so we definitely had universities that were of great interest to us in terms of their program that we felt like we could replicate in some sense at the high school level or make it uh you know use the the staff to make it developmentally appropriate for our kids we also looked into cte career and technical education the governing body the professional organization that is so again we compiled all this as part of the committee to to come together and to do not only
029the compilation but the analysis and then to share out with one another what were some interesting points to help guide our work as i mentioned the second part of our work is to discuss the comparable districts and so we looked at 36 different districts across the state of new jersey and so we were looking at what they were doing at the elementary middle and high school in terms of the trends or a summary that we can share with you we are very similar to our neighbors and our our districts across the state in terms of our technology platform so a lot of the districts are using naviance we also use naviance it's a it's a robust platform that we we have used for several years we also found it more difficult to find this information
030in terms of specific career programming at the middle school and elementary level from just our internet research and so we found it necessary to reach out to colleagues and to then that started a process for us of developing survey questions to ask eventually of people in other districts you know to specifically inquire about what they are doing with their students at all levels so we saw a varied approach based on our research that we did various different programs that are up there on the screen whether it's avid advancement via individual determination learning style inventories like i spoke about here there are a lot of other districts that are doing that at the same developmental level be it that freshman sophomore year and then we did find some high schools with a dedicated college and career
031counselor which is a different model as well so we have our research we have our comparable districts and then we came together to establish our program evaluation recommendations and so you'll see there on the screen that we agreed upon five recommendations that we are representing tonight so what we'll do for the next couple slides is go through those recommendations and expand further but the first is to build support for the mission and vision that this committee established to guide the expansion of the career readiness program so we're going to build support for that mission and vision that that we established together the second is to integrate and infuse a college and career education core curriculum across the district in both the curriculum and the counseling program third we want to expand the vocational skills and
032work program for students with disabilities we also are looking to expand opportunities for students to engage in college and career related activities and then we want to increase awareness of the variety of career pathways that are available to students after high school so we'll start with our first recommendation or our first goal that's to build support for the mission and vision to guide the expansion of our career readiness program so the career program evaluation team that met we spent several hours talking about the mission and the vision so we have all this data that we just compiled that i described for you so now we want to sit down and help to focus you know what it is that we're doing what is our vision and our mission and so that was the work of
033of the committee for part of our our work over the past few summers and so you can see the vision and the mission there on the screen but we are looking to be intentional and purposeful about college and career readiness and to enhance that career portion of that just as miss fox said so we're looking to broaden the understanding of available options to students and pathways that might be a great fit for them that's you thank you so as i mentioned earlier we're already responsible for implementing and fusing the 2014 standards standard nine and career readiness but i also think i mentioned that they've been updated for 2020 and we've been in the process of updating our curriculum um to infuse them and you know noteworthy they did make some changes in terms of um
034documenting and establishing career ready practices that we need to look throughout our curriculum and and place them where they're appropriate for students um and we need to do an analysis of of the um of the new standards and kind of look at our courses at where we're going to make some changes uh or where we're already meeting those standards so that is one really important goal that we will embark on first and you know and sort of along that line we also developed this sense of needing since since it's not a particular content area that one staff member teaches as a standalone there's probably less familiarity of the staff about the career-ready practices and goals that are infused into each course just because it's not what they're necessarily primary focus of their teaching and so
035what we feel is part of this goal is to survey the staff survey the students about what they're experiencing in class and make sure we have training and professional development uh with the new curriculum that also includes a focus on how this relates to whatever they teach whether it's world language or whether it's mathematics so where does this fit in what you're teaching in your discipline so that's part of this goal in surveying the stakeholders reflecting on where everybody's at with regard to this area and then providing some training and discussion opportunities to understand it even further and how this connects to what we're already doing a few other things we want to do going forward is look into expanding naviance into the lower grades and kind of look more closely at the modules that
036they've been developing expanding in recent years and consider whether it would be you know in line with our goals for our younger students as well so we want to investigate that um we've been looking at uh pursuing the offering of career exploration assessments like asvab and incorporating them as an intentional part of the student's experience in high school or at least an opportunity for that we talked about having we do have a lot of career fairs and they happen at different grade levels and in different buildings or classrooms where teachers or administrators have connections to different members of the community but what we talked about is being again more purposeful and intentional and placing those at a district level so all students have the same experience at key key um transition periods so like fifth
037grade into sixth grade or eighth grade into ninth grade um and the last one speaks to just trying to capitalize on experiences students are already having like our community service program and our active citizenship program and having them also make a connection and reflect on the career pathways that might be associated with some of those other experiences that they're having school number three what we'd like to do is expand our vocational skills work program for our students with disabilities one of the first action things we'd like items that we'd like to deal with is to focus on expanding the program we were hit very hard with kovid not only did our students lose time but we also lost a lot of workplaces within the community we're going back into the community and we're getting those
038workplaces back we're explaining to them how important it is for our students to work within the community and how they can accept our students and work along with them we also want to investigate community engagement resources and support we uh just have uh hired two new transition coordinators and they're going to be the two people that are going to have to realize those numbers that i talked to you about before how those numbers are growing but it's not only just numbers we receive a diverse amount of students with different disabilities we don't deal with one disability we deal with disabilities across the board so those transition coordinators along with our teachers have to understand the needs of those students those diverse students with disabilities and how they will fit into the community experience and last
039but not least we need to support the individual child this isn't a group effort our students come in they have ieps and they each have individual needs we need to look at their job readiness skills their interview skills we need to teach them how to job search had a job sample they need to become independent people they need to work independently they know they have to learn how to communicate problem solve have conversations we also have to look at alternative programs some of our students will not be able to work within the community they may be able to attend a day program within the local community we need to investigate those programs and connect parents to those opportunities so that when their students leave us they'll have another alternative there are also a lot of
040ours colleges are now developing programs for learners with developmental disabilities and they have what we call applied academics so we're beginning to look at those opportunities too especially not just for our resource not just for our self-contained students but also for our resource room students all right our fourth goal is to increase the awareness of the variety of career pathways post-secondary so to essentially expand the publicity of our newly launched post-secondary planning website and to include career learning opportunities be it in newsletters or communications that are sent to our students our teaching staff and our community and families as well we are looking to continue to include information about alternative pathways from a two or four year school in our parent evening events and again to just be really intentional and purposeful about that as
041mrs fox mentioned we are looking to investigate the use of our naviance curriculum and whether or not that would be appropriate and at what levels throughout the district lastly with this goal we are looking to formalize our plans for career fairs at key transition points so middle elementary to middle school middle school to high school throughout the district as well and so essentially this goal touches upon the increased awareness of all of the pathways that might be a good fit for students as they pursue their post-secondary goals and the last goal is related to increasing experiences that students have while they're are the the pre-k to k-plus setting that expose them to different college and career activities related activities skills and and pathways that might be open to them that they might otherwise not be
042aware of um so i'm going to skip the first bullet for a second should have been the last bullet but you know one of the things we want to do is to increase the number of dual enrollment opportunities that we have for our students we currently have four one of them you heard about in the last board meeting which was tomorrow's teacher so that was added just this year and that is a way for students to take a really great course but also earn college credit from kane university we have three others from raritan valley community college we have introduction to psychology we have honors personal finance and we have honors accounting so students can take that course here at ridge high school and simultaneously earn credit at those colleges that produce a transcript for
043them to take with them so we would like to increase those offerings and sort of overcome some of the challenges that have prevented us from doing more of that you know recently we want to think about other ways we can give kids opportunities while they're in high school to have experiences in different careers in different workplace settings maybe um smaller scale larger scale so we think we can be creative and try to get kids to have those experiences because that's where they're going to develop more a more a better sense of themselves and where they might fit the last bullet is the first one that i want to talk about and i'm going to introduce mr brum to talk about our senior internship program it's something we're very proud of and i give him a
044lot of credit for what he's done with the program over the last few years it was your passion and your vision that you brought to the table mr brom is our science teacher for i think about 15 years pretty close right ap science environmental science but he also has a passion for career career career awareness career exploration and he um beat down miss smith's store over many years and really pursued this idea and so i'm going to let him explain to you what he's done and where we'd like to see this go mr good evening members of the board um so as part of goal five we we're already making significant progress and one of the things that we've been focused on for quite a few years is the senior internship program so there are
045actually two programs one of the programs has been in place for quite a few years and that is the full year program so the full year program provides students with an opportunity via their schedule to actually participate in an internship on a daily basis there are several students this year who are participating the senior internship program is a newer program it's been in place essentially since and we sometimes refer to that as the may june program the may june program obviously runs from mid-may right after the ap exams end all the way through about the excuse me the middle of june all seniors are eligible to participate in the program and generally students participate anywhere between 16 and 18 days our program for this year is currently running our interns just finished their first week
046very successfully and our program this year will run for uh 18 days when we take a look i'll take you a little bit back in terms of the history of of this program that's the may june program we actually started to evaluate similar to what we're doing with some of our other programs we evaluated a number of years ago back in 2016 in 2017 and we looked at a number of different schools who are running programs similar to the one that i thought we should run here and interestingly enough our program is designed after programs that are run in the state of connecticut the program in the state of connecticut is actually one where the internship becomes a capstone program where all seniors are required to participate so we're not there yet but that may
047be something that we may want to consider at some point we spent a lot of time kind of putting the nuts and bolts together through over the course of 2017 and 2018 uh to figure out how the program uh could gain traction and um you know and how we would actually roll it out with permission from the board and the blecc we piloted a small program in 2018 actually in the spring of 2019 we had if i remember correctly 15 students participating it was hugely successful the students really enjoyed participating as did our internship host and i'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute and the program continues through this day we've had a few bumps in the road with covid but we still have a very solid program in place a
048program from which we can build on so some of the program benefits might be obvious when you think about internship programs at the college level right internship programs at the college level are door openers to future careers internships at the high school level aren't necessarily door openers but they're opportunities for students to explore career interests to see whether or not those career interests are a good fit to test out whether or not they have the appropriate level of knowledge and skills and figure out how they can fill those gaps it provides an opportunity for them to increase their network or begin to develop a network of people who could potentially open doors for them to future employment increase their self-confidence and personal capability and showcase their accomplishments i know alex splendor in the interns that
049alex has had over the years he allows them to spend time getting what are called micro credentials and these micro credentials if you're on linkedin are huge because um people announce the fact that they've gotten these micro credentials on linkedin and um you know and it's a a neat opportunity so you know they can showcase their accomplishments uh not only through the credential credentials but uh they can put those um things on a resume and add them to maybe a professional network platform like linkedin so when we look at the numbers i didn't have responsibility for the full year program but assumed that back in 2020 we had 14 students who are participating in the full year program now 2020 was you know a challenging year with covid we actually had to end the program
050with the exception of about five people who are able to operate online but any on-site uh interns were you know had to we had to stop it at that point because we had to follow school policy with respect to um covet and all of the rule rules associated with that in 2021 we had eight students um and this year we had one we have one student participating right now we actually had three and for various reasons two students dropped out so we have one student at this point the rotating drop schedule has created some challenges for us with respect to the program i won't go into the details of that but these are challenges that can be worked through over time as we get used to the drop schedule with respect to the full year
051internship program in terms of the may june program in 2019 the year we kicked it off we had 15 students participating in 2020 we had five students we had i believe two students who are working as interns for alex they set up 300 chromebooks on the board of education porch over the summer we had two students working online for language lizard which is a company here in town run by um by drawing a blank but anyway run by a parent here in town um and uh and annika forzani and then there was one other student who i believe worked in one of our elementary schools virtually and did an awesome job in 2021 we had 10 interns and this year we have six interns in terms of our hosts you can look at the numbers
052for our hosts they sort of you know go up and down based on the year we have always had more uh internship opportunities than we've had students so you know our our challenge is to um continue to communicate and continue to uh change the program up a bit so that we can um influence more students to take advantage of of what i consider to be a significant opportunity when we look at some of the internship host comments so these are the folks that actually host the interns you can pretty much read what they said i was amazed at what the interns were able to accomplish our interns were meticulous detailed highly respected and very responsible i have never had an internship host say anything negative about a rich student the comments that we get back
053from our internship posts are high-end comments in fact many of our internship hosts are astounded by what our students can do and their capabilities i would love to host another intern uh in the future and historically we had only hired college inter interns i didn't notice any difference between a high school or college intern which is kind of cool uh when we look at the senior intern comments um you know i was treated as a founding member of this entrepreneurial venture and was highly respected this particular student actually wrote a business plan for this new venture and i read through the business plan and i felt like i was back in the business world reading a real business plan it was just it was it was outstanding to say the least we set up close
054to 300 chromebooks i think either rohan or or alex made that comment i learned what's important uh it's important rather to like where you work and the people you work with and then the last one i thought was hugely eye-opening for me i became aware that police officers need to make decisions in a split second which gives a whole new perspective on the stories we hear in the media and this particular intern worked at the berners police uh station door for uh his internship um in terms of uh where we should go in the future i mean there are a number of different things that i think we should do um obviously there'll be things that we will be able to do and things maybe that we won't be able to do for some period
055of time but internships should become part of the program studies they are now part of the program of studies thanks to the work that mrs smith and ms fox did students have the potential we're working on the fact that students should receive a course credit and a grade now in the full year program we actually do grade pass fail we don't grade pass fail for the senior internship may june program but we do post credit uh in terms of the the fact that they participated in a senior internship program on their transcript but there's no grade or no credit for it and we hope that the grade would become part of the gpa you know i highly recommend that internships become part of the seniors the the senior schedule and i would advocate that the
056program becomes sort of a capstone program for all seniors it will take us time to get there it's not going to be something that we'll be able to do overnight but we should we should take that very seriously and figure out a way to do it at least at the senior level and then if we want to incorporate internships as part of other grade levels you know we can we can evaluate that we need to i think do a better job of increasing the visibility of the internships using social media uh i'm finding that my students don't always read email but i know they they look at instagram uh and they look at don't think they look at facebook but i know we have a facebook account and a twitter account here at school so
057you know however we can advertise it via social media i think that's the way to do it um we can also leverage genesis who actually announced programs to parents and students we do it a little bit differently now um through email we can also obtain permission from parents to for their their children excuse me their children to participate in the programs and then we might be able to put together there is a timeline but we might be able to put together a very um deliberate timeline once students are signed up so that they know exactly what excuse me they need to do um when they need to do it and by what um by what deadline so that's sort of a sort of a high level overview of what we might want to do in
058the future i have saved the last of this presentation um for to to introduce and it's my privilege to introduce emily gray who participated in the full year program back in 2020 emily is she's a rising sophomore uh at virginia tech sara skalsky who is a a you're a rising sophomore you're gonna be a junior right uh you're a rising freshman who is at syracuse right and uh julia you're a rising freshman um up at quinnipiac so um emily and sarah and julia have participated in the internship programs um and i am privileged to actually introduce them and they'll give you a little bit of a perspective as to what their experience was all about all right thank you emily thank you mr from um yes i'm emily gray i graduated from ridge in 2020
059and so my senior year i had the privilege of interning at cedar hill elementary school with two different hosts actually with molly wilcox who is now molly mooney she got married but um and beth calabrese so molly mooney is the school counselor over at cedar hill and beth calabrese is the occupational therapist over there and so one day a week i was with the occupational therapist just due the nature of her schedule it was harder for me to be with her all the time but she was incredible and had me one day a week and i got to do a lot with with her which i will go into a little bit more and then the remaining four days a week i was with mrs mooney um who is incredible and they both were just
060so accommodating of me and welcoming and were happy to have me there as much as i wanted to be there and as much as my schedule would allow due to senior year schedules and at the time it wasn't rotating drop so we had health and that sort of messed with how many class periods of the day i was able to be there but whether it was for three periods or two periods however much it was they were happy to have me so when i was with molly mooney i was doing a lot of different things on the counseling aspect i was planning assemblies with her and character education lessons in the classroom which was incredible because you really got to see what a school counselor at the elementary school level looks like and how a
061character education lesson can vary so much from kindergarten all the way up through fifth grade we were also meeting with individual students and groups of students and hosting lunch groups and all kinds of things and through all of that i was really able to form relationships with students which was really awesome and made it super rewarding and it always made me so happy when i would get to cedar hill that day and some student would be like hi miss emily and i was like you're so sweet um and then when i was with mrs calabrese who is the occupational therapist over there that was so amazing because i was able to not only shadow her while she was meeting with either groups of students for their sessions or individual students she also gave me the
062privilege of having one student that was essentially mine i would run her occupational therapy sessions that day because she received ot um i believe twice a week and so the one day a week that i was with miss calabrese i would get to run her session which is incredible not only was that experience so rewarding for me but to be able to put all of this experience on my resume and have it going forward is just amazing and it's so much experience that i just had by having this senior internship as a part of my class schedule senior year it wasn't like i was taking up time outside of school or anything like that it was just a part of my everyday which was wonderful so fast forward two years i am currently interning again
063at cedar hill with mrs mooney as mr brum said i am a rising junior at virginia tech i am studying human development and psychology and i plan on going on to receive my master's in school counseling after i graduate um and being back at cedar hill is amazing it's a full circle experience being back with mrs mooney is incredible and just having these relationships with both of them i saw both of them today and they are so supportive and as much as i got out of this experience they're telling me yesterday when i was telling them that i was presenting tonight that they got just as much advice as well they love having students with them and they're so welcoming and appreciative that we are interested in their careers and want to learn from them
064thank you [Applause] so hi my name is sarah skolsky i am a freshman at syracuse university rising sophomore now gosh it really went fast um i interned at language lizard for the may june program um and there i actually published a book i illustrated and designed the pages for this book right here and i will pass it around so you guys can all see oh no it's great and so i was working with annika forzani um who is the owner at language lizard and we worked together she gave me the manuscript and i was working with another intern his name is peter schoenfeld actually and we were working remote at the high school we worked every day monday to friday miss wendell jeffrey was kind enough to host us in the art room and we
065drew um all the pages for the entire story which was incredible um it's really amazing to be able to think about that i was a fully published illustrator at 18. to have that on my resume going forward especially in college is really incredible especially as a illustration major at syracuse university it's really opened a lot of doors for me in the sense that it's been great to talk to my professors about it and having an entire book on my resume has been incredible um my hope is that we can really expand this program because it really is an invaluable experience to me to be able to like look back at all of the work that i did and i actually chose to continue this work because um the duration of the internship wasn't actually enough
066for me to finish this project given that it is an entire book but um i was able to finish it over the summer because i felt so passionately about it and truly it was an invaluable experience so i hope that we can expand this program because had i not done this my senior year i would have felt definitely underprepared and i really enjoyed getting to work with annika forzani and getting to work with diane who was also in communication with us as we interned at the program and i want to thank mr brom as well for helping me set this up as well but yeah it was truly invaluable and i'm very very grateful for the experience [Applause] everyone um my name is julia schnarr and i graduated ridge you can see up there in
0672021 and now i'm at quinnipiac university studying a bfa in film television and media arts which is what i love um so when i did the may june internship i actually worked with alex blinder here for information technology and i had an amazing time i made a list of things that i did so i can share with you what the experiences was was like um i first started with um him teaching me all about how uh ibm courses were and i think mr brum touched on it before it was sort of like this um informational technology training that you can do online and then apply it to your linkedin profile if you really want to um just sort of like skills and foundation that were really interesting to like learn about and teach you about
068how to like be a team builder and time management all that sort of thing so that was something that he let me do for this internship and like i mentioned before linkedin was a big thing alex actually helped me get my first linkedin account which i still use to this day it's in my industry in the film industry it's actually a huge tool for networking especially when you want to meet new people and i've actually found a part-time job from it so i thank you for that alex because now i have something to you know bounce off of and that was a really big starting point for me with during that internship learning how to use linkedin and the tools and how important it could be in any job or field so really what i
069did at school when i was with alex was he let me shadow him and his everyday life as a technology man he does a lot for this school and all around the district he let me see like what his job was like communicating with teachers about their needs and their computers and stuff like repairing equipment making sure wi-fi was up and running what he did when he met with the board about um trying to get you know technology for the students and all that it was really valuable experience to try to see how across the board he worked with so many different schools and so many different avenues and he was very organized with his work and one of my favorite memories and things that i did especially was at cedar hill he brought me
070to cedar hill to build these chromebook carts for these little kids i like kids a lot um so i got to help build chromebook carts and learn about how that was introduced so that kids could have like that one-on-one learning with computers and things like that so that was actually really interesting for me um to do in my free time and another thing that i remember from this internship was that uh one day we were going through really old technology and we found some in a closet at cedar hill and he um he was like okay you can look through it and order organize it and things like that and i found two old digital cameras and me being the film person that i am i took them and i said okay let's see if
071there's anything on these sd cards because you know yeah old cameras must mean there's something on them and uh paul simpola who was working at uh as the principal at the time i don't know if he still is um i know him from a mutual friend and so i was like hey there's photos of these young kids at the time things like 2008 photos from 2008 i got to salvage them and like turn them into mp4 files and share them with them so that was a really interesting thing and kind of unexpected from the internship but it really did teach me a lot about you can you can do anything with this internship it's unexpected and i just really enjoyed the the time there it taught me a lot about like teamwork and team building
072and how much it takes to really put put yourself and your effort into a program like the um technology program at the school um so overall it was a really fun and uh informational experience for me and i want to thank mr rome so much for this opportunity to do it he's worked so hard on it and i wish that a lot of more a lot more rich high students would be interested in this program as well i think everybody should have the opportunity to kind of work you know under somebody who knows a lot about the school and get the experience of being out there in the world and what it's like to run stuff so yeah that was great thank you thank you so much for sharing your experience i thought it would
073be really great if we're talking about trying to expand it some of it is we have to share what a wonderful experience it was and so you guys were really really amazing to share that with us so i appreciate you coming um that's it i just that's what we wanted to share with you this was my way of highlighting one of our big goals around career career programming that we hope to continue and i just appreciate you listening and i wonder if you guys have any questions board members i don't have any questions i just want to say that i i think that our students are just so so lucky to be able to have a program like this i loved every single second of hearing about this i hope it grows and grows and
074grows i know we took a hit with covid but we're coming out of it so i i really hope that this gets posted and students go when they look at it and maybe they'll reach out to some of you and ask you questions programs like this are what make our district so fabulous and make rich such a special high school that was great one of the things at a college level i do presentations about internship opportunities for college students and many many many high school students are asking us well can we do internships at your school before we get there i said no but there is an interest i think in areas of science there's areas of things like nursing actually students who really want some practical experience for their resumes for their college resumes
075it's hard i mean it's hard to to identify some of those things and where peop kids can actually get involved but i know there's a desire yeah so agreed anybody else um thank you so much for the presentation i am i'm floored with all of your personal accounts i think that you guys spoke really well and happy to hear that you had such great experiences and i really do hope more students utilize this program i had a question about the naviance expansion and decr into the grades k-8 and was wondering how that would look and what would you focus on yeah so i think that's a great question i think that'll be part of the work of the committee moving forward so what is the content of the curriculum k-8 first discovering that we currently
076have we buy the product for the high school and so we're looking into exactly what it entails at that level and then once we discover that what if anything applies to us and so um but i can tell you from experience in a previous district that a lot of it is geared towards discovery of self and so a lot of it is learning inventories leading then to build upon interests and aptitudes that then could lead you to potential career paths and so um most of it is very developmentally appropriate in terms of you know what a sixth grader would be engaged in versus an eighth grader um but that would be part of the work that we would we would look into i just want to say thank you to the students um and a
077special thank you to mr brum because the passion that you brought to this from the first time you came to the boecc to talk about it was you know clear and evident um and i want to really say thank you to people like mrs mooney and to mrs cascarelli who's not here right now but she my oldest daughter was i had the good fortune to be a full-year intern in her middle school math class and it was just as incredible an experience and i i think at this time this program in combination with tomorrow's teachers which is so exciting and we heard about that last time is a great compliment and hopefully something that has us talking a little bit less about you know the gravitation away from from teaching because we we need amazing
078teachers like the ones we have in this district so thank you to all of our teachers if anybody's in the room we love you okay thank you we're gonna return thank you oh okay we're up to the superintendent's report there are two items would someone like to make a motion for those items is light and mr salmon did you want to speak about them okay anyone have any questions can we have a roll call please mr mclaughlin mr salmon yes miss schaefer yes mrs cray ms singh yes this is white yes there's light yes mr khanna yes it's hira yes mrs mckeon yes madam president thank you at this time we're up to public comment on agenda items if you have a comment um please come up and tell us your name and address and
079you can sign in on the clipboard after you speak hello my name is frank klaus i'm a resident at 18 owns court i think it's fantastic that ridge high school has the kind of resources to provide such diverse options for students it's really quite terrific the one that we just spent the last hour hearing about has less than 10 in it actually less than the number of board members there are here there are so many many topics that we need much more transparency into those topics that touch hundreds of students all the students tens of thousands of our residents i think we should bring those agenda items here to be discussed rather than parade the board members children and their topics here annika forzani 45 dawn drive um i'm not sure i completely heard that
080last comment right so um i just want to say that i um i am one of the internship hosts um and it has been actually a phenomenal experience the students i have worked with have been so talented i've been working with them for three years now um worked with mr brum and miss wendell jeffrey the art teacher to help find appropriate interns who have helped with illustration educational worksheets video creation and these were highly motivated extremely talented students so everything mr brum said about the phenomenal experience i can only echo that from my own personal experience i just want to make clear though that um i know two of the speakers were children of the board members however that had nothing to do with why these students were here so i'm not sure if i
081misunderstood that but i um had uh i spoke to miss jeffrey every year i speak to her to see you know who she believes some of the most talented students were and um you know you heard sara skalsky and if you saw the book you'll see she's a phenomenally talented person that i had a great pleasure to work with so take a look at the book and you'll see she was really remarkable and i think she was probably the top art student you know certainly among the top art students in that class so i just want to say it was a great program whether you expand it you know i think here we did have some very highly motivated interested people but i think you could definitely expand it with people that have many varied
082interests but the students do have to be you know wanting to do it and wanting to be interested in it and that's what makes it successful um the only other thing i want to mention about the career readiness and i know one of the board members asked about the expansion of naviance in grades k-8 which was also a question that i had had so it sounds like it's more discovery of self but i do feel that we have to be careful pushing too much of awareness of career pathways and things like that to the lower grades i i just think that maybe that's not um i wouldn't want my kid to be pushed into that direction i think that's a time of exploration see what their talents are etc so if it's general discovery that's
083good but i wouldn't want to see too much career focus on sort of the k-8 grades personally thank you cody smith 36 world of drive i agree with ms forzani about k-8 i don't know why we're uh getting our children at that age uh to think about what they're going to do for a living as you know we have enough problems with the sex education that we have to give them which is appalling and now we're going to tell them that they should start thinking about what they want to do with their lives can we just let them be kids and do what kids do and leave them alone teach them math arithmetic english and just stay out of that the other issue with the internship yeah there was a small number um but uh
084there's plenty of jobs out there kids can go out and get a summer job a lot of kids do i don't know why we have to get behind that and sponsor it when i watch that make connections and do that stuff maybe i'm different as an elderly person but i don't remember the kids i hung out with in high school we went completely different paths i'm still friends today none of those connections had ever gotten me anything that's usually something you think about in college if you're going to do that why do we need to think about that in high school when my kids have had jobs we have to come to the school and ask permission to have my kid have a job which has nothing to do with the school i've always said
085to my wife why is the school involved in this if we want our kids to work and go out and get a job why do we need to get permission from the school i've never understood it but i think what you're doing here it's more of a college thing it's not a high school thing and i'd say leave the younger kids alone thank you is there anyone else here in person for public comment is there anyone waiting in zoom no okay at this time i'll close public comment on agenda items um did you guys want to respond at all mr mccarrion or ms fox uh i just wanted to thank uh the staff for coming tonight uh for miss fox and the other admins as well as the students that came i know they probably
086had a busy agenda and they've departed but i just wanted to thank everybody for sharing their experiences and for working at the program thank you um and i would respond okay just briefly okay um i didn't hear all of the comments because i was you know walking the students and the staff out but i got a couple of the last few comments and i guess all i would say to that is our intention would not be to push careers on younger children um there's a lot of research about building interest inventories and just make building awareness so that kids and actually one of the things i was going to say and i think i forgot to say it was part of the idea is to remove some of the pressure of certain of like the
087one pathway of really competitive colleges that may not be the right path for certain children and to sort of make them aware of other pathways it's not really about getting younger children to plan their their futures at a young age so it's it's really based on interest connecting interest to skills and just just building more awareness at a younger age not pushing careers on anybody you know i can just echo what you were just saying in terms of what i think of when i think of what's important for k-8 learners is you know understanding their their strengths and their and their aptitudes um and their challenges because a lot of kids have trouble we've talked a lot about children having trouble with study skills for example that's been a chronic conversation um and i think
088a lot of it is understanding what kind of learner you are and what you like and what you don't like and what your strengths and weaknesses are and how to you know maximize that so i think there's a lot of exciting things going on at the middle school we heard about some of the meetings recently um and so i'm all for that i don't agree i also agree you know kids don't know what they want to do when they're that young in terms of a career but um that's just understanding all the different opportunities and and how to work with other people the skills they need in the workplace you know like how to how to work in groups and things like that are important so um yeah i do i do agree that it's
089too early to try to pin pigeonhole them into specific careers anyway um did anyone else have anything i think it's just great that the kids have exposure you know even my little guy he thinks he's going to be a youtube like gamer when he grows up i mean there's nothing wrong with exposing kids to different fields i'm not going to crush his dream right now again they just have the ability to have an open mind that they can be whatever they want to be and there's so many opportunities out there so i think there's it's a great thing and i mean some of the opportunities through this program and the tomorrow's teachers are not jobs that kids could go out and get in the summer my daughter who's a rising senior in college she shadowed
090an ot in the district when she was in between actually in the summer so it wasn't even the official internship program and that was made her decide to major in ot in college so i think there's a lot of really cool things that can come out of these programs okay um we are up to the approval of minutes would someone like to make a motion for that one item okay mr salmon would someone second it this is gray um could we have a roll call please mr salmon yes miss schaefer yes this is craig yes miss singh yes this is white yes miss white yes mr connor yes nazira yes mrs mchugh yes madam president thank you we're up to the next item which is the annual approvals and appointments there are nine items would
091someone like to make a motion for those ms singh and miss schaefer does anyone have any questions okay could we have a roll call please mr salmon yes miss schaefer yes this is craig yes miss singh yes is this white yes miss light yes mr connor yes is hero yes this is mccune yes madam president you're up to finance there are 56 items with someone like to make a motion mr salmon and this light was there a finance report sorry there is oh sorry i have the wrong there we go i'm sorry i got logged out before we were down there okay so the finance committee met on thursday may 19th the first agenda item was the ridge high school hvac project at the time of the sda grants that we applied for there were
09213 classrooms that were not identified at ridge high school so when the s or three funds became available last year the business office applied for those um for one million dollars of grant money to address those 13 classrooms mr mclaughlin will be meeting next week with tony katana and john perrin and bill larkin to detail the needs for this project spiezel would then be contacted and they would retain uh joe mastretta to perform the design work so that we could go out to bid by november at the very latest this would put us on schedule for the project to be completed over the summer of 2023. item two is the health benefits update um one of ron wendruff and joe colombo joined us from arthur gallagher because the district is self-insured which saves us consider
093considerably on the total cost of health benefits uh ron from martha gallacher who is our risk management consulting firm joined the committee and reported that arthur gallagher went out to market to get quotes for stop-loss coverage blue cross blue shield is the best with an only 11 increase while maintaining individual stop-loss thresholds the cost for this coverage is 871 thousand dollars symmetra and sun life provided the two other quotes both of which were higher as a self-insured district we also contract out to to secure an administrative services agreement this would continue to be with blue cross blue shield who we have used in the past this is this cost is associated with claims processing and network administration the proposed increase here is only about 1.5 percent uh both of these costs are within the established
094budget for the health benefits for next year the next item is the oak street school roof project update mr perrin joined the committee to share an update on the roof project he reported that the project had an official start meeting in march and since that time has been working through all of the steps preceding the actual commencement of the construction which will be i believe june 18th permits were issued in april the safety plan was reviewed in april whether or not alarm systems will be needed will need to be placed in test mode is currently being determined the construction schedule is expected from the contractor by may 24th which i think is today tomorrow the contractor will be sharing a submittal schedule for work for the work next week and mr perrin will use this
095to ensure that the contractor pravco is procuring necessary materials and supplies in a timely manner we also received an update on work orders uh aramark and mr larkin have been tasked to continue within with and accelerate processing of work orders and the weekly monitoring of the same and the continual committee will continue to receive regular updates on this um the next item is um an update on the softball field that we've been hearing about the last few meetings um the left field swale has been cleaned and the and graded and a base layer of stone is now in place the top layer will go in next jt surveyors were hired to survey the site the complete survey should be delivered this week the surveyor indicated that he believes the board of education will have to
096submit a soil erosion and sediment control plan with the county as well as a land disturbance plan with the township with these approvals the next step will be to obtain proposals from field installation contractors and to retain one for the project based on the surveyors calculations the goal is to have this be a more permanent solution then we had a brief uh busing update barker bus contract the next year's barker bus contract has been signed at a nominal increase of 1.9 percent for the routes that they are currently running for the bid specs to go out to bid for the current kensington routes mr mclaughlin asked jerry ford our transportation consultant from dell val and our council dave ruttenberg to enhance some performance clauses in the bid document that become part of the final awarded
097contract we will go out to bid in june and those bids are presented all bids that are presented will hold for 60 days our next meeting is scheduled for june 23rd any questions for the board members okay so we have i hope do i have all the items rod i do i have all 56 okay so um on the agenda we have the first three items are standing items um item number four is professional development um item five is a donation uh from the pec for uh summer fun at both the william annan and mal prospect school extended school year programs and thank you to the pec um item six is um the approval for the signatories of our accounts item seven is um all under this is just the approval of our insurance for
098these programs and it's identical to what was approved last year item 8 is a state requirement pre-authorizing the use of these specific contractors um item nine is the designation of our official newspapers and item 10 is authorization to open accounts transfer invest and maintain funds and the accounts are named there i'm sorry the institutions are named there item 11 is an approved shelter annuity plan for available that is available to staff members and item 12 is the approval of our purchasing consortiums uh 13 is the schedule of fees for use of facilities for 2022-23 and there's no proposed change there then the subscription busting is number 14 number 15 is the payroll the pay stub provider and that's a 2.5 percent increase in the contract there the next item number 16 is the approval of
099our board attorney excuse me um and then property and casualty and legal services are covered there and then where are we number 18 is the approval i'm sorry rod what is this one the approval okay so it's for a huge range of supplies from nursing and classroom music and art number 19 is the administration of health benefits number 20 is construction council number 21 is um financial advisor contract number 22 is for strauss esme for policy alerts um number 23 is our auditors and number 24 is our label labor council number 25 as a district physician number 26 is the sports physician and number 27 is our athletic physicians and um why i don't have any number 28 is the approval i guess it's self-evident treasure school monies and number 29 is the tuition rate
100for students being placed in our district and number 30 is our facilities consultant number 31 is for advocate for our food services monitoring and number 32 is for our dental coverage by the way the last two there's no change there from last year um number 33 is for horizon healthcare services number 34 is the transportation consultant jerry and we're getting there sorry uh i'm missing one 35 35 is oh this is the grant for the um oval at wams and number 36 is for home instruction number 37 38 39 and 40 are student services um determined by ieps number 41 is extended school year um number these are students with x regular school year and extended school year so they're paired 41 and 42 43 and 44. um and so on through uh 50 53
101right and then 54 is for behavioral intervention number 55 is a resolution not to apply for the our homeless um funding grant which i don't i don't remember why we had to um approve that rod well they require us to either accept it or to not accept it okay so we're just not excited of pertinent district administrators and there was a feeling that it would not be the reason we chose not to apply for it is that we have to make a decision to either apply or not apply for it and in particular after polling pertinent district administrative staff it was found that there was not identified a group of individuals that we could direct those funds towards helping thank you and the final item number 56 is the administrative services agreement um for the
102healthcare with horizon which is an increase of 1.5 percent any questions okay could we have a roll call please mr salmon yes ms shaffer yes mrs gray yes ms singh yes mrs white yes ms light yes mr connor yes ms hiro yes mrs mccoon yes madam president thank you after the personnel committee there are 18 items would someone like to make a motion mrs white and someone won the second let's sing it's already a personnel report uh yes personnel met on friday the 20th and for uh we discussed obviously various staffing issues negotiations issues um the one item i can report on is that we did we were joined by megan fuccirelli i think i'm pronouncing that right marion alt from us too to get some responses to some of the issues that have been
103raised in emails and public comment um the first topic we discussed was whether us squared has worked with other school districts megan reiderated that us squared has worked with 20 to 30 school districts including but not limited to ferndale in michigan farmington and michigan watching hills in new jersey in four districts in delaware megan again reviewed her personal professional background with us uh we asked some of the questions that or reiterated some of the questions that we heard about the surveys um for example why didn't the surveys include definitions megan explained that the survey was designed to get feedback based on foundational knowledge for example whether the students were even aware of certain terminology the survey taker did not understand a term or question a squared uses the open-ended responses in the surveys and focus
104groups to gather more information and feedback to generate like a holistic response to this to their questions the second issue was uh why they use rating scales for questions that seem to be yes no questions they wanted to leave room for nuance in the responses and for survey takers that do not feel 100 certain enough to say yes or no for example if the survey question is for a classroom environment at wams students have multiple classroom environments so i squared want to provide a response system to accommodate that we asked why the some questions didn't have an n a or an i don't know answer uh megan explained that providing an i don't know answer could skew the results because it'll limit the sample size for responses uh by forcing answers even if the survey
105taker is not sure doesn't know megan said the data can be used to understand the survey taker's gut feeling on the issue which can be wrapped up with the open-ended responses and the focus groups somebody had asked what the survey hypothesis is so the survey hypothesis is do current perceptions match realities of stakeholders in the district based on the public comments at board meetings and some emails the boards received related to the equity audit that came directly to the board not to the equity audit email address we the committee did inquire about the volume of email that is being sent to the to the special equity audit email address that is going directly to us squared uh megan said the following since the town hall less than 10 people have sent emails and currently they
106are getting approximately 10 to 15 emails per week almost all of which are from two people the preliminary response results was uh we had 968 responses from elementary students out of 1800 possible we had 893 from ridge high school out of 1736 students 763 from whams out of 1100 students some makeup surveys are still outstanding and the self-contained surveys are still open um when the pride survey was administered in 2019 there was a total of 901 responses in six through 12. uh 400 around 450 at wams and 450 at ridge and the focus groups are happening this week that's what i can report thank you mr salmon does anyone have any questions no could we have a roll call please mr salmon yes ms schaefer yes mrs cray yes ms singh yes mrs white yes
107ms light yes mr connor yes ms hiro yes mrs mccune yes madam president thank you we're up to the policy committee there are two items would someone like to make a motion ms hira and second mr salmon is there a policy committee report uh yes uh policy last met on monday may 2nd and there was one new policy that was created in several policies and regulations that were revised one of the new policies that were created was one that entails keeping track of our district's covid cases it's something the district has already been doing but there was no policy in place and the policy is 1648.15 and it reflects that a log will be maintained which includes an employee's name contact information occupation location where the employee works and when they tested positive for covid
108and when their symptoms have started the log is something that would be confidential and would not be disclosed unless required by law policy 2417 student intervention and referral services was revised merely to reflect changes in our state statute policy 3161 examination for cause along with policy 4161 examination for cause this policy was reflected revised to reflect that the board of ed may require the physical and or psychiatric examination of any support staff member who shows evidence of deviation from normal physical or mental health in accordance with nj ac 6a colon 32 hyphen 6.3 b and p3161 was also revised to actually was completely redrafted and outlined to reflect the procedure on how to conduct a fitness for duty evaluation of a teacher and or support staff if needed policy 5512 harassment intimidation and bullying was
109revised to incorporate certain changes in the law just to name a few in the event that there is a hib incident and it is determinate determined that it's not actually hib the policy reflects that the superintendent has to report it during the course of a hibben investigation if it is believed that a crime occurred the moa between the school district and the police department goes into effect and the hip has to be reported to the police the policy also has been revised to reflect that the principal has to keep a record of any hib incident reported and the parent notification has to be recorded if there is an appeal of the hip investigation it comes to the board if it does the district has to give the board a copy of the redacted version of
110the parent notification if someone wants to make an anonymous complaint online we have to have a mechanism in place to do that so the policy reflects that you know again there's something that needs to be done the department of education is most likely going to create a form there could be a hotline but there needs to be some mechanism in place the policy was revised to reflect that if the principal is going to make a preliminary determination of the hib incident the superintendent is to accept or reject it in writing the investigation timelines were revised it's ten school days and the date the principal receives the notification then the principal reports the hip to the superintendent if the superintendent determines that a hip investigation needs to occur the 10-day timeline starts from the day that
111the superintendent gives written notification to the principal the policy was also revised to reflect that our website has to have a link for the procedures and outline of a hip investigation we also have to post on our website who the state school climate coordinator is and give their contact information policy 7410 and regulation 7410.01 [Music] there were no substantive revisions there were the code sections were just revised policy 8420 emergency and crisis situations again this policy was revised to reflect a change in the law relating to notification for school security drills the policy reflects that a communication has to go out to the community of the date and time of the drill upon its com completion lastly policy 9320 cooperation with law enforcement agency it addresses the moa between law enforcement and schools i spoke
112too soon regulation 9320 cooperation with law enforcement agency this regulation aligns with the policy i just spoke about the moa is a document that is reviewed and revised on an annual basis it spells out when the district has to involve the police any questions can we have a roll call please mr salmon yes miss schaefer yes mrs craig yes miss singh yes mrs white yes miss light yes mr connor yes miss hero yes miss kim yes thank you we're up to the curriculum committee is there a report yes there is curriculum met on may 6th stephanie orr gave an update on how the after-school program to provide added support to identified students during the after school homework club time has progressed to review this after school program started five months ago and focuses on teaching
113and reinforcing executive functioning skills in small groups several times a week to students identified as struggling and needing additional support students are identified through rti and 504 committee school counselors teachers parents and administrators students are placed in small groups of no more than three students most students are part of a group of two students are grouped based on grade and need prior to each meeting staff connect with the teachers check genesis and plan a lesson based on need every student has a data tracking form that's accessible to teachers and counselors and teachers who participate in the program are provided with a half hour of time to prepare for the students they work with after school each staff member working with students works on the following identified skills organization prioritizing work long term planning sustaining attention
114while working following directions on assignments increasing motivation test taking strategies and other individual needs staff keep track of what they did each week with students and anything that needs to be followed up on school counselors and others that are connected with the student can see the information each month the staff meet as a group to reflect on the program and brainstorm what can be done to make improvements currently the program is supporting 17 students 10 staff members have been working with students in the program students come one to four days a week depending on need and parent request teachers and parents have all seen growth with the participants classroom teachers have shared that strategies given are working with the participants and others in the classroom too consistency over time between home and school is a
115goal feedback from parents has been positive students want to come and teachers have seen progress there are interventions during the school day too where students can only be pulled out from cycle or pe but these typically are different students and those involved with with this program ideally a similar goal is to have this option for ninth graders and for it to be funded through the same grant like viking academy a goal is to graduate students out of this program many teachers have been trained to work in the program staff involved in this program have participated in professional development to gain a better understanding of executive functioning and the challenges students face in school 25 staff members from across all teams and all departments at wams have participated thus far in training there will be a
116total of four two hour sessions with staff members one each month march through june on zuma's ongoing training model staff share out at team meetings and department meetings so the entire building can benefit mrs hudock reviewed the prior to covid whams participated with the college of st elizabeth on the culture and climate survey following a review of that survey the plan was to implement the following pilot program that is now being revisited for the next remaining wednesdays until the end of the school year saint elizabeth identified that student stressors both in and out of school were creating anxiety and leading to students needing time and support for help many other schools offer a block of time to seek counselors teachers and get help all this information will be shared with parents as well in a
117presentation titled learning labs on wednesdays at wams and it will also be shared with all students essentially this block of time will be a structured quiet stress-free purposeful time to get organized focus on executive functioning skills and allow counselors to work with groups of children in a safe and supportive environment students will be able to work on homework projects and teachers can invite students who they believe need academic support to meet them it is not enrichment free play on the computer movie watching or walking around building the schedule on each wednesday will be crafted in such a way to create 36 minute periods to free up an extra block of time from 144 to 220 for learning lab time students will all report to their homerooms students had reported feeling a sense of isolation so
118bringing them together collectively in their homeroom is a good idea the block will begin with students participating by following the learning lab procedures which are as follows one look in genesis and review your grades look for anything that's listed as missing or zero if you turn something in late you need to email the teacher to let them know that it was turned in two check google classroom to do to make sure nothing is missing and sees what what is upcoming three check your email for any messages from teachers delete anything you don't need or put it in a folder if you want to keep it students may receive learning lab passes so they can meet with teachers who have asked to meet with them this time is being created to allow students to have time
119to check things off their to-do list following the pilot outcomes will be reviewed and feedback on how it went will be explored to determine how to proceed with wham's learning lab next year we then had an update to march madness at ridge the student vote for the final four books for summer reading has taken place and the final four are six of crows which is fantasy by leigh bardugo the chemist which is action suspense by stephanie meyer let them read which is about business leadership by john you and persepolis volume 1 which is a graphic novel memoir by mary jane satrapi students can select the book or books that interest them as always in order to complete the summer reading assignment for summer extended instructional support program registration we were given an update at the
120time forms were just due on may 6th so therefore there were not actual numbers of student participation weren't fully complete but preliminary numbers based on those invited to participate are as follows extended in class support math there are 27 students extended in class support reading there are 61 students extended in class support for both 35 students and esl 35 students and tonight we're going to be approving 12 teachers 8 k through 5 2 6 through 8 and 2 esl to work with these students groups will be kept small to students and teachers will coordinate with families to determine the best time to work with students teachers and families have some flexibility to schedule meetings in person or virtually mr fackleman gave an update on summer financial literacy at the time registration had only been open
121for a week but as of that day 13 students had registered and last year there were about 134 students who participated tests will remain online on specifically scheduled dates as far as the classroom management pilot the letters had gone out to parents whose children or teachers were participating in the six week pilot and the k through eight and the high school letters were slightly different due to the bring your own technology policy in place at the high school we also had a review of the marking period three grades students receiving d's or e's and courses continue to be our struggling learners just like last marking period the rotating drop schedule is leading to an improvement in grades as students made scheduling choices that positively impacted them overall teachers are finding that students are performing at
122the same level or better than pre-covered in mathematics there's actually been a decline in d's and e's students are performing better in science demonstrating that changes in pacing have led to positive improvements there are half as many d's and e's in english classes than the 2021 school year a review of the end of the school year of grades will offer a fuller picture and lastly we were given a scheduling update and it will be easier to build the rotating drop schedule this year because it's not starting from scratch next week schedules will begin to be run and adjustments to sectioning can be made and our next meeting will be on june 3rd does that anyone have any questions okay we're up to the wellness committee yes so wellness had a meeting on april 28th i
123got notes out late so we're reporting out a little late our first item was a follow-up from the board of ed meeting where the big sibling presentation happened dr thorpe came to our meeting with two students and we asked the students some additional questions that the board had posed what they liked the best which was in person interaction and that they got to stay with their little for three years until the students graduate the high school students graduate or the littles fall out of the program which actually turned out to be somewhat of a surprise for some students who thought they were signing up for one year there are two events per semester the field day and an end of the year event the field day is an end-of-year event that's coming up they might
124they're looking at a little more support for funding for programming maybe expanding some programming and we did some brainstorming on what that might look like the second item was a continuation of a discussion with rich shella the director of athletics continuing the discussion about pulling our coaches into the wellness model and the communities of ridge and wams and encouraging the student development and culture within the athletics program we had an update about the cur what currently coaches training involves which is they go through about three and a half hours of mandated training including things like bloodborne pathogens hib first aid and cpr aed that happens every two years there is a one-time six-hour basis of coaching through the national federation of high school fundamentals of coaching including things like legal liability team management and the
125basics they do every year 30-minute session about concussions there's a heat illness prevention for 30 years 30 minutes excuse me every year an implicit bias annual training for 30 minutes and tourniquet use training for 5-10 minutes and we discussed adding into these modules something about promoting a positive culture within athletics and that's the point of wellness so it isn't easy to do these online rich was looking into potential courses there was a course through the national federation of high schools about protecting students from abuse student mental health and suicide prevention which is clearly a big issue in the ncaa right now bullying hazing and inappropriate behavior there's some 90-minute training through u.s center for safe sport and he had looked into a couple of other options for workshops but there was concern about you know
126needing the feedback and the conversations that happened within some of this stuff so he was going to continue to think about future ideas we'll be potentially we had one suggestion about parents involved and pass that to policy and we're going to look forward to hearing from mr shellow at our next meeting with more information about modules that he has come up with that he wants to integrate into his program and finally well not finally we heard about the ridge gives back program which everybody hopefully has heard about by now we're very excited about this um it's the first time that the entire ridge high school is going to be doing a community service event they did all this planning in two and a half months they got four volunteers really and really primarily one to
127plan this for 1800 students and as of that date in april we had enough activities they were going to be going forward most were in town some are at the high school but they're some as far as away as round valley and i think down the shore is what i saw they're using sked which is sched schedule software to schedule the students days and every activity is going to have a teacher leader um we're enforcing the field trip policy the um mr lazavec did a ridge high school minute and it went out on friday folder there was an announcement it was there was a bit of information it was a pretty quick turnaround because they needed to get it all set up um so it's the it combines with the wellness the tea time um
128theme for june is community service and um as i said all of our students are involved we have us special ed students are also being included in this day last time i mentioned to the board that we needed to cover or we were suggesting that the board covered the transportation costs and we did discuss that at board forum the pto is looking and helping get the supply lists i urge everyone in the community to take a look it's through amazon it's a really easy process to send some supplies to the high school to sponsor the this really exciting day and they're also doing a t-shirt drive we're hoping that all the students can be in green it's going to be a very you know really exciting day on june 2nd they expect that by the
129end of the day there'll be about 10 000 hours of community service done and accomplished by the ridge students so it's really going to be a very exciting day we also talked about the free and reduced lunch program so burner township does not participate in the federal program but we mimic it and we discussed a little bit about what meals look like there's a team well there's a team of administrators trying to tighten up the program and communication with students and administ and families so they wanted to share some information with us they talked about you know what it looks like we discussed whether adding breakfast is appropriate and possible we did commit the committee supported this idea but we need to look into some logistics and long-term costs and there was some suggestion about
130negotiation and working with aramark for breakfast distribution at different levels finally we talked about the elementary counseling program because there was some discussion about needing more support in the elementary school levels student need has increased i think kovid has resulted in a lack of social skills some aggressive behavior feelings of isolation due to the pandemic it's not widespread but it's just enough that we need some extra teamwork in the elementary schools they're currently doing group meetings they're doing individual lessons they're doing one-on-one meetings but the counselors are getting really torn because there's an increased need for one-on-one meetings but they don't have enough time to do those they actually the counseling staff did a case study at cedar hill and we looked at the day-to-day they looked at the day-to-day schedule for a counselor so
131they could see what their time was being spent at and it was determined that the assistant principals were helping out as counselors in order to serve the needs of all the students um and the concern is the counselors are having to shortchange the wellness lessons that we heard about at another meeting due to crisis intervention that there's just not enough time in the day so we were looking into expanding the ess program at william annan which could potentially free up some middle school staff to help with elementary schools so there's still some discussion about staffing um we were going to wait for ms smith to come back for maternity leave welcome back we're happy and we will be discussing this at our meeting in june on six the 16th thank you does anyone have any
132questions okay we're off to liaison committee reports does anybody have any okay we're now up to public comment on non-agenda items if you have a public comment please tell us your name and address and you can sign in on the clipboard after you speak hi my name is erica goldberg and i'm at 11 heather lane first of all i'd like to thank the board mr marcary and all of the teachers and staff in our district for all of their hard work oftentimes when parents aren't happy they blame the schools and teachers without really understanding that our staff and teachers are working tirelessly to ensure that every student is successful every presentation boe meeting minutes and the entire curriculum for every grade and every class is online there was even a round table type meeting on
133may 2nd about communication where we're able to share what was working and what needed improvements there is no deception or deceit everything is open to the public furthermore we have an amazing social emotional learning program that targets growth mindset and calming strategies my children have come home from school and share what they've learned they've taught me a lot about working through tough problems communicating having grit personally i know that the counselors at our schools have helped our family get through the anxiety and uncertainty of the last two years don't we want these things for our kids don't we want them to feel empowered and confident and able to problem-solve as they navigate through life i don't understand why some parents would want to limit their children's education to just the basics reading writing and math
134when life is made up of so much more than that don't we want to arm our children with all of the tools that they will need to succeed alarm along with arming our students with mental health strategies we also need to help them understand how to stay safe and healthy the entire health curriculum along with all of the other curriculums are online for parents to view in addition to that as parents you are able to opt out of the program entirely i cannot understand why some parents think they should stop the entire program for all of the children when they can just choose not to participate my second grader recently came home and told me that when she made an innocent comment about wanting some balls for the gaga pit at school a fellow eight-year-old
135laughed at her and told her why wanting to play with balls was so funny she was confused and upset that she was laughed at i am very angered and disappointed that some people think their eight-year-old son can tell my daughter what balls are but a licensed professional teacher can't explain what a uterus is why shouldn't that boy learn the proper name for body parts why allow vulgarity on the playground but fuss about scientific and clinical words in the classroom just like every other curriculum health builds on itself so by the time our students are seniors and leave our homes they are prepared for the world starting this health curriculum with age-appropriate lessons and building on it is exactly what our math and language arts curriculums do as well there's no reason why kindergarteners shouldn't learn
136about emotions or that second graders shouldn't learn that humans make babies but cars don't because that's what the curriculum says there's nothing to fear from it read the curriculum it's online for us to see and if you still don't agree then opt out but please don't waste our time trying to stop something just because you don't agree because there are many of us that do agree with teaching our children age-appropriate materials that will help them be stronger teens and adults finally statistics prove over and over again that numbers of teen pregnancy and drug use go down with health classes please remember that public school is for the good of the public thank you very much cody smith thirty six royal drive i'd like to address some of the comments that were made about the budget
137uh after in the discussion at the last meeting first off the financial statements the audited financial statements the reporting package that's comprehensive is about 150 pages i couldn't find it on the website maybe it's there unlike the township that has their audit report on their website i don't believe the district has the audit on the website i had to go to a state of new jersey site and hunt around to find it i thought the cover letter here done by mr mclaughlin and mr markarian was very good it's a good summary of information it should be available for people to read it along with everything else in there um and as to my request in the email i was looking for the required supplementary information from the budget this this table is seven pages of
138detailed budget information it starts with the original budget it then goes to budget transfers final budget actual and then the variance what i was asking for and did not receive is the original budget column only i figured that if we were doing a budget we would have this detail available as it eventually has to go in the audited financial statements and that's what i was asking to to receive i was not asking to receive the actual column like what i heard in in the comment i'm smart enough to know you can't tell me what the actual number is going to be at the end of next year today it's impossible we talk about pro forma actual well i think that would actually be the budget the budget should be the pro forma actual i was
139not asking for what the actual information is going to be i'm not notredomis and neither are you i was asking for the budget column so that was my first point again i didn't receive that the second issue with the budget is we ought to have a a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet or in the in the terms of these financial statements the statement of activity in the net position in the budget presentation that was given there was no overview of what the numbers are even in broad terms there was a bunch of variances budget to budget but there was never a picture of what the financial statements might look like where i think a lot of people that are versed in financials would want that to look at that that's what i
140was trying to do in that budget column i think you mentioned the the the user-friendly budget that's pretty much worthless i think the comment was made that that's required by the state of new jersey and incidentally i don't really care what new jersey requires what i'm looking at here is how do we be more transparent with the numbers not are we meeting the legal requirements that user friendly budget is pretty much garbage it doesn't have any detail in it and so i'd like to see that eventually in the future we give more than that the other thing about the budget i think the comment was made that we have to do budget to budget because that's apples to apples and if we did actual to budget that would be uh apples to pears or oranges
141to pears or something like that i would disagree with that i think the only thing we know about a budget is it's going to be wrong we just don't know by how much in which direction i think we could have done much better for instance if we took the nine month actual this um this year from july 1 through march 31 and then a three-month forecast added it to that in that forecast we talk about things that are either backend or front end loaded we can adjust for that in the three-month column yeah so i think that could have been much better too budget to budget is worthless but the one thing i'd like you to address is the comment that i heard in the dialogue between miss gray and miss light about not getting
142the budget information that she wanted more budget information and couldn't get it which caused her to vote no on the budget that is a real problem when somebody on the board can't get the information and unlike what nancy pelosi told us with obamacare you have to vote for it in order to see what's in it that's ridiculous so what i like to know is why can't people get the budget information it's one thing if me as the public can't get it that's problematic and that's troubling but when somebody on the board can't get it to make an informed decision on the budget that is especially troubling and it's a sign that there's a problem here thank you good evening i'm frank klaus 18 owens court there's been a lot of time spent talking about the
143gender diversity and equity survey and how it's going to be used you assured us about three board of ed meetings ago that we can calm down because it's not going to be put to use right away it's going to be used to uh take certain considerations and be used in the future we just heard that it's not even done yet and this really was quite reassuring to us as parents rumors have started to circulate that this actually could not be further from the truth according to these rumors the teachers have been instructed to build the gender diversity into the curriculum already this actually makes it impossible for me to opt my kid out to things because we built into all of the different classes this is very troubling to me as a parent and a
144resident what i've heard is that there have been requests made that foreign languages should no longer reference the masculine and the feminine in their teachings i took pretty basic german and bernard's high school back in the day i've actually worked in austria and the way they teach these languages in germany and in austria is referencing the masculine and the feminine it's the way romance languages are taught you know italian in italy this change would suggest that we in basking ridge know more about these languages those that consider them native i am all for our teachers they are awesome we need to let them teach is what i believe um if we do things like this it would most certainly hurt the test scores of our students this top-ranked school system is the key draw to
145our town i moved from overseas so my kids could attend this school district this change would would hurt our rankings if our rankings go down our property values will go down that will hurt our tax rate base and i don't know how we'll pay back the 50 million debt bonds that we have on the schools dear board can you please reassure us that these are just rumors and that they will not happen in our school district and please don't give me we'll take it under consideration we'll get back to an email etcetera it's pretty simple can you say no the rumors are false masculine and feminine will be allowed to stay in the languages and know gender diversity is not yet being built into the curriculum or say well actually yes we do plan to
146do that it's a yes or no question thank you very much is there anyone else here for a public comment is there anyone waiting in the zoom miss fox is there anyone waiting in the zoom there's not okay at this point i'll close public comment okay thanks everyone for your attendance tonight for your comments tonight i just wanted to say just briefly we we've all been living in a world where sometimes someone forgets to unmute so if there's ever a time that you can't hear us if somebody forgets to unmute or maybe isn't speaking loudly enough or closely enough in the microphone please just just nicely ask and let us know that you can't hear i i don't think it's right for people to be screamed at while they're up here so there were a
147couple comments one was about some clarification with regard to budget questions i appreciated that i i think that uh made some sense so thanks for clarifying that uh with respect to the health curriculum uh again thanks for those comments we are working on that and as miss fox has talked about any types of changes uh will be clearly communicated uh so that we can hear from parents as well as we work on that project over the summer uh lastly with respect to rumors i can't stand rumors i i don't i don't even i wish uh if you're hearing a rumor i'd love to hear the source of the rumor because that really helps a lot with dispelling it if you can get to the root of the rumor um we can do no more damage
148than with our loose lips and i i just don't know where this stuff is coming from i've never heard of anything about masculine versus feminine being eliminated in world language classes that doesn't mean that it might not have been said somewhere that i would want to chase it down and say what is that all about because i personally have never heard anything about it and i just asked miss fox and neither is she so um if if you are hearing about a rumor and you can communicate some source data to what's going on and help us get to the root of the matter that would be greatly appreciated but as far as a rumor about masculine versus feminine in world language courses that to me is a rumor i've never heard anything about it is
149there a conversation going on about what are the mandates that the state of new jersey has provided us with respect to uh some language with regard to how gender or gender diversity is taught yes that is out there exactly how that's going to play out i i can't say yet so i hope that answers that thank you okay we're up to board forum does anyone have anything um can we have a motion for adjournment ms late mr salmon all in favor