Bernards Twp BOE Meeting 5 9 22

001i'll just read the statement of public notice real quickly this is a regular public a regular meeting of the board of education of brenner's township notice of the time and place of this meeting was provided and copies of the resolution were forwarded to the official newspapers as designated by the board of education and to the township clerk and a copy of the notice was posted on the bulletin board of the board of education offices in accordance with the law 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.burnersboe.com the two links are both sharing showing the meeting it's just a backup in case one of them has a problem we very much welcome input from

002the public there are two times during regular meetings that the public is invited to speak tonight's a little bit different because there's a third time which is the for the budget which i'll explain when we get to there um when you are speaking in the first normal public comment is for agenda items so it has to be something that's on the agenda and then the second one is for anything that you're interested in talking that's related to the schools when you approach the microphone please state your name and address each statement may be made by 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

003the public to speak the board reserves the right to set a different time limit for individual comments and or set an overall time limit for the public comment portions of the agenda 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 should navigate to the district webpage www.burnersboe.com and select board of education followed by public comment to review the specific instructions or click on the link that's listed here 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 board forum of the agenda begins please

004understand 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 comments will generally be 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 or 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

005the 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 the public session okay we are now up to our student representatives tonight we have gordon lee and and chun li all right good evening everyone uh with a few weeks left in the school year ridge high school is certainly feeling that annual rush of excitement that comes with the arrival of may however ridges clubs are not letting those feelings interfere with their work

006legwork for lungs is currently raising awareness for lung cancer through their cookie dough fundraiser with all proceeds going to the memorial sloan kettering cancer center also the forensics team has once again reaped the rewards of their hard work over the past few weekends competing in the highly prestigious university of kentucky tournament of champions one of only three grand nationals every year ridge took home the champion in oral interpretation and placed a finalist in dramatic interpretation additionally ridge placed first at the spartan invitational tournament for declamation and entered a finalist in the tournament of champions for extemporaneous speaking these accomplishments are truly outstanding and a testament to the effort time and expertise of the ridge staff and students the world language department has been hard at work as well italian language students participated in the national

007italian exam and annual italian senior essay contest with the majority of students earning medals and certificates of merit 82 latin students took the national latin exam with three perfect scores and over 90 percent of students earning a medal or certificate of merit six seniors have also been invited to apply for the national buy and exam scholarship the most prestigious award offered to high school latin students here in the united states latin students also participated in the new jersey junior classical league curtainment quiz bowl competition with the ridge level 2 team placing second for central new jersey and the ridge upper level team placing first the upper level team will be competing in the latin quiz bowl state championship round on may 21st outside of tests and competitions world language students also learned about history and

008culture their activities such as experiencing the roman tortoise shell formation an authentic peruvian launch asl qr codes chalk messages in various languages and decorating ridge with replicas of italian sculptures these activities not only enhance our understanding of the material but also provide exciting novel ways to learn apply and reinforce the subject it is thanks to the effort and creativity of the world language teachers that we are able to learn in such unique ways finally the student government is hard at work anticipating the end of the year in addition to preparing for our new representatives coming in in september we are also making last minute preparations for our two proms additionally we are very excited to meet with the board on may 23rd we were very happy with the dialogue at the last meeting and we

009hope to update you on our initiatives continue that dialogue and finally discuss our year's work now i would like to hand over the floor to chan who will talk about student life at william anne in middle school hello my name is john lee and i'm here representing the william middle school student council over the past week the student council has been sitting at the front of the wham's cafeteria during lunch talking with students and collecting information so that we can represent the voice of the whole middle school here are some of the exciting news that the middle schoolers at willie bannon would like for you to know about this year each grade will be going on a field trip sixth graders will be going to camp bernie seventh graders to medieval times and 8th graders

010to hershey park the school play which was aladdin this year has finished and it was a huge huge success one of the nights of the play even sold out spring sports have officially started through wham's ao or athletic organization and are off to a great start starting in april we had to go back to using lockers in the gym locker room and changing for gym class students have had mixed emotions about having to change for class yeah njsla testing just finished this past friday and we are very excited to be done with testing orchestra is having a big concert coming up on the 2nd of june masks are no longer required in the school but there are still students who choose to wear them and we are now eating in the cafeteria with about a

011third of the grate at a time there's very mixed reactions some of the students are loving being in the cafeteria and love that the smaller numbers make it more spacious and less loud however some wish all their friends could be there at the same time others missed acquired a smaller setting of the classroom eating of classroom eating and getting to watch fun movies or do school work overall kids love sitting outside at the blue picnic bench picnic tables to eat lunch 7th graders have finished submitting their elective choices for 8th grade and the 8th graders have all scheduled their classes for the upcoming high school year and finally the student principal advisory council has been working with the willie manning principal miss hunak on evaluating our current dress code and book bag caring policy thank

012you to both of you it was very nice to hear from willie manning today i thought i really appreciated that um does anyone have any questions for either gordon or an sean no well thank you so much for coming and giving us an update on what's going on at your schools and we look forward to meeting with the bridge student government next time and getting some more feedback and thank you for coming [Applause] okay i just have one really quick comment before we go down to watch the presentations i just wanted to thank everyone who came out to the vt connect meeting last monday we had a really huge turnout of staff we had lots of teachers and administrators come we had some community members too um we were a little disappointed we didn't get

013more because we thought it was a missed opportunity for the parents who and community members have been asking for more communication and collaboration but we really had very productive conversations we broke into small groups to talk and brainstorm ideas for communication and collaboration and mr mercarian has collected all the feedback um and will be in bringing those ideas to different committees and having further discussion on those ideas our next bt connect meeting is next week may 23rd and that one is on technology and education and we really hope that people come out to that so they can talk firsthand with the teachers and staff members that are there to hear what's going on the 16th oh i'm sorry oh i'm sorry i just wrote down the wrong date okay so next week the 16th is

014the burners connect meeting and then the following one is our board meeting so we really hope that people come out and get to hear firsthand from their children's teachers um when they meet with them okay we're gonna go down below now for the presentations this is going to take only about an hour and a half for our presentation so don't don't worry it'll be great um my name is kathy stotler i'm the supervisor of world languages and esl here in the district um i've been the supervisor i'm coming up on my 10 year anniversary after memorial day weekend pretty proud of that i've really loved working here and something i noticed that was missing was that we were not really doing anything specifically to sustain the profession as a supervisor for the last 10 years

015i've noticed a dramatic decline in the applicants for our positions there's a ton of research about why there's a lot of speculation there's a lot of truths there's a lot of possible solutions but i thought it was important that we look internally to see what we can do to keep excellence in education so um i thought about my staff i talked to some people in other districts and i'm going to walk you through our path tonight to tell you how we got to have this lovely gorgeous very good-looking group of people um to join us here tonight who are also going to share part of their experience so again i'm kathy stotler uh the supervisor and i have with me tonight krista horvath she is one of our italian teachers in the department who is

016also the teacher of the tomorrow's teachers program it was about september 2019 that we started to really look for programs um look to other districts see what's going on ways that we can create a sustainable program in our school district so we did research for about a year and then in may of 2020 i came to the board of education curriculum committee with a proposal for the course which was very uh graciously accepted in december of 2020 though the following year we decided we created the program of studies outline for the course entered in the program studies and crossed our fingers that students would want to take the course and fortunately that happened in june of 2021 miss horvath attended a program at the college of new jersey well it was a virtual right because

017it was it was virtual because of covid right but so she attended a program hosted by the college of new jersey who are the main supporters of the tomorrow's teachers program for high schools in new jersey the program actually comes from south carolina but its roots in new jersey come out of the college of new jersey that summer we finalized the curriculum and this september we started the course we had 11 students take the course which is a pretty solid number for a first year course and we're really proud to say that next year we've doubled that and we have 22 students who are enrolled uh really and i think it's a testament to the teacher and to the students here who are out there telling their friends what a wonderful course it is and

018you're going to get to hear from them tonight you're also going to get to hear from some of their cooperating teachers who can share with you the experience of having a rich student in their classroom and district one of the additional perks to this program is something that miss fox has really been focused on the last few years is providing opportunities for students and ridge high school to enroll in dual enrollment programs with universities students and who elect for this have to meet the criteria set by the colleges and then you have to pay for 250 dollars for the credits and at the completion of the course and ms horvath will explain to you the assignments that they have to do earn three college credits i looked at several universities i met with a lot

019of directors from different programs we finally opted for keen university and i i couldn't be happier with the support they provided us they um they zoom with the students they're getting a real good look at what it's like to be a college student they had to go online and register for the course themselves so they became familiar with that process so even if teaching isn't you're going to hear from one of these ladies who might not want to be a teacher but she will speak about how this course is helping her but in any case they're just gaining incredible skills to prepare them for college they're learning what it's like to enroll they're learning what it's like to deal with college professors they're learning what it's like to write a pretty serious term paper so

020there's a lot more to this course than just becoming a teacher it's preparing them truly for for future readiness so at this point i'm going to pass the mic over to um ms horvath who's going to talk to a little bit about the curriculum and what the students have been doing for this year thanks kathy so as she mentioned the girls actually today finished their term paper so awesome job it was yeah definitely it was a long haul and i'm incredibly proud of all of the work that they've done so far so as you can see these are some of the overarching course objectives um and they include preparing students for college and career readiness building a desire to pursue education as a career and fostering relationships between high school and elementary school students within

021our district which is a really nice opportunity so the tomorrow's teachers curriculum follows the 11th edition of the course text called experiencing education which aims at providing students in high school with a college level teacher preparatory experience so our school year is pretty much broken up into three main parts so the first part or our main phase or first phase is um we begin with an in-depth exploration of educational theories while also reflecting on our time as students in all the different grade levels and then we focus on implementing these theories and practices into the classroom setting by studying all of the elements of teacher life so lesson planning instruction classroom management and assessment and then we conclude the school year by analyzing different elements of the teaching profession and preparing for applying to actual

022teaching jobs mrs dotler had mentioned that there's field work experience as well and so one of the things that makes this course unique is that students are required to complete a significant amount of field work hours in other schools in the district they have to complete a total of 50 hours through the course of the whole school year so we broke that up into two sort of different kinds of experiences so in the first half of the year the students are visiting classrooms and they are strictly observing so they are sitting taking notes about what's happening and we had over 37 teacher volunteers in the district which was incredible and it really gave us a wonderful opportunity to see all the different grade levels we were in multiple schools we were in every single school

023in the district and the girls got to see a wide variety of disciplines as well and then for the second semester students select a grade level and discipline that they felt particularly drawn to and then they were matched with one cooperating teacher and they stayed with that teacher for the remainder of the school year and so they were able to really build relationships and they could take on more responsibilities so including working in small groups doing read-alouds co-teaching and finally planning and implementing their own lesson it's been incredible for me to see my students fall in love with teaching every time that we were back in class after an observation they were bubbling with amazing stories and they had just such positive experiences to share it was so wonderful to see and that's really a

024testament to the kinds of teachers that we have in our district and a few of my students are with us tonight and they're going to share some of their experiences with you so up first is gabriella hairston who was placed at cedar hill followed by zia sarkis who was at william annan and finally sarah babcock who is placed at liberty corner and we also have three of our cooperating teachers with us as well who would like to share their experiences so maggie davenyon amanda hughes from cedar hill and chris swanson from william hi everyone i'm gabriella and i'm a senior and i'm so thankful to have mrs horvath as the teacher to guide our class into becoming such amazing teachers through our observations every sea day this has been an eye-opening experience to be able

025to see things from a teacher's perspective it's easy to assume that teaching is an easy job especially from the student's perspective but from witnessing the amount of preparation and management behind each school day teaching is much more complex than it appears i'm enrolled in mrs horvath's italian culture class and as a student i'm able to see her apply the classroom management skills assessments learning styles and much more she teaches us about in tomorrow's teachers this class has taught me so much in being able to identify and appreciate these skills and teachers and as well as and as well as being able to hopefully utilize them in my own teaching one day hello i'm zia sarkis um i have been observing mrs romano at um willieman in middle school which is a sixth grade science class

026i've also worked with mr swanson on occasion um so i think that the main thing i've come away from this course with is key values such as responsibility organization and leadership and personally as someone who is not actually going into education i'm going into environmental engineering i plan on using all of these values that i've learned i plan on using leadership and management in you know team leading and if i manage a team and i think that today teachers are needed more than ever because a lot of students have lost important developmental years in school due to the pandemic and so they need teachers to guide them back on track um and like gabby said ms horvath has been an amazing mentor for us to learn about teaching and all the all of the other

027life skills that we've come away with from this course hello my name is my name is sarah babcock and i'm a junior at ridge this year my whole life i've known that i've wanted to be a teacher and the second that i saw this class in the program of studies i just knew it was a class that i had to take i have loved being able to learn about so many different parts of education from assessment to classroom management to curriculum and then being able to see it a couple days later during observation at the elementary middle and high school levels i feel so grateful to be able to see teaching from such an incredible perspective in our district i have seen nothing but the best from the many teachers i've observed and i would

028like to give a special thank you to them for opening up their classrooms to me this year i feel honored to have been a part of the inaugural class of tomorrow's teachers and i would like to thank this class for helping me begin to visualize myself as a teacher in my own classroom someday good evening my name is amanda hughes and i am fifth grade at cedar hill and i'm going to start by saying that i was one of those people that i came home from first grade knowing that i wanted to be a teacher and so if this kind of class had been offered when i was in high school i probably would have been one of the first ones to sign up which is why when the offer came out to host a

029student in my classroom i was probably one of the first to sign up because i absolutely just welcome this kind of experience for our students as well as for my students so that's more of what i wanted to focus on a little bit is to say well these all of these students are absolutely amazing i want to share how much it has impacted my fifth graders so my fifth grader started the year with having a few kids kind of rotate in they'd be sitting in the back of the room they'd be looking at them they'd be watching and eventually i'd make the high schoolers get down on the floor and play a math game or read a book with them and really to watch my fifth graders change and smile and be so opening and

030welcoming to these high school kids was just awesome to see at the towards now in the second semester we have the same girl coming into our classroom every so often whatever the rotation is and um when she walks in the door my fifth graders light up they smile they cheer for her name they yell that she's there they're so excited and that's what i just love to see that relationship going from the younger students to the older students that while i know the high school kids are learning a lot i love watching my fifth graders learning from the high school kids yes they might also be talking about prom dresses and they might also be talking about music but isn't that what we also want our younger students to see and to have those positive

031role models in the classroom at the elementary level so thank you so much to you guys for coming into my room and thank you to this community for supporting a program like this i am maggie davinyan i teach at cedar hall also but i teach kindergarten the total opposite end um like amanda said we were thrilled when the high schoolers came in because my kindergartners we play outside every day because we still have play time and they see the high schoolers and they wave at them and they started waving back at us and then all of a sudden they started coming in our classrooms and they were so thrilled like we know you in fact the girl that we were with maclean she was in matilda and one of the kids during the performance is

032like oh my and she he was so excited to see her up there so what a connection between the high school and the elementary schools so i'm a third generation teacher my daughter's a fourth generation teacher so teaching is part of our family we love it and what i wanted to do is i wanted to instill that teaching in my kindergarteners and when i saw the high schoolers come in and their love of my kids which i call them my kids every nine months they're my kids um it was amazing to see and the connection and how like mclean would get down on the floor and play with them because they are kindergartens we also have play time she engaged with them outside playing um for our struggling learners we all have them she would

033sit and actually gabby you're in my room too yeah they would sit and work with these children um on how to spell and it just gave an awareness to these high schoolers like where they were 12 years ago there's so much that i know mclean brought because i'm going to focus on her she brought kindness she bought humor she bought compassion and she also brought this fear of the high school like i walk into high school i'm scared to death this is like so different for me and she brought that into my kids and they can walk into high school and be so happy because like oh maclean was here we know and that comfort level especially with what's happened in the last two years these kids were preschoolers a lot of them didn't go

034to preschool a lot more virtual to have this hands-on experience was amazing and you know kindergarten is that foundation year it's the year when you have to instill that love of teaching it's gonna be i mean the love of learning because they're gonna be doing it for the rest of their lives so thank you this is a great program i'm so glad that miss hughes and miss daven spoke about those connections because that's what i was going to talk about as well i'm chris swanson i'm a middle school teacher one of the challenges of middle school as you can imagine being a middle school teacher is nobody ever wants to come back most you know it's the awkward stage it's the clumsy stage and you kind of we all laughed a little bit when chun

035li was talking about some of the issues that they they're worried about and a lot of the memories that they have are not ones they want to revise so when mrs miss horvath suggested that we could have some of our students come back many of us jumped on that and we it was a total home run it was such a pleasure to see these young adults the poise the charisma and the energy that they brought to the class was just fantastic but as you were saying before the the thing that really really mattered was the connections that they made between the middle schoolers you think this is the time these are the ones who are still in that awkward stage and they're able to look at some of their peers they're more mature peers they're

036four maybe six years older than them and to think that wow these are these are kids who made it through our experience who made it through middle school we can do it and not only they make it through but they came back and they came back to teach us and i'll tell one quick story um i had one student i have one student uh very withdrawn very quiet comes in hi how are you doing not at work on the way out did you have a good day nothing michaela peratti the day she spoke the day she talked to her did her lesson did her little lesson thing this young lady who never said boo on the way out she tapped her on the shoulder thank you so much thank you so much miss peratti for

037coming to our class those are the connections and that's like we were saying before those connections and for those especially for the middle schoolers to see that and to know that you know what there's a there's some great people and there's some great places for us to go to um and i think we really i want to applaud ms sorvath and ms dotler for doing this great program and i know there's more teachers who are really interested in continuing it so thank you guys thank you so much i just want to say thank you for your time and attention i know these meetings are really long so we wanted to keep this as brief as possible but we also wanted we have so much to share and it's really nice to have an opportunity to

038do that um i also really want to thank my students thanks you guys for giving this program a chance we've had such a wonderful school year and it is not over yet definitely not over um i'm so grateful for the teachers in our district who were so willing to take on this extra responsibility without them we wouldn't have been able to do what we did so i'm really really grateful for them and finally i would like to think take an opportunity to thank mrs stotler mrs fox mr markarian and the board of education for your support and approval of this program it's been such a wonderful year and we've made really great strides and i'm so excited to see where we go in the future thank you [Applause] do you have any questions board members

039let me get you a mic just before everyone walks out the door i just want to say thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you to the students because i know they want to go home but also no that's fine thank you to miss stotler for bringing this to the board of education curriculum committee and to ms horvath for bringing it to life i think it's just so amazing and so very much what we need and it's exactly the kind of thing that makes me love being a board member i have a daughter who's an educator and one who's in school to become an educator and we didn't have this but we had teachers willing to do the senior internship weekly year-long program and i think this is a brilliant compliment to that

040especially i didn't realize juniors could take it but i think that's amazing and i i hope there's room for lots more sections i really do and thank you to all of you to all the teachers willing to open your classrooms up it you have no idea the difference you make every day to some child so thank you i agree with everything that mrs gray just said um i get students at rutgers who some of them are the ones who wanted to be a teacher ever since they were in you know second grade and some of them are just kind of experimenting and they don't get to have this kind of field experience until junior year of college usually sometimes sophomore year and some of them you know may never try it because they didn't get

041the idea or try it out when they were you know younger so i think this is amazing because people that may not have decided to major in it might try this in high school and then decide that they want to do that and it also gives them a chance to experience different grade levels i've had students who we went and visited in a middle school and they're like oh my god i'm not teaching that i thought i wanted to or vice versa i had some students who were like i love the middle schoolers that are so funny they're so amazing and they would have never probably given that a chance until they got in there in the classroom so i think this is a really amazing program thank you everyone thank you mrs stotler our

042teachers back there thank you guys for coming maggie krista thank you so much mr swanson thank you guys for coming i think uh it's it foreshadows something that we want to talk about a little later in the in the month actually and and that's some of our efforts to work on one of our goals related to you know showing kids more opportunities about uh career and uh this obviously uh hits that nail on the head so thanks for for your work on this all right so we are going to make a little bit of a transition here okay and uh we're going to welcome our business administrator mr mclaughlin uh he and i will be talking about our school budget for next school year mr mclaughlin thank you mr mercarian good good evening everyone welcome

043to the annual public hearing on the proposed budget of the bernards township board of education for the 2022-2023 school year as mr markarian indicated both he and i will be making this presentation this evening i can't promise it's going to be as short as the last presentation but we'll try all right so one of the things that i want to tell everyone here is that throughout the course of the presentation and in particular when you're looking at the slides that relate to finances in particular you will see comparatives those comparatives are from the budget as the board of education adopted it for the current year that we're in right now which was 2122 which they did in may of 2021. keep that in mind okay so what you see here is the proposed budget for

044next year and the current year budget the differences between them in terms of general operating expenses i'm sorry i'm working off a computer that's not mine so i'm not quite as facile with it as i would be with my own but you'll see that there are changes in general operating expenses of 1.35 million dollars and a reduction in capital expenses of roughly 80 thousand dollars total operating expense increase of 1.279 federal funds are essentially unchanged and debt expenses are essentially static as well have about a 90 200 increase although all in from the budget that was adopted for the year that we're in right now to the budget that we're proposing it's a 1.28 million dollar increase i do note there's a header mistake here so this must be one of the earlier versions nick

045that we had back and forth because it's got final budget for 2223 and 22.23 should be 21.22 the great the column to the left should say where it says final budget should say 20 21 okay so this is a breakdown of the general operating expenses the grant changes and debt expense changes overall as you noted in the previous slide it's a 1.28 million dollar increase 401 000 of that relates to salaries major drivers there are contractual increases and the cost of extended school year and substitute costs health benefits which i'll talk a little bit more about as we get into this presentation is up 972 932 dollars instructional supplies and services increases are 144 529 the majority of that is an instructional software uh there's a lot of software that's utilized in the curriculum these

046days and it's it's increasing at a rather rapid pace so that is what the driver is for that support services supplies and professional services these are going to be things when they say support their services things such as guidance such as what goes on in nursing and things of that sort so if we're their supplies are up that could be just a one-time but in this case it's a decrease of forty one thousand dollars uh in terms of professional services and telecom services an increase of twenty one thousand dollars roughly rounding up what's in professional services i think telcom is pretty obvious would be things like legal services and auditing fees pension and unemployment up 194 000 the big driver there really is what the state requires us to be making as a contribution as

047an employer for our employees who are non-certificated so if you think of all of the staff that are either administerial or who are instructional aides those don't those folks don't hold certificates that are recognized by the department of education because it's not required for their job or their position and as a result the state doesn't make those contributions towards their pension and social security that it does for any other certificated staff so any of the teaching staff the nursing staff the guidance staff the administrative staff all hold a certificate the state pays that share there but the state does dictate what the reimbursement rate is and because of the way the state is managing its costs and operationally its pension fund it is we're seeing large increases in what they're asking us to contribute towards

048for those employees towards their pension current capital outlay is down eighty thousand dollars really that that's a result of a net change of a phase-out of the last of a five-year long-term lease purchase against the increases that we proposed that long-term lease purchase was for technology that was a million dollar purchase that we finally paid off in this current year um facilities grounds and maintenance i'm going to talk about that a little bit more in another slide but and i talked about it last year but our third party contractor which is a large portion of our control of our cost there was subject to a unionization of its staff in the last year it happened last year we worked through that with the union and and the third party contractor where they phased in the

049cost over two and a half years but it's still a significant increase in terms of the wage rate because in order to get the folks to vote for a union they had to pay more than what the minimum wage was and the minimum wage was already scheduled to go up significantly as a result of legislation that was enacted by the state legislature and the current administration in trenton four years ago so you had an inflationary factor on top of an inflationary factor and in addition to that they had an additional provision for some extensive enhancement of health benefits technology as a seventy two thousand dollar increase primarily the driver there is uh the addition of additional security measures for the district's network and cyber security uh special education out of district placements are down 757

050the comment that i'd like to make about that is that we are allowed by the state of new jersey to only budget what we know to be the placements at the time we do the budget so right now when we're doing the budget we reach out to special education and we say to them what are the known placements that you have we have this that we've signed contracts for are there any changes that you foresee in those and they tell us that beyond that we can't guesstimate what an iep which is an individualized education plan review which will normally take place between now and early mid-july which is after the budget may change in terms of a placement of a student so it's a complement of placements and known costs for those placements as they

051exist at the time of the budget well they change sometimes they do sometimes they don't they go up they go down how do we deal with that we deal with that by the the extraordinary aid amount of money that we collect from the state we wait for that amount of money which normally we don't get from the state until august and we set aside a certain portion of that so that we have it as a contingency in case there are additional costs that we incur um we're up to the debt service uh we'll we'll see a little bit of that more talk a little bit more about that as we go forward but it's it's up ninety two hundred dollars it's essentially flat year over year when you see the slide that i have for

052what the debt levy is and the general fund levy which are two different components of what the tax levy is that we request from the town you'll see that it's been relatively static for the last five years and with the planning of the board beginning in 2015 it will remain flat now through the payoff of that debt which happens in 2030. um finally we're up to the big 30 change in federal grants and there's not nothing to be said about it it's just the way the numbers fall the next piece i'd like to talk about a little bit is the fact that in addition to and we'll talk about revenues in a few minutes in more detail in addition to those state aids and tax levy pieces that make up the largest share of our

053budget the second the third largest piece really is what we set aside every year from fund balance we set aside and reserve money to offset what would otherwise be a need to reduce program level or to somehow go to the state and ask for an adjustment to our tax levy upward so while we have an audited amount that we set aside of 4 million 15 000 we decided in balancing this year's budget to add an additional 475 000 to it because we felt that that was a viable thing for us to do with where we were going to end our fiscal year at the end of last year and also in consideration of uh the tax consider concerns that are going on for everyone i think you know in in this state so let's talk

054a little bit about revenue because the state requires this obviously to have a balanced budget and the revenue really is is the outside parameter it determines how big is the pot of money that you have right so fund balance i just talked about that a little bit it's actually 268 000 less than what we appropriated in the current year current year is a little bit extraordinary because you have to go back and think about the fact that it goes back to 21 and when the state legislature gave us our budget numbers in february when the governor and 21 promised us x amount of money when the state legislature finally got around to enacting that that appropriations bill they gave us 475 thousand dollars less so we ended up having to reach into our pocket and

055take that out of fund balance it was not what we had originally set aside but that's in the current year so relative to the to to the current year we're looking at a proposed reduction in terms of the dollar amount of 268 000 um tuition and miscellaneous revenue uh it's a thousand dollars it's just really what we expect in terms of some additional oddball kinds of revenues that we're going to collect for usage of facilities here and there the general tax levy we're looking at an 800 659 000 increase i'll talk a little bit more about that when we get into the the tax portion of the presentation state aid is up 887 thousand dollars year over year we weren't really expecting that we're surprised to get it honestly we're not sure how how long

056the state will be able to sustain this we've seen increases for a while i did talk about this last year when i did the presentation which is the fact that the state was the beneficiary as we all know of significant billions of dollars of federal funds in the last year and they haven't it has the effect in long in short term budgeting two three four years to basically create additional room in their budget to do these types of things in my my opinion there will be a question about whether they will be able to sustain it for three or four years right now we can only plan and the state only allows us to do a budget for a year at a time federal grants as i said are essentially flat i've talked about debt

057levy already there was a dollar left in fund balance so sometimes due to rounding 50 cents here 50 cents there you have a dollar left in the debt service fund we're required to zero that out so you see that dollar there and then we have the state debt age so the state of new jersey gives us a certain dollar amount or percentage of aid for the bonds that we issued for projects that were eligible they go back to the original projects that were done most of which were the ones in the mid to early 2000s that were done here we're gonna when there were two tranches of bonds issued for about 60 million or so and so we get all of 263 thousand dollars in and help from the state for that uh it's about

058151 dollars less year over year and as you can see the total revenue increase is equal to the total expenditures increase that we proposed now major factors in the bro in the budget the the objective here in working with the administration was to present a budget that maintains current programs and services staffing levels which mr mercarian will talk about and in particular with respect to class size will reflect the projected enrollment needs district enrollment continues to decline i'll talk about that in a few more slides that i have in the presentation here the state mandate chapter 44 health benefit programs continue to negatively impact the district so when you think about that 972 000 increase year over year in in health benefits if we did not have the new jersey educators health plan which the

059state mandated beginning in january of twenty one and i'll talk about this a little bit more we would be collecting roughly eight hundred thousand dollars more in employee contributions because that's the level of contributions employees were making towards their benefits prior to new jersey educators health plan so instead of having a 972 000 increase we'd only be looking for a hundred and seventy two thousand dollar increase but we can thank the legislature for that help um unionization of facilities negatively impacted the district they talked about that a little bit before it's now a union shop for aramark which happens to be the contractor of record however i want everyone to understand that the nature of a union shop is that regardless of whether aramark had the contract or some other third party like sodexo anyone

060that could come into bernards now would be under the umbrella of that union and so subject to the same constraints and cost issues that they face right now major district capital plans continue to proceed i'll talk a little bit about the the biggest one that we're undertaking uh beginning in june and significant costs related to one time and recurrent pen and non-recurrent it should say pandemic related needs have been largely offset by one-time federal grants i have a slide that goes through that okay so i mentioned already sustaining programs and services services and programs from the current year are maintained in the budget that's proposed for 22 20 years to three the budget supports ongoing efforts to complete district goals connected to the strategic plan and key components of the strategic plan including professional development

061of staff student competence safety and security as well as communication and collaboration are part of what is integral to the program and structure of this budget some of the more significant activities to support those objectives include professional development for the staff technical technology excuse me tongue tied here technological technological hardware and software resources and infrastructure staff such as instructional coaches and curricular materials there are some expanded opportunities in the budget i won't go through everything that's on the list here but enrichment gifted and talented programs also known as as quest is expanded expansion of our handwriting without tears program in degree 2 as well as the second year of our new word study program we have the addition of a second english excuse me ell course for students identified with this need at the high

062school level it's going to continue to support the rotating drop program as well as the wellness program talked a little bit about enrollment decline the statistics that you see here are a measure that is taken or is required by the state in in october of every calendar year so in october and mid-october we're supposed to take a snapshot of the students on role and that is submitted to the state they use it to calculate the state aid that they're going to give us because it's it it is part of the computational process that they use to calculate individual categorical aids that they're going to give us the types of heads they count basically but in total you can see that in october of 2016 we had 5518 students and as of october of 21 we

063were down to 4 700 students so an 809 student chain a decrease over six years that's not our high point in october of 16 because i've been here for 10 years in june and our high point was roughly 5 700 students okay so i have to turn around to look at this because it's too small on this screen so pardon my the back of my head what you have here is a multi-year six-year look at a couple of key data sets one the enrollment numbers that we were just talking about and you'll see in that first row those numbers that we just talked about in the previous slide thanks nick what you'll see on the second row is what the projected enrollment is for the budget for the 2223 year 48.60 but that number relative

064to the um six-year trend is still an 11 percent almost a 12 decrease i will tell you that the 4860 is predicated on a combination of things it takes uh the district's demographer's report which is dr richard grip who's done probably 80 school district demographic projections in the state of new jersey so he's pretty well known for what he does and then it looks at any variables that we see in terms of in particular our enrollments in kindergarten or our enrollments in special ed and we take a you know we'll we'll modify it slightly classroom salaries and benefits as you can see are are continuing to go up uh general classroom supplies and textbooks are up year-over-year classroom purchase services are up year-over-year and total support services for students are only slightly down they're down

065from 33.70 in the current year proposed actual budget that was adopted to 3226 but i would compare that if you if you would to what our budget was in 2021 where we had 4 845 students and we budgeted 3 219 so you know it for roughly 15 more students we have slightly more than what we did two years ago we had the same amount so we're fairly confident in these levels of of of classroom resources turn this off okay uh i've touched a little bit on chapter 44 already in a few different uh ways but that law was signed into into into effect by the governor in july of 2020 we had the first open enrollment for it in january of 21 and effective this january of 2022 375 of the district staff are enrolled

066in that program this is a 19 increase from the prior year as i indicated the estimated increase cost was preliminarily determined to be hundred thousand dollars annually in lost contributions that plan also called for the creation of something called the garden state health plan uh that plan just as of last friday has been announced and we have to offer enrollment for that as of this july we don't know what the fiscal impact of that program is going to be because we would need to see how many staff will enroll in it and we would also need to have then have claims experience against it what i can tell you about it is that it will continue to impact us in all likelihood negatively for the following reasons from what we can see preliminarily the level

067of contribution that is the maximum contribution say for a family plan with a hundred and twenty five thousand dollar staff member salary is only seven percent under the current new jersey educators health plan the garden state health plan says if you elect that plan and you have family coverage and you have the same wage you'll only pay 3.6 percent towards that of your salary so it's basically half across the board whatever we had in new jersey educators health plan the employees contribution drops by 50 percent uh the state's argument is that we will expend less for these claims because it really doesn't have an out of network component however we in in bernard's township uh do what only maybe a dozen other school districts do in the state which is we sell fund insurance because

068self-funding of insurance saves us a significant amount of money we're not paying for the [Music] the the markup if you will that a blue cross blue shield pays we're the bank basically we also save as a result of doing that about three and a half percent of the affordable care act fees that are charged to private insurers because we self-insure but what i can tell you is that when we look at these so we have all of the data that comes in and we can see firsthand kind of where the expenses are and while we don't know individual situations we can see kind of broad strokes how the how the costs are being incurred for the claims because we pay the claims every week and the majority of the claims for most of the people

069that we pay are going to be for stuff that's day to day and week to week i have to take my child to the doctor to get you know an annual checkup i have to go for an annual checkup uh you know i need a a measles shot for my child or i you know i you know we we fell and you know i i strained myself and i've got to go in and have them take a look at my back you're going to go in state for that you're not going to go out of network so i don't think we're going to see the savings that the garden state health plan predicted we're going to see and i and i think that that's consistent with the failure to see savings that the state said

070we were going to see with the new jersey educators health plan the biggest challenge for us is the state of new jersey has said this is not something that we can opt out of they said it's mandatory they said that every school district and every government must offer it to their staff and not only that but if you come into the staff you into the district let's say you're you're coming to this district from another district and you've been a teacher for for 15 or 20 years you don't get it you don't get a choice you must go into that plan the state of new jersey says and you must stay in that plan for up to seven years before you can opt out so a little bit about chapter 44. unionization as i noted

071already and i think i really touched on this uh you know we face it we're phasing in the increased cost over two and a half years they're significant uh the significant increase are really in wages because those wages are on top of what the state had already done in terms of a four-year phase in to maximize hourly wages to begin with and also health benefit provisions that the state did not dictate but if you're going to get a union shop in the union has to offer you something more than what you can get without them and so that's one of the things they they offer and uh they got the employees to vote for it it's now a union shop state aid as i indicated is up 877 thousand dollars the district is utilizing this

072entire increase to reduce the local tax levy we are not expending any of it we use it to offset the operating costs instead of raising the tax levy so let's talk a little bit about that um again i've got a bar too small on that computer um really want to focus on the bottom row here you've got 12 years of tax history what you can see is proposed increase as i noted early on in my presentation of 659 000 in taxes for the general levy that's 0.73 the debt service is what you see in the column labeled debt service fund levy and that's 505 million 115 000. it's a 9 300. that's there's this extra zero in there see this is not the version that we had nick three hundred nine thousand three hundred fifty

073dollar increase uh it's a total percentage increase of point one eight percent uh for the uh year over year so if you were to compare the combination of the 91314 and the 5 million 115 back to what's above it of 90 million 655 and a 5105 it's a 0.18 increase year over year uh the net taxpayer effect is a 0.699 increase in terms of the average the rolling average uh in the past 11 years the districts reduced its debt levy by 11.4 percent and increased its bond rating to aaa uh we were just recently re-rated in the spring and we still maintained our aaa bond rating uh that puts us in a rather small group of districts the reason that we have it is because of uh the conservative budgeting is basically if you look

074at what standards and poor says when they when they review us and they give the report and because of our balance sheet they take a look at our balance sheet and they say okay you've got a reserve for maintenance you've got to reserve for capitalization you've got a reserve for health benefits as i said we're self-insured for health benefits well that's an 18 million dollar a year cost to this district health benefits and when you do that we as a district are on the hook for that claim it's not the same as when you wanna if you individually were to go out and buy prospective insurance and you pay your premium and whatever you pay in claims whether it's more than what you pay in premiums the insurer has to pay well we're the insurer

075so you have to think of it that way and what that means is that you could have something like an extraordinary situation where an individual employee might incur a cost of more than 350 thousand dollars you might say geez i've never seen a bill like that well if you've ever had a family member in the hospital for a week for any kind of major surgery then you'll realize how quickly that can happen or let's say you know you were in a situation where you know you're you had a child that was born you know prematurely that can be very expensive any of these things can happen they happen on a regular basis and we have over 800 employees and those 800 employees between children and other dependents actually mean that we're ending up covering the

076cost for roughly 2100 individuals when you think about it okay because that's actually what it amounts to so out of that pool you can have those costs and if you have something that's in excess of say 350 000 we have an insurance piece that kicks in for that it's called we we do just what blue cross and blue shield would do if we were blue cross and blue shield what they do is they they basically share that risk with another insurance company they get something called stop loss insurance we procure stop loss insurance but that's also another way that we save money here because we can set a slightly higher threshold for stop loss than say blue cross blue shield based on our review of looking back 10 years of our statistical claim date and

077say we can have a higher threshold level and when we take that higher threshold level on our stop loss we actually end up paying less overall for that component of our insurance than we would if we had blue cross or blue shield but to be 100 protected and for the district and the board and the public to not have to be at risk if we were to have some extraordinary set of claims we do have an emergency reserve that emergency reserve has roughly 900 plus thousand dollars in it and that was created in large part back i want to say six years ago when we exited from blue cross and blue shield we had a contingent liability on our books for run out for them so what's run out run out is what in the

078insurance business they refer to as those claims that were incurred prior to but not paid for before the end of an insurance cycle so if an insurance cycle starts on june ends on june 30th as ours do they run on us on us on our fiscal year state of new jersey says that claims that were incurred prior to that june 30th period can be presented to the insurer up to 18 months after that period so that's your run out so we had that with blue cross blue shield because we had a hybrid type of insurance with them they presented a claim to us for that run out cost within 30 days of the close of that insurance period when we told them we were no longer going to continue on with them as a perspective

079we're a hybrid insurer we were going to become self-insured and what i said to them and with our brokers was that well okay show us the claims that you have that support that because it's supposed to be for claims that you're going to get over the next 18 months that process went on for roughly two years at which point we settled with them but we reclaimed clawed back if you will from what they were originally claiming from us 675 000 of the 900 that's in our current reserve and so we had the opportunity with some other good fiscal year operational results to get it up to that point where we said to the board we're comfortable with taking on self-insurance because unlike other districts that take it on we now have a reserve there if

080we have extraordinary claims that are above and beyond what our insurance will cover basically in terms of these stop loss claims okay let's talk a little bit about federal funds down at the bottom you're going to see three bucks of money that we got from the federal government late last year these funds are primarily available to us through the 24-25 school year so we have a bit of time to spend them yet there's no that's the outside limit we could spend it all tomorrow if we wanted to but we have until then to spend it up at the top are the things that we have either purchased or have proposed in our grant budgets to purchase at this point in time so there have been some questions i know since i did this presentation last

081time which of these things have we purchased and which of these are in the works and which of these have we not purchased so air purifiers they're in every classroom around the district 390 000 that's been done hvac upgrades roughly 172 000 of that is for upgrades to an antiquated building management software so the hvac systems and buildings like this are operated through complex software that remote engineers can monitor 24 7 for us and they can set back the system they can change it they can shut down a particular rtu they can do a myriad of things with those the software that we had in there was over 35 years old and so we have spent or initiated and they're in the process of completing probably by i would say late may or june they've

082been working on it for six months in every building the upgrade of those software systems the remainder of that is money for about eight classrooms in this building that don't have the airedale units that you see in all the other classrooms okay then you have the technology for virtual learning none of that's been spelled spent outdoor seating none of that's been spent pretty much everything else on the list has not been expanded yet okay but those are things that those are the descriptors of what we have in the grant that have been approved as to how we would spend the money i talked a little bit up front about ongoing capital projects one of the things i wanted to talk about was the fact that we have a capital reserve it's something that the district

083really took to heart probably beginning in 2013 and one there are multiple benefits to that one is that while we've done in the tens of millions of dollars of capital projects over the last 10 years we have not gone to the taxpayer to say we need a bond referenda to do that and we want to increase the taxes we didn't have to do it because we set up a capital reserve and so think of it this way you could say i want to remodel my kitchen in my house and i'm going to go to the bank and i'm going to take a i don't know what's a basking ridge kitchen cost these days eighty thousand dollars depending on what you put in it or forty thousand dollars i don't know somewhere i mean i don't

084know i'm getting the thumbs up maybe more i'm out of date i'm out of okay but it's a lot of money you could go in and you could get a loan and you could take a 10-year note and you could pay interest on it and it would cost you way more than the principal that you're going to pay to your contractor to do it right or you could save money every time you had the opportunity in a few years leading up to it so that you could basically pay as you go and that's basically how you have to think of a capital reserve it's the ability to pay as you go and set aside so that you're managing your debt now other school districts do it slightly differently they say you know what we can

085only raise our tax levy the general levy by x two percent a year in this case we're not doing that this year but but now we have to choose between we need to do 300 000 project over here or do we do ess in the high school right or do we do x number of you know of other what what other program or service in the district do we have to cut because you only have x amount of money right you can only raise it by x amount so if the state isn't giving you any increase and if you've got contractual increases and you want to sustain your programs then they have to choose we don't do that we don't have to choose because we have the capital reserve it's outside of the budget it's

086independent of the budget it doesn't incur an additional levy to do it okay so there's an operational benefit to us for having that because we don't have to make a decision about what program services are going to ebb and flow in a given year in order to make a capital project happened and we don't have to go to the taxpayers and increase the tax levy in order to make a capital project happen that said the oak street is funded completely from two sources it's the last of a series of school development authority grants which i applied for i think in my second year here most of which were to install upgraded hvac systems in all of our buildings that were had the older ones that were 35 to 40 years old at that point in

087time that was completed with the last phase of that being the william school uh the summer before we got hit with covid and the last piece that remained was to redo the old section of roofing at the oak street school so the sda and this is another benefit to having the capital reserve when those monies became available a lot of districts had to pass referendum get the fed matching funds we had enough money in our reserve at that point to say you know what we're just going to go right ahead and apply for it because we've got matching funds in our capital reserve and we did that and so the sda will pay uh 60 cents on the pro of the project and we'll pay 40 cents for every dollar excuse me it's the other

088way around it's 40 60. what are we doing we're removing the existing shingle roofing system and replacing it with new shingle roofing we're removing and replacing existing cornice gutters downspouts and trim so in the areas that you see oops looking ahead on the wrong screen that you see grayed out so that area immediately to depending on which to my right here okay uh is the area that is the auditorium and what you see at the top end there would be the the columned facade that faces out towards oak street then you've got some flat roof there's nothing to be done with that because that was redone a few in in relatively in the last 10 or 15 years and it's got a 25 year life span in it and then you've got the remiss the

089remainder of the old section of the building basically i'll show you some photographs in a minute so you have a better orientation on it but these are the areas that are affected in terms of the roofing uh so again you can see here immediately but right there there's the auditorium uh you can see this fire which actually was done i think in 2012 right nick is it 2012 we did the spire yeah and then the oak street facade the back basically section of that old section of the building which you're looking at here where that truck is parked you're looking at it basically from over where the gymnasium and cafeteria are if if you know where they are the cafeteria in the back okay and then you can see the trim work the the the

090the level of health uh basically uh eroded and degraded it is basically in some of these lower photographs here including finally the cornice piece which is that white octagonal piece there you can see it's just that's the weathering on the inside of it just plywood and leaking so that is the project that will begin uh in mid-june and will be completed before school opens uh next september at this point we're ready to talk a little bit about personnel and enrollment and i'm going to turn it over to our superintendent mr merkarian okay thanks rod so obviously when you are taking a look at our budget since we are a service provider a lot of the service that we provide is directly related to people and so the biggest portion of our budget is about personnel

091and the way that we think about personnel is to have the staff in place to meet the needs of our students which is driven in large part by what courses and programs the students need through their ieps if they're in special services or through their regular scheduling process and obviously the total number of students that we have so we have seen over the course of the last several years as mr mclaughlin noted uh a downward trend uh in enrollment so we'll be talking about that as we move our way through this class size is obviously a factor as well uh when we're thinking about our students we do have a guideline uh with respect to class size that we refer to for the k1 and 2 students where we try to keep the general classes

092less than or equal to 22 students per class and at the grade 3 to 5 level we try to manage at 25 or less students in our regular education classes at the elementary schools now other areas when we think about the middle school and the high school and the way their schedules work classes will typically range somewhere between 15 to 30 students now we we would look at 15 as somewhat on the low side and we would look at 30 as something that we would probably want to avoid getting classes that approach 30. but that range is somewhat typical when you look at our classrooms across the spectrum there are some unique issues that contribute to class size which also contribute to the need for staffing and personnel some of those things are related to

093simple simple things like scheduling or uh ieps specific things called for in ieps sometimes it is related to safety and capacity limitations in a particular facility or for a particular lab setting and of course sometimes class size can be related to retaining a program or starting a new program some examples of this in scheduling you have something that's called a singleton class and and that can be challenging because uh you're trying to provide a particular course that students want but you also need to provide to them other classes and in making up a student's schedule you can run into conflicts where it may not be possible for a student to get a particular singleton and that can cause you to need to open up another section so you might have a situation where you need

094another section to get students schedules to work as you're balancing out all the individual classes they may want so singletons can drive that level changes that students make after schedules are done can impact class sizes or drops in the beginning part of the school year can also affect class sizes some other unique scenarios with classes where you might see classes that are a little bit smaller might be in the arts dance or theater because you're trying to sustain a program but also because of the facility itself and how many students can safely occupy a dance class for example our ap classes sometimes those classes can be a little bit smaller and sometimes what we'll do to manage that is have a teacher have two different course titles running at the same time in their class

095so that we can offer those things to the students without eliminating a program the same thing can be true with world languages obviously those world language classes fluctuate from one year to the next because every year the students have the opportunity to uh enroll in different world language programs so that can cause some swings and fluctuations in class sizes depending on what the students are opting for each year music and pe are kind of examples on the uh high end of the spectrum where you might have all of the choral students together at once for obvious reasons trying to you know work on their choral skills uh as a group together that could be a large group of students uh the same thing could happen in band and oftentimes we have large pe classes in

096excess of 30 students we just saw today a new program that just started uh in in tomorrow's teachers so sometimes you'll see a fluctuation below 15 students if you're trying to start a brand new program and that's an example of where that can occur uh some unique courses can also have uh low low class sizes uh for safety reasons or for the for the sake of the program right uh american sign language is a good example where you don't want to try to teach sign sign language with 30 kids in a room it's very difficult for the teacher to be able to work with students in that setting and actually teach sign language and certain labs like the woods lab and the photography lab for safety reasons you're managing class size there as well so

097taking a look at current school year class size data is something that we do around the time that we're making the budget and around the time that we're working on scheduling for the following school year because it helps us as a guide uh in terms of where we may see adjustments in staff it could be decreases in one area increases in another area it could be repurposing staff it could also be not uh filling certain positions or eliminating the number of ftes that you need from one year to the next and in a climate where we've seen declining enrollment we have seen that over the course of the last several years where positions have been eliminated from the position control roster and we've had less full-time equivalent staff from one year to the next this

098projection as mr mclaughlin noted is a function of statistical forecasting which is the company that he mentioned dr grip and in this case i didn't do any adjustments i know that in the budgeting process mr mclaughlin showed you a number that looked a little bit different and that's due to some adjustments in the calculations for special education students from a financial perspective uh in this case i'm just taking the raw data as it was uh projected by the demographer okay so when we take a look at the class sections for the elementary schools we take a look at each of the general education levels kindergarten through fifth grade at all the schools and we take a look at how many sections and the total number of students per grade level and simply do a little

099bit of division to come up with the average class size per grade level uh you'll see an asterisk an asterisk there that not every single student is counted per grade level per building because some of the students are obviously not in the general education program you have some students in special education program classes that are not represented here but are represented on the next slide so you can see that the average class size overall at cedar hill was about 19 students per class here we're rounding to the nearest whole number and we anticipate a possible uptick there just a little bit at cedar hill school but we may see a reduction of one fte between last year and next year these are the cedar hills school special education numbers the resource room program the icrics

100program the lld program and the k-5 behavioral disabilities program as well as cbap which we'll take a look at at mount prospect school it's important to note here the asterisk refers to the fact that some students are counted more than once because they may be involved in more than one program they may receive some of their courses in the resource room program and other uh in the icr ics program depending on the specific needs of their iep so students can be represented more than one time in each of these programs this is the liberty corner general classes kindergarten through fifth grade average class size this year of about 19 anticipating about the same thing next year but we also anticipate going down by a couple of staff persons at liberty corner here are the liberty

101corner special education program numbers and mount prospect now mom prospect we are not projecting all of the uh course all the students here remember because a lot of the students are in some self-contained programs at mount prospect school especially with the preschool program so just remember that they're not reflected in these counts and at mount prospect we anticipate a need for one additional staff member going from 21 sections this year to 22 next year with class size going from 22 on average this year to we're anticipating 20 for next year now one of the things that we are seeing uh is the fact that we are coming off of this pandemic still and we think that is contributing to some of the differences between actual students uh enrolled and projected students as we uh have

102seen from dr griff's report so i wanted to just point out that where you see the kindergarten number here that projection is coming from that demographer's report obviously actual enrollment in kindergarten is the most difficult thing to predict because we don't have the students yet in the program once they get into our school system they're pretty steady throughout with some fluctuation you know we have oddities that happen every year with certain schools getting certain number of students in a particular grade and there's no real good explanation for it it just falls that way sometimes so again this is mount prospect so we have a lot of our uh preschool students at mount prospect we have our students in the full day program depending on their ieps and we have students in half day preschool as

103well along with all of the k5 cbap programs being housed at mount prospect and of course there are students there that also have ics icr and resource room programs okay last but not least you have oak street school similar scenario average class size this year of about 19 next year projecting about 19 also we do anticipate going down one fte in the general education program at oak street oak street has resource room and icrics classes as well and we want to take a look at the middle school and the high school so for the middle school and the high school these are current year class sizes and we broke it down into two areas one are the core content areas on the left side of the chart and on the right side you see the

104elective areas and the average class sizes uh in some of the elective classes we do have elective classes in social studies science art music dance theater and tech ed at william adden not every student is represented in all of these tables depending on their actual course schedules these are the programs in the special services department at william adden they do house both lld and the cbac cbap program at william as well and a similar chart for ridge with the core content academic areas and the elective areas on the right and these are the average class sizes obviously in practice there's a wider range uh in each section per period possibly but these give you a sense overall as i mentioned you might see larger class sizes in uh music dance theater if that is making

105you wonder well you could have a low class size and dance but you could have a really high class size uh in something like a chorus class so that's going to cause those uh higher uh those those numbers to go up in average and i mentioned also uh physical education is usually where we see our largest class sizes and you do notice that there in the table on the left here are the special education programs at ridge and what we anticipate overall is probably a change of eight full-time equivalents and our projection net at the elementary school level was uh a decline in three uh full-time equivalents even though we saw uh an uptick at mount prospect we were net down three because we we projected uh four students or four staff members down uh

106overall in the other schools so uh going down by four then up by one we anticipate a reduction of three uh two middle school positions and three high school positions now i don't wanna alarm people um i think that we have been um judicious over the course of uh the last several years that i've been superintendent in trying to make our uh estimates at budget time for the realities of how we think school will open in september in terms of the staff that will need to run our programs at appropriate levels of staffing but we also know that sometimes things change between may and september and the board has been supportive and we have budgeted in a way that where we need to uh if it happens that we get a strange uptick or an

107unanticipated uptick in registrations for example students moving in and certainly we recognize that with some of the construction projects that have happened that have started to happen over the last couple years there are some fairly large facilities being constructed even though they're mostly one and two bedroom units um we wouldn't be surprised to see a little bit of move-ins from some of those uh units being built we're in a position where we can make adjustments going forward into the summer if we need to in the same manner that mr mclaughlin described we have ways to respond to any changes in special education placements for out of dis replacements and tuition contracts we plan for the possibility of adjustments in staffing as well and it could go up or down additional personnel considerations so in april

108we did approve a contract that added one licensed clinical social worker to the district staff from the third party provider of effective school solutions that will be placed at the middle school to start the effective school solutions program at annan so that was already done and that does add an extra employee although not a direct employee of the board coming through another contract service provider it will represent somebody that is at the middle school every day uh serving our students so i noted that here these next two positions have not officially been hired they are under consideration going forward into the next few months we are considering a technology specialist to assist the i.t department uh in security as well as integration of softwares and lastly uh is the position of a professional development person

109an instructional coach um those of you that have attended some of our board meetings in the past may remember uh a presentation that mr sai did uh with the instructional coaches that we have working in the district now they really provide a valuable service in helping to meet the needs of our staff in terms of providing them some more personal professional development in the classroom and we are considering looking at adding a third position right now we have two full-time folks doing instructional coaching uh and the thought is to consider whether or not we may want to have one person dedicated to each grade band one for elementary one for middle and one for high school so a third person would allow us to do that so that is the uh second position under consideration

110that has not yet been budgeted for directly and uh and hired but we are considering those other two positions and that is it any questions from board members for rotter eye just one when um when i was looking at the class sizes it was a little striking that in pe for the high school the class size is about 40 but in william it's 25 um so i would have kind of expected that to be roughly the same could you tell give me a little more information on that sure sure i could just use this so um it's a it's a good observation um and you know one of the things that we've seen over the course of uh the last year or so is some adjustments to the option two program and by virtue of

111those adjustments we have seen more students in the pe classes so that could be something to consider going forward that is a high number um that's that's historically not uncommon for ridge uh and and we're kind of i'd like to not see it get too much bigger than that obviously just for safety considerations and and the ability to supervise that many students we did hire a teacher at one point when we got a little bit over that on average we did start to see um you know some challenges and just having enough eyes on on that many kids in the classrooms but i think that's why you see that for the current year because of the change to option two sorry what about maybe making the wham's classes a little bit bigger well i i

112guess i'd rather see the rich classes go down and the ending classes go up i mean we could take a look at that ratio in terms of the way the staff are are aligned i could talk to rich about that to see what he thinks about that for next year even if you don't hire someone you might look at the you might look at the alignment between the middle school and the high school sure anybody on this side okay well there is a separate uh opportunity for public comments specifically on the budget so i think we'll head back up there for the board and get to the next step thank you mr mclaughlin i just wanted to say yeah sure and just an apology for the uh clerical errors in here i will fix those

113before uh we post this the website thanks get this back up there um just before we move on to public comment i just want to make sure no other board members have any questions or comments mrs mccune we can't really hear over here you can't hear it's very echoey can you guys out there hear me okay it's okay out there i don't think these are on can you guys hear on that side so it's just that side okay well okay at this point i think dallas is making adjustments from from beyond okay so it's like okay so now we're up to um public comment on the budget if you have a public comment or question please come up state your name and address and then you can sign in on the clipboard afterwards nobody wants

114to come up for the budget oh here comes someone good evening oops good evening my name is chila chipok i have a question or a comment i do not know so practically you propose to have 1.2 million dollars increase but if we are going to have eight teachers less teaching then um just a quick calculation about the uh salaries what are shown here is going to add up to half a million dollars so the actual increase is 1.2 plus that half million that we are going to pay for that eight teachers plus the health insurance coverage for them so um it's a little bit misleading uh saying that the increase is going to be only 1.2 million dollars thank you is there anyone else with comments or questions on the budget oh he's coming down

115the entire starting riverside drive um concerning the roofing on um oak street school wasn't that roof just um repaired within the last 11 years if it was this is a different part of it or are we doing the same part if we're doing the same part how come we're not going after the original roofers because i would think a roof be you know guaranteed for a certain amount of time the other thing is you're kind enough to tell everybody the teacher salaries but you're missing some stuff like the salaries of all the superintendents and all administrative people that we pay for including any type of insurance policies or cars or anything else we pay for that thank you good evening emily jones cedar hill school 100 peachtree i just want to speak in favor of

116the instructional coach i know that was presented as a consideration i have to say um being relatively new to the district the instructional coach was really inspirational and i just couldn't live without them both both of kiara and vicki do an amazing job so if that could be a higher consideration i know a lot of teachers would really appreciate it thank you is there anyone else here in person for public comment on the budget okay i think we have someone in zoom miss fox and mr smith you're in the meeting you can unmute yourself and make your comment uh this is cody smith are you talking to me yes i am you are in the middle of i'm sorry about that um trying to go back and forth between the youtube and the zooms complicated

117uh yeah so cody smith 36 royal oak drive um sorry i'm not able to be there in person but i'm out of town on a couple of commitments that i have um so i want to say this is my first year looking at the school budget and quite frankly i'm surprised the lack of transparency with the public who's largely paying the tab perhaps incorrectly i look across the lacrosse field of the township committee as a model for transparency and communication and expect the same from the school district as a reminder the township asks us to pay about 24 million of its budget and this school district is asking us for 91 million uh the bernards township committee meeting that included the municipal but introduction excuse me and that meaning the township cfo presented nine pages

118of supplemental detailed financial information for review uh five days in advance of that meeting as part of the meeting's agenda this district didn't provide anything for the march 28 budget introduction a few weeks ago i requested additional budget information from the school district's business administrator and i was trying to compare next year's proposed budget to previous actual amounts in the district's audited financial statements which coincidentally cannot be found on the district's website at least i couldn't find them um and i had a nice question and answer with the cf the township cfo regarding the township's municipal budget and was trying the same approach here what i received back from the district a number of days later was an email from the district's administrative staff that appeared to be crafted by a lawyer giving reasons why

119none of the information i requested would be produced perhaps again incorrectly i assume that the district prepares a detailed bottoms up budget and such information is readily available last thursday may 5th the district published its advertised budget in the burnersville news with normal font the advertised budget would be about two or three pages i believe the only information available aside from tonight's presentation um that that was the only thing available since mr mclaughlin's march 28 presentation and while it's more detailed in the advertised budget it does not provide the advertised budget does not provide the level of detail that the audited financial statements specifically in the required supplemental information part three um we'll have about two years from now when those financial statements are published um so a couple of questions um the undistributed expenses

120improvement of instruction services of 200.95 146 is increasing by more than 500 000 from the last few years again that's in the advertised budget um which i don't think was discussed tonight uh can you tell us why and the undistributed expenditures instruction of 1954 is a decrease from last year of about from 202 million 659 but it's an increase over the 2021 amount of 1 million eight 23. if you can discuss that lastly i'd like to talk about what your comments would be on the outlook of where we're headed um meaning that the presentations are budget to budget as mr mclaughlin covered rather than budget to actual for the prior years and for the most part i don't think we've had significant advances although when you look at the audited financial statements excuse me that

121about 19 million of um benefits that the state of new jersey is paying that are then pushed in and imputed in the various line items in those financial statements so comparison is difficult but considering that the stated inflation is seven or eight percent but many believe it's actually higher the cost of everything is going up the free money the district has received from the federal government's money printing press that's causing this inflation is running out and we discovered that future state aid is uncertain um but maybe at least there was at the end of 21 from the audited financials eight or nine million in capital reserves but it doesn't appear that we funded those this year or last year excuse me mr smith i'm not sure i'm not sure if you can hear me but

122your three minutes is up so please try to finish up okay thank you and then uh we went through the student enrollment so for the board members or mr mclaughlin what i'd like to understand is what we're considering or giving to the developing the financial the developing financial crisis and what actions you're looking to implement in this current budget and in the future budgets in order to not exceed the two percent cap on our taxes in fiscal 24 and beyond thank you there's nobody else waiting in zoom no that's it okay so at this point i'll close public comment on the budget um do you want to really so uh mr mclaughlin may want to jump in on this also but the uh stated increase in the uh in the budget um does account for

123the uh reduction of staff that's factored into that so i think that was uh the crux of that first comment um i rod i'll let you just want to be clear on that i think the confusion was that was thinking that those were eight positions it sounded like the the person asking the question thought we were adding those eight positions and that that cost needed to be added to the 401 thousand dollars but the 401 is actually net of the re of those positions coming out of the budget right did you want to say anything about the the roof repair i know that that there's nothing there's nothing that's been done to that section of roof in the 10 years that i've been here that's all i can tell you yeah and there wasn't anything

124done and the time that i was ba prior to that right so yeah that shingled section of roof is not that section no the the old section of the roof that hasn't been repaired and i know that those uh soffits and gutters are the old uh integrated wooden gutters that are that are rotting and falling apart as you can see from the picture so i think we're overdue on that um as far as uh cars for administrators there's no there's no cars for administrators yeah the the the salary appointments are are actually not on the agenda yet but they will be in the next uh several weeks as we get the last of the personnel action items done for uh the 22-23 school year they'll be under personnel on the board agenda as well um

125mr smith asked a lot of detailed questions uh and i honestly off the top my head i tried to catch some of the numbers that he asked about i don't know if you caught anything mr mclaughlin but i think he talked about i think i can speak to some of it okay there were a lot of statements and not so much questions as well but some of what i heard and i think he he did note it but it bears repeating which i said up front i'm comparing budget to budget you can't compare a budget to an actual because now you're comparing an apple to a pair or in the middle of a fiscal school year and the state says that when you post your advertised budget show what your appropriations are as of february

1261st well if you want to take a six-year look back as i did in many of these instances or a 12-year look back you need to have the same point of reference every year and the best point of reference taking out any of the wild cards that can happen so for example we have a significant number of expenditures that we front end expended basically in this current year for federal funds before we got them so we're spending them out of current funds and then we'll have to shift them over to the federal funds when we actually get them emergency connectivity fund is one good example where this year we had to in order to get i don't know how many hundreds of chromebooks alex you're out there you can tell us we spent half a

127million dollars on chromebooks that's an emergency connectivity fund reimbursement which we'll get back from the federal government but sometime before the end of the year that's going to change what your budgeted number was in those accounts during the year because you move it from one to the other in order to facilitate it so we had to borrow it from one account in order to do what operationally the district decided it wanted to do in terms of that half a million dollar procurement of chromebooks last july and august that's a good example uh year-over-year we had some one-time rollovers that we don't normally have if you take a look at the encumbrance amounts from year to year coming out of the 1920 year which was if you remember that was the onset of covid in the

128months of we were closed from march mid-march through june and i've talked about this in in other meetings but not so much tonight we immediately shut down a lot of things so we basically laid off ninety percent of the aramark staff why because we don't need to be cleaning the buildings every night if we're not in the buildings every night all right so we save significant funding there we save money on waste we save money on utilities what did that mean it meant that we rolled over more money into 21 21 22 than we normally would have rolled over okay that also distorts the comparisons between one account and the other so what is presented in our presentation and what is presented in the advertised budget do reconcile but i think mr smith also alluded

129to the fact and he was asking for the compilation of what the audited financial statements would look like for next year now and anyone who is a cpa and i am one and i believe miss light is one will tell you that that would basically be a pro forma statement that we're not in the business of doing generally okay we can't tell you what the results are necessarily going to be at the end of a school year but that is one thing that mr smith did ask for so he alluded to information that he asked for that can't be prepared in other words you can't give the results of what an audited financial statement is going to look like until the audit period is actually transpired so i think it's a little bit confusing to

130the public when that kind of a statement is made trying to think of some of the other nick can you remind me what else was stated so there was one question about the undistributed expenses going up and i thought that might be related to pers i'd have to actually that's what i got to see what it is i can tell you that you know again the undistributed expense expense increase didn't really go up year over year and again i'm not sure that how he's reading that information because undistributed would be function uh instructional function 11190 and that actually is actually not up year over year unless you include in it what we spent for um technology remember i said it's 144 000 that's in there for technology so i'm not sure what he's looking at

131and how he's getting that number i'd actually need to see what he is what he's reading because a lot of times for inexperienced readers of these these that's why the state of new jersey frankly gives you the user friendly and advertised budget which are only a page or so because if you actually were to take a look at the budget document that the state of new jersey wants you to submit to the state it's a hundred and fifty pages long it's not nine pages that the township's talking about it's 150 pages long and honestly it it the state of new jersey and the legislature deemed that it was important for there to be what they called a quote and i'm not making this up a user-friendly budget which is something that is rather rolled up

132and line items but even that document can be misinterpreted if you're not knowledgeable about what the chart of accounts is for public schools so you know there's some question in my mind as to what what he's actually talking about there i honestly don't see it off the top of my head i i don't see that as as possible but it may be a combination of accounts that he's looking at that i'm not sure of that he's calling undistributed i mean but the request that we had talked about from him talked about if i remember correctly uh a pudding and we had to read it i gave it to mr crew as he alluded to to read into the audited financial statement format a pro form a form of financial statement for next year the budgeted

133amounts that we would have for this year again auditors wouldn't do that we wouldn't do it it's not something that we okay thanks ryan um just one of the things rod um one of the things that i actually find helpful when i'm reviewing all the numbers and all the financials is the board secretary report and showing that budget to actual going forward that kind of shows it in a more of an account by account level that i find helpful i said that's true but that's talking about this year's budget to actual expenditures and i believe what mr smith was asking about was trying to compare last year's budget to the proposed budget for next year so when we build so when we build up the budget we don't do it in that at that level

134we don't do what we don't build up the budget more on an account by account level to determine absolutely there's 600 line items in the budget so yeah we have to go through each line item but we do it in terms of how do we do it well as nick indicated here and and and i you know 75 of our operating budget is salaries and benefits so i budget salaries for 800 employees and then we put them back into based on the staffing back into the gap codes that they fit into so that's 75 and i work up the health benefits the same time for each individual staff member so we do that but it's done through a series of of you know um spreadsheets basically and downloads from personnel and software and then it

135has to be basically massaged to reflect uh whatever staffing changes so if we have people on leave you have to figure out are they coming back are they going to be maintained are we going to have any reductions in staff or are we going to have increases in staff so once all of that's done then you have to go back in by each one of those salary accounts and put in the body or a placeholder for that body so yeah we do do all of that but it's not in a way that would be public friendly because it's a work paper that is designed for school business administrators to do and use the state in fact i will tell you and i've been in this business for 25 years doesn't tell business administrators how to

136do this so you know what i try to use is a rather finite approach which is this is what the personnel roster and the payroll have as of this point in time let's talk about you know what are the variables to that i mean we could spend probably four or five hours just talking about salary protections and health benefit projections then we take into the consideration well is this employee in new jersey educators health plan are they in the are they in the pos are they in the ppo uh what is their salary rate because each one of those determines what percentage they contribute back to their health benefit plan how much what plan do they have do they have adult do they have two adults do they have parent and child do they have

137single do they have family okay what is their wage now we have to go to cross reference a a chart that's chapter 78 or a chart that's chapter 44 and see what their contributions would be okay in addition to that now what we have to do is we have to go in and we have to take a look at what the actuaries at arthur gallagher say is going to be the rate of claims experience for next year how much percentage do we put in on top of that so that's built up literally for every individual times 800 okay that's how we do 75 percent of the budget and then you know i could talk to you you know for for for six hours here about how we develop each line out of the budget but

138there is no one document or even six documents that i can give you that's going to show you how it's done yeah no i mean my only point is it it sounds like eventually it gets into kind of like a format like the board secretary's report it gets into the format of what you actually see rolled up in terms of what this as i said there are 800 individual gap code accounts the state of new jersey requires us to roll those up into probably what is about three hundred and the reason for the eight hundred is frankly because the st this district decided to take three hundred thousand dollars of title one funds because if you take title one funds from the from the state of new jersey as a pass-through you were required to

139be able to break down your level of expenditure down to the building level so for every salary account that i might have for for for just say elementary schools there's one one account that shows up in the budget but i'd have that times four for elementary schools because the state of new jersey says that when i do an audit i now have to take that total audited expense excluding those expenses that the federal government and the state say we don't want to count okay and i have to be able to allocate those back from the audit into the state system so that's why we end up in our internal records with 800 and why you're going to see when you look at that monthly board secretary's report you know a lot more than what you

140see in the budget basically they roll up to the major object level okay so yes it is in that format but the state has said look for people for the public to get an informed idea about where the programs are relative to the detail that you would have for auditing purposes user-friendly budget because most people aren't going to want to look at 800 lines and understand what the distinction is between them and i've only started to just touch on some of the nuances but yeah it's essentially that's what the user-friendly and the advertised budget are they reflect what you have in the board secretary's report the board secretary's report breaks it out in more detail because we show you the breakdown for cedar hill school versus mountain prospect versus you know oak street versus liberty

141corner when it comes to salaries and the same is true with the special education programs we break it down by the buildings as well thank you that was helpful um so we are now up to um superintendent's report there are two items with someone like to make a motion for them mr khanna and ms singh um did you have anything where should we vote okay so could we have a roll call please mr mclaughlin mr salmon yes ms schaefer yes mrs gray yes ms singh yes mrs white yes ms light yes mr connor yes miss hiro yes this is thecube yes madam president thank you okay now we're up to public comment on agenda items if you have something on an agenda item you can come up and state your name and address and sign

142in afterwards um just the agenda items that are on for the whole meeting so if it's listed on the agenda tonight then you can talk about it now if it's not listed on the agenda then you wait till the last public comment at the end of the meeting okay is there anyone here that wants to make an in-person comment on agenda items what about on zoom nobody on zoom okay so we'll close that public comment and we'll move up to the approval of minutes there's one item would someone like to make a motion mr salmon and ms light um could we have a roll call please mr salmon yes ms shaffer abstain mrs cray yes ms singh yes mrs white yes ms light yes mr connor yes miss hiro yes mrs mccoon yes madam president

143thank you okay we're up to the finance committee there are eight items that someone like to make a motion um ms gray and mr salmon seconded is there a committee report no no report we meet on the 19th but i'll just quickly go through the items the item one is a standing item item two it's the bills disbursement item two is professional development item three is um basically transfers for a grant very much like what mr mclaughlin was describing a couple of minutes ago item 4 is a student transportation contract and items 5 and 6 are the budget and then item seven is the field tip field trip destination list oh i'm sorry right and then i forgot about the addendum and the um addendum item is for the busing are the barker bussing contract

144why don't i have that it was under my presentation thing i found it under here does anyone have any questions thank you mr sam yeah so that's the barker bus uh contract um for school year 22-23 suzanne do you have a quick question um if i could just have mr mclaughlin remind us because the one thing we're voting on is the levy the percentage that we are increasing the levy versus the percentage that we are able to legally could you kind of go over that again quickly so the levy percentage increase and it's in the presentation is 0.73 and we could increase it two percent so we're increasing it a lot less that's about a one and a quarter percent less less than we possibly could afford thank you any other questions before we vote

145okay could we have a role call please mr salmon yes ms schaefer yes mrs gray yes ms singh yes mrs white yes ms light no mr khanna yes ms hiro yes mrs bacon yes madam president thank you you voting no on all the items she did just on five and six okay i didn't hear that okay i guess you better know on all of them okay i'm just confused okay um we're up to the personnel committee there's 20 items would someone like to make a motion on this thing someone like to suck in it mr salmon okay is there a committee report there is personnel met on april 27th the one item that i can report out about about was at the april 25th 2022 board meeting a question was asked from a community member

146about teachers salaries comparable to other districts and what the district is doing to retain teachers obviously the district tries to be competitive with salary and benefits to retained staff in addition to compensation mr saad explained that the district supports staff by giving them resources and training to provide the students with the best educational experience and to continue their own professional development mr syed explained that since 2007 approximately three to five percent or certificated teachers have resigned each year at exit interviews mr said asks why a teacher is leaving the primary reasons for leaving are to stay at home with children to find employment closer to home and moving as to retirement teachers retire for different reasons which the district does not inquire about traditionally if a teacher retired he or she could not work full-time

147as a teacher without putting his or her pension at risk the law was changed for this year and next year that teachers can retire and continue teaching but can't work for the same district until 60 days after retirement we also met on uh may 4th but those minutes are uh under review okay does anyone have any questions for mr salmon okay could we have a roll call please mr seven yes miss schaefer yes mrs cray yes ms singh yes mrs white yes miss light yes mr khanna epstein miss hero yes mrs mccune yes okay we're up to the policy committee did they you policy met uh last week but i'll report out at the next meeting okay um curriculum committee curriculum just met last week and i'll report out at the next meeting and the

148wellness committee wellness committee meeting minutes just went out this week uh or today so we'll report out later but we did have one item that i wanted to present um which was the ridge gives back which is the program that this high school is going to be doing this year involving all of the high school students doing a day of community service in the beginning of june the wellness committee would like to propose or to suggest that the board go ahead and approve transportation costs for that so that we're not charging our students to do community service yeah i i think um what ms schaefer is talking about is the fact that typically when we do field trips um the students as part of the field trip process get a permission slip sent home and

149it usually factors in the cost of transportation for the field trip uh in light of this uh trip being sort of a during the day mostly during the day maybe a little bit into the afternoon um not not getting back after 2 20 for anything okay so um you know obviously it's a it's a service project for the students um so we want to just make sure the board is okay if we um work to use the budget to to anticipate um no more than we estimate about twenty thousand dollars uh in transportation uh costs for various providers to help get the students to as you can see on the agenda tonight a litany of destinations associated with doing all those different service projects um you know it'll depend a little bit on the destination

150in terms of how much bussing will be needed and whether or not bussing is needed at all because some of the projects are are kind of being done right here at home and and we won't need to bust the students but we're going to try to get uh transportation for a lot of these destinations we're not even sure we're going to be able to get it because of how difficult uh it has been to secure transportation for students for anything outside of to and from but we want to try if we can about 700 of the students will be here at ridge doing community service without transportation um and some of the the thousand students that will be going out into the community could be as local as cedar hill schools they don't need transportation

151but there is some costs with some of the transportation no i don't know that you need to have discussion necessarily i mean i think our transportation budget will support it given the fact that we had um you know several routes this year that we we consolidated so um we think our budget can handle it but we wanted to draw it to your attention just because we normally um work that through the cost of the actual uh field trip fee in this case we're trying to do it without fees to the kids because it's a service project that makes sense does anyone have any questions about that or comments i'm just glad that they can do that day this year okay leia's on committee reports does anyone have any jen i just wanted to remind everybody

152of the last lunch and learn is being held on may 11th from 12 to 1 and it is on summer activities and it will be presented by allison reed lisa batali and stephanie orr and there is no sign up for this i know sometimes the lunch and learns have signups but this is not one of them thank you does anyone else have a liaison committee report just a quick reminder from the municipal alliance that the annual twilight 5k run is coming up on june 5th you can register in advance or you can register the night of there is a difference in the registration fee the closer you get thank you okay so we're up to public comment on non-agenda items if you come up please state your name and address and then you can sign

153in on the clipboard after you speak i spoke to you at your last meeting and really appreciated the ears that were attentive to our words both my wives and myself and we do thank you um i'm sure you're all aware of the demonstrations that went on i know you spoke last night but could you please state your name oh i'm sorry francis huber 228 arrowwood way i presume you're all aware of what happened in trenton today with the passage of this new governor's recommendation for sex education in the new standards and that he uses the word standards or whoever wrote it these are not standards these are intrusions into the moral life of children clearly stated but did you notice there were no demonstrations of people in the state anywhere in favor of this new

154standards the outcry has been uh and again as i said the last time surprised that the lack of parental involvement in speaking to the board but because it's something that you all are going to discuss during the summer i just would like to add a few other comments tonight that may help in your deliberations as to what decision you finally make um if the superintendent is aware of the east hanover superintendent natalie bartlett her name is in her stand in her position which i think is so worthy of consideration in your discussions but she has come out in regard to the mandate from the state and said this she intends and the school board evidently is in support of this and this is a quote to loosely interpret the standards so what they're proposing is

155for june of 2023 at the end of the school year in one single class grades 2 5 and 8 will have one 35 minute class on the last day of school year in regard to the mandate from the state and in that she will have both phys ed teachers and nurses speaking to the kids she evidently and and strongly opposes what we shared last week which i'm sure you're all aware of but it's worth repeating for children in eighth grade to be able to know all the different positions of sex oral vaginal and anal sex she's making a strong stand on a moral principle that i submit to you and pray that you will really take serious time to really understand the depth of the depravity of these recommendations and the state has also put

156out with their standards graphic designs and positions where the kids can learn these things in elementary school clearly unheard of at any time in the history of our culture that these things would even be under consideration and serious consideration by many my last thought is simply this is that from the governor and all the legislators that have voted this in would any of you allow any of your children or grandchildren to be educated by these that support such a thing or much less spend an evening with them i certainly wouldn't and i just submit all of these thoughts to you for your really thoughtful and moral consideration of the seriousness of this thank you [Applause] it was approved for me to read this short statement from somebody who couldn't be here tonight because her grandson

157is pitching for rich high school so she asked me if i would do it kathy huber 228 arrow woodway okay and then i just want to add a couple of thoughts afterwards this is from gene byrne who lives at 18 tanglewood lane i am sending this letter ahead as my grandson is pitching for ridge at patriots patriot patriot stadium this monday i'm submitting my comments related to the sexualization of curriculum which will be read in public comment reflecting a large and growing segment of the community these new educational standards issued by the state have not been studied for any length of time and are not proven to work yet they're still experimental this feels like an experiment with our children as guinea pigs in a classroom lab and then she went on to explain that

158her niece was in a trial program in the livingston school system and she was taught to spell a certain way and they made no effort to see if the child had dyslexia or a learning problem and what it produced years later was the people that were in this program still had great difficulty spelling so it was a trial that didn't bear fruit she also questions that an opt-out option is not viable children will talk about what they have learned outside the classroom in the playground and share very sensitive information with their peers and she ventured to say which probably will get distorted student enrollment continues to decline annually as parents lose confidence in the district and and withdraw their children currently the majority of township residents don't have children in the school system and still

159pay taxes which increase annually and have every they have every right to speak up evidently 66 cents on every tax dollar is going to the school district and you will see more residents here strongly object to the decision that you're making i'm almost finished bernard's township was once and can be again a beacon of light to other districts and a leader for common sense those pushing these depraved standards have no idea of the long-term effects on a child's impressionable mind it could lead to confusion insecurity anxiety and dissociation so she ends with the same questions which evidently were asked before but have not been answered number one are there well-designed studies which show these standards would be beneficial to young minds and not detrimental who is going to prepare the lesson plans over the summer

160do those individuals have a bias that's very important do the majority of already burdened teachers have the capacity for one more thing question three even today the lesson plans are not readily accessible as jennifer dorwood noted in her public comment remarks last time will this change in the future and her last question was finally where do you as the board of education stand on this very very critical topic and i just want to add a couple of thoughts there's a proverb that says train up a child in the way that he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it so if you're taking innocent young minds and you're putting these explicit sexual images into their minds i mentioned last time the neural pathways in their brain the more they hear

161it the more they think it the more they talk about it will become more and more densely bundled together in their precious minds and we as adults have a moral responsibility to guard their minds so their minds can function well and think truth and think things that will produce life and fruit in their life um whoops sorry to teach a child i'm almost done to teach a child that they can masturbate three times a day in order to deal with stress is ludicrous why not teach them how to deal with stress for goodness sakes what you're teaching them is to avoid dealing with stress and to mood alter it with a subs with it with an addictive process and it could be leading children at an early age to discover a sexual addiction which is

162one of the hardest hardest addictions to break that's an immoral thing to do these are kids for god's sake one last thing this is a very important thing for me jesus said better than a millstone be tied around your neck and to be sunk into the depths of the sea than to lead one of these little ones astray anybody who promotes this is going to answer for this this is a very serious thing not only are is it tampering with children's minds but those kids coming home with these distorted thoughts it's like forsaking truth for a delusion i'm a boy today is going to create division in the family hardship in the family tension in the family it has the potential for such darkness i'm the mother of six and and thirteen grandchildren five of

163our grandchildren have been in the school system so i'm very invested in what these kids are being taught and i was a schoolteacher myself please take this seriously there's a great accountability for this thank you my name is can you hear me my name is lauren small and i live on 83 east lewis street so while i am sincerely appreciative of the efforts of our district's teachers and administration and i understand that there is a greater role of technology in daily education i don't think that the classroom monitoring software is an appropriate response to the bad habits that have been developed in addition to this type of restrictive software not actually teaching the behavior we want to see it also creates a slippery slope what access to teachers have what do they actually see who

164will be monitoring to make sure that the technology will be used appropriately and there is no breach will parents receive reports to know what teachers are seeing on their children's computers will teachers have to be monitored what about phone use in school and if all of these kids are on their devices with teachers monitoring it just seems like an either even further disconnect increasing the use of computers and monitoring in the classroom when it could be more of a time for interaction with people it's also just sort of surprising how this started before the bt connect meeting so that's really all i had to say thank you hi debbie marcus 16 lafayette lien i'd like to request further research into the u.s square dei company efforts to survey our district for equity thank you for

165allowing us access to the questions beforehand as we requested however having reviewed them i have issues with both its format and content the parent version is one of the most poorly designed and biased surveys i have seen on design format alone first one is required to answer every question even if one has no knowledge on the topic there is no n a or not applicable option for instance one of the questions is about is the classroom set up for success for your student i have no idea what that even means or whether it's true but i had to pick an answer one through ten or it asked about the disciplinary system and whether it was fair and i don't have a comment on that because we have not experienced it yet i had to pick

166an answer second for each question one has to pick an answer between one and ten these are four questions that are basically yes and no responses they are certainly don't have ten levels of nuance within them and should have been maybe one to three or perhaps one to five i would be very wary of any statistical conclusions the company makes from a one to ten scale of these type of questions third there is a lot of terminology used without any standardized definitions given social justice means very different things to different people fourth there is a plainly revealed bias that a 10 for something occurring is good but for instance if i mark that there is a lot of talk about social justice so i put 10. that doesn't capture the fact that i don't want

167my child's class time to be filled with that talk yes i explain in the comments section and clarify the difference i've just explained to you but the qualitative aspects of this survey are separated from the quantitative ones fifth there was literally only one question on the parent survey relating to whether academics were effective and had diverse learning levels which is the actual part that i care about for my student say going into the student survey for the dei section one question is i know adults who are similar to me at school this reveals an incorrect assumption that one needs to match someone to bond with them my child would rather just be able to say she has someone she is comfortable speaking with at school which does not necessarily mean the person is like her

168at all another question or really a statement that students will need to rate is quote i am proud of who i am and can say that without feeling better than anyone else i mean yes that would be nice but that's an odd phrase and not something a regular adult would even say about themselves and an odd thing to have on to phrase it that way in a survey and a reminder that each of these questions is on a 10-point scale when really that's a yes or no query another question i am curious about how people are similar and different from me okay it's nice if you are but why is it presented as if someone should be or has to be curious about this some people are just easygoing and get along with people and

169don't focus on differences another question i am aware of advantages i have based on my identities repeatedly we are told that there is no critical race theory in our district this question is literally the definition of blaming preferences on race and backgrounds and would lead to a discussion about right privileges and other aspects even if crt and all these aspects are true we were told it wouldn't be taught or discussed in our schools another question is paraphrased i am taught skills and how to stand up against and take responsibility for injustice while my child does this it's because i teach it in no way do i want her teachers influencing her in this way or taking more time away from academics for it i do not think this con this is a concept that should

170be surveyed or promoted even if i support the idea having seen the questions on approach i have not been convinced that this survey is a good use of staff time or taxpayers money or students time at school filling it out next week or when i know we have to say whether they can fill it out soon i don't know exactly when they're filling it out please reconsider the expense of using this company's approach to capture whatever aspect of equity you're trying to promote thank you [Applause] gina capizzi winding lane first i wanted to thank the board of ed for explaining some of the board code of ethics and policies while my father is retired superintendent and i grew up hearing about board meetings i admit i don't know every detail about code of ethics policies

171that the members must adhere to and why it is so important that they do adhere to them i unfortunately missed the last meeting and i do appreciate that this was spelled out to the community as i've done in the past because i missed the meeting i did reach out i watched the video asked for clarification and explanation once i got that from members things quickly made sense it did make a difference so thank you to the board of ed members for being transparent and explaining the board code of ethics policies and more importantly why it is important to follow them thank you for always looking to be transparent and thank you for respecting my concerns and answering my questions with transparency furthermore i'd like to recommend to the community to reach out to the members

172more than one one if necessary with any concerns or questions as i look around at all of you not one of you is unapproachable regardless of where anybody sits on any certain agenda items there's so much being tossed around online lately and in the media it's hard to know where the truth really is and it's so much easier and comforting to have the explanation from the board of ed members particularly and reach out to members you may not particularly agree with right away there may be a reason why be open-minded and as for the equity audit i think it's great that the school is involved and interested in identifying how the school district and individual schools are doing our family moved into this town over 22 years ago my husband worked overseas and we kept

173our house here not just because of the academics but because of the diversity of the people the clubs the activities and all the extras that ridge has to offer someone recently told me that our school should just focus on academics and that will make them successful in life as an hr professional i responded by saying there's so much more than academics but more importantly how we relate to one another whether on a campus at work and even within our community with each other i think it's great that our school is looking to see where it can improve and is doing so and in doing so it's including everyone and embracing this diverse community including our teachers until we walk in our neighbors shoes we don't know how they feel we need to create whole world

174global thinkers thank you to the board of ed and our teachers [Applause] sorry i'm short uh megan dooley brook avenue um i want to just thank the board of ed and really all of our staff and faculty in the school district i think they really serve our students and our community well i just wanted to make a couple points about the standards in our health curriculum of lgbtq plus youth attempted suicide in the last year or considered attempting suicide in the last year nearly one in five trans and non-binary youth actually attempted suicide in the last year our new the state standards for the health curriculum that are being adopted are about recognizing identities and including these identities in the conversation i want to remind the community that the opposite of inclusion is exclusion the

175i read recently uh a school district's administration that said when questioned about how they would support teachers who recognize their students diverse identities they said we don't politicize identities we celebrate them these standards are looking to include students to make sure that all students in this district feel safe affirmed recognized validated and without all of those things they can't be expected to learn so i just want to thank all of you for your hard work and dedication to the district i trust that when you develop the curriculum in line with these new standards that you will do it in a way that affirms and validates and supports all of our students so thank you [Applause] annika porzani 45 dawn drive i just wanted to make a couple of points um first of all i i

176somebody commented that they um are concerned about the classroom management software and um don't think it's the way to go about it and i just want to say i was thrilled to read the email that um that that is going on that there's going to be some piloting of this because that's definitely been a concern of mine about some of the classes kids being on games not being focused on the curriculum and so is it the best way i don't know i know there's a bt connect meeting about it next week so i appreciate that and i plan to attend that and i'm very interested to hear why people don't think that would work because i'm just really happy that you're moving forward um at least looking to address some of these issues that i

177know have been problematic in the classroom for teachers with kids not necessarily focused so um again i appreciate the opportunities that you have given us um with these bt connects to come i know a lot of people say there's not transparency i haven't seen it every time i've come up with an issue an issue or question and i address them in the board i get a response now you put these bt connect meetings out to really give people an opportunity to discuss the topics and i think that's so important because i think the problem is we're seeing more divisions here and i think if we can come together in these meetings people can really have a discussion about it i think that's great and i think the whole issue with the standards as well is

178another one i completely get people's concerns there i know there's a lot of moral issues that need to be thought about and addressed but i really have great confidence in in our school district that you will approach these standards carefully and i think in a past meeting as fox indicated that we will learn more about it and we'll have an opportunity to give input on it and we'll see more about the lessons and i'm assuming there will probably be a bt connect meeting about that as well and i again appreciate the opportunity and i hope people that have these concerns will come in and talk about it because i really appreciate hearing some of those thoughts i do want to say on that point um and i've you know i have some concerns about it

179too but i also know that this is not um the same as when we were growing up and the kids basically can get access to all of this information on their phone and if you're putting parental controls on your phone that's great if you're being restrictive with phones as i am with my kids to their great dismay um that's great but the fact is a friend's phone they can get it so um so i understand we have to approach this carefully but i also think we have to recognize that it's a very different on time and the kids are going to be able to find this information out and i would rather a lot of this information be discussed in a respectful manner in classrooms where there can be you know good feedback where as

180opposed to kids you know trying to figure it out themselves on a phone so again right age approaches i don't have all the answers and i look forward to continue discussions on this but i just want to say that based on my experience with the board so far i have great confidence that it will be done respectfully so i really appreciate that thank you [Applause] is there anyone else here in person for public comment hello jennifer doorward cherrylane i just wanted to come back and sort of close the loop on some of the topics that i've talked about in the last couple of board meetings since the last sport of ed meeting i've received only two of the four fifth grade health units that i originally requested to learn about and after reviewing the content

181of those two units i decided to up my children out of those two one of the units focuses almost solely on emotional coping skills regarding the top regarding topics like how to handle divorce death parental conflicts and depression i think these kind of sensitive topics are best left to parents especially in these early formative years the replacement health unit that my children were given teaches about how to be a smart consumer related to topics such as you know basic budgeting generic versus name brand products truth in advertising and the roles of the food and drug administration and the federal trade commission i think these are very useful and practical topics that i think they should be taught in schools so let me close with this point what i've learned i hope this might benefit other

182community members and i have one question i persevered for weeks to try to gain access to actual lesson plans and then finally brought the question to the board and i did get that information but i really urge other parents to check their children's lesson plans to ensure that they're comfortable and knowledgeable about what they're learning and my question is like some of the other questions that have been raised tonight where does the board of ed stand with regard to teaching these very impersonal emotional coping skills in school when some of these topics may really belong more properly to be top of the family is there anyone else here for public comment is there anyone on zoom okay there's one person on zoom so miss fox is going to let them in you want me to

183wait mr smith you are in the um zoom right now you can make your part about that no go ahead sure yeah go ahead okay cody smith 36 for hello drive uh very quickly on the on the budget and the questions i asked there um i do know that we can't give actual information of what's going to occur next year that was not what i was asking for i was asking for more detailed budget information and the questions that i asked with respect to numbers were straight out of the uh advertised budget as published in the bernardsville news um so i will when i get back in town i will follow up next week with an email on the budget that's not what i wanted to talk about at this point um regarding what i

184wanted to talk about is i asked a couple questions before about the qualifications of us squared or us2 in this equity audit and going out there and looking at the public domain of what's out there i wanted to make a couple of observations um you know the first thing with miss bucharelli and her linkedin site you know she lists down that she has harvard university graduate school of education but other places out there where she described her resume as it's in fact it's a certificate in urban education and leadership and there's really nothing out there on what that actually means but you can see that if you wanted to get a certificate in the school management leadership from harvard that's about four online classes and cost you about three thousand bucks so i think her

185linkedin profile there is misleading on certificates and licenses she lists diversity equity inclusion in the workplace certificate from the usf corporate training and professional education program by looking into this a little bit further this was actually a free course from the university of south carolina sponsored by the tampa bay lightning and jabel circuits it's about 14 hours of online instruction and then in her experience she lists eight education related jobs over the 14-year period from 2002 to 2016 which is an average length of employment of one year and nine months on another website she states i quote in general some of the mistakes i i think about often would be when i'm staying in a position too long she doesn't list that she was hired as the director of hazel park public schools in august

18615 for some reason she also doesn't mention although she states that she's a retired superintendent that she was the superintendent at macomb academy in clinton township michigan in 2017. in the macomb daily newspaper uh some of the teachers said that under her leadership i quote about three quarters of the year in the teacher said we're on a sinking ship we're on the titanic the staff was made to feel they are replaceable um we're moving down to us two's website again miss fisturelli gives us a long dissertation on her life struggles with weight issues this shouldn't be this should be irrelevant to her qualifications for diversity and inclusion unless this is qualifying her as being marginalized other team members leanne crouch is not listed on the website at all she claims to be the chief opportunity

187officer in the webcast that we had she's not listed at all can't find anything on her qualifications um her background or why she's qualified to conduct this audit marianne alt she was a a substitute teacher mostly in mathematics and then said she decided to get into her passion of social justice education um on the data now data analyst and training uh engagement specialist ian unger nothing on his qualifications for conducting surveys analyzing data statistical analysis but we do learn about her journey in life transitioning from a woman to a man in other recent interviews with ms petrelli she indicates that us2 this might be your old doesn't have any employees but it's basically a strung together band of uh of consultants regarding their experience uh miss futurely cites the non-disclosure agreements to us that she

188can't disclose who they're working for but they're conducted about 50 equity audits trying to find any of these online is very difficult in fact when you look online most of what you see are articles from the bernersville news and tapped into regarding this district contract however there is one of the equity audit reports uh from the farmington public schools in farmington michigan uh the report mostly compares the racial makeup of the student population to that of the teachers and the administrative staff it's filled with local platitudes for instance she says within the elementary buildings it was reported that more students assigned mail at birth were referred to special education and in addition to academic programming it is critical to discuss discipline disportionate disproportionality there has been an increase in discipline referrals with students assigned female

189at birth excuse me mr smith excuse me just you're over your time so please try to finish up okay uh another part she starts that there's distrust among some of the staff and family respondents regarding the intentions of the district however the quantitative data shows that respondents are ultimately glad to be part of the school district the divide seems to include a very particular mindset and ultimately was an outlier for the most part so she dismisses what that is and doesn't talk about the people who weren't appreciative of the audit so in closing um the the the whole need for this honor remains unclear it appears the qualifications of us squared are lacking um it appears the group has an agenda and it will be difficult if not impossible for this board to eliminate the

190biases that will be included in us2 highly subjective recommendations and determine if any objective measurable actions are necessary thank you that's it hi jennifer ac71 better net lane i'm speaking to you solely in my capacity as a mother and parent of children in the school system i have professional market research experience therefore extensive survey experience and i'm also representative of the transracial adoptive community and i'm going to share my concerns about the survey based on those perspectives number one unclear objectives and hypothesis before any survey is initiated a clear hypothesis or objectives of the research is established the only objective i could find was assess the current reality the current reality of what this is vague and clear to me what triggered the need for this survey based on the adult survey questions i infer

191there's a problem regarding social justice in our community what is the true hypothesis of this survey number two there are instrument design flaws there's an old adage in market research and surveying garbage in garbage out if the instrument is flawed the results cannot be reliably trusted there are three areas of instrument design flaws one question construction certain questions in the k-5 survey have multiple variables in them such as those answers cannot be reliable specifically questions 29 and 30. the seven open-ended questions in that survey are also too vague lastly terms should be identified especially in the adult survey social justice its definitions have may bias those results second it the even rating scale for k through five even rating scales do not permit a respondent have a neutral opinion it forces a choice most scales

192use odd scales to avoid this a valid opinion might be a neutral opinion we shouldn't force people to say something that isn't true and lastly the respondent ability to answer certain questions are not comprehendable by elementary school children if my second grader saw questions 4 or 6 he would not understand prior to taking this survey i would have to explain to him gender identification and this is inappropriate for my seven-year-old lastly respond in awareness for questions 19 and 20 my children are not aware of communication that occurs and they would not be able to answer this accurately similarly in the adult survey there are questions i could not answer because i'm not aware of the staff's opinion a respondent should be respon be provided with the option i don't know forcing a level of agreement

193biases the results and finally sample bias while sample bias is often present in research for this particular research it's significant many parents have opted out of the survey the results of this survey is going to be biased to those who've opted in and therefore not representative of the entire school population as a member of the trans-racial adoptive community i have a particular concern with question 28 in the k-5 survey since my kids are chinese they would answer no because i'm not aware of any chinese teachers in oak street is this a bad thing my kids have thrived in the environment i imagine a possible recommendation based on this question is that there needs to be teachers of non-white origin our racial quotas for teachers going to be recommended as a result of this survey i

194ask for this survey not to proceed for the 20 or for the forty thousand dollars spent we will receive a report with recommendations that should not be acted upon because of the inaccuracy of the data and bias additional budget will be beyond the forty thousand dollars will be requested to implement biased and inaccurate recommendations i personally live diversity inclusion and i'm opposed to this survey thank you [Applause] is there anyone else for public comment okay this i'll close public comment at this point did you have anything you want to respond to so i i think we had a few comments about uh health curriculum concerns um and i i would just echo what miss fox said uh when we talked about this recently at another board meeting we will certainly be giving very careful attention

195and care to the development of the health curriculum over the summer and giving parents opportunity to give us input and feedback on what we're proposing going forward i've looked over the standards pretty carefully 66 page documents i didn't see anything in there about encouraging masturbation three times a day with respect to the classroom monitoring software um you know i i think that there might be a little bit of misconception in terms of you know what our goals are there i would encourage people to go back and and look at the presentation that the staff made i believe it was about a month ago april 11th here at the board meeting and that is recorded and i really think it tells the story of um why the staff are are looking for a tool uh to

196implement in the classrooms it's really about managing students to help them stay on task and stay engaged they're not looking to you know try to find some some way to to monitor the students especially outside the class there's there's no intent and no ability to do that out outside of the school day it's really about making sure that the kids are not straying away from what they should be working on in a particular classroom or having you know 20 tabs open when they're supposed to have two tabs open to work on a project so i think the teachers tell the story really clearly in that meeting we appreciate the feedback on us squared i would encourage you to use equityaudit at bernardsboe.com as a way to give them direct feedback and ask questions we appreciate

197some of the comments with respect to uh having confidence in the board we appreciate that very much and um you know i think that confidence is well placed that's about it for me thanks okay thanks um we're up to board forum does anyone have anything for board forum this thing um i wanted to make a comment about last monday's bt connect meeting i um i actually really appreciated hearing from a lot of the parents that attended as well as the teachers and the administrators and even my fellow board members so i i really encourage everybody to come out for the next one which is next monday at 7 p.m in the bridge cafeteria i think that we learned a lot both ways and i really hope to see more of these types of meetings because

198it's it's an informal discussion and it's an open forum for any question that you have and we've gotten a lot of questions on communication personally and through email and even at the board meetings and so i feel like um some of the parents who attended did seem to feel satisfied with what they gained out of it as well as i did and i think next week's will be even more important because it's on technology and that's a hot topic right now too so i do encourage members of the community to come out for next monday's meeting go ahead suzanne so on that same vein i mean we have so many opportunities for parents to learn and listen and talk and share and this is another one so at ridge high school everybody's very well aware

199now of our wellness program there the tea time program this thursday there is the last of the brews and that is from 6 45 you can sign up on the ridge high school website the instructors who have been the coordinators for tea time are very entertaining and i do urge you to come and hear about citizenship and community which are the two themes for the month of may and june's theme is service which goes along with the ridge gives back service day so come and learn more about the wellness initiatives at the high school which are supporting our students in lots of lots of different ways on their social emotional learning tim following up on the wellness component i think the the the tomorrow's teacher presentation was phenomenal um it was it was amazing to

200hear the kids experience also the from the teacher's perspective um i think that was a great follow-up to the big sibling little sibling program um so what i'm seeing from those is this kind of inter-grade cross-grade connection between big kids and little kids is something that seems to be kind of emerging as like a theme and really uh successful theme right with the the popularity of the big sibling little sibling program and then the doubling of the kids in the tomorrow's teachers program like hopefully these are the types of programs that will you know spur more of these cross-grade connections so that kids feel more comfortable going into different buildings going to different schools seeing different kids around town one to other i think i don't know i don't remember what it was but a

201month ago a parent came up and said she was so grateful for the elementary kids participating in the play the ridge play which was another kind of cross-grade connection which is a great opportunity um so i'm really excited about all these you know opportunities for big and little kids to kind of get together and for the little kids to feel more comfortable seeing kids around town or at different things so i i i'm these these presentations have been phenomenal i'm glad we're doing all this all these initiatives anyone else karen um i just kind of want to say ditto on what tim just said because i i think the exact same thing these are wonderful programs and um kudos to our wonderful staff for um initiating them and coordinating them and keeping them going and

202growing um and i just wanted to make a couple of comments first of all thank you to everyone who spoke at public comment last night i think there were a lot of um thoughtful comments shared um i do i have to say i i was compelled by what our last in-person speaker said having answered the survey i found it hard to answer and i'm answering as a community member and obviously mine didn't have 29 questions i don't even know the questions that she's specifically referring to but i think that there were some very salient points made about what we can and can't infer from that scale of one to ten and if you want to be neutral and exactly how that plays out in terms of the process on the other end so it just

203made me think a lot as i said like i think there were a few parents here who really made just really compelling comments about things that are of concern one speaker asked a question about what do we think and i while moved by what her comments were and i apologize i forget her name but um about um what do we think with regard to the health curriculum and specifically the lesson about coping and grief i think it was um i completely respect the concern but i also think to myself um knowing because i have a 29 year old daughter who's a teacher that students sit in classrooms where parents at home don't talk about any of those things and they have no guidance whatsoever so i don't know what the right balance is or how

204to strike it but i can't unknow that and think to myself it's fine if we just don't ever talk about it because everybody's supposed to do it at home what if they're not and i and i don't know the answers that that is not a criticism it's just a comment um and i thank you for bringing it up and then i actually have a question um kirsten if you don't mind my asking i'm very curious in the past i've sat through i don't know i can't remember the last time i wasn't at a budget vote as a member of the audience and or a member of the board and i never remember being surprised by a no it always came with predicating curiosities questions comments and i'm surprised so could you share with us what

205caused you to vote now the approach taken to the budget just you know it's it's been very confusing to me and you know we we're not increasing the debt levy that much but i felt with the budgeted overages and some things that we could maybe forgo that we probably didn't have to increase the taxes at all particularly in an area where inflation is crazy for the the taxpayers and i figured that there was probably a way that we could actually not raise taxes and we could okay fair enough out of curiosity what would you propose for going what would you propose for going because that's the hard part yes it's easy to sit here and say that but what should we cut which class which teacher which program i'm very curious and that's why i

206was looking for more detail on that that i wasn't able to get so so just i'm i'm not i mean i guess i am putting her on the spot but i'm not meaning to be confrontational i'm just saying that the community sees a no vote and wonders like i did i think and so to say i think there's things that we could forego well sure but but we need to know what they were and who who is affected by that and that's not an easy thing to do thank you by the way jen i don't know if rod has the answer to this but when you say the impact on the average taxpayer what is the impact on six nine nine that the on the average um taxpayer for a year because i remember last

207year it was about 112 dollars so i would assume that with the um tax increase being even less that we're talking we're not talking about a a huge sum of money i i think what you have to consider here is a couple of things and first of all maybe this i'm glad you asked the question because i don't know that most of the public thinks about this but we while we raise taxes to pay for the quality of education that we have here and because of the state's funding structure we have to do that they don't give us the money because they say based on the demographics of bernard's township you can afford to do this if you want to have that level of school district we're not going to give you more than what

208we're giving you in state aid which is 6 million in change out of 108 million dollar general operating budget is what they give us but keep in mind that in response to your question mrs white that it's difficult to give that answer this year because there is a significant increase in the assessed valuations of properties okay everybody sitting here at the table including myself who is a taxpayer in this township and has been for 25 years knows that that's happened because of what we've seen in the housing market we the burners township board of education don't control that okay that's controlled by the township assessor and he has to follow what state law prescribes so it's not really within his control either but essentially they have to look at they're supposed to be assessing properties

209predicated on what the fair market value is so when you see the kind of real estate markets that we've seen and in particular here in bernards and everywhere if you talk to people okay where property prices have gone up significantly what happens the assessment on your property goes up and that's what's driving up your tax increases and so it's hard for me to say that because now what happens is that for every hundred dollars that you didn't have assessed before even if we didn't raise taxes at all this year your taxes would go up and the township would be able to say well it's because x number of dollars which is a dollar 35 is what portion of your dollar 33.5 is what the portion of your total tax bill is for every hundred that

210relates to what the school district is but then you add in what the township gets and what the county gets and the other pieces well all of that added in times every hundred that you're paying of assessed additional value so if your property went up ten thousand dollars okay now you've got a hundred hundreds more times that amount so if it's two dollars it's two times a hundred even if the tax even if we didn't increase the taxes at all so what we're experiencing here as taxpayers in burnett's township is a direct result of the way the state structures it and in particular something we don't have any control over we don't do the assessment the tax assessor is a township employee and he only can do what the state prescribes that he do can

211do i mean the township some townships play around the edges with that i don't think and rightfully so that bernard's does that from what i've seen as a resident because it leads to trouble ultimately when you don't assess in accordance with what the state prescribes okay the state eventually catches on and they're there knocking at your door basically but i want to make that clear that even if we had not raised a nickel more in taxes this year everybody would have seen a significant tax increase and that's because of your assessed value changing they've gone up significantly i mean uh if and again we get that information from the township because i don't come up with what the average cost is but i did see something uh basically saying that you know the average home

212which was assessed 620 last year is now 660. that's a 40 000 increase that's and if we didn't increase the taxes all that's why people's taxes are going up because the assessments went up you know our our actual dollar portion actually went in reverse from terms of what the percentage was in terms of dollars i think it went down from a dollar forty down to a dollar thirty three five but this increase that we have this year so off the top of my head i didn't do the math on that because that's not really our job to do that but you know if if things didn't if they hadn't changed it would have been pennies on the i don't know i i honestly would have to i don't want to misspeak because my job is

213to be exact and accurate but what i'm going to tell you is that you know even with that 0.73 increase that people's taxes would have gone up significantly more because we all saw significant assessment increases i just want to say you know to go back also to karen is we have a wonderful district and we have wonderful programs there is nothing i would ever want to see cut you know tim just talked about the big sibling well that comes with the price we just had a presentation on a new uh course that comes with the price we have a huge special ed population they deserve a lot of services that comes with the cost we don't want class sizes overwhelmed that comes with the cost there is nothing that i want you know to be

214cut to to pinch pennies basically and um you know i've had two kids graduate i have two more to go they have gotten the best of the best from our teachers i want them to be able to get what they deserve i just you know i think it's interesting you know we have parents coming and saying oh the budget oh the budget oh the budget oh but i want your district to have this i want the district to have this well you know that stuff costs money and um you know i guess my thought was when i moved here i moved here because there were great programs and i knew my kids would have a great education and they would get everything that they needed to the best of what the district could provide and

215i stand by everything in that budget and i am so thankful i'm thankful to every teacher every administrator because you are what keep this district so wonderful for our children i agree with what you just said and i just wanted to add um karen and i are probably the only people that were sitting here and there back when we had budget cuts and the state took our state aid and we had to make those choices about what to cut and it was awful um you know the community was was upset and outraged like they should be um you know when things like that happen um so i i just am very thankful that we're in a place financially and that mr mclaughlin has done such a good job you know being um fiscally conservative like

216looking ahead you know with everything whether it be the way we were paying off the debt and planning for whatever could happen we could lose our state aid again you know when covet hit we had no idea what was going to happen to the economy or what was going to happen what expenses we could have afterwards when the kids came back um we still don't know for sure even the demographers report i don't 100 trust until we see because there's babies moving in all over my neighborhood and they wouldn't have been captured by his estimates so i don't know you know two years from now are we really going to have the declining enrollment that is projected we're not sure so i think you know we you know put as much of the money back

217to the you know out of the you know to the taxpayers of the extra state aid that we felt was was you know responsible but not being short-sighted because we do have the two percent cap each year and whatever budget we have this year then that's what we're building off of in the future and we just don't know there's still a lot of unknowns so i think you know i stand behind this budget too um and maybe if the enrollment keeps dropping and we keep getting state aid you know we'll be in a position where you don't have to raise taxes and that would be great but i think you know it's only because of the way that we've budgeted over the past bunch of years that we're in a position you know that we

218are now and you know i'm glad that we are because i've been here when we weren't in that position and it was not fun if i could just add one thing at the last meeting we were compared to milburn township and i understand why because demographically and in terms of performance they're very similar i will tell you that if you look at their proposed budget for the upcoming year it actually has a tax levy that's eight hundred thousand dollars more than our tax levy so they continued to raise their taxes there where we didn't and i don't know enough about their operation nor would i presume to without talking to their ba and going through their audit and looking at the last five years and sitting through all their board meetings to say i know

219why they didn't decrease it but i would presume it's because they didn't feel that they were in a position where they could afford to do that so while they were thrown out as a comp on the one hand they're not a comp when it comes to how they manage themselves financially in terms of the things that they do there and i'm just going to talk about the tax levy i could go through a litany of other things but financially they're not the same i just want to point out from the demographics from from milburn you know similar size similar numbers they have one additional building than we do but also their medium income for their residents is over a hundred thousand dollars more than than basking ridge residents so i think that that's why they

220can get away with the cost of housing is dramatically higher so exactly i'm sure it is but my point is that they have the same number of students projected in their budget for next year and what i'm looking at is performance for the dollar so you know if you look at theirs it's 48.34 and we're projecting 48.60 and so whether they have another building or not they also when you take a look at it have seven percent fewer teaching staff than we do which means that presumably they have larger class sizes than we do so the fact that people can afford to pay it because their median income is higher still doesn't mean that they're getting the most bang for their buck to use a very kind of crude way of explaining it it's not

221an accountant's way of explaining it but you know i'd like to make that clear karen so you were reading my mind robin and i just want to say for the benefit of the audience robin and i were there in the township committee in the in the former building right there the former public space when the township committee had to make decisions about what to cut in our budget because our budget was voted down this was back when the budget was voted on and we lost i mean we lost five four or five science electives we lost ap computer science we lost another ap course we lost what was then called women's study i mean i could go on and on there were 13 electives that were cut plus we had um honors courses and um

222in two or three subjects in uh a governing con and latin and uh brit lit all cut right out of the budget we just didn't have those classes anymore we had kids sitting on radiators 30 kids in a classroom so i mean everything comes at a price it's absolutely true but we don't want to go back and relive that nightmare and i don't have anybody in the schools i'm just here as a public citizen and a member of the sport of education it's not really going to impact my immediate household but i do remember those days very vividly they were not good and we i mean we never really recovered mr lock mr mclachlan would tell you but we we never got the funding that the fully funded school formula should have given our district

223and we've done remarkable things with deficits that are tremendous so you know looking at what we get and and i'll speak for two seconds as a real estate agent locally everyone i talk to who's moving to this town is moving here for the schools so we want to be cautious as to what we what we do to our schools because it will affect our property values somewhere down the line and the last thing i want to say is just what mr mclaughlin was saying about assessed value the way it works it goes up based on who sold around you so it doesn't matter that you didn't sell and that it doesn't mean anything to you that your house is worth more if you're staying exactly where you are it still impacts all of us so

224that is it that is a difficult thing about our community and it is true other towns don't necessarily do it exactly that way but burners township has been consistently um proper i'll say in that regard and following uh the you know the assessment rules so um we you know it's good for us if we're staying for the long haul but it's difficult when these types of things happen does anyone else have anything for board forum no okay could we have a motion for adjournment um schaefer and mr khanna all in favor