Bernards Twp BOE Meeting March 28, 2022

001good evening everyone welcome to the board of education meeting the board has already met an executive session and we saluted the flag in there so at this point we're going to start the regular session with the roll call please mr mclaughlin mr salmon here ms shaffer here mrs gray here ms singh here mrs white here ms light here mr khanna yeah ms hero here mrs mccune here madam president thank you um i'm going to read the statement of public notice this is a regular meeting of the berns township board of education notice of the time and place of the meeting was provided and copies of that 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

002bulletin 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 live stream links are both airing our meeting one just simply backs up the other in case of technical difficulty we very much welcome input from the public there are two times during the regular meetings that the public is invited to speak one time is early in the meeting before the board votes when you may speak about any item that is listed on tonight's agenda towards the end of the meeting there is another public forum to address any matter of public concern related to the schools when you approach the microphone please

003state your name and address each statement made by participants shall be limited to three minutes duration no participant may speak more than one time during a given public comment session in order to run efficient meetings and to allow maximum opportunity for members of the public to speak the board reserves the right to set a different time limit for comments or 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 get the specific instructions or click on

004the link that's in this agenda public comments made in person will be processed first then comments on zoom no public comments will be accepted before 7 pm or after the last item board forum of the agenda begins please understand that public comment portions of our agendas are not structured as question and answer sessions but rather they are offered as opportunities to share your thoughts with the board the board slash 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 that's it okay um we're uh what's happened to my agenda here it's missing a page i think yeah i know i'm missing a whole page of my thing does yours have all the pages after the public notice on

005the full room see what i mean yeah okay so the shorter version is correct so i'll stick with that for now does everyone have that problem with theirs okay so um i read the statement of public notice we're now up to our student representative gordon thank you so much and uh good evening everyone with the third marking period just about over the ridge student body is very very much looking forward to ending the to beginning the last part of the school year on a very high note as is the habit around this time students tidy up loose ends in anticipation for this fresh start while also continuing to demonstrate excellence in every facet of ridge student life the ridge high school choir presented their disney showcase on march 17th highlighting the positive impact of the

006arts on the basking ridge community additionally the ridge dance team put on an incredible performance last weekend at the groove national talent competition with all of their dances receiving a diamond award and placing first in their categories rhs congratulates these groups on their accomplishments and as we slowly return to a sense of normalcy we hope that these events will reach an even greater audience uniting us once again through music dance and song the ridge forensics team achieved an impressive milestone over the weekend taking first place at the state championship tournament for the 20th year in a row with ridge students earning the title of state champion in 10 distinct events the team also competed in the new jersey district tournament with four students taking first place in their events and 11 students qualifying to the

007national speech and debate tournament additionally ridge coach miss natasha doskey received the 2022 new jersey assistant coach of the year award furthermore the ridge international public policy forum debate team finished their season ranked in the top 16 teams in the world out of a pool of nearly 120 teams these accomplishments are a testament to the drive and determination of bridge students as well as the relentless pursuit of excellence demonstrated by the teachers and coaches year after year ridge is incredibly proud of everyone involved and we wish everyone the best of luck at the upcoming national level tournaments within the ridge student body other clubs and teams have not stayed idle either the girls lacrosse team hosted a closing drive on march 26 and the ridge track team hosted their annual are you faster than a

008ridge runner event to increase community involvement while raising money for their respective teams the ridge crafts club sold handcrafted pins themed around the blue and gold of ukraine to raise money for relief efforts in the region finally the ridge green team wrapped up their tree plenish fundraiser with the goal of planting as many trees as possible to offset bridges paper consumption ridge is committed to entering the final quarter of the year stronger than ever and as the days get longer so too does the list of activities accolades and accomplishments involving the rich community thank you thank you does anyone have any questions for gordon or comments thank you so much for your report as usual it's full of information and very exciting to hear about all the stuff going on at ridge thank you okay

009i'm just going to make one comment about the upcoming bernard's connect meetings that i think um this flyer has been posted around a fair number of places but there are copies of it down there if anybody wants to pick one up um we're now finally restarting the burners connect meetings that we had started after the strategic plan before covid hit the first three sessions are scheduled we may change the date of the the last one in may because we realize there's a conflict with a fifth to sixth grade orientation event but the first two dates are thursday april 7th which is going to be on zoom that is going to be the town hall with our diversity equity and inclusion consultant and we strongly encourage all members of the community teachers staff members parents students

010that are older that want to come on a zoom to come to this there'll be an opportunity to hear about what the project is about and to ask questions and provide input the second one is going to be on april 28th in the ridge high school cafeteria and that one is about communication and collaboration and we also encourage everybody to come to that the third one is going to be about technology and education and if the date gets changed the flyer will get updated immediately and the new date will be posted um i think that's all i have um so we're up to the um board presentation so the board is going to go down there and sit for the presentation on the budget so good evening i'm rod mclaughlin the burners township quarterback school

011business administrator and welcome to the presentation on our preliminary school budget for fiscal year 2022 2023 the formal budget hearing wherein the budget would be formally adopted will happen the first week in may on may 9. the purpose of this evening's meeting is to give the board and the community a preliminary review of that proposed budget which has to then be submitted to the office of the executive county school business administrator i'm sorry okay can you hear me better now okay so as i was saying after the board takes action this evening the preliminary budget is submitted to the executive county school business administrator for their review and approval they are the state's representative and they would give us approval to advertise that budget publicly at some point later in the month of april so

012that we can have a public hearing and adoption of the budget by the first week in may that said let me give you one a preparatory comment in here where you see a lot of comparatives between fiscal year 21 22 which is the year we're currently in and 2223 which is the year that we're proposing a budget for these are budget to budget so they are the budget for 21 22 that we adopted in may of 21 compared with numbers for the budget that we are proposing now for may of 22 to be for the year beginning july 1st okay so uh just a quick snapshot of changes in expenditures and a refresher a little bit for for those who have been on the board and for those who haven't and also for the public

013who may or may not have heard these presentations in the past general operating expenses are the day-to-day nuts and bolts expenses of the board of education they are everything from the benefits and which include health benefits and tuition that we may pay for employees all the way through their salaries and including transportation for students and including all of the athletics and co-curricular activities as well as anything that goes on in classrooms and anything that supports those activities so for example nursing guidance child study teams media services those types of things capital expenses here are current capital expenses meaning they're coming out of the current year's resources that we're proposing for next year i'll talk a little bit more about our ongoing capital initiative when i get to the end of this presentation but the board

014made uh and it took an initiative back in 2013 i believe the second year i was here to try to build a budget that would be independent of its needs in terms of capital and therefore has separately its capital reserves so what you see here is a relatively small piece of what comes out of current capital uh we designed it this way so that we would not have big outlays and have to choose between well are we going to do something of significance in terms of major infrastructure or maintenance work or are we going to put money back into a classroom our structure which is a long-term structure does not require us to do that because of what we have done in terms of our structuring of our reserves that said what we do have

015in capital expense are those relatively small expenses that we have that change from year to year they may be short-term capital leases which right now we have none of or they may be any item that is in excess of two thousand dollars so the state of new jersey says that if you're buying any individual asset that is individually valued in excess of two thousand dollars you have to pay for it out of this account first it's an accounting requirement and that's the best i can do to explain it to you so year over year we are looking at a 1.35 million dollar change in general operating expenses i'll drill down into all of these expenses that we as we go through this presentation capital expenses are down 80 000 subtotal for the general fund is

016a plus one point two seven nine million federal grants a thirty dollar difference year over year debt expenses plus ninety two hundred all in the budget year over year 1.288 million more so how does that break down in terms of what's driving it salaries make up 405 plus excuse me 401 plus thousand dollars of it health benefits which i'll talk about a little bit more as we go into this presentation are a large share of it uh at 972 932 dollars we are a self-funded school insurance fund meaning that we are the insurance company of record for uh the school district we don't while we use a traditional network like a blue cross and blue shield we are basically the bank that gives us generally savings and lower costs than if we were in prospective

017insurance there are a lot of things that because we're self-insured we don't have to pay right off the top so for example uh when the affordable care act came out there was a three percent surcharge on premiums for any private insurers as a self-insured entity we don't have to pay that so on an all-in self-insurance health benefit uh budget for of roughly 18 million dollars for next year do the math three percent is a fairly significant sum of money that we're saving right off the top because we self-insure as opposed to being prospectively insured instructional supplies and services are up 144 529 dollars the lion's share of that cost is really instructional software that's being utilized throughout the district uh support services supplies and professional services are down 41 thousand dollars uh that really is

018when we get into uh the presentation you'll see the per pupil amounts that we have and relative to the amount of employ of pupils that we are projected to have for next year it's actually more per pupil than when we had 400 more pupils in the district so we're spending more per pupil and sometimes you do have these non-recurrent expenses that are one time that come out professional services and tele telecommunication services so what we're looking at here are legal services audit fees and telecommunication fees uh pension and unemployment that's up 194 000 to 12. that's really driven by what the state of new jersey tells us it needs in terms of a percentage back from us for pension contribution for our employees anybody who's been following the news in new jersey for the last

01910 years knows that that's been the ongoing conversation amongst many others in in the what in in under the gold dome and trenton in terms of you know how are we going to fund this and where is it at and lots of dickering over it but the bottom line is the number keeps going up every year in terms of the percentage they ask us for a contribution on so it's really a factor of these are the employees that we have and we multiply their salaries times whatever percentage the state gives us for next year which is roughly it's a big increase year over year that's not the increase that's the total percentage um current and capital outlay is down 80 thousand dollars the big change really there is the net difference between some additional technology

020that's being purchased outright and the phase out between last year and this year of a five-year capital outlay that we had which was a million dollar purchase that we had made over five years for technology we purchased it five years ago but it was a five-year capital purchase these purchase facilities grounds and maintenance that's driven by unionization and the rotating drop schedule i'll talk about that more there's separate slides on both technology plus 72 thousand dollars the big driver there really is additional uh cyber security requirements that the technology department is set for set forth for us uh special education placements are down 594 dollars the caveat that i would give on that is that when we do this when we set this budget it's march now most students who have ieps will not probably

021have those individualized education plans done until may but the mix of students that we have now and the placements that they're in now would show this as being our number to budget basically meaning that the mix can change we could see a student who is currently in one out of district placement be placed in a completely different placement come july of next year right now we can only go by what we know in terms of their current individualized education plan uh payment of outstanding serial bond debt is just a function of what the tranche of bonds is it's 9 200 when we get into talking about the tax and i have a whole slide on that it's it's negligible in terms of the dollar impact obviously when you think about the assessed valuation of bernard's

022township being 6.7 billion dollars and then finally 30 i don't know what to say about minus 30 dollars on grants but if you want to do the math and it ties out that's where it's at uh okay so every year we have a slide that talks about and i'll talk a little bit more about revenue breakdown in a minute and or resources as as we governmental accountants like to refer to it the audited reserve balance is amount that is set aside in the prior year's audit for offset of the budget in the ensuing year it's a requirement it's a reserve for specifically for for the ensuing budget the amount that was set aside in the in the audit that ended for the period that ended june 30th of was 4 million 15 000. we feel

023comfortable with budgeting 4.49 so about another 475 000 based on the balances that we have coming out of the 20 21 year meaning last year last year as as we all unfortunately know was an unusual year because it was the heart of the the pandemic for us which meant that you know we operated during the year in a kind of hybridized situation where we had students in district and we had students who were uh remote and virtual for the year and what that means is that you just do not incur expense at the same level so just think about it for a minute if you have fewer students in the building you're going to use less consumables whether that's in the classroom in a restroom or in a cafeteria okay what that means is you're

024going to generate some additional balances and that's why we feel we can generate we can appropriate it this year okay the 450 4 million 15 is just the minimum that we have to do year over year so i just talked a little bit about the fund balance but just to see what the budgeted number was for the 2122 or 4.7 we're proposing 4.49 it's 268 thousand dollars less tuition and miscellaneous revenue is the next category that we have and the really the driver here is is uh the tuition that we receive for uh students that are sent to us by other public school districts uh for attendance in our self-contained special education classes anyone who's been in berners township for any period of time knows that aside from its reputation as a you know top

025tier high k-12 school district in the state it also has a reputation for having a very robust special education program and so therefore students that have rather complex needs can be sent here as opposed to a private school for the disabled and to the extent that we have space and we've had significantly less in the recent years because as our cohorts move up we have fewer spaces most of these students are high school level students but we collect the bulk of that money that you see there is coming from tuition from other school districts for students in our self-contained programs uh the general tax levy we're proposing an increase of 659 000 i'll talk about that a little bit more in another slide the state aid increased again this year by 887 thousand dollars again

026the federal grants for 30 the debt levy when you do the math between the debt service fund balance we had a dollar left in that uh we're supposed to operate as a zero fund balance we get as close as we can but a lot of times what happens with these tranches of bonds and the levies is the rounding piece results in 50 cents here and 50 cents there next thing you know you have a dollar left over and then a state debt service aid year over year is down uh 151 dollars all in it ties back to what i showed you right up front the increase in the expenditures okay what are the major factors in the budget i've touched on some of them but let me go through some of the others that i

027haven't current programs and services are sustained staffing levels will reflect needs for projected enrollment district enrollment and i'm going to talk about this in a few minutes and another slide continues to decline it's consistent with what the expectations were generally from our demographer who did his most recent updated study in december of 2019 state mandated chapter 44 health benefit programs have continued to negatively impact the district i'll talk about that in another slide unionization of facilities services negatively impacted the district and i'll talk about that again in another slide major district capital projects continue to proceed there is a whole section at the end of this presentation talking about that and then significant costs related to one time and recurrent pandemic and should say non-recurrent my i didn't pick that up non-recurrent pandemic related needs

028have been largely offset by one-time federal grants there's a slide that i'll go through that details all of that so sustaining programs and services all programs and services in the current year's budget are being maintained in the budget for 22.23 the district's ongoing efforts to complete its goals connected to the strategic plan are supported and key components of that strategic plan include pd for staff student competence safety and security communication and collaboration the budget also provides for expanded opportunities in the following areas in particular enrichment and gifted and talented programming also known as quest is continued expansion of our handwriting without tears program into grade two as well as the second year of our new word study program revision of our cycle and elective offerings in order to expand stem programming the addition of a

029second english language learners course for students identified with this need and that's in particular at the middle school at the high school there already is a second class for that at the high school level this budget will support two very important programs going into their second year the rotating drop system excuse me schedule and the ridge wellness program curriculum writing and staff development opportunities will also support work on the rotating rotate drop schedule here at the high school and the budget will support the second year of wellness coordinators and our student device initiative as we continue to refine our district approved digital subscriptions again i did talk earlier about enrollment decline and i'm going to have touch on that in a couple of couple of different ways first of all these counts that you see

030here are october and then it's a fiscal calendar year october of 21 october of 20 october of 2019 all the way back to october 2016. in october of every year there is a state mandated head count that's done it's called the application for state school aid these numbers come directly from that report and that count that was done for the state at that time you can see that the six-year change is an 809 student decline and year-over-year from last year up from the last count of october of 20 to the most recent of october of 21 we had a 2.8 percent decline i'll talk about a little bit as we get getting further and talk about purple expenditures and i did allude to it earlier why this is important to understand in terms of how

031you look at the budget men's numbers and changes so uh and here here we are so i think the this is really interesting in the sense that it tells it shows you what the in the top row here what the actual counts were that i was just talking about okay in terms of the actual october counts in the second row what you see here is the projected enrollment count for october of 2022. now you're going to see that it goes from 2021 at 48.45 down to this october 4709 and then back up to 48.60 and the reason for that is and we as best we can tell is in the 4860 is consistent with and in line with our demographers projections for where we would be in 2223 what you see in terms of the

032actual count for 2122 is largely pandemic-driven and we would expect that we would see those students come back i've seen that over the course of the 10 years that i've been here before where not so much obviously we've never had a pandemic before thank god but we have had other economic drivers and that pulled students out of out of the district at times so we would expect to see those students come back and we have to build our budget with that assumption if we were to understate it and assume we were going to have fewer students then obviously we would be unprepared if they did come back and it isn't it is consistent with our demographers projection which did not obviously envision a pandemic when he did it in december of 2019. that all said

033if you look at the change over this period it's 11.93 down in terms of enrollment that's not our high point goes back several years before that where we are at 5700 students however if you take a look at what we're doing next what are the amount of what is the amount of salaries and benefits basically instructional support staff what's in that what's in the classroom it's up year over year and over that period of time while we've had an eleven percent decline we've had roughly almost a 22 percent increase in in salaries and benefits uh classroom general supplies and textbooks has gone to five hundred and eleven dollars even in a large in what you have to understand is that generally as even though you're declining in your enrollment you can and you can have

034a decline in what you would you budget for that fewer students means that you can actually spend more if your if your reduction in your actual appropriation is not that great which if you know go back to my second slide and i talked about increases we have 144 000 more instructional supplies driven primarily by instructional software i mean technology is such a huge part of what we do today in terms of what goes on in the classroom classroom purchase services um are at 48 which year over year is an increase from 42. uh overall there's a decline from when we were at at our high of 61 but these are relatively small changes when you think about them uh they're that's 13 uh over a six year period and our enrollment has gone down by

03512 percent so i'm not particularly worried about that total support services these are things like nursing services child study team guidance things of that sort are at 32 26 which is year over year less but when we did the budget for last year we weren't expecting that come october we would have 4 700 students and if you take a look back to where we were in 2019-20 where we had 5125 students we had 48 dollars per student so we actually have as much budgeted for next year for 4 860 as we did when we had 51.25 uh overall uh then you get down to uh the total all-in number at 15 152 it should you know we're trending upward obviously it's a slower pace but enrollment has been declining so i think that's kind of

036an interesting slide the impact of chapter 44 so in in excuse me sorry about that in july of 2020 governor murphy signed public law 2020 chapter 44. i guess you could say potentially good for some districts not for burners township because we sell fund insurance and because our board was very proactive in terms of its negotiated uh collective bargaining agreements in terms of what it was able to do and so for us what it meant is that the law required that as of january 2021 we had to make available to employees something that was comparable to new jersey educators health plan and the big change there is that that plan unlike the previous chapter 78 state provisions which required a contribution by employees predicated on their salary as a percentage of the premium which means

037that as the cost of the insurance goes up and anybody who's bought insurance for themselves knows that it does what it never goes down it always goes up that it was tied to that at least and it was predicated on their salary levels and the maximum amount that any employee would contribute based on their salaries would be for someone who was at the maximum amount of compensation and them had the maximum amount of coverage seems logical and that could benefit as much as 35 percent of the premium the new educators health plan mandated that school districts could no longer do that you have to offer every employee the option to go into this plan and you had to any new employee that you have in automatically has to go into plan they don't get a

038choice and what it does is it ties it to their salary up to a cap and it caps them basically at seven percent for the maximum so where the maximum could have been for maximum salary and maximum benefits in the past 35 of the premium it's now 7 of their salary it's significantly less so you know between january of 2021 and january 1st of 2022 375 employees of this district have elected the new jersey educators health plan that just year over year that's a 19 increase and what it means is that the estimated increase cost is 800 000 annually due to lost contributions that's the call that's the value of the contributions that we lost as a result of this plan being created and mandated by the state of new jersey uh if you recall

039in my one of my very first slides when i talked about major drivers they said that health benefits went up 972 thousand dollars if we hadn't lost this 800 it'd only be 172 000 um you can tell i'm really happy about that unionization of facilities contracts the employees of the third party contractor that we have here voted to unionize last year and the the unionization had two it had one effect predicated on on two drivers salaries went higher and the state of new jersey under the current administration when it came in i think in year two of its current uh of its last term uh the administration was able to enact a law that was going to advance on an annual basis over before or i think it's four year period the minimum wage of

040the state of new jersey which means that when unions come in and try to unionize they have to offer more than that otherwise people won't elect to be in the union and pay union dues and as a result what that gives is it gives you an an escalation of that wage increase rate as opposed to just what statutorily was going to be in place in addition they have to offer something more than that because a few bucks more per hour is not going to do it for an hourly employee they have to use offer enhanced health benefits the result of that was rather significant cost increase that we now are subject to because our community has a union shop so to speak for these services it doesn't matter which vendor comes in the union has

041already has a union shop here so to speak the impact of that is being phased in over two years and i believe i mentioned earlier it was 352 000 now for some good news as i noted up front the state of new jersey gave us 877 000 dollars more uh in our budget this year the district is usually utilizing this entire increase to reduce the local tax levy it should say local tax levy there i apologize it doesn't say that so what does that mean okay here's a 12-year history go right down to the bottom what it means is that the 659 thousand dollar increase that you saw and i think of a slide two or three of the presentation so far represents a point seven three percent increase year over year in the tax

042levy the debt services i indicated goes up nine hundred and ninety three hundred fifty dollars which is point one eight percent which means that the total increase year over year between debt and local levy because there are two components to our taxes here there is the debt levy which pays for the serial bonds that were issued by the board of education back when it did a referendum back in the early 2000s to build this facility that we're in right here and a number of other enhancements including the new gym at the other end of the building and some other district-wide construction that it did that authorized the board and the to to issue bonds which in turn meant that it automatically authorized a tax levy right you have to pay back for it's like going

043to the bank and getting a mortgage you know you you issue bonds you're automatically committed to a tax levy for that that's the purpose of the referendum why the voters of the municipality are asked and required to vote on it that said uh the net impact of the two year over year going from the current year where it's 90 million 655 for the current local levy and 5 million 105 for the debt levy to 91 314 for the local tax levy and 5 million 115 000 for the debt levy is 0.699 percent i'd like to point out that the district's reduced its debt levy over the last 12 years by 11.3 percent we've done that through refundings uh refundings since i've been here we've done five they are only done when the bonds themselves are

044callable so our bonds as municipal bonds most municipal bonds are are tax-exempt and that means that at the time that the the bond authority is is issued and an ordinance is passed there is some provision in there as to when a bond may be callable and that bonds generally they're callable within 10 years of the time that they are issued if they are going to remain tax exempt and obviously you want to issue tax exempt bonds because you have to pay less face interest for them think about it i mean if you're if you have a a three percent bond and you pay no taxes on it as someone who's got enough money to buy one of these bonds because we're talking about millions of dollars okay that is not subject to federal income taxation

045or state income taxation if you're a resident of the state of new jersey and you're holding one of those bonds so you know that that take take top tax brackets of say 37 federal government and say eight percent on the state that's 43 40 what am i doing 45 and you will basically apply that amount of savings to the amount of the the the interest that you're getting on it so it's worth 45 percent more to you basically if you get a lower levy amount that's why we do tax exempt um what else do i want to say about this week we have a triple a bond rating in fact we just went through another ratings call uh let two weeks ago we received uh a week the week before last excuse me and then

046last thursday we did receive an updated ratings from standard force and us they re in uh they reiterated their aaa state rating for us so since 2015 we've had a triple a bond rating uh which makes this one of a handful of districts in the state that has it uh and over the last nine years the average tax levy has been 1.69 when you average this far right column here for the last nine years going back okay i did talk a little bit about federal funds so i had a slide last year that slide recapped the federal funds that we had received that were really as are all of these funds related to pancreatic but one time there were a lot of fun you know what should i say we had fema funds and we

047had cares act multiple types of cares act funds there were a couple hundred thousand here and a couple hundred thousand there they added up to a little over a million in change uh this this year in the last year we've received uh some other rather significant federal funds let's start at the bottom here oops excuse me and look at what those sources are so we've got the american rescue plan idea funds of 277 000. we've got the american rescue plan esser which is sometimes known as sr3 funds of 2.7 million and we've got the balance and i'll explain this in a minute uh of the elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund sr2 funds of 665. last year we spent the difference between the award of a million one and the 665 which is roughly

048400 and change on technology purchases that we made when we bought chromebooks additionally for the district so that we could have sufficient chromebooks to do the virtual learning that we were doing with so many of our students last year what are the either the budgeted purchases and i refer to these as budgeted purchases because some of them are it's what's in the grant application okay um but we haven't actually made the purchases yet we have up to three years to spend these funds and the the things that we have purchased have been air purifiers so if you're you've been in a classroom with your child you've probably seen a little white box sitting in the corner somewhere on the floor these were air purifiers that we bought that are in addition to the filters that

049we have in our airedale systems to further enhance the purification in the air in the classrooms and filter it we have also underway right now the third item on here which is an update and you'll actually hear a a brief update on this when the finance committee report is given this evening on the hvac controls in our district district-wide we had one set of hvac controls which were legacy controls meaning the software that actually controls these systems because obviously when you think about it nobody's going around like you do in your house and resetting a thermostat in every place or you know going to a rooftop unit and turning it on it has to be controlled with through automation and we're upgrading that because the system was for old legacy systems and not open architecture

050which meant that they were little or there was virtually no one left that could service these things they were 25 or 30 years old so that's what this item is for 165 here we have hvac upgrades here of a million dollars what we're proposing here is the there are about eight classrooms still here in the high school believe it or not out of the entire district that don't have new airedale units in it and we think that this will be about what the cost is the airedale unit itself when we last completed one of these projects because we had multi-year projects with the school development authority that we just finished with the middle school the year before the pandemic started were about 40 000 just for the units that doesn't and so you know you've

051got a couple of years you've got rampant inflation on manufacturing right now going on and then there's the cost of labor associated with it and usually there's case work and all sorts of things so it's a relatively expensive process per classroom but this should be more than sufficient to cover that including the controls tie-in technology for virtual learning we have outdoor seating really you know if your child is at the middle school the high school lay elementary you saw a lot of that going on with uh what went on with covet and they're just going to try to provide more of it even though we you know we're going to come to a place where we really don't need it hopefully for that purpose but it's nice they like it and nicer weather for students

052to be able to eat outside and do things outside in terms of accelerated learning we have you know a whole slew of things that go into that additional social workers nursing services and support service programs summer and after school program pramming excuse me tuition for students with disabilities post graduate and pandemic related transport costs let me touch on that one because that's a big ticket item there so uh during the uh the pandemic the heart of it the state of new jersey said look you know in particular special needs students in uh either 11th grade or 12th grade during that period of time who would normally potentially be eligible to go to say age 21 depending on their iep in the state of new jersey okay we're going to offer them an additional year so

053the cost of that is is rather significant in in a lot of cases for those students because most of those students that are in that are going to go to 21 a lot of them i should say not all of them are you know do have out of district placements and those out of district placements are significantly more expensive than in district costs so there's a provision for that the other piece that we've seen right now is that for the roughly 25 or so students that we send out of district we have to provide transportation for them that's done through the somerset county head service commission we contract that out that those contracts uh are and and this has nothing this was something that existed prior to covet uh frequently turnover during the course of

054the year and the somerset county head service commission would you know go out to bid and get another company to do it what we're seeing though because of the driver shortage which you haven't heard a lot about recently in the newspapers it was the big topic back in the fall but it still exists is that where the per diem cost for these routes was four hundred dollars per day it's now eight hundred dollars a day so we provided some additional money here to cover that we expect that as we come out of this you know socioeconomic health event that you know by we the time we get through the end of these grants in the next year or two that the labor market will smooth out a little bit and people will be back to

055normal and there will be less of a shortage but that's there is a stop gap for us for those costs because that's where in particular we're seeing it our in-district routes luckily i was able to bid those out in june of 20 before people really realized what was going to be the the impact on the labor market and the renewal of those and don't tell well the bus companies are going to know when i come to them but the the bus companies can renew those contracts but they can't renew it for more than what the state stipulates the cpi is and i'm going to tell you something that'll leave your leave you scratching your head when you leave here tonight which is the state says that the cpi for transportation is 1.9 percent so think

056about that one for a minute uh okay we're up to capital projects funding as i indicated up front the district does not rely on current resources to do that so it doesn't use the current current levy as a lot of districts do and they have to make a choice between well do i you know repave something or put a roof on this building or do i you know uh have you know uh a a particular initiative for an additional you know handwriting without tears all those things i talked about in expanded opportunities right earlier on in the in the guide they don't have to we don't have to make that choice because we did some long-term planning years ago one we went we had we enhanced our capital reserves and our maintenance reserves so what

057does that mean it meant that when the state of new jersey came along roughly eight years ago i guess now or nine years ago and said hey we just passed this law and we're going to sell i forget i think it was six billion dollars worth of cap construction bonds which means we can make school development authority grants to you and we'll give you 40 cents on every dollar of every qualifying project as long as you can show you have the matching funds we had the matching funds and we could step up and do that so we got 11 grants the last of which we are doing now the others were really all of the hvac projects that we did in the liberty corner school the cedar hill school the oak street school the high

058school and in the middle school and finally we had a roofing project and that roofing project is for the oak street school the older portion of that building which we all love it's got great architecture right but i think it goes back to 1938 and obviously that's not the original 1930 rate roof on it but it's not new so uh we have a project that the state will fund 40 cents on the dollar for we're going to pay the other piece of it we went out to bid in the board award contract uh to a responsible bidder in january of this year and the work will begin after school ends in june of this calendar year and our share right now based on the contract amount assuming that there are no change orders to that

059contract is going to be about 366 000 the state will pay the rest of the 566 thousand dollars so i will tell you two things about that one uh according to our architect of record which is spiesel this is a a company that has done a significant number of these roofing projects and they feel good about them as a contractor i will tell you that the challenge that i've had and i've been doing this as you can tell from the lack of hair and how great it is on my head for many years now that the biggest challenge for us as as a school district is always that the state's procurement laws require us to award the contract to the lowest responsible bidder not necessarily what you would do if you were doing it in

060your house right so you would try to save money but you wouldn't necessarily say the lowest responsible bidder sometimes what that means is they're qualified they're competent they can do the job but you don't always get get the labor the number of people on the job site that you might get if you were paying a few dollars more that's fine it requires us though to really manage the heck out of these jobs generally because we have from the end of june until about a week before school starts it gives us eight weeks to do big things right that's not a lot of time when you think about it so let me talk to you a little bit about this project we're going to remove the existing shingle roofing system and replace it with a new

061shingle roofing system we're going to remove and replace the existing cornice the gutters the downspouts and the trim so just to give you some orientation for those of you who know oak street school where i am at here with my arrow this is where the columns are on the oak street entrance this is where the auditorium is there's a little bit of a flat roof there and then you've got this whole wing these sections in here where you have the classrooms right let me show you some photos so this is what i was talking about a minute ago this is if you go to the left here you'd be in the park in the parking lot behind the building as everyone thinks about it this is where the auditorium is this is the cupola over

062the auditorium so all this is having it's being re-roofed and then all of what you see here all this section on either side of this is being re-roofed these cornices that you see here and this is a view inside of it are being repaired and replaced because they leak right and they're going to be redone you can see this is some of the fascia and gutter and you can see what kind of condition it's in so this is all going to be done replaced repaired and that is the preliminary budget presentation at this point i'm prepared to take questions from the board i'll try to work from left to right if anybody has any questions back row to front row i'll get to you in a second nick did you want to say anything i'm

063sorry i saw you stand up so out of the corner of my eye doesn't sound like it's working sounds like it's out of batteries there's enough money in the budget for them but no no them to the board members but i will say thank you mr mclaughlin appreciate the detail and the nice photos to let us know that uh we're going to take care of that roof at oak street uh as mr mclaughlin noted this is the 11th project funded by the regular operating district grants of which he has brought all of these projects to the district and done really a great job in upgrading a whole lot of hvac equipment in five out of six schools so thank you to him for his efforts and the efforts of his team to wrap up the

064last of the rod grant projects we really look forward to getting this roof taken care of as you can see it's got some areas that really need to be replaced badly so this would be a great project to get done thank you you explained about um that we're self-insured and could you explain for everybody though who may not be aware why we keep money in reserves um because we're self-insured sure so we keep money in reserves because we're self-insured but we also we also keep money in reserves for reasons other than being self-insured so we have about 900 plus thousand dollars in what is called an emergency reserve that's a term that the state gives it i i think it's really kind of a poor choice but if you go to the organic statute that

065it authorizes its cre its ability to be created in the district that's what they want you to call it we specifically have money in that because we are self-insured so beginning with that one uh and where did that money come from well prior to us going to self-insurance which we're now going to this would take us into our fifth year i guess we had uh blue cross blue shield uh retrospective and then prospective insurance and when we when you have retrospective insurance it's kind of a hybrid between self-insurance and prospective insurance i don't want to bog the community down with too much of that but the bottom line is that you have to book a contingent liability at the end of every year based on an actuaries determination of what the runout would be when

066you exit that program and what's run out okay run out is what the state of new jersey provides uh insurers it must cover when you exit a particular program so it says that for at the 18 month period succeeding the end of an insurance cycle if you have a claim that was incurred but not reported to your insurer during that period they have to pay it which meant we would have to pay it the folks at horizon blue cross blue shield at the time and based on our actuaries we had i think roughly 1.3 i have to go back and check the records this is six years ago now probably when we went through this battle with them because it was a year battle presented us with a bill within 30 days of the close

067of the term so june 30 came along and they gave us a run out bill and i said to them well show me the the bill that you got for all of this because it was the full amount of the what they what was actually determined and they didn't have that bill and so we went through a battle for about a year and the claims came in we said look you're supposed to pay this over 18 months and it got to the point where we ultimately had to through our uh risk managers who were arthur gallagher insurance company at no cost to the district they brought in insurance council to deal with uh blue cross's insurance council because blue cross was getting a little prickly about the fact that we didn't want to pay them

068the remainder of the money long and short of it is that we clawed back from them about 675 thousand dollars we didn't pay them they were we made them present us with documentation of what they paid and we strung it out over the 18 months to sell that that was where the bulk of that money came from in that 900 plus thousand dollars and then in ensuing years where we had good operating years i recommend it to the board that we fund the remainder of that when why do you do that well when you're self-insured you're like blue cross blue shield and what blue cross blue shield does when it's insuring you is it defers and manages some of its risk what it does is it retains some it retains a third party another insurance

069company to offset its extraordinary potential claims so they define and this is another way that we save money with self-insurance versus uh being with a blue cross blue shield as our prospective insurer blue cross blue shield says if you're with us and you're prospectively insured you pay your premium and at the end of the year you walk away and next year we come back and we hit you with a double-digit increase if you had a bad year that's what they do okay but they also have something called stop-loss insurance so they have another insurance company that they go to and they say for any claims on an individual basis that in excess of and if we were insured with them would be two hundred thousand dollars per person that insurer will pay that so there's

070a premium that's passed through that you as an insurer don't see that's paid by blue cross blue shield when they reinsure part of their risk basically we have to do the same thing obviously we're the insurance company in this case so but we can what we can do is we can raise the the amount per per employee in terms of the the claim amount based on actuarial reviews because one of the things that i saw when i talked to the board about switching to this was that in the seven years prior to our going to self insurance the amount of premium that was passed through we got this through this whole battle with blue cross blue shield was that the amount of premiums we paid vastly exceeded the amount of claims they were paying and

071what that meant is and we i asked about i said well could we have raised our per employee extraordinary uh threshold and they told us that no you can't do that because blue cross looks at it as the book of business right they're looking at all of their insurers across the board but we individually as self-insured could do that so that's the long-winded explanation of why we have that we have it for stop loss it covers us when we have extraordinary claims and we have extraordinary aggregate claims so most districts and they're only probably a dozen or so districts in the state out of 600 that self-insure as well but you know and most of them don't have this so they don't have that stop gap they have to rely on the current operations if

072they have a bad year so that's number one we have capital reserve as i indicated before we we have capital reserves so that when opportunities like the school development authority came along we could take advantage of that we had the matching funds to do that the other thing that that allows us to do is to avoid going back to the public and i will do a presentation this august we didn't do it we had a bit of a hiatus during the pandemic but we talked about every year we had a five-year capital plan to look forward and talked about where we're at in the projects that we've done that were identified for us in 2011 which is just actually the december before i came here they everything was december of 2011 i started here in

073in 2012 by spiesel architects and ksi engineers across the district they did a survey of projects the districts added a lot of things to that there were 145 projects that spiesel identified and we've done those basically out of our own pocket as opposed to going back to the taxpayer and saying well we'd like a referendum for 20 million dollars for which we're going to pay interest for the next 30 years it's a lot more expensive to do that obviously because you're you had i mean anybody who has a mortgage and most folks here probably have one okay you know know that when you take a look at the you know the term of your mortgage and the principal the interest you know it's a lot more than the principal you borrowed right because the interest

074adds up over a longer period of time so it saved us as taxpayers and i can say that because i'm a taxpayer here as well i have been for 24 years you know money right it saves us money to do that so we have the capital reserve it gives us the ability to not be dependent upon how are we going to get the resources that gives us the ability to also not have to rely upon you know the current making a choice in our current budget between what do we put in the classroom versus what do we do in the buildings that are support you know that the classrooms are housed in that type of thing uh maintenance reserve we have a maintenance reserve as well and the state of new jersey requires that we

075have something called a comprehensive maintenance plan every year in october the board enacts the authorization for a dollar amount at a minimum when the state says the minimum is two percent for expense against this you know the the calculated value using the state's formulation of what you should have in terms of maintenance back into your buildings they came out with this concept when they passed uh i think it was the uh i want to say it was one of the the the the bond acts that they did back in the early 2000s and they said you know we're going to send out all this money to public school districts we want to make sure they're going to spend some money to maintain what we've given them for for this capital infrastructure and so you know

076we have money set aside to do that and how is that endured to our to our benefit well i think back to to last year in december of 20 in this building we had a major sanitation system breakdown at the far end of the building where you walk into the building uh that section was built over 50 years ago so we found that the cast iron pipes had gone we had to replace something like 350 to 400 feet of sanitary line that was not an expensive project it happened in the middle of the school year you don't have the ability to budget for it because your budgets are done in may but we had a maintenance reserve and that's exactly what it's for and we went to the board and we said we need to

077do a resolution to withdraw 344 thousand dollars because that's the cost of an emergency repair we were able to do that emergency repair right now while i showed you that ame project which is the controls project for that we're going to charge the grants that project was begun before these grants became available we're going to shift that cost to those grants because we can but we didn't have to wait to start that project because we had the emergency reserves go back excuse me the maintenance reserve you go back you'll see that the board did an authorized withdrawal from the maintenance reserve for that that's why we have it and in years where up until the most recent years where the state has consistently increased its state aid to the districts we had it as a

078stop gap and a valve basically to help balance our budget so that we didn't have to make a choice between you know what we're going to do for basic general maintenance and what we were going to do for instruction again we could supplement it with a withdrawal budgeted withdrawal from the maintenance reserve during the course of the year so it's given us flexibility whenever the state has fallen short as well just in terms of its funding because we don't want to cut maintenance because the state says oh we're going to give you 400 000 less i mean i used to have a slide until five years ago that showed the amount of money that we'd lost because the state wasn't funding the formula for state aid and you know that that was up to roughly

07918 million dollars when i stopped basically if i recall in terms of state aid because for years the state just never funded the the appropriation and we're still not at 100 of the level but we're at a place where after five years and given the fact that we've been able to build a stable balance sheet and you know a flexible budget so that we can support and sustain programs we could say to the taxpayers we got 877 000 and we can give that to as an offset against the tax levy for the current year does that kind of answer your questions um can i ask one more history lesson question um can you just talk a little bit about what um the district has done to level off the um impact to the taxpayers with

080the debt sure so um one of the things that i and i think i'm sorry every time i bend this it seems hopefully i'm not breaking it uh i've done five refunding since i've been here uh what i noticed when i started looking at the refundings was not just and just for the record the state of new jersey says that any time a tranche of bonds is is callable and that you will be able to save three percent of the present value of those bonds through the termination of those bonds you should you must refund it that's what they say okay so that's what we've done that's been the threshold that's been the minimum and you can't extend out the term of those beyond what the term of those bonds is so if the termination

081of those bonds at 10 years in is another 10 years out any bonds you issue to refund can't go beyond that 10 years it could be less but it can't be more and you must save at least 3 of the value which means that all in the cost to pay off the old bonds okay and issue the new bonds must save you at least three percent through the term of what the old bonds would have been in terms of paying those off that said uh one of the things i began looking at was the back end because most of these bonds and these tranches of these refundings that i'm doing were based on refundings that had already been done and they went back to the big kahuna which was the 50 plus million dollar referenda

082or so that was done back in in the early 2000s and what i looked at was what happens to the payment of those tranches of bonds how is that structured at the beginning back then back in the early 2000s to end out in 2031. and one of the things i saw was that it was back-end loaded okay meaning that you had big amounts of principal payment at the back end of this which means what oh all of a sudden i'm paying off a lot more mortgage at the back end when i get into the last seven or eight years of this than i was and the first 23 years of this and what i did is i came to the board and i showed them this and i explained this and we talked about it

083and we brought in phoenix advisors our capital advisors and i said look we can do a couple of things but the biggest thing we did was we enacted in 2015 a policy that i helped to write with our bond council that and we and the board set aside money in reserves and so when it did a refunding in 2016 it was able to take a million dollars and just pay off some of that refunding eligible so think of it this way if you had a mortgage for three hundred thousand dollars and you wanted to refund it because the interest rates were lower and you said you know what i've got fifty thousand dollars that i can afford to put into that you could go to the you could pay it off right you can go

084but go to the bank and say i only want to refi chance 250 i'm going to give you 50. that's basically what we did with the million so that saved us significant money on the back end that interest on a million dollars from 2016 to 2031. think about it that's a lot of interest then additionally what that policy did and what we were able to do for a couple years there was to set aside 2.7 million dollars in additional monies in our capital reserve so that when we get to those big years which start in 23 24 and go on through 2031 we can make withdrawals on an annual basis because these bond amounts are gonna fluctuate from year to year that will keep the debt levy that i showed you here level meaning that

085this amount that we asked for the taxpayer to give us doesn't have to go up just because we have these increases coming because we thought about this back in 2015. does that answer your question okay thank you this is very um i think it's pretty clear can you just go to slide 10 for one second which is the per pupil spending in the classroom one of the things that i when i was looking at this is that on the far right side with this the yellow column that six year number on my sheet i got a little lost i missed it i just looked at percentage change there is a six year thing so that is the difference that final column is a six year percent percentage change so very briefly if you could attribute

086the not the total cost per pupil has gone up what are the top three things that you can attribute to the fact that our total cost per pupil has gone up year after year there are some who would argue that we should be keeping that also even is it inflation is it i mean because these are not adjusted is it cost of benefits and salaries what what are the big things that are so that's a couple of things uh one on until first of all um it is contractual increases right obviously salaries go up benefits go up i will tell you that if you do a seven year look back on our health benefits and you look at the appropriated amount now this will get distorted as we go forward because of what i told

087you about tonight with chap with chapter 44 but up until this point and especially since we've had four plus years of self-funding of insurance if you average smooth that average out it's a four percent increase over seven years i don't know anybody else that can say that in this world when it comes to health benefits that said it's still a material portion of our budget because it's now up to 18 million dollars for health benefits uh we've the board is always as i've said you know negotiated very proactively on the behalf of you know trying to balance that walk that line between getting a you know a good cadre of teachers and support staff in here who are the best you can get and you know that's seen in the results that we get in

088terms of how we stand amongst other school districts in the state obviously and you know their responsibility on the other hand to work within the parameters of what is a limited amount of increase from the state and up to now in terms of resources and even so you know the state still does not relative to 110 million dollar budget give us much more than six percent of our operation right it's we the taxpayers are what what drive the quality of what we have here in burners township but the board's always kind of walked that line and had some very stringent you know standards for for negotiation so you know uh you know there were always offsets the ability to get offsets for negotiated offsets with benefits against salary increases so and and that worked it

089worked for both parties uh but you nonetheless that's a big driver right because what we're in what we're a service industry if you think about it from a business perspective i mean we're all it's all about what's our most expensive item it's people right we you know we have 800 plus permanent employees so you know that is a that's where the cost is right and that's and that's where it should be for what we do uh the the other piece that you know that's going to drive that are just some of the inflationary factors and things that have just happened over seven or eight years you think about you know what we spend on for what we have to spend prior to the pandemic just technology i mean the state of new jersey you know

090has a model for what a prototypical school was supposed to be that was developed back in the early 2000s that doesn't envision the technology that we're all using every day in today in terms of you know it's it's just fully integrated into everything we do and it wasn't envisioned that's i mean if you stop and scr i mean we all kind of take it for granted because it's become such a part and parcel of how we live but you know it wasn't there before and so that's a good driver it's a significant driver in terms of what goes on we've been able to contain you know basically the cost for the most part in terms of transportation and i talked about what we did to contain health benefit costs and transportation costs you know are

091you know we even with this last go round where we switch from after 20 plus years we went to you know uh private privatization it was because we were looking at otherwise a massive 33 percent increase from the somerset county head service commission so that was able to keep us kind of static so you look at those areas of our budget while they're big chunks of change and even utilities they're relatively static over a long period of time it really is the salaries the benefits and then the the you know the integration of technology and what goes on in the classroom and then the additional support services types of things that for example that we have here at the high school for for students that you know are at risk and things of that sort

092so there is that piece the reason that we've been able you know and we haven't been in a place where and we're probably at a place now where we would consider it you know we've never reduced staff significantly we've often reallocated staff so while our staff would retire we reallocate them to other purposes that were other initiatives that you've seen many of them in terms of these quote expanded opportunities but we're probably at a point now where we've seen we've kind of reached a tipping point where you know you can do a little bit of that to counter balance that you're so far down in terms of enrollment right now does that answer absolutely so our outstanding staff our healthcare costs and technology which are all things that everybody can sort of understand why those

093costs have gone up excellent presentation thank you um i just have i have two points of questions that i want clarification on and then one more general one about the chapter 44. so i'll start with kind of the two quick ones um the unionization um so that that increase went up about three thousand 352. but that was part of something that's being phased in over two and a half years yes it was a two and a half year phase in it and and to be clear the other part of it was that we had to add eight instruction um support aids basically here for the rotating drop schedule okay so in order to manage what goes on here at lunchtime we needed to add those bodies now those are part-time bodies but it's still eight

094bodies but the big driver there is really the unionization but we did add eight part-time bodies which equivalent which works out to be full for full-time bodies yeah because i think i if i remember last year that number was a lot bigger but you said it's being fresh it's phased in over two and a half years okay um then for the oak street roof project um is that being paid for out of operating expenses or maintenance reserve or capital no it's being paid out of the school development authority grant what nick referred to as the rod grant no relation to me it's a regular operating district grant that's what they call them rod grants and those are from the school development authority uh they will pay 40 cents of the of every eligible dollar on

095the project the other 60 cents comes from our capital reserve as a withdrawal okay and then my other question just of interest it was something you actually skipped over in the presentation um related to the chapter 44 with the gshp it seems like their requirements were delayed and i wondered if you had any insight on if that would be beneficial to district or no it won't it'll be more of the same because it'll be the same sort of contribution standard so you have to go to and look you know i don't want to get into politics too much standing up here as a representative of the board but if you read the articles and understand how this law came to pass what it does essentially is it will ultimately in my opinion completely gut chapter

09678 because what you have to keep in mind is and i did touch on this but i know i throw out a lot of information is that chapter 44 says that any new employee that comes to your district must be enrolled in one of these programs we don't have the gsp program yet i'm not looking forward to it because it'll have the same kind of contribution standard okay that said uh the fact that every new employee that comes here think about it you have normal turnover in a district this size we're a large district right so people leave every year they retire uh you know they resign uh they might take a promotional opportunity to go someplace else that means that every year you're gonna replenish those people they're gonna go into this plan so

097that 375 that i showed you which was nineteen percent year-over-year increase is going to continue to go up every year we have ensured lives of around 700 those are the primary lives that we insure uh that meaning employees that have to take the insurance and then if you think about that there are pro and when we do 1095 c reporting for those of you who get a 1095 c from your employer uh we actually do the head count we see how many lives are actually insured through dependents so forth it's closer to 2200 right that's that's kind of typical of what happens so you know that primary is now more than 50 percent in the nj ehp and every year that number is going to go down as we have turnover if nothing else happened

098if just the existing employees you know that are here that retire that may be in the legacy programs that decide hey you know i really don't want that program and a lot of them did but you're seeing this turnover because of what happens in terms of how the law is structured it doesn't give the employee an option it says that they must come in and be in that plan for seven years which means that essentially chapter 78 seven years from now we won't have anybody that'll be in it yeah that makes sense okay thank you you're welcome okay i think we're good thanks mr mclaughlin so is okay we're now up to the superintendent's report um there are two items with someone like to make a motion for them um miss schaefer and this thing

099uh mr mccarrion did you have anything to say nope just the uh standard uh hib report and uh the ridge forensics overnight trips for their competition okay could we have a roll call please mr mclaughlin mr salmon yes miss schaefer yes mr scribe yes missing yes mrs white yes his light yes mr khanna yes miss hiro yes mrs mccoon yes madam president thank you you wanted to say something sure just a couple other things um i wanted to just give the public a heads up uh following up on last year's data security incident i'll be sending out a mailing uh at the end of the week to explain that affected individuals will be getting a mail a piece of mail to their homes next week so again i will follow up on that with some

100more details this friday in my weekly message to the community i wanted to congratulate ridge high school english teacher dave vyastromski dave was recognized in march of this year the national federation of high school speech debate and theater association announced that mr yastrensky was selected as the section one recipient of the outstanding speech theater debate educator award so congratulations to mr ustremski he's also been named a four diamond coach by the national speech and debate association and is currently serving as the president of the new jersey speech and debate league so i just wanted to give him a shout out for that recognition that he earned i wanted to share a couple other things too i was distracted by the uh copying issue that we had to take care of about on the agenda so

101sorry about that and i'm not sure if uh mr lee uh had had mentioned a couple things i know that uh we had a pretty cool event uh here at ridge last week on thursday night where we had the unified sports senior night so it was a pretty fun event for a lot of staff and students there on march 17th we had the ridge high school choral showcase they performed here uh with some great success and william middle school had aladdin junior on march 18th 19th and 20th so i wanted to congratulate those folks um the just just looking at some of the fun stuff i i really have to thank the staff every week they they publish their their version of the sos express in their friday folders and uh it really has a

102lot of great information so just encourage people to check those out just lots of fun little things that they share in those documents things about their stem uh liberty corner had worked on something with their uh pto where they were doing a bike skills clinic uh and i saw a really nice uh publication about the big sibling newsletter that was published for i think was the april 2022 newsletter so um great stuff uh and also available at each of the schools websites where they list their friday folders so thanks thanks to them for doing those weekly reports every week thank you mr marcarion we're up to public comment on agenda items if any members of the public have comments or questions about anything on the agenda please come and state your name and address and

103you can sign in on the clipboard afterwards down here hey good evening uh eric cute of that great drive uh thank you guys for the budget presentation i think it's important to try to balance the tax levy with keeping our school district as one of the elite schools in new jersey i think that's kind of where we are so i appreciate that um mr mclaughlin i appreciate you answering all the questions at the board hopefully you can maybe respond to me either here or offline in the emails a couple things i saw on the slides i just wanted to get clarification on it looked like the biggest cut of the budget or proposed budget for next year is in special services about 750 000 or so dollars so i'm just curious you know i know

104that's a proposed budget based on iep meetings that are to come i guess what my curiosity is what percentage of the overall special services budget actually is that a cut of because i know the special services budget is quite sizable for our district is that due to you know not taking in as many kids from out of district or you know what would be the reasons there other than just you know not seeing as many ieps needed for next year i think i would kind of disagree and say that due to covid due to the pandemic and the remote learning for close to you know half of a year and then just social distancing masking for these kids i think i've seen that there's probably going to be an increased need for special services ieps

105504s so just curious on how we've come to that number and what's the flexibility we get to may right say this the county approves a budget you guys approve a budget we get to maine we see a huge number in kids with ieps you know what are we going to do is it hopefully we're planning for that and where there's flexibility and i also saw on another um slide that you showed that it said something like staffing will be flat consistent with the the needs so i'm just curious are we going to see in special services any cuts to teachings counselors any kind of support staff due to the budget cut i don't know like if it's across the board if we'll see staffing decreases and i just want to remind i think i've talked

106to several of you on the stage about this in the last two years we did reduce special services budget a couple years back due to the head count and special services and the needs going down that need jumped up in like the next year and two and then all of a sudden we didn't have them enough support and i think still we still have significant support uh stresses at some of the elementary schools at least that i know of where we actually need so i know my wife has talked to many of you on the stage i've talked to you with many on the stage so important topic hopefully there's some flexibility because i'm hoping we're making a good decision i think it's a big cut and i don't know the overall budget but hopefully

107that you know when it comes we'll be flexible in making sure we have the right services nice job hi guys my name is larry rashio 234 liberty corner road far hills i have submitted my name for the board last go-round and i'm probably going to do it again in november my background is fixed income and bond portfolio management i've traded a significant amount of fixed income my entire career and specifically a lot of tax exempt munis triple a munis so my question so i'm obviously going to migrate towards the uh the debt of the of the township we currently have about 54 million in outstanding debt obligations assuming that all of our debt right now is held to maturity i mean it looks like we're not going to be able to call these bonds given

108what interest rates have done we've paid a total about 14.5 million dollars in interest since inception since these bonds have been put in place approximately 65 million has been raised through tax levies since these bonds have been issued given the maturity ladder of these bonds we have about 8 million due in 2023 and it averages about six and a half million in debt obligations until 2030. so my questions are this does your plan to pay down the debt automatically assume a two percent tax increase every year for the next seven thereby a 14 tax increase and second is what if any plans have you guys discussed even behind the scenes to help cut costs and increase revenues to probably mitigate some of these um debt obligations you can i don't know if you're allowed to

109respond here or wait we usually respond after all the public comments are done fine thanks is there anyone else here for public comment on agenda items is there anybody on zoom do you know nobody will there's no waiting room and nobody else here for public comment on agenda items okay at this point we'll close public comment on agenda items um i think in the slides just to correct me if i'm wrong mr mclaughlin about the special education decrease that was talking about specific um placements right like out of district placements so that number was just a complete reflection of how many students are getting sent where we're out of district placement so that number could change if a couple kids graduate or a couple kids move to a different placement or things like that too

110that's correct and that's always been the case and the districts always had flexibility to address those changes and it addresses those that flexibility through the reserves that it has and through the extraordinary aid applications that it does because the state of new jersey you look at the presentation that i had here tonight does give us something aside from the categorical state aids that we get for special education and transportation which are the primary categorical aids that we get something called special education extraordinary aid extraordinary aid is used for or given to us i should say for those expenses for students that are in excess of forty thousand dollars if they're in a public school setting meeting either here or in another public school setting say something like the morris union jointure or if they're in

111a private school for the disabled setting it has to be in excess of 55 000 and there has to be not just the general tuition educational experience for that child but some sort of extraordinary service which generally any student that's out of district has something called extended school year which means that instead of 180 day here they have usually a minimum of 200 plus days a year that immediately right there qualifies for the extraordinary aid application the way that works is that the state of new jersey uh appropriates those funds separate and apart from what it gives us in terms of its state aid notice we have to make application for all of those students that we have on our rolls respective with their respective placements every spring and when we do that the state

112of new jersey says oh you have x millions of dollars of eligible costs in excess of these thresholds and you're eligible for x amount of eight now for those amounts that are in excess of 55 in private setting or 40 000 in a public setting they give us generally 75 of the eligible dollar think of it this way if the threshold is 40 000 and you have 40 000 in one dollar then you can get 75 cents on the one dollar they don't give you anything for the first forty thousand they don't give you anything for the first fifty five thousand traditionally the state of new jersey has not funded that statute that they have at a hundred percent or anywhere near to it generally they've funded it on about what amounts to about 55

113to 65 cents on the eligible dollar this last year was the first time they were close to funding that at 100 and i believe that was probably generally uh attributable to their uh influx of federal funds everybody who read the papers last year knew that the state of new jersey was on the receiving end of something like six billion dollars at least at that point in federal dollars and so that enabled them to do a lot of things with their budget what we do is we always take that money and set it aside as the state permits us for one year and we have it as a safety valve for when these ieps come in basically you know if there's a fluctuation but to answer the specific question we can only pursuant to state regulation

114appropriate for the known students that we have at the time the state of new jersey literally requires us to only provide for not what we anticipate is going to come in the door when it comes to special education out of district tuition placement but what we know we have right now so that's why you see those fluctuations just as you see right here but we have the ability and we have always had the ability to provide flexibility for that it has nothing to do with staff the 757 that you saw there as a reduction relates to out of district placements thank you mr mclaughlin and in terms of the other part of mr kuda's question about staffing the challenges um yeah we've had a lot of conversations this year about the labor market and um

115challenges in finding staff members particularly in certain positions so there have been some challenges which is not because we didn't budget or you know try to get staff in some positions and i know we've all had conversations about the other thing i should have noted is that when i did talk a little bit in the presentation about the application for state school aid right and i talked about the head count and the fact that as of uh this october we were at 4 700 students now that is about a year and a half of where ahead of where our demographer says we shall be we should be right he said you know we would reach that static threshold somewhere in 2425. that said you know i still have to use his numbers because i can't

116conjecture about what is going to happen in the next year but will those 160 students that we show in the budget come back i don't know what i can tell you is that there was a commensurate reduction from the high point since i've been here 750 students that were classified within our total district enrolled headcounts down to roughly 60 680 so it's over a 10 reduction that we've seen in terms of the total number of students that are classified in the district which means caseloads for all staff are down basically thank you and then in terms of the um questions about the bond i can put my glasses on um i'll let you take those but i did want to just say like the question about does it assume a two percent increase obviously this

117year we got more state aid so we're not having a two percent increase which is very good news and if the state continues to fund us like it's supposed to that would be great but i'll let you answer the rest right so to be clear and i tried to make that differentiation when when i did make the presentation but perhaps i went over it a little too quickly there are two types of levy here we have the local tax levy which has been two percent and we have the debt levy the debt levy has nothing to do with the two percent we don't use the two percent in any way to pay for the debt the debt is authorized and driven by the referenda so when the referenda was issued and the bonds were sold

118initially that set in motion a series of payments on bonds over the ensuing 25 or 30 year term that we had for those bonds and that that levy is driven by that it has nothing to do with the two percent amount what i did also indicate was that the board took action and when i pointed out to them in 2015 that we do have these higher principal amounts due in in latter years of these these bonds as we get into like the last seven or eight years took action to basically set aside funds pursuant to and created a policy which most boards in the state of new jersey don't have by the way and i've been told that by senators and poor okay to set aside funds and have a policy to set aside funds

119in its capital reserve so that it could smooth out that debt levy so that the amount of levy that i showed in the presentation tonight which is about roughly 5.1 million dollars give or take 9200 will remain constant now through the termination of those bonds in 2031 basically thank you that's the point um anyone else mr mccarran you have anything i don't know okay um we're up to approval of minutes um we have one item would someone like to make a motion for that mr salmon and miss hira could we have a roll call please mr salmon yes ms schaefer yes mrs gray yes ms singh yes mrs white she just stepped away ms light yes mr connor yes ms hero yes mrs mccoon yes madam president okay we're up to the finance committee there

120are 18 items that someone like to make a motion for them ms singh and mrs gray um is there a finance report there is the finance committee met last thursday march 24th um the first item one that was discussed was the bond refunding update um we kind of heard all we need to know here but quickly mr mclaughlin uh shared that he met with standard and poor and the underwriters to review the district financials the long and short of that is that we received that triple a bond rating that he mentioned in the presentation and we discussed the situation with achieving the three percent or more savings net present value savings and unfortunately it seems to be dropping like a stone um so the next item was the boys uh varsity baseball field and the

121girls varsity softball fields um for the boys varsity baseball field in may of 2021 aramark senior vice president scott beer agreed to provide an outside contractor to perform field maintenance on the boys varsity baseball field aramark agreed to bear this expense directly airmark did pay a contractor to do most of the work already but they need to complete their commitment by having the contractor take care of the area around home plate and what as well around the pitcher's mount it is anticipated that this will be completed by the second week of april with regard to the girls varsity softball field hour mark is completely groomed the infield the right and left field swale have both been cleaned out and trenched and eventually stone will be added currently water is flowing properly through the swales additional

122clearing and cleaning behind the corner the left field fence is also helping the water move into the swale an outdoor pump is being used for moving any standing water longer term improvements mr larkin will be bringing in a survey surveyor to plan outfield grading improvements quotes from athletic field specialists will be sought to make these outfield improvements after the season is over and the um next item was the district-wide building management systems project update um old building management systems these are the computer systems that help control and manage the hvac equipment from a company called csi have reached their end of life and can no longer be supported the company no longer exists consequently new front-end systems are being installed to replace them the project specifications were written by former facilities director mr moreno mr

123mourinho also began the project before he left the district mr larkin has since taken it on it is anticipated that the work will be completed by mid april the project is being funded by the sr2 grant as we move into the cooling season mr larkin is planning to bring in an outside contractor to do the startup of the cooling systems given the strain of our given the strain our hvac equipment has been under during the pandemic additional skilled labor is necessary to bring cooling online in an efficient manner and to address expected necessary repairs notably the district's one full-time hvac technician has been out of work and is not expected back for another couple of weeks the final item was the kind of brief preliminary budget overview that mr mclaughlin just gave you the full-blown

124version of and then we have the 18 items on the agenda items one through four are standing items item five is a field trip item six is an annual resolution for the budget process to approve threshold levels for uh travel and transportation uh item seven sorry is a resolution for non-public security aid it's a pass-through item for ed services commission item eight is the preliminary budget resolution and items 9 and 10 are existing student services item 11 is consum consultant fees sorry and then items 12 and 13 are revised share time uh this is a correction to contract uh items 14 and 15 are special education services 16 is student services and 17 and 18 are evaluations for iep does anyone have any questions okay could we have a roll call please mr mclaughlin mr

125savannah yes ms schaefer yes mrs cray yes ms singh yes mrs white yes miss light yes mr khanna yes miss hira yes mrs mccoon yes madam president thank you we're up to the personnel committee report there are 12 items with someone like to make a motion for those this is gray and this light is there a personnel committee report uh there is um for the item that i can report on the committee discussed um the next steps for the diversity equity inclusion consultant us squared so us squared has been given a bernardsboe.com email address for communicating with students staff and parents during the duration of their consultancy a letter will be sent out to staff students and parents regarding an upcoming town hall style kickoff meeting for the project um mr scythe discussed the role

126of the leadership team with the consultant uh the personnel committee and administration pre-selected areas that i would like the consultant to focus on this was done as part of the contract contracting process to develop the fee and timeline those pre-selected areas will be presented and discussed at the kickoff meeting to allow for staff student and parent input the leadership team will then provide logistical support to the consultant for distributing surveys scheduling focus groups etc the final report of the consultant will be first provided to the personnel committee and appropriate administrators and a presentation will then be made to the public um i just want to say that uh subsequently we this personnel committee met with the um cons the leadership team of the consultancy and um i think it's probably important that sean gives a

127little feedback on that since we're gonna have the town hall next week so if there's any more information you want to go on that that this is the time thanks mr sam yeah this will just dovetail what we mentioned about the bt connect meeting which which is on april 7th to resume and would definitely encourage uh folks to to join and this meeting would really be run by the us two folks so certainly like i said everyone is welcome board members members of the public and the goal really is to just introduce the project to everybody talk about what the purpose of the audit is they'll go through the focus areas they'll also most importantly though introduce their team and then get feedback from through q a so they want to try to answer as

128much q as they can about the actual process itself and then also use some of the questions that they may get to inform some of their survey questions and this is why they call it a kickoff meeting it's not going to be a very long meeting depending upon questions they told me typically their introduction and going through the process is about 15 minutes to half an hour and then the q a is certainly undetermined but they want to try and answer all the questions if possible around the process and then shortly following that meeting they'll start to work on development of the surveys and send out surveys and what they're hoping is that there'll be lots of interest in being part of those focus groups because they really want to try to get a cross-section

129of the community multiple perspective perspectives involved so it'll be zoom we we won't actually be running the meeting the run the meeting will be run by the us two folks but of course everyone is welcome they they told me to stress that and so we will be sending information out as mr marcary noted right now we don't have a zoom link but we are working on getting that zoom link out to everybody and as mr salmon said they have a bernie's boe email to communicate directly with the constituents folks who are involved and so you'll their email is equityauditburnersboe.com and so that that email will be something that you'll be seeing over the next seven months of the project thank you is that me going to be recorded mr site it most certainly will any

130other questions can we have a raw call please mr salmon yes miss schaefer yes mrs gray yes miss seg yes mrs white yes ms light yes mr connor yes miss hiro yes mrs mccoon yes madam president okay we're up to the policy committee there are two items would someone like to make a motion for the two items mr khanna and mr salmon is there a policy committee report yes policy last met on wednesday march 9th 2022 and there were a few policies and regulations that we went through policy 1648.11 the road forward was updated to reflect the change in the mass testing policy pertaining to covet 19. the focus of the changes were on a new process to test students for covid specifically if a student is vaccinated and test positive the student can wear

131a mask and return to school if the student is unvaccinated and test positive then the student can wear a mask to school and attend but must test every day if you are close contact and vaccinated you can return to school if you wear a mask but if you are close contact and unvaccinated you can wear a mask and return to school but must test every other day if there is a household contact regardless of vaccination status the student can return to school but must wear a mask and test every day with respect to policy and regulation 8451 control of communicable disease it was revised to add a paragraph to clarify a nurse's role when a student has a communicable disease specifically at the discretion of the school nurse a medical clearance note may be waived

132for readmission to school for pupils that have a communicable disease policy 2415.05 student surveys analysis evaluations was revised to state that the district must notify parents and obtain prior written consent from parents or emancipated students when the district is going to survey students which reveals certain information also with respect to certain surveys the policy was reflect revised to reflect that the district must give the parent the option to opt their child out policy 2431.4 prevention and treatment of sports related concussions and head injuries was revised if a student had a head injury previously it was just interscholastic athletic programs and cheerleading that had to comply with this policy which governs what steps must be taken before the student can be cleared to participate in the activity again now intramural sports was added and must comply

133with this policy also new jersey law was modified to reflect that there are six steps now that need to be followed in order for a student with a head injury to play again our policy was revised to align with the revised statute regulation 246 0.30 this was this is a new one that was added because of the pandemic students that age out of special education services during the 2020 2021 2021 2022 and 2022 2023 school year are now eligible for an additional year of service until the age of 22. previously services were only permitted until the age of 21. policy 2622 and regulation 2622 was revised and then the regulation was added the new jersey state board of education will now implement an improv approved english language proficiency assessment for english language learners with an

134individualized education program to measure a student's progress in english language proficiency the superintendent is now required to report only the final results of the annual assessments to the board of education and to the members of the public policy 3233 political activities was revised it was just a simple simple word changes the term board of chosen freeholders was changed to board of county commissioners and the terms freeholder and chosen freeholder were changed to now read county commissioner policy 5460 high school graduation was revised to align with revisions of changes to new jersey law these provisions provide greater clarity regarding the graduation assessment requirements for the class of 2023 24 and 25 along with updates to the high school diploma criteria for out of school individuals additionally a new optional section has been added to policy guide

135546-0 for school districts who choose to participate in the new jersey department of education's state seal of bi-literacy program which our district participates in uh policy 5541 is a new one that was added there is a new and revised criminal law which provides an updated definition of hazing and requires districts to have a policy on hand anti-hazing and our our district has adopted uh such a policy p policy 8465 bias crimes and bias-related acts the policy and the regulation were both modified to capture the most up-to-date law and biased related acts phrases gender identity or expression and national origin have been added added to the protected class of individuals pursuant to the statute additionally school property has been revised to school grounds and the reporting provisions have been expanded to indicate when a report to

136local law enforcement by school officials shall be prompted as compared to the circumstances when a report to local enforcement by school officials shall be immediate policy 9560 administration of school surveys i believe i already went through this one and then we had a second reading on policy zero one five five board committees and policy zero one six nine board member use of internet email it's my understanding there were no changes from the last time i reported out that's a lot of policies does anyone have any questions it was a long meeting any questions okay could we have a raw call please mr salmon yes miss schaefer yes this is gray yes ms yes this is white yes it's light yes mr carter yes ms hero yes mrs mccube yes yes thank you we're up to

137the curriculum committee do we have a report yes um the first thing we discussed was option two dr lazavec shared that he had received about 100 feedback submissions and had completed reviewing all of them with his team they were on track at this time to send out letters to families on march 18th with the final plan that included any changes based on the feedback that was received and it was very clear that import incorporating feedback was an important part of the process the following aspects of his original proposal have been maintained popular off-site programs will be vetted ahead of time and approved organizations will be listed on our website the application has been streamlined to make it easier for students students will be able to apply for more than one marking period at a time

138when off-site activity is the same option 2 will not be available to grade 9 students we've rewritten our health and pe curriculum and it's important for all students to receive the full program off-site student athletes there will be a 300 minute average weekly participation excluding travel time requirement this maintains the appropriate rigor and commitment for off-site activities this change impacts relatively few of the applications from the current and previous years off-site student athletes will maintain a log of their activities and complete an end-of-marking period assignment on-site student-athletes are required to complete an end-of-season reflection this provides accountability for the program and more importantly helps your student athletes practice reflection and goal above to the maintained section the reflection is in line with what the njsia and other colleges universities and athletic health programs use for

139season reflection and future planning and this reinforces the underlying goals of our program in option 2. changes to the original proposal include certain ridge activities and teams have been added to the list of approved on-site activities timelines have been amended to allow on-site student athletes to remain in their option two study hall as long as their team is practicing or competing this is challenging operationally but we will pilot the process if it proves unsustainable then we will revisit this however for the 22-23 school year on-site athletes will be able to maintain their option two study hall while still competing when this overlaps with marking period change students will be scheduled into a gym class but will be able to continue to attend study hall for the full season students will be responsible for their grades

140for the time period that they are in physical education applications for activities that meet the updated criteria but do not have a culminating event or activity during the requested marking period will be approved if that activity is connected to a culminating event on or off site during the academic year dr lazavick believes that the changes being made to option two will enable the implementation of a program that meets requirements requires the appropriate rigor and reinforces the learning wanted for all students while supporting their overall wellness and next we had an update to the community service for students in u.s history mr terry shared with us that he's met with the social studies department and they have revised the community service project for the 22-23 year students may complete their volunteering virtually if the organization's social

141distancing policies require it they've recognized that while the local health situation has improved dramatically it is possible that changes may result in pandemic response policies that could impede students abilities to complete this project if changes to the public health situation warrant a widespread modification to the project requirements students will be informed by their u.s history teachers he reviewed that last year the program was suspended due to the pandemic and this year a version has been put into place that includes a modified time requirement of 10 hours however in light of opportunities becoming available once again and the importance of promoting active citizenship the hour requirement will be increased to 15 hours for the 22-23 school year as we continue our incremental return from the pandemic further discussion will take place to determine what the time

142commitment will be beyond 2223 for subsequent years after reviewing conditions next winter each student will need to keep a record of service hours and hours can begin to be kept starting may 1st for the oncoming school year students may select from the list of pre-approved organizations or may submit a request for approval form if an organization which whom they would like to work is not included on the list the final assignment remains a written one a reflection letter on the experience and will be due following completion of service hours students will be asked to write about the organization and their experience with it a change to this assignment has taken into account that students often become involved in more than one service activity unlike past years when each activity required its own written assignment students

143who opt to earn hours in multiple organizations will be able to write one reflection that includes a detailed comparison of the two organizations next we discussed the advanced math four and five as some questions had arisen about this topic mr coleman reviewed for clarification purposes the difference between advanced math four and five and accelerated math accelerated math begins in 5th grade and students are identified using a district-wide criteria for placement in the spring accelerated math 5 puts students on the start of a rigorous two-year accelerated pathway where students focus on mastering grade five and grade six new jersey student learning standards advanced math four and five is an optional one time a week pull out program which focuses on strengthening students understanding of grade level standards through deep meaningful mathematical tasks with similar like minded

144peers each building is different how and when the pull out works but typically students will miss different classroom activities in order to participate students are not learning material above grade level but rather may be completing a grade level appropriate enrichment activity he explained that we do not use the state metric to determine identified students for advanced math four and five as typically the majority of students in bernard township score in mathematics at the top 20 percent for the state of new jersey and classroom teachers are able to meet the needs of the students in their classes while also providing them with enrichment opportunities through differentiation including activities that are identified in the advanced math four and five lesson therefore in order to identify students for math four and five the district uses the top twenty

145percent of student math rich scores in each building and a math specialist teaches the advanced math then we reviewed some changes for quest some changes to the identification process were reviewed that identifies students for quest type 3 pull out activities k through 2 students will not be formally identified while grades 3 through 5 students will continue to be evaluated annually students in third and fourth grade will be given the cogat in the fall of 2022 fifth graders who choose to take the ctp5 in the spring for potential placement in advanced math or accelerated math will have the option to use scores from the spring or retake the ctp-5 in the fall of 2022 if a student retakes the test the newest score will be used students who score in the top 20 percent of their

146grade level will be invited to participate in the identification process the pros the purpose of the identification process is to identify academic ability task commitment and creativity for academic ability map scores are used for math and reading for task commitment a design challenge will be given in school with an individual and group component a change from previous home project from a previous home project for creativity profiles and contributing in creativity assessment the pca will be given to measure creativity students who took the assessment in the previous year can retake it or use their previous score but if they retake it then the new score will be used the results of the three assessments will be analyzed by grade and by building and the top three to five percent across the three domains will be able

147to participate in quest type three pull-out activities all students will receive quest as a part of the weekly special and lastly we were provided with the timeline and the rationale behind the long-term plan for technology in the winter of 2020 a small group of teachers began to investigate the district's vision of instructional technology they continued to meet throughout 2021 school year as teachers needed added support throughout virtual and hybrid learning the educational technology committee provided input and made recommendations for considering an inclusion in the upcoming district technology plan one of the recommendations was to investigate a monitoring system for use in district issued one-to-one devices and therefore four such monitoring systems are being explored at this time there is no monitoring of any devices occurring and there is no plan being explored that would allow

148for monitoring on any device other than a district issued one at the april 18th board of ed meeting a presentation that encompasses our questions as well as any questions received from the community will be addressed and our next curriculum meeting is this friday f sorry april 11th is the next board vet meeting okay does anyone have any questions we're up to the wellness committee report yes so wellness met on march 17th st patrick's day we first had an update from the elementary school principals who assured us that there were no leprechauns injured in leper contracts and all have been released healthy and rumor had that some coins were collected okay well i was just making sure everybody's paying attention so for real we have been discussing at wellness now for the next couple of meetings

149we're going to be doing building specific wellness efforts so this month we were joined by dr lazavick and dr foley from oak street school so we had a ridge overview recap of the march 2nd wellness day we've talked about that extensively at various board meetings but the feedback from the staff and students since this happened after our meeting happened after the actual day was overwhelmingly positive each student attended four different modules they got to see a mentalist thank you to the pto they got to see the musical which was really appreciated by both the students involved as well as the students who got to watch parts of that and there were wellness modules for ninth and tenth graders the juniors got to hear about some journeys of four teachers to where they got where they

150came from and staff had to attend two sessions and most actually went to the other sessions as well so that was really a nice mix of student and staff interaction during the morning of march 2nd on that wellness day this afternoon was focused for the staff on the greater good module support staff also participated and overall dr lazavick said that they discussed a lot about about those modules and the whole idea that ridge high school is moving forward in its wellness culture that the culture isn't bad but they felt that they could be better they were working on a collective understanding of where they were at and then taking actions that move toward increased school spirit connection and belonging at ridge not just to the clubs or sports or specific teachers but to the whole

151community the idea is to create a safe and supportive but serious environment the follow-up that's going to be happening in june they're going to work on moving forward making it even better and there's going to be discussion in department meetings and the support staff for the next few months at oak street the wellness has been focused wellness initiatives have been focused around their nests which are multi-level k-5 groups and they continue with their nests throughout all the years and that kind of supports the character education so a students are in nest and they get added new kindergartners as they come in the k5 overall um k-5 initiatives are working on structures and curriculum to help support students with wellness initiatives the id um dr foley talked a little bit about that in the moment you

152know teachers are feeling pretty exhausted a long couple of years of virtual and in-person teaching and that in order to help support our students we also need to do staff wellness in addition to taking care of our students the wellness day that they did on march 2nd was sort of a reboot day they tried a pilot program it was very experimental they wanted to try something new it was a quote non-academic day to connect with students so each there were no academics but tons of learning going on it involved all students and staff but was done primarily in within the classrooms working on developing castle competencies in a new way through play interactive activities non-academic activities the feedback was was great for they they asked students they asked the teachers and the administration is looking

153to help share what they learned from this day and figure out how to tweak it as well as maybe do the model again in the afternoon of that half day the faculty also gathered to discuss the greater good modules and talk about what they learned from that and how to apply it to teaching our kids the second half of our conversation at wellness discussed the revisiting the board of ed presentation on the 14th of march about the placement for the college placement for class of 2021 and uh mr seiat shared an article out of the stanford success challenge success about why engagement matters more than selectivity about colleges mrs ms fox shared a new slide that was prepared and proposed with detailed information about the number of students admitted and enrolled to various levels of

154colleges not just the ivs we had a long conversation about how to educate parents and students about the difference between selectivity and quality what the appropriate timing for this information is for parents and for students and discussed that there had been previously as a scheduled workshop that have been planned by the guidance office about this issue but was cancelled due to covet shutdowns we did discuss the idea of having a workshop for parents of younger students in the district and what that would look like and topics that would cover regarding the college process we also discussed and this is particular to wellness the impact on the mental health and wellness of our students with such a focus and emphasis on just the most selective college admission as the ultimate result of their education we discussed

155the idea that students should be encouraged to find the right match for their goals not just focusing on selectivity that we don't want to encourage the race to nowhere mentality and i'll put race to nowhere in quotations that is a an official it was a program in a movie which was a big concern about five years ago and finally we discussed the idea of educating parents about all that the school is actually doing to support students in their applications to college and that there isn't really something lacking in either our education or our counseling project process but rather the selectivity of college admissions continues to be a challenge and our high achieving students are competing with students not only across new jersey but the nation and around the world and they're being very successful the

156next meeting of wellness is april 28th does anyone have any questions okay we're up to liaison committee reports does anyone have any karen oh jen just very quickly i just wanted to give an update that there is a special special services is offering their next lunch and learn it's march 30th from 12 to 1 and the topic is the transition process and it's being presented by allison reed so i just wanted give a shout out to that because i know that they have been very successful with the lunch and learns and they have really been asking for this information to be pushed out as much as possible thank you no one else okay we're up to public comment on non-agenda items oh karen has i did have one thing i thought it wasn't a report

157i just wanted to share something that was shared by the municipal alliance um there is uh naloxone um training that's uh what the medication in narcan um on april 25th it's being delivered by the robert wood johnson medical school staff and it is a virtual event and you can register by emailing s condis s-c-o-n-d-a-s at njprevent.com okay thank you so now we're up to public comment on non-agenda items if anyone has a comment please tell us your name and address and then you can sign in on the clipboard afterwards if you want good evening i'm frank klaus 18 owns court this is probably my second board of ed meeting and i promise next time i will bring a pencil um there's a couple different points that i'm curious about so the first one regarding the

158new policies on on the covet i was a little bit confused i understand that if a student test positive for kovid is vaccinated and chooses to wear a mask they're able to come back to school if they are tested regularly it is confusing to me to understand what are they being tested for if we know they are positive for covet and what the difference in those tests will mean if i understood that correctly or not in the curriculum i understood that accelerated math is an intense math course for fifth and sixth graders is a student able to place into accelerated math in between those two years so if they didn't place into to go into fifth grade can they place him to go into the sixth grade and then going back to the original agenda

159items on the uh the financials thank you very much for the presentation i thought it very interesting that the student numbers have gone down 15 and the cost per student has gone up of teachers approximately 21 percent and i really appreciated that that was due greatly in part to the fact the number of teachers has stayed the same while the number of students has gone down i would be very interested to see as we move forward in the budgeting process a couple of statistics how has the class size changed because i'd be very curious to know if the change in the teachers to students is being used to lower the course load for the teachers or increase the focus on the students i think it would be much more telling for the taxpayers and the

160parents to understand not the pay per student but the pay per teacher so if we could see over those six years how the average salary for the teachers has changed and i'll be very curious to see a breakdown of teachers versus how the pay has changed for the administrative staff over the six years as well thank you very much cody smith 36 rollout drive uh just like a couple questions um after i got up and spoke a couple of times mr solomon reached out to me we had a good conversation i think we spent an hour and 15 minutes on the phone um unfortunately i was it two hours i i had an hour and fifty so two hours um and uh uh and while there was a lot of things that he couldn't talk

161about uh my concern about what happened in the appointment process still stands i still believe that um some of the members should have recused themselves from participating in that the second thing on the committee assignments uh once again um we had a long discussion about that but i'm still not sure why miss light isn't on the finance committee as a cpa and a financial expert any company any public company that has an audit committee has to have financial experts i'm not sure why we don't have a financial expert she would qualify as a financial expert in a public company setting why we don't have a financial expert on the finance committee the other thing though i think that i found interesting was that when i asked whether or not somebody could attend one of the

162board members could attend one of the committee meetings as an alternate or otherwise i believe if my understanding is correct the answer to that is no because then we would have a majority of the board members in the committee meeting and then that would be subject to the new jersey sunshine laws and that would have to be a public meeting and therefore even if somebody wanted to attend they couldn't and the alternate uh as miss light is on the finance committee cannot attend unless one of the other members uh uh cannot make it um which i found uh kind of interesting uh perhaps troubling uh but moreover um the notion that we don't want the public at the committee meetings i well i can understand that that might become burdensome and we'd have to open

163up those committee meetings when i sit here tonight and i listen to the reports of the various chairs doing a very good job talking about what happened in the committee meetings and then i look at the agenda as a member of the public i don't have any ability to prepare to ask any questions we come to the agenda questions early in the meeting i think the wellness committee i think that's not even on the agenda it says report in progress some of the finance things i don't know what the background is the policy we read all these changes in the policy i don't know how as a member of the public i can look at that and see what those changes are so that i can become informed before this meeting and be able to

164comment on something if i choose to comment so i i'd like you to uh if you would address that and i'm happy to take it offline and talk to somebody else outside of this meeting about that and then unrelated but with respect to the diversity consultant next week i'm not sure if you were going through that i missed what you said was going to be public but for some of us who'll be traveling and we'll be able to participate in the zoom call my question is will that be recorded where i can go back and look at that later i'm not sure when you were talking if that's what you're talking about okay thank you thank you very much is there anyone else here in person for public comment is there anybody on zoom waiting

165to come in no okay so at this point we'll close public comment um there were a lot of detailed questions which i'm going to let other people answer about covid policy um and the accelerated math placement timeline um and then about the budget um in class size um just to respond to the last comments um from mr smith i i had heard from mr salmon that you had a conversation um there's two things that you brought up that i wanted to speak to i guess i'll start with the second one in terms of committees versus public meetings um so there are boards as mr croot knows because he serves on other boards in the state that serve they work as a committee of the whole so they don't have committees that the whole board meets

166for everything and most of those districts are small districts that don't cover as much uh stuff where there are k-8 districts i can't imagine if all of us had to sit even though nick has to sit through most of it through all all of these meetings because that would be a million hours and so it's not an option to have um public meetings like to have committees publicly unless the whole committee is it's a public meeting right so then the whole board would be invited so that's how those boards function generally they have work sessions in public at night and they generally don't cover that much detail from people i've talked to in other districts they don't get into the level of detail so you do lose something doing it that way because you just

167can't be there every night of the week so i feel like um it's a it's a trade-off you know that then everything would be a public meeting but you wouldn't be able to cover as much ground so that's kind of my personal um you know experience talking to people in other districts about that um in terms of our committees and the alternates um we can't have more than four people at a meeting because of the sunshine laws like mr salmon said um in terms of the finance committee and ms light being the alternate on it um you know she's a new board member and just had her financing we just had it on thursday last week so i i was perfectly happy to like stuff down and let her come to some finance meetings because

168i've been serving on it for many years and they can be kind of long um and i have a lot of work to do on my dissertation so the intent of her um being the alternate was that she i knew she was interested in that committee and you know we did discuss that so um anyway um but and the broader thing about committees i think mr salmon probably explained when he talked to you like we don't serve in our what any kind of professional capacity on committees no matter what our professional background is so if someone's a teacher like um you know mrs white doesn't get involved in like writing the curriculum or telling the staff how to write the curriculum and things like that just because she has been a teacher um so that's

169that's not really our role so um yeah board members have interests and committees that they're interested in but that's not the role that we serve on those committees i don't know if you want to show me in there yeah i just want to read it reiterate two things that i said during that conversation um number one is that as i mentioned commit other board members that are not on the committee are not precluded from coming to the board meeting uh to the committee meeting they can ask to come if they for example have an issue that they want to hear about or they are bringing to the committee that i have not seen really but it's not precluded it's not stopped there's no rule from stopping that uh the alternate is like i mentioned on

170the phone kind of the first person off the bench if somebody else can come that happens a lot or if that person wants to come and wants to sit in on the committee they're more than welcome to say i would like to come to this committee meeting could somebody step aside for that meeting i mentioned that the other thing is that um uh the issue about um what was the other thing that you just said about uh the committee as of a whole versus the warden committees or you know getting the materials oh uh i don't know no i think it was something about how can i there was a question about like how can i know what's coming before the meeting happens right so as the agenda says like we report on progress of

171the committees so if you hear what happened tonight and you have a question then you can email us like what happened last time or you can watch the youtube playback and formulate questions that way this is great um i just want to kind of piggyback on mr simon's last comment and say a couple of things about like preparation for coming to the public meeting um if you look at the agenda in advance of the meeting and you see that the policy numbers that ms hira just shared with us this evening during her report all of them are accessible through the district website there is a place where you can look up each policy and the regulation that is paired with it as far as the public comment sections of the agenda i think it might

172be worth mentioning because i think it can be confusing the way it's termed but there's nothing that prohibits someone in the public from asking a question about agenda items in the non-agenda portion of the meeting public comment it's the other way around that that's that is not the case because we have to move through the business of the meeting and keeping it to public comment on agenda items at the beginning as a way to get through the business of the meeting other opportunities to address concerns or just general information that you're hearing in the course of a meeting like mr salmon said please by all means email us or contact us send us an email if you want to talk by phone but also be comfortable to come forward next time if you have something

173that you heard that you feel like you didn't have a chance to prepare for and you go home and you look into it or talk to other people certainly you can bring that question up again or that concern up again at the next meeting in two weeks i remember the other thing experts okay um we're not experts as i mentioned when we talked on the phone um the the board uses the administration and service providers as experts and we rely on the information that they provide to us we are not relying on the opinion of a board member in formulating a path of path forward for ourselves so for example on the bond refunding nobody in the finance committee was proposing how to administer the bond refunding or whether to execute the bond refunding that

174was done in consultation with board council a bond council and the the district's financial advisor in addition to the input provided by mr mclaughlin um so nobody on the finance committee there was we weren't relying on anybody from the finance committee regardless of what their background is the same way we don't rely on anybody from the policy committee regardless of what their background is or the curriculum committee regardless of what their background is nobody on the board here is we're relying on their opinion on how the the board um charge progress so i just want to make that clear i remember that and i'm just going to say if you want to back out of any meetings for the finance committee i'm happy to attend whatever ones you know i'm sure i'll find an opportunity

175um especially in the summer now because it does meet over the summer um so in terms of the other questions i think there was a covid one that i'm sure you can easily address that one i will try the uh the evolving uh cobit protocols so fortunately we've gotten to the point now where uh we've been able to pretty much keep kids in school but just to kind of run through it quickly i think the question was about whether or not uh someone could come to school with covid the answer is no the student or the the staff member would have to be out of school for at least five days they they may return to school on day six what we've been asking for and encouraging is for folks to take a uh a

176home test if you will uh prior to coming into school on day six it's we're strongly encouraging it uh but we are we're not uh requiring it we are requiring that kids and staff wear a mask for days six to ten after having tested positive for covid the next situation we talked about was if somebody was a close contact in in the case of being in close contact we're asking for a quarantine for 10 days if not up to date on their vaccination status or to participate in the mask to stay program so you can come to school as long as you're participating in the mask to stay program regardless of vaccination status all asymptomatic close contacts have to wear a mask for seven days from the last date of exposure if you are not

177up to date on vaccination and your close contact then in that case in addition to the mask to stay program you need to participate in the test to stay program and and in that case we're talking about uh testing every other day uh and what again we're asking uh kids to do is to take the test in the morning before they come to school and then the last situation was if somebody was a household close contact in that case regardless of the vaccination status we're asking the kids to quarantine for 10 days or to participate in the mass to stay program and and and that would allow the student to continue to come to school but they would have to test each and every morning again regardless of vaccination status and of course wear a

178mask in school for seven days from the last date of exposure so this has been working well we we have had many folks involved in both mass to stay and test to stay we have of course been encouraging folks to take advantage of uh quote unquote free ways to get these home rapid antigen test kits however we have also been taking advantage of different programs that are being offered by the state of new jersey to collect kits here as well in fact just in the last few days we received a major delivery of several thousand uh of these test kits that we can uh help uh families with if they're uh in need uh and in particular if they are participating in the test to stay program we can provide families with the with the

179test kits certainly um you know if they need them uh and and help them uh to participate in that program uh and even if someone is tested positive uh if they need a test kit they seem to be pretty readily available but they need a test kit we'd certainly be happy to to send one home because we think it's smart to test on day six before coming into school after having tested positive for kobe okay i think there was a question about the accelerated math i don't know kristin you want to jump in there sure i think the question was whether students can qualify for the two-year accelerated pathway beyond their entry into fifth grade when we talked about that criteria so yes students entering sixth grade have an opportunity to what we call on-ramp

180by qualifying to move into accelerated math in sixth grade and again there is criteria for sixth grade students to qualify for algebra in seventh grade which is also that two-year accelerated pathway so the answer to that question was yes um okay and then i think there was um a couple of questions related to the budget presentation do you want to sure so um i i certainly appreciate the the the mathematics and the the uh dynamic between the declining enrollment uh and the uh per pupil cost expenditures and what's driving that i think we had some discussion uh when the board uh was seated as one of the board members asked a similar question about that uh and and obviously i think that the simplest explanation to think about it is if you imagine you know

18123 students in a class and three or four of the students drop away from your enrollment then obviously you have a declining enrollment in that particular classroom so just looking at it from that single microcosm of a singular room uh a few students leave and you recalculate the per pupil cost it's going to be changed significantly if the class size goes from 23 to 20 and then the next year salary and health benefits costs go up and your denominator is no longer 23 but now it's 20. so you're going to see an increase in uh per pupil expenditure and that's pretty much what we see happening here obviously our challenge in moving forward to try to manage our budget is to take take into account class size as it evolves with the change in enrollment

182and look for where breakpoints make sense right because at some point the class size will will get low enough in aggregate when you get outside the microcosm of a single class maybe across a grade level within a school you might see okay well we had four second grade classes and if we lose enough students from each one now maybe we only need three second grade classrooms and and this is the kind of thing that's been going on uh for the last several years where we look for these opportunities uh where it makes sense is to still have a reasonable class size with respect to uh what we want to see between the students and the teacher and also um to be able to manage uh budgetary costs and and realign resources where it's appropriate so

183that that is generally what is going on uh i think most of all uh as we look forward we have to we have to kind of take a look at where do these things break right because that's that's where um the class size issues come into play where do the numbers break where the sectioning makes sense that you may be able to reduce sections if if that's the goal and obviously the other consideration is programs right because in some cases you have classes running at a lower than what might be viewed as a normal class size it's lower than that because the program is either required perhaps it's required because you have students with an iep certain programs are necessary and and maybe the enrollment is low just because of the number of students that

184need that particular service that can drive a small class size um you know planning for the unanticipated can sometimes create blips in class size you may anticipate a little higher enrollment when you're setting up your budget uh in in february or march or april and things don't play out quite that way as you go through new new enrollments uh in kindergarten especially or over the summer students coming and going the other thing that can happen is you set up your budget and students make adjustments in the classes that they want over the summer so you have variations that can happen there that affect class size and i and i also think it's important to recognize sometimes the questions come down to programs and elective programs and when class size gets to be at a certain

185point you may raise questions about whether or not you want to maintain a program um i think that uh as as a philosophy here we're loath to see good programs go away but it is something that we do look at we will be talking about class size as we move forward into the spring uh and certainly that has an impact on the overall picture of uh the the cost that we anticipate uh typically what we what we manage here is a budget that gets struck in the winter and spring and then as we move forward and finish ieps finish scheduling look at what's going on with staff that are coming and going there are sometimes adjustments by the time we get to the school year in in september we even see it sometimes with unexpected

186uh move-ins that that may happen whether it's in a special area program that you need to now create a section for or perhaps it was unanticipated blip in the first grade at some elementary school because it just happened that way and for whatever reason we saw a bunch of first graders move in in a certain part of town so class size is certainly a dynamic and fluid thing and i think you have to balance the needs of the students and whether or not you're going to remove a program when you're thoughtful about class size yeah i just wanted to also mention i mean aside from the normal class size issues in terms of you know projecting what we think is going to happen which is a little bit unpredictable although the demographers you know estimates

187were pretty accurate for a couple you know the first couple years we have you know the situation where we deliberately decrease class size by hiring more teachers during covid so that we could have you know um virtual classrooms for the elementary students and so we that was a deliberate decision which is a blip in the um slide you know what i mean so this year you know coming out of the pandemic we still don't know for sure how many students to anticipate and like in my mind this year was not a good year to like try to make big classes when the poor kids haven't been in normal school for two years and we want to try to get them back up to speed so going forward this is definitely be something we're looking at

188um and you know closely because we have to see what the demographics actually come out to be so if i could just comment i'm sorry yeah we're not allowed to let it back and forth after public comment is closed you can talk to us after an email list sorry um okay so we're up to board forum does anyone think what do you have anything for board forum yeah okay we need a motion for adjournment this light and mr salmon all in favor okay thank you all i wanted to say is that i think you completely must understand i think