001Motion to reconvene the meeting. public meeting at 7:38. Thank you. Rob second. All in favor? I Please stand for the pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for it stands. One nation under God, indivisibley andice for all. Good evening everyone. Um, as you can see, we're a smaller board. Uh, tonight uh there were two family emergencies uh that were last minute. So, um I'm sure both of them are uh apologetic, but uh hopefully we can have them at the next meeting. All right. So, board announcements. Uh anyone have anything to share? No. Um, just the one short little thing I can share is that uh when I was dropping off my daughter this morning at Ka Lane, I saw all the the the all the things in
002the field set up for the the fun run and I heard they made their mark. So, uh I know we have a school district that's waiting for something um something very positive. Um, but yes, uh, it's I I know the kids had a great time today. Uh, my daughter came home so excited to share. Um, so I'm very appreciative for the the district for putting on that event. Um, if there's nothing else, superintendent announcements. So, welcome everyone. It's great to see so many people here. We have a lot going on tonight. Uh, just to echo Mr. Finn's comments, Cottage Lane fundraiser this morning was awesome. Dr. Scarth, Dr. page, our PTA president, Laura Schwab, um, and other PTA leadership. Thank you for organizing that. $25,000 was raised and I was sharing that many years ago
003when I came, we had three elementary schools and the total combined fundraising between all three schools didn't even reach that mark. So, that's incredible. Congratulations. So tonight we are uh here to recognize some students. But before we do that, I want to recognize one of our colleagues. And I want to begin uh by recognizing actually one of our former Tapid High School graduates for continuing to pursue their education somewhat long after graduating from Tapenzee High School. So please join me in congratulating Dr. Rudy Arietta who just completed who just completed his doctoral coursework and dissertation at Manhattanville College. Rudy, this is an amazing accomplishment. And after students present, we're going to take a short recess and you can join us next door for some chocolate cake. I know how health consscious you are, but Genie
004said you love chocolate cake. It's only 320 calories per teaspoon. So, when we take a recess, I'm going to have some cake. Congratulations. I'm going to give Rudy a certificate. [Applause] And now moving on to our student recognition. So at our last board meeting, we invited all of the volunteers who volunteer for our local ambulance corps and fire departments. And we had quite a number of students come up. At the same time, eight of those students distinguish themselves by going on and uh getting their emergency medical technician certifications. And so I want to take this opportunity to recognize those students and just to say a few words. So the emergency medical training course is offered up in Pomona, New York across the county. It's an intensive endeavor that required a lot of time not only
005in the classroom but also out in the field. Emergency medical technicians have the knowledge and skills necessary to stabilize and safely transport patients ranging from non-emergency and life-threatening emergencies. We want to take this opportunity to thank you, congratulate you for your hard work, and thank you for providing such a valuable service to our entire community. We all rely on you very heavily and uh we're really happy to have you up here tonight. So, I'm going to call you up one by one and then we could take a group photo. So, please join me. And if they're not here, I know Mr. Roisher is here again. So, you can just give me the sign if if they couldn't make it. We'll make sure they get their certificate. Is Megan here tonight? Megan GC. I know she
006was here last time. Okay. I see Julia Spano. Come on up, Julia. [Applause] Stay up here. Yeah, no worries. Mate [Applause] Shing. You get two. Yep. I want to pronounce this right. Kira [Applause] Looo. Ria [Applause] Jose Nina Nina Gil both of them for you and Avery Carter. somewhere. All right. And also at the last meeting, uh, Mia Patronic was here, and I don't know if she's here tonight, but we'll make sure she gets her certificate. Congratulations to Mia. with these guys. Thanks. Just for a second. [Applause] All right, moving on to student presentations. So, we have students here tonight from our computer science program and computer science club, and they participate every year in a program in New York City called Project Invent. So, we have students here tonight that are going to share
007their projects uh with the school board and and the public. And then we also have Sobots, our robotics team, team 6911, who just got back from Houston, Texas, and they're here, many of them, almost all of you, uh, to talk to you about their experience. So, we're going to start with, um, Joseph and I'm Joey. Joey, sorry, Joey. Joey Juan to talk to us about uh, your project invent. Sure. Welcome. Um, okay. Do I need to turn this thing on or what? You just have to speak into it and loudly, but I see. Can everyone hear me? I'm sorry. I'm not very acquainted with device of this sort. Okay, that was probably a bit too much. Uh, all right. So, um, I'm Joey, a senior from Tabs High School. Um, many of you might not
008be that familiar with me because in fact, I am a transfer from California. However, I love this high school here and this school district and especially this computer science class which I got to do this project and event which me and my three awesome classmates have invented something to address some real world problems. So I would like to talk about that problem first which I think is recycling in our school district. Um this is Miss Ya on the screen and with her quotes. She's our Tapenzy High School S librarian if you are not familiar with her and she said there is very little recycling going on in our school even though there are labels on the trash cans. They every trash has been thrown into the same bin. So, we were thinking of a way
009that maybe could allow the recyclable materials to be actually separated and go where they should go instead of ending up in the landfill like almost everything else right now. So, here's a demo of our contraption. I'll bet it's a animation. So, okay. Um, right. So, the video is not playing. I don't know if this is a technical issue, but uh the idea is you have a cart and then you drop something into the cart and then it sorts for you. It's that simple. And this cart right here, it's relatively humble compared to that big beast that belongs to robotics. I know, but it gets the job perfectly done. All right. So, because as you can see, we don't have much of prototype right now. So instead of looking at that I would like you to
010introduce you to the works behind the scene on this project which is the AI model something that's very ri uh viral amongst this age and I would like to to show you the three methods I use to improve the AI models performance. So, okay, this might be a problem because um my presentation's heavily reliant on animations and if there isn't, there's not going to be anything on the board. I'm I'm worried. Yes. So, excuse me for a second. Or perhaps hopefully they're going to work on it. Let's see. This wasn't pre-planned to challenge Joey in public. We're just uh he seems very positive. Although, notice his perseverance and willingness to try to get this to work. All right, just in the interest of time, while they're troubleshooting that I'm going to invite up Colum Sjan
011Colum to talk about his project invent uh project from last year which they're still working on called way to go. Does he need it? Does he screen too? I don't know. Both of them. Yeah. All right. Sorry. We'll figure it out. I don't know if I can keep things like awesome. Can never have that happen. No. Okay, here we go. All right. Okay, you guys are good. All right, Joey, you're back up. Hello. Very good. Oh, hello. Hello. All right. All right. So, uh, fortunately, the issue is resolved and we may resume with our presentation. So, just a quick recap. I'm Joey and yes, I got a lot of people forgetting my name. So, I've been called Jack, Joseph, whatever. So, uh, Mr. Kula is perfectly fine. All right. So, recap. Miss and a lot
012of us think that there's a lack of recycling in our school and I have um me and my uh teammates have um done a contraption to automatically sort trash. All right. So now onto the neuronet network. So here on screen a simplified illustration of a neuronet network. It consists of a lot of nodes and um edges connecting them. What you do is you dump a data into it and after some linear algebra magic you get the result. A simple one. Can you show the simple one? Um yes there will be a simple one. So this on here is actually um already a very simplified version. The re the reality is much bigger and as a consequence it also has a rather good accuracy 95% on trash classification. However, that model size does come with a
013cost, which is the time to run it has become intolerably slow, which I mean 60 seconds for a single run because we're using a not very capable computer, which is in the upright corner of Raspberry Pi for anyone who knows that. I'm sorry. So, because no one wants their trash to be sorted for an entire minute, I had to downscale the model. However, the results are not very satisfying. The accuracy dropped to 71% which is much less than desirable. So today we I'm going to introduce three methods that I used that can drop the model size without sacrificing too much accuracy. So first we'll go into quantization. So um the concept of quantization builds on the principle that in a neural network calculations does not have to be too precise especially in the case where
014we're only sorting trashes into a finite amount of categories which means if I ask anyone to find probably the square of pi I I think no one got the answer in that amount of time. Um most people pull out a calculator but if I tell you you can just get the results and we'll accept it with a margin of like one then you can just calculate 3^ squ and it's nine and it's very fast. So that's what we do to a model. And so if we look at one single computation in a neural network like this it goes from a rather hideous oh sorry a rather hideous computation to a rather easy one. So the second uh technique I would like to introduce is pruning. And this is based on the concept that different nodes
015in a neural network have different importance. For example, if you're looking at an image of a plastic bottle and you want to determine what kind of trash that is, you might look at certain important things. Maybe you'll see that this thing is transparent, so it's probably glass or plastic. Then you will see there's a lot of wrinkles and it's crumbled. then you know this is a crumbled water bottle and you know the correct thing to put it in. However, while we can train neuronet networks to p to perceive uh something as something um we cannot train the way how they perceive it. For example, it might look at the things I just described but might also look at the things around it. Maybe we'll look at the logo things are of lesser importance and the
016concept of pruning is finding out no those nodes with lesser importance to the results and printing them by and by removing them you get you do less computation and thus faster computation. All right. So finally that brings us to our third technique which is called distillation. In a sense I would say this is the most befitting method for this scene for here because it involves a teacher model and a student model. So if we have an image of a plastic bottle we'll take a larger more precise but slower teacher model and take a look at what it says. So what a teacher model will do is it will output a bunch of things that it think it would be with a confidence value associated with them. So here you can see that um it's probably
017a bit small but uh it thinks that it's 90% uh likely to be plastic and 64% likely to be glass and so on. And if we look at a student model, which is one that is smaller, faster, but less precise, you can see that um give it a second to run. And you will see that while it also predicts plastic as the most likely trash in the scene, it sort of confuses between plastic and glass given that there is only a 5% confidence change between them. So what we do is we'll use what we call a loss function to compare the difference between the teacher and student model and we'll try to adjust the student model to the teacher. So as a result the output of the student model will also match that of the
018teacher. The key of this method is the output of a teacher's model can contain much richer information than just the label of an image and therefore there is more efficient training and therefore the student model is more accurate. All right. And thus the summation of all three methods would bring the accuracy from 71% to 94% while keeping the inference time the same. All right. Then that will be the end of my presentation today. I would like to [Applause] thank I would like to thank the man community for this awesome animation engine. Without that all of these animation you see today would not have been possible. And of course, Miss Ya and Miss Connell right here for their continued guidance and support through this project. And of course, all of you right here for watching this
019presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Joey. Questions? Good. Good. All right. Thank you. All right. Next up, Colum. [Applause] Hello everybody. Um my name is Callum T John. I'm a senior at this high school at the Tapen High School. Um and today I'm going to talk a little bit about a potential solution um towards a more efficient towards a more environmentally friendly busing system for our school for our school district. So let's talk a little bit about the problems with our school district. As you know, our buses take a predetermined route and they stop at every single stop whether you like it or not. The students not there, doesn't matter. Still going to stop. Um and so I think the biggest issue with this is pollution. So I think there's some kind of misconception between um
020buses being very environmentally friendly. They are in fact not. Um they are not much better than car pooling. Um, and in general, they are producing a ton of carbon emissions. Um, including that, they're also stopping the five or six cars behind them trying to get to where they're trying to be. Um, and so that also increases pollution from those cars having to stop and wait for the buses. So, what my team did um me and eight others um last year was create a project called Way to Go. And I'm going to briefly summarize this. Um, first up is a busing signup. So, parents would sign their children up for designated days that they needed pickup and drop off um from the school to and from the school. Next, we would use AI busing routes, which
021would automatically map the most efficient uh most environmentally friendly route for the bus to take instead of taking some predetermined path. Um and then lastly would be the RFD um system which I'll be talking to you shortly about. So what is the purpose of the RFID reader system? Um there's already a sign up for parents. Um so that way you get the information of when you need to pick up and drop. But let's say there is an emergency and everybody has to leave the school. Here is when parents haven't signed their kids up but the parents still need to go at home, right? And so this is where this kind of system comes into play, right? You are tracking pickup and drop off and you're using this information for future data analysis. Um let's say
022students aren't taking the bus um or utilizing only half the bus, then you don't need to drive around this big hulky diesel engine that is spewing carbon emissions everywhere. So I'm going to do a quick demo. It's going to be very brief on how this works. Uh, can everybody hear me okay without the microphone? So, I know it might be a little bit hard to see, but um, this is the RFD scann that would go in any kid's backpack. Um, so you kind of see here a little bit. I'm just going to start the program. and it's going to start scanning for RBD cards, right? And so very simply put, RBD card, you walk onto the bus, right? It will scan this and it will say getting on the bus and it will have a
023unique ID to risk which you can apply to any student and it will put that into a list, right? When I walk off the bus, it's going to say getting off the bus. Very simple, right? And it removes you from the list. um which is extremely important. These tags will not be held by the children and as you know public transportation you have to stay in your car. You do not have to do this and this tag can be your backpack. So then again I'm wearing a backpack if I here it would scan at the same thing. And so this is one of the most important aspects for this project. Um simply put that you're not going to have a cloud students or paper students having to scan their card every time, right? And so
024this way you leave it into their backpack, right? And they are able to um scan onto the bus without any issues. Um and so this works with backpacks, right? If it's covered, anything like that. It does not need direct line of sight or anything like that. Um, it is also fine with computers or laptops if you're worried about interference of that sort. The RFID reader has been tuned for that. Um, and so there's really no complications with this system unless you're sticking your RFID card in a metal tube. I hope nobody's going to do that. So, what does this mean? using the way to go system you are one reducing costs purely based on hey we don't need to use so many buses and we don't need to always use the bigger buses all the
025time um also saves time saves time for the district saves times for the busing system um the district has to in case a parent is wondering where their child is um the parent has to look up where that child is um and so from what I know it is quite difficult to find that information and it usually takes a long time so for the school district it is very easy to see which student is on what bus in current time. Um and then finally you have increased safety for the students. So for the cottage lane um and the younger kids right if they get accidentally onto the wrong bus um you will know that they are on the wrong bus. Future steps. As you can see this system is hooked up to my computer. It
026is not isolated which would be like on a bus. So that would be a future step having this completely run on a pi. Um next would be data organization. So right now I have all of the information being stored in an array in the code. Um I would like to better organize that based on grade, districts, age, things like that. Um and then finally safety notifications for the parents. So when your child is actually getting onto the bus and off the bus, you will be able to see that in real time. um instead of scratching your head and winning uh wondering when your child's going to come home and if they gone on the wrong on the right bus. Thank you. Thank you, Colum. So, just for the audience, the plan is to pilot this.
027Uh they've been working on this for about 2 years, and it'd be really great for parents. Like Colum said, you'll know when your kids are on and off the bus. It will also help us with efficiencies because the back end of this, the bus driver, when they get on the bus, they're going to route the most expedient way possible and not have to stop at houses that kids aren't getting on the bus. So, great job, guys. And last but not least, Sobots 6911, welcome. I just want to say something about the Oh, sorry. Sorry. Question comment. Just one one thing about the presentations. I I I work in um an industry where there's lots of pitching, investing. I'm serious and I do some coaching to help people like my age try to raise capital for
028their startup companies. I actually think these presentations were better than some that I've seen from people at PhDs and MBAs and trying to start companies. Very succinct and very um the the big the best takeaway from your presentations was like very little on your slides but extraordinarily clear. It's very hard to teach that. And I was waiting at the end of both of those because I've been to so many angel events and investor events like what is your ask? Like do you need $2 million to like start this and roll this out to some places? Like I think some of them have I think they actually have that potential. So I encourage the I encourage like that entire course to like try to take the next step of like let's not just think of like
029how to solve this problem, but maybe you can monetize this and actually make a company around that. So, I don't know if that happens or not, but I'm being completely earnest. I thought those pitches were amazing and I was just waiting like where's the ask slide that we need two million to hire some people and start to make some prototype. So, both both were both were very good, extremely impressed. I work in like the venture industry. So, I've seen so many pictures that were absolutely horrible and those were completely opposite. Thanks, Dr. Coleman. So, just to to piggyback on that, the the team did go down and they go every year to present at Project Invent in Manhattan. They're presenting to uh tech CEOs companies and they did win the Moonshot Award last year for
030the Way to Go app. So, they did get $500. They're well on their [Laughter] way. Thank you guys. All right, Luca, are you ready? All right. Uh hello everybody. Uh my name is Lucas Aoswood. I'm one of the four project managers um for Sobots. And today we're going to talk about our team and um our experience at Worlds. In front of you is an outreach booklet that has all of our events that we do throughout the year. Um there's also a button from our team and a picture and the one pager that has all the information about our robot. Hello, my name is Kiana. I'm a freshman. I joined the robotics team this year. I'm on the software sub team, but I really like outreach events, so I'm going to tell you about one of
031those. So, this year we made a stronger connection with the Girl Scouts. Julian Warren, the director of the Hudson Valley Girl Scouts, reached out to us and asked our team if we could support local troops by helping them earn robotics badges at various levels. Recently, we hosted three troops from Cottage Lane at our outreach event using Edison V3s, which are these small educational robots that use block coding. We introduced them to the Edison, teaching them basic coding and also showing them more advanced code so that they can see the possibilities of computer science and robotics. In particular, there was one activity where we preloaded and played some sumo wrestling code and the girls really like that. They were so excited they kept asking what's next and this is what Sobos is all about. Inspiring and
032nurturing an interest in STEM in the future generations, especially in the little girls. [Applause] Hi, I'm N and I'm the design lead. Our sub team has grown significantly over the past year. One of the major changes made was switching from Fusion 360 software to Unshape, a free and web-based software that allowed the new students to learn CAD more efficiently and quickly. Alex Gatley, a graduated alumnus, has come back to help guide the design team to success. He was a very crucial part of the success of the design sub team, and we are very grateful for his support and dedication to the team. [Applause] Hi, my name is Jaywan and I'm Adrian and we're the co-software leads of our school's robotics team. And while many people think of robotics software as just controlling and programming the
033robot, it's really far beyond that. We help teach coding and software development at outreach events introducing students in our community to programming and technology. In addition to our work with the robot, we also develop software projects to support our team and community. This includes building websites to showcase our work, creating an attendance application to keep track of our team members, and running interactive coding workshops for the younger students uh through presentations and projects. Our goal is not just to build like a competitive robot, but to inspire the next generations of engineers and programmers. [Applause] Hello, my name is Alana Sheridan and I'm a member of the software sub team. This year I'm in the computer science capstone class at our school where I learned web development using different coding languages like CSS and HTML. And
034I was able to apply this experience to the robotics team. Using what I learned in class, I was able to redesign and build a new website for our team. And this site helps us share our accomplishments, promote outreach, and connect with sponsors and the community. [Applause] Hello. Um, I'm back. So, one of my favorite initiatives within our team is our Crescendo Cafe, which is an afterchool at cafe managed by our team. The cafe runs Monday through Thursday from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. and serves a variety of snacks and beverages like ramen, Gatorade, and a new addition, which is ice cream. Crescendo Cafe provides a welcoming space for students involved in after-school activities and offers a unique opportunity to foster community and also give members of our team an experience in running a business. The cafe
035generates about $100 in daily revenue which not only reflects our team's dedication to the shop but also its popularity within our school. [Applause] Hi, my name is Esther Hong and I'm the finance lead of this team. Um, I'm going to share some finances for our team with you. Um, so, um, at the beginning of the season, we started out with $3,742. Over the course of the year, our 71 members through a combination of donations, sponsorships, and four fundraising activities raised a total of 62,358. [Applause] In addition to that, we secured 12 local corporate sponsorships, including nine sustaining sponsors, some of which having supported our team since our inception in 2017. We're grateful for the $21,500 of inkind donations we received from local businesses in our community. Um, and they promoted efficiency during our hectic robot
036build season. We spent $9,282 on materials and $1,400 on registration for our three offseason events this year. Our ongoing fundraiser, which Luka just talked about, Crescendo Cafe, has raised $5,114 just this year. For the two short weeks leading up to the first championship in Texas, our team with great support from our parents rallied and raised a total of $20,629. With the huge support from our district and all of our sponsors, we competed in three regional competitions, won four team awards, won two individual awards, and competed for the fourth time at the 2025 first championship in Houston, Texas, wrapping up our 2025 FRC season. Hello, I'm Cassie and I'm the co-p project manager of Sobots and we've had an incredibly successful successful season so far. We've won six awards and specifically at our local re regional
037Hudson the Hudson Valley regional we won the judges award which is in recognition of our team's efforts and performance. Along with this, our mentor and adviser, Miss Connell, won the Woody Flowers Award, which recognizes an individual who has done an astounding job of motivation through communication while also challenging the students to be clear in their communications as well. We truly are grateful to have her. One more highlight I'd like to note is that we won the engineering inspiration award at the Fingerlakes Regional for the second year in a row. This award recognizes a team's success in advancing respect and apprec appreciation for engineering and STEM within their school institution and community. This allowed us to qualify for the world's championship yet again this year. [Applause] Hello. Um if you don't already know me, my name
038is Callum and I'm the other co-ro manager of this team. Continuing where Cassidy left off, um we won, um at New York, at the uh Tech Valley Regional, we won the creativity award, which is given to a team um that creates an exceptionally unique solution to the game. Um, additionally, our mentor, Mr. Got Leeb won the volunteer award, an award given to a volunteer who went above and beyond to make sure the composition flowed as smoothly as possible. Um for your information, without Mr. forgot making the parts for the actual game um and actually managing the entirety of the traffic for load in and load out of these massive robots and their pits. Um this competition may have never occurred in the first place. So thank you Mr. Gotautly for [Applause] that. And then finally
039at the Fingerlakes regional, I think this is pretty self-explanatory, but we were regional winners. Um, and so this is just another testament to how hard our team worked on our competition robot and all of the outreach we do in general. Um, yes, thank you. [Applause] Hello, my name is Jacob Kim and I am a sophomore. A highlight of the World Championships in Houston was the opportunities offered at the competition. The free seminars offered at Worlds provided me a specific direction for what I wanted to do on the team, which is to help other people with the skills that I have in order to strengthen my team and my community. Overall, I love the way how the world's competition was able to foster a positive environment where I could be inspired throughout the competition and further
040my passion in robotics. Hi, my name is Dia and I'm a freshman. One of the main things I did at World Championship was connect with others. My friends and I often went around talking to teams during conferences, pit scouting, or during our free time. I enjoyed meeting people from not only other states from from other countries. I specifically remember playing Jenga with a few people from another team as I learned about their personal experiences with robotics. Interacting with others allowed me to learn about their culture, especially in the pit area. All of the teams were extremely friendly, which allowed to for me to have a positive experience at [Applause] Worlds. Hi everyone, I'm Yuri. I'm a sophomore. This is my first year in the team. I joined robotics to gain experience in programming and since
041then I've learned so much from my project mentors and peers. Their guidance has helped me grow as a person and set a stronger path for my future. Next year I plan to stay committed to the team and I may even take on a role in as a leadership and programming. Thank you. Hi, I'm Isaac, a freshman on the team. I can confidently say that joining robotics has been a highlight of my year. Throughout the season, I've developed important skills like collaborating with teachers and teammates, um, communicating ideas clearly, and taking responsibility, especially in areas like understanding and writing the prestigious impact award, and managing the team's finances. As a new member, I'm proud of these achievements, and I'm grateful I accomplished them in such a dedicated and supportive environment. Robotics has made me excited for
042high school and I feel more prepared to take on challenges and opportunities in the future. [Applause] Hello, my name is Remy and as a freshman, joining Sobots has been an incredible learning experience for me as a software member on the team. I've learned many topics related to coding robots, such as how to make a robot move by learning to code its drivetrain or how to make a bright LED light on the robot display various vibrant colors. I have learned how to code with Java in a program known as WPI lib and have been taught by other students as well as my teachers how to complete various tasks using the program. In the future, I also plan to help my team assist others in coding, more specifically in certain schools in Kenya through the Kimi program.
043Besides coding and utilizing different online programs to learn more about robots, I've also learned about them about team building as well and how to work together with my peers to accomplish great things together. [Applause] So, we're going to start the robot and demo the robot. But I'm Obby. I'm a project manager in training. And this year's game was a little complicated, but I think we did it pretty well. We have So, we have two game pieces. This is one of them. This is called the core which is just a PVC pipe that we take and we put on the reef over there. And we also have which we take from the reef or the ground and we put it in the processor which is on the other side of the field which allows for the
044other team player to shoot in the net or we can shoot it directly into the net. So on the reef which is the main scoring part of the field there are four levels. Each level gives us a different amount of points. I'll say a bit. You have to you have two minutes and 15 seconds to score on each level. However much you want. And level one, which is the bottom right down here. The least amount of points of two points. Then level two gives us three. Level four. And we'll show intake and level one first. Sorry. No worries. So this is our 2025 season robot hydra for the race season. And when designing it early on we decided we wanted to be not just good at everything but great at everything. So we took into
045account that we need an elevator that can go all the way up to L4 reliably with help from our mentors and design we came up with this design and we're demonstrate here in a second. So the way we have driving this year is called what we can do off the reef whenever it starts on there on the ground. And the way it detects that is through the current. It'll determine whenever the motor stall is starts while they're stress. [Music] It's okay. We have insurance. It's fine. It's good. to make it much faster in a big net about what is it four single best team scoring teams at least as well. So that's just our event world. We like to focus on the coral because the reef was more difficult to do than the better robots.
046They fill up faster. So what we do is we'll intake the coral which can rotate 360 for the fastest kind of scoring. So what it does here on this button that we made ourselves he will select L3 L24 and detect whichever side of the he want to go to. So you can put in [Applause] We can do four scoring points as [Music] just normally So that's just how we do our basic function of the game and 15 seconds. So in the last 20 seconds of the game, we have to do what's called climb on this big steel cage. So we have to do our open and what's going to happen is It's going to come all the way in. And once it latches on to the bearings, it's going to pull up to say at
047that point the chain which is a lift during the match will be about right here. The cage will be all the way down here with this foot keeping it out. So we and the robot will be up off the ground. Those clips and then you can kind of imagine it's twisting horizontally and that way you're reducing the reducing the actual one we did this year in contrast is that we use a lot of prints like these are made of PLA vibration autogenerolid. which is 150 lb [Applause] it. All right. Thank you all for coming up. I just have a couple comments and then I'll open it up to the board for questions and comments. I just want to say every year this team just continues to impress us in every way, shape, and form. You
048really embod our district motto. Together we can. And you represent the best of of South Orangetown and Tapenzee High School and really are a model for a lot of other clubs in the district, not only in terms of your fundraising, but your camaraderie. And Colum and Cassidy, thank you for acknowledging Miss Connell for winning the Woody Flowers Award at the Fingerlakes competition. That is a very difficult award to win. And also in the same year, uh, our mentor Joey Gotautle, winning the mentor award, it's really welld deserved and I know Joey's not here tonight, but without him, as you said, this all wouldn't be possible. So, congratulations and I'll open it up to the board for comments, questions. I just have to say that's amazing. You guys are doing great. Excited to see what next
049year brings. So the one question I had was um so each year you get a new challenge, you make a new robot. What what happens with the old robot? So we keep them for legacy. We keep them for the further years. So we can have software members train them or for outreach events if we want to have you know younger people are interested in come up learn about the robot you know play with it whatever so games are different every year they'll always have similarities so our club this year while very unique mechanism was partially inspired by our 2018 game club which was another game that two separate game pieces. One of them being slightly smaller. So that's also a similar mechanism of opening and closing. And that was an inspiration for this one. And
050I was Yeah. Thank you all for coming up. We're going to take a last round of applause for everybody. You're obviously all welcome to stay for the rest of the board meeting, but I'm going to take a brief recess to to let you get out of here and make sure Rudy eats some cake. So, take about two minutes, three minutes to give you guys a chance. Uh, we'll get right to bring them back. Oh, really? Come on. Okay. According to their interview, He's going to They keep every robot every year. We're I wonder where they keep them. It's going to take up going to take up a lot of space. [Music] He says no right now, but You had a better [Music] Don't you have a date with some cake? Last summer. wondering where you
051are. I'm sure. You want to eat it now? [Music] But I heard you're [Music] Anyone want cake just taking the other road? No, I want I'll eat it all myself. I just want to see proof that you ate it. Congratulations, Rudy. Congratulations, man. That's great. chocolate. Yes, you are. Thank you very much, sir. What's up? It's still nice shirt. I'm going to just run through my superintendent report quick and then I'll almost All right. Yeah. There we go. [Music] Brian, how in depth do you go through this? Yeah, go ahead. We went over in the cabinet today. All right, folks. I'm just going to keep uh going on with our meeting and I'm going to continue on with my superintendence report. Get the live stream up. Thanks for coming up. Oh, wow. I didn't even
052have to say if you hear my voice clap once. All right. I think so. George, are we good? We live streaming. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That was awesome. So, continuing on with uh my superintendent's report, I want to take this opportunity to thank the board of education for supporting the return of international trips to our district. A long-standing tradition that is hamper was hampered by CO. Over the spring break, 43 Tapenzy High School students studying either a fourth or fifth year of a foreign language embarked on a trip to Italy, France, and Spain over the spring break. I would like to publicly thank Suzanne Ginsburg, Maria Bruno, Christy Walsh, Adulo Gadinez, Elaine Hayes, and Francis Duffy for chaperoning an unprecedented 10-day trip to three countries again with over 40 students. And I'm just going to read
053uh Mr. Dr. Arietta. I have to get used to that. Love it. Dr. Arietta and I got a few emails at the as did Miss Luciano from some of the the staff that went on the trip. And I just want to read what some of them wrote. This trip was definitely one of the most memorable and rewarding experiences of my teaching career. The students jumped in head first to cultural experiences and language practice. They took every opportunity to engage with and explore the cultures and people in each country we visited and are already talking about studying abroad. Thank you so much for supporting us every step of the way. And that was from Suzanne Ginsburg. We also received an email. This trip was definitely one of the most memorable and rewarding experiences of my teaching
054career. Oh, that was the same one. Sorry. Um uh and this was from um from Christy Walsh. Um yeah, it was very similar. Sorry. Uh but both teachers reached out to us and also last night at the Italian awards ceremony, we had a number of students come up and speak and they all talked about that experience. So, we're really grateful that we were able to bring that back and we're hopeful that uh we'll be able to continue it for many years to come. Moving on to student accomplishments and celebrations. So, Tapenzy High School celebrates National Merit Scholarship Winner. This year, Owen Epstein was named 2025 National Merit Scholarship Winner and was awarded $2,500. and merit scholars are finalists in each state and they're judged to have the strongest combination of accomplishments, skills, and potential for
055success at rigorous college studies. So, congratulations to Owen and he is attending Cornell University as a public policy major. So, let's give Owen a also want to say thank you to the grant writing efforts out of the office of curriculum and instruction. Elementary students have been participating in a number of field trips to state parks and historic sites. This spring, the district was awarded $75,000 by the New York State Parks Recreation and Historic Preservation Connect kids to parks field trip program and nearly $19,000 from the American Battlefield Trust for a fourth grade visit to Fort Montgomery State Historic Site. So great job to the office of curriculum and instruction for getting those grants and really enabling our kids to have such enriching experience experiences. A thank you to the PTA. We talked earlier about the
056fundraising they did at Cottage Lane, but also our PTA uh for teacher appreciation week last week, and they do this every year. They go above and beyond to recognize our faculty and every school. Uh, and I just wanted to take a moment to express our gratitude for the year- round support of our associates, SOS, and Tapenzy High School PTAs and of course to all of our teachers for all they do for our students and our [Applause] community. Moving on to athletics. So, this afternoon, uh, Mr. Pill and Miss Luciano and a lot of our coaches were out, uh, on the high school field and hosted our annual signing day ceremony. and we got a little bit of rain, but it was fine. And we had 22 senior athletes who committed to playing sports at the
057collegiate level. So, congratulations. 22 kids uh going on to college to play. So, that's awesome. And thanks for having that signing day. It was great to see their parents and everyone. Also in sports, our Tapenzy High School boys lacrosse, Tommy Lahan became the first all-time point leader in Tabenzy High School history with over 300 points. And Kevin Kler reached 200 career points, which is the most by a midfielder in Tapenzy High School history. So, congratulations to Tommy uh and also to Kevin. [Applause] And moving on to golf, one of my favorite sports. I just learned recently we had a a student who shot under par and Chip Foley was coming down the hallway. I said, "Hey, Chip." Hey, he's the golf coach. He says, "Wow, we had a kid shoot under par." Said, "Where did
058that happen?" He said, "Rocklin Country Club." He was so excited. So, sure enough, um, I want to congratulate Jason Stmick. His current stroke handicap is a 3.1. The lower the better for those of you that don't play golf. Bill ours nowhere anywhere near that probably like a couple zeros and which currently puts him in the top 60 in section one top 60 qualifier for section one individual state tournament. He has been the top golfer and again during a recent match he shot a 33 a minus one at Rockland Country Club which was the best scoreer of a Tapenzy high high school golfer or any com competition in the last 10 years. So congratulations to Jason. I see him at the driving range. So, he's practicing [Applause] hard. Uh, and our girls flag football team, varsity
059NJB, throughout their career games, varsity flag football, Eve Gerardi, has thrown over for over 3,000 yards. Ellis Sabatini has 1,000 yards receiving and Nina Vasquez has a 100 flag poles. Uh, and earlier this year, Alyssa Sanchez was voted low player of the week. New this season is our JV flag football team which is composed of 16 players and they're in grades seven through 10 and the team finished the season seven and three. So, thanks for starting that team and it's just a couple years young and it's going really well. We appreciate it. And last but not least, boys tennis. Our team recently won first place at the Pearl River Tournament defeating Irvington, Pearl River, NYAK. It's a little rivalry going on there just really between me and some of the people that work there. Nanuette
060and all eight players won their respective flights. So I heard about the fact that our team won uh in that tournament and awesome. So congratulations to all those kids and all those [Applause] teams. All right. So uh we're going to move uh quickly to public commentary um before we do your presentation because we just had one person sign up. Going to read that. Sure. All right. All right. Protocol for public commentary is as follows. All opinions are heard. Everyone should be an active listener. Each person is responsible for his or her behavior. Respect diverse perspectives. Be conscious of your speaking time and tone. A limit of three minutes is an appropriate time frame to state your issue. Speakers may not give unused time to other speakers. Issues of specific personnel, either positive or negative, cannot
061be discussed at board meetings. References, comments, or discussion that does or may identify a specific student or students by name or situation, will not be discussed publicly due to FURPA law. Issues pertaining to specific students should be addressed privately with the student's teacher, principal, school counselor, or school counselor in accordance with policy 1400, public concerns, before bringing the issue to the superintendent's attention. The board reserves the right to close comments on an issue if residents become unruly or disrespectful or if the topic is something that the board is legally unable to discuss in public. If an unusual number of people are attending to bring forth a specific issue, the number of speakers could be limited. Depending on the number of people wishing to speak during public commentary, the board reserves the right to reduce the
062time limit on each speaker until everyone is heard. The sole purpose of public commentary is for the board to actively listen to the community. Meeting protocol requires that questions presented to the board during public commentary will be responded to when possible. At the board's discretion, questions requiring investigations will be referred to the superintendent and will be responded to in a timely fashion through future board meetings, electronic mail, mail, or telephonically, provided the contact information is supplied on the public commentary signup sheet. Sean, hi everybody. Um, so we're here on behalf of the Sobots's parents and we just wanted to give you a huge thank you for all of your support this season. Um, as parents and as a teacher myself, this is the greatest program I've ever seen. I, every child has a chance to
063be a part of this. There's over 72 kids, I think they mentioned, in this program, and not one kid gets cut. You know, sports are amazing, but there's cuts from time to time in them, and there's no cuts in this, and there's a place for every child. Um, failures happen all the time in this program, but out of every single failure comes a greater success. And that is probably the best gift that you can give a child at this age is to learn from their failures. Um something that happened to this team that every competition they got better and better and if you saw them at worlds they talked about the climb uh that last component their robot couldn't go over 115 pounds. And all season long they struggled with how to keep their weight
064down but get that climb component on there so that they wouldn't be disqualified. And at Worlds in Houston in the last day of competition, they figured out how to make that climb happen. And if you saw our team, we went crazy because it was the greatest success and the best way to end our season. We didn't get picked to move on to the finals, but to end with that was just totally amazing. So, um, one other thing that happened this season, which was just a great lesson for our kids, was um, Mr. Gotibb who is a parent in our community. His son Alex came back this year as a mentor with the program. He um they were up in Albany for a competition and the competitions are three days long. On Thursdays is a practice
065day and then Fridays and Saturdays are competitions and finals. And Thursday their last practice competition of the day. It was probably six o'clock at night, maybe five o'clock. something on the robot that was major component broke and all of the kids were devastated. Like if that component didn't work, there was no way they could have competed on that Friday and Saturday. Mr. got hopped in his car, drove down from Albany to Yonkers that night, got that part that they needed for the robot, hopped back into his car, drove back up that night, and the very next morning at 7 in the morning, they were in the pit fixing that robot so they were ready for competition. And when I saw him, I went over to him. I was like, "Oh my gosh, thank you so
066much for doing this for our team." And Mr. Gotly like like it was nothing like he ran to the deli for a soda for us. He was like he was like, "Yeah." He's like, failure is not an option. He's like, the biggest lesson I want these kids to learn is that when something happens, you can bounce back and you can fix it. It's a lesson for life. So, I just wanted to say thank you so much for your support of this program. It's an amazing program and I hope that it gets stronger and stronger every year. Thank you so much. Yes, my name is Hermand Dominguez. I'm from the BP from Cleaning Service of Hassan Valley and I have a I'm going to read something and I would like to give you a copy just
067in case I misspell it or mis read it. Sorry. Thank you. Can you just make sure to sign the the sheet? Okay. Sir, can I just get you to sign your name on here, please? Okay. on tonight. Business office consent agenda item 11- C. The South Onentown Central School District proposed to award the contract of cleaning and summer cleaning service 24 25-26 to Apple Maintenance. South on Sound District originally request this I mean requested this request for proposal in December of 2024. At that time the B submission was cleaning service of Hudson Valley Inc. was the lowest responsible bidder. Despite our company being the lowest res bidder, the school board decide to reject all the bits and rebate this project. The rebbit were submitted on April 7th. At the time, at that time, three biders
068were submitted responsible to the re bit. One of one of from our company cleaning services of Hudson Valley, another from SJ services, and the third one for Apple services. The bit resort was as follow cleaning services of Hudson Valley $793,88155. SJ services 858,688 and 0. Apple maintenance 895,000 and $10. Cleaning services of Hos Valley was the clearly the lowest bidder by far and Apple service was the highest bidder. The bid from cleaning service of Hudson Valley was overund 101,000 and 120 $120 lower than the bid from Apple. Despite this enormous financial discrepancy in the amount of the bid, the proposal from business from from from the business office is that the bid be awarded to Apple Maintenance Service. the highest bidder. New York General Municipality Law Section 103 requires that school board to award the
069contract to the lowest responsible bidder. On two separate occasion, Clean and Services of Hos Valley was the lowest responsible bidder. The second time by 12% less than Apple Maintenance. Depi despite the clear language of the law the school boy is now awarding the contract to higher to the highest bidder without explanation and reason and why the lowest bidder or the other company were not accepted in this board award the contract to Apple maintenance service the cost will be more than 100,000 greater than the exact same services I urge the school board to follow the law and reject the recommendation of the business office to award the school cleaning and summer cleaning service 20 2025-26 to Apple maintenance service and award to cleaning services valley thank you thank you Is that wrong? All right. So, so
070we uh now have to make a motion to adjourn to the public hearing for the proposed budget. So, motion to adjourn to a public hearing on the 2025 2026 proposed budget at 8:56 p.m. Good evening. Um, well, those wonderful students presenting was um Oh, we don't do this now. I'm sorry. Yeah, you're good. The public hearing, correct? Yeah, I got I just need a motion. Motion. Thank you. It's all right. Second, Rob. Thank you. All in favor? Hi. Hi. Good evening. So, I enjoyed the first half of this meeting um listening and learning about what the students do and the wonderful I mean, incredible. I couldn't even compete with um their presentations. But as we know, the budget hearing is a necessary part of the annual um adoption of a school bo uh budget. So
071the SOCSD vision and mission statement, the the vision is elevate, engage, and inspire through personalized and exceptional educational experiences that ensure all students achieve to their fullest potential. Our values are to challenge our students with the highest quality education, to foster an inclusive school district community based upon respect, responsibility, equity, and global global citizenship, and to provide a safe and nurturing environment, which prepares every student for future success. So broadly our agenda will be to um briefly go over the budget development calendar and the timeline that we adhere to the proposed estimated revenue. Uh with that revenue considerations, the final tax cap calculation, the executive state aid proposal. Um then we'll go into estimated expenditures. We'll look at expenditure considerations, transfer to capital, and the three-part budget, and then there'll be some key notes for
072the the public. So, I will not go into the details, but we did follow a timeline. It's really an annual process that's continuous. So you'll see once um May 20th is here and passes, you know, and the date passes us, we'll start developing the next budget. Um so just take note today, May 13th, we're going through the budget hearing and then May 20th is the public vote. So there were we had a little bit of a challenging budgeting development process and um the as the first step in developing the budget we look into the estimated revenues for the coming year. Um projecting the funds available for next year's budget sets the parameters and limits on spending. So the tax levy is final upon voter approval. uh state aid final upon legislative approval. Um the legislative
073uh budget was approved just last week, a few days ago. And the discrepancy from the amount that was budgeted was only 240,000 more. Um at least it was on the positive end, but it's it's still a little minimal. Um the tax levy is limited by the tax cap formula and subject to voter approval. Um there is uncertainty in the state aid funding formula because they have new initiatives and new measurements for the various factors that drive the foundation aid. Um but the legislative budget approval again the calculation factors will be updated um for more current data to be used to estimate the to to um calculate the foundation aid for all the districts. However, it is a pivotal time in funding. There's constraints for South Orangetown and many other districts throughout the state. Um there
074is I did mention a minimal increase that we'll see next year. So one of the challenges that we face is that over time the inflation factor has surpassed the tax cap calculation. Um so this is a comparative of the inflation over the past three years against the tax levy for the district. Here is the tax levy calc calculation. Um, this is not complex compared to what I saw those students just do, but uh I mean there's a few line item there, line items there. We start off with the prior year's tax levy and then there's um pilots and capital expenditures from the prior year that are re deducted from the amount and then the projected ones and and the contracts for pilots for the coming year are then added back. So it's kind of an
075in andout. Um, that's why we're at a point where the transfer to capital and other capital expenditures are zero impact overall because they're in on one end and out on the other. Um, so the tax l the tax cap levy percentage for um the following for the coming year is 2.31%. which is an a maximum increase of $2,61,48 with a tax levy limit with exclusions of 91,158,847. And I just wanted to note that um districts can go up to the tax cap or lower and require just a majority vote. Um, districts can propose a tax levy that exceeds the cap, but they would need a supermajority vote, which is 60% of the votes. So, this is just the state aid portion of the anticipated revenue for the following school year. Um, these are the funding
076categories within state aid. We have foundation aid which is driven by the state aid formula. Uh the remaining categories are expensed. This means that the district receives a calculated reimbursement based on the amount spent for each of those uh categories. For example, South Orangetown receives 38% of reimburseable transportation expenditures. That was the slide. I saw your face, doctor. Okay, so this is the total estimated revenue for the 2526 school year. On the top, we have the tax levy going increasing by the tax cap amount. So we have 91.1 million and then there's an allowance for SCAR settlements. Those are small claims for tax reductions that we receive throughout the year. Um pilots again are agreements with development organizations where they have a set amount of taxes to pay. Um going down one of the greater
077increases are in our interest income. Um in prior years we were more conservative with estimating interest income. um because of the volatility of interest rates, we we can never be absolutely um sure that we're going to receive the amount, but this estimate is still a little bit conservative and I consulted with our banking representative. Um further down, we did we did have a little bit of a gap that we worked through throughout our budget workshops. Um so we to to close the gap we're appropriating which is use appropriation means use of our savings you could say for a district our ERS reserves and TRS reserve funds as well as unrestrict unrestricted fund balance which is um basically our cash in the bank um reserve funds are savings accounts savings that the district is able to
078put put to the side year after year. Some of them have restricted um amounts each year that you can put aside. And however, we're able those specific purposes are for um taking care of expenditures in future budgets. So, what we're doing right now is appropriating some of that savings to um cover some of the expenditures in the 2526 school year. So going through our estimated expenditures, there were some considerations as far as enrollment and student needs. Our enrollment is estimated to decrease um approximately 25 by 25 students. That's just a rough number, but it's not it's minimal. Um we have to consider our contractual obligations. and in considering our contractual obligations, the increases due to CPI adjustments. Um, this includes Boseies, pensions, the pension cost, health insurance, facilities, uh, maintenance and transportation cost. We also
079have to consider that we have a few open labor contracts that are um, under negotiation. So, here's the line by line on our estimated expenditures for the forthcoming school year. Um, salaries and benefits usually amount to the greater percentage because we're we provide services. We need teachers in the classroom and just overall that's the the bulk of a school district's budget. Then we have supplies and materials, contractual expenditures. Transportation also tends to increase due to um market conditions where there's comp competition and um the that prices that drives the price up. Um we also have debt payments from past capital projects as well as current projects. At the very end, you'll see we have a transfer to capital which South Orangetown has um maintained in the budget year after year. Some of the highlights and
080additions for the 2526 school year. Um, we're adding an elementary teacher, a secondary physical education teacher, a secondary reading teacher, and a special ed teacher at the secondary level. Going back to the transfer to capital amount of 2 million that's um set aside for um addressing sha uh casework at at the at eight classrooms at William O. Schaefer, the Tapenzee High School nurses suite, ADA restroom, the Tapenzee High School store entry, and districtwide cameras and safety enhancements. So, every district is legally required to present their budget in the three components. Those three components are the administrative which um compos is comprised of the oversight of the district uh the programmatic which are those expenditures closest to the student and in the school buildings and the capital component which is the maintenance of all the school
081facilities. We see here that the largest component is the program component at 79% which is 90 approximately $90.8 8 million. Uh the capital component is 11% at approximately 12.8 million and the administrative component is at 10% at um 11.6 million. So what I did here is just separate each component and you'll see the expense categories that um make up each of the components. salary again being the largest and then we have some equipment Bose services debt services and the transfer to capital within the capital component. So there for the 2526 school year, we developed a balanced budget at $115,289,084. Um key notes and um I'm sure of public interest. The budgettobudget increase is 4.24% 24% in the amount of $4,694,049 and the tax levy is at the cap of 2.31%. Uh the tax levy increase
082is 2,61,48. Um the estimated tax impact for a taxpayer with an assessed value property value of $200,000 will be an increase of $195 for the entire year. Um so that will conclude it and you know the team helped develop it was all of administration, the board and many other staff members within the district. Thank you. Thanks, Natalie. [Applause] All right. Uh, any comments? Anything? No. Are we good? Okay. So, motion to reconvene to a public meeting at 9:11 p.m. Motion. Thank you, Rob. Second. Thank you. All in favor? I Okay. So, now um board discussion. Uh were there any committee reports? I don't any All right. If no committee reports, uh we have a chance to discuss agenda items. And there was the one addendum. Uh do you want me to read the addendum or
083do you want it first? I have a question about 11 C that's the case because we are supposed to accept the winner. So if somebody can speak to that let me look at 11C 11C is the cleaning services. I don't know who can speak to it. I just see here that nonresponsive where the bid bids from the other two cleaning companies are nonresponsive. Right. M Espanel can share. Sure. So we do follow municipal law and typically it is the least respons the lowest responsible bidder but the bid specs also call for specific items. So they also have to be responsive to the bid specifications. Okay. Yeah. So the comment I would make is it's not lowest bidder, it's lowest responsible bidder. And that that's the key until next week uh to vote on 11C until
084we all receive the bids with the actual information. Sure. Okay. That's not to hurt us tonight. That's fine. Yeah. I think we're fine doing that. I would like to do that. Sure. Okay. Absolutely. But I would like to table 11 C until next year. I don't want to split the agenda we to do until we get the actual bids from the companies to for all the board members to and then we can have a full vote on it too. Right. Okay. So that fine orders, right? Okay. So 11. All right. So um was there any other agenda items before? No. Okay. All right. So you said 11 C. Yeah. Okay. So, we will table 11 C and uh make a motion to make the changes to the agenda by adding this addendum to the superintendent's
085office consent agenda. And I'll read that resolution ratifying memorandum of agreement South Orangetown Administrators and Supervisors Association. Be it resolved that the board of education of the South Orangetown Central School District hereby ratifies the provisions of a memorandum of agreement executed by the negotiating teams for the district and the South Orangetown Administrators and Supervisors Association dated May 13, 2025 and hereby authorizes the expenditures of those monies necessary to fund the provisions of the 2024 2026 collectively negotiated agreement between the South Orangetown Central School District and the South Orangetown administrators. and supervisors association. So once again, make the motion to make the changes to the agenda. Motion. Thank you, Diana. Thank you, Rob. All in favor? I I Okay. And motion to approve the amended consent agenda categories 8 through 13. Thank you, Rob. Second. Thank
086you, Diana. All in favor? I I. All right. uh opportunity for any new business? No. [Applause] Thank you. Any new business? No. All right. Motion to adjourn the meeting at 8:15 p.m. 9:15. 9:15. Sorry about that. Wow. So, if I could just get the admins real quick. Um, Rudy's going to have another piece of cake, but I also want to just share some information with you guys before you go home. Diana, Diana and Rob, give me a