001Repeat. >> Good evening and welcome to the Yorktown Central School District Board of Education meeting for December 15, 2025. Can I get a motion to go into executive session to discuss the employment history of particular pedagogical and non-pedagical employees and matters made confidential under federal law? >> So move. >> Second. >> All those in favor. >> Any opposed? >> I. >> Can I get a motion to go back into public session? >> So move. >> Second. >> All those in favor? Any opposed? >> Good evening and welcome to the Yorktown Central School District Board of Education meeting for December 15, 2025. Um, we will stand for the pledge of allegiance to be followed by a moment of silence for our armed forces and those in the Yorktown Central School District community who have lost loved
002ones, especially former administrative assistant Rosemary Depala, the father of Richard Anderson and the grand grandmother of Morgan Donahghue. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America to the republic. One nation God indivisible. >> Public comment number one of it. Uh we'll go to our student member report. Good evening. It's an exciting time for the students of Yorktown School District as we conclude the final academic days of 2025 and head off for the holiday vacation on Friday. Over the past few weeks, the Yorktown schools have enjoyed numerous incredible musical performances. This week, several schools will offer additional holiday musical performances. Tomorrow morning, our fourth graders will present their coral concert followed by the YHS orchestra winter concert tomorrow evening at the high school. On Wednesday, the Mily String Middle School band will
003perform its winter concert. And on Thursday evening, the YS choir will perform its winter concert to round out the holiday musical season for our Yorktown schools. Auditions will begin this week for the YS spring musical. This year at the high school, they will be presenting the Wizard of Oz. Performances will take place in early March. While the winter athletic season is only in its first few weeks, Yorktown's teams are off to a great start. Our wrestling team made a strong statement in its opening event by winning the Mike Nardone wrestling tournament for the third time in four years. The YHS boy basketball team is currently 2 and 0 with an impressive performance in their early season. The boys will face Mayak this Friday evening at Mayak. Yorktown's track and field team had numerous athletes stand
004out in the recent annual Big Chill relays. Our teams are off to a great start with their winter season and I look forward to reporting further success as the season progresses. In the season of giving, I want to highlight a generosity and community spirit of our Yorktown community. Yesterday, several several of our varsity boys lacrosse team members joined the local Yorktown veterans at the VFW to make a donation to the organization from the proceeds of the recent Battle of Yorktown event. Also, the National Honor Society celebrate this season by participating in Operation Santa, providing holiday gifts and necessities to the families in our community that are in need this holiday season. Now, on behalf of the students of the Yorktown School District, Luke and I want to wish the board, the faculty, and staff at
005our schools and the entire Yorktown community a wonderful holiday season and health and happiness in coming new year. Thank you. >> Thank you. Same to you, uh, Dr. Hatter. >> That was excellent. Okay. So, I often use the last board of education meeting of the calendar year, not our fiscal year, but our calendar year to provide the board, the community with an update. And I believe that this update sets the stage for the meetings and the presentations that will come after the new year as we build our budget for the 2026 27 school year. So, Evette, if I can ask you to pull up the presentation. Thank you. So, we are obviously always grounded in our vision statement. I won't read the slide to you, but that certainly is what drives us. The areas of
006focus of our board of education are always something at the forefront of our mind. And in fact, our superintendent student council has spent much of their time focusing on areas within these six areas of focus and our administrative team and buildings as well. In this presentation, I'm going to share some updates. It's really is a look back on some of the things we're proud of in each department in 2025 and a look forward to the upcoming calendar year 2026. areas that we want to either continue to work on or new areas that we'll be undertaking. So, with curriculum again, so much here on the slide, but as I was looking through and and thank you to Miss Ammerling for her leadership of our curriculum office. She is just the best in the business when it
007comes to teaching and learning and building instructional programs that meet the needs of our students. As I was looking through the bullets, I I don't know which bullet I'd feel comfortable removing and not acknowledging whether it's the building of our instructional programs or the seal of civic readiness at the bottom of the screen that has almost 250 students as part of the program. Such a refreshing endeavor for our school district as we look ahead to 26. Certainly artificial intelligence and there are many bullets. I'm just going to pick out a few, but certainly the audience can read the bullets that what I have here. The artificial intelligence is something that we're certainly looking at from an instructional perspective. How do we leverage AI beyond ways we're already leveraging AI instructionally? We're looking at new course
008proposals certainly on transition to new learning standards that have some new requirements specifically a personal finance requirement for our high school and our middle school eventually our elementary schools. So we'll continue working in that area. Athletics is is always going and we had a wonderful 2025 and I hope for an even better 2026. Some of the things on the left are how I measure the success of the program. We have a lot of student involvement and that's the beauty of our high school. More than 50% of the students are registered for at least one sport. So many scholar athletes, so many teams. We've built one of the best streaming platforms in high school athletics in our region. And we're proud of that. We're proud to be able to offer that without subscription fees or without
009uh subscription requirements. The facilities are looking amazing and as we look to 2026, one of the big areas of focus will be the athletic complex and the renovations that are due to come online at various points during calendar year 2026. Whether it's the baseball field and the field hockey field in June of 2026, late June 2026, or it's the additional multi-purpose field later in calendar year 2026, closer to uh November, Decemberish, but lots on the horizon and we want to continue to strengthen our streaming and broadcasting capabilities. facilities has been incredibly busy. I I'll acknowledge Rob Barrett as our athletic director. He does a great job. Dennis Ver equally does such a tremendous job as I I couldn't fit everything that I wanted to say on this slide. But there has been so much that
010we have done with regard to facilities, whether it's renovations, replacements, meeting the needs of students in different ways. So, a new bus loop at the middle school seems like it's a relatively small lift, but the impact that it has had has been enormous. We're now able to stage our afternoon bus dismissal prior to the crosswalks, which keeps vehicular traffic away from where the bus traffic is. We had not been able to do that prior to the bus loop. So, even something as simple as our bus loop has had an enormous impact. We sealcoded all of our driveways. I know for like many of you when I have to seal coat my driveway, it's oh my gosh, where are we parking? We can't go on the driveway for three or four days. We we put down
011a seal coat on the entire middle school high school campus that is incredibly difficult to stage and Dennis made it look easy. So, new LED lighting and so many other projects that we're proud to have been able to deliver to our students and our community. Looking ahead, there's a lot more that we want to do. They're they're on the right side. Again, not everything that we're looking to do, but just the highlights of some of the work. And my thanks again to Dennis, Diego Arau, and uh Dan Satarali and our facilities department do just a great job. Human resources update. We've been fortunate to welcome Janette Msina to our HR office as our new director. And there have been so day-to-day HR is incredibly busy just with the things that happen in running an organization
012that has almost 700 employees. So the recruitment is always a perpetual piece. The integration between the offices, business and HR has been incredibly seamless. We do have collective bargaining agreements. There are about 11 different collective bargaining agreements that we negotiate and certainly I rely on uh HR and Janette's expertise to assist in those negotiations. We're digitizing a lot of our records trying to move to a more modern uh system as opposed to retaining a paperbased system and we'll continue to move that effort forward. PPS under the leadership of Director Caroline Almeida has has just been extraordinary. What you'll see on the left side of the page is extended, expanded, increased. We're offering more courses in our ESY program, more seating capacity and flex path as we're seeing more referrals and the referrals continue to come
013in and we continue to aspire to provide whatever the services are that a child needs. As we look to 2026, the reality of the increased referrals is expected. It's the new norm in in that department. The PPS office and the clinicians within our buildings are are spread very thin. There are big case loads, lots of demands, whether it's psychological testing, educational testing, counseling, and the various supports in our continuum of services. the PPS office and departments within our respective schools and district office are certainly um being spread technology. Everything, every department integrates and interfaces with technology. A big push for us has been around security. And I recognize that there's only one bullet on the slide for security and I don't think it does justice to how enormous this lift has been, but we have
014done so much in the way of security both from a network and data standpoint, but also the physical security of our students and staff. We have leveraged AI. We have leveraged computer systems. Our our cameras are incredibly uh incredibly sophisticated and so we have put in so much in the way of safety again data safety network safety physical safety and much of it has been done through our technology office. looking ahead AI again looking at ways that we can recognize efficiencies for some of the non-instructional tasks and doing that uh a little more seamlessly is something certainly that has our attention and all of the other bullets again I'm not going to read every bullet to you our business office led by and and I do want to acknowledge Jen Forsber our director of technology
015who is just second to none and our business office under Miss San Philippo's ction. We implemented a zerobased budgeting process last year that proved to be incredibly important in being able to build a budget that not only balance the needs of our students but was also sensitive to taxpayers. We realized good savings in a zerobased budgeting approach. It's a ton of work and my thanks to Miss Anilippo and her department for undertaking that work. We'll continue with that model for this school year and as we build out the budget, you'll see us scrutinize each position. That that's really where the expenditures are in a school district. It's it we're a people or organization. So there there's only so much you can save in reducing paper use and reducing writing utensils and so on. But we
016we scrutinize the need for every position to ensure that if we're going to put in our budget, it's absolutely needed. And certainly we have labor negotiations that are upcoming that Miss Analippo and her department will be integral in preparing data and information for us to analyze. And then there's me. So I get to oversee the other aspects of the organiz all of the aspects of the organization whether it's driving around at 4:30 this morning to assess the roads and determine that uh schools are safe to open or or any of the other items on the screen. So we put it all together and speaking of putting things all together moving forward our plan is very simple. We want to continue to improve in every aspect of the organization in structurally, athletically, from a technology standpoint,
017in every single aspect. We want to get better and we will we will continue to get better. We have the best people in each of our respective departments leading the work. We're obviously going to look at the needs of our district. Whether it's the instructional programs uh under Miss Samarling's supervision, whether it's a special education or or PPS services under Miss Almeida's supervision, we're going to monitor the needs of the students and the program that we build will adapt to those needs. And we're looking at housing developments in town and real estate developments in town. That's something certainly that that's on my mind. and we're looking to see the impact on our buses, transportation budget. As we build a budget for the coming school year, we do have to take under consideration impacts of developments
018and and it's not just the obvious in enrollment, but it's also in traffic. We want to get to the students, we want to get the students from home to school and school to home on time. We we're mindful of the duration of the bus routes. And so as enrollment is an important factor, so is transportation. And both are considerations and everything in between. In terms of the budget development process, everything that you just heard tonight, albeit very brief and and high level, will be discussed throughout our budget meetings. Those meetings have already started. Those begin in November and we meet with each school principal. Every department head meets with Miss Ammerling, Miss Analippo, and Miss Almeida and we talk about the needs of each department, each building. We compile those needs. We assess the efficacy,
019the reality of our needs and then we'll begin budget presentations to the board and to the community. The first very first budget presentation is an overview that'll happen in January. That's just a very basic presentation, but the true presentations are going to begin February, March, April. We'll look for a budget adoption April May time frame and then the budget vote is always the third Tuesday in May. So it's May 19th for this school year. So I'm happy to take any questions that you might have on any of the items. Anybody have any comments or questions? Go ahead, Mike. >> Ron, I think uh comments wise, I think um it's been a tremendous year. You and your team have done a fantastic job. One of the things that I'm I I guess most pleased with is
020how anytime we've had to, you know, somebody leave, retire, whatever, it it always seems like you're bringing in someone, you know, that doesn't just fill the the spot. I mean, they're they're taking us to another level, and it's obvious and evident in in everything that's been going on around the district. So, um, I'm very pleased with that part of it. Um I did have a question on the curriculum. Um there's it looks like a couple of new courses. Maybe you could just speak a little bit about the historical inquiry and innovation and the in particular the personal finance ones. Um what does that look like? How does it what does it involve? >> Yeah. So there are two new electives that are happening now and then there are two that are just in the pipeline
021under consideration. Dearra, you're welcome to speak to um >> yeah uh Dr. Hatter is correct on that. Um this year uh raising Asian voices, which was a course that was proposed last year I by Miss Lauren Suhu, she's teaching it this year. So the enrollment wasn't high, but typically that's um common in fall course offerings. Uh so I believe they started with 10 students and one had to to drop it. Um but it's off the ground which is a wonderful thing and it's it's great for the departments. It's great for the students. Uh in the next semester, the business entrepreneurship course is going to run. There's already 30 students signed up with some on on a wait list. So that's going to be a wonderful um additional course and that actually was driven by the
022request of a student who came to um teachers and proposed that that this is a need. Um and they built a beautiful course uh last year, spent a lot of time uh planning it over the summer. So, we're happy to see that run um next semester. We've already received some course proposals for um next year. So, that historical inquiry and innovation, that one is now going to come up for review. Um it's a social studies based course um that would end up in uh students participating in a historical fair um history fair. So it's really u focused on critical thinking um statistics assessment and doing something with that um for the purposes of improving civics. So it's it sounds really interesting. It's it hasn't been formally reviewed that's coming up. Um and I've also heard
023of other courses that are coming our way from both the music and the art departments to enrich uh those areas as well. Jacqueline, any questions, comments? >> Not at this time. Just again, thank you for welcoming me this year and looking forward to next year. >> Sure. >> No, nothing yet. I guess we'll uh come up with some more questions as we see the uh presentations un unravel over the next few months. But thank you, Catalina Pete. Um going back to that same screen, uh slide five, MTSS, what is that? >> That stands for multi-tiered systems of support. Uh that is how we provide recognized students that might need support in English, uh in reading, in math, um with social emotional support. Uh so we spent a lot of time focused at the K5 levels
024over the the past years. we really entered into a phase of really looking at our secondary level. So, right now we're doing a heavy focus here um with the middle school, looking at criteria, looking at assessments um to for students to be recognized to enter into those special programs uh as well as looking for programs that are really designed to support students that by sixth, seventh grade still need some remediation. Um what is most appropriate? how are they monitored? So, it's it's very involved. It requires the the guidance department, our reading specialists, some of our English teachers, our math teachers, um as well as the administrators. So, that has been a huge focus. And this year, uh we're so fortunate that Miss Marily Maro is our new um MTSS coordinator who really is helping us
025to look at a K12 approach to MTSS and support for our students. >> Great. Thank you. Okay, you ready to move on? Okay. All right. We'll go to policies. We have the first reads of the following policy. 2120.02 voting procedures. 2210 annual organizational meeting. 6830 expense reimbursement 9,000 personnel goals 9240 recruiting and hiring 9260 emergency conditionally appointed employee. Any questions or comments about those? Moving on to uh policies reviewed. Waiting for my screen to update. Y the policy the following policies were reviewed with no changes. 8115 pesticides and pest management. 9140 board staff communications. 9140.01 non-represented staff complaints and grievances. Moving on to the uh consent agenda. Our consent agenda includ includes items 8 through 13 which is the approval of minutes, approval of the treasures report, approval of the claims audit report, approval of
026the extra classroom report, personnel agenda, business matters, the Westchester School of Music lease agreement, the YHS overnight field trip, PPS independent contract, budget transfer, um curriculum and and instruction construction matters, pupil personnel matters, and our gifts, grants, and donations. Can I get a motion to approve? >> I move. >> Second. >> All those in favor? >> Any opposed? U moving on to board comments. Start down there with Pete. >> I've got nothing. >> Okay. >> But just merry Christmas, happy holidays to everyone, and hope you have a great season with your families. >> Adelina, >> same. Just happy holidays to everybody. >> Cheryl, >> happy holidays. This is one of those few years where we have two weeks off. So, enjoy every minute of those two weeks with family and friends enjoying and celebrating. >>
027Jacqueline, >> I second that. Enjoy the time with family and friends. I'm very much looking forward to that. So, >> Mike, >> I I obviously wish everybody happy holidays um and and some welldeserved rest. Uh, but I would also like to just something that came to me as we were going through the u 2025 summary. Um, and it kind of ties into some of the things that we've been talking about, but um, it it's really nice to see. I mean, we have a vision statement and it's it's great to see when there's stuff that comes out of that that is visible and tangible, right? So, you know, at the bottom of of bottom line, right, we want our students to have the capacity to influence positive change in the world. And I think three times
028tonight, I heard that our students drove a process. Our students drove change. Our students came up with this idea. Um, and to me, that just embodies everything that we're trying to accomplish, right? And so I think it's a great testament to you and and the team and and all of our faculty who listen, ask questions, listen, and then actually take that information and do something with it. Uh you know, to to make the experience better for our students and uh the learning and the growth is tremendous. So just want to recognize that because uh it's nice to have a vision statement, but it's more important to actually see it in action and and the outcomes of it. So um thank you for that. Uh yeah, I second um everything everyone said. I mean, thank you
029for doing that year in review every year. Um like Mike said, it's it's easy to to talk the talk, but you show us that you're walking the walk and it and it shows us and the community how much work is being put by in by every member of your team. Um and really make us the excellent school district that we are. So, so thank you for that. Um, as a board, we just wanted to address that we started the consent agenda to make our meetings a little bit more efficient, but we don't want to gloss over the gifts, grants, and donations that we get um e each meeting there. It's always on the agenda, and that's an amazing thing. So, we just want to emphasize that we are we are incredibly grateful. Including it in
030the consent agenda is not meant to minimize it. So, I'm just going to point it out that we got $85.19 for the Brookside PTA for a first grade school trip to Yorktown stage and $1,000 from Thomas and Marie Jordan designated for instructional programming. Thank you for that. Um, and and we acknowledge it every single meeting. So, thank you. I do want to raise something with the board. Um, in previous years, every year the do the board makes a charitable donation. Um, and historically it's been um a food >> feeding Westchester I believe. >> Feeding Westchester. Um, I I wanted the board and even our our student members to weigh in if there is a particular charity, something that's meaningful to you that you want to make the donation to or if we should continue on
031with Feeding Westchester. I'll just say I think this year in particular um it it's very important with the cost of food and and what a lot of our community members are going through that that we continue our contribution to Feeding Westchester. I think it's something that's very close to home and impacts a lot of people that um are in our community. >> I I 100% agree with that, too. >> All right. That's what we'll do. Yep. >> Okay. Um, so, uh, on my behalf, happy holidays to everyone. Enjoy the break. I hope we get some nice snow. Um, is there anyone signed up for public comment number two? >> All right. Can I get a motion to adjurnn? >> No move. >> Second. >> All those in favor? >> I. Thank you. Have a good
032night. >> Thank you.