001Sure. Board member Jeff Bennett. Board member Dearra Brown here. Board member Elizabeth Callahan here. Board President Nubia Duval Wilson here. Board member Regina Eckert here. Board member Bill Gford here. Board member Bimal Kapadia. Board member Will Meyer here. Board member Shaina Saka Gable here. All right, we have a board. Okay, please stand for the pledge of allegiance. Please take notice that adequate notice of this meeting has been provided in the following manner. That written notice was sent from the office of the secretary of the board at 2:30m on January 3rd, 2025. That said notice was sent via email to Maplewood in South Orange Township clerks and the editors of the news record Star Ledger Tap into Soma and the Village Green. I'd like to make a motion to enter executive session at 6:33 p.m. to
002discuss attorney client matters, personnel, and hibs. The length of the executive session is estimated to be a 75 minutes after which the public meeting of the board shall reconvene and proceed with business where formal action will be taken. May I have a second? Thank you. Board member Saki Gable. All in favor? Okay, great. Uh, we are now back in regular session. Um, oh, do we have any students here tonight for public speaks? No. Yes. Okay. So, um, motion to have public speaks start for students, please. Why don't you, um, come on up? Let me make sure, uh, Mr. Bonds can set it up. Are you able to set up public speaks just for the students? Okay, great. Um, so why don't you come on up, state your name, town that you're in. Thank you. Okay.
003Can you hear me now? Yeah. Yeah. Hello, my name is Alexander Wood. I live in South Orange and I'm a proud Columbia High School freshman. I'm also part of the marching band and I've been in it since 8th grade. The reason I'm here before you today is the marching band needs a larger truck and we don't have that. I understand that what you guys are doing isn't easy and it's not possible to get everything done for it's not possible to have everything work out for everyone and I and I understand that there wasn't enough money in the budget this year for new truck. But I'm pleased but I'm asking you to be willing to talk to CHS administration Mr. Bower and other members of the Chism and other members of Chismimpa to please try to
004find a solution to this. The truck not having enough not having enough space last year to move equipment was incredibly hard for the front ensemble and other parts of the marching band as the front ensemble was during the preseason band camp was trapped at psalms and wasn't with the rest of the band during practices which made us feel isolated. Also during the first performance of Dante, which was our marching band show last year, half the front ensemble could not perform because of because we couldn't bring all the equipment there. Also, we weren't allowed to have we weren't able to have sectionals because all of our equipment was at was at Underh Hill, which was also put in danger of being broken as there were videos of non percussionists and non marching band members playing these
005instruments. These instruments aren't safe at Under Hill, need to be kept kept safe. And as we're incredibly grateful for what Mark Sllay did with allowing them with allowing us to borrow their truck, it's not a sustainable and reliable option. They have a business to run and they might need that truck. And also having um parents need to move around sousafones is also not um sustainable because if we don't have parents that have enough equipment to move around sousafones, we can't have sousafhone players. We need a new truck and I'm please encouraging you to sit down with the parties at work to please get us a new one. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay. So, I think that was the only student public speaks. Thank you. So, now we'll move on to um I'd like
006to make a motion to approve the board meeting minutes from the April 23rd, 2025 executive board meeting and the April 24, 2025 exec session and regular board meeting. Do I have a second? Thank you, board member Eert. All in favor, please raise your hand. Great. The meetings have been approved. Next, we will have our student update with Oliver. Thank you. Okay. First, I want to say congratulations to our students who are recognized in the 2025 International Chinese Language Day video competition organized by the New Jersey Chinese Teachers Association. Um, Eden Phipe, Genevieve Campbell, Stella Williams, and Casper Parvin received the outstanding collaboration award for their video. Beijing Opera and Sydney Anrig, Michelle Chen, Caris Evans, Grayson Freriededman, and Clover Rosenberg earned the best creativity award for travel agency. Each winning group will receive a $50
007Amazon gift card from NJCA. We're proud of their effort, teamwork, and interest in the Chinese language and culture. Congratulations to CHS senior Jules Melman whose artwork rooftop vista earned first place in the 11th district congressional art competition guided by art teachers Mr. Katrona and Mrs. Pahoki. Jules's artwork will be displayed at the US Capital for the next year. Uh we are happy to share that the first ever CHS all art showcase is still on display at the Pierro Gallery from May into June. The exhibit features student work from the classes of Mr. Katrona, Miss Malhotra, Miss Murphy, Mrs. Pokei, Mrs. Stewart, and Mrs. Thomas. The show will wrap up on June 6th with a special screening of films and animations from Mr. Migliano's classes. Seth Bdon Elementary School was recently honored with the 2025 Arts
008Champion Governors Award by Young Audiences Arts for Learning. This award recognizes the school's strong commitment to arts education through its 5-year partnership with the AIE residency program. Over the years, students have worked closely with teaching artists to explore stepping, an African-American dance tradition, and develop original performances. This year's residency wrapped up with Step Show, The Musical Jr., written and directed by teaching artist Maxine Lyall and performed by fourth and fifth graders. The program has brought arts experiences to more than 375 students and helped build a supportive and creative environment for both students and staff. Seth Bdon's dedication to the arts has created lasting opportunities for learning, expression, and community connection. Congratulations to CHS students Oliver Vital Panalberg, Reese Wolfinger, Zachary Baron, Nev Kunvski, Theodore Rothberg, Sophia Natrop Jones, and Adam Jacob for their success at
009the Monontlair Emerging Filmmakers Competition. Their film Project Weekday took home the best action award, the second award this project has received. Special shout out to Reese who also earned a second award in the best sci-fi category for his film Static. Great work by all on showcasing creativity, collaboration, and strong storytelling on screen. Um, and we're proud to share that the South Orange and Maplewood School District has been named one of the best communities for music education by the NAMM Foundation for the ninth year in a row. Uh the awards celebrates school districts across the country that go above and beyond in providing strong, inclusive music programs. A huge thank you to our dedicated music teachers, students, families, and community partners who help keep music a vibrant part of the SOSD experience. The district continues to
010support music programs, making music ed education accessible to all students. And that's all our recognitions um for the report. Uh like will the like the graphs themselves be accessible on screen or should I just talk about them? I can just talk. Yeah. [Music] All right. Um, my name is Oliver Nessen and here's um, this is a survey that was conducted a couple months ago at Colombia and received 161 student responses. Uh, the purpose of this survey was to gather feedback on key aspects of the school environment, programs, and student support. And the data from the survey has recently been shared with the board of education. um here with this this first data result from the question. I believe that removing and combining course options for next year will harm the academic environment at CHS. It's
011clear that an overwhelming majority of students um around 80% felt that it would either strongly or somewhat harm the academic environment. And so, um, Ace and I believe that while we understand that these are necessary reductions, that just, uh, a more open, um, explanation to why each each course is getting cut down would definitely clear up some of the confusion for these students. Um, and then the next next graph. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For the for the total Oh, like for for each section. Oh, okay. Yeah. No, I said I said Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's 160 total. Um, and so for this this next prompt that was about prioritizing the arts in its budget, uh, we see over twothirds of students believe that the arts need to be prioritized as we we just
012heard about with the marching band. So, um, it's definitely something worth taking into consideration when exploring budget options for the next year. I mean, we know that Columbia is uh a well wellrecognized arts district. So, just keeping that up is uh definitely important to our students. And then next um here we have uh the prompt, I believe that increased academic support from CHS counseling would help me to thrive as a student. And uh we see moderate to strong support for um some some greater roles in CHS counseling. Um, and you know, Asa and I have talked about some things that this might look like from, you know, college help and the application process and uh further further career advice to just regular meetings so that uh students know their guidance counselor better and are able
013to go for that go to them for help. Um, but yeah, definitely something worth exploring. And then next Um this was was an interesting question definitely um okay for the times I believe that using AI as a tool can help me to succeed in my courses and we're definitely seeing uh some mixed responses here um but you know it it makes it clear that um AI is is a a tool that's still developing and some students are going to be using it and it's it's something that we need to consider maybe adapting coursework to it. I know we've talked about uh maybe developing some more project based learning and um you know real real life experience to uh make AI more of a a tool than a harm to the classroom. Uh next um here
014we have the prompt. I believe that CHS is a welcoming environment for all students regardless of their differences and we were pleased to see that for the most part um this was was a prompt that students agreed with but we do do still have some uh students and I know that that uh the the recent district survey focus in on some more specific uh differences that you know make make CHS um an environment that as students could feel safe in. So, I'm sure that we're working towards that. And um then next uh this was um a little little disheartening to see, but uh the the overwhelming majority of students do not believe that the security guards at CHS are helping them feel safe despite um it being a welcoming environment. So um what that means
015for for students is definitely uh not good because you know we need need to have a environment that's safe in order to to learn easily and so um there's definitely some some things students explore when uh discussing security options. Maybe we go to the next. Um, it was also clear that students did not agree with uh IDs as a security measure as indicated by a little bit of difficulty in in implementing this. So, um I think going into next year it'll be um interesting to to see what what uh how you know the the IDs evolve and if there's any other procedures that we can implement to to stop that gap um of sec of of students who feel safe with security. And then next um we have uh the prompt I believe that CHS
016has done a sufficient job of readying me for the college application process and uh many many students we see do not feel this way that they're ready for the college application process and um so like we talked about uh bringing some more more hands and and guidance onto this and um I was actually part of a panel today for some some juniors uh who you know wanted to learn more. So just getting some some more events like that where our senior class can help out juniors would definitely I think be of assistance. And then the final one um believing the prompt is I believe that CHS has successfully prepared me for further education andor a career. So, um, we see a little bit more of a positive trend, but still some room for growth in,
017um, you know, just specific college and career preparation. And again, I think guidance could play a role in this, but also, uh, specific programs that are tailored to, um, career paths, and I know uh, Dr. V uh worked on a lot of those um certificate programs that are going to be integrated into uh the school's learning environment. Um and yeah, that's what I have for today. Thank you. Good job, Oliver. I'm so impressed that you and Assa took the initiative to put this survey together and I hope that future uh student reps will carry that torch on and maybe add even more elements to the survey. I think it would be interesting to know um how the responses differ depending on grade. Um I'm curious if you if you know if a lot of the
018the students were seniors um or if you know what that mix was. Yeah. um we did not collect data on this. So I think yeah it would be interesting to see and then also um I think just just even making this more of a a frequent thing um you know obviously it won't be me but the student reps for for next year just um maybe less questions but on a on a more frequent basis and then if possible working with administration so that this is a mandatory um or at least incentivized response because we did get 160 responses, but it's a 2,000 student school. So, um there's definitely some perspectives that uh we know we're missing. So, it's it's important to get the full range of uh voices here. Uh Oliver, I know that there
019were a number of narrative responses that students were able to give in addition to these. Uh obviously we can't share all of those, but would you be able to highlight from your reading of it uh you know any of tall trees as far as suggestions that students had? Yeah, I mean it was really just uh going uh with with the the responses that we've already seen and just wanting some more clarity and uh communication in the actions from the board and I think uh definitely the board board reps current and future should be working to facilitate this type of communication. Um, but you know, I think a lot of this um this is is just stemming from uh perceived like just feelings that they're not being uh informed on all the decisions made and that
020just a little could go a long way and uh making them making all students at Columbia and across the district feel uh more more safe and heard. Okay, great. Thank you. We'll move on now to the superintendent update. Thank you, Oliver. I also appreciate you leaving out the survey question about myself. Who is the uh who is the best district superintendent? I understand I came in third in that vote. A Dr. Bill Looney was first and a Dr. Peeper Pepper was second. Totally understandable. Third is admirable. Nothing to be ashamed about. It's and we'll continue with my positive affirmations every morning. We did have our first uh superintendent student council. High school couldn't make it because they had a conflict, but we met with both student councils at middle schools. So, uh that's going to
021be carried over into next year. There'll be monthly meetings. will be bringing students to this building uh to discuss issues as Oliver noted. Uh just big thanks, I know we have a couple presentations, so I'm going to be quick. Big thanks for our ribbon cutting uh on May 27th. Uh really went quite well for our high school library media center and Commons area. Um you know, truly special event. We lucky enough to have uh current and past board presidents uh show up. Big thanks to Frank uh Sanchez for his his comments and all his work uh in regards to the space. Uh also another big thanks to folks that showed up to our anxious generation book study number two last night. Had about 30 plus folks show up. Uh great discussion really delved into the
022challenges young people face in our increasingly connected and flat world. Um, again, I think it provided an important opportunity for parents, educators, and community members to engage uh in the themes that were presented in the book um on that uh subject. And we've had discussions as a board. We're going to continue having discussions. We do have a policy that that upholds the ban of cell phones district uh districtwide. Um, we'll be looking deeper into that policy uh at our next uh board committee meetings and setting out some correspondence to the public uh over the next month or so in regards to decisions made uh around smartphone usage K to2 uh contract settlement. Again, I know we announced it last time, but we're very proud to announce uh that the South Orange Baywood school district has
023successfully reached a new collective bar agreement with our South Orange Baywood Education Association. We have also made significant progress uh with our uh association of supervisors, coordinators and administrators. Uh we are pending ratification from that group. So we are excited and very close to the finish line with our administrators. So big thanks to both of our associations for their diligent work in addition to our board for their hard work uh in regards to settling uh our contracts. Uh very quickly, our financial landscape as you all know and big thanks as well. We approved their 2526 school budget on Thursday, April 24th. Uh big thanks uh to our community budget advisory committee for their invaluable work in addition to the board of education and our dedicated uh SOMD staff. It is imperative that the address the
024district address financial landscape for the foreseeable future. The reality is South Orange and Maplewood School District along with many other school districts uh across the state anticipate a very lean budget year for the next several years. This outlook is influenced by a combination of factors including rising operational costs and inflationary pressures, state aid constraints, and the need to manage prior commitments while continuing to invest in essential programs and services. Uh this lean budgetary period will necessitate continued fiscal prudence, strategic resource allocation, and at times difficult decisions regarding spending priorities. Our commitment remains steadfast, maximize every dollar to directly benefit student learning and uh maintain the high standards of education for which our district is known. We're going to focus on preserving core academic programs, supporting student services, and ensuring the safety and maintenance of our
025facilities all while operating within stringent financial parameters. We currently are examining personnel and position rosters and also facility space. We are working closely with building leaders to ensure district vacancies are filled uh internally first uh and secondly hiring externally. This process will ensure no reduction in force for the 2025 26 school year. Um finally we are starting the work as a board around one of the promises we made in this 2526 budget around an energy savings improvement plan. We started discussions at our last uh FFT committee meeting. Um for those you don't know uh the New Jersey Energy Savings Improvement Plan, the initiatives demonstrate New Jersey schools district's commitment to sustainability and fiscal responsibility. Uh by leveraging EIPS, our district can fund essential infra infrastructure upgrades through energy savings, minimizing the financial impact on taxpayers.
026As government entities struggle, such as school districts, to offset many costs, a performance contract can be a solution to afford the upgrades. Uh, an energy savings improvement plan is based on financing today's improvements off of tomorrow's savings for little to no cost. So, we're excited about starting uh that work. Um, and finally, you know, I really did want to focus on on a few things because we we've been receiving emails uh for for uh the past week or so. Um, as a district founded on the strength of relationships, we believe that it's our responsibility to teach our students how to participate in civil discourse with empathy, empathy, openness, and integrity. These conversations, sometimes challenging, always essential, uh, are where true learning and growth happen. Uh, through intentional practice and guided opportunities, our students learn not
027just to listen, but to understand and not just to speak, but to contribute meaningfully to a broader dialogue. This alone is a huge task. Uh this job, well, I'm not going to call it a job, but it's I I will uh it's better entitled a calling. Education, the education field. Being an educator uh can be very rewarding. However, as you have read in the headlines, education burnout is growing. Recruiting uh students and and folks into the teaching field is becoming more and more difficult. And our responsibilities such as student safety both physical and emotional, developing critical thinkers, cultivating empathy in our students and so much more uh increases every day and it can be quite overwhelming uh for administrators, for our classroom teacher, for our par professionals uh for every level uh of employment uh
028in any education uh setting. So what we what I what we often receive, we often receive requests um to really unil unilaterally solve um adult and community issues within Soma as a school district. Uh so to that end, I I'm really going to urge our communities to create spaces and opportunities that demand regular, reasoned, open, and collaborative evaluation of ideas, spaces where viewpoints are examined, not individuals attacked. We must set an example for our children and work to be a community where wrestling with complex concepts and their implications is not only allowed but actively encouraged, provided it is done with a genuine commitment to SM's shared values. Social media misuse threatens this process by promoting disingenuous dialogue over genuine understanding and by encouraging division rather than connection. adults, educators, parents, and caregivers play a crucial
029role in the modeling the kind of communication we want to see in our children. Um, our students, our children look to us to model what communication looks like, not only face to face, but also online and on social media. um you know, in reading emails I receive along with other staff uh emails that they receive and viewing posts on social media and listening to public speaks, not only at our board meetings, but at South Orange Municipality Board meetings and Maplewood Township Board meetings. We need to set a better example for our students in regards to what communication looks like uh and what we want to reflect our values in Soma. Um, when we demonstrate as adults how to listen with humility, humility and empathy and seek truth without taking away another's dignity and utilize social
030media responsibly, we set the standard for our children. Our children are watching how we respond to conflict, how we speak about others, and how we respect each other in the face of differences. We have a couple presentations tonight. Where's Dr. Dr. Gilbert will be doing a couple presentations, one on year four of the ALS report and then also on survey results. So, I'm going to turn this over to Dr. Gilbert. [Music] Hello, good afternoon, good evening. Uh, for those who don't know me out there on TV land, I'm Dr. Kevin Gilbert, the assistant superintendent of schools, uh to uh our superintendent, our board of education, uh and all of you who here. I am here to do a couple of things. One to give you the year four report on our triple I uh also
031known as the uh intentional integration initiative. And then followed with that I will go through various survey data that we've collected uh this year. So oh the clicker can you just click the next slide for me Keith. So this presentation is uh going to summarize our year four report a review of uh the the the fourth year of our integration of triple I the purpose just to remind people the purpose of our algorithm is to kind of help build diversity through our student placement process based on socioeconomic status and it's happening in our elementary and our middle schools. But I just want to caution pe just remind people that this is only one part of our integration effort. Thank you sir. Uh moving students is only one way we do that. We're trying to deeply
032embed integration or inclus inclusivity throughout our schools through our implementation of our Ruckers uh equity audit uh recommendations and other aspects. Uh our aim with our triple is to have a 5% variance between our low, medium and high SCES groups in our schools. So we start with kindergarten. Kindergarten is our largest group of students who uh are placed through triple I uh this as this past year we we we put in about 510 kindergart we placed 510 kindergarten students. Um as part of that placement uh the capacity it was very tight. So we have to give seat capacity numbers to our ALS group for placement. This year the capacity was tighter than previous years and the enrollment has uh outpaced that capacity. So it was very challenging to kind of try to keep students at
033their closest school as we try to do uh as well as balance the variance across our district. So, uh, we did add a new class at Dillia Balden and we released whole seats at Clinton Elementary and the class size cap, uh, was raised from 22 to 24 students. Also, uh, most of 71% of the placements uh, were assigned through sibling priority. I mean, excuse me. Yeah, sibling priority. Um, and also 80 nearly all of the students who came through 84% of the students that received were placed through uh from the through the algorithm. 41% of our SOSD kindergarten students were assigned based again uh on sibling uh priority ensuring that placement with their older sibling already in grades 1 through five. Uh 60% of students were placed through sibling priority through Tustin and Marshall. There's
034a graphic there to kind of show you the various percentages uh of our placement of our students. Also, um there was um all of our students made made we made our target of our plus or five minus variance in all of our schools with the exception of Clinton Elementary. Uh this was due to uh couple of factors. one uh the low SCES tier student increase uh that were signed late in our school in our school time got assigned to uh Clinton as well as we had a significant number of or we had some we had a number of multilangual lingual students who were also placed uh at Clinton. Okay, the there we go. This is just a uh the the next graphic is just a um table to kind of show those numbers. You can't
035see that, but when you see it posted on the the website, uh you'll be able to follow along with the graphic. Although the integration algorithm is race neutral, we do monitor race in the district and Clinton experienced the most significant variance in terms of number of our black students. They were uh up from 2% last year the previous year and they saw an increase of about plus 23%. Again this is imbalance was caused by a reduction in the number of seats that they had as well as a sharp increase in the number of preassignments for black students who are in special education and multilingual students. Clinton houses not only our ML program but it also houses our ABA program as well. And uh our special education numbers show that the ABA or autism program has
036a significant number of students of color in there. And so that's why we saw that increase in Clinton Elementary School. Again, another one of those graphics for you to check out when we put this online. In the 2425 school year, about 48% of the algorithm assigned students again were placed in their closest school against uh with the higher placement rates for high SCES students about 59% compared to our low SCES students which is about 45%. However, the share of low SCEES students attending their closing school rose 34% to 45%, which means that there was a slight decrease in the number of our medium and high SCES students who went to their closest school. And here's another graphic for you to check those numbers out and see how they compared across our district. Then the neighborhood
037analysis that we did uh shows that between like 20 2023 and 24 and 2425 South Bordon has seen the most significant increase in students who are going to their school who live near this school in their neighborhood while South Mountain and Clinton saw declines and this was due to a reduced capacity. Uh notably only 18% of the Clinton neighborhood students were assigned to Clinton through the algorithm in 2425. Again largely because of all the other factors that I mentioned earlier and the uh the assigned seats and the preass preassignments that were made uh from those other factors. Again another chart for you to review. between 20 um sorry I already did that one overall the average distance uh increase marginally from 1.09 09 to 1.13 miles uh for our low SCES students who saw them
038who saw a notable drop from their average distance as well. And this was largely again due to we increased the seat capacity at Seth Bdon. So uh even though the overall average of the distances uh for students kind of mar kind of rose largely uh we did see a drop for our low SCES students in their distance which was 1.45 to 1.25 25. And so, uh, that's one change that we saw. And we also saw that our gains were strongest for our low SCES and black students, both that seeing significant increases in those traveling less miles to school. That's been one of the issues that we know that we were dealing with in that our algorithm was placing some of our most our students, our low SCES students were having the furthest to travel based
039on their placement. But this past year through placement we did reduce that number. With that being said, that does mean that the number of our again our mid to high SCES tier students were had went went a little further than they normally would have gone. Couple of more graphs for you the tables for you to check out um to compare those numbers. And now we move to first grade. So remember now when it comes to now kindergarten all of our kind our new K our kindergarters are placed through the algorithm after that grades first second third graders are only new students go into the algorithm. So as new students register so those numbers will be slightly smaller than overall but we still monitor that because these new students are actually coming into classes that have
040already had full class placement. So we have to monitor and see what that variance looks like. Just some highlighted numbers. Clinton saw a slightly over representation of our low SCES students. Uh Dillia Balden saw a slight under representation of our low SCES students and Seth Bdon saw a slightly under representation of our high SCES students. Another one of our graphs for you to to look at. Go back one. Um on this particular graph that's the one we just saw. I am struggling here with the technology. For those who don't know me, I am very technology challenged. So Keith, I'm probably going to turn this back over to you to kind of help me. It keeps going back to the other slide here. I know it was working and it stopped working and now I'm sweating
041because now I'm embarrassing. Now I'm embarrassing myself and I know my partner is probably watching. Look with her head down like, "Do I even know you?" All right. So I elementary school, our first grade. So two high highlights here. Seth Bdon, our white student variance increased from minus 10 to minus 11 percentage points. And in Tuscan, our black student variance increase from minus 10 to minus 10 percentage points. One of the things as we go through this presentation, I want you to pay attention to what's happening at Tuscan Elementary School. I know in the past when we started with triple Live prior to my arrival here, the concern was around Seth Boyd and South Mountain showing the largest variance especially when it came to race in the students. But now our numbers are really showing
042that Tuskin is now becoming that school that we have to really pay close attention to uh for several several ex external factors that I'll talk about later. Let me just Do say that. Okay, thank you. Because it keeps popping. It keeps going back to Thank Thank you. Go to the next slide. So, now we'll move to second grade. Go to the next slide, please. Um, in second grade again, our variance numbers are showing our variance numbers are show not showing they're not showing much change from the variance. doing a good job of trying to stay within that 5% variance, but again, we have our outliers that we're we're we're monitoring. So, Clinton, South Mountain, and Seth Bordon still are showing slight uh excesses in our variance uh that we're trying to make, but overall, even
043in our second grade, our variances still uh for the other schools are looking like they're staying within that our our mark of 5%. Next slide, please. Here's another graph. Next slide. Um on this particular slide gives a couple of things. So when we talked about talked about Tuscin, so Tuscan elementary school exhibited the significantly higher positive variance for white students about plus 18 and a negative variance for black students which is about -3. when we looked at what happened to them in the first grade to the second grade. And there's four factors that are playing into that. One, the pre- triple eye imbalance. So we again we're just talking about prior to that there was already an imbalance and it just and when they were in the first grade and it got exacerbated with the
044second grade students that we pushed into the school. Sibling priority. One of the reasons why Tuskin is showing the demographic that they're showing is they are the school that has the largest sibling priority in our district. There's more sibling priority in Tuskin than any of our other schools. And so they get a lot of siblings into that particular school. And then uh the white representation across SCES tiers, they have the highest percentage of white students in the SCES tier in all of the categories of the SCES tiers, not just high, but also in the low and the medium range. And um that's also becoming a factor in the in why um we're seeing their numbers kind of spread out like they're doing in terms of their their their diversity. Look and then the capacity constraints.
045Uh Tuskin and uh Miss Mjid always reminds us is that she has a small building. uh because of the small building the capacity is smaller and so we uh we aren't a lot of the whole seats and things it fills up quickly and with all these other factors that are happening Tuskin is is is just is just that outlier that are in our district that uh we have to just kind of pay attention on how those placements look but they also don't have the the capacity for a whole lot of inputs to come into the school if that makes sense. Next slide, please. You can go to the next slide. Again, here's a graphic to kind of show some of the the the tables to kind of see the comparisons that I kind of talked
046about. Next slide, please. Now, we're going to third grade. So, uh again, third grade. Next slide. Again, uh, Seth Bdon showed the most positive variance for low SCES students, while South Mountain showed the most negative variance for SCES students. And as we look at these grades now, kind of remember that these students are being placed in schools where their class was placed by the algorithm when they were in kindergarten, right? So as they move through and so whatever capacities and whatever influences were happen at the front end when they were in kindergarten it gets uh the imbalances kind of come in as you add other students. And so part of what we do at our placement is have to try to look at that to try to keep the variance together. But we're still uh
047like you see uh plus seven at South Bdon, minus eight for low SCES uh at South Mountain and then but they did have a p a positive higher SCES variance of plus seven at South Mountain as well too. And so those are just factors that are piling on to other factors that were that were already uh percolating inside of the school when they got there. Next slide. Well, another table uh that you can compare those numbers with. Next slide. In grade three uh for the 24-25 school year, the racial ethnic dist uh distribution of variance across most schools did remain stable as they were when they were in the second grade. Again, there was an overall improvement in the average variance across schools with many variances moving close to zero from several of within several
048other groups. And so you know even though we have those few outliers that we talked about the other elementary schools variances seem to be uh in line. Next slide. Again another table is going to come here that table there that you can compare those numbers with. Next slide. The Dillia B Marshall Dillia Balden unpairing. Next year, Marshall and Dillia Balden will finally be K5 schools. Yay. We got there. We got there. Uh but this year, uh so hearing the the the concerns from families about around not having a choice in the unparent last year, we provided a choice option this year for families to opt into Dillia Balden. Uh unfortunately, only about 13.8% 8% of those families opted into Dillia Balden which meant we still had to use the algorithm for those remaining families uh
049to place them uh in Dillia Balden. But the end result is that now for the 2526 school year both Dillia Balden and Marshall will be K5 schools. Next slide please. Now to the middle school. So sixth grade. So the kindergarteners are our largest group of placements uh in our elementary school and our rising sixth graders are our next largest group. So our sixth grade all of our rising sixth graders get placed into the algorithm. Uh there were prior to the placement again there are administrative transfers which center around uh ELLL as well as special education uh sees based on the programming prior to the algorithm placement of the other students that go there. Um again the goal is still the same to try to get students to their closest school based on their SCES tier.
050Next slide please. The next two tables will give you the comparison data. What I want you to pay attention to, you can go to the next slide too on these datas as they do the year the ne the the year comparison. We are seeing in our middle school the the same balance of student distribution whether it's SCS tier or racial uh demographics. We're seeing that the we're seeing that both of those placements are really leveling off. And so we're seeing if there's any area in our district where the um the school populations are getting close to matching with our district-wide populations are, it seems to be playing out in our middle schools. And so you can look at the data to to to to test me on that. Uh next slide, please. So a couple
051of highlights. Um 43% of the students were from our low SCES uh tier, 22 were in the medium, and 35 were in the high. The placement the racial ethnic uh placements panned out with 22% being black, 9% Hispanic, 70% being white. And then these are all the withdrawals uh that people who kind of withdrew from our school. So this is the percentages of the students who were withdrawing what their socioeconomic status were based on the withdrawals and 56 of the withdrawals were students who were assigned to South Orange Middle School. So that's either withdrawals um that that's the school that was hit hardest by our withdrawals. Next slide please. Then on the mileage piece, uh the preassigned students, many of them are 1.37 miles for our preassigned students, 1.17 miles uh for those who were
052assigned to Maplewood Middle School, and about 1.20 miles average for those who were South Orange Middle School. The top one though says that 83% of the students overall were placed at their closest school, at their closest middle school. But for those students who were placed by the algorithm, 90% of those students were placed at their closest school. So, uh the the lower number factors in the algorithm and administrative placements, but when you look at all the students who went through the algorithm, the algorithm placed 90% of those students at their closest middle school. Next slide, please. Because again, a couple of more tables. Next slide. You can go to the next slide. So, seventh grade, an analysis of our socioeconomic status and racial e distribution shows that the demographic difference between our two middle schools
053still remains minim minimal and reflecting continued balance across stability for both years. Again, that goes back to my earlier point that we're seeing the balance in our middle school. Next, next slide. And charts for you to review. Next slide. And then our eighth grade last the this year was the year we added our eighth grade graders to the algorithm. And so the next couple of tables show you how that dispersement happened with our introduction of our eighth graders, our new eighth graders to our middle school in the algorithm. Next slide. And again, when you look at these graphs, it's the comparison. When you look at last year, that's where they were at seventh grade and what it looked like this year with the placement. Next slide. Next slide. So, in closing, I go through a
054few highlights for you all. Um, next slide. So five out of six elementary schools and both middle schools maintain their v maintain their variance of 5%. Kindergarten students who were placed at e were placed at either their first or second closest school increased from 67% and from 23 24 to 71% to 2425. So that means that we were able to place 71% of our kindergarteners this year to either their first or second closest school. 83% of sixth grade middle school students were placed at their closest school. But as we said, if they were placed by the algorithm, that number rose to 90%. Over half of our elementary students assigned by the algorithm, 56% were assigned to schools less than a mile from their home in 2420 in 2425 and it slightly rose to about 55%
055uh for the this this current school year. Um, and then the number of low SCES tier students traveling more than three miles decreased from 6% last year to 2% this year. And then the number of elementary school black students who had traveled less than a mile to school increased from 34% to 52%. And then this year, the number those traveling over three miles also fell from 10% last year down to 4% this year. So, uh, we were able to help some of our most, uh, challenging students get to their closest school. Some other key Next slide. Oh, you got it there. Some other key highlights for our implementation. Uh, we made progress in identifying our students uh, who were preassigned. Uh, we developed a weight list pro uh, protocol and procedure this year and we
056assigned a staff person who monitors that. We were unfortunately we were unable to move students off of the weight list and so we are actually if you were on the wait list in kindergarten for this year we move the weight list we move you over to first grade for next year. So we we're going to keep the weight list in inactive so that if something opens up in your first grade year we can get you off of their weight list. uh over 85% of our kindergarten families have reported their self-reported data on either their educational levels and their income levels. Uh we now regularly provide the withdrawal data that the ALS groups need to kind of help us monitor what's happening with our withdrawals. And this year after much demand, we did ALS groups did
057get uh access to our transfinder data to help them with the distances in their schools. We know that's something the board has been asking for several years. It happened this year and we're happy to have that implemented. Uh the ALS group for the last two years they completed helped us with our unpairing. Uh we work with the uh ALS group to put together a workable timeline to get these placements out uh in a timely manner. Um and then um the we reviewed with the ALS group the possibility of looking at the waiting system that they use in their formula and uh after several tests it was deemed that changing the weights the only two factors that are weighted are income level and education level and through the beta test there was no significant difference in
058distribution to make any radical changes to that. And with that, uh, I and I think we're joined by Mr. Michael Alves, uh, will take questions. I don't know. Did I make the 20 minutes? Actually, you are exactly at 20 minutes because I've been timing you. So, thank you. Look at that. Excited. Excited. I did it. Your wife is very proud. All right. Okay. So, um, unless Mr. Als had anything to say, we can start with questions. Do we know? Yeah, I don't. Mr. Als, are can you hear us? He needs to unmute. Mr. Als, can you unmute your microphone and say hi to everybody? Trying to. All right. Hey, can you hear me now? Yes, sir. We can hear you now. Yes, sir. All right. Okay. Thank you. Is there anything you'd like to add
059before we take questions from the board? Well, of course. Uh, again, I've been at this for nearly 50 years. I hate to say so. When I started, I was the young guy and now I'm the old man. But anyway, it's been a absolute pleasure working with the South Orange Maplewood. Uh what's so impressive and of course you've gone through and you've seen the results that you're achieving but you also need to recognize that um this is really a a a p a new major major innovation in trying to integrate schools because you're trying to achieve parents want schools near their home and we able to do that to the extent practicable the 5% variance Cambridge started with that years ago and they've expanded candidate. But in this particular case, I'm quite impressed how in terms
060of your variances, which means the extent to which your schools are truly at least in terms of the enrollment truly diverse with socioeconomic status and your racial results, although we do not have any factor dealing with race are certainly proof of a well-integrated district. Remember, I designed a plan in Seattle, Washington that the Supreme Court in 2007 said, "Oh, you can't use race unless you're convicted in federal court." And so, we've been developing a multiaceted socioeconomic model. And so, what you have here in South Orange is certainly an evolution of that model. So again, I always I I really want to commend the district and of course there's always room for improvement and we certainly work very well with Dr. Gilbert, Lyanna, the host staff and so we're always searching for what is the best
061practice and we always open for new ideas. But when anyone wants to make any changes to something that is apparently successful, we always do, of course, a beta test. So you can see what the results would have been if you had implemented that suggestion a year ago. But overall, I just uh am very proud of working with your school district. Thank you, Mr. Alves. Um, can we get any questions? Who wants to go first? Okay, Regina, raise her hand and then and then this was actually an unplanned one, but um Mr. Alves, thank you by the way for for joining us tonight. Um you just mentioned something about Cambridge's plus five uh variance that was recently expanded. Can you just talk a little bit more about that? Well, I started I started what's called control
062choice. I invented that along with the people in Cambridge back in 1980. And so the uh they had to adopt a variance to measure the extent of school integration and they adopted 5%. But then over the years um Cambridge expanded it to 10 10%. Uh but then when the Supreme Court outlawed race, we had to convert the socioeconomic. So now in Cambridge they have issues in Cambridge where there are certain still are certain schools that are not very attractive to the high SCEs in Cambridge and of course like South Orange Cambridge is has their SCES high SCEs is is in terms of highly educated parents. So they they are str Cambridge is still struggling with some schools that to the extent you could have a bluecollar neighborhood in this in Cambridge today they're still struggling
063to attract more middle class families. So they've expanded the variance over time to it's about 10%. I've been assigning the kids in Cambridge now since 2000. Uh and so the v the variances just depends in terms of what is the comfort level of the district but in terms of South Orange is just well within the 5% and so I don't see any anything right now in the data at all and I've talked to staff about this that would require uh overall increasing the variance again if where you may have issues like Cambridge and all the other districts I've ever worked with, it's more school specific. So, you may have a couple of schools that for whatever reason are not attracting a certain socioeconomic group and also uh as pointed out in the report uh is
064that you do of course preassigns and of course sibling preference uh is is a major preassignment and that can that simply takes up seats. Then of course in place your special ed and your limit English proficient children and those those administrative assignments are all preassigned and all and all of that of course affects capacity. The one thing to understand about student assignment it depends on capacity. how many seats you have available in the school. And so you're always struggling with issues of capacity, but capacity and preassignments have a major effect in terms of the actual placement and assignment of the students. Um, no, that that was very helpful and I think the you know, I know Cambridge has a different model than than you know, Somd because they have the controlled choice. So I can
065see why expanding that variance if they're having strugg if they're struggling to attract other I think you said middle class middle SCES families. Um you know I think we are also a bit different from that because we are not controlled choice and I also think what we get challenged with like you mentioned Mr. elves is the um you know it all depends on seat capacity and you know thinking about the the whole timeline of registration to assignment to when people move and the late registrations what we've seen I believe and if you can confirm is that often times the later registrations will not end up toward like nearest their closest school and then subsequently we then have to end up transporting them. So I think that to me is like the biggest difference is that
066what one it's a different model. It's it's controlled choice versus ours. But I also think we have in the kind of budgetary world that we now live in. Those are things that we actually should be considering is, you know, obviously seat capacity is constraining us, but how much are we then, you know, quite frankly spending to to transport kids all around town? That that Thank you very much for bringing that up. That's also why we're able to utilize your new transportation system. My colleague um Nancy McConnell is not here tonight and of course she's brilliant. Margaret for probably one of the best in the country and Nancy's been working with that software and I and that's been very helpful because now you're in sync in terms of your distance for transportation eligibility along with the
067distance used for the algorithm. Uh so that's so we're very cons we're very cognizant of the idea of children being able to attend schools nearest to their home and at the same time do it in such a way that you're able to maintain an integrated school district. I mean this is what's remarkable and one of the things we've been thinking about in terms of our so-called algorithm uh after you uh have the students sorted by their SCES tier in the past we've been just using the random number who got the highest random number gets assigned first and Nancy has been doing various beta testing where it would always be the children who live nearest closest to a home and the results of that are very promising and we want to work with Dr. Gilbert and
068the staff on that. But we're very aware that we try to avoid outliers and when you have transportation, you always have a few students that they're way out in the fringe of the district and that's something that we're very aware of all the time. And that's why sometimes you need to be flexible in terms of your capacity. You may want to then just maybe because you you don't want outliers. We're very again in the report we talk about children being transported over three miles which we've made headway on significant but ultimately I think that you should try to be a little bit more flexible with capacity and in your case uh the thermostat is class size but how far can how many seats can you increase by classroom the other big one is an enrollment
069strand which would be K through six. That's schools that have extra classrooms. But again, every district struggles with this and especially a district like your district where you don't have a lot of excess schools or excess capacity. But but you're bringing up is something we're aware we're very aware of it and we're always trying to work with the district in terms of minimizing uh any children were not able to attend a school within their first or second closest school. Thanks, Mr. Alves. Um, we we have a time limit on this presentation, so I'm going to move things along a little bit. And Will, I think you're next, right? Yeah. Thank you very much. Uh, hi, uh, Dr. Ros, it's I appreciate the information from the presentation. I, uh, know that in the presentation from last
070year, the year three report, it had a list of certain recommendations for the future, and that may be semantics. There's a lot of uh uh indications of things that have been achieved uh in this year, but I wonder if you would just give us your overall view on the the state of Triple I as it is and going forward and the degree to which you have recommendations for uh ways that it should move in order to stay uh effective and achieve its goals right now. Yeah, I I'll be very brief. I think um the concept of a weight list uh that first started again 1981 when children did not get their first choice school under control choice. So clearly we designed what we call a weight list. But a weight list is really something for
071only those students who went through in that case a lottery. And it we we've learned over time to try to have a a shelf life because um again uh what's probably more important is to be thinking about a control choice transfer policy. In other words, your weight list uh will only affect students certain students whereas a transfer policy for whatever reason uh for use utilizing control choice is something to consider in the future. Um we've made great but now the weight list that they have working with staff is certainly well be well managed the question is again availability of seats uh and also I'd recommend again this idea of this is an internal thing it's kind of a best practice uh for us would be to really think about instead of just sorting children by
072the random number high to low that we consist be consistent and congruent and continually just trying to assign students to their closest school. Uh those are the two recommendations that I would make in the future. Other recommendations made in the past as we point out we've made great progress on especially being able to identify early on all of your preassigns and the district should be commended the staff because they've done a very good job on that. So overall I would say that the the to me the program uh is working very well is pro but most important providing you with stable integration and also what that means on the withdrawals not many people are leaving your school district I don't think any of them because of student assignment so no one can you use that
073phrase years ago white flight or class flight I you you don't have that issue here I think overall all the district has done a great job because it's committed to it and being able to work with people who uh the plan's been well implemented and that's so important. But we're always trying to come up with ways we can fine-tune and anything that is major obviously we have the ability to beta test it. In other words, we go back to last year and say, "What if you had done that change last year what the results would be so the board can always make informed uh choices and decisions when they want to make some adjustments. But overall, I I I commend you. I I I think that this is becoming in terms of student assignment incredibly
074well integrated school. I don't know of any other school district in the country is as well integrated as yours quite frankly. But then of course what happens in the CL in the school is equally probably many times even more important. So I think overall in terms of at least trying to provide the schools with an integrated student enrollment I think that um certainly the district the the algorithm that we've all put together is working. Hi. Uh, thank you very much Mr. Alves for speaking with us. Um, I had a question about uh control choice. Like our integration plan seems to be unusual because we don't use any kind of zoning. We don't use school pairings anymore, but we don't have control choice. Our system works by, you know, a proximity assumption where everyone wants to
075go to the closest school or second closest school, etc. Um, are we the only district in the United States that has an integration plan that works this way on like mand random mandatory assignment with a a proximity assumption? Well, what you are actually is most school districts United States assign students based on where they live. Residentialbased assignments have been around since Horus man. No, no, no, no. I'm sorry. I I know that I was referring to districts that don't have zoned schools anymore but have an integration plan. Like are we the only district that operates on something like a proximity assumption where there's no parental ranking of schools that doesn't have control choice and doesn't have zoning? Well, again what what you have you do not have you get rid of individual school boundaries. Okay.
076And that's a that's something which came out of control choice and that you're assigning students again based upon proximity to the school nearest their home and which is control choice allows parents to choose whatever school in large school districts I I I create zones geographic zones like I've done Wake County North Carolina here in Charlotte where I live in in North Carolina now Boston And so in terms of your district, I think that uh as I said earlier, I I I the idea that you could initially assign students to the school closest to their home because overall probably that's most parents prefer that, especially if it's if it's a good school. But then also, you may want to think about introducing a control choice transfer policy. In other words, it would be a parent for
077whatever reason did not want to go to a different school, they could apply and we could develop a control choice algorithm together. But I would be utilizing choice in terms of school transfers, not necessarily the initial assignment because the initial assignment uh most of most parents evidently uh are pretty satisfied with that assignment. But there's always parents who would prefer to go to another school. So right now, I think to start exploring the possibility of introducing a control choice transfer policy, I think it' be a more prudent step at this point for the district. Okay. Um, we have room time for one more. I just want to make sure because Liz, did you have something you wanted to add? No. Okay. So then you'll be the last one. Okay. And then we'll wrap it up.
078Thank you for being here today. Um I was looking at some data that we received in a Friday packet in February and it had data by of assignments by neighborhood that you had provided and I just want to understand a little bit more about the scrubbing that you do to remove the isolated placements. So, for example, this year I saw that there was one kindergartener from the entire Marshall neighborhood that was assigned to Tuscan and there were only three kindergarteners from the entire South Mountain neighborhood zone assigned to Clinton. And this occurred in other instances as well. Um, in some cases, the preassigned students, so the siblings, the ML or the special services assignments did help. So for example, there might have been one student that the algorithm assigned from the South Mountain neighborhood to
079Tuscin, but then there were other two there were other two uh preassigned students from the South Mountain neighborhood bringing the total students to three from the entire South Mountain neighborhood to Tuscin. I consider that to be an isolated placement. Um I think it is not conducive to community building to rei to allow parents to rely on their village for car pooling and I don't think it um is prudent for transportation efficiency. So, can you talk to me a little bit about what scrubbing is done to try and minimize this from occurring? And also, um, does this happen in other districts that you work with? And are there solutions to how we can, um, prevent this from happening? Well, here's some help. Can you define what you mean by scrubbing? So if the algorithm places all
080the students according to the algorithm, do you go back and look at the data to see, you know, this placement doesn't really makes sense. This student is the only one from this area being busted to this to this one school. From a community building standpoint, from a transportation efficiency standpoint, this doesn't make sense. We should manually manually change what the algorithm has assigned. Well, okay. Yes. This we call these kind of outliers. Because again, we're always concerned about uh ideally when you assign students, okay, that there's a cluster of them and and that's where certainly as we continue to utilize your trans student transportation system and have a better understanding about routing that you're always trying to you have enough students to justify a bus stop, for example, in a certain area. What we don't
081really want to see is one or two students who get isolated. And this is something that certainly with um with Nancy and staff, we we'll we can take another look at that and get back to you with more precise answer. But the issue you're raising is something we're always concerned about. And ideally what you want to you could maybe have a critical mass of students from a particular area uh that it'd be they could be assigned to a school further away but there's enough students to justify the yellow bus uh bus stop. That's the best answer I I can give to you tonight. But certainly if you could tr send it on to Dr. Gilbert and he can put that in written form to me and and Nancy will certainly pursue it and get back
082to you with probably a much better answer. Okay, I'll do that. That's helpful. And I I agree. I think the it does make most I agree with you completely. Assigning a cluster of students as opposed to one student is just so much better for many many reasons. But I noticed that according to the data we have that hasn't been happening. So I just want to make sure that it does happen for the school year coming up which is 2526. Yeah. In one footnote that's why I think moving to this um instead of random number because that would be a random number effect uh that we actually sort the kids by closest by closer schools. So that in and our initial beta testing on that is actually resulting in more reduced uh tra uh distances and
083uh more students attend getting their closest school. But again, please put that have Dr. Gilbert send us you know that in writing to us so then we can really um take a good look at that and get back to you with again a better answer. But I'm hoping for even uh one way to solve that problem. Let's work towards a solution. Thanks for assigning me some homework, Mr. Alves. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Alves. That'll complete the Q&A and then we'll move on to Dr. Gilbert presenting the survey results. Right. Absolutely. Again, thank you, Mr. Mr. Alves. Your work is done, sir. Enjoy the rest of your evening. Well, I want to thank you all and have everyone have a good night. Thank you. All right. Good night, sir. Good night. All right, Mr. Bonds. Let's
084try this again. I'm not going to mess with this clicker, sir. You're going to have to control me this time. And the clock is running. Okay. So the next presentation uh I'm going to run through the many surveys we have conducted through the community. And let me just take a point of personal privilege to thank all of the community people, the families, the students, the staff who have uh answered the call when we sent out these surveys. Uh, one of the rationale reasons around asking to discontinue the second phase of the triple eye survey is so we can evaluate the amount of surveying that we're doing. When the policy uh around doing the triple eye survey came out, the district did not have this wealth of surveying going on, but now we have a a
085bunch of surveys that we can kind of look at. And so we want to make sure we we value your time as as citizens. We value the times of our students, but we also know that this feedback is very important. So uh the one survey that will not be presented tonight will be the work that we did with Satan Hall. I think we're going to come back and do that uh at a later date. But other than that, we're going to I'm going to present on all of the surveys that we've done this year with the exception of the data you see for the New Jersey school climate improvement survey. That's last year's data. That is actually being administered as we speak now. So, our schools are administering this year's version of the NJ Sky
086as we call it right now. Okay. So, next slide. So, we'll start with the triple eye experience survey that was only given to our families because our sixth grade students had the DEIB survey from handover. We just felt that no need to give them another survey to do. So, this is the family feedback for the triple I experience survey. Next slide. So, in January 2025, we surveyed families who were placed through uh our triple I a total of uh 1,08 students were placed. Our goal was to get at least 300 families to send back the s survey. So, we have a grow here. We only had 268 families, but I will say that we did see an increase this year in families who represented our students of color. So that was a that was a
087grow for us. Uh go to this go to the next slide. I'm going to go through these slides. This presentation will be placed for you uh online. So I'm probably going to skip through several slides. But this one again shows the demographic data of our families. And I want to call your attention to the orange slice. That's the slice for our black families in particular. We did see an increase in the number of those families that participated in the survey. And so that was that was very that was very important. Next slide. This slide talked about the diversity question that we asked. You can see we have a large number of our families in the red and blue. Next slide. I want to talk about this slide. So the question was it's hard for our
088ch our children to be accepted in the school. uh we saw a grow I mean a glow here where we had a large almost what 94% of our families who replied said either strongly I'm sorry who strongly um disagreed or disagreed with that which means they felt like their students were accepted into school. So that's that's a negative reversal but that's what we want to see. So 96% of our families felt like their children were accepted in school. That's a that's a glow for us. Next slide. This is the data on the question about tensions in school. Next slide. This particular slide again is another glow for us uh on our children being feeling connected with another adult. I think uh that's right at 90% if you take the strongly agree and agree panies together.
089And the reason I'm focused on the 90% is when we started this survey two years ago, our goal after that data came out was to try to get 90% in our positive categories. That, you know, 80% is fine, but what we're looking for is 90% or above to really show that we're meeting some of these standards. And so the ones that we got 90 this time, I'd like to lift up. Next slide. Another another grow glow for us is whether or not staff cares about our children. Uh there again uh is is is another one where we hit the 90% mark. Next slide. Staff understands uh my child. We didn't quite make 90 there. So that's a growth for us. Next slide. Another one. I'm not going to intelligent to read all of these to
090you. You can see on this particular question where we landed. Next slide. We're going to stop here. Here's another glow for us of my ch uh children. Well, not a globe, but one that I want us to really flow on. This is a grow for us. Um my children, I see my children reflected in the lessons or our child can see them reflecting the lessons high in the mid80s. That's good. However, we want 90%. So, this is a growth for us. We want to try to make sure we get that number up and above. This keeps us to tell us we want to go. And you still got about 13 14% of the people who disagree with with that statement. So that means, you know, we've got we've got work to do. Next slide. Receiving
091proper supports on benchmarks. That's for you, Madam President. I know you really want us focused on our level benchmarks and things like that. And so, uh, this is a a area of growth for us. We haven't quite made the 90% mark on that, but it's pretty high in the 80s. Next, uh, slide, please. Definitely a growth for us. This is the engagement piece. We're still working on our opportunities to engage with our families. This, I think, was one of the lower uh end pres uh data we got back. Uh so we've got work to do in our schools in terms of engaging with our families. Next slide. Another grow here is uh feeling treated and respected in our in the classrooms. This is actually a glow for us. We we reached that 90% mark in
092this particular one. Next slide. Feeling welcome and valued. Uh a grow. We're not quite at 90% yet in this. And so this is what this is what this work is about. This is the work that we're trying to do to build welcoming and inclusive environments. Have work to do in this particular category. About 15% people disagree with this statement. So that's too much. That's too many. Next slide. Another growth area for us is uh the the hardship piece. Uh I know that uh one of the things we're going to do uh this is to you uh board member Brown is we've got to go into this and see where the kindergarten data is. Uh and the the problem with that where we got to work with that is it's optional for families to kind of
093tell us what grade their kid their kiddos are in. But because you have to put the student number, we can actually take the student number and match it to the answer. That means we got to go through every single answer, match it to every single question, and pull that out. We're going to do that for you. We're going to do that. We're going to do that for you, and we're going to get that done to you, but you'll have to wait till the Ruckers implementation meeting for us to get it to you, but we're going to get that done for you and the board. I She chairs a Ruckers committee, so I can pick on her a little bit. But we got 22% We have 22% of our families who have experienced hardship. That's too
094much. That's too many. So that's a that's definitely a grow a growth area for us an opportunity that we need to fit. Next slide please. And then as a caregiver I feel proud of being belonging to the school community. Uh quite I think we little bit slightly under the 90% but it's in the high 80s. So next slide. So the takeaways from the triple eye survey again 92.9% of respondents believe their children uh don't find it hard to be accepted. 91% believe their child is connected to an adult. 96.2% feel their schools care about their children. 96.7% either strongly or uh strongly agree or agree that they are treated with the same respect as other families in their school. But we do have some grow areas. We need to grow in building our welcoming and
095belonging environments in our school. We need to continue to work towards making sure our children see themselves reflected in our curriculum and in our practices that that we do here in the school. Uh we do have work to do on our family engagement piece which was the lowest responded rate for strong and strong and strong strongly agree and agree was about 74%. And then uh only 82% of our families felt that the school staff reaches out to them to help them feel welcome and valued in their school. And then we've got that 22% hardship uh families that you know we still need to dig deeper in and see what's happening with those particular families in that particular area. Next slide. The New Jersey school climate improvement survey. Uh this survey started in 2122. Uh it
096was piloted by our middle schools and our high school. In 22 23 our middle schools and our high schools did it again. And then last year for the first time all of our schools participated in the survey. This is one of the most uh uh informed surveys we have because we get a lot of participation. As you can see, 3,292 students, 450 staff members, 857 caregivers. This has given us a wealth of da d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d da. It's on a 4.0 scale. Uh so when you see the slides coming up, you'll see that and our principles use this data
097in building their building level plan. So they get the reports as well as all the reports are underneath the office of the assistant superintendent tab. If you go in there and go to reports, you can see every single NJ Sky data that we have for all of our schools, caregivers, staff, and students, and what those responses were. And right now, the window for the survey was April 28th to May 23rd. However, with testing and stuff, some schools extended that. So, I think some of our schools are still administering it on into the first or second week of June, and that's fine. But when we get that data, our principles will look at it and dive into it. Next slide, please. Again, you can see our numbers at the top. So, the rows as we go
098through these slides, you'll see the first row are students, third through fifth grade. So, our third through fifth grade students do it in our elementary schools. But all of our families have an opportunity to answer this survey in our elementary schools. Our 6th through 12th grade students, our staff, 450 members of our staff, and like we said, 857 caregivers. Those numbers represent where they fell at on the 4.0 0 scale. You can look at those numbers and those who want to make 4.0 A, we don't do it that way, but I know people like to grade stuff. 4.0 will be a A and all of that stuff. You can kind of see where those grades fall in on that particular slide. Next slide, please. Remember the first row is third to fifth grade, second row
099is 6th through 12th grade, third row is staff, and the last row is family. You can see those bottom two uh domains uh on uh or deals specifically with staff and caregivers. And then the last one was just a staff question. Next slide please. And then you can see the numbers on these particular ones. Uh the leadership support and organizational resources was just given to staff and then the students got the student sense of belonging uh one. So the staff and and families didn't get that one. So here are the takeaways from looking at those numbers. Areas of glow. Uh strong sense of physical safety came out on top. Uh continue to the next slide across all groups especially in our third third through fifth grade student. Our elementary students love us. You can see
100in this data that their scores are off the charts. Uh supportive staff and student relationships uh in those domain were very were generally positive. a high sense of belonging with our students from from our third to fifth graders and the positive family and collegial support among staff amongst themselves and staff and families. Our families really love our teachers and our teachers really love our families and and and the work that our staff is doing collectively. It showed up in this survey. Our opportunities uh there is definitely a c there's a gap of climate and culture with our with the between our students. Our third through fifth graders love it. They're having a wonderful time. Our sixth to 12th graders, their scores are a little bit lower. They're not where we want them to be. So,
101there's a gap on the experiences that our our students are having. Uh student voice and involvement, there's an opportunity there. Uh the data kind of shows us because of the student scores are lower compared to where families and staff feel like student voice and involvement is. There's a difference between that. There's a gap between how our adults feel like our students feel like they have voice versus what our students are actually saying. So, we need to look into that a little further. Social emotional supports for students, especially through our 6th through 12th graders, is definitely something we've got to pay more attention to. Uh, and the interpersonal relationships that our students are having. Our adults seem to believe that our students are getting along just fine, but that's not what the data is. Our students
102are saying our students are saying there's some things we got to look at. It's not bad now. It's not like we're in the ones or anything with those numbers are like 2.3 2.4 2.5 but though we still want to get those numbers up. So I don't want to be too gloom and doom here. All right. The next slide will deal with the handover DEIB survey. Next slide. So this was given through December 2024 through January 2025. We had some good response. We had 2539 respondents, mainly students, and over 450 caregivers and families. And so we got we got a good a good number of people. We didn't do staff here because the last slide I'm going to show you is the actual staff survey that we did. So staff didn't get this survey, but we
103added some DEI questions to the end of the staff survey that they did get. So they were able to give us their impressions on DEIB. Next slide, please. You can't even read this. And so if you when you get your magnifying glass out and you can you can look at that you can see that the 79% of the respondents were students. If you go down to that bottom column that shows you that uh our special education families uh and students had the highest grade in our special programs people who responded. And if you go to that very last box on the right that's the ethnic breakdown. You can see that again uh 60% of respondents were white, but we had 21% who were black and 10% who were uh Hispanic. Reason I point that out
104to you is that's pretty closely kind of lining up to what our demographics say. So what that tells us is we're getting a we got a good survey sample to look at some of this data. All right, next slide. So I just picked out a few things. Um our schools have not yet gotten their individual score reports. their schools are going to get their independ individual score reports. But this kind of shows you the district overall satisfaction. You can actually go to the next slide because on this slide, this actually gives you a breakdown of the the the respondents broken down by all of the people of color who responded versus our white families or white students who responded. So, this gets to show you a little bit of some of the differences. One of
105the things that this survey did show us is that in some of our categories, and many of them, there's a disparity in which group feels like we're doing one or the other. Uh but um in this one, it talks about, you know, the satisfaction rate on how we as a district are recognizing various racial and ethnic groups, recognizing various cultures, recognizing sexual orientation. Those were the top three areas that we're doing pretty well in. At the bottom, there's concerns about how we are looking at disability status, how we are looking at socioeconomic status, and how we deal with our home languages. So, some some grow some glows at the top we're doing really well at, but some work we got to do at the bottom end of that with some of those things that I
106just talked about. Uh, next slide. Again, uh, some district priorities. So, this talked about where people thought our district's priorities were and and and and what we were where we were performing best at. Next slide. Uh the top two things that came out here, this again shows you the difference was uh creating a welcoming environment and then uh recognizing and supporting student diversity and resources and support for academic achievement were the top three areas where they thought we were doing good. But then there's some things at the bottom that we need to pay attention to like resources and support for student mental health, staff professional development. That's going to come up again later. And resources and support for staff mental health. Those are areas that that showed out at the bottom that something that we
107going to pay attention to. Next slide. And this panned out with the district priority pieces that people talked about as well. Next slide. All right. Next slide. So, some some key takeaways again, social emotional learning ranked at the top. Perceptions of support for diverse groups was very positive. Uh uh although our students frequently take classes with other students from different backgrounds, fewer feel like we spend time getting to learn one another. That came out of this survey. Incorporating more DEIB in our instruction is a potential growth area for us. and uh that many respondents didn't feel we do enough to hire or retain teachers of diverse backgrounds. So, we got a five-year diversity plan and other things that we're trying to work on that piece, but we have a survey now that kind of shows
108that's still a need, something that we need to do. Uh there was definitely differences in the respondent rate based on who you were. Uh most respondents uh believe that we're doing a good job of recognizing different cultures, religions, and things of that nature. However, there's room to grow there. And facility and maintenance was also of concern for many of our respondents. And finally, the upbeat staff survey. So, this is you can go to the you can go to the next slide. Keep rolling. There we go. Next one. So, this was new. Uh we conducted the upbeat survey was administered March 4th to 18th. It was really for uh all of our teachers and the classified staff were folks like our instructional coaches and things of that nature that made up that group. So those were
109the groups of people who took this survey. Um and there were 21 domains involved in it. Next slide. When you online you'll be able to read this. You can't read that now but uh these are the different domains. I'll highlight the area the domains that we showed the great greatest promise in was around uh principal trust instructional leadership and self-efficacy of our stu our staff. They felt like you know they were they had they had a lot of empowerment for themselves there. The areas of grow were around professional development, around teacher voice and leadership and around composite compensate compensation and uh and and and benefits and stuff. And so all that dancing we saw Rosio do after the sign the contract, I think we might have got that covered hopefully. Right. Okay. Messing with my
110friend Shiva right there. Uh next slide. This is another the some more of those uh areas uh some of the domains. Next slide. Now this graph that you can't see is uh what our staff of color said. And so when you get a chance to look at this online, I want you to do a comparison of what those areas actually look like. But there were some similar things. For example, where the overall score on professional development was uh slightly low in terms of overall. It was 5050 for our staff of colors, but that's still not impressive. So, that's that's things we have work to do. Uh the uh self-efficacy e efficacy was high on that range for our staff of color, but compensation and career path was something was much lower than the whole the
111district average for staff on that particular piece. But, uh our staff of color thought that there was an opportunity for equal opportunities for all staff here. So, so take a look at that when you get opportunity and it's uh it's it's it's very fascinating data. Next slide. I'm not going to read these, but when you go and look at this particular presentation, I just pulled out a few of some of the questions that were asked in each of the domain areas for you to kind of look at. And I kind of related them to some of the other areas that we had talked about in some of the other previous slides. Go to the key takeaway uh slide, please. I'm feeling like I'm brushing up on that 20 minutes. Uh so the key takeaways from
112uh the upbeat survey compensation and career path opportunities uh were only rated positively by 31% of the teachers and 30% of the classified staff. Professional development uh was another area of concern with just 39% of our teachers and 40% of our teachers having positive reactions to that and only 55% of our teachers and uh classified staff felt that the resources in our facilities were adequate. The survey results indicate that strong staff perceptions in these areas such as efficacy, equal opportunities, trust and sense of purpose were good. But however, they compensation, professional development, resource and facilities uh need our attention. So what does it all mean for SOMD? Last slide. So based on the data, here are some things that you can look forward to us doing. We're going to bolster our social emotional support system
113for students. So, we're looking at a little reorganization with uh some of our non-child study team social workers where a few of them may start coming under the office of the assistant superintendent so that we can be more intentional in how those supports are reaching our young people. With one thing yelled out of all of these surveys, we've got to do more to support our social emotional well-being of our students. And then we got to create more spaces for our staff who also uh uh uh uh had social and emotional and mental health as a high priority in some of this information. We're going to continue to implement our Ruckers equity audit recommendation that's going to help get us to that welcoming, belonging, inclusive school system that uh that we desire. We have a professional
114development committee this year that Mr. Being is leading that committee. We are working to look at streamlining our professional development. we just met. One of the things that came out of there is we have four concentration areas for professional development coming to you soon. I'm not going to reveal what those four areas are, but they're coming to you soon. And all of our professional development has to fit underneath these four categories. And so, this committee has been working. They've been asking their colleagues about what more professional development they need. And so, we're excited about finally getting a strength and a and a and and a strength in that in that particular work. Uh we're going to provide more opportunity for staff and low to grow uh learn to grow together. You know, we talked about
115affinity spaces. Many times when you talk about affinity spaces, you hear about being broken down and uh and based on race and ethnicity, but they're also affinity spaces that allow groups of people whether your same teachers, your same categories or other likenesses that you have. We're going to create those spaces so that educators can learn from one another, but also uh build each other up and empower each other to kind of help with some of the social the well-being things that they've asked for. And then uh we're going to increase some leadership and growth opportunities that yelled out at us from the upbeat survey that our teachers need more leadership opportunities and want ways to grow. And we're going to continue to enhance our facility upgrades and maintenance. I believe we're working on a a
116new uh uh uh facilities maintenance plan uh plan that we're working on to come off the heels of all the other work that we're doing. And so with that, that completes the survey presentation. I'll stand for questions. Good job. Thank you, Dr. Gilbert. Um questions, Jeff? Yeah. Um, I was going to make a commenting question on question 18 in the triple I survey. Sure. Because that's the one that relates the most to placement and difficulties families have placement. Mike Dearra is going to comment on the fact that we don't disagregate sixth graders and kindergarters and that's a big deal because as we saw just now 83% of sixth graders assigned to their closer school anyway and for them it's not the same kind of um participation of of a districtal challenge like it is for
117kindergarteners where 52% of kindergarters are not assigned to their close to school and like you know sixth graders don't need early care and afterare which is a big problem for some families who have unwanted triple eye placements for kindergarten And like sixth graders can also get themselves places independently and kindergarteners can't. Um so if you actually disagregated, you know, by grade or kindergarten and then you disagregated by kindergarters who are going to their closest school versus a distant school, I think you would see a lot of hardship by families who didn't get their closest school. Like it would be over 50%. And like you know we've made a big deal the fact that like we send 70% of kids to their f closest or second closest school which means a third of kids are not
118going to their two closest schools. But it's not necessarily even good for a family to go to their second closest school if they're under that 1.25 mile threshold. And for most families who live very close to an elementary school, their second closest school is less than 1.25 miles away. The only two of the six elementary schools that are more than 1.25 miles from the nearest school are South Mountain and Balden, and they're barely over 1.25 miles. They're 1.3 miles from each other. Um, this is more of like a I don't have a question here, but it's more of a comment, but like we've seen difficulty in terms of like distance, like a family is like over 2 miles away, over 3 miles away, and that's really important, but also we should consider the fact that
119the difficulty could be a long bus ride. It's possible that someone who's a mile and a half from a school might have a longer bus ride than someone who's 2.5 miles away. And I think emotionally what matters to people is sometimes the ratio of like the distance from the closest school to where they're assigned. So, you know, if you live one block from your closest school and you're assigned to a school a mile and a half away, that could be pretty aggravating. But if you're not that close to your closest school anyway, like hypothetically if 525 Academy Street were a house, you know, we're still almost a mile from Clinton School from here. So if you're assigned to like your second closest school, it's barely farther than your closest school. It's not a big deal
120emotionally or logistically. So, you know, we have to consider that too. Um, so anyway, I hope that we can disagregate that question 18 about hardship. Um, I had a question though, like here's my question. Like, you know, we got open-ended responses from, you know, almost everyone who filled out the survey. And, you know, I have to say that like the responses on triple life placement are overwhelmingly negative. Like I counted only three people said anything good about it and then a fourth person criticized other people for criticizing it. Every other response is negative and they're often extremely negative. Um, a lot of people I think actually said their children were isolated, didn't have any friends on the block and it was damaging the community. Like you know this is someone said the placement of a
121child to a different middle school than their elementary school friends is a horrible mistake. Um, you know, a lot of people also talked about having unnecessary um early care and afterare. Um, people used words like chaos to describe it. Here's another one on isolation. The only family on our entire street did not place the nearest elementary school. Um, here's a family. Their bus was supposed to pick them up at 6:59 a.m. Like, you can't make a 5-year-old get to a bus at 6:59. Like, what's the administration's comments on like, you know, feel a lot of discontent about the triple eye placement? like that I think does show up in the open-ended responses like what are you guys planning to do to make sure that like we have maybe a more collaborative placement system starting in
12226 27 I' I've been waiting a few years to say this because I've been part of this too and it hasn't my family has gone through a lot of trouble too I want to I'm going to let Mr. being addressed that but before that I want to clarify one point so we can disagregate the data because parents do put in their student information. It just got to take us a minute. We do know that 47% of the 268 families who filled out the survey were kindergarten family members. 27% of the kiddos who filled families who filled out the triple eye survey were sixth grade parents. We do know that. So that we were able to get that information by matching up the things. So so to that particular point, we can do it. It's just
123it's just going it's a little difficult because we we left the option open for families to tell us that because we wanted to give them the freedom to cuz some people don't like to let us know certain characteristics about what they are because they feel like that h that may challenge them in being able to be as open and honest as they want to. So Mr. being I'll let you address the concerns around some of the negative comments that uh Mr. Bennett raised about what we're going to do. Yeah. No, I think the board is moving in the right direction with the Ruckers implementation committee and uh leaving ourselves about a year's worth of runway for to do the work. This is an overnight work. We've discussed that multiple times and I think we have
124some pretty good uh strong agreements amongst the board of where we need to go uh in order to meet some of these uh needs. So I I look forward to the work of the Ruters Committee. Uh thank you very much. That's very encouraging and thank you for validating the fact that most of the comments were very negative about triple EI placement. Um has Michael Alves seen the open-ended responses? Because I think if he had seen them, he might have had a different tone tonight. So yeah because like he was you know he said it been implemented very well for instance and like he focused on like you know integration it sorry he said it's been implemented very well which I think a lot of people disagree with and you know he made like integration itself
125the only metric of success when I think like we should consider like actually like you know um parental satisfaction um academics once we have that and the budgetary impact and you know I think that like if he saw the open-ended responses like you know he would see that things are not going quite that well. Yeah. But I think for a statician the algorithm's intent is 5%. So that's all he's looking at that to be very honest with you that's that's his life's work is is algorithm and uh the intent of the algorithm is to integrate our schools at that 5% number. And I think that's the lens he was speaking from. Yeah. use the mic. Anyone else want to com um just really quick, thank you for running through all these surveys. It's it's really
126helpful. Um the one thing that stood out to me that you didn't mention was the the college and career readiness support and that's something also that Oliver had mentioned. um when you when you looked from the the handover survey in particular, you know, in terms of what the district is doing best, um that was low for both white students and multi-racial students with only 9% saying they felt that was uh I can't remember the exact question, but it was something like um the district was doing it well and then 15% of multi-race students. Um, and I just kind of want to get your thoughts on because college and career readiness support, I mean, I think what 85% of our students or so from Colombia go to college. Um, and then if they don't go go
127to college, we want to make sure they have, you know, other options available to them. Have you thought at all about, you know, what we can do as a district to address this area? Yeah, I mean if you look at the data that's and not only this data, but we we've we've seen it in real time. Uh you know, CHS is a bit of a onetrick pony. It's a school that sends kids to college, but then you've got about 15 to 20% that may choose not to go to a four-year college. We're not meeting those needs. So, uh, I think a lot of the work that we're currently doing and moving towards a an academy model and bringing back career in technical education and as Oliver noted making, uh, more opportunities for industry certifications, uh,
128for students to get a taste of college to make a decision of whether or not they want to go directly from high school to college. We also have students that need to work in order to afford college. They they don't want to take out loans. Um, so for us, we need to do a lot better job of workplace readiness and integrating 21st century skills into our curriculum. Really fourth through 12. It's not only a CHS problem. Uh, schools that are uh, exemplar really integrate 21st century skills starting in fourth grade. And those are the skills that it doesn't make a difference what career you're going into. Your critical thinking, your leadership skills, uh, they transcend any career and they're skills that kids will carry with them for the rest of their lives. So, we need
129to do a lot better job with that. And I think the work uh will probably present something to the board within the next month or so in regards to the one pager in regards to CHS, but that will also tie into how we're integrating 21st century skills and an earlier grade. We've also talked about that pipeline. Okay. And then I guess I also don't want to forget about the other 85% who do go to college right after because I have heard from parents and students that the support there for the college application process, the writing of the essays, the understanding what courses you need to choose to get into certain schools that is also lacking. So I think we need to do both. Yeah. I think you noted uh at our ribbon cutting um oh
130my god I lost track of days yesterday. Uh so one of those areas dedicated in the media center will be a college and career uh readiness center. Uh we're going to model that after a couple schools such as Bergen Tech and a few others that are top in the state uh that really leverage that space to make students uh better consumers because right now they're not there. Uh so for us it's also working uh with our industry partners in the area and also working with our local colleges in the area to better educate our students. Um so I think that leveraging that space I think is a great first uh first step. I also as we noted I think if you're looking in the commons uh we're really going to start theming the commons more
131towards career. So you saw those blank walls one of those walls is going to be a Bloomberg wall. you'll see a stock market ticket. You'll see a TV running business. Uh then you'll see a STEM wall. So, we're trying to really integrate more careers and just making kids a little, as I noted, better consumers because right now we're just not we're not there. Yeah. I had a question. It's okay if I go next. Um so, um for the upbeat survey, were there opportunities for teachers to provide commentary? because if so, I'm curious if there were ideas shared for how to how to better support their mental health. Um, was there an opportunity for them to give feedback? There were no open-ended uh responses for that. But what we'll do with that data and we have
132an internal team that's going to do the the analysis. We'll probably bring because that was one of the one of the highlights that that we need to kind of look at, we'll bring a team together of teachers and kind of bring them in and kind of talk them through. Uh so what what are some of the things they would they would like to see happen to kind of help them with uh some of that mental health pieces? Okay, great. Thank you. Uh we're also working and I think Krie mentioned it at our last committee to be a little more proactive with assessments for our students and their mental health. Uh I think many of you know if you have younger kids right now they're giving certain that your pediatrician is giving certain assessments to students
133now and we're going to try to make that a little more widespread especially for incoming freshman because as we noted a couple meetings ago the data is is showing clearly that you know 60% of the discipline is coming from our freshman mental health issues coming from our freshman. So we really want to make that a focus but I think being a little more proactive with our assessments will get us in a better place. Last one. Fine. Last question. Dr. Gilbert, I I appreciate having this summary of some of the many surveys that we have administered to our students, staff, and community. And we all are so data hungry and want to, you know, slice and dice things different ways to understand how we're doing and how we can do better. I know that one concern
134we've had though is survey fatigue. uh and looking here, you know, there's probably uh between the the NJ Sky uh survey, our own triple eye survey, and the handover, there's probably, you know, areas where all three are asking the same question. Um and I know, for example, you know, the the tremendous student data we get out of NJ Sky is probably overlaps to a degree with the great survey that our student reps uh did at Colombia. Do we have a plan going forward as far as looking to see any ways that we can streamline some of these uh to get the best data all in one place instead of having folks, you know, um avoid the surveys because they are pretty sure they already did it five times already? Yes. Part of the evaluation piece
135as we look at the changes maybe even made to the uh triple I survey. One of the conversations I think we're going to have hopefully in the Rucker implementation meeting, but uh I know we're going to have at SLT is, you know, which surveys we can get rid of and which surveys we need to to to to keep. Uh I'm a proponent. I love the uh NJ Sky survey. We get a lot of participation from that. A lot of those questions I think overlap and if there's a way we could actually we could actually do the NJ Sky data uh twice a year as opposed to one. Matter of fact, the folks from Ruckers have been trying to push us to do that, but we've been pushing back simply because of the amount of surveys.
136This is just an example. I think we need to look at our surveys and determine which ones can get us the information and then figure out u what that's the one that we're going to use or maybe a couple of them and then figure out how to get the other information that our people are thirsty and knowledgeable for. So what is it that we need to do with our folks who are in triple line? How we can maybe come up with another vehicle to get that information or for our staff? What is another vehicle we can get other information from? Um, I think we've got a couple of good surveys and I just threw NJ Sky out there because that's the one I've been most familiar with uh since my arrival here. Um, so we're
137going to take a look at it hopefully in like I say in the Ruckers implementation committee meeting as well as through SLT and have a conversation and then we'll come up with a plan to present to you all as a board on you know what surveys I think we should we should do and use. I am thankful that we did get handover who's going to help us put together dashboards and they can actually take they don't ne necessarily have to use their survey. They can use other surveys and bring that together and help us create a dashboard. So, uh that's going to be quite helpful in making helping us make the determination on which surveys we want to. So, that's a long way to say. We haven't come up with a plan yet, but we'll
138have one soon. So, yeah. Okay, great. You're out of the hot seat, Dr. Gilbert. Good job. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Okay, so now would be BA update, but I just confirmed you've anything? Yes. For the good of the order, I'll surrender my time. Thank you very much. We will accept that. Um, moving on, I'll do my board president update. Um, the board is striving to consistently integrate pre-K topics into our committee discussions, recognizing that our preK program will often be the first point of engagement for families entering our district. The program has exponentially increased over the years with more than eight locations, including Montros. Thank you to board members Callahan and Bennett for passionately encouraging this effort with the district and the board. I've asked our committee chairs to include prek as a monthly
139agenda item to remind us to discuss townly topics and provide ongoing oversight as needed. May not always be needed every month, especially with respect to our policies, pop-up issues, and necessary caregiver communications. Also, thank you, Superintendent, Mr. Bing, and the director of early childhood education, Mr. Leroy Johnson and team for organizing and hosting our first prek and kindergarten town hall. Right. Yep. That was May 16th. Um, as part of our board duty, we have completed our evaluation of our superintendent in his first year, which will be presented to him formally in our closed exact session after our recognition and retirements meeting on Thursday, June 5th. We have reviewed the rubric for internal student transfers process, which incorporates protocols for triple eye transfers. It's important to ensure that the rubric and accompanying worksheet reflects the 5124
140policy changes from 2023. The 5124 policy changes intentionally removed the language, and I quote, "Hardships do not include child care needs, transportation, and work hours so that they could be considered when reviewing transfer requests on a case-byase basis. It's important to recognize that our intentional integration initiative brings its own challenges for families that zone schools did not. We need to approach these challenges with as much empathy for families as we can. We will be discussing this further in upcoming policy in Ruter's June committee meetings, including the idea of making the rubric public so that the community understands how transfer decisions are made. We have asked our business administrator and FFT committee to revitalize our legal bill tracking efforts from 2023. Because our board has a fiscal responsibility to stay on top of our legal spend
141and liabilities. Thank you to board member Brown for bringing this bringing this need up earlier in the year. The board's legal fees do not have its own line item in the district's overall budget and the 2022 23 school year. FFT uncovered an exponential increase in spend and the central office analysis was never completed. This work needs to continue with comparisons from 2024 and 25 so that we can understand the trends and find ways to reduce costs. Sorry, Patrick. Thank you to our BA and team for taking on this integral task at a time when we know the forthcoming years will be challenging financially. Patrick isn't our only legal counsel, by the way. Okay. Board President statement. The school board meeting is a business meeting in public and not a meeting with the public. Oftentimes, it
142may appear to members of our audience that the board of education takes action with very little comment and in many cases a unanimous vote. Before a matter is placed on the agenda at a public meeting, it has thoroughly been reviewed by the administration, the superintendent of schools, and the board of education, after which it is placed on the agenda for board discussion and action at a public meeting. Now, we'll be hearing for delegations. If someone could grab the sheet, that'd be great. Thank you for coming in person and joining us online this evening. The South Orange Maplewood Board of Education values public involvement and respects that you've taken the time to address to address uh the board at tonight's meeting. As this is the board's business meeting, a friendly reminder to please be respectful as
143we take into consideration your valuable input, which will inform future deliberations and work by the board of education and its committees. The board does have time limits by policy and it will be enforcing those to enable as many people to speak as possible this evening. Each individual will be given three minutes to speak. The first public comment uh period is usually limited to one hour with priority often given to items related to the meeting agenda. Second public comment may be limited to 30 minutes. And please remember to say your full name and town where you reside. Uh we Oh, yeah. So then Oh, was that the only one? No, I think he spoke. She didn't. Oh, she didn't. Is she here? Jennifer. Jennifer Spiegel. Thank you. Yeah, that's perfect. Hi everyone. I'm Jennifer Spiegler from
144Maplewood. It is so refreshing to see this board in action. I haven't been in a meeting since the new board took effect. So, thank you all for your support. And I just got a text from my brother-in-law about um this district being on the target list. So, I wish you all well as we approach this new crazy endeavor we're in. Um, I came here to speak about the marching band truck, but after listening to these few hours, you have a lot on your hands. Um, Mr. Bennett, I hear you. We have a neighbor who is gets home from school from kindergarten after 4:00 in the afternoon being busted all over the place. Your survey, I think, is applicable. I think the parents are in complete agreement as well. There is no college preparedness for these
145students at all except for 15-minute meetings with their counselors or the exception of an amazing English teacher who is helping the students, but there is no preparedness at all. The students are amazing. They do wonderful things. But I am here to talk about the marching band truck. My student is leaving the district and moving on to amazing things. Thanks to the teachers in this district. Thank you all. Um but this is been years in the making. I don't even I don't even need to write new remarks because I've been talking about this for years. You have all received many emails with stats about what's going on. When I walked down here, the lacrosse team was practicing. Imagine them practicing without their sticks or their balls. What we did to the marching band students last year,
146half of the band performed at SS, the other half performed there. A football team, offense is playing on one field, defense is playing on another. It doesn't work. It's dangerous because the instruments are not being transported properly. The students are in danger. The families are completely overworked. We are all doing many things. I flocked to your house the other night. We are all doing a lot of things because we love our communities. We're doing a lot, but the kids need a truck to compete, to perform. You go to any competition, every other school has a truck to move their equipment. It's It's really unfortunate. It's been going on for years, years. You heard all of us these past few years. So, I really implore you to do something. A lot of these musicians, as arts
147is important, a lot of the kids are going to school with scholarships anywhere from 10 to 50 $50,000 because of their amazing proficiency in music and arts. So, let's keep this going. But the band needs a truck. The band was also told that their concert for next week or that's been reschedled for two weeks is being cancelled because we can't use the stage, which is another issue. But I'm not going there tonight cuz we're in senior year of that pro program right now. But please the truck. Thank you very much. Have a good night everyone. Thank you so much. Um it looks like you know what I I should say something about that. I mean, we we've heard uh and received those letters and we've heard the appeals and me personally having been a member
148of band uh growing up and in uh in college. I definitely have an affinity to that and understand how it moves the needle from an education standpoint and uh inclusion. It's amazing stuff and we it's definitely being prioritized uh and we're we're taking action to to try to solve that. Thank you so much, Mr. Moody. And there um are no online speaks. So then that would conclude our public speaks tonight. Well, at least the first one. Um so next is going to be committee reports. I'm not going to read the summary I normally read because it's after 10 o'clock. Um so you know what you need to do, keep it short and we'll start with this side. CI please, if you're ready. Thank you. All right. So, the CNI's curriculum and instruction committee uh met
149on May 12th at 6:30 p.m. with all members present. We discussed progress and updates related to district goals, including the following highlights related to goal one, college and career readiness, middle school math course selection is underway through the end of the month, which is this week. Uh the district will share data on course recommendations and selections with the committee in the future. They will also survey teachers and caregivers about the process. More surveys to come. Um the district PD committee as we heard about is meeting and underway related to goal two global citizenship. We discussed um updates on the extensive freshman academy planning that's been underway. Um related to goal four family and community engagement. We heard about the middle school math presentations which about 250 people attended live and the video has been posted
150for others to check out online. Um we discussed policy 2314 as I'm sure uh board member Meyer will discuss and we were updated on three new regulations written by district CNI leaders regarding the budget. We heard the progress being made in utilizing title funds. Um in addition, we received key updates related to the CHS scheduling process. Things remain on track with the use of poweruler reducing errors and enabling better planning tools like graduation planner. We heard about new pathway programs which was great to hear especially given um discussion earlier and these pathways range from entrepreneurship to health care and will help students plan earlier with their counselor support and prepare for a variety of um post high school options. CHS administration met with student board of ed reps and other students to share the scheduling
151timeline as well as give feedback on course the course selection process and their response was positive. New business topics included classroom screen time and mental health supports for students. Our next meeting will be on June 9th at 6:30 p.m. Any questions? It's not really a question. It's more of a a comment um but related to freshman academy and scheduling. I just wanted to raise a concern that I've been hearing from rising freshman and parents that within the past couple weeks the district has been selecting and reaching out only to certain eth grade students to inform them about um taking a humanities course in 9th grade in place of their world history and English one. So, that humanities course is an honors course and allows students to take the AP exam in May. Um, I don't
152know the exact situation, but from what I've heard, only select students are being offered this course, which obviously runs counter to our equity and access as well as our parent choice policy. So, just given that time is of the essence because we're in the middle of scheduling right now, I'm just I'm raising this now, but I know that we're going to discuss it at length in the CNI meeting. So I'm hopeful that we can learn more about the situation and make sure that all students humanities. Yeah. Yeah. You raised that to me and I as I said I would I forward it to Miss Bobby. I just wanted to make sure putting it on our agenda for June. Yep. Thank you. The special services committee met on May 15th with all members in attendance. We
153began with our CPAC check-in with the CPAC president Beth Kosantino. This month we discussed the CPAC resource fair which featured an array of provider and community resource tables including a district graduate. Miles Cabbagetock who's a motivational speaker and a sensory calming space by Together we bloom an art activity table by the South Mountain YMCA. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive. It was great. I was there. Um and plans are in place to host it again next year. Additional discussions with CPAC included clarifying paraprofessional support guidance for NJSLA testing, supporting parents during IEP meetings with resources like spans checklist and concerns about older school buildings buildings that might lack natural light or air flow issues the district will explore further with school leaders. Next, the committee discussed the special education experience survey, not to be left out in
154the survey department. Um 90 responses have been received so far, so thanks to everyone who has already participated. Please note, if you have not had the chance to complete it yet, there is still time. Responses will be accepted through tomorrow, May 30th. Your feedback is important and it helps guide our work. So, please do take a minute if you're not overwhelmed by all the other surveys to fill that out. Um, we received an excellent presentation last month uh or this month rather from Dr. Gilbert around special education demographics, composition, and risk ratio data. We received instructional updates that included planning for our ICRS classrooms in the 2526 school year, the expansion of our ERRI programming and par profofessional tracking and support alignment which has continued across this school year year and is gearing up um
155to ensure that it is happening in tandem with scheduling so that resource allocation um goes as planned for the upcoming school year. Personnel updates were highlighted where uh the hiring of two board certified behavior analysts and an additional CST member. We also, I will leave it to board member Meyer in policy and governance in the interest of time um to cover, but we did discuss a regulation to support our section 504 plans following a conversation in policy and governance. We discussed it in um special services. Our next meeting is scheduled for June 12th. Full recap is available on the website and the floor is open to any questions for my colleagues. Okay. Uh on Monday the municipal partners meeting uh we all met. Uh everybody was in attendance as usual and I would say in
156terms of summary the biggest thing that we talked about was Richerfield. Uh the decision was made uh to move forward this year to request funds to uh to get con to get the project going on Richardfield. As we know, it's been approved for for uh last year. It's been taking some time and getting the project delayed. Uh in April when there was a the first Bose meeting, we decided initially to uh to make it as a future ask and not go, but that would just delay the project further. So the uh senior leadership team, the missile partners, we all decided that we're going to go and make the request earlier. So June 16th, uh FFT chair, uh superintendent Bing, uh Miss uh Miss Nubia here will will be in attendance to make that make that
157request to the townships to move forward with that project. There's also been some back and forth in terms of clarity as to what was actually approved in the schematics. So, we're going to go through that again ahead of time to make sure that we get reacquainted with what was uh approved and what needs to be revisited and adjusted uh to get construction going, which I think Bill, you're probably going to talk about a little bit more, but if I stole your thunder, sorry. Uh which topic was that? The Oh, yes. Okay, great. Any questions, by the way? Not a question per se, but just as with municipal partnerships within FFT, as you continue to talk about Ritzer, um I just wanted to raise a concern that was brought to me um a couple days ago.
158I believe it was last week, the girls JV softball team had to end their game after three innings because of a it was a town wreck baseball team. Um, and so I just want to make sure that as we are re-evaluating those Ritzer plans, we continue to remember um that that girls softball, JV, and varsity need their fields. Thank you. Um, the FFT committee on uh met on May 21st with uh all board members attending. That's actually a better way to do it than naming everybody. I saw you say that. Um taking one. Um I did want to call out the um and just give some more details around um the the marching band truck effort. You know, as Mr. Moody pointed out, you know, that is front and center for FFT. Just to give
159some more details there, principal uh Sanchez identified a suitable truck for the marching band available for purchase at $5,000. However, we do need a mechanic um who has been selected to conduct an inspection and provide repair estimates before uh proceeding. So, we are moving on that. Um we discussed initial preparations for consideration of the EIP funding opportunities uh working with sustainable New Jersey. Um, you know, we did discuss Ritzer softball fields. Um, and we the receipt of various plans for the build out of the softball field. So, um, you know, I I do think there was an original plan. Um, we have received a few different that that the board is going to weigh. So, you know, I think that's an ongoing discussion. Um and uh to Nubia, Nubia kind of stole some thunder that
160we are um looking into legal bills and settlement tracking. So, thank you, Nubia. Um the and uh lastly, uh Gem Solutions Invoice. A decision was made to pay the invoice at 65% of the original total. A formal resolution um will be voted on by the board tonight. I wanted to give a big shout out to the uh to CHS who brought in the um after the fire assembly for seniors. Uh the assembly was fil facilitated by two Cen Hall University uh 2020 fire survivors. Um its focus was on safety uh for college and university campuses. So that's awesome. Um the these are my highlights. Um but more details are posted on the website. The next meeting for FFT is June 11th. Any questions? No. Okay. We did we also spoke about transfers. We did. We
161did. No. No. And I um you know I because this was such a long meeting I I was selective but we uh board member Bennett is correct. Uh we did speak about prek busing um and and um yes and and and uh transportation. So um and that that that's an ongoing conversation as well that we'll dig uh deeper in. But a very a very spirited conversation. Yes. Thank you. All right. The policy committee met on May 7th with all board members in attendance. Uh we have four different pieces that came out of that committee that are up for a vote tonight. Uh they uh we have three policies. First of all, policy 1331 on evaluation of the board secretary which adds in language from our Strauss estimate template which uh conforms uh our policy to
162our current practice where the superintendent evaluates the board secretary when that person is also our uh our business administrator. Uh we are also adopting changes to policy 327 and 4217 both uh staff and teacher policies on the use of corporal punishment to clarify and affirm that uh that policy should be read in concert with the protections available for special education students uh as far as uh restraint on those students. We also are adopting in first read tonight uh regulation 2418 which is a regulation that has so far been missing uh from our policy book. One of many unfortunately that we're slowly chasing uh with regard to section 504 of the rehabilitation act. So implementing a lot of those section 504 requirements. So uh very welcome to get that on the book. So all of those
163are for first read tonight. We also address in our policy meeting a number of other policies that are in the hopper for possible uh amendment and adoption including uh policy 2365 with regard to uh acceptable use of generative artificial intelligence. Uh the uh use I'm sorry um uh policy 2314 regarding academic placement uh policy 5530 regarding substance abuse. Policy 6472 regarding tuition reimbursement to our staff and administrators. Policy 912020 regarding public relations and specifically as it relates to restrictions on uh district use of uh materials regarding board members when those board members are up for election. uh and looking at policy 2431, our academic competitions with regard to uh squaring that policy with our expansion uh hopefully into middle school sports and policy 8600 regarding transportation uh in looking at uh how that transportation policy
164uh may need to evolve to specifically uh memorialize the uh current scheme of uh courtesy busing that we have uh and any changes that could be made to transportation in the future uh alongside our review of the implementation initi the integration initiative on an ongoing basis. Uh everything else can be viewed in our minutes on the website. Any questions? All right, I'm up. Personnel is up. Personnel committee met on Tuesday, May 27th at 6:30 p.m. Unfortunately, uh board member Gford and Mr. Bing had conflicts and were unable to attend. the rest of the committee was there. Uh, a few things I wanted to highlight. Um, up for vote in the personnel resolution, you'll see the revised director of guidance job description. I know many folks, including myself, are very happy to see that included back
165in the budget. Um, I just wanted to call out the addition of managing the Perkins grant and coordinating coordinating CTE programming. Um while we were reviewing the 2526 vacancy report, we did have a discussion about the 14 new unbudgeted um special ed positions based on projections and legal mandates. The plan is to fill new positions by reallocating existing staff and right-sized based on current program staffing levels. Um the committee did express concerns that you know these are new unbudgeted positions and you know what that impact will have on staffing in our budget. Um, and we will be discussing further in our June special services meeting to get a better understanding of the plan. Um, we also discussed the upbeat staff survey results, but Dr. Gilbert did a good job of giving everybody the download, so
166I'm just going to skip my bullets on that. And the rest can be viewed online. The next committee meeting will be Monday, June 23rd at 6:30 p.m. Questions, comments? Okay, great. That concludes committee report outs. Great. Oh. Um, sorry. The delegate assembly. Oh, that's right. Yeah, I forgot. Thank you. Keep it short. I haven't had many updates. I'm just kidding. On May 10th, I went to the semiannual New Jersey School Boards Association delegate assembly. Um, the delegate assembly had three resolutions that all the assembled districts voted on. um that might actually give a picture to some people about where our education's going in a couple areas. One is about awarding varsity letters for esport participation which we voted for that passed. Um another was uh supporting excused absences for votech and union certification um activities.
167Um right now there are seven different kinds of excused absences in New Jersey including college visits. And the advocates for this bill said that you know they should people should be able to miss school with an excused absence for voting and union certification. Um another reg resolution was on liberalizing the rules on who can become a school nurse. Uh this would actually allow someone who has an associates degree like with a nursing certificate to become a school nurse. U the basis for this was that New Jersey school districts have a major shortage of nursings. Um, not everyone agreed with this. At the New Jersey School Boards Association meeting, it passed by a single vote. Um, we did, according to my authorization, a vote for this. So, my vote actually was decisive. And, uh, you know,
168again, if you're out there, um, New Jersey School Boards Association takes a variety of views on educational issues and it's supposed to lobby for or against like whatever is authorized by the assembled delegates. Uh, the NJSBA passing something doesn't mean it's law. Not even close. And actually the varsity uh esports letter thing that's actually just to encourage districts to grant varsity letters for esports. It's not binding in any way, shape or form. Anyway, that's all. Thank you very much. And Jeff, the next delegate assembly is in is it in December when they meet again at the end of the year? Yes, I think it's December 9th. Okay. Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, so yes, now we have concluded that and we are now going into the action portion of the meeting. Um I think there
169are no severs. So Mr. Moody, can you please read the resolutions into record and then we'll have open discussion? Sure. We're set to take action on action items 4804 through 4812. Uh if there's any discussion on those action items. Okay, discussion is now open. I believe uh Dr. Mr. Bing has an update or whatever. It's late. Just wanted to whatever you know what I'm trying to say. You have something to say. Just wanted to point out on 4807 resolution uh Z under there uh it is the gems. Um it is gems and as you recall that as a consultant brought in uh last summer uh for scheduling uh we wanted to be as transparent as possible and make sure we're pointing that out. Uh obviously that that that time brought some uh challenges and also
170some opportunities which uh included bringing back the director of guidance position adding college and career readiness to that title and career and technical education also gave us a opportunity to examine our process of scheduling and to form more collaborative uh committee to really analyze every step of the process and I think we're in a very good place I think as noted uh right now. So, we just wanted to be transparent and point out that the uh gems uh is on this agenda. Thank you very much, Mr. Bing. Um any other No. Okay. So, then we will vote. Thank you. With that, we'll take it to a vote then. I'll begin a roll call vote for the action items. Board member Bennett, yes. Board member Brown, yes. Board member Callahan, yes. Board President Dval Wilson, yes.
171Board member Eert, yes. Board member Gford, yes. Board member Kapadia, yes. Board member Meyer, yes. And board member Saka Gable, yes. All right. Thank you. Okay, great. Thank you. Um, okay. Keep it down over there. All right. So then, uh, last section of this meeting, uh, hearing of individuals. I don't see anything online. I don't think anyone's gone up there, so it's just new business. Remember, new business items are things that require immediate attention and a vote tonight. Do you have any new business? No. Okay, great. Thank you. So, future meetings, um the board of education will meet again in exec session on Wednesday, June 4th. No action will be taken. Then in public session on Thursday, June 5th, 2025 at 6:30 p.m. for our recognitions and retirements meeting. Action will be taken. And then
172again on Thursday, June 26, 2025 at 6:30 p.m. for a regular board meeting where action will also be taken. I am now going to adjourn. Uh Mr. Moody, I would now like to make a motion to adjourn this meeting on Thursday, May 29th at 10:37 p.m. May I have a second? Thank you, Brown. All in favor? Okay, great. Meeting is adjourned. Have a great night, everyone. Literally just