Board of Education Meeting - Public Session - May 25 2023

001good evening it's 6 30 p.m and I'd like to call the May 20 fifth meeting of the South Orange Maplewood Board of Education to order Mr Burnside please take the Roll Call [Music] board member Nubia Duvall Wilson here board member Regina Eckert here board member Bill Gifford board member Alyssa malaspina here board member kawi tellsford here board member Arun vadalamani yeah board member Courtney Wingfield here board president Caitlin whitlider here board member Johanna Wright thank you board president woodler can I before you make a motion to adjourn I just wanted to make a motion to amend the executive session agenda to add an item I'm interested in adding the CSA superintendent contract negotiations that we discussed on May 5th back to the agenda at the end of our exec session tonight [Music] um I'm just

002double checking do we have to Rice the superintendent in order to do that and how much time sorry the superintendent has not been raced for tonight and so it requires a reasonable time frame for consideration I've never seen it done with an immediate notice like this so what's the process for can we add it to a future session can we make a motion to do that tonight so we should just we just discuss in an executive session because it's just highly unusual to create the agenda that way um and we have to go through the rice notice process okay can we discuss that in it is that tonight thank you okay thank you please take note that adequate notice of this meeting has been provided in the following matter a written notice was sent from

003the office of the secretary of the board at 2 30 pm on January 6 2023 that said notice was sent via email to Maplewood in South Orange Township clerks and the editors of the news record Star Ledger and the Village Green tonight's meeting will feature a district goal update presentation from the administration during this presentation the district will provide some additional details around the progress of the CHS bid and we have invited the architect and project management firms to attend and address any questions from the board we will also have an exciting student performance from our Seth Boyden Elementary School so with that I'd like to make a motion to enter to Executive session at 6 35 pm to discuss attorney-client matters safety personnel and Hib reporting and CSA I guess uh anyway whatever and

004whatever Courtney just said the length of the executive session is estimated to be 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 okay let me just clarify then Courtney asked that we discuss the scheduling of this at a later date we're not talking about CSA negotiations and that's what we'll be talking about okay um so thank you board member Eckert and all in favor the vote appears to be unanimous so we are now adjourning to closed session thank you foreign okay we are now back in regular session so good evening and thank you for joining us tonight we're gonna rise for the Pledge of Allegiance and then have a nice performance from our Seth points Seth Boyden

005students pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right so let's kick off this meeting with an exciting student performance from our Seth Boyden elementary school thank you so much for being with us here tonight the stage is yours [Music] foreign [Music] course that's here with you tonight we are very excited and not just because it's not a school tonight how long is that the entire School actually learned uh Angela everybody turn me around and the students compose versus all through K through five and these verses that we are including today are that we ain't gonna let no mean words and you know what segregation and ain't gonna let no haters we know

006that the price needs to do is always the right thing to do and not let anything out of the way [Applause] okay um [Music] [Applause] let's follow me [Music] foreign [Music] turn around [Music] Church alive [Music] [Applause] thank you [Applause] let's give it up again for Seth Boyden Elementary School [Applause] okay okay so the first order of business is the May board recognition so student rep Morris can you please present this information to the board hello and good evening everybody so as we do uh at every main board meeting uh we're going to be recognizing some of the staff and students in our school district so we're going to start with the student recognitions Columbia High School Arts is proud to announce that the following students were recognized for outstanding achievement and are at the

007Essex County teen Awards held on May 3rd at Essex County College the students are Bonnie donaque 12th grade Emma Hayden 12th grade Jordan Kinley 11th grade Kiara Navan 11th grade and Zachary Uris in 10th Grade as there is as a result the art piece is created by the above name students we entered into the New Jersey state teen Arts Festival congratulations the next one goes to Sally Shupe a junior at CHS who has been named the principal first place guitarist for the 2023-2024 New Jersey All-State Jazz Ensemble her selection to the 2023 all North Jersey region Jazz Ensemble qualified her for the audition and she outscored students from Ridge High School the Pennington School in Kingsway regional to take first place during the 2023 uh NG NJEA teachers convention in Atlantic City she will rehearse

008with the All-State Jazz Ensemble and perform twice once in Atlantic City and once more at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center congratulations thank you the next one goes to um since the Marshall School Marshall Elementary School children took first place in the art category at the Essex County law Day contest the goal of law day is to honor the rule of law in the United States the theme for this year's conference was cornerstones of democracy Civics Civility and collaboration Miss Jessica Fong our art teacher collaborated with nearly 200 students in our second grade and multi-age classes to produce a project that incorporated the American flag the scales of justice and children's self-portraits the quote Injustice everywhere is a menace to Justice everywhere it was included throughout the project the cover of the awards program included

009our artwork congratulations to those students at Marshall School the next one goes to two students at South Mountain Elementary School my alma mater South Mountain student Alexa Byrd was chosen as a winner in the Essex County Clerk's my Essex County fourth grade poster contest ours our staff members from wearing sweatshirts or workout attire under number two sub Clause B so as a student I can easily say that the existing policy adopted and in place since 2001 has never been a problem and in my opinion has only helped our students the sweatshirts are work out a tire collarless shirts that are teachers and staff wear in the building 99 of the time is always in support of a student organization or a sports team I mean last year I remember my economics teacher always used to

010wear I think every single day of the week was a different student organization that you're supporting whether it be minority minority achievement Community baseball soccer girls lacrosse every day was something new and that's not uncommon at all especially with coaches that uh with teachers at coach or team so but I'm not I'm not sure why especially after a year-long negotiation period with our Union that we continue to make our Educators lives unnecessarily difficult it's true I mean it's it's no secret that they don't get paid what they're worth anywhere in our country anywhere in our country but policies such as this one just make their lives and jobs far more difficult and make it harder to support their students and their interests so I would highly recommend and ask that number number two sub Clause

011B whether it be struck for the policy or heavily revised uh after the first read and I just wanted to end this month's report by thanking the board members who approved the superintendent's recommendations for Staff renewal's last meeting your courage and duty to serving those who put you in the chair that you sit in right now which obviously recedes very highly by the community and student body as a whole so I want to say thank you to all of you and if you have any questions regarding anything going on in the district whether you're watching at home here in the crowd on the board you can find my email on the board members page of the website thank you thank you great thank you so much student rep morose so now I will turn it

012over to Dr Taylor for an update on the new policy adoption process and for a presentation with an update on the district goals the administration will present each goal individually and we will pause after the presentation of each goal to field questions from board members each board member will be able to ask a maximum of two questions or make a question or a statement about each of those specific goals and we have asked that the presentations were going to attempt for each district goal to run a total of 10 minutes but we'll see so thank you Dr Taylor we will do our best to stay within 10 minutes Madam president and good evening to everyone in our community before I begin I just want to acknowledge and ask for a moment of silence we recently

013lost a member of our district family uh Miss Christine Hopkins um who's a beloved member um of our district so just to take a moment of silence to recognize her passing thank you very much um regarding our student rep I just had two really really quick comments when I first arrived in District there was a lot of discussion around who should read the board recognitions I know for the last four years it's been our student rep but that was a really in-depth conversation I gave the recommendation that the person who would do the best job would be our student rep and you proved me correct every time you do it um Mr Morrow so thank you for that and and also um we we strongly encourage our schools to participate in contests we know that

014it can be a drain sometimes on the staff members who are responsible but you can see from the student rep and the in the board recognition that our kids are just um leading in many of these high-level contests like the law contest that that was mentioned we encourage participation we don't mandate it we understand that um sometimes um staff members in schools are overwhelmed with so many responses abilities for our students and staff shine so well and represent our district and they receive you know pretty significant rewards um Awards excuse me from those contests so I will now shift over to our district goals and our policy update I'm going to share my screen Mr bonds foreign let's go so the order of our review this evening we're going to start with just a brief

015reminder of our district goal process it's a pretty significant process for the board and myself and then go through each of our district goal action plans and the updates on progress thus far this year our SLT is actually joining us many of them on the screen there to chime in and give lots of real-time feedback on these District goals so for those who may not be aware the New Jersey School Board Association is a big part of our district goal process we partnered with them like many districts in the state of New Jersey and one of the things that we partner with is called field services and the field services rep comes out and helps us to go through a goal setting process and so it customarily the district goals customarily begin with the Board

016of Education and the superintendent and the New Jersey School Board Association field rep having a conversation uh we talk about the previous year's outcomes we include challenges and triumphs the board and myself we then come to an agreement on the selected goals there are so many things that we would like to do but we narrow them down to the highest priorities and we also understand that some of these goals are so robust they may take multiple years the goals are then formally adopted at a board meeting just like this I then take those goals back and I work with our team to develop action plans to successfully address those goals we then bring those goals back with the action plans and share them with the public and the board and take feedback so the action

017plans are really administrative but the board is often able to give us really um strong feedback to make them even better I then report out on the on the action plans because they're organic sometimes they change based on the work that we're doing um and they often Cascade across our school district it does no good for a district goal to just be my goal the goal for it to be impactful and effective it has to be the goals of many leaders in our school district and we did add a step this year where our team leads gave bi-weekly updates on District goals and I shared those bi-weekly updates with the Board of Education and then now in the spring we provide artifacts and evidence of the goal completion through a platform that the New Jersey

018School Board Association provides for us we will now have a brief policy process update from Miss bedine who's our liaison to the board for policy and also the assistant superintendent for special services Miss padine are you on some here foreign thank you so the policy committee's done a lot of work this year taking a look at our policy process because we had some discussions about how much time it was taking for us to get through the process of reviewing and revising policies so in January we had a discussion that we wanted to abbreviate the process and one of the ways that we decided to do that was rather than have the policy come to the policy committee first and then go on to its respective committee we decided that we would send the policies directly

019out to the related committee for their review and their feedback due to a scheduling conflict at one point along the way it ended up that the policy committee meeting happened very early in the month and the policies went to their committees for review and then went directly to the board for first read for for feedback before it came back to the policy committee and we actually found that that process worked better for us because it allowed the policy committee to have feedback from everyone when they sat down to review the feedback and make a decision about what feedback we would utilize and so on and so forth so we ended up actually making the decision to keep that process the same with the policies going to their related committee and to the board for first

020read before it came to the policy committee for discussion so our policy our updated policy procedure looks like this so first we have policies that are identified for review and there's a number of ways that that can happen it can come through Australia alert it can be something that's identified by an audit something by the policy chair the Board of Ed and administrator but a policy is identified to go through our process for review and revision once the policy is identified it's sent to the sent to the related committee and they provide their feedback then it goes to first read with the board where feedback is given as well add this first read there is no action on the policy the existing policy remains in place while that discussion and feedback process takes place the

021policy then comes to the policy committee complete with the feedback from their related committee and from the Board of Education at the policy committee the members of the policy committee consider that feedback and they make decisions about which recommended revisions will be implemented that revised version of the policy then goes to the board of education for second read at second read the board of education then makes a decision whether to approve the policy or not if the policy is approved it's adopted and placed on the website if the policy is not approved then it's pulled and goes back to first read and starts this process over which means that the existing policy remains in place until a new revised version of the policy is adopted by the Board of Education the policy committee has been

022having a lot of discussion about the redlining process so we have been exploring some tools that might be able to do this for us one of the pieces of software that we were exploring is lacera they have two different versions but the desktop version seems to be the best version for our purposes so in this particular tool which is often used by law firms it basically looks at the two different documents and then it combines them and red lines them as you can kind of see from the visual it shows you know where things are redlined like we have done in the past so we really liked this particular tool it's one that we're exploring so we're waiting for a little more information from the company about cost and you know how we would get

023licenses and so on and so forth and then we'll make a decision about whether or not to move forward with this tool thank you Miss madine and board members we've also embedded in the updated presentation videos from this software so you can take a look offline on your own time we will now move into District goals uh number one regarding facilities Mr Burnside we'll take it from here we have some guests to also support us oh were the questions about exactly I got questions now or later if if there are questions about the policy process we'll ask them now board member by the money sure so no thanks for coming up with the process the first time I'm seeing it at least you know but it's good that at least we have a process after

024six months we're all asking for it not not pointing to any anyone in particular but in general right okay so all the policies that we see on the public website are redlined which is good and I'm glad we at least we're doing that my question is why can't they be redlined when they come to the committee somebody is doing the work somebody is sitting there and making a redlined copy of that and why can we not get that in the committee because in the committee we don't get that and there is really no humanly possible way of putting two documents next to each other and saying oh this paragraph should go from here to here I mean would it not help the Committees understand better and provide recommendations back and make the process much better

025that's number one right and the number two is I mean I I I understand software no I mean everyone thinks technology will solve everything you know I mean you know we have Google Docs turn tracking on that's it that's redlining it's not some Rand some I mean right now we are sitting it's sitting on our head saying oh redlining is what lawyers do I'm not a lawyer I need this is the we're making it more difficult for ourselves than it needs to be just turn on tracking in a document and delete and it'll show you delete it so I am I really fail to understand why we're exploring all these complicated software Solutions when we already have them thank you um so from my experience and those folks who are responsible for doing this work

026we have gone through Google Docs um a word and other um widely used um software and while it gives you an output that has red lines on it when you compare it to the products that started the process there are big chunks of the dot of the documents that are missing in that output um and so you know the folks who are responsible including our I.T Department um it's just a matter of that's the output right it doesn't there's no way for us to fine-tune those already existing software pieces to more accurately represent that and we feel like um the number of hours that are dedicated to the significant Red Line we've spoken about some of those documents are 40 pages long right and we're in a push to catch our policies up because um

027we're being we've been getting from Strauss Sesame really heavy policy updates and audits that are that are providing as we shared in our previous meeting the need to update significant number of policies for us to be in compliance and so um that's the explanation I know it's um there are lots of solutions and we're just trying to find the most efficient and effective one um that can help to close this conversation and so that the board can go about his business without being concerned about redlining [Music] board member Gifford yeah I did just want to share that at a February 22nd uh 2021 board meeting a regular board meeting uh the former policy chair uh Susan Bergen stated that we have over 200 policies that are past their review date so we have our work

028cut out for us so you know when you think about where we are now we have not moved the needle and the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result so you know we are trying to do it differently um we are trying to take some work off of the administration and we're actually putting work on board members to to do a little bit more reading and I know that uh I I think it it is a bit of work for us but I think we're going to be helping the administration to get through this backlog in in October uh we we should be through this so thank you board member Wingfield and Dr charlesford and Barbara malispino so I can say firsthand that board member Bergen

029and before her board member ciders would definitely say that um quantity should not Trump quality and what we're dealing with right now is policies that are being rushed through that are being copied and pasted from boilerplate language from Strauss Esme language that does not reflect the values of this community and as a result we're ending up with policies for second reads some for first read that hopefully will be pulling tonight because we need to slow down I understand that we need to be able to get through the backlog but that getting through the backlog can't come at the expense of really taking the time to think about what we're doing so that it actually reflects the needs and the values of this community not what some lawmakers and policy writers down in other communities in

030New Jersey think we should be doing um no is it I think what board member Wingfield share speaks for itself and um for us I know selfishly as superintendents we're always very concerned about the resulting Cusack grade that comes from our review that um covert has pushed back significantly and we don't know when it's going to come I'm going to assume it's going to come next school year so we're just trying to just be efficient and I 100 respect uh what was shared about honoring the work of past boards and I think what we've seen in the policy committee meetings um when Strauss Esme came to visit they shared their concerns about the former process and about kind of the I hope what Mr dying share people got from that that we're we're taking out

031the step where the policy committee views it first right so to try to expedite it by giving it to the Committees first and taking out that unnecessary step to to um to expedite the review but we're just literally not not trying to disrespect the past work or the current work that's happening just trying to provide it at a faster pace for easier review I guess I just want to say that I think the process is rushed and to say this Rush is an understatement because over the past two months we have not reviewed any of the first three policies in policy committee because we were very early in the month and then we're saying that was a good thing um however I I think the problem is yes we're going to now have these policies

032going forward very very quickly and when I actually mentioned that this is a too rushed I was told I have a lack of appreciation for the substantial backlog of policies we need to address and I'm and you know I agree I I'm fine with that I don't care about the backlog I care about the quality of the policies that come out and so let me be clear I don't think there's some nefarious plot to like put prayer in schools or put armed police officers in the hallways or anything like that but when we just accept the boilerplate language of Strauss Esme who is our vendor then we end up with these unintended consequences where you know we shouldn't have of an avalanche of emails and a long list of people here from public speaks talking

033about policy um just to give you an example this is my sweatshirt that I've had since like 1998 for Columbia fencing if a teacher wears this they should be able to wear it if they want to encourage students to um they want to wear their alma mater and say I'm gonna wear a Rutgers shirt and say cave apply to college they should they shouldn't need to ask can I get permission to wear this if it's a hot day you should wear shorts if you're a gym teacher you should be able to wear a tracksuit I think when we just take the boilerplate language we end up in a situation where we don't reflect the values of the com of the community and a lot of the things that I've seen with policy is we get

034these two versions and we can't tell the difference and we can't tell the difference until we actually get to the meeting where we see a bunch of first reads up with red lighting but what I've seen from the redlining has been mostly just remove all the language from the board's previous work and then just insert Strauss Esme and then what happens in avalanche email saying what are you doing what are we doing what are we doing I don't think we should have that I think that we should have a very deliberate process and we should be thinking about what exactly is going into our policy if that makes it take longer that's okay because I care more about the quality of our work and not whether we've passed 40 policies today I care about whether

035we've done good policy thank you Dr Thomas board member milesfina then board member of Deval Wilson um I appreciate everybody's discussions um I will say that yet again reiterate the fact that there is no nefarious plot out here to do any of that that when we to do anything that is being um put out there in the public um these policies are not just boilerplate policies they are policies that are used by over I think what is it 500 in some odd um districts in the New Jersey um and that we do customize them to say that they're not being customized is absolutely incorrect we have and we will continue to customize them and this is why we have first read and second read is for have these discussions so like Noah I appreciate you

036brought that up um because it's going to first read now we can take it back bring it back to I guess it was came from Personnel committee Personnel committee and then Personnel committee will then make those changes um everybody has had multiple options to see these policies we see these policies before they go to committee when they're coming into committee for discussion we see these policies when they go for first read and we have a time during the first read to discuss them as a whole as a board we see the policies again when they come back to the committee for second read we have an opportunity to discuss it then we see the policies then we also have opportunities the board members have opportunities at any time or the public during first reads to

037make suggestions like Noah made or for others we then see the policies again when it goes to policy committee so to say that these policies haven't been seen is just not true they have gone through a rigorous process and we are not just copying pasting we are taking things do things fall through the cracks at times yeah something happens is the policy that we're going to be looking at tonight that we've gotten things on from yeah we think uh between first and second read new language came out so we're probably going to end up making changes based on that but I think we need to clear up this misconception that we are trying to just boilerplate something that is going on that there's some nefarious um you know things going on in this board that

038is not the case it is not the case and we understand and we value the community we value their input we've taken it and we've we make adjustments all the time there's been numerous policies over the years that have have changed and that we have changed based on feedback that's why we do a first read and second read some districts don't do a first read and second read so I appreciate this process but know that there is a process we take the feedback and we do it but please stop with the mischaracterizations that are out there and also one more thing the reason redlining is not being it was costing over a thousand dollars a month for redlining and I'm sorry but my money would be better I'd rather use that thousand dollars a month

039on my students than on redlining for a board of ed members so that they can't so they can have it I just want to say like any time that there is a new process to something um something as great as a school district there's going to be some key learnings and there's going to be some gaps and I think that thank you quality for what you thank you everyone for what you said we're just trying to do our best and we're just trying to support our superintendent who is saying he's worried about Cusack and worried about our ability to get a high score and I just ask the community to just have a little bit of humility for us while we are trying to do our due diligence we care about our past process we

040care about our past wording and policies that past board members worked on it's not that we don't care it's that we're trying to balance what Dr what Dr Taylor said what Susie said about making sure that we are compliant and also I will say that the amount I will say the amount of policies that we are reading at at once is is a lot I do think we need to maybe look at that a little bit because um I mean I'm an fft a lot of our policies this month was like all right lead testing of water I mean there's there's not that much that you're really going to change with that right that's just it is what it is but um some of these policies are more nuanced and and are more complicated and

041um I I want to make sure that all of us feel like we have that time we all have jobs you know multiple jobs in addition to being parents and so um again I just asking the community for some humility during this process of trying to support our superintendent with the with trying to be compliant while also dealing with the backlog and doing in a way that is that is um sensitive to the needs of this community and again that's why we have board meetings like this where we can have public speaks with people can email us their concerns but and we listen and we might not get a chance to respond to every one of them but we do read them and um and we're going to try to be better at this process

042so thank you um I'm gonna just say one thing and then I'll pass it over to you guys um I just want everyone to know that for policy three two one six and I'm not trying to steal the Personnel meeting minute Thunder here but that is something that the board members flagged it was you know we were like it's 21st century why is there a dress code right and is this normal and these are the questions we had for administration because we don't work in education and so the conversation in Personnel was from the board's perspective this doesn't seem right like why can't they wear jeans and why are we restrictive but we asked the district to take a look at it and that was part of the conversation that coming to the next Personnel

043meeting that that conversation would have happened and then there would be a report out back to the board so I just want to make sure that people understand that you know we support the Somaya sweatshirts we support you know Gene wearing shorts and all those things hair coverings um and I just wanted to make sure that that was made clear but um and then uh board member of adelimani and then Dr telesford so so this is what bothers me the most right I mean writing policy and making sure that the community understands policy is our job that supports job it is not the administration's job it is not the public job that's our job and it really really bothers me that we've outsourced the entire coming up of the process to the administration and put

044them on the spot to explain to the public and be the you know the the unpopular people and it's we should be doing this we should be leading this job sitting up there and explaining to public that this is the process this is how we'll do it and this is why we can do that and one thing I want to clarify I mean first reads does not mean it's an incomplete product we should not be triggering public every time put something out on first streets that is not what firstly is for first reads is a complete product which we all agree we all see it and then put it out there and there'll be minimal changes based on public feedback unfortunately now every document that's out there for first reads requires massive changes I'll just

045say for at least for three two one six if there were this many questions I don't think it should end up for first read in the first place and we should have had that continued discussion and know allowed us to get the policy committee because yes you know I don't want the public here I think that the board work that we do should kind of be boring and no one should have to pay attention to everything we're doing and when we are triggering the community to say oh my goodness what are you doing what are you doing that is a reflection of the work we're doing now I did say that there is no nefarious plot and I don't think there is nefarious plot but I do think there is a level of I guess

046not work ethic but maybe there's a level of sloppiness that can occur because we're just taking boilerplate language now we are the policy makers that's why we were elected Strauss Esme was not elected Dr tiller was not elected the administration was not elected we were elected so it is our work to be the policy makers and to make sure that the process is transparent and doesn't have a bunch of people coming out just because they're afraid of what the policy is and if we have that many questions about a policy and saying why are we doing this and then what we should be doing is saying this should not be up for first read we should be reviewing this more and I just want to say I understand that there's a cost incurred but if

047you want the board as a whole to be engaged in reviewing these policies and really understanding the changes then you have to understand that what we see is not at all what the public sees when they get their first read and so for us to be engaged we should see the red line version of the recommended changes the same way that the public does eventually when they're posted it is a barrier to our ability to fully engage in the process and I think we talk a lot about ways to make board member service more inclusive and more accessible in particular for those of us who have very very demanding jobs and all sorts of other things on top of our board service this does not do that and so I would like to get a

048commitment from the policy chair that we will immediately go back to redlining across the board for committee views so that we catch these things much much earlier and are able to spare the public from so much triggering as Arun said and instead take care of these things in our committee discussion so that by the time they come to first read it's a more appropriate version of the policy board member Eckert a lot of people up here have made honestly excellent points on all sides of it that I've talked about the process I have my own opinions of it which I've discussed with the policy chair before um it is it's challenging we obviously want to support the the district as much as we can um the one thing that I ask is that we all

049agree that we are all as a board accountable like there are going to be things that we bring up with certain policies that I didn't catch you know I'm I'm the chair of the Personnel committee and even though you know board president letter said we discussed it you're right we should have made those changes and then gone on to Second read it shouldn't just be first read shouldn't just be a a kind of pass and there will be others that we discuss this evening that community members wrote in frankly I did I didn't think about it like things slip through the cracks and I am always going to be one I can only speak for myself that will own up to it and take responsibility but I I do believe that we as a board

050need to do that because there have been multiple instances where we can all review whether or not it's Redline or not I totally understand that's a challenge um but I think it's unfair to mischaracterize that it's only certain like or what feels like it's only certain board members I think it's all of us including myself that's all we're going to move on now to the first district a law statement No so we're well we're each just getting two times to comment so once we've exhausted those comments we're going to move on because we have special guests here this evening and we have a lot to get through so I just want to acknowledge the thoughtful conversation right and I think that um one thing that I noticed when I first came to this District was

051the amount of effort that board members put into policy review which is what we're seeing right this is The Echoes of that work and so whatever we can do as an Administration to support um board members we are of course here to do that I want to now pass it on to Mr Burnside who will introduce our special guest as well thank you hi tonight we have Scott Downey from spiesel Architects and we have Kathy tartaglia from epic construction management thank you okay okay so this is our progress here today um three of our elementary schools are substantially completed under Hill Field is completed we've got another three elementary schools that are going to be completed this summer we've got two more elementary schools underway that's gonna happen that's gonna start this summer we've got

052our Middle School bids and they're all they're both due June 1st and phase one of the Columbia High School is up for consideration this evening so Marshall and Montrose those are our two the newest projects we're uh waiting on permits right now and Montrose has a HVAC equipment ordered and will begin next summer Clinton Elementary School phase two it's on schedule to finish by August 15th of this summer Bolden Tuscan and Seth Boyden so they they're they're all substantially completed and finished to work and they're just working on small projects right now the South Mountain and the annex uh their boiler Replacements are scheduled to start this summer the middle schools as I said they're good the the bids are going to be open on June 1st and under Hill Field we're just doing some

053minor repairs to the PA system on the agenda we've got the base bid and the alternate number three to be awarded for the Columbia High School bid so the base bid has all of the uh um multiple projects in it alternate number three is uh partial roof replacement and that's 2.2 million some of the highlights on the Columbia High School projects I was talking about in the base bid is going to be the students student Commons Area library renovations science lab Renovations boiler replacement asbestos abatement unit ventilator upgrades HVAC and Masonry okay I'll leave it right here and open the floor for questions and we've like I said we've got our architect and construction managers uh firm here so please direct the questions yeah did you guys um just want to do an overview of

054this initial base bid for CHS if that's possible for the um for the board [Music] our recommendation um for our purposes oh sorry um our thought process on our recommendation we're making um collaboratively as a team to the board is to award the base bid um the base bit includes the renovation of the science labs it's a significant abatement the pool area everything that's listed there but it's just so you understand just the base bid project is a two and a half year duration because in order to do the work in the high school we are starting out by taking over the b-wing and the old pool area abating those areas and then renovating them the pool area becomes the student comments and the b-wing gets four new science labs in it and then some

055renovated classrooms and then there's some other uh work within that phase that's phase one that will start as soon as you give us the okay like tomorrow and um so that they can do the abatement the significance of getting that started is that B wing and the pool area have some of the most significant amount of abatement to be done in the building and so we need this summer to do that it will take the entire summer just to do the abatement uh everyone will be out of the building with the except custodial staff and once we Abate in the fall the contractors can start those areas they'll work in those areas they'll be pardoned off from the rest of the school and then next spring we will give those areas we'll end the end

056of school year but next summer those areas be turned back to the school to move back into and we will then go into phase two which will be the library renovation and the existing Library will temporarily move into the new Commons area so that they have a library for school year and we will the B wing will be completely open with four brand new classrooms and then we will obey the d-wing and the old library and that will happen next summer and then similarly they will renovate the library during the school year and the B wing the d-wing is not completely being taken over for the whole year but the science classrooms in the d-wing will be under construction and then when they turn over the following summer we then there's other areas of renovation

057throughout the a-wing and the c-wing that will get done and renovated um so that's about a two and a half year duration just that scope um and it's it's we've been through it with principal Sanchez and with um the staff with the facilities with Tom gillio and um you know it's it's a number of moving Parts because obviously you guys need to run a program in that building while we renovate and so our recommendation is that's a big jump to start with um and to be conservative we should do to that and then our second recommendation would be to award the roof um because the roof is already significantly leaking and it doesn't make a lot of sense to do this much renovation within the building and not repair the roof and oh sorry the

058last piece and then I'll just um so there's still another phase of the high school to be bid we have not bid Ritz or field yet because we have to Stage the construction on a portion of rinterfield um so it doesn't make any sense to bid it because we can't do the work so that will be bid probably in the spring of 2025 and at that time by fall of 2024 all the other projects within the district will be completed and the only project that we'll continue on is the high school so we will then know a final accounting of how much money we have left overall and with that money we can then bid um other projects that we need to be completed in the high school that we're asking to put off until

059later and also ritzer field which we still have the money ritzer field the money for ritzer field has been allocated but we we're not going to bid that at this time that can you just explain to you know so that we all know what the dollar amount is for the base weightage it's not in here I mean you know some of us know obviously but yeah just clarifying no an approximate number I don't need yeah so the the base bid on a tone was 32 million six hundred and seventy one thousand and then our recommendation adds the roof to that which would increase that to 34 million eight hundred and seventy one thousand six significant Dr teleford and then I guess when you're going to be taking over the B wing the whole idea I'll

060be doing the commons area and everything is that you want to get that construction done and then I guess part of the significant programming that we want to add to the school was things like with the guidance suite and having uh I guess these additions for SEL um I guess why didn't um things like the guidance Suite why was that not I guess a higher priority and was that pushed off later because so we're we're in a difficult bid environment right now uh costs have Contin have been escalating as I think you're aware over the last several years and they continue to be escalating so when we put the high school out to bid we tried to identify scopes of work that might be suitable bid alternates just to provide us some protection and put

061you in a position to be able to award the high school now um we have some options regarding that scope so I don't know that I would say it's a lower priority but it was scoped that was easily broken out as an alternate isolated and it's work that we can go back out with a separate bit package very easily for that work to be done at a future time as part of the phasing of the project so within that two and a half year project even if that work were to be awarded today it's not going to get done for a year and a half basically either close to two years right so so we have time to bring in the Middle School bid to see exactly where we are in terms of the budget

062contingency and so forth and then we can structure a bid to implement that additional work um so my other question was for the girls locker room one thing I'm not clear on is was that bid or was that um now just for changing the lockers or is it for a full renovation of the locker room because that locker room needs a lot more than just new lockers the um and I think that's just uh so the locker room was not in the referendum right but in order to do the uh renovation of the pool area to become the commons whatever you might not like again sorry um the um we have to do significant amount of abatement in in and around the pool area and so it fell into the locker room and so then

063once we had that abatement to do we'd either have to put some of that back in place or um you know we thought well we'll get a price and see what it costs to fix it it was never really in the scope but we just thought we'd price it out so I guess my question was was that really so does that abatement is that going to be for the total locker room like a total locker room renovation or just the locker rooms just because last year we got uh I guess a estimate of like in the middle and I guess two point million 2.5 million dollars it's not a total renovation right so it's just just the locker room there's lockers okay yeah and I just wanted to say that the guidance area well what

064would become the guidance area that is getting abated in the first phase uh this summer if we award tonight and also that is one of the areas that needs a significant new roof over it and that is in the alternate roof package so even though we are asking to well even if we were to award that piece it was not getting done on for two years out because it was in the Final Phase but the prep work to renovate it later the roof and the abatement was in this phase it's getting done with the base bid um this is more of a question about trying to enable the community to understand all of these different moving Parts um so you know we have that list that actually Caitlyn helped put together spent her time which

065you probably should have been just anytime her family actually putting this list together um that was cross-referenced by epic about what was in the base bid right because a lot of community members were asking us they were concerned about some of the questions that are bruin um see me that quality um asked when it came to the locker rooms the transgender bathroom which is included in the basement so just a lot of questions and so um I my request is could we add this document maybe just amend us like I don't know if you need to have the budget numbers in here but but add this document to our long-range facility plan website so that community members can see what's in this base bid and understand like what's included and what's not um uh or

066just or just putting what is currently included because there's just we're getting emails of people being panicky about certain things that they care about are just curious and it's hard to find and cross-reference I mean we have members give giving us screenshots of things they're trying to put the puzzle together and not everyone watches our meetings as exciting as they are um so I just think being able to update the website with what is included in the base bid um would would allow more transparency in this process um especially since um more will hopefully come in the future when it comes to our budget but um this will just answer a lot of questions so um I think that we can triangulate that right because of course this meeting is online on our website on

067YouTube and everything um the presentation that we're doing is under the boards Link in our um website as well and on the lrfp site perhaps we can work with our two partners here just to make sure that it's the most up-to-date information we do upload those bi-weekly updates on there but this is one of those pieces that after you approve it we will spread the word very very wide for sure if you approve it sorry I didn't mean to be presumptive yeah I think I think that's a great idea I mean this list that we have internally is much longer than what's in the presentation talks about how many science labs whether you know obviously there might be things from a security standpoint or just internal standpoint that we would have to cut like I

068said maybe the money and such but I just think it would be nice for the community to have that type of access so thank you um yeah I think it was really helpful to go through that exercise because last year on fft you know one of the things we talked about in turning ritzer into double softball fields is that there's going to be more foot trap traffic and usage um of our our girls locker room um and it's something that when you go in there you're like the state isn't great and I know as a board we express some concerns about that so it was interesting going through the process to see that only the Skylight and the windows were included in the referendum in terms of Maintenance um but I guess my broader question

069is when you look at the district goals from 2021 to 2022 we were supposed to have gone out to bid for Columbia High School February of last year and obviously we've been sitting in an inflationary Rising inflationary environment um why have we seen such significant delays with the bidding process because I just want to know what those key learnings are as we think about ritzer being bid out in Spring of 2025 um you know how do we prevent further delays with this construction timeline if we hopefully can start you know ASAP foreign so uh overall as you can imagine there were a lot of moving Parts with the various improvements at the different schools uh with regard to the high school and the middle school there was a little more time spent than originally scheduled

070to work through design considerations and some of the alternate design ideas that were explored with regard to the middle school there was a restructuring of that bid so it could be put out with a with a PLA and so forth and also considering the timing relative to abatement and other efforts that need to happen at very certain times of the year so all those things came together and that's why we are on the schedule we are right now at this point the middle schools are the um the next piece they're out to bid their bids are due next week and then um beyond that the only components that will be fit into the schedule that aren't bid yet would be ritzer and then any additional work at the high school are there any other questions

071from board members something else sorry for them or for the district for the district okay so not for you if you have any other questions for our special guest this evening thanking none okay thank you so much for coming out we really appreciate it and so uh board member of Al Espina has a question for the district thank you um uh as looking at the presentation the stuff there was there is also another sub goal for the facilities area that states that quote the district will review and continue enhancements of its comprehensive Safety and Security plans procedures and mechanisms in the district schools the plans and procedures um which shall be in written form will provide for the protection of the health safety security and Welfare of the school population the prevention of intervention in

072response to and recovery from emergency and crisis situations big long sentence that we put together there um nothing in the presentation speaks to this um I don't know if this didn't occur or is it we haven't seen any evidence but I is it just that we because we are in public can't see any evidence I just want to make sure we're not you know we're doing our due diligence here yeah so um the board um I guess like almost 18 months ago approved the job description for our new security and safety Community lead um and that director uh was brought aboard um prior to the past summer and as I shared publicly during I believe our Safety and Security um Town Hall that we have that we had late summer early fall and through um

073many conversations with the board um that we've submitted those updated safety plans that are due to the county office um annually and I just recently um saw also from our director an update to that to update those plans to be submitted we of course couldn't share those plans publicly or even individually with board members because of the confidentiality of them um if if for satisfaction of that goal we could simply show those emails that were sent or show the receipt from the county office that those have been submitted thank you I just wanted to figure out how we could publicly show some evidence related to it so that we were no we were in compliance thank you 100 and you know our new ID program at the high school has been spoken about by our

074student rep and others but we can definitely offer some evidence in that njsba platform you'll see that um in my submission are we comfortable moving forward I think we're comfortable moving to the next District goal so um just for shaping this portion before our experts leave us um for the board president would you like to them to stay for the public speaks to respond to the public as well I think that would be great okay are there any public speaks tonight in is raise your hand if you intend to speak about CHS bid or okay so we have two good okay so that sounds um so the board could vote to move public speaks that aligns to CHS up singularly and then we could let our guests go but I'll get our attorneys um thoughts

075on that right just to go out of order on the agenda you need a motion and a second and a majority approval to make a motion to move up public speaks related to the CHS bid this evening um do I have a second thank you phone number Mala Spina all in favor please raise your hand okay thank you oh uh first Publix we're going to grab the list just make sure yep yeah first public speaks this evening is Jocelyn Ryan thanks Jocelyn Ryan Seth orange I wanted to speak about a couple of things the first thing is the lrfp and so the long range facilities plan as it pertains to the older kids particularly the high school is what I wanted to ask about and thank you Dr Taylor for your detailed reply to my

076email and Nubia and Arun thank you and I and thanks to the presenters this evening I only really have one question left about it and it was uh when does the roof happen when does that work start sorry could you repeat the question just so the board could sorry when does the roof begin oh yeah of this summer okay great thank you I'm just going to reiterate so that everybody in the audience in her home can hear that and that it meant that they said late some late this summer this summer yeah thank you and do you want me to go away and come back yeah yeah that sounds good yeah yes thank you so much thank you right um so then I think uh ambra Teague on Boutique thank you hi I'm Amber Teague

077from Maplewood um this was super helpful um but one thing I'm not clear on is uh when last board meeting or two board meetings go there was a discussion that we were running out of money right because when we originally did the bond um the plan for 160 million dollars which when we went through it with Dr fakar I was lucky enough to be on President's Council when he was going through that whole process um and everything on there was really health and safety related once we really boiled down to it so um it sounds like we are running out of money um and that we may not be able to do all the things that we had originally intended to do I think it makes sense that we are running out of money because

078obviously these are unprecedented times in terms of living through the pandemic and supply chain issues and of course inflation so what I want to think about or have you think about or have us all think about is if for a flagship School Columbia High School where hopefully every student in the district will go through um how can we get all these projects done if we are running out of money is it another Bond how do we think about Capital Improvements in our budgeting plan because I think what we've learned is waiting sort of 30 40 years to do these things really puts us on our back foot wouldn't we be in a different place uh post pandemic if we had new HVAC systems our kids could have gone in school so much faster so many

079of the complaints and concerns of this District could have actually been addressed if we were dealing with Capital Improvements and plans on a more consistent schedule so I just put it to you I don't know where this is all going to land and I'm sure there's not a huge appetite for another Bond but I really would love everyone to start thinking about how we regularly incorporate this kind of work into our annual plans thank you so much thank you very much so is there do we have anyone else I don't see anyone else on here that was intending to speak about it but raise your hand if you are so I can call you up here um I know and it doesn't I see them online but it doesn't say what they're calling about so

080I don't know how to feel those um I can respond to that public speaks if you would like okay um so just thank you for that and um please know that annually the board approves our annual maintenance plan uh we have um a very impactful facilities director who has taken a very proactive stance on um things that are not a part of the long-range facilities plan and the board and fft have had conversations about what happens if when we get to that point when money runs out right and we cannot expend other funds until that money runs out which is a really important point and in my previous experience managing large construction projects in other places um there was a significant amount of money left for other things um but the beautification of the buildings

081was never one of them which was always something that I didn't love either right that we want to make the buildings beautiful for our kids and our staff members so we are keeping that top of mind some quick numbers on the financial side of this um so the the bonds all three tranches that we sold came to 157 million 386 000. as of this week about 61 of that has been expended or encumbered so that comes out to about 96 million we have approximately 61 million 386 000 left Madam president um Mr bonds is informing me that a Community member Megan Goose link has a hand raised online which may be about this topic okay great let's let's driving hello I am driving in the car so I hope you can all hear me um

082thank you for recognizing my hand raised um I have a bunch of things to say but specifically in this section about the CHS award as the parent of a transgender child at CHS we would really like to know the status as a board member already indicated it's very unclear to us the status of the all gender bathrooms in the facility these are extremely important to our child who currently does not go to the bathroom at school all day long due to the conditions of the existing all gender bathroom which the students refer to as the coffin um which also there's only one all gender bathroom in a school that serves you know on average 2 000 students and there's one all gender bathroom so that is my question about the CHS award is where are

083the all gender bathrooms that are absolutely necessary to serve our student body so that they can use the bathroom and be healthy in their school day thank you those are still in the plans for the CHS project yeah phone number Deval Wilson sorry one last thing that I forgot to mention was when this came up the the the bid the base bid that we had to vote on the full board didn't have all of the info well yeah the full board didn't have all the information as to why um and I think it was great that epic was able to come and and deliver that message to us as the full board in the community um as fft chair I didn't have the reasoning either I mean I know it just it just happened in

084the way it happened not I'm not trying to point any fingers but my point is just I think that it should be a best practice moving forward that when the full board has to vote on a resolution such as this one that the full board is is informed not just fft um because we do we do often get information before the rest of the board and often that gets into a recap and or I'll send an update to the to the rest of the the team so I just I would just request that in the future we're able to have this type of information in advance so that everyone feels comfortable about moving forward with the vote duly noted and um I think that that's why also we try to push out those committee minutes

085to the full board as soon as we can when we get them to ensure that folks have a chance to review along with um launching all the supporting documents hopefully the Thursday before this week and so we we always are pushing for that so I appreciate the feedback thank you um if we're prepared to that was a little bit more than 10 minutes I think for that for the first goal I want to promise that we're going to Pace a little more he's a passionate and important topic so thank you for giving us Grace for that um we have our assistant superintendents uh who are joining us um per our design our redesign of central office um the vision was to have special services access and equity and cni working together and uh the assistant

086soups are really embodying that work so to our assistant superintendents um Miss Bodner Miss badine and Dr Gilbert I'm going to start going through the slides feel free to chime in great thank you so these are action plans we're not going to spend time on them because we presented them to the public multiple times we're going to skip through them but they're here for anybody who wants to go look through the documents when they're posted online oops there we go thank you so we'll start with our work on Intervention and referral services so the assistant superintendents work together to complete A needs assessment and an audit of the inrs processes and procedures across the district and then we took that information to start working on different aspects of the inrs process for improvement so we've

087worked this year on a handbook in the related forms to create the handbook and create a standardized set of procedures and forms and so on and so forth to be used in the upcoming school year we are continuing also to work on an intervention Bank we have begun that process and we're continuing that process to put together a general overarching intervention bank that can be used by any school to help with the inrs planning procedure for their students we also have taken a little time to meet with different vendors to seek out a tool that will really help us with housing a number of the different aspects of intervention and referral services such as our forms data documents our intervention Bank you know whatever features the different tools offer to help make us more efficient

088and proficient with this process so we've looked at many many different tools but we've narrowed it down to two different tools that we think have the aspects that we're really looking for one of them is preferred over the other we're in the final stages of that review process the director of access and Equity also has been attending random inrs meetings across the district gathering information to look for specific areas that might require immediate training or long-term training and intervention as needed and of course we're planning the administrator training on the upcoming in the upcoming summer for the updated inrs manual this particular slide highlights for you the different opportunities we've had for professional development we know that in this goal and then also the goal that deals with the social emotional learning and restorative uh

089justice professional development was one of our pieces and so this is just an outline for you on many different areas and leverage points that we had to do professional development one key change we did this year is we rotated uh PDS uh in October December February and March where we allowed the building levels to do specific building types of professional development and then they rotated between that and District offering where they had choice we put them in two groups and this with this clot this this slide shows uh what that actually looked like next live please and this you could probably barely see this but this is a list of other some examples of our professional development offerings we don't have included in here the plc's that our teachers ran within their particular buildings a

090couple of that I would like you can see it's broken down into academic a restorative justice practices and our access and Equity pieces a couple of things that I would like to just highlight on this slide is that you see a couple of offerings that deal specifically around phonics everything you need to know about phonics and early Elementary are you g phonics and we also have some things that talked about like creative thinkers and problem solvers and math and then the English Department had a reading and writing professional development for grades 9-12 and our restorative justice practices you can see a huge emphasis around community building and there'll be another goal that we'll talk about why that's significant and when we talk about access and Equity windows and mirrors and stem uncovering the impact of

091intersectionality on mental health and then also several uh content specific things around for example teaching Amistad in the curriculum and then uh the Danielson through the equity lens really working on how to our teachers can can uh before a culture responsive teaching within that class but also how our leaders can actually recognize what those look like when they do observations in the classroom this slide shows our administrators we're not leaving them out in our professional development and these were the different opportunities and times that we had I would highlight for you you'll see a mcrail training that's actually the training that we're doing with our administrators on evaluations on what their evaluations are going to look like and how our principals evaluate their assistant principles and we're actually going to be moving to our directors

092at central office of going through some of the same type of training and so we're all getting trained to really understand what that is uh you see the Danielson training that's the training we do with our administrators that I talked about in terms of being able to recognize uh the culturally responsible teaching the thing that goes on in the classroom and a huge professional development that our secondary schools went through with scheduling because we really wanted our secondary schools to think about repurposing their scheduling that can incorporate times where we could actually focus on some community building and things and Natures for our young people okay okay and then some other areas we really focused on were was RTI and we reviewed our process and targeted areas of improvement um and at the tier one

093level um we begin to Target intervention and collect data to drive our changes we continue to work on this process moving forward we really focus in on our tier one intervention in our classrooms we do this through our instructional coaching sessions and coaching sessions with our supervisors we look on at things and work on uh areas like behavior management small group instruction we have data meetings with our staff department meetings that Target individual needs of teachers and we also do this to focus on our bank of inrs interventions we're continuing with our ninth grade Humanities class this year we did expand it we doubled the number of students who go through our humanities class we have met with the teachers a few times throughout the years one so we will continue to be doing this

094we are making revisions to the curriculum this year our teachers are who teach these classes are going to be working on it this summer they have visited schools who successfully have a Humanities class and we are offering the PD to teachers to what they feel they need PD in and we're giving them those opportunities foreign we have scheduling professional development um for our uh Elementary teachers had um professional development on using our new scheduling software that was their phase one um as a formal principal at the elementary level one of the hardest things that you had to do was create the master schedule and there is a piece of software out there that helps our teachers do that and it really or our principles do that and it really allows to create priorities who needs

095to be scheduled first who might have some outside of the box needs so they went through that training in the beginning of the year and they will be using that new software for next year to create a very efficient schedule our secondary principles as Dr giblet said did go through a scheduling scheduling PD session and coaching sessions with this um professional development uh people and their whole idea was to hear what the priorities are of the buildings and then to help them to create a schedule that reflects those priorities we we have student tutoring which we have created the RFP we had to re-publicize it because we realized that we needed the um RFP or the contract to go for much longer um and services will begin this summer so they will we will have

096a contract for our summer school kids um we had two more instructional coaches at the secondary level they have led numerous PD sessions they've worked with our principals and our supervisors to lead faculty meetings and department meetings and they've done a lot of coaching sessions with teachers we continue to use risk ratio when we are looking at data and Analysis analysis analysis thank you and um we really use this when we are looking at our Middle School and High School advanced placement courses and another area that we are finding is our Chinese World Language expansion um has happened and is continuing to happen um due to the popularity of our Chinese World language courses our middle schools have asked to increase our offerings and so we're happy to announce that next year we will be

097expanding our Chinese offerings at the middle school and I think that the board is considering that action this evening sorry cases of data we have used pass fail data at Columbia High School to help us to make some systemic changes at the building so what some of the things that we've been doing as we've been analyzing this data and we've been having multiple uh data meetings with the staff with the administration at Columbia High School we've seen I've we've seen a lot of Trends in the data these are some of the examples I'm not going to go through each and every one of them but some of the things that we have seen um the end the data indicates an overall improvement from q1 to Q2 in our arts classes ninth grade biology course less

098than seven percent have received a failing grade so we've really dug deep into the failure day to find data to find out what is truly going on and we did this as an overall for Columbia High School but we dug also dug deep into our departments to see what is actually going on and where are the areas of need that we can then make systemic changes or maybe some small changes at Columbia to improve our supports for our students and the experience for our students we also asked um I'm sorry you this is again some more trends that we have seen again there were a ton of lists and lists of lists of things that we we found When We examined the data but these are some of the things that we have found um

099just chime in for those who may not have been a part of previous board meetings and discussions uh late last summer early fall we did a deep dive into some of the failure past pass failed data from those previous quarters um with the board and in the cni conversations um this year there were discussions about just raw data right and if you you can do the math 2000 kids eight or nine courses a piece you're talking about 18 000 grades and so we're trying to really build back the onion to look at the trends that we can really Point our interventions towards in the in the previous updates that we've given on on these topics we've spoken about um layering those interventions and making them more and more customized and that not every situation of

100course is the same and some of them but some of them are similar in nature and we can start to guide our interventions to be more customized for students needs please continue thank you yes so we also in our some of our department meetings that were led by our supervisors we wanted to hear what teachers were seeing and where they thought some of some areas we can look at and try to um focus in on and here are some of the some of the information that our teachers are seeing day to day maybe overall Maybe by quarter um but they're here for you to look at together okay so when we look at an the overall analysis of of student data we as a team as an administrative team with Columbia High School administrators and

101central office administrators we really found that we could put this information and this data into four buckets and one is looking at students who had one or two failures and that that was allowing us to put in immediate interventions we could do things immediately to support these students then we had students who or we had three other areas that were more systemic that we needed to dig deep into and look at our process and procedures and how we do things at the at the high school and the supports that we're putting in place at the high school so that we're we're really changing the systems that go on so some of those are students who have Ace F's based on attendance attendance in classes not necessarily overall attendance but in certain classes where students are

102failing there is a very big correlation between attendance and students who are getting F's students with outside of the box situations we had some students who had an enormous amount of F's but when we really dug deep to find out what was going on many of our students had left the district and never unenrolled so they remained in the um in registration and they continuously were getting at so we pulled those out because they were outside of the box situations and then finally we had students with multiple F's but not for reason two or three meaning not based on attendance or not outside of the box situations so when we look at each of these areas we started to do some individual um to create individual student learning plans for students who had one or

103two failures these were the immediate interventions that we could put in place and everyone was different not everyone received all of these um interventions because it wasn't appropriate for all them but we did address these students and some of the interventions that could be put in place these were some of the interventions in instructional strategies again just some of the things it could be give time and class to make up some missed work group students to Foster more discussion ask higher order thinking questions these are things that we could do in the immediate to support our students next slide so another way we're working with our students was flexibility Strat strategies pushing back states to allow for more review or modifying questions or allowing or reminding students about retakes these were some of the interventions

104that could be put in place for students with one and two failures next slide please and just to add on Miss Bodner that you know understanding that we want to meet our kids where they are right and peeling back the onion to really understand why students are exhibiting or um being or being seen as at risk Beyond just the grades that they have many times there are more circumstances that a closer thoughtful look shows us thank you honey thank you and another area would be contact strategies you know because student students printed copies of their grades and reports give extra credit for people who go to period nine constantly Myers have missed work hold one-on-one conferences with students on missed work so all of these again are based on the needs of this individual students

105where you these are some of the strategies that we could use for especially for our students who had one in two failures this year so then we start to look at things that um are a little bit bigger and have a lead more than just what we can do immediately and we started to look at some of our students who have failures due to absence and and for out of the box situations and here are some of the things that we will be looking at for next year so the data that we have collected this year this pass fail data this or q1q2 data are um any of the the RTI and tier one interventions the things we're hearing that areas that we might need to put more supports all of this data collected is

106giving us information to make changes that are systemic so some of those things are we need to really make sure that our students have full schedules with no gaps in them we need to make sure that we're going to be looking at our assistant principles and and they are going to be um their their um their work is there is going to shift not So Much by grade level by by actual um areas of focus um we are going to have um our system principles are conduct seat times random ideas to see how we can make up for some students who might have missed some classes um and you can continue on and I won't read each and every one but there's more we're constantly finding ways to make changes um we will have this

107data when um over the summer from as we continue to plan and as we do student schedules and as we're looking at class sizes and making any changes to the to the next school year coming in again we're going to be real accounting reallocating our CHS administrators responsibilities so that they will have individual responsibilities and not set not just by grade level and one of the big things that we're really focusing on and that we've been focusing on for a while on planning is we will be establish publishing a 9th Grade Academy next year with a focus on transitioning our students from the middle schools into CHS and we're bringing a culture of success to our new students including freshman seminar class where they will be doing things like focusing in on SEL they will

108be learning about executive functioning and organization they will have time to work on get extra help from teachers um it so our ninth period conference will now be at first period during our ninth grade academy we will have Ela and math labs for students who failed those classes in eighth grade and they will go and get extra supports so this is a huge shift in and something that we think will directly connect to really building a nice foundation for our freshmen so that they can use these skills that they're learning their freshman year into the following years at Columbia thank you and that's also an example of data driving our decision making similar to last year when we were doing um you know backwards mapping of incidents that occurred and the timing of them seeing

109who was involved and that there were threads there and making shifts in the lunch schedule for our freshmen keeping them in and adding in that layer of ID checks and things like that very similar with seeing that this group um has year over year had been been our biggest challenge and trying to put put real specific um guide guide rails in place to make sure that we're helping them to be as successful as they can be go right ahead thank you and and the other big area that we are looking at is really looking at our counseling Annex and slam lab and one of the things that we want to introduce next year is to use our National Honor Society as and and our Max Scholars to do mentoring and tutoring of our students which

110we think will really really support and hopefully engage our students more yeah so some we are for next year we do have some areas that we are planning in curriculum instruction and launching one of the big areas we have budgeted for is a new K-5 math program um our math program for many years has been um it's it's very old and outdated and one of the things I knew when I came from the building is that we and hearing my colleagues around the district is that we really needed to put some focus into our K5 math so at the time has come this year we have been vetting numerous um programs and our um all of our elementary teachers have had the option to be a part of that during professional development days we've videoed

111all of our presentations from the different programs so and we have a lot of teachers surveys filled out so that we know um we have their voice and we hear what they feel is the best program for our our community we will be picking a program uh next month so you will have something on um we will be presenting at cni or the program that it was the choice of the district um and then for ELA next year our we are making some some shifts in our professional development our K-8 tenure teachers will no longer be required to attend Teachers College coaching sessions our non-tenure at this moment and next year will be attending them because it is currently our program that we need them to be able to especially our new teachers be able

112to deliver the curriculum our K2 professional development will focus on Focus instruction we'll be using inside and outside professional developers our three five will focus on Phonics and spelling instruction topic based reading and writing instruction again using inside and outside professional developers and six through eight will focus on vocabulary grammar instruction topic based reading and writing um and writing instruction again in and outside this summer we will be the summer 2023 we will vet a new um phonics program for the K3 and we will pilot it during the 20 23-24 school year with the many teachers that we will be asking to be on this committee to vet these this phonics program Define what best meets all of our needs and then we'll have full implementation across the district in 2425 the the next three

113slides are going to highlight something that we're very excited about our partnership with equal opportunity schools has proven to be one of the most beneficial Partnerships that we have that in our our partnership with TSL are restorative justice group uh but this actually shows us the growth in our AP enrollment this slide actually talks about the number of students that we're up we're seeing AP enrollment up year after year but we're really excited about the increased numbers we saw 32 percent uh increase for our black students 121 increase for our latinx students and 30 percent increase for our multi-racial students and we have been highlighted by EOS and our superintendent and our group uh went to the superintendent's Council where EOS presented the work that we're doing to show us and show us as an

114Exemplar of what you can do when you put your focus and your dedication on help moving students of color to our upper level schools and this particular slide here is just showing if you look at the bar graph this continuing Improvement these are the expected students who will be enrolling in uh uh advanced placement for uh you know going into the next year you can see that we're above the line on each of those and in the third slide just highlights again some of these games that we have had so um back to you Dr Taylor thank you Dr Gilbert and yes we were able to take this information with EOS to the Essex County superintendents meeting and present uh to all the superintendents in Essex County the work that we've been doing um with

115EOS and thank you to our assistant superintendents for leading us through that discussion we'll now pause um for our board president if there are questions on that on that section uh board member Gifford foreign I do just want to say thank you for that presentation but I did feel it left out some of the raw data that we have previously been given and glosses over the fact that a huge number of our students are currently struggling especially students of color uh black students make up 31 of the student population at CHS but they have almost 63 percent of the F's Hispanic students make up close to eight percent of the student population but make up almost 11 percent of the S white students on the other hand make up around 50 percent of the student

116population yet only have 16 percent of the F's it does not get better for students with IEPs out of the 329 students with IEPs at CHS 69 percent got at least one F and our students who are already overaged and under credited out of the 104 a 102 got at least one F I'm happy to see that we are focusing our efforts of trying to help ninth grade students who had 33 percent of the F's but there's almost no real systematic changes being put in place for the 10th graders who had 32 percent of the S and our 11th grade students who made up almost 25 percent of the ads are students with IEPs our current 10th and 11th graders and our students who are already failing need the help now we need alternative setting

117for our students and I know this is something that many pushed for a year for years now we have heard we are working on something we still don't have anything concrete in place so let's be honest here uh students who are already failing are not coming in for the summer for help they're not going to use the slam Labs or the Mac Labs unless they are made to while we seem to be on the right track with the ninth grade academy uh it is really upsetting to see that we don't have that much uh for the other students and I did want to say I heard that um you know for the students that are fail that are having a lot of trouble there is a ninth period but that that that period is not

118um mandated it's optional and I I did want to kind of challenge the administration to think about making that mandated because I've spoken to some teachers who say you know the students or the especially the ones that are having a lot of trouble are just not using utilizing this period so I I didn't catch a question in there um but I acknowledge um the numbers that you read off and the concerns that you have and my response would be that throughout this presentation we spoke about interventions and in previous presentations spoke about interventions and there is no Silver Bullet right there's there's no magic pill to give um a challenge situation you have to work it and you have to work it with the people who are there every day our teachers and our assistant

119principals who are in our principal who are dedicated to this work and we support them um so I acknowledge that we're not here to say that we don't have challenges we're here to show you and demonstrate our planning to work together to address them and we certainly acknowledge what you shared remember Wingfield um I just want to thank the district for the presentation and it was a lot of information and I just want to highlight a couple of things that I thought were noteworthy and also um I guess Give Me Reason for Hope in particular when we've seen this data replicate itself you know year over year at least in my time on the board one of the things that I think is really significant um is that there is a very intentional approach to

120braiding interventions so the idea that there is not a one-size-fits all but rather we are layering those interventions so that students have real wraparound supports for whatever their needs may be the other thing that I thought was really significant is that we I I see the team looking at the data in a very different way and that's very encouraging to me because I think when we look at F's we can't think about failure as a monolith we have to think about failure as incredibly nuanced and Incredibly circumstantial based on the unique struggles and the unique needs that our kids are experiencing and so I think it's a really important step that we look at the data to find out both the frequency of failure um the totality meaning if kids are failing all of their

121courses versus failing one or two discrete courses because to me beginning to tease out and separate that data gives us a lot of important information about ways in which we could differentiate our approach and become much more targeted whether it's an academic Gap that needs to be addressed or whether there is a Confluence of academic and social emotional issues that need to be addressed in a much more substantial way I think that's the right move it's not an easy move but it allows them to begin to separate and Target their approaches um and I am hopeful that with some sustained effort uh that next year's data will look different than this year's data the last thing that I just want to note is something that Dr Taylor has been very intentional at least for the

122last few years around building an SLT that works collaboratively and in an integrated approach it was not always evident in my first year on the board this year has been markedly different and just in the presentation we saw the fact that that presentation was not just made by assistant superintendent Bodner which is the sort of official domain over this particular goal but rather it was made very intentionally by three of our SLT administrators to me demonstrates the Intensive collaborative partnership that the SLT has formed and to me the only way we're going to move complex adaptive problems like the one that we've been seeing for year over year is with that kind of of intense collaboration so I wanted to lift that up and note that because it was not um it did it was

123not lost on me thank you I would also want to congratulate the board who supported um our grant support for the Hub and the Loft um that they did receive the full Grant amount for the wraparound services to launch next year to speak about you know serving the whole child right and understanding the complex circumstances and also want to make sure that we lift up and remember that we're also triangulating this concern with our integration efforts next year your sixth and seventh grade um are are integrated right right behind them your K first and second grade will be integrated which will also help to address I think some of the achievement gaps that have been shown historically even though we're considered a high performing School District we do not shy away from the achievement gaps

124as being our our heaviest and probably most important lift or a member of alimony also think what would be very interesting to see would be all the data that uh you know board member Gifford talked about to see it longitudely over years year on year growth I mean it may well be true that it is as terrible as you you know he's saying it is but it may not when you put it against a you know a y-axis of time it may be increasing like for example I mean the AP enrollment data is you know 1548 students that's like like three quarters of all high school kids in our high school take an AP class that's 77 you know I'm assuming it's like 2000 right I mean 15 1548 students have taken an AP as

125out of two thousands that's just amazing I think that is a number that we should be happy to look at and I'm sure if you kind of plotted against the last couple of years I mean it's increasing so so that's always a good look at so longitudinal data is my my request so the challenge and we've had those discussions too we have a dynamite I.T Department Mr bonds don't turn the microphone off on me back there um and student Information Systems lead and we're marrying multiple years when there were different methodologies there and so like I said there's 18 000 probably grades for this marking period and 18 000 for the previous and eighteen thousand for the previous and so looking at instead of just putting up raw data that looks like the phone book

126right we want to give you nuance and so we're taking that back with the team that has bought in their referenced including supervisors and assistant principals and um you know folks who are on the ground um with our teachers helping kids guidance counselors to try to get really um easy to understand data and we in our recent data committee meeting I share with the chair that I've had a couple of meetings with the company that works closely with PowerSchool that I think will be more user friendly than our data warehouse that can really pop up and do comparisons quickly not just for the board but for the teachers who have kids in front of them and so that's what we're working towards and we'll have that for the next data committee meeting or member Duvall

127Wilson thank you for this presentation um and for giving us the past fill data in advance to look at it um I guess I have two questions one is um what professional development when it comes to phonics instruction what professional development outside staff developers are we using just curious who they are also um one of the things that we've said a lot about is of course we've got to look at the high school and we have to support the students but also um looking at the elementary school level we're looking at a new math program um are we seeing that is our assumption that um there are some gaps in our current math curriculum that is impacting our students as they move up throughout the district especially our students um of color we've seen the

128data from Star assessment that it's not really starting in the high school our students there's a disparity starting in the elementary level so knowing that I know we focus a lot on the high school in this presentation but I'm just curious when it comes to our math and our in our Ela curriculum are we looking for a new math program because we're realizing that that that is part of the part of the challenge and I'm happy to hear that you're vetting a new phonics program over the past couple of months since I've been on the board there has been pushback about um looking into a new phonics program so I'd like to know what um why the the change in the past I don't know two weeks or so um and and looking forward to

129doesn't have to be at this meeting but looking forward to hearing how um you are putting together this team to uh evaluate new phonics programs and how that pilot program will look next year um so so yeah I know that was a lot can I frame it back for you yeah sure all right so the the first question that I heard was the reason for the new math program I know Miss Bodner gave a few quick reasons but we're asking for if if there are if there's more to add to that the second question was um who are we using for the current outside phonics PD this the third question was was around pushback on changing the on addressing phonics I would say that I don't recall there being pushback I think they were just

130prioritizing the math um because of the reasons and I'm sure miss Bodner is going to share and there was a fourth one I think I mean I'm sorry I'm more so just commenting that we we are heavily looking at the data in the high school and talking about intervention in high school but I know we also care about the elementary level yes it's not it's not exemplified here in this presentation but you know our community has voiced that when we can't just look at high school what's going on and you know right it did mention in this presentation like eighth graders that are that were failing they get to do this new program in ninth grade it's like okay well we know those eighth graders are failing what's working backwards and evaluating what are we

131doing what could be fractured earlier on yes to change got it so the reason that this presentation reflects the way it does is because that's that was the district goal the district goal was around that that was set and I'm sure that um as we enter into that season this summer what you just mentioned could be a consideration for the board as well um so Ms Bodner did you catch those questions are you still on I I am still on I and I did catch them I'll try to make sure I address all of them so K5 math for a very long time we've had the same program for a very long time and it has become outdated and we needed to look at it after hearing from many teachers and hearing from many principals

132throughout the district and looking at our data it definitely showed that we needed to build a real strong foundation in mathematics for our kids because even if you when you start to look at our K5 data and then look further into the upper grades we're seeing where there are some holes that need to be filled so when we knew and also a lot of our professional development money was not necessarily go over the years before I was there was not going through um was not being sent to mathematics so we needed to put some attention in math for sure at the K5 level and that's what um that's Based on data and looking at test scores and looking at all and and student work we knew that we had to do that and then also

133aligning our curriculum with standards right we needed to make sure we're meeting the new standards that have come in since this particular program that we use now math and focus was was adopted by us so we had to do all of these things so one of this was starting back from last year we've been having these conversations and that was during budget time to really start to look at our budget and how we can do this work um so that's why we're really looking at them at the at the K5 math I am going to push back a little bit on the phonics piece I have never been opposed at all to looking at new phonics programs I believe that my again like Dr Taylor said my focus was definitely at math in the in

134the beginning of the year and now we're starting to expand our our looks at things so the phonics program was not necessarily something that I would say that I was steadfast on and I wouldn't I wouldn't even consider something else I I've never in in many ways I've never said that I I believe that everything we do is correct I said that we have many supplemental pieces to build our whole program and each one of these pieces has to be looked at and addressed every year so that's why we're looking at our phonics program for next year and and um we will be reaching out to all staff to see who would like to be a part of the committee over the summer and we will also be asking them if they would want to

135Pilot this and we would have them become experts in this because they'll be doing it for a year and then they can support and do professional development with our with our teachers um that following year and they can be a real support system for the the teachers in the buildings um the professional development Phonics that we had that is we are in our time right now that we are planning professional development we have no contracts created yet we have not um signed anything yet to say that we're working with anyone we are now vetting it this is the time that we do that we start planning for next year and I don't know if there was another question I think she got them all she got them all thank you thank you very much Madam

136president are we are we ready to move forward um I just have one so to date the district has only spent about 46 of our allocated covid funds which is a much slower pace of spending than many of our neighboring districts at around 70 to 80 percent so we currently have a balance of about 3.57 million in unspeed coveted funds which we have to use by September of 2024 otherwise we lose this money so I have a lot of questions in here but it's all on the same topic so how does the district intend to utilize these funds to support the educational needs of our students I understand that some of these funds will go towards Summer School this year um but I can't imagine that that cost is going to make a significant dent

137in the unspent fund balance um and if we don't use the covid funds as I said we we will lose them and we unfortunately lost seventy two thousand dollars in 2022 because we hadn't spent the funds by its expiration date and I guess you know my focus is and what I'd love to learn from the district is is there a plan in place to use these funds to support kids while we have them in the building during the 2023-2024 school year and how as a board can we feel confident that the remaining 3.57 million dollars will be spent within the next year because over a three-year period we've spent less than that and how can we feel confident that the source of this funding will be our students so anything you can provide around that

138would be greatly appreciated sure I'll I'll lead in Ms Bodner I know that we've shared um the answer to a few of those questions in committee um and you share some of that that the the focus of our um of our immediate plans for spending is Summer and it's not summer school it's all of our summer programming we have a very robust summer program that we shared um the redesign of when we were in the thralls of covet um far beyond just a simple uh summer school the enrichment and the expansion of the support of students you heard Miss Bodner in her presentation speak about the tutorial expenditure that we're looking to go out to bid for which is a very significant piece as well um and Miss Blondo you can take it from there

139yes so um summer school actually the the grant will pay for two more years of summer school and I think we and if correct me if I'm wrong Eric and I might have to look but I believe the cost of summer school just for personnel with the 100 and over 140 classes that we offer is five hundred thousand dollars so right there for two summers just for personnel we're looking at close to a million dollars we have we are using some of this money towards our supplies and professional development for um our new math program we will also be using this for our phonics professional development um we have like Dr Tyler said there are tutoring services that is going to cause a significant amount of money um those are the things that come to

140mind right off the top of my head there are plenty of other things that we have planned with it will be helping to fund our Freshman Academy it will be funding our social emotional programs that we that we are putting in place um it will be supporting our anti-bias anti-racist professional development it will be supplying our uh restorative practices professional development um it will be looking at our special education um uh uh pump Ed um Services it will be looking at giving some occupational therapies uh professional development to our kindergarten first and second grade teachers as we have heard that some of the areas as OT that we're seeing our students are struggling in um it will help us to develop any other programs that we believe we need to put in place um at

141any of the levels any intervention programs it will allow us to make crit kits for intervention supplies for the building so that when an intervention or an inrs action plan is created the assistant principals can hand over supplies to the teachers to use if need be um and it just goes on and on um I can definitely give you a more comprehensive list of things that we are doing but off of the top of my head those are the things that we have planned for next year and the year after that and I know that uh Miss Bodner is humble but she's one of our lead if not the lead grant writer that helps us to get funds that we can expend on on such um worthwhile projects for our kids and families and school

142districts and as we shared before when we start our summer programming we're going to have a running record of those expenditures as they come off the total for the monthly f8 fft meeting uh board member Duvall Wilson yeah we um thank you Mr Burnside you had given us an overview of expenditures and based on what was given to us what month that was in March well after the summer we'll have a balance of a million dollars that will expire in September so I think we just need to no this September there's some there are some that are 2024 but there are some that he gave us that is 2023 so I think we just need to be aware and it's something that we'll put on we didn't get a chance to talk about covet expenses

143less or Esser funds less fft but I know originally we were told August would be when we would get an itemization but I think we should actually evaluate it a little bit earlier because based on what we have we'll have a balance of a million dollars that needs to be spent by September 2023. so we could discuss that next meeting and just make sure I mean look maybe that's padding like a case where there's overages I don't know but anyway just something that we're trying to be mindful of because we don't want to lose any more money sure and I think that one thing that we have to also know is that the procurement of the funds and it's always a part of that month's building report that you're getting so the August timeline was

144important because the building will hit at that time but we'll take it offline and talk with the committee um we have no problem sharing information are there any more questions on District goal number two seeing none will go to number three I promise this one will be 10 minutes I promise um so SEL of course when the district goals were made at the end of last summer and for those who were talking like acronyms here social emotional learning I'm sure everyone is familiar with um was seen as a very high priority still coming from the impact of the pandemic so we're going to have Dr Gilbert walk us through some of our work around SEO skipping through our action plans thank you Dr Taylor uh again as we did before my colleagues are going to

145help us so Susie go ahead if you will not yes sure so our professional development of course also included professional development for teachers related to social emotional learning and these are just a few of the different workshops and professional development opportunities that we've offered so far this year in that area so I won't read them all but they're there for you of course to review and and take a look at in addition to that we've been doing work this year oh go back one sorry in addition um this year we did work on our suicide screening tool in the previous school year we selected a suicide screening tool and did training on that with everyone that would be involved in that this year we've been working hard on a standard operating procedure that you know

146kind of rounds out all of the different steps that would go with this developing related forms and so on and so forth It's been through a number of different revisions it's been through a number of different legal reviews it is in and wrapping up its final legal review I think it's been back through several reviews along the way so now we are looking at finalizing this document and having this ready for implementation in the upcoming school year and that procedure will be ready for training and implementation at that time so some of the area other areas that we worked on this year um the three assistant superintendents sent out a um first two weeks of school letter to our staff and we it really focused in on building relationships and and and expectation that you

147know our students and would build relationships with one another and that with um our teachers and students together so it was a real Focus for the beginning of the school year that everyone would really stop and focus in on this um we had challenge day for all three of our secondary schools and all of our schools in the district participated in respect week in October with different activities and events and just to reiterate um when for our first couple of weeks of school we had we had plans that we wanted to make sure that folks didn't feel meaning our staff members the the academic pressure that can sometimes you know impact the beginning of the school year we knew that this was a very significant restart and as we visited classrooms throughout those first couple

148of weeks we were thrilled to see um that our teachers and our principals and APS and supervisors um and guidance counselors were all bringing um that Vision to fruition and again for those who don't know challenge day this is our second year implementation of challenge day in our schools and this is social emotional um day for selected students using an outsourced group who specializes in this and if you want to hear some see some highlights of it you can go to challenge day dot org it's a super emotional on time and by all reports um was really impactful for both staff and students who participated um we'll move on now and so a big part of this though really looks at our school culture and climate and so as part of this goal all of

149our schools completed uh culture and climate plans that will be made available to you as the artifacts and part of that work included myself going and doing periodic culture and climate visits to the schools and meeting with administrative teams throughout the year and we're actually in going through the director of access and equity and I are going now through the final rounds of those of meeting with schools talking them through what their plans were and thinking about the next year and how they're going to go about their goal setting uh our director of human resource and worked with uh Keith bonds to really put together some great analysis of our exit interview data that we're getting from staff who are leaving which can inform us on what buildings cultures and climates look like and we're

150going to be doing more data with our department of human resources to kind of help us see what are some of the areas and things we can do to make sure sure we're building not only student emotional well-being but also our adult well-being and our director of access and Equity who has been a gift to us in this district with her knowledge around HIV and anti-bullying work is becoming a primary support to our anti-bullying specialist giving them the kind of support they need and she's going to also be working with our school culture and climate teams uh that's going to kind of help us shift and build an infrastructure of success next slide please foreign s that we're doing this year is that we know that there's been a culture of restorative justice here in

151this school district and we actually want to reframe what people's ID ideals around restorative justice are we want to shift from right now where people feel like it's like an alternative to discipline anytime you talk about restorative justice people want to say well that's what we're doing instead of suspended when actually restorative justice is a school culture and climate building thing and so we're working with our school leaders we're going to be working with our teachers to help shift our frame of mind away from a punitive approach with restorative justice and moving more to a proactive approach and so we want to focus on building communities we want to focus on building healthy relationships we want to focus on creating those Justice Equitable learning environments and at the same time when you do that you

152can actually repair the harm and transform the conflict you're looking for that started with us going through a book study on the little book of restorative justice and education we don't actually have the time but if you link on to that board members you can actually see the presentations that we're using with our board members that action with our with our leaders that actually show oh we're going to go ahead and do that very good all right if you could since you're there if you could go to slide number six I think that'll be the the one that we can highlight for people to see uh do when we were talking about this seven go to seven the next slide please there you go this this Venn diagram actually shows you the things that I'm

153talking about we talk about with a restorative justice uh culture looks like right in the middle middle it talks about people being worthy and and looking at the relational aspects that we have we're grounded in respect dignity and mutual concern and those three things that I talked about building a nurture and healthy relationships creating just an equitable learning environments and repairing harm and transform conflict are there all the work that we do around our school cultures and climate fit within this Venn diagram and this is how we're going to build a restorative justice culture this is how we're going to transform our schools this is how we're going to do the things that I hear the board telling us to do build those academic things success move these students in the direction that we want

154them to go to it starts right here with this kind of framework and Foundation that we're going to be putting in our schools uh next slide please you're testing my I.T skills give me one second to go back up I understand it's coming all right let's see are we here yeah and go to the next slide yes sir thank you part of the other work that we've done here right so we have we have been continually to closely monitor our suspension Trends and looking at the possible inequities that we have through our suspension part of the work I guess you know the suspension moratorium was lifted however one piece of that proposal that remained was that before principles suspend they have to go through they have to come to me and we talk through things

155like what's going to be your re-entry plan for this student when they get in what are some of the current restorative approaches that you're using and you're going to be doing with that student at the same time we're gathering this data and we're looking at the numbers and we're seeing what those numbers look like and we're going to be working with our our schools on that we had a meeting with the Columbia High School administration where we looked at their suspension data and we're actually not just looking at the data numbers but we're looking at the kids who are being suspended and we're gonna get we're getting inside of who they are what they're doing and then possibly before the end of the school year we're going to be bringing some of those kids together

156as a focus group to talk to them about what is happening we're also going to bring some of our students who have in tennis issues bringing them together and having conversations to them so we can get to what is actually going on so we can start making those significant changes that I hear everyone asking us to talk about the social emotional learning and adult well-being I think this is important I think this is something that this this goal really lifts up so our director of access and equity and our director of the curriculum and instruction they led a work group inside of our district who put and and they looked at several Frameworks and they just made a recommendation to us on a framework not a program right but a framework what's going to be

157the basis when we just like I just showed you that kind of framework around restorative justice what is that framework we're going to use about social emotional learning which fits into that VN diagram that I just showed you around healthy relationships and if Dr Taylor if you want to spend some time and click on that little button for us this will actually go into the presentation that was that was done by our directors and if you want to go to the slide 15 or 16 uh I think this is a good place where we can uh really highlight some of the work the next slide well this is an afforded slide too because it showed you who the team memes were but these were the list of the Frameworks that the team evaluated when you

158go into this you can actually click there and see the website links we also have in this presentation for you with with the great appropriate levels for this was and with the score they use a Rubik's score a rubric scoring tool to kind of analyze and show where where the team looked at and it was a very diverse team if you go back to that that last slide uh Dr Taylor where you listen to team members here are the team members who worked on that uh director label director Carrera uh Miss Horn from Marshall little Miller Mr Rivera from Delia Boulder Mr King from Maplewood Middle School Miss Morrison from Columbia High School and we even put a couple of our abs's and social workers on there Mr Blackwell and Mr Topia Vargas they all

159work to put this together and if you go to slide 17 or 18 um the next one I think there we go this is the one with that was recommended and this is the group that we're going to everyone's familiar with the castle framework this is the framework that's going to ground us what this basically means is these are the things that we're gonna want to work with our teachers and talk about when we're looking at what are the social emotional skills we want to look at these are the framework pieces so if a group wants to come in and do professional development their professional development is going to have to be grounded in Castle so that we're all on the same page when we do this work foreign the next slide after this one

160uh I think I messed up my 10 minute time limit oh we're good Lord Dr Taylor I believe that's it so I do want to I do want to put emphasis on that we are working so uh Miss Weibel Miss Carrera and Mr Adam Doyle are working on an adult well-being plan and we're gonna roll out some really good things that's actually going to look at our adult well-being we can't have student well-being without adult well-being and that's all part of what we're doing that concludes this section did you make superintendent well-being no no I'm just joking thank you thank you very much board member well-being right yep um so um to our board president are there any questions so much Dr Gilbert any questions uh remember Gifford I just wanted to say Dr Gilbert

161that the initiative and enthusiasm really came through and I just really appreciate the nuanced uh approach here and it instills a lot of confidence so really appreciate that it was kind of like a mic drop there too that was great real passion behind this work I'd also like to commend um them for the research this is something that I um one of the goals that I worked hard on and um know the benefits of scl when done correctly and implemented throughout all of the uh buildings consistently um and I just want to and I and I think it's there but I just want to make sure that we're making it that the the castle framework I guess um which is the one that personally I'm happy you guys chose because that's the one that um

162I think is probably the best but um uh is this going to be implemented at all schools equally throughout the district and Universal Universal good okay because I know in the past we had had some issues with like some schools were doing one thing and other schools were doing what another thing I want to just make sure that we are are doing that um and I appreciate the um hard work and I'm really impressed because I don't think I I that working group uh that presentation that you just put up I didn't see that uh until just now so um I really impressed with the work that went into making these choices and um that there were people on there my only um little uh thing moving forward is to try to get some teachers

163involved in some of these discussions um that was the only thing when I looked up there that I saw that I was missing was um it it seems to be a Common Thread that we keep missing bringing in the teachers to these working groups and other places and they're the ones who are going to have to implement it and having their their buy-in and their um and their input is really important because without them in the they're they're in the discussion um to begin with it makes it harder for these uh things to really happen and especially SEL which can greatly change and impact students um in all grade levels is something that I really wish that we had seen all of them a part of but I appreciate the hard work and I thank

164you yeah and we're not done yet right you know we're we're still working through this and part of what you'll see those links are part of the artifacts that are part of the evidence that's put forward at that time and um I'm sure that Dr Gilbert and and Miss Korea and uh Miss uh Weibel um all noted the concerns and comments um thank you Dr Gilbert for the presentation it's clear under your leadership um that the district has made an enormous amount of progress in an area that we've been talking a lot about as a board over the last few years um I'm really excited by what you shared about the intention and the process to actually interview students who are who are really making up and showing up in the suspension data that is

165concerning and has gone up um you know this reflects uh a research a body of research called the empathy interview process that um I think should become more widespread in general around data points that are persistent and nefarious including our academic failure data and I'm hoping that when you have a chance to work through those uh interviews that we can benefit from that by you know hearing a presentation from you around some of the patterns and Trends and what you've learned from speaking to the young people thanks thank you board members any other questions or comments okay we will move to the last District goal I just want to make it noted that I am um recused from this one so I will not be participating in the discussion related to it thank you and

166so again um we won't go through the action plans we've shared those previously and also updated them and I'm just sharing again um and Dr Gilbert will be jumping in here with me a little bit as well um just so that everyone again leaves with the same information Rising kindergarteners first graders and second graders Rising sixth and seventh graders they have received their placement letters uh connected to intentional integration um more than 2500 students next year in our district would be placed by intentional integration we've made improvements to The Sibling preference placement process using multiple sibling data sources we had less than 10 sibling placement Corrections across the placements for this year and um you know we try to use many data sources to including of course asking parents when parents register there's this there's

167a there's a um an ask in that process for if you have siblings but there are still times when that is skipped in that process and I'm sure is arduous for our parents so we're very proud that we're getting better and better at this um we launched our integration stakeholder survey it was developed and launched in January we get it we did do a Boe presentation and shared the response rate for both our students and our families and the feedback from our board um was utilized and we are sending out an updated version of that survey on the 31st of March and we also have presented um the year two triple I um presentation as well as the survey results in Jan from January to the board and the public um Dr Gilbert you could

168take this piece so so some some important details to be made with the survey drops on May 31st is that we did remove the so the public to the public the questions will be the same so one reason they're going to be the same is so we can do a comparison analysis of what what the results were in February versus what we get uh in the one that we drop in May but one of the things we did do we took out the neutral response and we hope we can help not only increase you know of some more thoughtful responses but also help to help us see where the areas of growth and things that we need to do but some other things that we're doing to try to increase our parental response rate is

169one we're going to leave this survey open to the end of school so June to the end of June 26 to kind of give opportunities for as many long opportunity for our families to participate the next couple of board meetings we're going to have laptops here at the board office for families who want to come to the board office and complete the survey so we'll be here you can come to the board office doing the Boardman I think June 5th is one that's coming up in June 22nd we will be here we being me and miss wabel our director of access and Equity we'll be here to help families get through and and do that survey we're also up going to be working with our middle school principals uh Miss Irby and Miss Grinnell one

170of the things we heard about the student survey was that some of the language was maybe it had not have been student or Asia appropriate so we're actually going to put it together an Administration guide for our teachers when they do the survey this time where we're going to have common language that they can use alternative questions they can use when students have issues with some of the language to try to help them but the biggest thing that we're doing differently is we move that survey away from PowerSchool and it's going to be a Google survey but to help us uh maximize the opportunity and security of it we're going to ask that parents put their student ID number on the survey and we will be providing we're sending out customized letters to all of

171our families who are doing the survey that has the student identification number for all of their children who are part of the triple I algorithm so all they have to do is get that letter click on the link to go into the survey look on that letter and get that ID number and put it in and then that's going to help us make sure uh are we protect the validity of our survey thank you Dr Gilbert and and that's that's just a real key for us that this data is going to be used for decision making so we have to ensure the validity of it and the protection of it um just to talk a little bit about the Marshall bold and unpairing um next year's unpairing is completed we presented on that as well

172we have already placed the 140 or so students for next year in that process a parent survey was utilized we wanted to see if parents had a preference between those two schools this was a unique piece for us obviously because these are you know schools that have a unique relationship so unpairing them um we received from the parents information that was the opposite of what the majority the vast majority of parents had shared in our integration town halls for example there are parents in the Marshall Bolden survey who did not want their siblings together they were parents in the Marshall building in a survey who wanted their student moved from their current school and this was that was the opposite of what the majority of respondents had shared in previous engagement so that was a

173great learning for us and so the rising third graders they received their uh placement letters for next year we did receive five parental appeals and gave those thoughtful reviews and um responded to them um the exciting piece here that we're looking at we will be using the third grade as a leverage point for the next two years for the next two years after next year 24 25 and 25 26. um so that third grade leverage group it becomes more complex because the third graders in 24 25 and 25 26 were already placed by the intentional integration algorithm so there's some questions there on how you divide them between Marshall and Bolden so we are running right now a beta test with the Alves group who supports our integration work to see what would have happened

174with next year's third graders if we had simply used our algorithm and compare that output to see if there's a significant difference there and that will help to inform our planning for 24.25 and 25 26 additionally we've had a meeting with the PTA from Marshall to talk about this and and um to help to ease folks Minds around the future design of the unpairing um and so again part of our intentional integration was also part of this goal um relating to intentional integration spoke about developing a transportation piece that would support our integration work and I again I won't read through everything we've had intense meetings about this topic I'll just highlight a few things that we did run a parallel process where policy mileage considerations were running right along the side of the board

175of school estimates proposal and the second question within our annual budget and also the Hazardous routes update all these pieces riding um in the same direction so they can work off of one another um you see the timing there of the recent work that we've been doing and that we brought in a third party engineer to support both the emergent relief hazardous route reviews and the district-wide analysis um the board School estimate presentation I'm sure many took part in that it was in March um and then the final one was recently in May and of course our fft committee is continuing to discuss this and sending questions back and forth to fine-tune the policy connected to um to this work um and again future considerations one thing that we've spoken about in different committees um

176were recommendations from our consultant who supports our work who does this work um all around the country and one piece was around the consideration of wait lists um and there was there's a lot of conversation around what that means and what that looks like and setting expectations for wait lists that might not come to fruition within SCS um guidelines and Scopes so we're have we're still having those conversations and really specifically part of our methodology uh the whole seats that we put in place for special services in language and English language Learners who come throughout our school year and their um their appropriate placement least restrictive environment is of course of the highest priority and now we're at next steps so I will pause see if there are questions about the presentation on intentional integration

177District goal number four Dr telesford with regard to the SES wait list um are there any um as what are the I guess the usual numbers that are I guess preserved for special services in English language Learners and if we were to um have a wait list would that have an impact on any I guess kids being classified or students moving around so the um the special services and ell placements those holds are customized every year based on those departments reviewing students who they think are in the pipeline um and uh a wait list would not impact that some of the fine-tuning if the board was to consider a waitlist methodology would be the timing of it right when if I'm on a wait list when would I expect to be considered to come off

178of it that's a real key point would it be a mid-year shift would it be a three-quarter year shift leading into the next year I can tell you from my personal experience in our school district I've discussed with very um I won't say angry with some upset parents who were on wait list at number one for multiple school years and didn't move off those lists and so just trying to help set those expectations that our our classrooms are very efficiently uh managed so there's not a lot of space that opens up in them but um the consideration of an SES wait list with parameters around when it happens I think um our consultant recommends that it could be a good addition based on other districts that do this type of work [Music] board member found

179them you mentioned that there was some beta testing done for current and future cohorts I mean is there any thought to maybe running a beta test to see what would happen if the Bold students who are around Bolden who never participated you know when it was closed when there was the third grade and throw them into the algorithm today and how many of them would actually be picked as a school so obviously you know the end result being all the kids who are going to different schools and not Bolden can now go there and that's you know they can walk to school yes we did have those conversations and the challenge there is less of the um integration or social um economic status and all that stuff it's it's really the budgeting and the the

180year-over-year Staffing of schools if you're pulling students from different schools to come to another school what's the landing spot for them how's their space there and if they're if they're moving in in pretty significant numbers then you're lowering the class sizes and the schools that they're leaving from so how do you manage that are you consolidating classes and moving teachers now to a different school um and so I think that was more so the concern not necessarily that it would that it that that we couldn't design something that would maintain Equity it's more so the unintended consequences Rippling when you do that kind of work and shift board member Eckert thanks everyone I was going to ask a very similar question but just as a follow-up to that um even prior to even going into

181a beta testing you know you talked about a parental survey with the initial unpairing um again it's all anecdotal but you could also make some assumptions that at this point the Bolden area families however that however many that may be may may not necessarily want to so we could be talking about six I don't know 20 I don't know what that number is but so maybe preemptively surveying to see what the appetite is and then you know based on that moving forward that was just a thought that I had sure that could be that could be a consideration right so um on the top of our parental survey I shared it with the board it said of course your your preference does not dictate your placement you made it very bold and very large in

182everything and there were still some folks who appealed right and that's natural and we were able to give thoughtful reviews of those um I wonder it makes me wonder if if I send out a survey to those who we assume would have been at Bolden we're just thinking about the reverse the reverse engineering of that right because at the time when integration first began the year before 25 of the kids were already not in their zone right so I'm going to look at the kids who were living in a zone or am I just re-running all the students who are now Rising second graders to see if there were space at Bolden at that time would they have been placed I think that there's a lot of ifs in there but I'm happy to engage

183the Alps group and get their thoughts on it it's fair it's a lot of nuance I mean there's a lot of nuance in all of that but just something I just wanted to bring up um and the the second question I had um I know you didn't go through at all but one of the major activities was a public forum to share the elves report findings from family surveying education educator focus groups with a timeline of May 2023 so I know we've we've gone through the elves report we've gone through this surveying I don't know that we've touched on the educator focus groups as much so is this something that you ended up splitting up or is that coming yes so the a couple of things are still coming um the the one thing that

184Dr Gilbert didn't share about our um our work around um climate and culture is that we have a separate climate and culture survey that is for all three stakeholder groups right and so we're pacing the timing of all these to not have survey fatigue from all of our stakeholder groups and so the the conversation that we had previously was that to take a deep dive into the survey results during the summer um because that just gives more space for us to have that conversation without having um the the Rutgers initiative that we have the climate and culture survey with it drove our climate and culture plants and so we'll be able to compare that year over year and present that as well so there's just a lot of survey presentation and there's also stakeholder groups

185that are occurring with Dr Fergus as well so there's he has a QR code with surveys too so there's a lot lots of surveys happening so we're just trying to be be thoughtful about that got it thank you any other questions okay I think that closes out I got one more slide one more slide um just just just sharing what happens next so we go to the New Jersey School Board association's website I go into the platform I update all the artifacts and evidence then the board gets notified that it's done and the board has access to all that information and then we hold a meeting where they share their results with me that's all thank you and thank you for that great presentation on all the goals we really appreciate it um Okay so

186I wish we had some coffee right about now but um all right we are now moving on to the business administrator update oh you don't have anything for us okay it was folded into the district okay all right thank you um so now I will be doing the board president update so as the president of the South Orange Maplewood Board of Education I believe it is my responsibility to be responsive to the community's questions and concerns after the May 11th meeting and all board meetings unfortunately the May 11th board meeting became a source of panic and stress for our community and for that I'm deeply regretful I'm working alongside Administration to improve the renewal process moving forward to avoid similar outcomes in the future to that end I requested a meeting with the superintendent this

187week to discuss key learnings and to strategize on potential calendar adjustments to the process for next year we were in agreement that the renewal process timeline should shift to account for different due diligence procedures that were followed this year to avoid potential issues issues in the future the superintendent and I put together a proposed calendar that would kick off the renewal process as early as the March public board meeting instead of the historical start date of mid to late April the proposed calendar would include board member training on the process and would account for a separately held special meeting where no action would be taken at least one week before the renewal non-renewal meeting this meeting would bring the board together as a body to discuss Personnel matters together well in advance of any action

188being taken there were other key learnings discussed and tweaks made to the timeline which will be presented to my board colleagues for additional feedback having this process documented will better support the future work of the board and will be included in every new board member's onboarding packet on another topic I have heard in the community a concern that employees might be able to leave the district resign or be terminated under troubling circumstances and that prospective employers would have no knowledge of any issues that might have spurred the employee separation I have consulted with the board's legal counsel and can say that under njsa 18a 67783ab any prospective employer is required to obtain a written statement from the past employer as to whether the applicant a has been the subject of any child abuse or sexual

189misconduct investigation by any employer State licensing agency law enforcement agency or the Department of Children and Families unless the investigation resulted in a finding that the allegations were false or the alleged incident of child abuse or sexual misconduct was not substantiated or B has ever been disciplined discharged non-renewed asked to resign from employment resigned from or otherwise separated from any employment while allegations of child abuse or sexual misconduct were pending or under investigation or due to an adjudication of or finding of child abuse or sexual misconduct our HR department and those of other districts take compliance with this law seriously we have and will continue to comply with our legal obligations additionally some board members have also requested that we review board policies related to staff misconduct to evaluate of additional measures are needed in

190these policies as well finally I would like to update the community on policy 2270 religion in the schools the board and administration recognized that between first read and second read of policy 2270 religion schools the Department of Education released updated guidance from the Biden Administration on May 15 around constitutionally protected prayer and religious expression of public elementary and secondary schools I'd like to make a motion to amend the agenda and remove resolution 4465k the effect of this motion would be to remove policy 2270 from the agenda and it will not be approved tonight the committee then can review the usdoe guidance that was issued between meetings and determined whether to bring the policy back for second read or if revised for a first reading at a later meeting please know that any future board revisions

191will follow the U.S department of education's guidance and our anti-discrimination policies to establish a lawful separation of religion and public education the board will continue to ensure there is no religious coercion or discrimination and the update of this policy will not do anything to undermine those efforts the board is mindful to move forward cautiously so that safeguards against religious coercion or discrimination remain intact may I have a motion to um sorry uh so with that um to amend the agenda to remove resolution resolution 4465k which would be the approval of policy 2270. do I have a second second thank you board member male Espina can I do all in favor I have to ask for a roll call vote for that okay you can do all in favor okay all in favor please raise your

192hand okay thank you so much we officially have support to remove this policy from the action portion of the meeting and so that concludes the board president update so please bear with me I have to read through the board president's statement now so the school board meeting is a business meeting in public and not a meeting with the public often times it may 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 the Administration has thoroughly reviewed the matter with the superintendent and if the superintendent is satisfied that the matter is ready to be presented to the Board of Education it is then referred to the appropriate board committee

193the members of the board committee work with Administration and the superintendent to assure that the members fully understand the matter after the committee discusses the matter it is then shared with other board members for consideration only then is it placed on the agenda for board discussion and action at a public meeting we will now begin our first hearing of individuals and delegates this evening thank you for coming in person and dialing in by phone the South Orange Maplewood Board of Education certainly respects they've taken the time out of your busy day to address the board at tonight's meeting we value public involvement in our school district and we are eager to hear what you have to say the board does have time limits by policy and it will be enforcing those to enable as many

194people to speak as possible this evening each individual let's see okay think each individual will be given three minutes um to speak so please do your best to stay within the time afforded to you the first public comment period is usually limited to one hour all input share with the board of education is taken very seriously and will inform future deliberations and work by the Board of Education and its committees we request that you please state your name and town of residence for the record so with that we'll get started with Alan guy pardon I have a question about public speaks I mean I don't know if we should bring it up in new business or now is that is there no way to move public speaks right up front I mean we've been talking

195for two hours which the public really has no interest in I mean has it built they should be interested I'm not saying they shouldn't have interest in but they don't have interest in it today so can we not have had public speaks as soon as we get back from the exact session so we are develop public speaks and then we do our business yeah I actually asked this question this uh last week to uh Patrick right so uh you have a policy that sets forth your order of business so that's why your um your agenda looks like this every meeting because it's by by board policy if you want to adjust um how the order of businesses to a car it's by motion second and a vote so now that we have a new board

196uh policy creation process which will be easy to do right okay great okay Alan four four six five k which is policy two two seven zero yep absolutely okay thank you um my name is Alan guy I'm a parent of a student at Marshall uh I'm a husband and a father and an Interfaith and uh interracial family and I'm an attorney of about 15 years in practice and when I read the policy which I commend you for taking back for another look it's a couple things struck me one of which is I don't understand what most of those words mean and respectfully I think I'm someone who should understand what most of those words mean and I think that that means a couple things for the students and teachers and staff in the school um

197first of all the one thing the policy does make clear is that if you become involved in um enforcing discipline or otherwise get involved with what someone else considers their religious expression you really do so at parallel for your career in your employment um I grew up in a community that espoused the kind of openness that this policy appears to support but the reality was that the most privileged and most disruptive voices were the ones that dominated most conversations because teachers didn't understand what they could do to intervene when some of these Expressions regarding their religion um began to have a negative impact on instruction made other students feel threatened and so what that meant is if you were straight and white and Christian you could pretty much say whatever you wanted and if you

198weren't straight and you weren't right and you weren't Christian you've got the feeling that the student the teachers the administration the other students either couldn't help you or wouldn't help you and a result you felt less valuable in that community um I don't think that's consistent with the values of this community I think our old policy says pretty clearly what we do value which is protecting the rights of every like Nicole default that were there for years and everyone knew it because students knew it so teachers had to know it administration had to know it everything that I said here is truth it is not a lie and you all have to recognize that and do something better about that secondly I asked um for you all to communicate to the community what training is

199available and or mandatory for teachers who have students with IEPs in their classroom Dr Teller told me that these classrooms are actually amongst the most monitored and regulated classrooms that exist how so if dalen Wilkins can walk from his classroom in the basement because students with special needs are kept in the basement how can he walk from the basement up to another floor to another teacher's room and knock on the door how come the police department did not find out about what happened to dalen until his family got there how come most of you didn't find out until it got into the public it is not the most looked at classrooms it is not thirdly I said a District employees stated on the May 11 2023 board meeting that there's a lack of support for

200teachers who teach students with special needs there is a clear indication of the lack of accessibility to support these teachers and to give them the tools that they need for these special education classes what plan will you use to address this I was told that one comment from one employee is not necessarily representative of the entire department how if one teacher feels like they do not have the support that means that there's more than one student that is not being supported meaning that the whole entire department needs to be adjusted means that it needs to be looked at one teacher speaks volumes for a department we are talking about kids who cannot speak for themselves you cannot tell me that one teacher does not speak for a whole department they do because they speak for

201more than one child so it does matter and lastly I asked about what you all would do after learning about dalen Wilkins and what happened in the classroom and that is something that you cannot comment on and that is ableism as people who can talk as people who can say something that choose not to for people who cannot that is called ableism you all can speak you all can do something Do not sit here and say nothing you sent me six policies and none of them are on the agenda for tonight why why is that not a policy that you all are looking at you sent me six of them and you actually told me to go find them myself while Nubia sent it to me look at these policies do something about it you

202are not doing enough you say you are doing enough and I'm telling you you're not so please do more thank you Felicia Chris Duran good evening everybody my name is Chris Duran I'm also a Maplewood resident graduate of Columbia High School 2015. I first off would like to thank the suggestion of moving public speak up in the meeting considering that on the paper that we all sign up for it says that there will be time at the beginning of the meeting for public speak and also just considering the fact that on a Thursday night you can see most of the public here has left because they have work in the morning they have children um on the subject of policies including ones that were discussed tonight um on behalf of you know on behalf of

203the Wilkins family we would like to remind the board and the superintendent of some of the policies um that we're not discussed tonight that pertain directly uh to the to these systemic issues happening in the district uh as well as in the case of Dana Wilkins uh policy 3281 and regarding inappropriate staff conduct uh states that in support of this board's strong commitment to the Public's trust and confidence of school staff the Board of Education holds all staff all School staff to the highest level professional responsibility uh in their conduct with all students in appropriate conduct and con and conduct Unbecoming of a school staff member will not be tolerated in the school district so if inappropriate conduct is not tolerated how are the teachers who were present in the classroom still in the classroom

204uh each teacher and adult who is in the room for the assault are mandated to report the assault and did not report the assault um so again how is the district strongly committed to trust or transparency when you have irresponsible staff still present in the building um you know maintaining a present danger to children under the age of five another policy is uh 3159 teaching staff member slash School District reporting responsibilities uh which states that the superintendent shall notify the New Jersey state board of examiners when one tenure teaching staff members who are accused of criminal offenses or Unbecoming conduct resign or retire from their positions and two non-tenured staff members including substitute teachers who are accused of criminal offenses or Unbecoming conduct resign retire or removed from their positions again all five teachers in

205the classroom should be reported to the New Jersey state board of examiners uh watching assault happen to a child a four-year-old child who is not able to represent himself um and now reporting it is a clear Act of misconduct and um you know very much a criminal offense between March 27th and March 29th anything could have happened to the health of dalen and his family would not have been aware of the assault that took place even though he was exhibiting clear signs of the assault in that time another policy is three two eight zero which is liability for student welfare uh which states that each teaching staff member shall maintain a standard of care for supervision control and protection of students commensurate with the members assigned duties and responsibilities it also states that a teaching

206staff member shall report immediately to the building principle any accident or safety hazard that the member detects again all teachers and adults who watch The Assault on the 27th went home without reporting the incident there was no immediate support from any staff member in the classroom so again what is the response or action for these teachers when this is the case if they're silent for 48 hours is there not some mechanism you know that is actively silencing them that is actively keeping them from speaking if they're afraid of losing their jobs why are they afraid of losing their jobs or interfering with the investigation it is the law is the policy of the district for these things to be dealt with and it simply wasn't and again thank you for again the suggestion that public

207speak be moved up uh but I also speak for many members of the community and saying that if it has not moved up it will happen at the beginning of the next meeting whether the board votes on that or not this is a meeting with in front of the public but again if the direct responsibility of anyone who works in this district is to serve the people of this community you will be responsive to the community and again more effort has to be made in order you know for that to be pushed on your behalf and so thank you all right thank you so much Anne-Marie Meaney thank you I'm Anne-Marie Manny from South Orange uh as many board members have already mentioned the primary responsibilities of local New Jersey school boards is policy uh

208policy is the board's primary communication tool to reflect the community's values and aspirations influencing how our children families and staff are valued in our school organization vocal boards are required to have policies that clearly and fully explain what state and federal laws apply to all aspects of the district functioning and clarify what that means in the local context it also avoids ambiguity and confusion in the past unclear policy has led to us being known by uh Dr Ramos and Dr vakara as a district of exceptions and disparity where each principal or building leader had a different interpretation of the policy uh yes Strauss Esme has a majority of 515 districts there are very small company they are for profit and they can't even be bothered to use gender-neutral language in their policy releases we had

209Dr Taylor send a letter multiple times we had Dr Ramos on the letter um so hopefully your meeting with them will at least get them to do that so Strauss Esme did not have a policy on access and Equity Strauss Esme did not have a 504 compliance policy Strauss Esme did not offer any options to include an imbalance of power in the HIV policy prior boards added know your rights training for our students well before it was included in mandates this was done to ensure our children knew their rights when interacting with police again as the sensible thing to do and not wait for Strauss estimates bare minimum approach the corporal punishment policy that's up today is recommending that you return to protecting the rights of Staff who do harm to children by detailing when

210corporal punishment can be used instead of the prior board's work of highlighting what staff behaviors would lead to discipline and dismissal and restricting the excuse if I feared for my safety straw Sesame has failed to incorporate the June 2021 New Jersey transgender student guidance in both the medical records policy up tonight and the HIV policy that you passed last month these guidelines are intended to protect the Privacy rights of students and by failing to include these guidelines in your policies we run the risk of creating unsafe spaces and experiences for our children and again you're going to have some staff members doing one thing in one building and other staff members doing something else just because Strauss Esme hasn't found the guidance to be critical in their policy work doesn't mean that we shouldn't work

211towards best practice and I do want to suggest that reading the prior policy is a great Tool uh for Learning and for framing your own questions not just accepting uh what Strauss SMA updates under Dr vacara our board also uh had to uh pass you know 80 plus policies a month to get ready for Cusack um we were clear why we were doing this to the public well before we started it we were talking about Cusack for six seven months um and more importantly we didn't take what Strauss Esme sent as the policy we kept our policy and changed the legalese or the you know the main pieces that needed to get updated we didn't change prior boards work on representing our community um I do request that a bare minimum please abstain if you

212haven't read and I served on the board so I know many of my board members didn't read the policy and understood the policies up for tonight and Dr Taylor respectfully uh you know I have great respect for you but the uh Cusack process and updating policies really doesn't fulfill the spirit of Cusack because it's develop and implement the policy and if you don't have good implementation you can't really score yourself high on on that part of the of the metric um your ultimate goal is to protect our children and clarify for the community and staff the guidelines they should follow this is your solemn obligation under the law and I really hope our district continues to be a leader in at least on paper as some board members have said you know in protecting all

213students and as a note on the women's bathroom locker room um I do sorry about that I do ask that you just check uh title uh we put it in the plan for Title IX compliance and it might have gotten lost in the bathroom updates um or it might have been embedded in the bathroom updates that's all thank you next up uh Shannon cuddle okay once again you know if it's important if I'm taking I'm taking my mask off um good evening everyone I'm Dr Taylor um and just want to take a note of say and thank you for the presentation too by assistant uh superintendents um I have been waiting years to hear something about climate and culture I've been talking about it for years I've been helping plant the seeds in our district

214and conversations so thank you for that um and those that are there to support that um so I'm here for a couple of reasons and one of which I just really wanted to start with by saying we saw a lot of academic data and one of that was how to support students that are feeling marginalized that aren't feeling supported they have failing grades or they don't find another Pathway to get them into school if we have buildings um that are failing the students structurally they're not going to come to school academically if we have buildings that are not safe and welcoming for our students so they know that they can be their best selves and I've come here and said this before they're not going to come to school academically that is another failure of

215our students and when we're talking about bathrooms board member um Deval Wilson um thank you just a point of correction it's not called transgender bathrooms it's just called all gender or gender neutral bathrooms our buildings and our commitments have always had single stall restrooms for students and staff and it is part of our commitment with Title IX um as the previous person said when we were building this plan with Dr fakara at the time to be able to support not just with Title IX but support all of our students and families and that doesn't mean one bathroom for 2 000 kids or a Janitor's Closet that's been converted that so non-binary and transgender kids can use it so they can get ready for gym class when we don't have those facilities those kids skip class

216when we don't have those facilities those kids are harmed because they can't use the restroom they might not eat they might not go to the bathroom all day they get UTIs it's not just for transgender students single stall restrooms locker rooms that are accessible and updated are for all students all students not some students and that means all students can be successful in addition to that for the learning that also goes into the two policies thank you for shelving the religious uh policy tonight that does not meet our core vision and values as a district and community and I'm glad it's going to be revisioned to take a look at it some more because we really need to make sure that we are being purposeful and mindful and something I think is really important as

217also as mentioned or transgender student policy didn't cross with a head policy we just passed the health records policy that's up tonight our even crisis our prevention policy as well cross-referencing our policies to have a better understanding in our commitment as board members was something that was ingrained when the policy committee was formed five years ago we did not have one before and it was the policy committee that was formed that was to help us be our best selves as board members since we only have two duties one make policy and two oversee the superintendent and with all due due respect board member bill um that yes a former board member Susan Bergen may have made that quote but that was to highlight the fact that we never had a policy committee before and the

218commitment and the depth and breadth of the board took to be able to look at the policies was not just to fast-track them but was to do our due diligence because we want to ensure we're creating an enshrining best practices because it's not about just what's happening now it's for those who come after us and it's not for those who come after us to want to just change the policies to change the policies it's about changing the policies and updating them so we can consistently continue to move our district forward together thank you thank you Shannon next up is Rocio Lopez we're a little bit tired because you know it's a school day well it's not tomorrow maybe Spanish teacher at Columbia High School and resident of Maplewood um the first thing I want to

219say is we were coming about the dress code for policy I am going to change my height of President and I'm going to put the teacher one if this is a learning experience and this is going to do better I appreciate it and if you're all gonna work and change it we're happy with that uh we just heard you saying that Administration gave you that you kind of didn't know what to do 21 century so I want to believe all of you today at least for a little bit I want to do that and hope that for the next board meeting when is the second read is fixed then number two it's completely crazy nowadays not only Sexes you know many things that are wrong about it so if you ever have questions about that

220I don't know if you're allowed to ask but when it's something about the staff please come to us and we will tell you this is not comfortable for us for ABCD reasons that's all so thank you for revisiting I want to appreciate and if Administration told you that please don't do that ever again um give them language that is more you know to the 21 century um the second thing I want to talk about it's important for me because we keep sitting here and saying that we're working with Somaya so I'm gonna tell you that there are sometimes what is very obvious they're not work with tomato there are some work with somebody but nothing important work there is a board policy about financials 4462a and then there is a resolution for four six two

221R I believe um it's about home instruction let's just talk about home instruction so you know do you know how much we get paid for home instruction 35 dollars an hour do you know if anybody has reached to us from central office to talk to us about increasing that rate no do you know that you're passing today something that you're gonna give Outsource company 60 and 44 cents when you're giving us 35 dollars and we're the professionals we are the teachers of the kids we are the ones that care about the kids and we're going to prepare the information that they're going to learn so how is that that you go out again we you already did it with Transportation it was a whole mess and we all saw it what would you Outsource and

222pay more people to a company you know that we don't even know who the teachers are going to be instead of giving it to the professionals I sat down here in the last meeting and some of you board members were talking about the professionals and the professionals we should ask the professionals we are the Professionals in the classroom we create the curriculums we teach them we create the lessons how is that that nobody came to us and say would you be willing to work for 50 an hour I'm telling you you will be saving ten dollars at least at least because we were willing to do it and you know it's mind-blowing and I'm sorry I don't know if that's a bad word but it's horrible for me to think that you have not approached

223me none of you to talk about that and you say you want teacher retention and you say you want us to have a sit on the table that's a lie this proves one more time that's like when it's something important you never care about us and I don't know how many times I have to say this we are trying Shira is trying I am trying we're working with the other people in central office really well but it looks like with money wise and things that are important to us that really really show if you disregard teachers or you really care about us as professionals you actually don't care you will Source transportation we had the whole year out of mess now you keep doing that and now what's gonna happen to the kids again in

224detriment of the kids if we care about the kids we pay ten dollars less and we get the professionals and the teachers we don't go out and give them a worse education sorry I I'm sorry when I saw that I got really upset and I told you we were gonna do better and this in my opinion is really important so thank you and hopefully you have a nice weekend all of you it's a long weekend that we all need thank you mozzarella Amanda she she laughed okay Richard encero hi everyone uh my name is Richardson Cerro I'm a South Orange resident with two boys in the school district uh before I begin I'd like to tell you the conversation I had with my son today I told him I was going to go speak at

225the board of ed meeting and he said are you going to talk about the Sanchez incident I said yeah I am and he said well when you come back could you tell me what they were thinking so I just want to let that sit there for a minute because it's percolating all through the school so I've been in the community for 19 years and I never thought I'd be sitting here up until the debacle I saw two weeks ago um I recognize you're all volunteers you're our neighbors I think you have our best interests in heart but as a board you need to do much better because you're dysfunctional uh there are Rumblings in the school district that after uh Mr Sanchez Dr Taylor is next in your sights um I'd like to ask that

226before you make a decision on Dr Taylor you truly think carefully about what the impact is because it goes beyond just the person and it goes to the stability and the reputation of the district um for argument's sake and Dr Taylor entertained me for a minute um let's assume he's doing an okay job not a great job he's not hitting the ball out of the park consider what's happened in the last few years pandemic triple I long-range facilities plan a vocal Community a complex district and a dysfunctional board so if you think that you're going to get a better superintendent given all of that I think you're probably deluding yourselves and you have to be very careful as to what you do on a next vote um and I do ask that when it comes

227to vote the next time that you vote that means no abstentions you were elected here to vote on the board and an abstention is a lack of respect for the community if in the future you choose to vote I'm sorry if in the future you choose to abstain please don't do something stupid like give a double thumbs up sign thinking it's the most clever thing that's around because that's another sign of disrespect for the community lastly you know people have been so upset and outraged that there's talk um about recalls maybe we should recall some of the board members and when you read the rules around recalls it does say you can't recall someone who's been in their job for less than a year because they're still learning they're learning what they need to do

228I find it kind of ironic that where you can't recall someone while they still the training wheel is on they're still empowered to make decisions they're going to have ramifications in the district for years to come so again I ask you recognizing your neighbors your volunteers please think very carefully about what it is you do on the votes you're taking for the impact on our children thank you thank you Richard Monica Morton I'd like to say good evening but it really isn't it's not a good evening my name is Monica Morton I'm a black mom from the community and I stand in solidarity with dalen and his family I find it appalling to see the obvious protection you're given to this teacher for assaulting and abusing child abuse this sweet little four-year-old boy black boy

229who happens to be autistic and non-verbal the stonewalling here is disgusting you're all aiding and abetting this teacher who committed a crime along with ableism and racism silence is complicity and silence is violence this teacher should have been fired and not allowed to resign she should have been held accountable instead of quietly disappearing in my eyes you're all cold very very cold and you're all accomplices especially the Blackboard members and the Blackboard members that are moms you should all be absolutely ashamed of yourselves Justice for dalen thank you Monica Lisa Davis my name is Lisa Davis and I too am a member of this community of this area I've lived in Maplewood South Orange all over and a couple of things I want to start off with first is that if you're going to have

230executive session you should have the respect for the community and to not have it during a public meeting you could have an executive session separate about two weeks ago I sat here about two hours it was so very disrespectful and um also you could easily pertaining to the issue of public comment because I've sat on boards before we would have a Time certain where we would stop and take the public comment because we recognized that people worked they're not rich and you're not just entertained people are not just here to come to look at you you have a responsibility to the public I share Monica's view about what she just said it is absolutely disgraceful that a teacher and I understand that the teacher's wife could dangle a four-year-old black child by the ankles and

231be protected by the school no one ever told the parents the name of the teacher every parent has the right to know the name of every member of the staff everybody who goes into that school system that is their right to know but you protected the teacher and this just goes back to all the years of being in this country where black children are not protected but white teachers and the ones who assault them argue look at the record you'll see that black children are get the highest suspension rate and even black preschoolers are suspended and expelled at a much higher rate and that is not because of the child it is because of the system and the so-called adults serving them and lastly my question is when I look at this board I see

232it's diverse why why why what does diversity on a board mean or anywhere we voted but we thought so much that if we had representation they would look out for our interest but that is not true at all it's really disgraceful you Martin Luther King said I cannot obey a dishonest law or a dishonest rule you all are sitting here where my color because people challenge systems and things that were dishonest they would not do it there's no reason at all why why the parents did not have been told the name of that teacher you protected the teacher and you are as complicit and um it's just disgraceful Thank you Lisa next up is Jocelyn Brian I had a few more comments I wanted to say on the lrfp but first of all I wanted

233um to thank Mr McCormick who was here earlier today because he protected my black special needs child from being beaten by her algebra teacher earlier this year okay on the long range facilities plan we are punting a lot of projects down the road or they're going to be another board's problem I would love as Nubia suggested to have all of the projects with timelines for each on our website so we don't forget what we have promised the kids for a not insignificant number of students school is their safe space and they deserve better safe spaces as Shannon said earlier they deserve to have toilets that are unlocked that have toilet seats faucets intact sinks and walls like that Mom who called in earlier said there are many students that do not go to the bathroom

234at school and that does cause significant problems the girls deserve the same standard locker rooms as the boys that is a Title IX issue our transgender and non-binary students and teachers deserve adequate spaces to change and enough single stall bathrooms our special ed students deserve a viable 18 to 21 program in District so that they don't have to travel elsewhere our community was willing to dip into its wallet for our elementary students I hope when asked they will do the same for the older kids the middle and high schoolers who make up half of this District because as the other speaker said earlier we will have run out of money we will have to ask again and we cannot forget our older kids I was going to speak about the religion policy I guess I

235don't have to now um well I believe it was up for second reason that should not have happened as so many people have already said this evening you have two jobs managing your one employee and writing policy and that is policy for our community and that goes beyond signing off on the work that stress Esme does and I recognize that it's a lot of work but it is what you volunteered for so I look forward to some robust discussion this evening about some of those policies including the corporal punishment policies the very prescriptive teacher dress code policy and these policies just don't affect our community's values or I hope your own and hopefully none of them will be adopted as is thank you thank you Jocelyn Stephanie McKee hello my name is Stephanie McKee my

236husband Mike and I are 20-year residents of Maplewood and parents to two current CHS students I would like to speak tonight about the last Board of Ed meeting which I intended in support of Mr Sanchez and Ms Bodner the events of the evening were something that I couldn't stop thinking about for days so I'm here as a concerned citizen to call for changes to how you are operating as a governing body I have empathy for and appreciate anyone who dedicates their time and energy to sit on a school board to do this very important and complex work the challenges facing this board and this District are many but probably most impactful to our students is Talent retention and stability I've spent my career in Human Resources leading the function for global companies and I've learned

237that most people want the same four simple things from an organization in order to feel that they belong to be heard to be valued to be respected and to be rewarded the CHS students and parents who spoke so passionately at the last meeting told you in their own words loud and clear that they wanted those same four things from this school district it is my recommendation that all of you hold yourselves accountable for figuring out whether you are meeting those four principles of belonging with your fellow board members and with your constituents and that self-reflection needs to start with the board president and vice presidents As Leaders of this body because you set the tone with your words and your actions until you do this board will not be operating in the best interest of

238this community and members of this board will be doing a disservice to the families of South Orange and Maplewood this board should be working to stabilize our district so that our kids feel secure and can excel in a nurturing environment not to create chaos and distrust no matter how you voted the May 11th meeting was a disaster for you as a board and for this community I implore you to do better for all of us by considering how to act with more transparency and empathy I've never served on a school board and don't know the rules but I have no objection to all principal contract renewals and other key administrative positions being carved out for public comment as part of the process these are critical roles with a significant impact on our kids holding our

239leaders to high standards and expectations is key to the district's success I believe these Talent decisions could benefit from public comment but with proper notice so people are prepared and not blindsided please work together to find ways to create a culture of Excellence while not sacrificing a culture of belonging and finally as a parent of a child diagnosed on the Spectrum as a preschooler who's now 17 at CHS I can only imagine the pain dalen's family has experienced my husband and I stand in solidarity with the Wilkins family and hope that you would display the empathy understanding and compassion and action they are calling for and while I'm on the topic of special education I could spend your three million dollars in a heartbeat if you invested in special education 15 years my son's been

240in the school district and we have been blessed with wonderful people who have looked out for him but this system is broken because it relies on individuals to take the effort and the and to the care for the kids that they are overseeing and what happened at that um that preschool is an absolute tragedy for that family and for this school district and they deserve better every parent of a kid in the special education program deserves better every parent in this District deserves better and I hope that you will do something to make this family feel like you are listening to them and lastly on the point of failing the one thing that you missed in the plan to address the interventions for kids who are failing any class is Parental partnership it's not on

241that list at all if parents know that their kids are failing even one class if you let them know maybe they haven't looked at PowerSchool it's happened to me we're all busy make sure that it's part of the plan that a parent knows because they will get involved it's not that they don't care thank you my apologies I skipped over you Michael schloth I'm sorry about that all right hi I I come in peace um and and and sincerely with a message of Hope and something constructive that we can do together so um Dr Taylor board members thank you for your service my name is Mike schloff a 20-year resident two kids entirely through the school system here now both graduated and I helped start maker Madness back nine years ago with a great group

242of people and have been involved ever since um I noticed a thread running through tonight's meeting um that might be missed due to a lot of other discussion but it's like how to serve the whole child and engage all our students regardless of race IEP status in a very constructive tactile way what's missing is is Hands-On learning I didn't see any of that in any of these discussions of interventions um so when I was in second grade I spent half the year in the hallway because I got kicked out of class because I had add and it was undiagnosed and I was made to feel dumb in seventh grade my parents got a letter saying they should be ashamed of me and here I sit and it's nothing's you know kids are we're all wired

243the same regardless of any you know um differences uh or Generations um I wanted to be a doctor but I didn't think I had the attention span yet along the that pathway when I had Hands-On projects I um you know kinetic learning I thrived so fast forward to 2015 we hosted maker Madness I ran a woodworking table and even with a successful corporate career it was the first time I felt such a sense of purpose a year later I founded Maplewood Shop with a mission of helping all children develop life skills through woodworking because our lack our youth lack Hands-On learning so I would like to ask us to consider a safe portable and easy to implement program which is also by the way used in 140 other schools and camps Nationwide these schools have

244used the program for tactile stem CTE social emotional learning executive function peer leadership and special education the program is also endorsed by the Carpenters Union and students can earn up to 22 credits while in high school so we know that our students are suffering from covid exacerbated learning loss and mental health issues from social media they have a desperate need to engage in the real world as a community we need to build together and I mean that figuratively and literally we know that tactile career exploration is proven to improve attendance engagement and increase graduation rates this is an intervention that works I taught woodworking in almost every school in our district and after school programs while honing this program and those students now are exploring engineering trades and medicine this is for all students so

245I'm here today to implore this board to explore adding tactile stem and CTE to the district as soon as reasonably possible let's improve attendance awareness of all career paths and let students discover the intelligence in their hands if you want to see the program in action please Google CBS News and Maplewood shop um and thank you for consideration thank you Michael Deb Engel hi my name is Deborah Engel and I'm a Maplewood resident many of you know me in my official Town capacity but today I'm here with my day job hat on as a representative from Jewish Federation of Greater Metro West where I serve as the associate director of the Jewish community relations Council I'm happy to hear that you are tabling policy 2270 titled religion in the schools until your attorney can revise

246it to reflect the new Department of Education guidance released on May 15 2023 while I understand the importance of updating our District's policy to ensure we are compliant with Federal guidance and the U.S Constitution we at Federation are concerned by the language used in the policy as written and introduced in April as it is based on Old guidance and I am specifically concerned about the language in paragraph 3 and the use of the terms prayer and classroom assignments student assemblies and non-curricular events prayer graduation after reading this language I looked at the U.S department of Ed guidance released last week and noted that the term prayer and classroom assignments is nowhere to be found as for the other verbiage I quoted I feel like it is important to read some of the exact guidance into

247the record in regards to assemblies it says where school officials determine or have control over the content of what is expressed such speech is attributable to the school and may not include prayer and school officials may not mandate or organize prayer at graduation we at Jewish Federation of Greater Metro West believe in the separation of church and state we may not have a say in what the Supreme Court decides but we stand up for the rights of the Jewish community and all minority communities I have three Jewish children in our school district one of the most profound memories I have from her early days in our schools is when my daughter came home crying after kindergarten class in the month of December she was crying because she learned that day that she was the only

248child in her class that did not celebrate Christmas she felt like the only one to reference our family's favorite PJ library book The Only One Club all of the children in our community should feel comfortable accepted and part of our community I know each of you feel that way and I thank you for tabling policy 2270 until it is revised to reflect the new guidance I hope you also take into consideration the language used in the revised draft to ensure none of our children feel like the only one thank you again to each of you for serving our students and our community thank you Deb next up we have Dean Davis good evening everyone good evening to the community and good evening to my esteemed colleagues um my name is Dean Davis I live in

249Maplewood I'm the mayor in Maplewood and I'm here to talk to you as your legislative colleague about policy I'm not going to repeat what was already said I too commend the board for tabling the the uh the presented religion policy um I implore you to do the same with the teacher dress code policy um I don't think it's necessary we heard that from our our student representative uh you adopted a a dress code policy uh recently um and we also heard from our our teachers and our Samaya president that it places unnecessary burdens on our already overburdened teachers furthermore I'd like to highlight that it may have the unintended consequence of targeting transgender or non-binary folks and it's speculative and legally unenforceable as an attorney I can tell you how do you enforce um something

250that says any Insignia that is sensitive or inappropriate will not be accepted as in a dress code who determines that what is sensitive or inappropriate in Soma or mapso accordingly I'm here to um something that hasn't been said yet is is the following I'm here to raise our Collective awareness about the policy vendor advisor to the school district as board member valspina educated the community earlier they are a policy advisor to many school districts and as former board member and former president Poe president many advised their advice is the floor not the ceiling and we should never consider what they recommend to us as our policy it should always be tailored made to reflect Our Community Values why do I say that to you beyond what was already stated because I can tell you this

251is my third supportive Ed meeting this week I have stood up to hate groups who are connected now to this policy advisor the policy advisor does have a conservative bent and they do have an agenda to come and recommend policies that seemingly on the surface are benign but they open the door to a slippery very undemocratic and ultimately autocratic slope so I want us all to work together and to be hyper aware of this and vigilant I also want to applaud Dr Gilbert for the information that he provided earlier about increased professional development and training in our schools to make sure that we are supporting all of our students whatever their needs and all of our vulnerable students whatever their needs accordingly I take this back to the Wilkins family that has spoken already this

252evening I recognize as someone who sits in your seat that you can't comment on what happened of course you cannot at this moment but we can educate the family and the community about the process so that this doesn't happen to another student or another family and if nothing else you can open your door to just provide comfort as I did a few weeks ago because Justice for Dylan includes acknowledging the family's pain thank you and good night thank you Dean next up we have Christina Mendoza hi everyone I am Christy Mendoza I am a Maplewood resident and parent of a seventh grader at MMS and a rising kindergartner I am also the CPAC HSA liaison for MMS and a local pediatric occupational therapist I am speaking today about my concerns with the intentional integration algorithm

253specifically in regard to my Rising kindergartner who has special needs first I appreciate the district's effort through the intentional integration initiative to integrate the schools I have built a career as a pediatric occupational therapist under the ideal that every child has the right to receive the right supports in order to reach their full potential I am here to advocate for my daughter Clara who was placed at South Mountain School we have concerns with this placement and requesting that should be transferred to Tuscan we have expressed concerns about our placements or her case manager as well as sent numerous emails to the intentional integration team and have yet to receive a response there are multiple reasons why we are requesting this change first we are deeply connected to the Tuscan Community Clara's sister attended Tuscan and

254given the district policy of placing students at the school of their sibling Claire expects to attend Tuscan as well Clara actually received a Tuscan kindergarten placement for this school year however because she has a September birthday and has special needs we decided to hold her back in a private school year to grow program which has given her a stronger foundational start to her educational experience also I was an active member of the Tuscan Community for many years I consulted with teachers helped bring the Handwriting Without Tears program to the Tuscan K first and second grades I was involved with the PTA was a class parent for five out of six years and also the chair of the art show I have also assuming that thought that I was going to be part of the Tuscan

255Community again uh took the Tuscan School PTA liaison role for next year um second Clara has special needs which impact her learning motor and feeding Claire has a diagnosis of A congenital neurodevelopmental disorder and ADHD Her diagnosis significantly impact her motor skills oral motor function her feeding and her processing her current IEP highlights these challenges we believe that a placement at the nearest school Tuscan will provide her with the least restrictive environment her disability impacts her ability to complete multiple tasks like completing her morting routine while her feeding challenge is greatly slows her ability to eat it often takes her yeah sorry um just this is recorded and also live on YouTube okay and so we get what you're saying I just want you to protect your child's confidentiality with such detail about okay Her

256diagnosis yeah so we live uh 0.1 miles from Tuscan we live across the street um it was our understanding geography would still be a factor in the intentional plan it's merely a five minute walk to school versus a 25-minute drive to South Mountain in traffic our street is actually closed um in a one-way traffic pattern in the mornings and our home is adjacent to the street closure so there's a physical obstacle course not allowing us to get out outside of our home um fourth the physical act of walking to school is an important daily exercise which promotes your motor skills and facilitates her emotional regulation and improves her processing for a better more focused day um also Claire has really struggled with building social relationships and friendships if placed at South Mountain she's the only

257child on the block that's not going to be at Tuscan um while I recognize the importance of integration initiative the algorithm has neglected the needs of many children including mine um I thank you again for all your important work that you do and your consideration this matter I believe that an elementary school placement at Tuscan will allow my child to receive an equitable start to her day on part of that of her peers thank you so much Christina so that includes our in-person public speaks so Keith will go to audio um first up is Danielle tropeja that committee members not present thank you um next up is Kells Savage that committee members not present okay Tom base Community member is not present okay Asia Marche that Community member is not present hey Laura Choi and

258I wait am I am I new hi Laura hi am I muted I'm not sure no we can hear you okay thank you um hi my uh hi everyone my name is Laura Choi um and uh first I want to thank you for tabling policy 2270 for now um but since I already prepare my message I waited four hours I'll take my three minutes um I hope that this will plant some seeds as you're thinking about what to think about this policy if you need to address this again um I am a school board member in Warren County I am disclaiming that I'm not speaking on behalf of my board um only as an individual a resident of New Jersey a parent a leader of API rainbow parents of P flag and a faith leader

259in my community and a candidate for ordination in the Presbyterian Church USA I'm a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and currently completing my masters of divinity at New Brunswick Theological Seminary I'm also married to a presbyterian Minister and a parent of a transgender a young adult whom we affirm and support so I became aware of your intention to update your policy 2270 and I was intrigued and I started to do a little digging and research because I remembered that our district adopted our policy 2270 in the summer of 2020. at which time I was also concerned with a new language that was devised under the department of Ed um under under Betsy DeVos at the time I heard someone say earlier that since this was a first read the language may change and you may

260not adopt cookie cutter policies that do not serve your students as they may serve students in another district with very different culture um so I want to tell you that how much I admire your work from afar and your inclusive policies since I had been since I have been serving on my board since 2019. um I know that I'm not the only one who follow your work so please believe me when I say that you are a model for other districts who want to express more inclusive policies when the transgender student policy was up for Revision in in our district in 2019 um I sh I shared I shared your policy with my school board as a model to follow so when I saw that the language of policy 2270 that you're introducing tonight is

261actually the exact same language that we adopted in 2020 um you can imagine my surprise what's even more surprising to me is the deletion of the more inclusive language and this was the fight I put up in our district against Strauss Esme language when this was up for revision for us um our compromise was to adopt most of the new language but also keep what was intended to be deleted in 2020 we revised this policy that was last introduced in 2010 with a lot of the same language and some editions um I didn't even think to come up with this kind of language that you're introdu you're considering deleting especially the first paragraph um so as I'm rereading this policy especially on the emphasis of prayer I'd really like you to consider the following questions

262and concerns please define prayer what exactly do you mean from which tradition or do you mean all Traditions expressions of faith and prayer cover wide range even within the same Faith how do you include students with no faith and what does it all have to do with student dress codes so please specify that if you mean something else please consider students that are part of the lgbtq community um I'm so sorry Laura thank you so much for coming on and sorry that you had to wait so long but we appreciate your time wow okay I was hoping to finish since I did wait so um all right thank you thank you um so the last person on audio public speaks is Leslie Kerner oh okay hi Leslie thank you my name is Leslie Kerner I'm

263a South Orange resident I have two kids in the district and have served on ptas and hsas for the past eight years I'm a big champion of our districts and have worked hard to bring my experience as an educator and Ed Tech leader to our district in schools early this evening board member Wingfield mentioned the superintendent's contract negotiation and while that's not on tonight's agenda I know it will be in the weeks and months to come now we hear a lot about the things in our district that need to be improved and it's not a secret there are several many even we've heard a lot about a lot of them tonight I mean I've brought up some myself in the past um and as with any and every District we know we're not perfect we

264need to keep growing and improving but I also believe that consistency in District leadership is Paramount to continuing some of the most important work that we're doing in our district work that we as a community value significantly work that is helping us improve and grow as a district Dr Taylor inherited our groundbreaking intentional integration initiative and even with the two plus year Interruption of a global pandemic he and his team launched it on time and without sacrificing the original Vision sure we've heard some hiccups we just heard some we need to continue to improve the algorithm the process the communication around the initiative but I'm not sure many people in this community maybe even on this board understand how difficult real change is to make in public education most of the time these types of

265initiatives just sit on the Shelf and don't get implemented with Fidelity or at all so the fact that it's been implemented it was on time it's actually going and we have you know we're going into our third year of doing it is pretty remarkable I hope you'll retain Dr Taylor's our superintendent so we can continue to move us forward in this work that's critical to who we are as a district and as a community to underscore that point board member malisbina stated earlier tonight that money would be better spent on our students than on redlining policies and then we heard about necessary scope Cuts in the CHS construction plans I hope you won't waste valuable resources on search firms and interim leaders over the next couple years but directed toward keeping our critical District initiatives

266on track thank you thank you Leslie next up we have Stacy Thomas I think she um it's audio hi can you hear me sorry about that we can hear you Stacy wonderful thank you I just wanted to bring up um the policy of corporal punishment the use of corporal punishment policy policy three two one seven um while I understand the importance of maintaining discipline and ensuring a safe learning environment I believe it's essential to carefully consider the potential implications of the policies wording um specifically I'd like to seek clarification on two points raised by the language in the policy the first one is ambiguity regarding the use of force during disturbance the sentence in question to quell a disturbance threatening physical injury to others appears to suggest that force can only be used when there

267is a physical threat however the presence the new presence of a comma because it wasn't there in the first version in this sentence creates ambiguity leading to potential misinterpretation it becomes unclear whether force can be employed solely in response to physical threats or if it is also permissible during any form of disturbance I just think that we really need to consider you know the implications of that and what that means the second concern I had was the priority sorry the prioritization of property over physical safety another concern arises from the statement for protection of persons or property this line seemingly implies that force can be utilized to prevent the potential destruction of property while I recognize the importance of maintaining a safe and orderly environment I find it troubling that the policy places physical safety

268including that of a student in crisis below the preservation of property I would think that a student safety you know and obviously the safety of the people in the room obviously is more important than any property that we could have I also worry about how that can be applied and how that can be interpreted property could mean many many things it's very very Broad and vague and it worries me that you know it's putting us you know in a bad position as far as liability is putting people in a bad position as far as understanding and I think that we should carefully consider the wording before we implement this policy the way that it's written thank you thank you Stacy and last up is Beth Constantino good evening uh Beth Cosentino from Maplewood uh I'm

269here tonight um because I noticed that this afternoon two pages were added last minute to the board of ed Financial document that's attached to this evening's agenda the first one States be it resolved that the Board of Education rejects the bid received May 17 2023 for paraprofessional services and then the second page says be it resolved that the Board of Education enters into an agreement with Essex Regional Education Services Commission to the for the period of July 1st 2023 to June 30th 2024 to provide paraprofessional services um and then goes on to talk about the rate so no one here in front of me at this horseshoe was here when a few years back when Essex Regional was the para vendor but there were many many issues and there was good reason for the district

270to move away from that vendor um I don't quite understand why all bids were rejected or even one bid was rejected and then um turn around and there's an agreement made with Essex Regional um but as a parent of a nine-year-old autistic child who requires one-to-one assistance by a para all day long it's very disconcerting to me that there is a lack of consistency with the vendor and that this or send in any of the Paris and all of the Paras that are here and who have been here for years are not treated better that then we would go back to a vendor that they didn't want so I just wanted to put that out there and let you all know that that's what's happening because like I said I didn't this wasn't posted until

271late this afternoon so I wanted to bring it to your attention thank you thank you very much Beth president letter oh it appears uh Mr Tom bashore has called in okay you want to put him on good evening members of the board and school Community can you hear me all right yes we can my name is Tom Bayshore I'm vice president of operations for ESS has been providing paraprofessional services to the district since June of 2019. we have a long-standing partnership with the school district of South Orange and Maplewood and have worked hand in hand with the child study team and special services department over the years to provide qualified caring nurturing and outstanding paraprofessionals throughout each of the district schools along with four out of District school locations serving students from pre-k to age

27221. in fact we have grown this outstanding staff of power professionals to a team of 240 people to meet the growing needs of these District programs in May of 2022 last year ESS was awarded the most recent paraprofessional Services bid for the current school year school year 2022 this bid award includes the option of two renewal years a renewal for school year 23-24 and a renewal for school year 24.25 ESS provided a renewal contract to the district for the year 2324 and proposed to keep the current pricing flat meaning ESS is willing to renew our agreement with the school district for the available renewal term without increasing the billable fees to the school district in an effort to retain our program and keep our paraprofessional staff members employed within somsd schools additionally all of our

273paraprofessional employees are members of a union local 68 ESS and local 68 have a ratified collective bargaining agreement in place through June of 2025. now as you may know rather than renewing our service agreement for school year 2324 at a zero percent pricing increase a solicitation of bids for paraprofessional Services was made public earlier this month to our surprise ESS responded to the solicitation of bid last Wednesday May 17th just eight days ago and was the only vendor to submit a proposal response earlier this evening around 4 30 p.m we noticed a surprising change to the agenda for tonight's meeting we noticed that item 4462 a b a rejection of all bids for paraprofessional Services was added to the agenda we do recognize that it is within the district's right to reject any or all

274bids for paraprofessional Services however action item 4462 AC was also added to the agenda which if approved Awards the contract for paraprofessional services to the Essex Regional Educational Services Commission this agenda item also confirms that Essex Regional Education Services Commission would be charging the district a rate of thirty dollars and 80 cents per hour for all power professionals and a 9.84 additional charge for every Power professional who participates in diaper changing these costs are greater than what ESS had proposed in our bid submission on May 17th so I asked the board to consider rather than renewing the ESS agreement at flat pricing for the available renewal term why would the decision be made to award this service thank you Tom I think I'm so sorry no other Professionals in District it will cost you more

275they have no employees working in the district oh ESS is saving upwards of two hundred thousand dollars for the board for next year we really appreciate you dialing in and sorry that you had to wait so long thank you Tom so that concludes our public speaks Dr Taylor did you want to respond to anything I know it's late but I always think it's appropriate to respond um because we still have constituents here so for those who don't normally attend these meetings we do do our best to take copious notes and try to respond to each public speaks if we are able to do so even though our attorneys advises that we should not right so um thank you Patrick for allowing me to give a few updates um is Alan guy still here I think

276he may have left out okay um he was providing points around policies and how important they are and um who had the whose voices were heard as he was growing up and wanted to avoid um that being the the our reality at the school district and I wanted to just say to Alan that I was at Marshall today um hanging out with the mascot owl for the um for the field day I want to acknowledge that and how great a day it was um confirmed by by the folks who I ran into including principal horn um I'm just going through my notes as I give responses thank you to our former board members uh Anne-Marie and Shannon for coming out and um and sharing your wisdom and expertise around your experience with developing policies and

277how important they are um I think that there's definitely a balance between Expediting and honoring the um the collective beliefs of our community that have been established and and supported even this evening um just regarding the njq sac um we backwards mapped our policy updates to make them a reasonable chunk for each committee to go through and review monthly as you know if you review the first month then the first read the second month and then hopefully approval the third month it puts you on a trajectory if you maintain um your momentum to being to be in a good shape with like like you said not just approvals but implementation um we of course respect the process which is why we also are looking at ways to expedite the authentic redlining and do so in

278a way that keeps that information um for easy board member review and we'll continue to to review that process and we appreciate the passion behind um all those comments that are in that space um the commentary around the um all gender restrooms is of course not just acknowledge we also have followed up with our Architects and our construction Partners on that and it's not just a request it's a mandate not from any other entity but from ourselves [Music] um Rocio Lopez thank you for your comments um I would just say that that um that resolution that you mentioned around home instruction is not a new resolution um that we we do have those Partnerships to reach out to provide home instruction because there's an obvious need for it and has been for um for a

279number of years uh if if you would like to speak more about it we can talk about it during our monthly meeting or whenever you'd like to talk about it just let me know I think that if it takes a sidebar negotiation for us to consider something like that I I think that we have right we've talked we've had several sidebar conversations that I think have been fruitful um for the staff and for the board and I'm open to definitely having that but just to reiterate that that's not a new a new engagement it's a re-up to to ensure we have um opportunities for homeschooling for kids who unfortunately are in that circumstance whether it be through injury or illness or other circumstance um but we'll I'm open to that conversation for sure and um

280again I make recommendations to the board so I would definitely um love to have that conversation uh I'm just again going through many of these our our passionate conversations around the same topic so I don't want to be repetitive um is Michael sloth still here oh he's going okay well please yeah I would love to uh um I recently put together something from Ikea so I can know all about tactile and and how great it makes you feel when it's done so I would love to to talk more about that offering um thank you to our mayor for giving up your evening um and sharing with us your concerns and recommendations the parent who is Christine is still here I think she may have left out I'll reach out to her um I didn't catch

281if she said that her other her other child attended or attends Tuscan that's a very significant piece for our work around integration and I'll follow up with the integration team on her emails to make sure she gets a response and a review and she may not be aware that she can put forth an appeal that would make us have a closer look at those circumstances um for those who don't know um special services Miss bedine and her Department have a very very impactful um lever for our integration work anytime a parent brings forward a concern that their child has special needs and it was not honored or reviewed we make sure that we get that from our special services department to ensure that their placement um is not impacted that there that their services are

282not impacted negatively by their placement and the first students that we place um are our students who the special services department brings forward to us uh regarding um the uh the district's choice to to recommend a new vendor we've shared with the board the reason for that um and you know we are as administrators um directly reviewing the services that our district and our kids and our families are receiving and we know that um regardless the vendor that we go with that we can put a mandate forward that they give right a first refusal to our current Paris um and I won't speak disparagingly about our previous vendor but please know that we don't make these decisions lightly um and in the state of New Jersey though you may have a multiple renewal contract as

283Mr Bazemore said um it does not mandate or tie the hands of our Board of Education and it's our responsibility as Leaders to recommend changes based on the services that we are receiving and um will you not come upon this decision lightly and I'll just leave it at that to be respectful of all involved that concludes my responses Madam president thank you so much Dr Taylor so we'll now transition to our committee report outs um we'll get it started with Dr telesford if you could do the readout for data and special services ad hoc committees I'm going to cover the policy committee readout personnel and cni and then fft will be Nubia or Miss Wilson all right I'll start with actually special services we met on May 18th we covered a large set of topics

284but we didn't get to all of them so those were moved to the next meeting first thing we talked about was Data regarding students receiving comp compensatory education for staff vacancies we want to know how many students had not been receiving Services as part of their IEP that was not related to the pandemic so this would be related to um if there was a resignation or there were a vacancy that needed to be filled um we were given the data regarding teachers or students that currently do not have that um but one thing we want to do is expand this to look at um look at these vacancies over time just to see how the district is doing to ensure that students um should not really require compensatory education if they're receiving compensatory education that

285means that their IAP is not being honored here the next thing we discussed was administrative communication one of the things we focused on was when we have Staffing changes when you lose a social worker when someone resigns or you have any sort of changes um for the classroom for your child what is the communication that is coming from the district um what we learn is that the traditionally this actually comes from the buildings themselves which we usually become from the principal in some cases some principles are not as comfortable with that and that's when the district comes into um um we'll move into that role and then communicate that um I think one of the things that I would advocate for is to have some sort of uh I guess a protocol so that we

286can ensure that families are always informed if there are any sort of major changes um the next thing we talked about was the extended school year esy and just also um communication about um I guess a a letter that was supposed to go out telling them about the um esy this year there was a glitch in that um but there have been changes in the program to ensure that um you know that it's not too long so that you know parents students aren't going hungry because one of the issues last year was it was extended an extended time and then kids didn't have food so parents had to chip in so one of the things that we want to make sure was that the district is behind all those things and making sure that program

287is not too long so that they're not going hungry um the next thing we discussed which um Dr Chile just talked about was the RFP process um so some of the information that we got in our meeting um it got further updated today so um I'll leave that um update and to Dr Taylor and then following and the next thing we talked about was the documentation process and for the documentation process one of the things that I was I wanted to know was um when a child is being classified what is being documented by the district and can we see or can the board see what are all those they get those points of contact UM and this would allow us to see how is the process moving for any particular child um if someone

288who's referring student is that coming from a parent is it coming from a teacher is it coming from a parent that that wants their child referred and then let's just say you're rejected do they come back with a lawyer I want to know we want to know all those points and so understanding how we're documenting things will be very important so that we can I guess I guess surprise the system to make sure that we are I guess we have a well-run system here um and then finally we talked about personnel and that was about I guess the training that we received when we look at some of the incidents that have gone on um without going into details we want to make sure that teachers are receiving the proper training and then making sure

289that we want to know I guess what is district-wide and what is specific to school or specific to certain classrooms um so that's going to be an ongoing conversation that we're having with the district when we're looking at personal development uh or professional development sorry um our next meeting will be in June 14th and we will cover some of the topics that we were not able to cover um in that meeting any questions all right so moving on for data and Technology uh we actually covered many of the things that we just saw today that was in the district goals the first thing we did was a check-in on the integration student survey and the analysis around that and so you we we talked about some of the things that we're going to do the

290second time around like having computers here at the the board at the district building for having parents come in and do the surveys also having those at sites where whenever they're having events at the elementary schools so that parents can go there so that it's not everything going through PowerSchool another thing that was changed was using the student ID so that you can put in the student ID and then do the survey so I think the idea here is to try to increase the number of people doing the survey and so make it less cumbersome uh the next thing we discussed was just talking about the q1 Q2 Q3 pass fail data and I guess talking about all the the work the district is doing to I guess delve into this data you know as

291I said as they say peel back this onion and that was to basically I guess look at the different ways in which students are having challenges because one student that has a single F maybe in an AP class is very different from a student that has multiple F's and as we saw in the district update um those students were kind of require different supports so we just kind of talked about some of those supports which were to detail just now and yeah that's my update for those two committees thank you Dr Thomas or does any any board members have any questions for Dr John I just want to add you did force me some questions about the integration initiative and I will afford those to Dr Taylor and he said he'll okay answer those thank

292you so much I actually have some other questions to send to you too so yeah thank you um okay so I will do the readout for the policy committee on Tuesday May 9th 2023 the policy committee convene from 8 30 to sorry from 6 30 to 8 PM the committee members present were Bill Gifford chair Alyssa malaspina uh quavi telesford and I also attended at the beginning of the meeting there was a lengthy discussion around the new policy review process thank you to the administration for their presentation on it um we have 16 policies up for second read and adoption and 23 for first read um I guess I'll go through them all the second read policies are as follows uh zero one three one bylaws policies and regulations zero one three three adjudication of

293dispute zero one four four board member orientation and training zero one five five point one board member participation at board meetings using electronic device zero one six three Quorum one five one one Board of Education website accessibility 1581 domestic violence 1643 Family Leave 2200 curriculum content 2260 affirmative action program for school and classroom practices 2270 religion in the schools two five two zero instructional supplies three two one seven use of corporal punishment 4217 use of corporal punishment 6122 reimbursement of federal and other Grant expenditures 611 5.01 Federal Awards funds internal controls allowability of costs 6115.04 federal funds duplication of benefits 1140 affirmative action program 2432 School sponsored Publications 2464 gifted and talented student three two one six dressing and grooming 3224 evaluation of principals Vice principals and assistant principals 3230 outside activities three two seven

294zero professional responsibilities three four two one point one three postnatal accommodations 5112 interesting entrance age 5114 children displaced by domestic violence 5230 late arrival and early dismissal 5305 Health Services Personnel 5308 student health records 5310 Health Services 6471 School District travel 7243 supervision of construction 7320 lease of school premises 7410 maintenance and repair 7425 lead testing of water in schools 7430 school safety seven four four zero Security on school premises 8420 emergency crisis situations 8600 transportation and in new business we discuss policy 5124 General transfers and decided to send it out to CNE cni for feedback are there any questions yep go ahead doctor tells me I also have a quick question about I guess the first three policies now do we do we I guess talk about any objections to the Poetry policies here

295or is that that was about the action portion doing the action portion yeah okay we can sample those well no I'm talking about the first read policies oh okay because yeah the first you probably won't talk about it yeah oh you want to talk about it now he wants to talk about it now but I thought we had to wait till the action I could help a little bit okay um so I could chime in if board members have conversations or concerns around first read you could always email them to that to that chair of that committee to expedite it to be added to the conversation that occurs at the committee meeting okay you know it doesn't stop you from talking about it during that portion but there's no action pending for it right I

296recognize there's no action but I think when we discussed this I guess this new policy there's this whole idea that we're supposed to discuss the first three policies here which I didn't think made sense because I would never think that we would want to spend hours talking about like three two one six three two two four five one one two there are so many there are so many policies of the first three that I just saw all these issues with that I don't think you want to spend this meeting talking about so I'm wondering when do we talk about those issues with the first three policies well that's a good question considering if the process now is to talk about it here then we should probably talk about it here is that the process I

297don't think that there's a limit to what you can do right so when we get down to the resolution if board members want to talk about that resolution they would sever it normally and when you sever it then that gives the opportunity for you know whatever the resolution number is to be discussed and that could include that first read which is a part of it even though it's not up for consideration Patrick any thoughts on it uh yeah certainly you can talk about it here um and usually in most places the policy committee discusses the policies before they get to first read right right okay so uh a board member bought the money I actually think I said it earlier that it's a finished product when it's first read right so that is how it's

298done in most districts right I mean that's I guess that's what we were doing before anything I don't want to actually do first read discussion here you know it's already after 12. but like I kind of felt as though this it I'd mention this like it feels a little backwards I feel as though we should be discussing these things before we even gets to first read and then maybe have further edits but yeah just want to chime in there no I I agree with you board member um sorry um yeah I know it's like 12 o'clock um I I agree I think there's we want to have the discussion I know me the way I've done it if I have like questions I'll email the chair but it doesn't afford the group discussion so I'm

299I agree that there's some things I think that we should possibly review again um within that policy not or within the process not to kind of beat a dead horse but I think we can all agree that there are still things within it that need to be improved and talked about sorry a quick thing I mean not to beat this dead horse or more but I mean if the process is not ready why the heck are we pushing so many policies into second read and first read and you have a boilerplate and all that the process is not ready let's admit that let's go back fix the process and fix it I mean my concern has always been listen I'm sympathetic to the cause of you know yes we need to vote for all of

300these things we need to get these out of the way but not I mean we we started this in January this is not new we've been talking about having a new process new it's coming it's coming it's coming we're in June so the process is not ready it's clear there's a hole in here we just we just discovered the whole so I don't know how to fix this right I mean so we need to fix that right yeah I think the feedback goes to policy committee and administration and because this we one one final thing not the administration's problem this is not their fault this is not their job this is not their issue this is our issue let's fix it let's get it done and let's go on with it I I don't want

301to keep dumping it on Administration no but oh guys fix it yeah fix it again I mean come on man the board we have to consult the administration on policy so they are you must consult the administration on policies policy process not on policy process policy process we own we can decide whatever the heck we whatever the whatever we want we can say process is step one step two step three step four step five we decide that and then yes once we feed this in we come to the admissions say three four five zero what do we do uh whatever eight four two zero what do we do that's the feedback I'm not complaining about the policy itself that's down the line I'm talking about the process of the policy itself that is broken yeah

302I I think that that the big shift sorry this charming and yeah um the big shift from when the policy alert happens who what happens next right do we wait does the policy committee do work on all the policies that they come in or does the policy go directly to the applicable committee I think that that's the that that's the hitch and the decision that's made I've seen it done both ways in multiple places and I think that part of what that not to speak for our chair um but that was part of the the discussion right is do we if you're if the policy committee looks at it and does work on it first and then it goes to the applicable committee that's a month and if the committee finishes that work and goes

303to first read then that's two and then three months that's fine right I'm just saying but that's that that was the rub I think is that I was dealing with this Governor's book or whatever but was sent out recently and it says a policy should you should estimate it takes about five to six months to update a policy so I'm not saying you know I mean so we take a lead time and that's the whole reason for a policy anyway I mean we don't have a policy chair here you know I mean so let's talk about this later yeah I was gonna say I think this is really good feedback and I think you know we we're all presented members of the policy committees were presented the process in the policy committee but this is

304feedback we bring back and if we believe that it's important to go to policy committee first we message that and we we do it right go ahead Patrick very briefly just so so one of the things that you have to know is to triage your policies because some of your policies are mandatory in a way that it's you must have a policy that says something okay and that's a policy that put it this way you want to adopt by the deadline you're given by the regulation or the statute or the doe guidance that says it must be in place by this day so you're in compliance with it put it and then after that if you want to continue to improve it revise it make it locally relevant then certainly do that but the suggestion

305would be triage those policies figure out which ones are mandatory which ones are permissive put in place the language you must have to be in compliance with the law and then certainly keep it on the docket to revise and improve and make it locally relevant um but certain policy language and certain things must be in place by certain dates and so that's the only thing I would point out to if you want to be compliant with the law make sure you know which ones are necessary and which ones are not and then the only other thing I would say is many of stress resumes policies and in njsba which is the other company that does it they just regurgitate the regulation that's all it is um and so there are circumstances where that may be

306satisfactory too because all they're already doing is is saying exactly what's in the regulation then there may be policies that are a little bit more nuanced than that and certainly can can be worked a little bit differently for your local needs foreign member Eckard for personnel and cni Personnel committee meeting met on Wednesday May 10th board president whitlider and I were in attendance board members Wingfield and Wright were absent we kicked off the meeting reviewing recommendations for non non-renewal based on performance we discussed the process for non-renewals which is something the board does not vote on I won't go into full details of the process you can view the public meeting minutes on the website but I did want to mention that I am encouraged that our new I don't know if he's new anymore

307but Mr adedoyan has made a few tweaks to the process and memorialized it into a new form so that any staff members that have a corrective action plan in place are aware of expectations moving forward and given ample time to do so the committee then reviewed recommendations for rehire and tenure of non-tenured staff we reviewed a list that showed the status of evaluations for these staff members most had been completed while a few were still in progress at the time all evaluations are due to the state by June 30th and the in progress status for some isn't typical and we discuss some of the reasons those specific ones had not yet been completed at the April committee meeting we reviewed some of the data from recent exit interviews but the districts was still in the

308process of analyzing some of the more qualitative data Mr adiroin is looking to make some improvements that include changing the format of some questions in an effort to gather more quantitative data and as a committee we are looking forward to seeing a revised questionnaire soon and engaging in more conversations on how we can also increase participation as the exit interview is not mandatory at the end of the day I think we can all agree this is a great opportunity for us as a district to help identify areas of both strengths and improvements to make the district a better place to work so the more info we have the better we reviewed a few of the Personnel policies up for first read we discussed some concerns around the dress and grooming policy as it seemed to

309be dated and may need some tweaking based on current trends and our community values as Caitlyn sorry I can't go through the formality at almost one o'clock uh and and I even discussed you know there's there's certainly tweaks that need to be made for that um it's first read so our feedback will be incorporated into second read the last item we've discussed was a non-renewal budget cut the district assured the committee that there will be an opportunity for anyone working for beyond the bill to work for the YMCA should they choose to do so meeting adjourned at 7 40 p.m and our next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday June 13th at 6 30 pm that is all I have for personnel before I move on to cni questions I am moving on to CNA the

310May cni meeting took place on May 17th and started at 6 30 p.m in attendance was myself and um Alyssa Nubia and Courtney Wingfield were not in attendance we received a presentation about the Freshman Academy from Dr Gilbert and Miss Bodner we saw a lot of the information during tonight's School presentation so there's no need to dive into it again um both Alyssa and I were excited by The Proposal Alyssa did express some concern that while it has it has actually great potential to help the incoming freshmen we still do not have a concrete plan with specific supports in place for our 10th to 12th grade students and I know that Ms Bodner had spoken about you know rolling this out and using it as a foundation for 10th through 12th grade students so also

311very exciting we also received a presentation from Miss Korea related to the process they are using to choose the new math correct the new K-5 math curriculum the goal is to have a program chosen by by the June meeting and we've been assured that all materials will be ready and in place for the new school year we did not get a chance to review the passville data since the presentation was not ready for us at the time we did mention that some Boe members found the raw data that was given to us in a Friday packet to be confusing and in need of context I think Dr Taylor has addressed some of that already um so I won't go into that anymore we talked about summer curriculum writing and specifically about the journalism course and

312that they plan to work on it during the summer with the hope that it will be finished in time for it to count as a full year English course and have it count for English credits next school year if that does happen the administration said they will work with guidance to ensure that any student who wants to take it will be able to we spoke again about GNT just as to get some status updates and they are in the process of gathering a committee for an audit of our program we also had a large number of policies that we reviewed for second and first read we spent some time looking at both this dress as my versions and the somsc versions the one big change that was made is that we are now making it

313that only seniors will have the option of coming in late to school if they have a study hall first period and leaving school early if they have a study hall last period the administration believes that it should be a senior privilege and will hopefully help to cut down on some of the absent-based failures we are seeing from 11th graders we did pull guidance counseling from first read because we needed some additional guidance on language from Administration and our hope is to have it ready for first read the next month and the last thing we discussed was our votech policy and how and asked how the district is communicating the opportunities to students in grades 8 8-12 we are awaiting follow-up from the administration to see when and how that is occurring that is all any

314questions seeing none will move to the last committee report out which is fft with board member Deval Wilson I forgot um on May 15th fft met and board members Caitlin whitlitter Bill Gifford and ruin badamani were present the meeting was from 6 30 to 10 10 p.m I think our meeting is probably the one that lasts the longest um also just side note um Mr Burnside I don't think we need to make sure our next meeting is on the calendar I don't think it is so we just need to double check that later um so uh let's see Auditorium bids we discussed the fact that we were going to have a potential lawsuit brought against us by keyboard Consultants because they decided because when we decided to go out to bid independently to get additional

315bids for Psalms and Seth boyden's auditoriums keyboards can oh oh I can't talk about that yeah that was the discussion oh sorry all right scratch that luckily we'll be fine um all right so the next thing we discussed was policies um we went through one of the main thing we talked about was hazardous roots and uh in addition we talked about school safety seven four Thirty which is being abolished um we cross-referenced and one of the reasons why I can be abolished is we are covered in other policies so this one is no longer necessary when it comes to hazardous Roots it is currently not on first read um it is not even though we discuss legally sound ways to update the policy we also discussed posting the final report on the district website so

316that all community members can see the Hazardous Roots report um because we know it's something that's really important to the community but as I said this will be your first reads next month um and this does not impede our ability to go to bid one thing to note is that I have spent a lot of time since our fft meeting going through our hazardous Roots report and I do want the community to know that um we take this policy very seriously and I've spent a number of hours during my work day and after hours cross-referencing talking to our Municipal Partners who Dean I was going to shut you out but you're probably in bed by now um thank you um mayor Dean and Village president Sheena for your partnership during the municipal Partnerships meeting that

317we had I guess it was a week ago now I'm talking about some of our hazardous roots and so I want to make it clear that one of the reasons a couple of reasons why this is being pushed one is to there were some discrepancies between Stone Fields late breaking supplement report that we just got last week that I spent many hours cross-referencing I'm also realization that the police departments didn't view these funnel reports and want to make sure that they are viewing them since it is part of our policy for them to to to look at these reports um and that there were just some some some some discrepancies so um as I said um I've been reviewing this I think that um there needs to be a more consistent process moving forward when

318it comes to hazardous roots and how our I've mentioned a couple times how our transportation department can be part of this process it seems like everything is siled right now um and I'm a little concerned about that but at the end of the day we are doing our due diligence to make sure that our hazardous Roots report is updated properly and all of our stakeholders and constituents are part of that conversation so that is why that will be up for first reads um and then for epic construction um you got the update today the only other thing that I will add is that um South Mountain big school might need a backup generator for the boiler system if our switch gears do not arrive by August 1st so epic is just doing their due diligence

319letting us know in ahead of time um that hopefully these gears come on time but if they don't they needed to to receive our feedback and thoughts on using a backup generator and that backup generator has a cost to it which is seventy thousand dollars a month um with a startup cost of a hundred thousand and so they're pretty confident that this won't be delayed but again doing their due diligence to let us know and we agree that um the other the other point to that is if we don't do construction to the boiler this summer which is when it's slated to be demoed that delays our trans transportation that delays our construction timeline and we are already delayed so we don't want to do that um and the boiler system is just out of

320date so those we can't even get any uh we can't even get anything to fix it like like whatever is needed this applies to fix it just aren't on the market anymore um security bid is dude is due to be the school security bid is due to be rebid it must be a bit every three years by law um we've been hiring security since 2018 um and I don't know if there's anything interesting to add to that but we discussed that um we discussed beyond the bell thank you Dr Taylor for your updates on that and just wanted to read what what was reiterated to us in fft I'll reiterate here which is that you know many community members have reached out about concern with this switch and the whole purpose of this is to

321grow the program um so we're simply shifting it to the YMCA's purview because it requires more admin support and we want to grow the program to allow more students to participate um and this was difficult to do under uh one director handling it all internally in the district so this will be a pass or Enterprise account meaning the district helps collect the funds for the Y with a new partnership they will expand it to more days per week um and Dr Taylor thank you for sharing this information with our PTA leaders and other parents who have inquired you've done a good job every time someone sends an email you respond um we also brought up an fft the concern from parents that would the Y be giving preference to its members for Early Access to

322apply to be on the bill because that's currently what they do for aftercare and the district said that that would be something they would look into um almost done I know this is long we're ready for what four hours um let's see we will cover fft goals next meeting because the are there items just took a long time um we talked about paraprofessionals and cost analysis of community about community members have asked is why aren't we bringing back highly trained Master pairs back in the house and the cost would be 10 million dollars annually and we currently pay six million dollars for 250 peras they've been outsourced since the early mid-2000s and we talked about budget cycle and Communications um the ba has created a budget calendar in the past that will allow the board

323to see a year in advance of what is upcoming so that we understand the budget cycle and can anticipate the budget more efficiently especially if we have questions in advance about the process and then lastly we have to reschedule our MMS tour um which is part of our fft goal to look at Maplewood Middle School and see what repairs need to be made that are not part of long-range facility plan and so that tour is being rescheduled quickly for June questions okay all right thank you um so that concludes committee report outs we will now transition over to the action portion of the meeting um so I will hand that over to Dr Taylor to lead us through it but I'll start off by asking if there's any resolutions that um the board would like

324to separ go ahead uh Dr telesford I like to sever 4462y 4465 i m and n one more time please 4462y and 4465 i m and n of course I in and and I Mary and Nancy or 4465 I'm Mary Nancy okay so now I got it um sorry board member sorry board member Eckard I'd like to sever 4462r 4464 m n n or six parameter and that's all Eminem okay hold on oh you have one two okay go ahead um yes yeah I just wanted to several four four six five um let me just look at the letters hold on is it Eminem uh I couldn't hear you I'm sorry yeah sorry so four four six five m n is that already it's already okay good and then what was the other one oh

325it might have been a first read so it doesn't matter hold on I'm tired let me just double check oh and um what number about the money oh oh okay sorry uh three two one seven was that one mentioned three two one seven four five six three two one seven that's M oh yeah that was the one I just mentioned isn't it okay yeah all right thanks uh I mean clearly a lot of the servers are for the policy stuff that is in second reads and we found that many of the policies that are in second reads need to be worked on and like for example right you know we have the policy two four six four different and talented I mean that is a complex and a lengthy discussion just in itself in fact

326I would argue that it's probably more complex in the transportation policy we could put out so what I'm recommending is that instead of severing each one and kind of worrying about what did I forget it or not why don't we just stable all of that stable them all today and send it back to the new process we have a new process well I mean whatever shape it is it is still a process and follow that process and come back and you know and then do it next month that way we'll have more confidence we'll have the public will have more confidence in our ability to kind of put forward a policy that actually looks like a you know acceptable policy and and it's simple because you know nobody wants to look you know at this

327point in the night who knows who's voting for yes no whatever you know I all I'm saying is to stable them all a to Q when there are 17 of them of which we we've heard from the public at least three four that are problematic I can I can point out right now for GNT is problematic just stable them all there's nothing pressing in there that requires urgent like you know oh my God mandatory requirement next month will you know have the SEC or whoever controls us Crackdown on us just table it and also we're missing you know two like three or three members out here you know it's it's it's good to see everyone being involved so so I'm so do you want to make a motion sure so I'd like to make a

328motion to table resolution four four six five eight to cube to the next meeting to have a second second all in sorry but presented on the meeting um okay yeah okay so you made the most and you seconded so so okay all in favor please raise your hand okay just one clarification um one of the requests to sever I think was read incorrectly it may be a duplicate that was four four six four M and N that's five right okay got it all right so we'll distract through that and we'll strike through the other severs because we just voted to table it four four six five I Amazon Mary Ann as in Noah those are all tables one four four six five four four six five eight to Q are all tables so therefore the

329servers don't matter right so the only servers we have are four four six two R and four four six two y That's what I have is there any unreadiness okay scene and hearing on um I put forward for the board's consideration resolutions four four five nine through four four six six severing 4462 R and Y and recognizing the tabling of four four six five do I have a second second okay we are now in conversation for all the affirmation aforementioned uh resolutions with the exception of the center bird resolutions is there any comments or questions okay okay I just wanted to see sorry I'm just I'm going through 460 for one second I'm so sorry all right so then we can go to the role Please Mr Burnside board member record yes board president whitlider

330yes board member Duvall Wilson yes board member Wingfield yes board member telesford yes board member valmani yes motions passed the first severed resolution is four four six two r ow a second board member Eckert oh you seconded okay so we got a second from someone okay okay so now we're up for conversation four four six two R does anyone have anything board member Ecker so I I just wanted a little bit more clarification as Miss Lopez had spoken up during public speaks um and I apologize because this is not my area of expertise so if we were to have our teachers doing the home instruction you'd need a sidebar agreement because that's not currently included so I want to be careful because we're talking about negotiations but I'll be as clear as I can okay

331and I'm sure Patrick was tell me when I overstepped home instruction is already available for our teachers we use different agencies we use different agencies if they are needed because we don't have teachers to provide it um this is a previous agreement that's being renewed offered to be renewed um and there are others that we use because uh over the this this was gosh I don't want to go to my my memory at this time of the evening but it's multiple years that we're just trying to make sure we have a coverage for home instruction and I know um we've spoken about concerns around home instruction because even in this world every you know folks have gotten used to the virtual opportunities and we were told that we couldn't do that and we got Clarity

332that we could so we started offering that and we put in the board's recent Friday packet here's an update on the number of kids who were getting home instruction and it is a very significant need and it's very unpredictable the kid could break their leg tomorrow and need home instruction and so we keep a Cadre of offerings because it's difficult to find folks who want to engage it it's just it's an evening opportunity and you know you just want to make sure you have resources to make sure that you're able to provide students with their legal um requirement of home instruction and for the secondary schools even more complex because you're trying to get multiple teachers because there's multiple courses right so so those are some of the some of the complications you gotta stay

333clear I think okay and stop me if I will try to stay clear um I think obviously it's important to have the Safeguard of a home instruction provider but as we reflect on like the comments made earlier this evening and just some of the and again I won't get into the specifics because it's negotiated item but um I'd like to just have more information on the parity of what our staff makes for home instruction versus what we're paying an outside vendor even if we pass this tonight we don't have to use it it's just an option I just want to make that clear but I guess if you'd like to see I mean I don't know I'm speaking about meant to work with the teachers so that they're getting I would just be careful right

334so miss Lopez and myself and Miss Irby who represents aska we negotiate sidebars all the time and um this this was never approached to have a sidebar but I'm very open to having that conversation okay uh what happens if this is does not pass um so this is for next school year so if you don't pass it um we would likely bring it back to you to say that we need this up this opportunity this we need all the all the support and resources that we need for our kids so so if if you um I think I heard an echo out there if you if you um so that's that's what we would do if you say no then then they don't get the contract and shock that next right okay Patrick's going to

335tell us you have a super intended recommendation in front of you right now um and you know there have been people tonight that say they support the superintendent and I would be happy to talk to the negotiations committee about this outside the presence of certain people um okay yeah I think I'm a little hesitant to not pass this because we keep saying that we're supporting our special ed students and the think you're publicly saying that you're willing to have a sidebar conversation and we support that and so that'll be in the minutes and we'll check in next month to see how that's going anyone else have any comment to make or are we ready to vote on uh resolution 4462r okay board member hacker yes board member valamani yes board member Duvall Wilson yes board

336member Wingfield yes board member talisford yes board president with letter yes motion passes board members um you have your final formal resolution with but you also have two hand carries just to just to make sure that you're prepared for them uh the final uh resolution that's on your current agenda is four four six two y as in yellow all second so and just to clarify 4462 Y is in yellow just so everybody knows it's to award the contract for renovations in additions to Columbia High School so that's the upper discussion is there anyone who intends to comment oh uh yeah so so just to clarify I mean so that everyone knows what we're voting on is I I know you just said it but but this is the this is the presentation that was made

337by the architect and the Epic construction people who came here the this for the Columbia High School projects the base bid is 32 million bucks and some change and we chose the alternative three which basically means a partial replacement of the roof for about 2.2 million dollars so this is like the last big bid for CHS before we go somewhere else clarif that's we're all in agreement okay thanks yeah that's correct this is this is linked to the presentation that was Within um Mr burnside's uh portion that's correct we'll go go to vote please for uh 4462y board member of adelamani yes board member talisford no board member Wingfield yes board member Deval Wilson yes board president with letter yes board member Eckert yes motion passes one is the rejection and one is the approval

338but both of them are affirmatively written right okay do we need a moment to review Madam president okay all right um board members we will do the first um hand carry I present for your consideration 4467 do you have a second we are now open for discussion for resolution number 4467 um and the subject matter is a Hib appeal do I have any folks who want to comment or question or anything nope all right we're going to the vote on resolution 4467 which is a hip appeal yep board member Wingfield yes board member Ecker yes board member lamani yes board member telesford yes board president letter yes board member Deval Wilson yes motion passes board members your final resolution I believe is four four six eight do I have a second second okay we're now

339open for a discussion for our last hand carry resolution resolution number 4468 which is another hip appeal do any board members want to make any question I can't talk okay I think we can go to vote board member Deval Wilson yes board member vad lamani yes board member telesford yes board member with letter I'm board president with letter yes board member Wingfield yes motion passes I'm sorry board member record I was blocking you yes thank you that concludes the action portion of your meeting great thank you Dr Taylor so we will now begin our second hearing of individuals and delegates this evening uh the time limit is three minutes um did you sign up okay so we have one in person and we have one person uh one on audio who uh is waiting but

340we also have okay so we'll let Rocio go and then we're gonna pull in Kells Savage um okay so let me explain the home instruction thing so you know um it's 35 what they pay us an hour right and we have a lack of home instructors why because you have to go to the house right of the students for 35 dollars well you get forty dollars to cover a class so it doesn't make any sense so we have been trying to get people to do it and sometimes the teachers on hand like if he's my student let's say right um and my student needs home instruction you know sometimes you're gonna do it or you say I might do it because it's my kid and of course you have to be approved but you're not

341doing it even for the money or not it's like okay I'm pretty much getting ripped off because it's my student and I want to help them so the only people that are doing it right now is because or they have the time and they can do it or they're like they feel so bad for the kid right that they're like let me do it so when I go back and now you know we have a problem of home instructors and if we know we have a problem of home instructors right why haven't central office reached to us why do we have to be one the ones reaching to them the problem is front central office they need home instructors you have the labor you have the people you have the resources so why don't you

342go and say hey whatever it will take for you guys to do home instruction and probably I would say fifty dollars now I'm gonna have to say 60 because it's all clear but fifty dollars it would have been good Patricia just told me for fifty dollars that she would have done it so you have a person right over here right away I probably reach one of my kids in AP I will be like okay I'll do it even though I don't have the time I'll figure it out but it says lap in the face knowing today that you're paying an organization sixty dollars when you don't want to pay us even like you pay us 35. so what are you telling us oh no it's fine we have a problem with home instruction what we're

343gonna do is we're gonna let the district pay more money to people that are worse prepared that they don't know what they're doing because you know we don't care about you or we don't want to sit down with you so see this is my problem my problem is not negotiating of course we'll negotiate but it shouldn't be me and I have to say Dr Taylor that from the high school I know an assistant principal that was emailing central office saying that you guys should pay more for homing structures because it was like the rate was embarrassing until you put it in an email and I think it was because of a specialized student that needed it and we could again people to the like we got one teacher to do it um and we're going

344to get more because of the rate and that's what I tell you seeing today for me you know in the agenda and the attachments that were paying 60 to another company and we don't even offer 52-hour workers when you have the resources it's crazy in my opinion so hopefully we're gonna negotiate because if not you know I'm going to be sitting here in like a week or two whenever is the next meeting and I'm going to say we got ripped off so I know this is um look how Patrick is laughing he just played me the other day for 40. you know you blame it now you're not gonna blame me I know it's 60. so we're gonna have to pay people more okay thank you everyone thank you have a good night and I'm

345sorry but I had to say it you too have a good evening so the last public speaks audio Kels Savage foreign I'm here to advocate for the gender sexuality Alliance clubs otherwise known as gay straight Alliance clubs at South Orange middle school and Maplewood Middle School um I've been working with both clubs over the past year through my current position as a care manager for an lgbti plus youth Focus program Pride plus which is part of family connections and organization that provides Social Services to families individuals schools and other orgs throughout Essex County this past April I did reach out to the board and received some assurances that the following would be taken into consideration I am here to bring it to your attention that currently the GSA is both also known as Spectrum at

346Psalms and MMS are part of the youthnet program um I want to First acknowledge that having gsas at both middle schools is wonderful and it does set a standard for other schools to follow suit which is exactly how gsas have grown internationally since 1988 and Studies have conducted over the past few decades since their Inception that they positively impact school climates um not just for lgbti plus students but for entire School population students and administration um in fact in a study in 2014 it showed that it reduced suicide ideation by 50 percent uh among CIS had young men um well initially using a security place for gsas to exist it does put restrictions on the accessibility of these life-saving clubs one they're not available for this full school year and especially at times when their

347most important especially during the holidays when it's really extremely hard for lgbti plus Youth and during pride month which is June right around the corner and it could really give an opportunity for lgbti youth to utilize the time to not just celebrate but to bring a lot of important messages to pride month into their school and while there are scholarship for students I cannot afford youth now a barrier is still a barrier and gsas need to be accessible as possible in my 10-year career working with JSA is throughout the tri-state area I can't tell tell you how many times students wanted to just stop by to learn maybe just support a friend or simply give it a try and always walk away with some sort of knowledge and many times I've heard from you that

348it's the only time during their entire week that they feel like they can be themselves you have incredible GSA advisors right now Celia Graham Mary Kate Feeney at MMS and Laura Walsh at Psalms and as well as Beth Johnson um CHS is amazing amazing GSA advisor um and then they can all attest to how important their GSA has been for them um and as you know CHS is a year-round Club um so I just want you to know that what these GSA advisors do is really important and the impact isn't measurable um and I hope that there's a way that we can secure a fair stipend that is not dependent on attendance numbers I think it's just a responsibility to our community to have gsas accessible and I believe even the Maplewood Health Department expressed

349that they have room in their budget since this is a healthcare need as we know that disproportionately our lgbti plus uh youth are have um mental and physical health impacts so while there is a minimum of 10 students to be in attendance for a club to remain secure and just know that CHS at one time only had a few thank you so much Kels I'm so sorry to cut you off I'm I hope thank you so much for dialing and I know you dialed in earlier today and we we missed you somehow so we really appreciate you staying staying up with us and for um coming on to to speak with us this evening thank you so much oh okay so um Dr Taylor so um just so that the board is aware a few

350years ago one action that we took to try and increase the number of home instructors was we approved every teacher in the district it used to be you had to approve just a certain amount or a list or sign up and all that so we did generic uh resolutions so that if any one student was impacted we would be able to engage with those teachers just wanted to share that that backstory with you because we are a supportive of having teachers with kids who they know the best but they're not they're not always available so again we've put that on the record um I think we lost our second caller but if they would send an email I can follow up I had a hard time following what the advocacy was for mentioning that our

351family connections is providing gsas but maybe there's a request to establish I'm sorry yeah the name looked familiar so I went into my inbox and it looks like she had sent an email back in early April I can reforward it um because I also couldn't grasp it and I got it that's great thank you I'll be happy to follow up so now uh it's the new new business portion of the meeting does anyone have new business okay great we're closing new business so now we're right we're good okay so with that I'd like to make the following motion the board of educational meet and public session on Monday June 5th 2023 at 6 30 PM in the district medium 525 Academy Street Maple New Jersey in person and utilizing an online video conference platform to

352honor retirees and celebrate staff accomplishments action will not be taken the Board of Education will meet in public session on Thursday June 22nd 2023 at 6 30 PM in the district meeting room 525 Academy Street Maple New Jersey immediately following the opening of public session the board will move to go into a closed session in the superintendent's office um immediately following a closed session the Board of Education will meet in public session estimated to be 7 30 PM in the district meeting room utilizing an online video conference platform which will include hearing of individuals the community can view the meeting by following the steps which will be listed on the agenda and action will be taken may I have a second okay uh board member Ecker all in favor that appears to be unanimous so

353Mr Burnside I would now like to make a motion to adjourn this meeting on Friday May 26th at 109 a.m um may I have a second great okay thank you all in favor yay meeting is adjourned thank you have a good morning