001To the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberties and justice for all. Welcome everyone. Pursuant to the open public meetings act, adequate notice of this meeting has been provided as follows. by having the time, date, and place of the meeting posted on the bulletin board in the administration building April 17, 2025. By sending a copy of the meeting notice to the Star Ledger newspaper and the local source on April 17, 2025 and by filing a copy with the Township of Hillside and Public Library, April 17, 2025. Roll call, please. EJ, present. Har, present. Given present. Dr. Howard present. Mr. Okai. Miss Parks present. Mr. Shapiro. Yes sir. Miss Best present. Okay. We will public only on this. Okay. We will
002go. May I have a motion to go into public comments? Is there a second? I residents are requested to state their names, addresses, and subject matter. In the event it appears the public comment portion of the meeting may exceed 15 minutes, the presiding officer may limit each statement made by participants to three minutes duration. Issues raised by members of the public may or may not be responded to by the board. All comments will be considered and a response will be forthcoming if and when appropriate. The board asks that members of the public be courteous and mindful of the rights of other individuals when speaking. Specifically, comments regarding students and employees of the board are discouraged and will not be responded to by the board. Students and employees have specific legal rights afforded by the laws
003of the state of New Jersey. The board bears no responsibility, nor will it be liable for any comments made by members of the public. Members of the public should consider their comments in light of legal rights of those affected or identified in their comments and be aware that they are legally responsible and liable for their comments. Do we have any public comments for agenda items only? If not, may I have a motion to close? Motion. All in favor? I Okay. Um, so are you doing a presentation? No executive. There's no labor. [Music] Okay, we can move on. Superintendent Glover. Good evening to members of the public. To those who are here this evening, we thank you for coming to participate and hear the 2025 20226 budget for Hillside Public Schools. What I would first before
004I begin like to say to all of our educators, those in the room and those who are watching, happy teacher appreciation week as the week of May the May the 5th through the 10th is teacher appreciation and next week is special education awareness week. So I just want to make sure we are acknowledging that and also this is mental health awareness month as we celebrate and nurses appreciation day. All these we we appreciate you all everyone but we just want to give a special shout out to those spaces. The mental health awareness month um you will see there are various notices going out to the community. Little short um just kind of mental affirmations and sometimes just things to think about as we all need to protect our metal protect our mental space. And as
005someone said to me recently, protect your peace. And speaking of protecting our peace, I want to just before we get into the details of our budget and Dr. Iikenhost will jump in. So this will be a dual presentation at different points in time. I want to let everyone in the community know that this was a year across the state of New Jersey where we had to make a lot of tough tough decisions. We had to make decisions that we know are going to impact the long-term programs that we have set forth. However, our goal here was to make sure that we put forth a budget that was sound, that was reflective of the the mission and vision of our district and also kept our students on the right path for postsecary success. There's some there
006were some some tough decisions we had to make and we had a lot of back and forth with the New Jersey Department of Education who I want to publicly say thank you for their support, especially our county superintendent and our county a new county business administrator. But with that being said, we hope that we're putting forth a budget that's reflective of the expectations of the superintendency and the expectation of our community. I'm going to jump right into the budgeting process so that we're all on the same page. The 202526 budgeting process. I will not read everything line by line, but I want to be clear that we really begin looking at the budget like we start looking at next year's budget right now. So, and when I say next year, excuse me, I mean 26,27.
007That's where we're already thinking because sustainability of anything you bring into your district has to be of the utmost utmost importance. Dr. Iikenol and myself began in December of 2024 and through the month of February 2000, that should be 2025, I apologize. We began looking and taking a hard look at some of those spaces that needed adjustments. We continue having conversations with our school level principles in January and February of this year. It's important to note that the school-based budgets were derived by conversations with the principles, recommendations by the principles, and then sometimes tough conversations where we need to make adjustments. The budget review process also took place simultaneously with the directors of each respective department, curriculum and instruction, student support services, etc. to make sure that they too began to examine spaces where we
008could grow and where we may have to make adjustments and cut. We took a look at our grant-f funed programs. Hillside prior to a couple days ago could proudly sit here and say that we have received in excess of $1.5 million in but grants both federal and state. Um those grants have allowed us to bring forth mental health programs to have our students engage in a variety of STEM activities. The list goes on and on. And we were one of those districts that was proud to say that we were using our grant funds in the correct manner. Those grant funds, although not into not included in your general budget, they do aid and allow us to make the um additions to programs and activities that support our instructional activities. We were we presented our preliminary
009budget to a finance committee on March 24th. we had to submit to our county office a little sooner than this, but at our March board meeting, we voted on approving our first budget. Due to some changes, some unforeseen changes and some some adjustments that were required of us by the county superintendent's office. We had to have another special election on April 23rd of 2025. And then that brings us to tonight where the public as well as the board gets to ask the questions in regards to our budget and our fiscal stability. The fund descriptions this again will be available um but it speaks to how we have to allocate our res resources and the descriptions of each fund that it comes from. We have fund 10, 11, 12, 20, 30, 60, and 90. Department of
010Education, state of New Jersey, bases base your funding primarily on your per pupil allocation, the number of students enrolled in your district. October 15th of every year and across the state of New Jersey is an important date because that's the date where your rosters are certified and that's the number of students that you will be funded for in the subsequent years. Approximately 350 certificated staff are in our district and roughly 287 although that number is a little higher and that's because because that's inclusive of substitute teachers um non-certificated staff operate in our district. That does not include necessarily our part-time employees or our tutors who are part-time, but that definitely captures the health of our district. I will say this and then Dr. Iikenhost may add to this. To date, we have not had to
011do a reduction in force. We have not rifted any any members in any collectively bargain unit, nor have we talked about a reduction in force of unaffiliated non-aligned folks. And that speaks volumes when especially when you see what's happening across the state of New Jersey. The enrollment trends is something that um concerns me and you'll see in comparison to previous years. While we are still over 3,000 students, we have seen a reduction in some spaces. We have a plan of action to address this, but I want you just to point out our enrollment of where we're at right now. Um, our two largest schools in our district is our early childhood building, AP Morris Early Childhood Center and our high school. AP Morris has a little over 618 students. down this year in compared to
012previous years where we were closer to 700 and our high school numbers and this is as of the October 15th count. So we've had some fluctuation and increasing in our numbers but we're around 900 students. Those two spaces definitely concern me because I know the importance of um early childhood programs and I know our high school programs are definitely improving and I'm curious to know where our students are leaving and going to. We have seen an increase in our students attending private schools. parent choices is their choice, but we have seen an increase in our students leaving our district in some spaces. However, they are coming back and I will I'm proud to say if you look at our early elementary grade levels, Deanna Taylor, Herd and Looker and Ola Edwards, there has been an
013increase in student population compared to last year. Same can be said for W. Last year, they were just a little under 300. As you can see, there's an increase in number of students attending there. Again, it's important to highlight that our enrollment trends are different, but this graph really depicts how Hillside looks. And a lot of this has to do with property values. A lot of this has to do with the changing in demographics of your community. Something that's beyond the district's control because it's hard to recruit when folks may be fleeing to other spaces. But I just want you to see the shift in enrollment that has occurred in our district over the last decade. Share sharetime students are students who go to our vocational. They spend half their day in the high school
014and then they spend another half of the time at the county vocational. What I appreciate this is they're still our students. They're not full-time vocational. So we have several students who um take advantage of that opportunity for postsecary activities. So this is somewhat of a a a blessing and a positive and then sometimes like a challenge. We receive funding based on the number of students who receive special education services, but you also want to see your numbers going down because it speaks to students who may be transitioning out of special education services or our programs are doing better. Um, so you can see that we have gone from at our height 519 students in the year of 201920 prior to my time being here to where we're now around 454 students. We understand that number
015can change but that also speaks to the reduction in resources that may have to go there. However, the needs and the and of the students still are the primary reason why we may have to have certain teachers and resources available. Occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech are just some of the examples. But those costs to to educate have also gone up. So while the numbers of students receiving special education services may have gone down, the cost transportation, healthc care related services has actually gone up. Our enrollment in charter schools now this is one that I'm happy we can show this slide as compared to the slide that the department wanted us to show at one point in time. We only we only have but we have 98 students who are attending charter schools. We have 11
016students currently who have applied to go to charter, but many of those are folks who may not live in Hillside currently or may not have ever even stepped foot into our our district. We have a partner, we're about to partner with an agency that's going to help to re recoup some of these students and bring them back into our district. Um, and that would bring some savings as we can get at least five of those students back. it would bring back approximately um about $80,000 into back into our district. So just sharing with you that it's important to make sure that our students are staying with us to show you about our students who live in Hillside and looks like we have students coming back even though our patterns of enrollment are changing. In 2023
01724 approximately 96 students went to vocational schools. 50 students students chose a choice program outside of our district. The state facility are students who are beyond our control. Happy to say this current school year 70 of our students are in vocational programs and 48 students are in choice. So we went from a total of 152 students down to 119 students who are now attending school elsewhere. That's money coming back into our district. That will be accounted for as we move forward in our budget. Our revenue stream is as follows. Local tax levy, state aid, and federal education funding. As many of you are aware, state aid across the state of New Jersey has been reduced. Hillside did not receive the state has received in the past. In fact, we were reduced by approximately one $1.1
018million. And recently, due to the changes in our federal government and the president's executive orders, we just found out that we also are losing one of our significant grants, our grant around mental health, which was our 1.25 million grant. And we had another two two and a half years left in that grant. And it looks like we will be losing that about $500,000 over the next two that specifically address mental health. There were some cuts to preschool as well. So we are going to see some changes in the way our federal funding looks. To quickly talk about the federal space. We have yet to receive our final allocations for title 1, 2, 3, and four. Um we don't know what the federal government is going to do when it comes to those grants as of
019yet. Those title funds, excuse me, not grants. I want to just show you how our operating budget has adjusted over the last four years, five years, our proposed budget for 2526. But just as you can see in 2122 where we are operating around $56 million about $57 million to where we're at today and there's a variety of reasons associated with which we'll be able to discuss further if questions are asked, but it's speaks to a healthy growth of our district. It also speaks to an infusion of resources and funds, but our revenue streams, right? Um you you can just see how we've had to make adjustments and our revenue streams this year are impacted due to the cuts that were given to us by the Department of Education and other spaces. And for those in
020the community who are asking the question, well, you're raising our taxes or you're doing these things. I'm going to show you what happens with the tax increase that comes from many of our districts that look like us and our size. Hillside public schools this year will need to levy a 2% tax increase. We could have gone much higher. Dr. Iikenhost and I had a conversation with the board board president and and the finance committee and we just knew it wasn't going to be the right time, but we could have gone much higher. This was a year that the Department of Education and the governor's office said you you have the ability to raise the cap higher than 2%. If we had raised it higher than 2%, we knew the impact it would have on our
021homeowners. What is the impact that it is having? It is approximately $620,000 coming back into our budget. $620,000. What does $620,000 really mean for our district? Over the 3,000 students that we have, it's approximately $200 per child. I'm going to be quite candid. That's the equivalent of a Chromebook. So, you may say, "Well, I don't have children in the district." I understand. I understand the impact, but for us, the $620,000 does not move the needle significantly to cover the difference in what we lost in state aid. Again, we lost 1.1 million. The cost of everything else that's associated with this budget continue to rise. And so therefore, it's important that we understand although we raise the taxes and you'll see in the line where it says local tax levy, we remain consistent for three years
022consecutively. Raise the taxes once in the six seven years that in the last six or seven years and this is the first time we've raised it. So in the course of of a 8year period of time is two times twice it will have raised and we've only this will only give us $620,000 additional in our in our budget. Therefore, the total raised from local sources is $32 million revenues from state aid. This is essential to see and note 202526 we saw a reduction in transportation aid. Transportation costs go up. categor categorical special education aid. We went up about $100,000. Equalization aid, we lost $1 million security aid, and we've made additions and upgrades to our security systems, and we had we had plans on doing even more. We saw little less than $100,000 decrease there
023as well. Compared to TW 2024, 2025, you can tell that we went from a 38 approximately a $39 million budget, excuse me, revenue down to a $37.7 million revenue. I'll pause there for a second. Dr. Akenos, anything you want to add for that section? No, it is important to point out that that transportation has been ba basically flat going back 2122, even going before that. My start is 1920 here. And if costs have doubled and our field trips have been more picked up by the board of education rather than the burden to our families, you can only imagine how that hasn't made a dent in those costs. Not a dent. And then the fact that equalization aid which is supposed to level the playing field for our district with the other districts in the state
024for that to go down and you've noted in the operating budget side that we go up at least $3 million in our expenditures. That's without really any kind of fluff or excess at all. It cost $3 million more from one year to the next to carry our increases for our staff and things like that. Supplies and and technology cost that much more. So, it was a $4 million swing between going up three as we should have and going down one as we did in state aid. That's what we've been wrestling with for about eight weeks now. Thank you. Revenues from state aid, preschool. So, there's carryover money that we've had in our budget. So, our carryover, but we did we did lose 25% of the carryover. preschool education aid. We we we lost about a
025we lost significantly there. Also, it's really about $150,000. Total revenue, you can see we went from 6 million 6.6 million to 5.5 million in this space as well and we still have to make up for it. So, when losing doesn't mean you just get rid of. You still have to account for that in your work and your budget. Remember what I led with? We didn't riff. We didn't reduction in force and we didn't do any um reduction in unaffiliated and that's because it would be a challenge because we still need those position in those people in order to run our programs. Revenues from federal sources. I won't go through that. Remember I said that we're doing projections for 2526 for our title funds because we do not have the final federal numbers as of yet.
026But it just gives you also an idea to say we are close in line but these are projections when it comes to the federal space. We have to account for how we've used these resources and we have a laundry list of things that we have can share with the public. I won't go line by line but I want to just make sure everyone understands what you're getting for the budget that we put forth. our continued investment in visual performing arts, our continued investment in STEM, our continued investment in our summermies, which we asking folks to register for now, making sure that we close the gaps for those students who still may be struggling learners as well as those who are gifted and talented and need to be accelerated. We've made some we've noticed and if
027you look at our our assessment data we know we still struggle in area of mathematics and by increasing our resources and these language arts literacy and math we hope that by the year 2627 we can definitely show the fruits of our labor. We know we need to make sure our students stay engaged. We have forthd a proposal for a dynamic esports arena that speaks about culinary arts, speaks about design, speaks about engineering, and it speaks about the sports space. So hopefully we will not lose that. We will continue to invest in our middle school programs as well as our high school programs. And I'm proud to say we continue to expand our ESL and bilingual services for those students who are newcomers to our community. With the reduction in our mental health grant, as I
028just stated, we will work diligently to see how we can supplement that, but it's going to be a challenge. We have social workers in every building. We have programs and resources such as Thrive and other thirdparty vendors who are working with our children, giving in school counseling. We're talking about mental health. We're talking about substance abuse. We're talking about those students who are going through depression. These are resources they can actually activate in school and not have to pay money outside. Again, parents, $200 per child. The co-pay alone would probably eat up that if you had to go out and find a service, but we also can make it happen much quicker than you going through the rolodex of providers that you may have to with your insurance. There are some operations uh some improvements
029we want to make. heard in Looker Elementary School edition. We're still moving forward with that. We we we've committed to that. We've committed to making sure that our buildings meet ADA compliance. The HVAC system where we get air conditioning and our auditorium which could then become a money generator for us if we do programs. And then our esports arena, we're going to still continue to see that is. And if you haven't seen our new fleet of buses and transportation in the district, we're going to make sure that we um address that as well. continue to address that as well. Excuse me. I'm happy to say that we have really stabilized our workforce and our workforce, we do not have as many teachers leaving our district, but we have great teachers coming into our district. So,
030the one thing I can say is that our recruitment efforts have worked. Our retention efforts are working. Outside of those folks who are retiring and going on to enjoy their their golden years, our teachers are staying, but there's still a challenge in the areas of chemistry, math, biology, those hard to fill areas. Um, but that doesn't stop us from looking. We have a great partnership with our university higher ed spaces, and we will continue that, but that does cause money to recruit and our partnerships have expanded. We are now in in conversation with Apple Education to um strengthen our five through 8 our fifth grade through 8th grade learning opportunities. We have a partnership with Lumi which we're going to have a competition and showcase coming up in about four weeks. And so those opportunities
031for our students also put them on the track for much greater higher ed and post-secary career and college options. I know I would be remiss and I'm gonna let Doc because I think he may have the number. Um the average cost to a homeowner with the 2% increase and being that it's so low and we don't know all the assessed values and some homes have been reassessed recently. So docy if you do have that number or we can talk about it. The number that came from our attorney was $7 a month for the average home. that you have to take into consideration what the average equalized value is for the homes across Hillside which I'm sure they do vary to some degree but that would be the equivalent of about 80 some odd dollars a
032year I'm sure each and every but person would not feel the same effect because everyone's home is of a different value but I can't stress enough in the seven years that I've been here the four years that Mr. Glover's been here to have two increases and to let you know that the state wasn't happy with the fact that we weren't increasing our local tax levy. It shows up in the schedules for our budget that they want the local to bear some of the burden of the increases to run the school district, not just on the back of the state. So that that amount of money, I'm not going to say it's moderate. I'm not going to say it's modest. I'm just going to say that's what it is. That was the calculation that came up
033from the equalized value of the town. The reassessment is going through now. That would change, but we don't have that information. Board President and board members, I want to thank you for allowing Dr. Ianos 9 to present this year's 202526 budget. And we now are prepared to ask ask any questions, answer any questions. Excuse me. Any questions? the um the amount that you quoted per household is that per 100,000 or is that no that's based on what the actual value is that house at that average value which I don't know what that value was considered that average household value is going to go up $7 a month. Okay. All right. Thank you. It used to be quoted as $100,000 in value. Any other questions? not fully having all the information. I grant that, but in
034terms of sustainability, where do we look now? I know we have enough to get through this year, but moving forward. Can you just give a shed a little light on that? It's very hard to predict long range for a school district. We we've tried and we've tried and Mr. Glover has a strategic plan he's putting together, but with the variables that comes from the state, the variance that arrives from the state, it would be very difficult because if we had planned next year, way back last fall, we would never have said in our planning that we would be receiving a million dollar reduction in state aid. That wouldn't have been the plan. You always go by history. And by history, we would have assumed it would have went up around $3 million as it had
035for the entire period of time that both of us have worked here. So it would have been off. So we don't know. Should state aid increases go back to where they were after this year. It'll be a much smoother ride into the future. Hope I would I will add that what we have done. So when Dr. I canos stated that you're talking about a $4 million shift. We went back and we sunset several programs that needed to be sunset. There were some positions that maybe didn't need to be filled that we said, "All right, we'll still hold off or we'll just remove them from our position control roster." Um, we began to look at how to basically reduce the footprint of particular vendors that may be in our district currently. Um, we didn't have just
036$4 million of fluff sitting around. We also had to pull it from other components um, within the district. We had to put it from um, some of those capital projects that we really were excited about doing. As I said, esports has been put on hold, but we're trying to find some philanthropic support for that. We understand that we have a healthy technology space. However, we're not going to be able to add like we have in the past. So, we've we've kind of foregone in that as well. Um, our primary goal was not to impact instruction to a point where teachers felt the pinch. Teachers will still have the ability to get the supplies they need. We're not going to impact the teaching and learning environment. And we're not going to have class sizes that are
037dramatically larger. When I say dramatically larger, outside of a few in the high school, we won't have elementary school students sitting 30 to a classroom. They won't even be 25 to a classroom in most cases. Maybe a handful here and there. Are we able are we able to quantify what the um total value of those opportunities where you found to do some reductions are in dollars? Yeah. If we without having every individual list, it came to about $2 million that we we cut we we we we cut about two million Dr. Ignos and then we went into some of our reserve and looked at what we could do from that our carryover money, but it was about $2 million that we quantified to stay out of the classroom. Capital projects are feeling it. We typically
038would throw out enough money from what's left. We are still in a healthy position for this current year that we may have some money left over at the end of the year and that would be a tremendous relief to us. But we typically would move about a million and a half dollars into capital reserve to do the building projects. Many of which you can't see. Uh David has a schedule back there of the windows that need to replacement, the roof issues and things like that. You see the classrooms are constantly being updated throughout the district. um that had to be cretailed because it was much more important about the educational processes within the classroom than the actual infrastructure. We've been very lucky to address that infrastructure for seven years now. We also froze spending at
039the school level in December. So, our school leaders knew that in order to get items approved for um purchase, they had to come through Dr. Iikos and myself. different than we've done in the past. So, that made teachers have to teach, excuse me, school leaders have to be a little more conscious of how they were allocating and purchasing certain things. We've we've streamlined a lot where it used to be kind of a free-for-all in some spaces where somebody might order an Apple laptop just for the building. And so, we've really curtailed that. And I will also share this, our infrastructure, our networking and our technology infrastructure because it's gotten better, it's also saved us money. We're seeing a cost there savings. We're about to switch to a a phone system that's going to save us
040about $25,000 a year. So, we've also found savings in some other spaces just because of better technology and better warranties and an internal networker rather than an outsourced service. That saved us some money, too. Any further questions? If not, I would just like to let Superintendent Glover and do Dr. Dr. Akenhol know that you've done a remarkable job. I know it's it was very challenging during this budget season. Um and it's always difficult when we say we have to increase um our taxes no matter what the amount is. But I know that you both have done a great job looking at the numbers line by line and just ensuring that we still have our teachers that are you know we don't have any reduction in force. we we still um have most of our programs
041that we you know that we've been utilizing. So, it's just a tight situation, but I just want to applaud you both just for your due diligence during this process. Thank you. Okay. Um so, I would like to ask member Hargrave to please move the finance agenda. I move the finance agenda. Is there a second? Second seg. Yes. Miss Hargrave. Yes. Miss Horton Given. Yes. Dr. Howard. Yes. Mr. Okai. Yes. Miss Parks. Yes. Mr. Shapiro. Miss Best. Yes. Thank you all. Thank you. Um I think we are all before we leave just wanted to wish Dr. E, Mr. Dave Dlory, and although Christian Estraa is not here, a belated happy birthday. Their birthday was this past Monday. Happy birthday. We wish you all well. Um with that said, I will have a ask for a motion
042to adjourn. Motion. All in favor and happy Mother's Day to everyone. All the mothers. Have a blessed night everyone.