001Okay, statement is hereby made that adequate notice of this meeting was given by the prominent posting of said notice in all district schools and other public places, the mail and gander hand delivery of said notice to the designated newspapers, the Asbury Park Press, and the Manalphin Patch, finally with the clerk of Manalphin Township and the clerk of English Town Borough. Just please call the roll. Mrs. Campo? Mr. Capric? Here. Mr. Ferber? Here. Mrs. Her? Here. Mr. Gain? Here. Mrs. Luther? Here. Mrs. Lucas? On her way. Okay. Mrs. Parisi? Here. Mr. Singer? Here. And Mr. Tostetti? Here. We have a quorum. Please rise for the flag salute. Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Good evening, everyone. Okay, we are jumping right into public comment. If anyone in the audience would like
002to come up to the podium and speak, now would be your opportunity. You can speak on any topic you would like. You have three minutes. Feel free. And please just announce, if you come up, just introduce yourself, your name, and just your street that you live on. During this time, I'd just like to take a second and introduce two hopefully new staff members that are on the agenda tonight. Erica Goldberg, who's here, she's going to be, she's on the agenda for the kindergarten position at the ELC, and Elizabeth Parker, who is on the agenda for the math position at MEMS. Thank you for coming tonight. It's always great when you can put a face to a name. All right. Last call for public comments. And if anyone would like to come up, going once, going
003twice, and public comments is closed. All right. We will jump into our action portion of the meeting, starting with our business items. Can I have a motion and a second on business items one and two, please? Jamie, anyone else? And Mr. Caput, thank you. Any questions, guys? Mrs. Campo? Yes. Mr. Caput? Yes. Mr. Ferber? Yes. Mr. Ferber? Yes. Mr. Cain? Yes. Mrs. Parisi? Yes. Mr. Singer? Yes. Mr. Tosetti? Motion passes. Thank you. Can I have a motion and a second, please, on personnel items D1 through D10? Mr. Singer and Mrs. Parisi, any questions? No questions. Mr. Caput? Yes. Mr. Ferber? Yes. Mrs. Her? Yes. Mr. Cain? Yes. Mrs. Parisi? Yes. Mr. Singer? Yes. Mr. Tosetti? Yes. And Mrs. Campo? Yes. Motion passes. Thank you. All right. We are... That concludes our action items. We are
004going to jump into our presentations for the evening. I believe first up is Mr. Marco, who's going to go over our response to intervention program. Ms. DeMarco is... Her title is supervisor of special projects due to the state regulations on how to be a single project. But can I assure you that Ms. DeMarco has a lot of projects. Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me tonight. I'm going to share an overview of the New Jersey Tear System of Support, NJTSS, and how it's implemented in Menilb and Ingleshtown regional schools. NJTSS is built on high quality learning environments, evidence-based core instruction, and targeted teaching that's driven by frequent universal screening and progress monitoring. Multiple convergent data points and collaborative problem-solving teams ensure that academic and behavioral needs are identified early and addressed systematically. Our system is
005sustained through ongoing staff, professional development, coaching, and PLCs supported by strong district and school-level leadership, family engagement, clear communication and proactive positive school climate create the conditions for improved student outcomes. Response to intervention, RTI, is a framework we use to match students with appropriate levels of academic support within NJTSS. RTI allows us to adjust instruction and interventions based on how the students respond over time. The NJTSS model uses three tiers of support that increase in intensity over time based on student need. Most students succeed with high quality tier one instruction while a smaller group receives tier two and tier three interventions as the data indicate. Tier one is the foundation where classroom teachers implement New Jersey student learning standards using research-based, differentiated, and explicit instruction. Teachers use ongoing assessment data to scaffold learning, provide feedback,
006and monitor progress so that all students can access grade level curriculum. Tier two is more needs-based learning. It adds targeted small group interventions for students who need additional support beyond tier one. Progress is monitored more frequently. Students are typically provided services in pull-out groups three out of a six-day cycle. As you probably know by now, tier one is continuous throughout the RTI process, even if you're receiving tier two or tier three, you are still getting tier one. Tier three is more intensive and individualized learning. It provides the most individualized support, including in-depth assessment, daily progress monitoring, and use of tools such as ECCBM. Students receive high intensity, one-on-one interventions tailored to their specific needs, typically five days within a six-day cycle. Our NJTSS structure is organized as schedules, staffing, and processes so that students move
007fluidly between the tiers as their data changes. The structure ensures that school-based teams can respond quickly and consistently when students need more or less support. We operate on two RTI semesters with midpoint checks, and teachers can request support for struggling students at any time. Data scans after winter and spring assessments flag students using at least three data points in reading and math, and all tier decisions are made in conjunction with the problem-solving model. Here's an example of what a data scan might look like. It illustrates how multiple benchmark and classroom data points are used to determine supports for students. The scan is a red flag for struggling students. Tiered intervention supports are always determined in conjunction with the problem-solving model. The problem-solving process provides a structured way for teams to analyze why a student is
008struggling and to design targeted interventions. When a student is not making expected progress in tier one, teachers can submit a problem-solving team referral so that a multidisciplinary team can review the case. The team identifies the problem, analyzes underlying causes, implements an intervention plan, and evaluates effectiveness to guide future educational decisions. Our MERS RTI funnel shows that all students begin with tier one instruction and receive tier two, three supports as needed. The process is cyclical. In 2024, 2025, 860 students received tier one only, 418 received reading tier two, and 73 received reading tier three. All 625 received math RTI tier one only, 237 received math RTI tier two, and six, that's a six, it looks a little like a zero from here, but it's a six, math RTI students received tier three. I'm going to pull
009up an example of an RTI plan to give you a sense of what it looks like. The RTI plan is a concrete example of how tier three support is individualized for a single student, specifying goals, evidence-based interventions, and the exact schedule for delivery and progress monitoring. It documents baseline data, targeted skills such as phonological awareness, decoding, fluency, comprehension for reading, foundational skills, problem-solving skills for math. It provides clear criteria for success so that staff can make data-based decisions about whether to continue intensity or fade interventions. This is our fidelity chart to ensure that students have enough opportunities to receive instruction so that determinations regarding the response to that instruction can be evaluated. Movement data shows that most students across all three tiers either stayed in their tier for an additional intervention round or moved to
010a lower tier with very few requiring CSU and just some key takeaways and updates. Overall, about 44% of students moved down to tier. 39% of students remained in the same tier for an additional intervention round. 17% of students did move up a tier, and about 1.5% of students were referred to the CST from tier three. The slide also includes a sample, sorry, we reviewed an alternate problem-solving model platform, and in doing so, we were able to review our own problem-solving model process and found it to be very efficient for our classroom teachers and interventionists while maintaining our own key RTI plan components. Additionally, we are working with Novamat in our math RTI department to strengthen student conceptual understanding, and we are currently updating our intervention plans to align with their lesson progressions for round two.
011Thank you for your continued support of NJTSS and RTI to help us work to meet the academic needs of our students of Monalagin. Any questions? I had a quick question for you. I know the lights are out, so it's hard to see who's talking. I'm just curious, I don't know what made me think of this when I was just watching, but do we track at all, like let's say a kid who was in third grade and they received RTI and they moved down a tier. Do we track them in fourth grade to see, like every year, are they able to stay out of RTI? Do they wind up going back in and up and down throughout the grades? In Genesis, we do flag if they are in a tier and what tier that is and
012what domain that is. So we are able to go back into Genesis to see historical data in terms of what they're – if they were in a tier. I'm actually going to add to that. I pull an annual report that Kim is referencing and I extract that data so we can see. That's actually how we identify for summer school eligibility and also for some state reporting. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Can I just ask a question? I've always been curious, what is the usual timeline for a student to like move through the RTI process? Like from when they're identified all the way up to whatever level they may need? Like is it very fast or is it like they go into tier one, they have to stay there for a period of time
013before they go to tier two? I'm just not that all familiar with this. I feel like I learn something new every year from it. It varies. Sorry. I have a special ed department behind me and they will tell you that there's a couple things. The law wants you to provide interventions but it also wants to make sure that you don't delay a referral if you suspect a disability. So it does vary for students, you know, typically our rounds are one semester so if the child is, if there's no suspicion, if there's no disability suspected and we are thinking that we can remediate the child, right, they might go through one tier per semester but we are always coming together with that multidisciplinary team and if someone does determine that they suspect a disability, then we
014don't delay that referral and we wouldn't make sure that they went through the whole process. They don't have to go to tier three but as long as we are expecting that we can remediate, they may go to tier three. Does that make sense? Yes, I think so. So can they move through more than one tier in one semester, as you call it, or is it every... They can. They can. Okay. So just to clarify, your calendar for semesters, September through end of January, mid-February through end of May are what constitutes our semesters and as Kim has been explaining to you, the problem solving model is discussion based as well where the data is also evaluated beyond her data scans so that can also prompt changes to a tier. So I just want to elaborate on
015that. I think the most amazing part of our whole RTI process is the problem solving model and the problem solving team. Can you just explain a little bit more for the board of how often the problem solving team meets, what they do, who makes it to problem solving, how they make it to problem solving because I do really believe that that is what has made our program so successful and it's our ability to have multiple people in the district that are specialists truly understand each individual child. So tier one, I'm going to start with tier one and just go to the problem, I'll start with tier one. Problem solving. So problem solving is made up of the administration, the specialist in the building, RTI guidance, ESL, the CST, speech and language therapist and so you
016have sort of this, you have this multidisciplinary team looking at children who are struggling, trying to identify what the struggle is and we can obtain some data through observations or informal assessment or just through the scan to sort of identify where that deficit is and address it through early intervention and in doing so we're able to monitor to see if it's effective and if not we might add another, I would say you can go vertical or you can kind of go broadly. You could add another domain because sometimes things are not just one, not one domain, they could be multiple domains or you can increase in intensity within one domain. So that's really what the problem solving's job is to continuously, we could talk about the why, like why is a child struggling because you
017don't know what to, how to intervene unless you're able to identify the why, right? We don't want to just throw interventions at a child because that doesn't, that's not going to help, you have to really dig down to find out why they're struggling and then that targeted intervention and kind of going back to your previous question about the time frame, I also think that it depends on what the goal is because if you look at the research, some of the goals like maybe phonological awareness, like they, the research shows that remediation can happen quite quickly whereas if you have goals like comprehension, they might take a little longer which is actually why we built out that whole semester of intervention because it could take about 16 weeks to remediate. So we want to give the
018student time to get the instruction and remediate. And Kim, how does a child get recommended for problem solving? Sorry, they, if the tier one is not effective, then the teachers can fill out their problem solving team referral form and the child comes onto the agenda and the team will discuss the teacher's concerns as well as the data that we have to identify where to intervene. And I think it's important to go to Jamie's question back. You ask about how it's followed up. The problem solving teams have a lead. Sometimes it's the assistant principal, sometimes it's the principal, sometimes it's another designated staff member on that team. They maintain folders for each child electronically. And minutes. So they are following a child's progress and they can look back year to year as well through those notes.
019So if a child was exited but happens to get re-referred, they can go back to see the history for that individual child. So not only is it just a student name with a tier in Genesis, but there's notes and comprehensive records. That's actually what we discovered through piloting a program that our current systems are actually so comprehensive and thorough that they're hard to top by using an outside system. So it's very impressive having seen it and obviously we can't share because it's confidential information that's individualized, but there are records. They're comprehensive and they're detailed. They do a nice job of maintaining that. To the point of the why, it's always easy to say my child's struggling in reading, my child's struggling in math. They need old school basic skills help. We don't call it intervention.
020My child needs to work with a teacher for math outside their classroom. The why is so essential and I think it's important that you brought that up because it's not always just math. That's what the teams sit to do. They sit to determine the underlying root cause. Is there a lack of focus? Is there a memory retention issue? If it is math, is it just a computational skill? They have to narrow it down because saying they need help in math could be so many different things. We can keep throwing an intervention at a child that will never work because we've never gotten to the root of a problem. That's why the problem solving team, as Kim has explained, is so essential and that's what sets this district apart from many others. I was going to
021ask, is there regular progress reports or anything like that that go out to the parents? How is that communicated back to the parents? At the beginning, whenever a child is identified for starting at a Tier 1, prior to that, there has to have been some communication, organic communication with the teacher and the parent so that the parent understands that there's a concern from the classroom teacher. Then any time a plan is created, that plan is shared with the parent, whatever tier it is. Then we, at least at the end of the round, we share the plan back with the parent with the progress monitoring data, the fidelity chart, all of it completed, all of the assessment data that's in there. We share that whole plan back with them so they are aware. At certain points,
022we also invite them, like for Tier 3 students, we also invite them in for meetings at the midpoint if they're not making the expected progress so we do have constant communication. I also remember that I forgot to mention how often the problem-solving team meets about once every other week. About every other week because it's once in the six-day cycle. I know some schools might say F-Day is our problem-solving day or B-Day on the B-Day rotation. They're meeting frequently. Based on the foundations of this strategy. Students that are in Tier 3, they actually do have a home component. Our Tier 3 interventionists spend time with the parent to determine something that's feasible for them to participate in at home. Again, when a child reaches Tier 3, it's all hands on deck. We do try to bring
023the parent in and they certainly have that collaboration with the interventionist to determine what kind of intervention they're comfortable doing at home and can be feasible. So during Tier 1 and 2, that doesn't occur? Not in terms of determining the intervention, no. I think David also to add to that, it's purposely data-driven because we have to come up with an evidence-based strategy that can support that. So there's a lot of research that's happening through the collaborative process with the teachers at least to make sure that the strategy that's being used for the intervention plan is effective. Kim, I think what he's asking is what data do you use? Is it a child not doing homework? Could that get them into RTI? That's what you're asking. So there's a couple things. A teacher could certainly make
024a request for support based on, that would be the outward signs, but really that would just indicate maybe something deeper like lack of motivation or depression. A student that's not performing anything. So the intervention wouldn't necessarily be do your homework. It might be something, again, going back to the why. Why are you not doing your homework? And of course in that case, there would have to be some kind of conversations with the home. But in terms of the data scan, that's not a data point. It's benchmarks that we use. But again, because teachers can request for support for any kind of behaviors, that's really what those are. Those are behaviors. Not doing your homework or, I forgot what the other example you used. But that would be a behavioral concern. I think to Kim's point,
025that's important to recognize. There is different elements of the intervention process. There's math intervention, reading intervention, behavioral interventions. There's pieces outside what Kim does that overlap with what Andrew might work with for special education. And he can more than likely be bringing that up later during his presentation with Ms. Petillo. But for the purpose of the data scans for reading and math, those are based off different assessments. Because you can have a child, I know from personal experience, who doesn't like to do their homework and may not easily do homework, but can very well perform and can intrinsically have that motivation and do well on a test. And then you can have homework impact a grade very differently, which is why when we do grades, it's very different. We're looking at the actual skills. We
026have standard-based report cards at K-5 for a very particular reason, because we're looking at their progress on the academic indicator. There's other characteristics, right? Homework is organizational, behavioral. They're different pieces. But for the purpose of providing a math or reading intervention, it's very much based off skill and performance based on the evidence with data. Does that help answer? A couple questions. Well, first, thank you for being here tonight and presenting to us. It's great to hear that from a student journey perspective when someone exits and they potentially get reclassified later that we're tracking that in Genesis. I'm curious, once somebody exits though, is there any support we offer them in the near term once they've exit to ensure that they don't potentially need intervention in the near or short term? So again, we have the
027three tiers. So if somebody exits completely, it's likely that they exited already from tier one. So it's very unlikely that somebody's never going to exit from three to zero. Zero would be just core instruction without even that tier one plan. So it sort of faded out. It scaffolded out. So they go from three to two to one and then they exit out. There's just the great explicit core instruction that our teachers provide, but there's always that if they are still struggling, they can still be re-referred for support. I know you had showed the, I think it was 2024, 2025 data in terms of tiers of intervention. How does that trend with prior years? And I know that the raw numbers are probably reflective of the overall student population, but percentage base, is it trending in
028a way that we want it to or is it going up, down? So I did look at last year's numbers and they are very similar. I think that our students, again, they are either moving down in tier or they are there for another additional round within that same tier. We definitely have more students that are moving in the right direction than needing to move up a tier in intensity. So it's similar. Thank you. Thank you. I want to give a little historical data and I think the year, if I go back, was around 2013 with our former superintendent. We were looking at our NJSLA data and we were consistently seeing that we hovered around 30 percent of students who were not at the meets or exceeds. And that was one of the reasons we transitioned
029to this model, because we knew there was, we called it a bottom 30 who was in the approaching, in the partially meets and the not meeting that we needed to do something different for. That's how this actually evolved. Kim's been in multiple roles in the district prior to being in the supervisory role that helped this to evolve. And looking at the data and the points that we now have for the data scans are all developed with intent to help. And whether the numbers go up, go down, remain consistent, we know we have a very targeted and specific audience because we don't want to just throw everybody to a referral because that may not be what they need either. And we also know that sometimes things have to look different and that's why this process is
030as comprehensive as it is. It's never a one size fits all package either and we know that. And Kim is constantly making updates in collaboration with her team and the other administrators throughout the district to continuously help this evolve. So we thank her for that. Thank you. And I think, if I may, just one more thing to add to your question is the data that we use for the scan, which we use as our red flags for struggling students, is based on district means. So if you're always using the mean, you sort of always have that same population. We're looking at one standard deviation below the mean. So even if our data is going up still, we're still looking at the students that might still be struggling, which is that one standard deviation. So that's
031why the numbers are usually similar. Thank you. I want to thank you, Kim. In many districts, the RTI program is run usually by the math and the ELA supervisor. Kim was actually a child psychologist. She was also part of the special ed department. So she's very much in tune with data-driven decisions using research, and that's something she really brought to this position, was how to use data and research to model a program that follows data and research. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming out tonight. So tonight you're going to hear from the special ed department. That's comprised of myself, Gigi Petillo. We have Andrew Perez and we have Lisa Reiser. We'll briefly be talking about what we have in our department, so feel free to ask questions as we go along, because it's
032a lot of information. All right? Okay. So basically, just to give you an overview of our special education population right now today, and this number changes basically on a daily basis, if not an hourly basis, we have 685 special ed students, and that is about 14.8 percent of our total population. The state includes speech-only students, so that's actually around 16 percent, which is very good for a district this size. I know in other districts their numbers are much higher than what we have, and that is due to the programs and the supports and the continued support from the Board of Education. So we collectively, the three of us, just want to say thank you so much for all your support throughout the years. Last year we had around 660 students for special education when we
033did this presentation, and the most unique thing that we have here is that last year in the entire year, so from July 1st all the way to June 30th, we had 65 students transfer in with IEPs. Right now we've had 70 today, and we still have from tomorrow all the way till June 30th. So that's a significant number of students moving in with IEPs, and for our programs that is, it's significant. So hopefully everyone can hear me, I'm talking loud enough. All right, let's talk about our programs and services. Again, as I said, we really appreciate the continued support, the mental health clinicians, the BCBAs, the teachers, the instructional assistants that you have always supported us in. We offer a variety of programs from in-class support to resource room to special class, or better known
034as self-contained. We also have supplementary aids and supports, so we offer one-to-one. We may offer a classroom assistant to a student. We really look at what a student's individual needs are, and then we literally tailor a program wrapped around their needs. There are many times when we have a student who is in a classroom, and there are times where you will see reverse mainstreaming. You will see students that are getting a combination of a multiply disabled class as well as an LLD class, known as a learning language disability class. So we really look at the students, and we're going to dive deeper into that a little bit as we go on. The most important in our department, we have systems, and what we focus on is data collection. Data drives our recommendations, so when we
035sit with parents and we talk about IEP programs, we're basing our decisions based on what the data is telling us, which is crucial. If you go to the district website and you look under pupil personnel services, we offer parents a variety of information. Child find activities, which help parents look at if they suspect a disability for their child. This gives them some insight. We have procedures on how to refer your child for an evaluation. We have our guidance handbook, our mental health resources, and then Lisa Reiser narrated a great video in describing the programs offered in our district to our students, and that's all on our website. So great news. We have a terrific special education parent advisory group, which a shout out to Jamie Harp, who is a part of that. We have three
036people in our CPAC. Our representatives are Janine Matroni, Lisa Strom, and joining us this year is Jacqueline Velez. Every year we do at least two events. It's a fall forum and it's a spring forum, and this is an opportunity for parents to come out. They meet with the administrative team and they talk to us about their concerns, and we really look for those systemic issues. CPAC has been very busy this year, and they are also doing an additional three opportunities for parents in the area of trainings. We are going to have behavior therapy associates. They have Dr. Salzman, who will be doing a virtual training on how parents can provide support to children with anxiety, and then on April 8th they're going to be doing a training on supporting siblings of students with disabilities. Both
037were two things that came out of our fall forum, and so hopefully this is a need that parents have demonstrated to us that they would like more information. There is also on March 10th the blue envelope, and that is for if you have a child who will be of driving age soon. It basically is an envelope that you would hand over to a police officer when they're driving so the police officer understands that he's going to be, or she's going to be interacting with a student who has special needs. So that's a great opportunity for parents to participate in as well. Yeah, that's the 25th, not the 27th. It's my husband's birthday, and I just am stuck on that date. Sorry. Okay. So another great opportunity that the PPS department is in is effectively resolving
038disputes. So this was put out last year, and our district was chosen, and this is a phenomenal opportunity that we get to participate in. We will be provided a multi-year training. It's throughout the state of New Jersey, so there are two other districts that were chosen along with us, and the goal is to effectively build capacity with our child study team so when we're working with parents, we can come to a better understanding, a way to resolve parent concerns, and that's all through training through the Center for Appropriate Dispute Resolution in Special Education, and they're nationwide. So this really is a phenomenal opportunity for our district, and we were chosen for that. In the area of additional training, we have RPDA, which is our Regional Professional Development Academy, and the great news is that means
039that all of you here get to go to any training you want that RPDA offers, so please feel free. You can go on to www.rpdaacademy.org, that's for parents, board members, staff. Plenty of our staff go to RPDA. The training is excellent. I am on the board for RPDA, and I can tell you we bring in top-notch presenters, so I really encourage you. They do fill up quickly, but if you can, take the opportunity just to peruse the offerings that they have. Right now, we have 27 students that are placed in approved private schools. There are some students that are currently on hold. We are looking for placements for them. That's not too far off. From last year, we were around 25. We were able to successfully bring back three students. I have to give kudos
040to our principals, to our teaching staff, and to our case managers, because they all work very hard every year in transitioning students who were once placed out of district because we did not have the program or the right supports that the particular child needed, and we were able to return them. One student came back to kindergarten, another student came back to sixth grade, and one student came back to the middle school, seventh grade. It's a big deal for those parents, for those students to be with their peers, and it's a great thing that we're able to achieve every single year. I talked about systems early on. Our goal as administrators in the Pupil Personnel Services Department is to provide support and to build capacity. Those are the two main functions in our role that we
041really emphasize every single day. We do that by having standard operating procedures. They don't pick up the phone and say, hey, how do I do this? They go onto our table of contents for our SOPs, and that gives them detailed procedures on how to be compliant with the New Jersey Administrative Code, or IDEA. We also meet monthly with each building principal, so you have a number of PPS administrators, you have the building administration, you have the child study team when appropriate, you have the BCBAs, and you have the related service staff. BCBA is a Certified Behavior Analyst. Basically, they are certified behavior analysts that have passed a stringent exam to demonstrate that they are proficient in applied behavior analysis. Then, we have building-based meetings every single month where we review procedures, we talk about cases,
042and we deal with compliance issues. Then, branching out, we also have randomly, we review IEPs to ensure that they're compliant as well. Then, I'm going to introduce Andrew Perez. All right. I'm going to be talking a little bit about the mental health supports that we have available in our district. Like Gigi said as well, or Mrs. Petillo, feel free to stop me along the way if you have any questions. I'm happy to answer them, or I'm happy to answer them at the end as well, if needed. Some of the supports that we have in our district for mental health purposes include the school counselor, the school psychologist, the school social worker, in addition to the mental health clinicians that we have. Our school counselors serve as the anti-bullying specialists for the buildings. They're also the
043homeless liaisons for each of the buildings. They also do whole group push-in sessions once in a six-day cycle as part of our cycle rotation to provide that whole group support to students. They provide small group counseling, individual counseling, and they do tier one behavior and incentive plans as part of that RTI process that we were talking about earlier as well. Our mental health clinicians, we have three throughout the district right now, and they support students through intensive individual and group counseling. Students have to be identified through a referral process, so we created a very strict process that we have to follow throughout the district for referring these students, and the goal of that is that we're ensuring that students are receiving those tier one and two supports before getting that referral to that tier three
044mental health clinician. In addition to them being required to have their NJDOE certification, they also have to have their LPC or their LCSW, which is their Licensed Professional Counselor certification, or their Licensed Clinical Social Worker certification, and the thought behind that is really to make sure that the people that we're hiring to support those higher level needs for these students have the clinical background to support them, so we want to make sure that they have those backgrounds and interventions and counseling strategies and techniques to do so. An important thing to know about the clinician referral part is that they do require parental consent to deliver services as part of that. All right, so what's new? So with the great support from Dr. Santora, Mrs. Pipchinski, and the board, we were able to add two different
045positions. The first one is our Student Assistance Counselor, or our third counselor at MEMS, and what we did with adding that third counselor is we were really able to provide those tiered supports at the middle school level, where we were able to have the counselors do 504s and then support the seventh and eighth grade students, do all the tier two counseling, individual and group, and then we developed a referral process to getting that support through the SAC as well. Another important part that we did with adding that SAC is that we were able to have that person complete all of the investigations at MEMS to make sure that there's more consistency when we're completing those investigations versus having two different people doing them, so she does complete all of them there. With the addition of
046the Student Assistance Counselor, we were able to also create a position that's called the Mental Health Intervention and Support Coach, and this is a position where we have a coaching role for someone that has very extensive expertise in mental health, and they're able to provide that support to our staff and sort of collaborate with them to try to come up with different interventions and supports that students may need. So part of that, what it looks like, is having what we call SSI meetings, or Student Support Interventionist meetings. So this individual has these meetings once a month with each building, and the goal of those meetings is really to talk about individual needs and staff support needs that are needed within the building, and then talk about the movement between supports that we have in each
047of our buildings as it relates to mental health supports and interventions. They also attend one problem-solving meeting per month per building. They consult and train with staff, and they offer coaching for our counselors in terms of different approaches and counseling techniques that they can support through the full spectrum of supports, so from doing those behavior intervention plans that they do in tier one, all the way to supporting students individually, and they may be having some difficulty or stuck, and they support with those transitions in doing that as well. Another thing that's new is we've been working, we're in the third and final year for the Enhancing School Mental Health Services Grant through Rutgers University and the NJDOE, and the big thing that we've been developing over the last three years is the PBSIS, or a
048Positive Behavior Support in Schools program. We fully implemented it this year. We implemented it at the end of last year, and this year is the first full year of implementation. It's called the MEMS BEARS program, and essentially the goal is that we're positively reinforcing behaviors that we expect to see in students. So our staff has tickets, and everyone in the building has tickets that they hand out, and the goal of that is to really be able to reinforce those behaviors that we expect to see in students versus it being a punitive approach. Sorry. It stands for brave, encouraging, attentive, respectful, and self-aware, and I'm going to show you a little bit of that, what that looks like in the posters that we have in school. We've had incredible buy-in from staff and students, so students
049actually are walking into classrooms and asking when they can get these tickets, which is a positive thing, right, because it's not easy to implement a system-wide thing in a building. And then staff, I mean, we've had, we started with just a couple of teachers, and this year, as we started the year, we had a number of teachers just come to us and say, hey, can we join the team in putting this in place, right? So they've been having a lot of buy-in, and what we did is we strategically picked staff to be in our team that were from each community and then from each grade level so that then they can put that buy-in and share it with other teachers, and it's been very successful. The goal this year for the program is to really
050develop a comprehensive manual or a PBSIS manual for MEMS. We have some in some of our other buildings, and we want to develop something similar to that but with the support of Rutgers and then put a comprehensive thing that's shared with all staff members on a yearly basis and discussed. This is what the poster looks like. If you walk into MEMS, you'll see it all over MEMS. We really did a nice job of enlarging them and putting them all over the walls. As you walk in, you'll see the tickets. As soon as you walk into the building, you see a giant clear box of tickets, but the idea is that we want to see expected behaviors in three different areas, so in the classroom, in hallways, bathrooms, and cafeterias, so non-structured areas, and then how
051to be responsible with digital use and what we see with that. The tickets that teachers are filling out are specific, so if they're giving them a ticket for being encouraging, they select which section of encouraging they're being so that then the student knows exactly why they're receiving that, so it's specific praise for our behavior that that we're intending to see in students. Some training and procedures for our mental health staff. All of our mental health staff are trained in the Columbia Radiance Scale, and this is a radiant scale that's for students that are being identified to be at risk. They're guided questions. It's structured, and it helps us identify what level of risk we're seeing when we're having a student there. We restructured since getting the mental health clinicians to having them be the only
052individuals administering this assessment, and the purpose of that is that, again, they have the higher level of skill and training. We want to make sure that we're properly identifying students and not sending them through more trauma by sending them out for a clearance if they really don't need to go out for a clearance to return to school, so we really want to identify the right students and then put the right supports in place when they return or if they're not going out, and then our goal within the mental health department is to always be preventative as opposed to reactive, so to do that we have those push-in lessons in the classroom where we're teaching SEL skills. We have counselor-developed groups, individual counseling. Again, we have referral processes for individual and group counseling, and then we
053have also referral processes through Collier, which is another agency that we use if needed for additional counseling services in the district. If you go on a district website, you have mental health resources that are available for the community. When I developed this resource, we tiered it in terms of what is a high risk versus a moderate risk versus a low risk because we really want parents, when they're in those really hard moments of distress with their child, they should be able to identify what types of supports they need right there and then and not have to go looking for those resources, so we vetted these resources, made sure that they're reliable and able to have those supports and they're there for families to use as well. These are our counselors that we have in our
054district, so one in each school, and then we have three at the middle school, and these are our mental health clinicians. We have one that supports Wembrock, Clark, and Taylor, one that supports Pinebrook, Lafayette, Milford, and MEMS and ELC, our coach. So Dr. Campbell is our coach for the district as well. Ready? Can I just ask one question on the BEARS program? And first, thank you for presenting this information tonight. For the BEARS program, what does the staff look at in terms of measurable outcomes? So we're doing this, what are we hoping to see as a result of it? Right, so the goal of any type of PBSIS program is to really look at data and make sure that we're seeing less referrals to the main office, less suspensions, and less behavioral concerns, right? So
055the data part is complex. We did a data sweep at the beginning of putting this program in place because we're just in the first year. At the end of this year, we're going to do another data sweep and try to see where that stands, but the goal at the end of this grant is that the team that's there supporting this, and the goal is to continue having those monthly meetings with those teams, is that they are continuously doing these data reviews and then making adjustments if needed. It is the first time that it's been implemented there, so it's not something that we would see like an immediate effect, right? But the fact that we've had students asking for these tickets is a positive thing, and we're hopeful that the data is going to show that.
056Sorry, I do have another question. I just have one quick follow-up question, which was, I know that this was done in partnership with Rutgers, and every school district, of course, is different, but do they say on average when they do this with other districts what are the results that they see when these types of programs are implemented, so that way we know what we're somewhat baselining ourselves against with other districts? Well, they didn't share that with us, and the reason for that is because the program was very individualized, so some district chose to go a different route than developing a PBSIS program, right? So some districts chose to do like mental health surveying for districts and then identifying things that way, right? Or they chose to do different things. For us, we really focused on
057putting that whole school tier one plan in place to try to figure out and identify and positively reinforce those behaviors, so they wouldn't have that readily available. So with the tickets, is that for all students or just the students who are in a counseling program? For all students. For all students, and what is the reward for accumulating the tickets? Like what is their reward? There's a lot of different rewards. We have a reward menu, and it's ever-evolving. We have a lot of things that come through donations that we put those rewards, so it's anything from like gift cards or they have like activities that they do within the building that they would want to do, but our goal is to continue to grow those, right? So just recently, we did like a partnership with, I
058believe it was Chipotle, but in the sense that we, you know, got a certain amount of money that if parents went there to buy, they would bring back, I think they've made like six or seven hundred dollars for that, and the goal is to continue doing these things so that we can bring in more revenue, so that we can put more things in place, because one of our goals for doing this is going to be to put a larger incentive plan at the end of the year, so if students want to at the end of every quarter, because a year is a long span for a student to hold onto tickets, right? So at the end of every quarter is to have a large incentive plan to have them really want to work towards that,
059towards those things. So as you collect the data, I know it's a new program throughout the year, so at the end of the year, are you going to be able to disaggregate the data as to, I mean, is it just the students who are complying who are asking for the tickets, or the students who are having behavioral issues and referrals, are they not able to achieve those tickets, are you going to follow the data in that aspect to say is it just the students who comply who are consistently receiving the rewards, and if not, if the students who are in counseling and not able to get to that point to receive the rewards, is there going to be a backup plan for that? So our goal and the goal with this plan is really not
060to, it's really to focus on finding the good that students are doing throughout the school, right? So it doesn't matter whether they're frequently in counseling or not, we focus on even little wins, right? So like if there's a little thing that they're doing that is, meets any of the criteria, we're giving them a reinforcer. And again, it requires buy-in, we have some staff that are still working on that buy-in, and we have staff that are really into it. Our goal is to have everyone really into the program so that we're handing them out all the time, right? So every time we have a positive behavior in the classroom, in the hallway, we see digital citizenship being displayed, then we're providing them those reinforcers. We look at the data as a school as a whole, we
061can desegregate data in terms of pulling it from Genesis for like referrals or for suspensions or things like that. But our goal is really to see like, are we decreasing the number of referrals that are coming, you know, for behavioral instances, right? And we'll know more as we desegregate that data and look at that data this year. So you have a tiered system with that? Did I, with the counseling, you have tiered levels? So is it up to tier three like the other system of intervention? For this? For the counseling. It's three tiers. So if you have students in tier three and the reward system is not effective, like I said, they have other issues they're dealing with, they're trying to manage. Are they just receiving the counseling to try to support them if they're
062unable to achieve the reward tickets? Like how are they going to improve? Like what is the plan for their improvement? You have students who aren't able to comply. I mean, do we refer them to outside services or do we stick with when, you know, like when is the... Yeah, there's a variety of things, right? So I like to treat them a little bit separately in the sense that this is a whole school approach to reinforcing positive behaviors. The tiered interventions in mental health counseling is a little separate, right? So those are being identified. Again, they attend the problem solving meetings. So all of our clinicians are at these problem solving meetings to discuss students, especially as they come up and they have any questions related to mental health. They may provide strategies or supports. The
063goal of having these clinicians assigned specifically to buildings was to make sure that they are familiar with the teaching staff in that building and that teachers are comfortable coming to them for support if they feel that they need it. So there are two separate things and the tiered supports are more for identifying students that need that more intensive counseling. And part of our mental health clinician portion is supporting them in getting outside supports as well, right? Because we know that we're only a school and we can only do as much as a school can do. The goal of anyone, if they're receiving support through a mental health clinician, is for them to also help them attain some type of support outside of school. Can I add a comparison for Christine's question? Christine, I always like
064to think of PBIS as, because it's whole school, as like a tier one. It's what we do with academics. Your whole class instruction that you hope gets to 70, 80 percent and those interventions that are targeted with those tier two, even the tier one, tier two, tier three, are supposed to be very individualized to differentiate. It's really a way to differentiate instruction, which is a manner of which we would individualize what a specific student needs. PBIS is somewhat of your whole class instruction for the whole school. You're hoping it's grabbing everybody, it's motivating them to do the right thing and to have an extra incentive. It's supposed to get to the whole. It's that reward and the system that's in place. So I just, when we're making the comparisons between intervention systems, that's just how
065I generalize it. So at the end of the year, you'll be able to go over that data to see, was there a reduction in behavioral incidents? Was there a reduction in referrals and suspensions? And that's going to take, so that data, with any new program that you put into place, it takes time to see that change because it doesn't happen overnight. Even throughout the year, it's going to take time for us to see it because we have to successfully fully implement it, which we're doing this year, but we're still working on having some buy-in that we need to get. But the goal overall is to make sure that we are positively reinforcing and it's all students. So regardless of whether it's a student that someone may feel may not get a reward or a ticket,
066we're intentionally trying to find times that they are engaging in positive behavior so that we can purposefully try to get that. That's the whole purpose of PBIS, right? It's that we are, even if it's a struggling student or it's a student that has behavioral needs, if we can find that positive time and immediately reinforce that positive behavior, then the goal is that they are feeling that sense of reward for that and then attaining or changing things in that way. Okay, thank you. I also just have a, I don't know, a question or something to throw up. So one of the things you mentioned was the buy-in and I think that's an important factor, but there's some other, I guess, questions that I'm curious how the district will handle. I've done PBSIS as way back as
0672013 when I was in Asbury Park through Rutgers. I've done many versions of it in some of the other districts and there's some pitfalls that you fall into because inevitably you try to target those kids that are not intrinsically motivated that do have those behavior issues and you do try to when they happen to pick up that pencil or do something and that's great, but what sometimes happens even though it's school-wide and everyone's getting them, you do have those kids that are constantly always doing good things all the time 24-7 and they get the same one ticket as another kid and then when there are prizes and that kid who's always the problem has that one lucky ticket that winds up coming out, some of the good kids tend to be like, well, what's the
068point? I feel like it's, how are we going to balance that to make sure that those kids, because we do want to encourage those kids that do have those issues, whether they're behavioral, whether they're referrals, stuff like that, that they do have that sense of they want to be, they want to get that ticket. I've worked in districts where they've had trips to Great Adventure at the end of the year, they've had school stores where they can go shopping and with their tickets, different ways to get the kids excited for that buy-in, but sometimes it has these unintended consequences and so how can we get ahead of that and are we going to track that because while it's good in the one area, we don't want to see other populations of students maybe feel defeated
069by it. So how do we battle that, I guess, and how do we get the teachers to buy in? Because some teachers are like, and if you don't have people giving those tickets, you have one teacher that gives out 500 in a year and one that gives out five, so how do we balance that and make sure there's equitable? We have a couple of things. The first thing is our focus, although the purpose of PBIS is to reinforce those positive behaviors and we want to make sure they're intentionally fine students that may not usually get those, it's not the sole focus of PBIS and we've made that very clear when we presented it to the staff at Men's is that we are reinforcing every time that we see a behavior that's expected to all students,
070not just to those students that are exhibiting behaviors. For staff buy-in, we're doing a lot of things and we're trialing and airing some things, but we're doing things that teachers on the tickets have to put their name when they give out the ticket and the purpose of that is that we do a teacher draw as well and they may win like a parking spot that's close to the entrance, which is very popular in the winter months, right? Or we might find things that are like intentionally things that we can give teachers that doesn't cost us significantly, you know, any type of monetary value, but teachers really want, right? So our goal is to, you know, get that buy-in from teachers, but also make sure that we are rewarding teachers for giving these tickets to students.
071I think Andrew touched on this already, that it takes time. Anytime you have a cultural shift, it takes time. I'd love to say it happens within a year, but you've heard me say before, any good plan takes three to five years. It takes building a foundation, adding to that foundation. I think you've learned over time everything we do, we just don't wipe away what we did the year before and start over. We take whatever it was the year before and we build upon it and we enhance it to get to truly where we want to be. It will take time. There will be things that go awry and we have to adjust and we have to be flexible. That's being realistic, and that's where I think to go back to the point about using the
072data is going to be essential, but it will take time. Cultural shifts do not happen overnight. They're slow and steady. Any other questions? Thank you. Thank you. Go ahead. Hi everybody. I'm Lisa Reiser. Thank you also for having me here tonight. I am going to talk about a few essential staff that we have. Mrs. Petillo talked about our BCBAs. They are our board certified behavior analysts and we are lucky enough to have three district approved or district hired BCBAs amongst our eight buildings. We added the third one in September of this year. All our BCBAs are trainers who participated in a train the trainer program for handle with care, which is our de-escalation strategies and techniques. They train any staff needed, but they definitely train all the necessary staff, not limited to, but including anyone
073who's a one-to-one assistant, teachers in self-contained classes, and our child study team members. They are busy doing that from the beginning of the year and then as needed throughout the year. Our BCBAs are responsible for a lot of things, including creating behavior plans for students with significant behaviors. Those are behavior intervention plans that are put into children's IEPs. They train teachers, they train assistants, and they train our child study team on those plans. They review data and make adjustments to those plans that have been created as needed. Our BCBAs are also in our classrooms. They spend a lot of time in our multiple disabilities classrooms and our LLD learning and language disabilities classrooms to make sure that they're in the necessary components within those classrooms to run a structured program throughout the day. They also
074supervise the three registered behavior technicians that we hired as a district. Those are the RBTs and they work directly with students and or within classrooms for groups of students. Oftentimes, we have our RBTs in our multiple disabilities classes for our students with the most significant behavioral challenges. This year, the BCBAs created at the beginning of the year, over the summer, they created a six series behavior training that was shown to all, I think we're on four right now, that's shown to our staff at staff meetings. All of the staff within the district was able to see that. They are, this year, participating in the PLC, so the professional learning committees that are within each building. They are working, I think, five times this year, so five out of the 10 months they are in a
075PLC with our general education teachers in special areas and our special education teachers and that group of people, that cohort, are working together to support students in those special area environments. So, for example, if a student is mainstream for art or mainstream for phys ed, our behaviorists and our self-contained teachers meet with those special area teachers to talk about the students individually, to talk about their behavior plans, to talk about what works, and to help them provide accommodations and modifications to be successful. And our BCBAs are in there. They're going into those special area classrooms and they are going into all classrooms whenever is needed. Our three BCBAs are Ashley Alvany, Stephanie Shaman, and Beth Reblowski, and they're at the schools listed. So Ashley's at Clark, ELC, and Pinebrook. Stephanie is at Lafayette, Mems, and
076Milford, and Beth is at Taylor, Mills, and Wemrock, and that is their contact information. We also have a special education coach within our department. She is here tonight. Miss Gabby De La Paz, she is here. She came to come to see this board meeting tonight and see what happens here. Listed here, very small, are her many, many duties that she has. They are definitely not limited to this, but this is mostly what her day-to-day responsibilities look like. Not inclusive, of course. At the beginning of the year, Gabby trained all of our special education teachers at a professional development day in September and created a thorough support guide for the teachers for IEP development. That's an ongoing document with links and links and links within it to help with IEPs. She does work directly with teachers.
077For our new teachers, they're required to meet with her for at least the first three IEPs that they write within our district, but she is there to work with any of our teachers and does often. She works specifically on components in the IEP, focusing on SMART goals and students' present levels. Miss De La Paz works with teachers and is building capacity and analyzing multiple sources of data, so as to form their instruction within their classrooms. She is in those classrooms. She knows those teachers. She knows our students. She's modeling and reinforcing strategies in all subject areas and helping to design small group instruction, as well as help students access grade-level texts. She is also working with teachers to build capacity and progress monitoring IEP goals and identify targeted skills for our students. This year, we
078are in the middle of our second year of our inclusion grant here at Wemrock-Brook. It is called the Systematic Change Grant, and it's through the Department of Education with All In for Inclusive Education. It used to be in a New Jersey inclusion project, and they changed their name. Our team members are here. Dr. Ciri is part of that team. I'm part of that team. Our two school psychologists at Wemrock are on that team. We have a media specialist who serves as one of the Gen Ed teachers, Miss Grande, a third grade teacher, and then we have one special education teacher. As I mentioned, we're in year two last year. The team members spent a lot of time analyzing our procedures at Wemrock, and we're able to identify ways to increase inclusion appropriately. If you see
079here, these numbers here are the percentage of kids who are in general education. This is a snippet, and it was taken from our IEP program back in October. This might be a little bit different today, but generally speaking, this was a clip from our program earlier in the year. At Wemrock, 55% of special education children are in the Gen Ed 80% or more of the time. Maybe your kids who are in an all-inclusion program are mainstreamed most of the day. 36% of the special ed population at Wemrock-Brook is in the general ed between 40% and 79% of the day. Those are typically kids that have one or two resource rooms, so pull out replacement academic programs and or maybe one program, and maybe they're pulled out also for a related service. And 9% of the
080classified students at Wemrock are in the Gen Ed, less than 40% of the school day. We don't have a comparison because that number changes depending on where we have programs. For instance, last year we had two LLD self-contained classes at Wemrock, and this year we have three. It's where we housed the program, so that might look a little bit different. As a result of the time that we put in last year, the team really put in a lot of time. At WB, many of the students are connected to a homeroom, so our kids and our self-contained learning and language disabilities classes are connected to a homeroom. Some of them participate in morning meetings, some of them participate at the end of the day, some with unpacking, and the team has continued to monitoring this and
081increasing opportunities for the students throughout the year. I did talk to the case managers today, and that number has changed from the beginning of the year with the amount of students going into that general education a little bit more. We are currently in the process of creating ways to have parents more actively involved in the IEP process. They are involved, and they are invited to meetings, and they have the opportunity to be a part of that process. We've created things in the past that we have, how to participate in an IEP meeting, and what questions to ask. We've presented those things at Parent University, and this year we are including, it's like a questionnaire and a survey to go to parents prior to our IEP meeting. One quick question on that particular program. Is the
082thought here that at the end of year three that this is a program that could scale out to the other schools and be adopted? So the goal of the program is for us to be independent in this and continue this at Wemrock Brook, but yes, there is an opportunity for us. It's a little bit separate, so we would have to apply as a separate school. I do want to shout out to Clark Mills because we did apply at the end of the year. We weren't chosen for that building, and I assumed it was because we had a less amount of students there, but I did talk to the people at All In, and it was a little bit, the answer that I got was a little bit different, and it had to do with the
083timing of when the applications came in, even though we were in the timeline. It was by June 30th, so she did, you know, one of the people said they thought it was sort of an unfair practice and that we can apply again this year and it should look different the way they choose. So yes, whatever school wants to do it, we can do it. However, Wemrock does turn key to other schools, right? We do share this stuff amongst team members, right? Child study teams, we meet once a month. We share this information with them. We talk about how to be more inclusive, examples of how, you know, what has been successful at Wemrock, and looking at creative, the creative ways that they've chosen to include kids, and it can be because there's such a team
084of people doing it, and they're talking about it for hours and hours each year and each month. They've come up with some great ideas, and so sharing those, I think, people do get excited about it, and I think there is an overall increase in inclusion, because you're the lead there. Last year, many CST members came to those virtual trainings. It was a little bit more difficult for the teachers because there's so many and they're for like two and a half hours during the day, but the phys ed teachers did come. Within a few of our buildings, the ones that have our self-contained classes, and we've had administrators come to those community of practice meetings, so it is open to a lot of people. Speaking of community of practice, this is our last slide and the
085last thing that I'm going to share. Last year, the Department of Education created opportunities for public school staff to participate in communities of practice, which are basically learning communities with other professionals across the state. The three areas were preschool, speech, and our behaviorist, and we had three staff members apply, one for each of those areas, and they were all accepted. So that's Cindy DeStefano, one of our preschool disability teachers at ELC. Felice Semagram, she is a speech therapist in the district. She is mainly at MEMS, but she is also at Milford Brook this year, and our BCBA, Beth Reblebski, and she is at Taylor Mills and Wemrock. So each cohort is a little bit different, but they have anywhere from four to five meetings throughout the year, so I think they've all participated in two.
086Some are in person, some are virtual, again, depending on the cohort, and so far the feedback is positive. They're having productive conversations within those communities, and our members are gaining knowledge and ideas from their cohorts, and the plan is to have those members turnkey that information with our staff. So I'll be meeting with them once all four meetings take place for each cohort and talking about how we can turnkey that to the speech therapists, to the other preschool teachers, and to the BCBA. Does anyone have any other questions? Thank you. I want to thank the three of you for presenting, and I want to congratulate Ms. Petillo on her last Board of Education meeting before her retirement, but I do want to say something, and I know Ms. Petillo thanked the board repeatedly for their
087support, and I think where this really stays is when we had a supervisor of special education leave, the board allowed us to bring in two supervisors, and that was so instrumental. There was many, many things that the special ed department wanted to do, but they were always inundated and never able to do it, and I think having the two supervisors, Andrew and Lisa, have been phenomenal for our district because they've really been able to specialize their expertise in certain areas and get a lot of programs off the floor. We have a number of grants, which you saw tonight, that we are implementing that we would never have been able to put the time into that we can now put the time into, including the amount of time that they're able to spend in the schools
088working with administration, you know, working with our staff, and Ms. Petillo has been a wonderful role model for them and leader on what makes our district so successful, so I do want to thank you for that. And if I might, I was going to save it for the end because I thought we were doing questions on everything at the end, but then we started interjecting after each person. So I did want to say that I was happy to see Ms. Velez is on as CPAC. I know that they were supposed to be meeting with her and with the snowstorm. I don't know what wound up happening. There was some scheduling conflicts, so I'm glad to see that we do have a new member on, and I look forward to meeting with her. I did want
089to point out that with the Supporting Sibling virtual meeting, I was really happy to see that because when I attended one of the CPAC meetings that they had, I think it was last year when Robin Waller gave her presentation to the parents on the book club on anxiety, one of the things that came up with a lot of the parents that were there that really hit home for me was the issue with siblings. I think it's really an invisible issue of students in school because the siblings of children with special needs have their own needs because the center of their household is this child with special needs. As you understand, they need that. I had my own issues with my kids where my daughter cried one day when she was little, why does my brother
090hate me so much? It wasn't that he did, he just had a lot of stuff going on. We wound up, thankfully, we brought them to his therapist and she sat down and talked to him and explained everything, but there's all these invisible things they take a lot on, they become protective of their siblings, they have issues, and they often get swept under the rug by default. I think a lot of the parents that were there that day did exhibit needing something like this, and I'm glad that we're able to give it, and I certainly hope, especially being that it's virtual, that we do get a lot of parents, so I hope we can push out and publicize it because I do think there is a really great need for parents in the district to know
091that there is some kind of support available for these siblings that are kind of like in the winds. I just want to say that the reason we were able to make that happen was because you all approved for me to go to that autism conference in October in Atlantic City, and Dr. Bianca Coleman was presenting there, and everything just fell into place, and I think that that's the key is building capacity, not only with administrators, but we then take that information and we turn key to our staff, and we've already sent out the email on February 25th, for the February 25th with Dr. Salzman that already went out, and it identified the March 10th date and the April 8th date for parents, and it'll be on the website, and we'll keep hitting that home. It
092went out to staff, so all staff are aware of it, and hopefully we will get a good turnout. Ms. Pipchinski, could you put that on Facebook too if we haven't yet? Gigi, we send the flyer. You had said that there are 27 students that right now are out of district. Is there a common service that they are all getting that maybe is one-on-one that they have to go out of district, or does it really vary? So it varies, and every year we sit down as a team and collectively look to see if there's any one type of program that we could bring back or start in our district to bring students back. In addition, every summer the three of us go and tour all of our students in their out-of-district placements to see who we
093could bring back. It's varied. So, and even if we have a cohort one year, we don't have the students to support that cohort. It's difficult. One of the benefits is that we are surrounded by many excellent public schools that if we don't have the program, they may have the program, but it is something that we do focus on. We have had behavioral programs in the district. I've been here since 2003. There were two instances that we had for multiple years behavioral programs, but then we didn't have the students to support that need, and so that really can't have second graders with fifth graders if they have significant behaviors or if they have autism or even multiple disabilities unless it's a very unique group. It's hard. We're big, but we're not. That is one thing we
094talk about too in our weekly meetings. We talk about different programs that we've seen, different programs that maybe our neighbors may offer, and you know, what it would take to bring that in and what that would take budgetarily to bring it in. Is it necessary? Is it going to be effective? Do we have the supports in place? So that is something that we do spend some time discussing. I did have a question as well. With the program that's running at One Rock, was there a requirement to have additional support staff then with that program? And if we're planning on rolling it out, then would we need to do that elsewhere? Speaking about the grant that it's funded through the Department of Ed and no additional staff. It's training. That's basically training. So it's training that
095supports the staff that we already have. The goal there is to build capacity. It's to take the staff that we already have and build their knowledge to be more inclusive and adopt inclusive practices. Anybody else? Well, now we're going to take a whole new direction and we are going to discuss our Academically Talented Program with Ms. Singer. I can also say that our Academically Talented teachers are here to support Ms. Singer and also answer any questions that you may have. I'll put you on the spot a little bit. Thank you. This one? Okay. Okay. Thank you also for having me. I'm the supervisor of the Academically Talented Program and also the Lafayette Mills Assistant Principal. Our philosophy and overview of our program is that our program focuses on providing students who demonstrate high levels of
096ability and academic ability with a challenging and engaging learning environment. The program is designed to extend learning beyond the regular curriculum while keeping students connected to grade level classes. It's offered via a continuum of services to students in grades K to 8 and support is delivered through differentiated instruction enrichment accelerated advanced courses depending on the grade level. And all the information that I will talk about today is posted on our website. And there's the link. The New Jersey Administrative Code and Strengthening Gifted and Talented Education Act work together to define what districts must do for gifted and talented learners in New Jersey. And the act requires our district to provide appropriate K to 12 educational services for gifted and talented students. These are the parts of the code. The identification process and appropriate educational challenges
097must begin in kindergarten or when a student enters our district. Students are identified as gifted and talented if they possess or demonstrate high levels of ability in one or more content areas when compared to their chronological peers using multiple measures. Our state does not provide us a model or program. We have a choice on that. We must offer it during the school day and each district must report to the NJDOE gifted coordinator on its continuum of services policies and data as well as professional development and staffing on a schedule tied to CUSAC. If you look at the bottom that is what our school offers as part of our program. We have personalized learning, pullout enrichment programs, classroom-based differentiated instruction, acceleration advanced classes, and summer school enrichment programs. Our goals here are to provide our challenge,
098I'm sorry, our program goals aim to challenge academically advanced students, encourage independent thinking, develop problem-solving skills, offer an environment that helps nurture students' critical thinking skills, provide real-world applications, engage students with opportunities with hands-on learning, and expose students to STEAM and STEM-based activities. So speaking first for K to 5, we have our pullout enrichment program and it's available to all students in K to 5 schools. We have two district-wide enrichment teachers that are both here today and this is what our program consists of. We have differentiated instruction, small group project-based learning, and STEAM-based activities. We run classes for language arts and math and a student can qualify for one or both depending on eligibility requirements. Students are pulled out for 30 to 40 minutes during the win period so they do not miss any academic
099classes. We offer two full semesters of enrichment for grades one through five using current school-wide data and then our kindergarten groups begin after our mid-year assessments semester two and that's kind of where we are right now. We're in the process of getting ready for semester two and we'll be pulling our kindergarten students. We also have additional extension opportunities pending on building schedules and we work with our technology teachers for district-wide contests and competitions. Our criteria focuses on the top 10 percent of the highest achieving students in K to 5 at each school. We post our criteria, that's the link, and it's updated each semester based on our district assessment schedule and each day the data that we use is dependent on the grade level and including multiple measures. You can see those are all the
100examples that we're using depending on the grade level. We do use school-wide school specific data to ensure that students from each grade level in each school can participate in this program and that makes the identification process equitable. It's also inclusive of all learners as we're reviewing students who have IEPs, special ed, 504, and our ELL students are all included in our data sweep and our program and this is just some data from last school year. We don't have this school year yet because we're about to start semester two but you can see how many students that we have in math and language arts. So if you look at the math side 244 students made our program the top 10 percent in semester one and then 221 in semester two, 128 students are the same and
101you can see the language arts data but if you look at the bottom this program is servicing over 1,000 students and 86 kindergartners across our K to 5 schools. This chart is very interesting because it just shows you before the law and after the law and the biggest difference in the after the law and the change in our program is that we're servicing more students. We're servicing over 1,000 which includes K to 1 which we did not previously. I was lucky enough to be here when we had our self-contained classes, we switched to our enrichment program and this is now our pullout program and it's during win. The students are not pulled out of academic classes, they are pulled out of our win program. These are additional enrichment opportunities and we have a contest, we
102do it every year, we always win which I'm very excited about as well and what's lovely about these contests is that it's not just language arts and math. We are asking kids to show me their art, writing, instrumental music, we have students composing their own music and video and one of the things I really work hard on is celebrating this from all of our schools. K to 8, also MEMS and Pinebrook are also included in a lot of these and then we have our spelling bees, continental math league, science, social studies and geography challenge come from CML. Carrie Marsala who is our supervisor of science and social studies, her and I work together to push these out and just this week every student in grades 3 to 8 are offered the social studies competition and
103the teachers are getting it out, we'll close it out, we'll see you know who gets certificates and medals but regardless all the students are getting exposed to higher level material in a different area. Battle of books, coding, young scientists, we run a family math challenge and we have summer school enrichment opportunities. Our enrichment teachers also and this is part of the code, they have other responsibilities. They serve as a resource area expert where they help us do the competition contests but they provide resources to all of our teachers and parents. It's very important that we intend and turnkey all the professional development. Every summer I go to NJPSA and there's a lawyer there who reviews the law and we make sure that we're hitting all the pieces of it and we adjust our program as
104needed. So we are part of all those things. We try to go together because there's just three of us and then we come back and turnkey to all the schools and then we also provide professional development. We could do any faculty meeting, we do trainings, we always present to parent university and we have a google classroom that we push out resources to the whole district. Switching to 6 to 8, 6 to 8 we continue to be offered via continuum of services including accelerated and advanced course placement, differentiating instruction, enrichment activities and contest opportunities and these are the opportunities that we offer in 6 to 8. We have accelerated advanced math courses, level 1 ELA classes and or with distinction program in language arts. We have a distinction program in science, lots of content related activities
105and you can see that they're offered differently through MEMS and Pinebrook, lots of contests and the National Junior Honor Society. And then in 6 to 8 also we have to make sure that everything is data driven using multi-measures identification process compliant with the law. So we make sure that we're using diverse objective criteria, district benchmarks and standardized assessments and we want to make sure that we're identifying the students for placement into these programs. It's also very important to note that we students can move so if they don't qualify for a program students have the opportunity to move into those programs throughout the school year. The criteria is developed by the district content supervisors but I do meet with them in review and I am in charge of the district website. So I always meet with
106the supervisors a few times a year and we make sure that we are pushing everything out together. If you have any questions you can see that the supervisors are there for math, English, language, arts and science. Everything is posted and sent to parents for transparency. And just for the benefits for our students overall of this program it's an opportunity to work at an appropriate pace and depth in the areas of strength and we help develop higher order thinking, skills, creativity, problem solving through project-based learning and enrichment activities. And we want to give these students access to academic peers, activities and competitions that nurture motivation and engagement. And you can see that we also have our family engagement piece, that we have our website, everything is posted on there and updated. We ask parents to monitor
107communication for our identification cycles, letters and summer enrichment. It's very important that parents contact the teachers individual child, I'm sorry the teacher first to ask them about their needs, check in with the data and then encourage students to participate in these contests whether they're in enrichment or not. We backpack everything to the district, we go over on the television because we want all these students to have that opportunity whether they qualify or not it is a push in many different areas. Our family math challenge is amazing, it's sent out every other week through all the schools. We have prizes and what I love about it is we don't recognize kids just for getting things right. We get them recognized for trying and if you have students that are in different grades they work on it
108together. So if I have a first grader and a fifth grader it's meant for them to work on it together and it's higher level. So that's something that we do every year, the teachers then pick out random winners, a hint we make sure everybody wins at least once and they announce the students on the TV station, they have a prize and at the end of the year we have a celebration of everyone that participated to increase participation. And Parent and University is a great place to come as well. We do have an appeal process, it is also part of the law and parents, guardians and students have a right to appeal any decision if we remove you or select you for the program and you have to submit it within 15 working days. And you
109can see on here that here is who you should reach out to so I am in charge for the K-5 and then once again our supervisors are working on 6-8 but we will all work together and sometimes we might need additional testing or review more data or have a meeting for this process. And more information is available on the district policy 2464 which is also on our website. And finally if you have any questions about your child's progress or performance on assessments please just go to the teacher first but you can always CC me if you're not sure about enrichment. We have the enrichment teachers that are part of each school and if not the supervisors for each subject area. And we just wanted to add just some resources if you want to check that
110out. We do update our website typically in August for the school year. We do it again in October or the end of September when our district data is ready and then we do it again usually right around February. We push it out to the teachers, we have them check and then we send the letters out for our enrichment cycle in K-5. So if you have any questions I am here or you can always email me and I appreciate your time. Thank you. First of all thank you. I appreciate that we have a great enrichment program here and thank you guys. I think it's it's a great thing but the question I have stems from an area I've never been that comfortable with which is my understanding is that there are different standards for getting into
111enrichment depending on the elementary school you go to and I feel like it's it's a little odd because if you go to one elementary school you may not be classified as enrichment but then you can go to Pinebrook and be in the same class as someone who is or you could even really be higher. Like you could be pre-A and not have been in enrichment but an enrichment child is is then in like the pre-B math. So I kind of feel like it ends up classifying children for enrichment depending on where they live a little bit which kind of takes an opportunity away from them. So can you just shed a little bit of light on that thinking because I've never really fully understood it. I mean there may be a very good reason but
112I just have never really understood what what it is. So Lindsay if you want to start I'll jump in just to talk about the disproportionality. Yeah I was just gonna say too the data all the assessments are the same so it's just that we use each school data for each grade and one of the things we were talking about is that the grades you know we want to keep it equitable by school and there are you know at Wemrock Rebecca might have six classes in a grade and I might have three. We have different teachers we have different students we have different populations of students there are schools that have more special ed programs because that's where that is housed. So we have done it over the years we feel like it's more equitable that
113we do each school each grade 10 percent so that the teachers are also present at those schools for a full day. I only have two teachers and they service the three schools so for them they're there that one day they're pulling each grade the top 10 percent so that we feel like that is the equitable way to do it for our district purposes you know with our numbers now. Do you want to jump in there? So as Lindsay said so for understanding and I think many of you know who have been in each of our buildings there's a different population there's a different dynamic there's a different culture you have the assessments are the same that's consistent across the criteria vary slightly for eligibility points basically and that's because you're looking at the individual dynamic
114of that school. It also helps to prevent the disparities that can occur by looking at a district as a whole. When that was done prior you did have schools that had very few students who were eligible and other schools with larger populations so we're actually excluding other children who may have the potential to grow and be exposed to the opportunities. There were years also that we had none from a school that when we pulled the self-contained classes with the data there were some schools that had no students coming to our program. So the other purpose in how it's developed is that the program very much like intervention is cyclical it's not a one time you're identified and you're there forever you have the opportunity to come in you have the opportunity to grow out because
115children are dynamic they're not static figures they don't just stay the same we actually don't want that we want to know that children are growing so when a children has a new opportunity that may have been closed to them the prior semester they can do it it shows them they can sometimes it shows them they have to potentially work a little harder and I always think of that when it comes to intervention as well right a child may understand concept a really well but when they get to concept b they might need extra support same with enrichment we're growing we're learning there's different areas of strength the middle school piece because you essentially your question evolved into pre-a or pre-b once they get to pine brook and mems it's a very different situation because those
116five different dynamics six different dynamics that existed with the elc included because kindergarten's part of that they all merge into one so you are going to have children who may not have made enrichment who then make it because we're also using different data to determine that consistency of who is eligible for a program and we do have children who were in enrichment it's all brand new a new starting point for them when they get to that what lindsay did mention i'm pretty sure you're aware of this in prior conversations is if a child doesn't make it for let's say pre-b there is another opportunity come september and then there's even another opportunity at the end of that year where they can move up and and miss bootress i was going to say miss bakal it's
117actually dr bootress i have to correct myself she's not here right now but she would be able to give you an in-depth and i believe she's had that conversation with the board at some point fairly recently about the criteria our students whether they and i'll let me give you another example once upon a time when we had self-contained classes there were three classes actually four there was a second grade third grade fourth grade fifth grade second was eliminated and eventually we got rid of the others to provide more equitable opportunities there were children who never made those classes who outperformed children in those classes when they got to middle school they too were able to get into geometry they too were able to get into algebra one so what the way we do it now
118helps to ensure that children are still provided opportunity to meet their fullest potential i i don't know if i got to the root of your question but essentially the goal is to make sure we're always having an open opportunity for all children it's not meant to be everybody wins a trophy type mentality but we want to make sure that children have opportunity and opportunity exists you have to work hard for it and it can change year to year i think of it like sports some years you make the sports team some years you don't sometimes you make the a team sometimes you make the b team sometimes you make the c team there's all different levels too some years you can move up from b to a and you might drop down from a to
119c it happens with academics as well i also just had a quick question and i think this this might i don't know if this will be more jody or um dr santora question but um so i'm curious for the six to eight you know we have the pre pre-v we have the pre-a and all that good jazz but ela is just extra enrichment on top of your class is there ever a scenario where we have an accelerated version that kids are scheduled for as their primary ele because if we can do for math why can't we do it for ele i know that in the past kids you know my daughter got put into it and she felt like she was being punished with extra work because she had to do all of her work
120for ele and then she was like come to this once a week meeting and now you can read all this stuff on your own and do all of this great work because you're really so smart and she was like i'd rather be done like that's really just how she felt and i feel like can we make it where it's and you want to go first or second okay i said you got to release the pit bull right i'm coming okay so having once been an english teacher at mems so you have varied levels our level one is an accelerated course they're working at a more independent piece they're working at a higher level reading their expectations are higher when it comes to writing what makes it challenging at this level is the way the ela
121standards are developed unlike ela which is very content specific unlike i'm unlike mathematics i'm sorry which is very course and content specific ela is not the standards are very similar they are like a staircase they're progressive so you're only building upon what is done prior so in giving the with distinction status it is more work it's not meant to be a punishment it's meant to give them exposure to a high school level expectation it's not done necessarily at the eighth grade level aside from level one programming because of the way the standards are math is course specific i think math ela because of the way the standards are allows more differentiation as well so multiple children can be in the same ela course and you can differentiate based on their ability um like for example
122i used to teach computer programming right i would have children that were there because they need a fourth year math and then kids that were there because they were gonna they actually did become programmers and that's another thing where you'd say build this program but i had a lot of wiggle room to differentiate your program is going to include all this your programs i'm not going to have so much um and i think that's where ela leads itself where math doesn't because there has to be more whole group instruction so as an english teacher myself right ela here for almost 20 years now then if they wouldn't have honors english in high school they wouldn't have ap english they would just be like well you can differentiate they're more whatever so i still feel i
123feel like i don't know i just feel like if we can make it work for math is it something we ever envision doing for ela is it a scheduling issue is it that we can't um i think when you're looking at ap and you would know this having taught high school ap is very specific there's ap criteria that's developed from that outside organization as opposed to there's a very unique curriculum as opposed to a state standard when coordinating with honors classes we also have to look outside there's coordination of novels being read there's coordination of materials you can read a text at a higher level pace and have a different expectation regardless of it being an honors class the honors class comes with standards that are still based on njsls new jersey student learning standards
124so i know you love your acronyms when i say them for you but there's also the expectation that still comes with independence we're still working to make sure those foundations exist for sure but i guess i guess what i'm saying is yes there it does lend itself where you could do that higher level in a you know you can put your kids in groups right so you have four different groups and you can have all your high level kids in one you can separate it you can mix intermingle them but they're still in the end of the day not like in math all of the pre-b kids are all at the same level working at that same level of rigor whereas in that ela class you still have kids so now you have a discussion
125and you maybe have a kid who doesn't get it right and now you're trying to have this higher level analytical thinking and you have a kid who's maybe not on par with you and i'm just saying i feel like there's still you could level one class you are getting that because the way the groupings occur and okay yeah there's a level one and then there's a level two all right the level one typically gets your high math kids the way that they're and there may be kids who may not have made a high math class who get into that as well because they're looking at criteria also the ela supervisor is using njs la scores he's looking for students who have advanced criteria in those areas including writing so there is that piece that comes
126with it so with the level one and two is that something like that parent like would a kid or a parent know that they're in a level one or it's just how you do their you get what i'm saying like pre-b is called pre-b is there a where is it just english look at the letter and so like kids could potentially be in an accelerated accelerated english class and not even realize i wouldn't call it accelerated per se but they're in a level one because it's it's working at a more in-depth level i don't want to say faster it's more in-depth and deeper in their analytical skills okay thank you you're welcome and i want to add that with mathematics when a child takes at the middle school level the algebra one njs la or
127the geometry njs la they actually get high school credit for that you are correct um no no one's correct um i look there's if you look at a child's schedule it'll say language arts seven dash one or language arts seven dash two so if you don't know if you're like like i'm a parent who has a kid i just think that might be a section i don't necessarily know that that means my kid is you know maybe in the different level and what which one's higher one or two that i don't know yeah that that i will say i have no idea how that's communicated i have a question um my question is more in regards to k through five so i know right now we're doing the top 10 is there opportunity to have
128more students by not doing 10 and possibly like the top 12 students just because like dave pointed out the schools are so different so i'm just looking like at enrollment for let's say first grade um one school the top 10 could be six children versus another school it could be nine that's three kids that one school might have more students of where if the program itself could be open to 12 students at a time i'm just wondering if it's more beneficial to get as many kids into an enrichment program as possible that they're not just sitting and when doing i kind of like that idea i'd like to dig more into it and not maybe respond right now i just want to throw one thing out if the if a school has a lot more
129students and we have time in our schedule like jessica goes to wem rock an extra couple periods so that she's going to pull more kids some of them also depend on our what our project is so if we have students like we try to look and if it's close we will take what we can but we try to stick around that 10 it's not a hard 10 it's around the 10 so it could be 12 we do do that i just want you to know right no i'm i'm but i'm thinking of the other side of it not the schools that have more students this the schools that have less so it's like if one school is only getting to have six students in their enrichment program while the other school of the same grade
130gets to have 12 could we match the schools that have lesser children to also have 12 students we yeah we always okay the optimal number for the program is supposed to be okay we always try to go to the higher end and there are times it's 12 there it depends and it were you know if a student moves in and we take the link it we try to make sure that because every student has to be looked at when they come in but i don't think we've ever had that low amount of students so to that also similarly to rti how they're doing data scans twice a year our enrichment teachers are following the same process so kind of like how the state scores the njs la there is a sliding scale at times so
131they're looking to fulfill what the need is for that school based on the grade level so that is nice to hear from our teachers as well as lindsey that they are looking to optimize already i think that's a great point of clarification but i think we could talk we could talk more about that too okay i want to um take a moment and thank lindsey as well as our enrichment teachers that are here tonight um you know back in like 2020 right we had looked at our program before that maybe even we had looked at our program and it was very elitist right we had one class at lafayette mills for third grade one class for fourth grade one class through fifth grade if the child got in they stayed in all three years um
132we only took as many of children that could fit in the class so it was like what around 24 25 um and that was it and we were servicing at that point about 75 children for the whole district in at and i came up with this idea we met we talked about it and the three of them have really taken this idea and run with it and made it an amazing experience and now we're servicing over a thousand students so you've seen us in a short window how we went from 75 to over a thousand and i thank you both for being so committed to this program and lindsey and working together so nicely as a team to really make this program as successful as it is and as fun as it is because i
133think that's one of the most important things our children in this program really enjoy it anyway thank you everyone appreciate all the presentations thank you so much it's very informative um we are going to be moving into executive session right now so i need a motion and a second to go into closed session for the purposes of discussing student matter involving student 45051 and a personnel matter jesse and christine all in favor anyone opposed i mean it's 9 31 p.m all right ron are you good open i mean whatever you're going to do we do we do have to if we don't if we don't end the meeting before 11 30 we have to do a motion to extend okay i think we will we're going to try to um all right we're going to
134jump right into new and old yeah well that would it would have been after anyway so let's let's get through it all jamie anything i'm good thank you very much everybody i would like to thank everybody for the presentations it was very informative i should probably be polite but that's about all i have ditto yeah i got a little something um so this saturday past was the uh red division district wrestling championship at mems um 18 weight classes mems had 14 wrestlers that placed in the top three uh third place finishers were andrea naja vlitsky nick scolisi and parker stocklberg second place finishers were uh levi cats logan herrera noan zeobro aiden samara vicenzo romeo de sotelo will recman and peters avalint nick now the top first place finishers were uh 70 pounds chase steenwig
135110 pounds hunter toseti 138 pounds luca de janeiro and 145 pounds nakita krulik um all those 14 wrestlers that pinned were coached all year by uh jim tumbleson and robert shrek um the top four finishers uh the first place finishers wrestled monday night last night at uh mems at the mammoth county tournament of champions chase hunter and nakita all uh lost but uh luca de janeiro won uh by fall in 21 seconds that let luca to wrestle tonight at the battle of mammoth tournament of champions and luco luca de janeiro won 10 to nothing tonight at down in wall which um leads luca to wrestle uh thursday evening at 6 p.m at lake revira middle school in the tri county championship and um i just want to point out that uh luca de janeiro is
136also the eighth grade student body president at mems so um well rounded kids over there rounds of congratulations um i think maybe next month or something uh we can get all 14 of those kids to come and get recognized by the board of ed that's just a suggestion and also next wednesday at 7 p.m at mems is the winter sports award ceremony thank you jesse mr sing or anything just a couple uh comments to keep it short first and foremost i'm happy to see that we hired um some experienced teachers here i think that is an investment in this district and well needed so i appreciate that um i was also happy to see two of those three appear here i think that shows a lot of respect and and and obviously i'd like to
137see that in the future that perspective or current or those we hire appear at the board meeting so we can actually introduce them i think that's a really good thing um so thank you for that the presentations were great uh very informative um and uh that's all i have thank you thank you mr capper uh just a couple things one thanks to everyone who came here tonight to present super informative informative and enlightening also we had the uh fun with your son sneaker ball event on sunday february 1st great event huge turnout kids had a lot of fun uh their loved ones that came with them had a lot of fun so again great event looking forward to to it again next year and uh that is all for me thank you i just wanted
138to acknowledge the four winners we had in the district uh presha patel from milford uh dylan akron from lafayette sirithya matuku i'm sorry from mems if i said the name wrong and arian sunder from clark mills um also uh wizards versus mer's tickets go on sale tomorrow we have some athletes on our board that will be playing so hopefully everyone buys their tickets this side of the table over here i don't want to speak out of turn but i think mr singer said that he made dunk in one of the games in case you guys are on the fence so you have to deliver now we're all looking forward to that um i just want to think of um our administration for their presentations as um it's good that it was videotaped and recorded so
139our community can see the hard work and dedication that they put in um it's a plethora of information and to weed through it is very difficult and they kind of streamline it as best they can with all that tons of information but you can see the dedication and the work that goes into it to ensure that our students are being successful and their needs are being met and that we provide the proper resources so i just want to thank them personally for all the work that they do i'd also like to welcome aboard um our new staff members welcome to the district hopefully it's everything you dreamed of thank you even though he forgot to mention it merced and i went to the foundation's retreat saturdays ago um and i just want to say it's
140awesome to see a group of people giving up their saturday to find ways to help raise money for our school district so i thank them very much and i of course wish them the best of luck oh i think yeah maybe a little after us though yes thank you uh yeah just again wanted to say thank you to our administrative team that was here tonight presenting the presentations were excellent and always you know helpful to both refresh and also you know bring us up to speed on new things happening and new programs and strategies being implemented it's a lot of information so it's a bit overwhelming to be honest with you um but uh are those presentations outside of the recording of the meeting available so so um janay had suggested that and we sometimes
141send it out we sometimes don't but i think we can probably have felicia send out an email i'm gonna wait though until the meeting is posted so we can send the video and then those as well but no i think that's a great suggestion yeah definitely great um and yeah that's all i got cool anything oh it's my turn already um i did have something very quick oh for the board read across america month is coming up you should start be getting emails from administrators about um coming to the schools to read um sometimes they ask you what grade levels you prefer i used to have a k1 preference but now i have two books and now i have a full span of k5 i'm whatever um it's a lot of fun if you don't
142have a book the administrators will have books for you when you get there if you do have a favorite book you have a favorite grade level they'll try to make it work for you um we also recently got asked by the momma county judges to be invited which our principals have reached out to them and invited the judges to come into it to read so we're excited for that i think that's a great opportunity to connect the larger community with our inner community that's all i got yep all right thank you before we adjourn so we have on the agenda workshop to discuss the committees that the discussion we started um i'm going to suggest that we postpone that but at the same time i would like to suggest an ad hoc committee um to
143help bring that forward or or decide that it's not you know the way to go um but i think if we have a couple of board members right now um in in the short term focused on providing information gathering you know some some good um you know background and context to help the rest of the board come to a conclusion would be helpful um so if anyone would like to raise their hand and volunteer to be part of that committee now as good a time as ever jesse mr singer we can go one more yeah and for you know so this commit this ad hoc committee would basically help just gather information about the pros and cons to present to the rest of the board kind of save everyone okay well then that would be
144that's great send it out yeah but i think definitely listen any information that anyone gathers that you think is helpful feel free to you know just simply send an fyi out you know for everyone else to review and then we can discuss at our next meeting fantastic yeah exactly yeah like i said just an fyi and then it could be discussed at our next meeting um so if everyone's good with that cool all right motion to adjourn jamie jesse eric massad thank you good night