03-05-24 Manalapan-Englishtown Board Of Education Meeting

001Statement 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 mailing and or hand delivery of said notice to the designated newspapers, the Asbury Park Press and the Menalpen Patch, filing with the clerk of Menalpen Township and the clerk of English Town Borough. Kevin please call the roll. Thank you. Mr. Ferber absent. Mr. Green absent. Mr. Green. Here. Mrs. Her. Here. Mr. Cain. Here. Mrs. Lucas absent. Mrs. Parisi. Here. Mr. Santoro. Here. Mr. Tosetti. Here. Do you have a quorum. Please rise for the flag salute. Pledge allegiance to the flag. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and

002justice for all. Actually, Mr. Ferber is our acting president this evening so. Good evening everyone. Thank you for being here and I want to thank everyone involved in the art presentation that was really fantastic. Thank you to Mrs. Jent. Thank you to all the students involved in the entire art department throughout our schools for putting this together. It was really, really impressive what the students accomplished here. So thank you for bringing that to us tonight and we will start with our meeting tonight if. Want to start roll call? No, we're done. Oh, took it. Beautiful. All right. Yeah, we did that before we started. Go right into the meeting. We're going into changes and revisions? Yep. Okay. Do we have anything? We have a couple of things emailed earlier, but other than that, anything else?

003Okay. Moving on to item D, public comment. Anyone in the audience? You're welcome to come to the microphone. You have the opportunity to speak on anything you would like for three minutes. Please just state your name and your street location. Diana Ganter, 8 Woodruff Court. Okay. Diana Ganter, 8 Woodruff Court, English Town, New Jersey. Good evening all. Thank you so much for this opportunity given to us after I've approached the board with our concerns. It is with great anticipation that we, the Muslim community, await the passage of this resolution, which holds profound significance as the first of its kind in our town. It is essential to having this resolution passed tonight so the Muslim community feels safe and secure during Ramadan. The holiest month for Muslims, which begins on Monday. I hope this is the

004beginning of everyone embracing each other's differences and create community bonding in our town, no matter your religion, background, or ethnicity. May this initiative inspire neighboring communities to follow suit, fostering a ripple effect of harmony and cooperation. Once again, thank you. And I hope that we're able to pass this resolution that's really important to us and especially right before Ramadan. Thank you. Thank you. Any other speakers? Good evening. My name is Waleet Mohammed. I live on to McDonald Way in English Town. So I wanted to say I implore you to recognize the paramount importance of publishing the resolution tonight or voting on it tonight. Every child deserves to feel included, valued, irrespective of their religious beliefs, race, or any other distinguishing factor. This resolution is not just a document. It's a pledge to uphold the principles

005of equality and inclusivity that our society desperately needs. Let us take a resolute stand for the well-being and unity of every child in our community. So again, please, I urge you to take this seriously and really consider what this Islamophobic resolution stands for, and it is for the safety of our children and the community. So thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? Now's your opportunity. If you'd like to come up to the mic. May peace and blessings be upon all of you. I am Imam Omar Papraniku. I'm the Imam at the Dibra Community Center and also the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center. I'm representing the Islamic opinions, I mean, from the South Amboy to Jackson. I'm also Imam Chaplain at the Mahomet County Prosecutor's Office and also for the F.R.E. Holt Police Department. I'm supporting this community

006here. I don't have any doubt that the resolution, your respectful members, so will pass, because if you ask me as an expert in this field, I will just say that from the first human being and the prophet Adam, peace be upon him, until the last one, or maybe the major the Moses, the Jesus and the Muhammed, peace be upon all of them, there is no better religion. There is only, sometimes you might find the bad people, but there is no better religion. And I think that if you ask everybody, so why did we came in this beautiful country of ours, it's only because safety and security. And I hope that these laws, these resolutions are for everybody. Thank you again. May God bless you and your families. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? This will

007be the last opportunity for public comments. Going once, going twice. Okay, we're going to close public comments for the evening. Thank you for those of you who spoke. We appreciate that. Moving on, we're going to jump ahead to item F, action items. Can I have a motion and a second on F1 through F4? Jamie and Ryan, any questions, comments? Nope. Okay, Kevin. Thank you. Mr. Ferber? Yes. Mr. Green? Yes. Mrs. Herr? Yes. Mr. Cain? Yes. Mrs. Parisi? Yes. Mr. Santoro? Yes. Mr. Tosetti? I'm going to be a yes on one through three and abstain on number four, please. Thank you. Motion carried. Thank you. Can I have a motion and a second on G1 through G13? Christine and Mr. Cain. Any questions, guys? No questions. Thank you. I don't have any questions, but on four,

008well, I guess my question would be, this is everything we talked about last week, right? These are all the items that were discussed last week for the referendum? Related to the referendum, right? Yeah. So if so, I just want to reiterate for those who are watching either on video or here that this is the first step in a process and isn't necessarily the guaranteed final outcome of what we put on the ballot. So we vote yes here tonight and we move it along. Doesn't mean that that is the final conclusion of what will appear in November. This is the first official step we're taking to submit projects to the state for their review and approval. As we said at the last meeting, we anticipate getting what is called preliminary eligible cost letters sometime hopefully the

009end of July, early August, if not sooner. And that will be the next major step we take once that comes. We'll evaluate those and make our decisions as to what stays or goes and move on from there. All right. Thank you. Thank you for clarifying that. Okay. Kevin. Thank you. Mr. Green. Yes. Mr. Cain. Yes. Mrs. Parisi. Yes. Mr. Santoro. Yes. Mr. Tosetti. I'm going to abstain on G1 and yes on all the others, please. And Mr. Ferber. Yes. Motion carried. Can I have a motion and a second on H1 through H3? Mr. Santoro and Mr. Santoro. Sir. Thank you. Any questions or comments, guys? No. Kevin. Thank you. I'm sorry. Yeah. Hey, for the Stockton University field trip, how many students are going on that? I can tell you right now. It's after school,

010so it's not a during the day field trip and it's for one of the clubs. Let me see if I have the number of children on here. I do. It's the science competition. It has 10 students. And that's funded by the school district right now, not out of pocket. It's a competition, so if there is a cost, that part would be yes, but it does look like parents are actually driving their students and no busing is needed. You're welcome. Thank you, Jeff. Mrs. Her. Yes. Mr. Kane. Yes. Mrs. Parisi. Yes. Mr. Santoro. Yes. Mr. Tosetti. Yes. Mr. Ferber. Yes. Mr. Green. Yes. Motion carried. Item I, personnel. Can I have a motion and a second please on I-1 through I-13? Mr. Parisi and Mr. Tosetti. Thank you. Any questions? No questions. Jesse. Thank you, Kevin.

011Thank you. Mr. Kane. Yes. Mrs. Parisi. Yes. Mr. Santoro. Yes. Mr. Tosetti. I'm going to abstain on I-5 and a yes on the rest please. Thank you. Mr. Ferber. Yes. Mr. Green. Yes. Mrs. Her. Yes. Motion carried. Thank you. We are going to go into a presentation right now. I will pass it over to our superintendent. Do you want to? Yes. Let's see. I may have to move. Yes. The mid-year's update. No, I think I'm okay. And I should be able to work this from there. So we'll go with it. So mid-year update is our, okay, okay, I'm ready now. Yes. So every year we update our goals and actually I am going to move so I can see the screen. I'm like trying to figure out how I'm going to do this without looking.

012There we go. So our mid-year's goals update. Every year we put out a mid-year's goal update to just show how we're progressing through our goals. And we oftentimes talk about any new data that's been released from the state. So for the 23-24 school year the district had three goals. The first was to implement strategies and resources to support all stakeholders in their social and emotional development to ensure a safe, healthy, equitable, and inclusive school environment. The second is to continue to utilize various forms of standard-based data and special programs including response to intervention and gifted and talented to ensure equitable opportunities to learning outcomes and to address achievement premised on individual, cognitive, effective, and behavioral student needs. And the last was the district will apply instructional and assessment practices aligned with model school's principles and

013high-effect instructional strategies to reflect strategic thinking and require authentic applications of concepts. So I'm not going to go through each slide and read each slide. I sent this to the board on Friday to review and then I plan on sending it out later in the week to the rest of the community where you can review at your own speed, but I do want to highlight some items. So for goal one, we continue with our nurtured heart initiative including trainings, Q&A sessions, and newsletters. We also continue our building-based activities focused on a variety of social and emotional development, including celebrating differences, character education, and self-esteem. Additionally, our counselors and our SCL interventionists conduct whole group and small group sessions tailored to our specific needs. We will also be developing an internal bank of resources to address

014our specific needs. For staff, we continue with our district vision days, wellness fairs, and building activities. We also created a nurtured heart champion teams in each school that focus on morale in each building. And for parents, we continue to offer workshops through individual workshop nights and parent university. So here's just a rundown of some of the items we do for students and here are some of the items that we do for staff and then for the community. For our second goal, throughout our problem solving model and our commitment to effectively using data, we continue to analyze individual student achievement as well as cohorts of students to create plans that effectively address those needs. And through the use of academic coaches, we provide targeted assistance to our staff in meeting those needs. Some of our specific

015progress to address these needs include RTI, ESL, and gifted and talented. Additionally, we use our tiered system of support to also address our effective and behavioral needs. So again, here is how we address some cognitive needs this way. Here is some specifics to our programs of RTI, ESL, and gifted and talented. And then here's how we address some of our effective behavioral needs. And the final goal. Throughout the years, we have always had one goal dedicated to instructional strategies. Since I've been here, there's always been one goal primarily dealing with instructional strategies and it usually followed model school's principles. We have kept that going. And this year, we've created a consistent PLC calendar amongst all our schools that focus on revisiting these instructional strategies that we focused on over the last 10 years. So over

016the last 10 years, we have introduced and reaffirmed different instructional strategies. Now 10 years later, your staff changes. It's time for a refresh. So we really use this year to kind of refresh on those strategies that had the highest effect size for aiding towards student growth. Are there any questions from the board on 1 to 3, the goals, before we get to the data? Are we still utilizing model schools? Yes. Right. So because I remember a few years ago, you were considering going in a different direction because you used that. Right before COVID, we stopped going to the conferences because we felt that the conferences, and I hate to say this in public, but it was almost like one step behind us. So we were going, but we weren't necessarily learning anything new. At the

017last conference, we were presenters that had a huge audience of people wanting to hear from us. So you have to weigh, is the conference worth your time? So we started looking into other conferences. Again, it was around the COVID year. We were going to go to one that focused primarily on high effect sizes. I still have airplane mileage from that failed trip because COVID happened. We never got there, and then we began moving towards the Blue Ribbon conferences, which our team of Blue Ribbon administrators will get up and discuss after I'm done. All right. Thank you. Is there any other questions about our goals? Overall, I'm very proud of our goals. I think our goals truly, and it says it in the summary again, but it truly looks at the whole child. Right? We're focused

018on learning, but we're also focused on that cognitive, I'm sorry, effective and behavioral as well. We try to do always look at the whole child, and I think we do a good job of doing that, and I think we also do a good job of supporting our staff and giving them the resources that they need to do that as well. So what does our data look like? Again, as you all remember, in September, Jody gives a presentation on data, and that's based on our NJSLA scores. However, around December, the New Jersey Department of Ed puts out a very large, multiple large Excel spreadsheets that list the data for every district and school in New Jersey. I love when we get that, and I like data. So I take that and I play with it to

019filter out different, to filter out to get to what I'm looking for. Basically, what I do though, and I want you to know that before you look at the data, I filter out all charter schools, and I filter out any district that doesn't have data for that grade level because I don't see it as a fair comparison. So this is districts and schools that are public schools similar to us, not similar to us in that they're not charter. So this shows our district ELA average score rankings. In parentheses is where we ranked last year, next to where we ranked this year. And what I mean for where we ranked, I look at the average NJSLA score for third grade, I sort the entire document by that, and then I find where our district falls in

020that. So for third grade, our district was at ranking 129 out of the 490 districts in New Jersey. If you look by the time we get to eighth grade, we're at 49 out of 450. I find that very interesting always with our data is in a lot of districts as students get older, less students tend to be as successful. But we always seem to kind of go in the opposite direction. We get more and more successful. So basically what this says in eighth grade, we were in the 11th percent of districts in New Jersey. Now, again, if multiple districts have the same ranking, same scores, it'll just be in the order of alphabetical, so maybe off a little bit, but we're in the 11. And then on the right shows our MERS rankings for the

021districts of Monmouth County. Again, we continue to score towards the top. I think if you remember my presentation last year, I wanted to go back to it, I actually compared how we scored amongst the districts that were ahead of us. And what I found was most districts that were ahead of us were either a higher socioeconomic town and usually a smaller district. We are one of the few that score so highly for such a large district in our socioeconomic status. Here is math. And in math, one thing to take into account is when you look at algebra and geometry, not every middle school has algebra and geometry, and this also includes high schools. So just something to remember is that those are high school numbers included in there. But as you can see, once again,

022we stayed within the top 20 percent of the state, which is quite impressive. I do want to say one thing about language arts because I'd be remiss to leave it out. In third grade, you notice that is probably where we are lowest at 26 percent. That tends to be very consistent for us, and it's something that we continually as an administrative team talk about and look at and try to improve upon. So please don't think that that goes unnoticed to us. We have many, many admin meetings where we think about what can we do to start off where we end, not have to get there. Oops, wrong way. Our district science averages were in the top 21 percent and 26 percent of, no, this year's 29 percent and 30 percent of the state. We are

023probably one of the few school districts that do not teach science and social studies all year long in middle school, seventh, eighth grade, and sixth grade we do. But as you can see, we're still outperforming 70 percent of the districts in New Jersey. This is the chart by school. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. Like I said, I will send it out. You can check for yourself. And these are science scores by school. Again, but I will mention this. We are still in the top percentage, and when you look at schools, you'll see a much larger number because it's not just the districts, it's every school that could be in that district. And that's where you'll also see, because I get these questions. So if you look at, let's say

024seventh grade, you see 678 schools. And then when you look here at seventh grade, you see 447 or 428 schools. So people are like, why is that number so off? Because like us, there are districts that have multiple middle schools. So one is comparing districts, where the other chart's comparing the school among schools. So the data will look different. So in summary, this year our motto was every child deserves a champion, be the champion. We focus on our goals with this motto in mind as we look at our students' cognitive, social, emotional, behavioral needs. We utilize a variety of data points to identify potential academic gaps and have meaningful conversations through data meetings and problem solving to create plans that target those gaps. This effort has been showing success as our data demonstrates that we

025are leaders in terms of our achievement on the NJSLA. We also focus on the whole child, like I said earlier, including tiered behavior intervention plans. And we're excited to continue on this course and look towards the future. So is there any questions about the data? I don't actually have a question. I just wanted to point out with the third grade as well, I think it's important for those who don't realize third grade's the first year they're taking the NJSLA. And I think not having taken that type of test before on the computer and knowing how to manipulate everything with that, I think will factor in to how well they do. It's their first time test. So I think seeing a higher number there doesn't really concern me as much. So I thought it was important

026to point that out. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Does anyone else have any questions about the data? Okay. Anyone have any questions about the whole report? I just want to say I think our numbers are impressive. And I know that the staff and the district continue to strive toward closing any gaps that they see. And I know everyone is on top of it. Again, third grade, like you said, it's the first time taking the test. So maybe we can, I know I'm sure you're already focusing on how we can acclimate them a little better to that as well. And this doesn't include any special ed, this is, or is it does, it does include the whole population. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. I compare the whole, all, all students. Anybody else? Okay. At this

027time, I'd like to turn the stage over to our blue ribbon administrative team. So that would be Ms. Pepchinsky, Dr. Ciri, Ms. Orlando, and Ms. Foy. Please come up to the stage. Do you want this? All right. While we get set up, I do want to say thank you to everybody for allowing us, the Board of Ed for approving this trip, as well as the county superintendent, because this needs to also be approved by him. I'd also like to thank Christine for bringing up the point about model schools. And I'll add a little bit more about that and how we got to where we are with model schools and attending these conferences instead. So the end of November this year, the four of us did attend the Blue Ribbon Conference, which was held in Florida

028this year. So we're very fortunate for that opportunity. But not only did we attend, but we presented. And our journey with presented did come from the experience that we had at model schools. And Christine, you were, I think, a part of that very first trip with model schools, which was around 2015. So we've been doing this for quite a while. And that actually was where we developed all of what we're doing with curricular initiatives and goals for the past nine years. And our goals have derived from that. But as Dr. Santora said, we felt that we had more to offer at that last time we went than we were gaining from those trips. So we started to venture outwards. And prior to COVID, we were looking into the John Hattie visible learning, high-effect instructional strategies,

029which did come from model schools as well. We learned that there. We are carrying in everything we have done since, has been strategic and purposely planned out even our trips to model schools, and I'm sorry, Blue Ribbon. And what we're going to talk about today is really what we presented. We're going to give you an abbreviated version of that, was it an hour, hour and a half presentation so that you understand what we presented. And we're very fortunate to say that we had over 40 attendees, which is actually a lot considering the room was not very big. It was standing room only. So we're very proud. This was our third year presenting. So we're very lucky. We always have some sort of theme that goes along somewhat to our goals as a district as well.

030Our presentation this year was called SOS, supporting our students, ties very closely in with what we've been talking about with intervention, mental health, counseling, what you've been hearing. It was entitled, Riding the Wave to Success. And just so you have some background, our objectives, we had an ocean theme, SOS. So our objectives for this presentation were to share how to increase student success through interventions focused on fostering academic and social emotional growth. We shared out strategies to build professional capacity to create a collaborative culture. And we shared organizational structures that effectively promoted student success for all. So I hope just even from those objectives, you see how they're even aligned to what we do with our goals as a district. So I'm going to pass off to Mrs. Orlando, who will talk to you more

031about supporting students. Good evening, everyone. As Mrs. Pepchinski said, it was such an honor, again, presenting at the Blue Ribbon Conference for the third time. And one of the things we talked about is how in Monalath and English Town we support our students and our staff. We talked about data meetings and interventions, how we meet with our staff three times a year. They analyze the data after all of our Lincoln assessments, after our Lexile, our DRA. And we meet with them and we talk to them about what surprises do you see in this data? What does this data tell you? And what are we going to do with this data? How are we going to help our students be most successful? We have to think outside the box. We're implementing our tier one, tier two,

032and tier three interventions. So our teachers are meeting with us several times a year. They're meeting with our interventionists. They're talking about students. They're talking about the why. And what can we do to meet the diverse needs of our students? The other thing we talked about was something called report card interventions. Several years ago, we were asked the question, what do you do with the report card at the end of the year? And we said we file them in the CUME folder, of course. And Dr. Marchante at the time said, well, that's really good data. What are you doing with that data? So what we do is we give the teachers at the end, at the beginning of the year, the previous year's report card for every student. And any student who is not receiving

033a tier one or tier two or tier three intervention, the teachers create what we call report card interventions. So they look at the standards on the report card where any student was below meeting expectations for the end of the year. And some of these interventions include personalizing learning on IXL or Mobimax. Teachers are meeting with students in small groups. And then we meet with teachers at the end of December. And we talk about these report card interventions. Have we filled the gap? Have we closed that gap for students? If not, what do we do next? So again, it's really that spiraling. And we use our win period or what I need period for teachers to do these interventions. So we, as Dr. Santora said, we focus on the whole child. It's about their social-emotional needs

034as well as their academic needs. So we have a lot of SEL, social-emotional interventions in place. We have our counselor, our school psychologists. Some schools have social workers. And we also have an outside agency, Collier, that we use and collaborate with as well to once again give our students what they need in this area as well. We have a variety of Beyond the School Day programs. This year we also have our HIT, our High Impact Tutoring Grant, which we have been able to really offer so many additional supports to our students. Sometimes during these Beyond the School Day programs, we offer math, reading. We offer social skills groups as well. And again, it's about what can we do? We use the data, and how can we help this child be more successful? Sometimes we even

035look at what we call our bubble students, our students who are right on the cusp, who just need that little push. And we again are offering reading comprehension, decoding groups, really anything to meet their needs. As you all know, we have an amazing summer school program where we offer remediation classes as well as enrichment classes for our students. Any student who is a tier two or tier three learner, those students receive summer school at Wemrock Brook free of charge. And we offer our extended school year program for special education students who have shown that regression as well. So we have so many supports in place. And these are just some of the things that we spoke about to all of the participants that came to our workshop who are really excited to hear about what

036we do here in Monalepin and how they could bring it back to their district. We also have a variety of computer subscriptions, fracks for fractions, ST math, we're always running ST math contests in our schools to get the students excited. Right now it's March Mathness, not to be confused with March Madness. And again, these programs are also available during the summer as well to keep those skills up. And we have an awesome enrichment program. We have enrichment teachers, again, we look at a variety of data. And those students are able to meet with our enrichment teachers and again do a variety of activities such as the stock market, such as building bridges. And they are challenged in language arts and mathematics. So these are just some of the ways that we support our students and

037ensure that they are getting what they need. Mrs. Foy? Sorry, thank you. So Mrs. Orlando mentioned a little bit about the social emotional learning supports that we provide. Obviously, not everything is academics. We need to cover those other areas. Some of the ways that we've done that over the past few years have been eliminating clip charts in the classroom. Obviously we don't want a public display of how the children are doing. And even in pre-K and K where I am, they know what that color means. We've provided reset spaces within the classroom, a safe space where students can sort of take a break, get themselves together with some sensory items, some breathing activities right within the classroom. And we've added sensory hallways in a lot of the elementary schools, which is great for all of

038our learners to get some of those wiggles out, get a brain break, do some motion through the hallway as they're transitioning from classes. And that has been very successful. We also use the zones of regulation at the elementary school. It's really a visual of kind of a face of what they look like so kids can gauge how big their problem is when they may not have the language to express how they're feeling. And that has been successful. As Mrs. Orlando covered, we collaborate with an outside agency for some support. And we also engage in a lot of year of kindness activities, whether it's morning announcements, you might see students or staff wearing the hashtag choose kind shirts, acknowledging students, but also staff for all that they do that's positive and just really build that culture

039of understanding what we want our community to be one of kindness and openness. And we've added actually a lot of different assemblies this year that have been very positive for our students. And I know that the board has heard a lot about it and we're, you know, working on it monthly within the building and even some parent evenings about their nurtured heart approach is our latest addition to make sure that we're meeting the needs of all the students and also enhancing our communities through all of the positive recognition and a positive approach to behavior. And I'm going to hand it off to Dr. Siri. So I talked about the staff capacity component because without our staff continuing to learn and continuing to grow and come on this model school's journey with us and the blue

040ribbon school journey with us, it would not be possible for our students to make the type of growth that they make. So we, as many of you know, we host the OG program for training and staff for our staff members to get OG trained. Right now we also have a Wilson cohort getting trained, which are two amazing multisensory strategies for struggling learners to help, again, close that gap and show academic growth. Our coaching models have been so successful in literacy and math. We continue to grow that program as a district and add coaches that focus on specific targeted content areas. But we knew that we also needed those coaches for behavior. We added a district BCBA, which was huge for us. We have the behavior and the special education coach, which help us day in

041and day out. Sometimes they are a text message away and we're like, please come help us now. Otherwise they're meeting with their teachers on their preps and doing that hands on job embedded training, which is so important, working with the students hands on modeling exactly what they need them to do. We train all of our teachers across the district on their tier one interventions. It's important that all of our teachers are doing the interventions with fidelity for them to, again, show that growth. So nothing like our RTI teachers and our RTI department to train all the teachers on what that intervention should look like so it's consistent across of our buildings and consistent across the district. And then, of course, we do our pineappling and micro teaching. For those of you that don't know, we've

042talked about it before, but I'll give you a quick overview. Pineappling in colonial times was the pineapple was out to welcome you in and to also send you away. So we use the pineapple as a symbol to welcome teachers into the classrooms. And we've been doing this for years. It was something we picked up at model schools many years ago when we were brought to Menalapen and the teachers invite one another into their classrooms to watch them do something in action. And I can't even tell you how many times a teacher says to me, I went in to watch a reading mini-lesson and I came out with the reading mini-lesson and this transition idea and this behavior strategy and they learn so much from one another. Your best PD is your colleague down the hall

043or across the district. We've even pineappled across buildings. The admin team had pineappled with each other, watching each other's problem-solving meetings because we can all continue to learn and grow from each other. Micro teaching is very much like an NFL team watching back their footage and kind of improving on their practice for the following game. Micro teaching, we do two cycles throughout the year in all the buildings where teachers record themselves teaching with a specific focus in mind. They watch it back with themselves, with a trusted colleague, with a friend who's going to be brutally honest with them. And they reflect on the process and then they do it again after they set a goal and try to work on it. And it's really just an important way for us to pick up on some

044of the things we do grow as professionals, which really help, again, the students grow. Lastly, I talked about organizational structures. Things needed to shift slightly in the district to make all of these things happen. The biggest shift, I think, up there was the move to the six-day schedule in 2018. It was a big move. There's a joke in education. If you're in education, you know this, is if you want to create stress in a school, change the schedule, right? We did it and we did it very slow and we were really patient and they understood we gave them the why, right? One of the biggest things we do for our staff is we explain why we're doing this. Why are we shifting to this? And shifting to the six-day schedule allowed us to add the

045when period in, which allowed us to do our interventions during when. So if a student needs an intervention, a tier two or a tier three intervention or speech or OT, that all happens during when. So enrichment happens during when so they're not missing any new instruction and there's that time built in. It gives the teachers an opportunity to do enrichment and do small group work with their students, but it also gives them the ability to provide those interventions without our students missing any new instruction. So that shift happened in 2018. It seems like we've been doing it forever now, but it really hasn't been that long since we added the when period and now we present it at conferences all the time and people are really interested in our model and how we do that.

046When we added a PLC schedule, I know Dr. Santora spoke about this during her presentation, it's consistent. We have a monthly guide. There's some flexibility based on our individual needs. So when that data comes out and we look at our data, we grab the coaches. Our coaches help us implement this schedule across the district to make sure that they're getting that job-embedded PD based on what our data shows and what our district goals are. And we also have grade-level meetings. So that six-day schedule allowed us to make sure that our entire grade-level had prep or special at the same time, which gave them that 40-minute period of time at the elementary school to collaborate with one another, not during their lunch, they could have their duty-free lunch and enjoy, but had 40 minutes dedicated to

047working together, to norming writing samples, to working with the coaches. So our grade-level meetings and our PLCs are mostly scheduled on those grade-level preps. I'm going to turn it back over to Ms. Mepchinsky. So an area that we always continue to want to do better is when it comes to parent involvement. And this is an area that we continuously strive to make our own district goals. Things we have added over the years have included parent interventions. Not only do we feel that we need to support our students through their learning, but we also need to be able to support parents so there's that reinforcement at home. So any child who does receive a Tier 3 intervention, we do often, it is part of the process, either have the parent in or there'll be a conference,

048whether it's done virtually, remotely, or over a phone. We will work to train them sometimes, even through training videos, on how to do a short task at home to reinforce concepts with their goals that are being taught in school. It's simple. Typically, it can be a two to three minute at the most, no more than 10 minutes, something that's reinforcing that partnership and helping the parent to have a better understanding of what their child needs to grow and evolve. Parent University, when we do present, this typically piques the interest of those attending our conference. They do like the concept of Parent University and how we do hold that event once a year, but we have a follow-up series. And most recently, we did have Nurtured Heart, even with CPAG, which is our special ed parent

049group. We also had another parent presentation last week on supporting the behaviors of children, and that was presented through, by our BCBA. So we do strive to educate our parent community because the more they know, the more they can support their children, which helps build the partnership between us and them. Something the principals did plan for in collaboration this past summer with the ESL supervisor, they recognized that some of our MLL students, also known as ELL students, if you know that term, our English learners, multilingual learners, that it's hard for some of their parents, just with cultural shifts, language concerns, that we felt we had to do something to support them, particularly when it comes to the opening of school. And I'm sure everybody here recognizes the hundred or so documents you have to read

050to get your child's teacher. And we recognize there's a lot of language there, and just even the technology support that's necessary. So we did open up our schools to the parents of our MLL learners. We had two sessions at two schools so they can come and gain assistance, support, just to better support their children. That's always the purpose, always the need. And before we talk about some of our takeaways, I'm going to go back to how I started. Christine brought up earlier about going to model schools. You've probably heard similar things presented to you by our model schools team. That's what we tend to call ourselves, even when we've transitioned to Blue Ribbon. We're the model schools team. This has not been an initiative. I don't like that word. It's been an evolution, a transformation.

051This is at least nine years in the making. And in order for this to be successful, we need to be redundant. We need to be repetitive. We need to be consistent. If we were to do something one year and never again, we would not have long-term success. And we take great pride in being able to reset, such as what we did this past school year, where we went back to model schools principles, and to build. We don't just stop and say we're going to do the same thing always. We will evolve with it. We'll build upon what we've done. And it's not just nine years. I can say I can go back as far as 2012, where we started to look at the data really in depth, and we said there's 30% of our students

052we need to still really get to. And that's when our transformation, our evolution, began. And what I'm so proud of is that we continue to build. We don't drop everything we do and restart over. We just keep adding to it. So you will hear us year after year, even within our district goals, build upon what we have been doing. We get better and better because we are evolving, reflecting, assessing, and making small changes, not big changes. So we don't just go to brag, though I like to say we do, when we go to these conferences to talk about all the wonderful things we're doing and how our district has two blue ribbon schools prior to COVID. All of our elementary schools were in the top 10% in the state. Dr. Santora just shared our recent

053data. We're doing quite well. But we do come with takeaways. We do learn from the conferences that we do attend. Got to catch my breath. We'll each add on, but some of the takeaways this time were more STEM and makerspace materials. WAS-Ed was a big one. There were also some free resources, which is websites that we can access, no cost to the district. 2x10, a walk and talk, MLL tip of the month, again, that helps our ESL department, AI is a topic you will hear a lot about in the upcoming months, the use of chat GPT. AI should not replace learning. It is supposed to be a thinking tool. You're going to hear us talk more about that because this really, I think, leveraged us wanting to learn more. And we are researching. Coffee with

054the counselor, positive office referrals and decodable texts. We found some great resources there as well. Did you want to share anything about any of the takeaways? Okay. What was really interesting was when we first attended the Blue Ribbon Conference three years ago, we were the only district talking about the win period. And this year, there were probably more than half of the different workshops we attended talking about the win period. And we did go, huh, we're a bit ahead of you there. So we do try to stay above, but it's nice to know that others are seeing the value. And we hope they get that from our presentations because we recognize we are researching. We're working hard to build. So when you do see other districts who are attaining Blue Ribbons also doing what we're

055doing, it further validates all that we do as a district. I like being the trendsetter, not the follower. Any questions? And we have to thank you. We did get to have some fun while we were there. So thank you. That was in the conference hall. They did have Mickey come to the hall. So thank you for this opportunity once again. Just thank you for all your hard work and dedication. I know it's a lot. Just listening to all of you tonight, it just makes my head spin. Everything that you are doing to keep our students successful. And I appreciate it. And thank you all. I want to thank you all too for presenting tonight. I think it's important for the board to see when we go to a conference what we do there and what

056we take away and how we truly use that to set our next goals. Probably with it around May or June, all of us on the model schools team will work collaboratively to start talking about our goals next year. The goals aren't something that I come up with alone or Jody comes up with alone. It's really a team effort. We first talk amongst ourselves, then we bring in the rest of the administrative team. And it's paying off. So thank you very much for sharing with us your experience. Thank you to our Blue Ribbon team. Great presentation. And again, to echo Ms. Parisi's comments, it really makes my head spin seeing what you guys do and how you put it all together. Really impressive. So thank you for that. We are now going to move into workshop

057and we will be discussing our budget. Ronnie, do you want to start and then I'll chime in? Sure. Actually, earlier, I believe we handed out a copy of the projection, which is confidential at this point. There is some confidential information on the back page. So please keep that in mind, talking about salaries and certain things. This year, we were faced with a little bit larger shortfall than we had maybe seen in the past. We're fortunate in a way that we didn't actually have a reduction in state aid as we had anticipated. I was expecting about $950,000, $980,000 reduction based on the original S2 tentative schedule for reductions. It's been fairly accurate so far. But we were very pleased, Nicole and I, when we opened up the state aid report the other day after the governor's

058budget address. And we're like, wait, it didn't change. The numbers didn't change. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? So we were fortunate in that, which saved us from having to cut an additional $1 million. That being said, we are still approximately $2.4 million short at this point. We are looking to, we have to adopt the budget tentatively on March 19th. Nicole and I and the entire administrative team have been going round and round looking for places we can cut and places we can actually eliminate or push off or possibly, instead of making an outright purchase, say, for Chromebooks or for something else to lease purchase our buses, I would like to purchase them because that's the best way for us to do it. We don't incur any interest charges, but unfortunately, I can't bear the

059full cost of the buses and the budget, so we are forced to lease purchase. Not only are we forced to lease purchase, we're going out over a longer period than I would normally like. I'd like to do buses over five years. We're pushing it out beyond that because just to keep the budget as lean and trim as possible. So can I share? Sure. So I'm about the process. Friday, I thought we were at 1.7. That was ahead of the game. It turned out that... It's a constant moving target. It's a constant moving target, yes. And there was something that was in capital reserve, right? Capital reserve? Yes. That Ronnie had put under revenue, but because it was capital reserve, I didn't have it under possible cuts. So once we spoke and combined it, what we

060were both doing, we realized that that was another 1.3 million. Just so that everyone understands, our projected budget from last year to this year increased by 1.3%. So when you think of inflation, you think of the cost of living and the increases. We have 1.3% more than last year to handle all those things. We were told to estimate health insurance to go up between... 10 and 12. 10 to 12%. Last year, it went up about $1 million, which would be almost the entire 1% that we increased. When you look at health insurance, which is about $20 million in our district, increasing by 10 to 12%, and then you look at our budget only increasing by 1.1 million, 1.17 million. You can see that the money isn't physically there. So it's easy for people to say,

061wait, you didn't get any money cut, so we're good. Not so much. We are still going to have to make significant cuts. One of the things that I do is Ronnie prints out the whole budget. I put it in an Excel document. I categorize it. I group it. So I have salary one. I have instructional supplies in another, office supplies in another. I look at about how much is each in each category and where we can make possible reductions. I did something this different this year than I've never done before, and I don't think we've ever done the district before. I had a group meeting with every administrator and director in the district to talk about what the budget looked like and to ask them to go back to their budgets and see if there's

062anything else potentially that could go. It's going to be very hard for us to get the remainder of this money. The number you're seeing now does not include any cuts to staff. At this point, they're not there. We are going to do our best to not increase class sizes. That is one of my major goals. We're also looking at different courses of revenue, and I don't know if it'll yield results for this budget, but we're going to try different things to yield results for the following year. So for instance, Ms. Petillo is looking at partnering with neighboring districts to do shared services for certain services that she needs that she may need part time. They may need part time versus hiring an outside agency, hiring a person that could work in both districts. Ms. Vistano

063is looking at covering some of our out of district bus routes internally. So we're going to try that this year to see if we can handle that, and then hopefully expand it. But those are some areas where we're looking. So we have also at this time have not cut anything that has a significant impact on students and their achievement. We have not increased class sizes, which I said, primarily our cuts have come from technology supplies. The curriculum department put together their bare necessities and then what they would like to enhance education. We went with the bare necessities. We cut a tremendous number of physical plant projects. It's truly one of the easiest areas to cut. But as we've said for the last seven years, every time we cut more to physical plant, the more dire

064need we become in. We're not painting, we're not retiling. All those projects are not happening like they used to happen regularly, locker replacements. So big cuts to physical plant that also looks at some of our vehicles. We have a truck from 2005 that we're now going to have to put some money into. That's what happens when you have a 20-year-old vehicle, right? But we're not replacing those at this time. And we also looked at some of our transportation supply account lines and also some of our routing. Like I said, Ms. Vestano is working to make that happen. We cut some of it and she's going to make it work. So any reduction of staff that we are looking at currently is to decrease enrollment due to the decrease enrollment or the needs of services and

065special ed. That's what we've put together so far. Again, it is not shown here. The other thing we were able to do is some of the projects and supplies we have cut. We're able to use stabilization aid, emergent capital need aid, and cafeteria reimbursement. I'm sure it has a fancier name than that, Ronnie, to still manage some of the projects that we had to go by the wayside. So a lot of cuts to the technology is because we're using stabilization aid to finance. Also, again, sixth grade Chromebooks we used to buy outright. We are now doing that on a three-year lease. One of the items, though, that I have not cut yet and I find this one of my most difficult decisions is, as you know, the additional spending question didn't pass for third grade

066Chromebooks so we can never buy third grade Chromebooks again. We can buy fourth grade Chromebooks. It's about $170,000. I equate every $100,000 to a staff member. In my mind, that's how I work. $100,000 is about a staff member. So when I make decisions, my goal is to try to save staff. I believe that the interaction with students and staff builds on the most success. You can't have a successful child without having someone successful behind them. That's why our motto is be the champion. So we're looking at about $170,000 for those Chromebooks for fourth grade. If we don't go in that direction, our Chromebooks are end of life. We do not know if the state will do an update to what we need for testing. So if we don't have Chromebooks that are compatible with the

067state update, then we're looking back to what we did when I first got here that I changed 10 years ago where classrooms are sharing Chromebooks. Not everyone's testing at the same time. Chromebooks are being shipped from one school to the next school, which can also cause damage. And you're looking at testing instead of being a week in a school being possibly over a month. And we don't have our labs anymore because we had eliminated them as part of our cuts over the last seven years. So that's one area that I have not taken out yet. I will try to keep it until it becomes an absolute necessity, but I do really struggle with the impact that it'll have on students, possibly our test scores, which impacts the entire community, really. So that is one, in

068all honesty, that I am struggling with, and I wouldn't want to not share that. Ronnie, do you have anything else? On the revenue side, on that first page, if you want to just take a look, I just want the first line with the ad valorem taxes, they are at our 2% cap. We did have a small amount of bank cap available from last year, which is about $70,000, which came to be because of an increase in health benefits once the budget was all said and done. But we finalized the budget so last minute last year as well that it really was impossible to take use of. So we have that to take advantage of. We have also generated, based on the numbers that I have in the budget now, more banked cap, or actually not

069more, it's actually automatic tax levy adjustment for increase in health benefit costs. So $420,000, the state is allowing us to increase our tax levy over the 2% amount because of the increase we're seeing in health benefits. They do a percentage, it's anything less than 2% over the state plan increase. So that's what the calculation amounts to. We are fortunate or unfortunate, depending how you look at it, but we are under adequacy now. In the past, part of our issue with health benefit increases was that they looked at anybody that was over adequacy and looked to take back any savings that we had in the area of health benefits and not savings that we would necessarily say on a direct basis, but the way they would calculate where they said we had savings, which we really

070didn't, but they threatened to take that away and return that to the taxpayers. We're not in that situation any longer because we are now $3.6 million below adequacy, where two years ago we were probably $4 million above adequacy. So it's been a large swing. Ronnie, could you just explain quickly what adequacy means? Adequacy is basically what they say that the school district should have to run appropriately. So what the school district does is they put together a fictitious district, like a medium, like a northern, southern, and central school district of average size with average administration, average enrollment, and said this is what it should cost to run a school. So what we have doesn't include transportation costs either. I believe it was $6 million. Oh yeah, in the beginning we were. No, I think we're

071$6 million under right now. No, $3. I think we're $3.6. Yeah, I think we're $3.6. Okay. I thought it was $6. Regardless, they're basically saying that we are short that much to what the state considers would be enough money to adequately run the school district. So that's one of the items that we're dealing with. And when you look at it, whether it's $6 or $3.6, when we initially put together our budget, and I have the number exactly, we were $4,779,000 over, which is almost exactly, if you think about how we initially budgeted on, based on what we needed, we budgeted almost at adequacy. Right. Unfortunately, we don't get the money to be at adequacy. And I've also taken as aggressive an approach to the other revenue items as I'm comfortable taking. I mean, I've looked

072at, I know Jesse asked me earlier about some of my notations being So basically, we've not reached those revenue levels, so I'm not going to increase them any more than what we had anticipated in the 22-23 budget. We're not going to reach them in 23-24. So I don't feel comfortable increasing those. The one area that we will have additional income in this year is since PNC did review our account structure, we are earning more interest. So I did bump that number up by a significant amount. Everything else remains equal for the most part. We do have one project being funded with capital reserve withdrawal, which is our network upgrade in the tune of $1.3 million. The way this shows is that it is a capital reserve withdrawal, which is our revenue item, and then we

073have an offsetting budget appropriation for $1.3 million. So basically, they're tied together, and they go hand-in-hand. If we take one out, the other one comes out. We can't leave the revenue item there and remove the project to help the budget situation. And I asked Rommie, because that's what I had initially last week, and I thought it would be great to have it as a revenue and not a quasi-sum. Right, but you can't do that. They're tied hand-in-hand. They're tied. And we hopefully, the hope is, because we did also submit an E-rate application with the U.S.A.C. Universal Service Commission. Everyone pays on your internet and your phone bill. You pay a tax that provides money for the U.S.A.C. to give us money back towards certain eligible services. So we do have what's called Category 2, which

074is more equipment and infrastructure funds available to us. That money will come to an end after next year, so we're trying to take advantage of it. This money wouldn't have been available to us to do this. Well, it would have been, but we were hoping that this would be taken care of in the Stabilization Aid application, which we all know we did not receive anywhere near as much as we had hoped we would get. Everything that we've been holding capital reserve funds back for has not come to fruition. So this is at a point, too, where it's pretty much end of life. We need to upgrade the infrastructure. So we will use $1.35 million worth of capital reserve. Any money that comes back to us as a reimbursement from U.S.A.C. will go back into the

075capital reserve. So that kind of always has to maintain that identity. And anything, I mean, you can ask any questions. I don't know if anybody has any questions on anything else you see on the sheets. On the second page with the summary of appropriations, you see that the added district placements, which we're showing currently at almost $2.5 million, that is after I've allocated almost $900,000 of tuition to our IDEA grant. So add those two numbers together, and that's really what our added district placements would be costing us anticipated. Are there any grants or other aid packages on the horizon that we're anticipating might help offset any of this? Not that I'm aware of. There was some talk, and I think there was a bill, Bruce, I'm not sure if you're aware. There's a bill about

076S2 funding, like try to give us the ability to raise our tax levy beyond the 2%. But unfortunately now, I'm not sure that we qualify as an S2 district anymore because we didn't receive a state aid loss. We don't have a reduction in state aid. So I don't know where that puts us kind of in like limbo sort of this year if we didn't have, I mean, they're not looking at the reductions from the past five years or six years. Actually, this is year seven, 2024-25 is year seven of the final year of S2. They're not looking at anything that happened prior to that. But I don't think we maintain that status of being an S2 district any longer because we did not see a reduction in state aid, thankfully. But I don't know what

077possible benefit that might preclude us from having now. We may also not be able to apply for stabilization aid in September because we technically didn't lose any money. Correct. Bruce will figure that out. So I mean, you can take a look down some of the things that are... Would the referendum, if the referendum that we're going to be going out for passes, would that help offset any of the... None of the referendum projects are counted. So the required maintenance grounds and stuff, that's nothing that has to do with what we put in the referendum. Everything else... So Ronnie and I have made about $3.3 million of cuts so far. Obviously, if we were up to almost $5 million, we're down to... When we went through anything that was redundant from the referendum, we took out.

078That was one of the first things we took out. So basically, the spreadsheet has about 3,000 line items on it. That's why I organized it into smaller spreadsheets. It shows what we appropriated last year, what we've encumbered so far this year, and then what we're anticipating to appropriate for next year. So I look at what we had last year, what's increasing by, and also we're about halfway through the school year, what we've spent. If we spent almost half the account, and it's something to do with sub-op fees, something that changes throughout the year, that I'm going to keep consistent. The other thing that's important to notice is about 80% of our budget is salaries and benefits. 80% of your salary being those areas, there's very little left. What is transfer to charter schools on the

079bottom of this list? Charter schools, we currently have two students in charter schools now, I believe it's two students. Yes, it's two. Next year, it's two. Two. We have an obligation if a child from our community, from either Manalapan or English decides they want to go to say Hatikva in East Brunswick, which is where our two students do go, they have the right to do that. As long as they enroll here, they can literally move into town today, come to the district, enroll, and then disenroll and enroll into Hatikva in the same day. We have an obligation to pay them a certain portion of our state aid over to the charter schools. That's how charter schools are financed. Yes, that's how charter schools get financed. We've had as many as eight students in charter schools.

080We've had them in Hatikva, and we've had them in College Achieve in Asbury Park, too. The state, when we do our ASSA counts in October, our school aid counts, the charter schools also do that, and they tell the state how many anticipated students they have. We get a printout from the state as part of our state aid report telling us how many students and how much we should be budgeting, and they run about 25,000, 24,000. I rounded up to 50 for the two. If additional children go out, I'll be responsible for that as well, or we'll be responsible for that as well, and then we'll be looking to move money into that account to fund it because we don't have a choice. Thank you. I had one other question, which I don't know if I'm

081going to ask all that well. The health insurance increases, which seems to be a lot year over year. Is that consistent with other industries, businesses, or is that very high because this is a school district, and is there any other option for us? We're in the state plan, and again, talk about Main Street. For as long as I've been in the district, which is 27 years, we have looked to get out of the state plan. Every year, we ask for what they call our claims ratio. Every other year, they give it to us for free. The alternate years, we have to pay $2,000 to the health benefit plan to actually obtain that report. Every year, we get it. I send it off to our health benefit consultant. He opens it up, and 15 seconds later,

082he says, no, sorry, you're not in a position to ... The way he likened it was to go to a private carrier, which was what our other alternative would be to go to a private carrier. They want us to have, for every dollar we pay in to premiums, they want us to have about 85 to 90 cents in claims going out. There's a 10% profit margin, 15 to 10% margin in there where we're paying in premiums more than we're pulling out in claims. We've had claims ratios at $1.15. For every dollar we put in, we're pulling out $1.15, $1.19, which is not good. It won't save us any money to go to a private carrier because that's what they're going to look at, and they're going to charge us appropriately. One thing with the health

083benefit plan is that it's kind of out of our control. They don't only control the cost, but they also control the plan structure. NJEA does sit on the team that reviews all of the projections and the plan structures. They do make changes occasionally. We used to have about eight or nine plan options. They're down to one, really, which is direct, direct 10, direct 15, which we don't offer direct 10 anymore. They have to buy up for ... Then there's the employee health plan or the educator's health plan, which is now mandated. Any new employee that comes into the school district that has not transferred from another district and was in the direct plan has to go into EHP. Our current employees that are in another plan can opt to go down if they feel it

084saves them money out of pocket. Unfortunately, what that does is it saves them money, but it costs us more. There's a garden state plan, which is another plan option, but it's very similar. It's not to our benefit. We're not seeing the ability to offer health benefit waivers like we used to as much. It's not as appealing because the out of pocket, based on not Chapter 74, but not Chapter 78, Chapter 44, they're paying on a percent of their salary, not a percent of the premium. It really isn't to our benefit. That's something interesting about the healthcare education is that we pay our percentage based on our salary, not the premium. If you're single with a higher salary, you may be paying more than someone that has family benefits, which are triple the cost because it's

085based on salary, not the cost. Our average family plan on projecting ... As a district, we make up the difference. I think I'm projecting a family plan, say a direct 15, which we do have a good number of people still in direct 15. For family coverage, it's costing gross premiums, about $45,000 for family coverage. From that, depending on who it is, if it's a more highly compensated person, for direct 15, that's based on your salary band. There's a percentage of premium based on salary. EHP and Garden State are strictly based percentage of salary. Everyone has a ... There's a calculator on the state website that people go to and can say, this is what my salary is going to be. This is the plan I'm looking at, and they can do comparisons. Whatever is less

086out of pocket for them, as long as they're okay with the network and what's out of network and the co-pays, they can move down to a lesser costing plan to them, but it costs us more. We really don't have any choice. Yeah, that's not the best answer by the way. It's very frustrating. If it's going up, I think you said, did you say $2 million this year, or was it $1 million? It was $1 million last ... From 21 to 22, we increased $1,111,000. If it's going up that much regularly, it's a serious expense. Our budget increased by $1,175,881, so we're looking at a difference of $60,000 for everything else. Salary insurance is going up, salary increases, cost of materials, gasoline prices. I don't have a crystal ball. It's anybody's guess what gas prices might

087be this time next year. They wax and wane, depending on what's going on in the world. We cannot say the bus isn't coming because we ran out of gas. Yes. Well, thank you very much. It's not going to be acceptable. No. Nicole, I guess I have more of a process comment or question. This is more for the board. I really feel, as I sit here and listen to this, next year we need a finance subcommittee. I don't know how ... We're supposed to come up with a budget in two weeks. We have $2.4 million. I don't know if the thought tonight is just to start spitballing ideas. I almost feel like we should do an ad hoc committee that meets next week and kicks around some ideas because I don't see how we're getting to

088a $2.4 million cut that we're ready to vote on two weeks from tonight without substantial input from the board as to how we're going to do this because I don't see how we do this without some impact on the instructional program that the community is going to feel. Right now we haven't had to touch the instructional program. We want to continue in that direction. My concern is we only have a week. If we start with 3,000 lines next week, we've gotten it down $3.3 million in five days. This is all we do every day. Yeah, seriously. I worked on this literally until 15 minutes before I walked out of the building. I don't go home for dinner. I worked on this all day and taking these numbers and making sure that they agreed between the

089spreadsheet Nicole's working on and I'm working on where we're tracking what we're cutting and the details of what we're cutting into Genesis, which also has the details. I have to keep that in line and then taking that and dropping it into adjusting my salary spreadsheet because I have to present that to the county office and then taking that and also making sure that the state budget numbers are accurate because some things throw out, you know, edit check, fatal errors and things I have to be careful on that end too. It's a very multi-step process that takes literally it's we've been living it every day for the last two weeks. Sure. I think Ryan may brings up a great point, although I also don't know that, you know, an ad hoc committee is going to, you

090know, maybe we'll come up with a, I don't know, some kind of suggestion that can maybe we'll find 30, $40,000, which everything counts. I think we're going to get close to making a dent in 2.4. That's what I mean. A big decision is going to have to be made here to get to cut the 2.4. If there's a big decision made, I will bring it to the board. Right now we don't have a big decision. So hold on. So you're thinking we're not going to have to make some major decision that impacts has a significant impact on the district that the community is going to notice to get to cut the 2.4. As I told you, I haven't done the $170,000 for Chromebooks. Any of my new cuts sent to me by directors I have

091put in, all of my principals have offered up items in their school to be cut and they're not huge things. They're a projector, cubbies, things like that. I have not cut all of them yet. I'm trying to keep the school's budgets intact because what they're offering, their budgets are so small, what they're offering would devastate them, small impact on the budget. So have we went through all of our possible cuts yet? No. This does not include staffing. Most of right now what we're looking for staffing were vacancies that were in the budget because when Ronnie pulls out the numbers, it may be like the position was created but not abolished yet because of where it happens on the board agenda. So we went through all that. We've also looked at some retirements. We don't have

092them all yet. And we also looked at decreases in services and enrollment. We are not done at looking at those areas either. And then don't forget, March 19th is, we have to submit the budget attentively. We have to submit a tentative budget on March 20th. So March 19th, we'll have our budget tentative adoption. We still have time between that period of time and our final adoption to make slight revisions. I mean, we can make revisions if something, if there's something in there that is, you know, you're really totally opposed to, we have time to make changes to. So then it would be done via email is essentially what you're saying? I could send an email, yes, and you could give me feedback. I just don't think there's enough, there's just not enough time to do

093that in a total committee situation. The other part with the 3,000 lines of code, because I had thought about sharing it with the board, is that each director and principal put in their own items this year because we're using Genesis for process. So their student names, their stuff that can't go to the whole board for confidentiality, which means I would then have to go through the 3,000 lines and pull out anything that you may not be able to see due to confidentiality. Well, also, there's also information there you can't necessarily see because we have conflicted board members as well. So to look at staffing salaries with individual names and position codes is problematic as well because of some of the conflicts we have on the board. So now I'm spending probably at least a day

094going through 3,000 lines of code to organize. Again, I'm just suggesting to the board that we think about this for next year because right now it's essentially the superintendent and the BA doing this all day long for days at a time as the deadline approaches. And I feel like there's more the board could be doing here to be involved in this process. So even now, I guess we're just going to hope for the next two weeks that this happens. It's just not Ronnie and I. And I said that. Friday we met with every single administrator and every director. We sit today from 1030 to 1230 with the primarily of our conversation being the budget and reviewing it and analyzing it. That conversation is not done either. So it's not just Ronnie and I. What yesterday

095you and I sat for what an hour, hour and a half. So it's also meeting with different areas and having those conversations. And I think when I met on Friday with the administrators, I went through everything that I was looking to cut at that time to see their input and their insight. And like I said, there are schools that have sent me $20,000 worth of cuts and they're not big projects. At this point, I don't want to take those little, you know, the ELC has a very small budget due to their enrollment. They sent me like $1,500, $1,500 is not going to make up the difference. It's going to devastate them. But if I look at each school and each school gives me $5,000 to $1,500, now I'm at almost $50,000 and it may come

096where I need that $50,000. Right now for this initial budget, I did not want to pull out every single possible thing for the budget because it doesn't need to be done at this stage. And we're going to try our best to look at big ticket items such as transportation. Our transportation to out of district is astronomical. You know, that's one area we're looking at our out of district. One of the areas is we always budget for a few students to go out of district. We may take that away. That would be a large chunk. So there's areas still that we haven't touched for this preliminary. Again, I think I've made the point. I feel like the board needs to be more involved in this process. And I mean, this is really the first discussion we're

097having about the budget. And it's two weeks before the budgets do. And it's an unusual year on Friday or Thursday. So it's kind of hard to have this conversation before you know there are things that can be discussed. There are when is the final budget adoption deadline at end of April, actually, April of April. This has been an unusual year. Ryan, I do agree. We normally would have had at least two budget projections that I would have prepared. One in December, one in January. We would be dealing with this one in late February or early March. Unfortunately, with the change in software and having all the department people entering their own budgets now is a different process. It's a transition year. Do I want to be this at this point this time? No. I prefer

098to be much further along. It's just the time it takes to get the training and to work through the new process. It's a totally new process that we're implementing. It's a whole new way of budgeting. In the past, people would send me a spreadsheet and I would be the one to look at it, make sure it was in the right account code and drop it into a master spreadsheet that I could then provide, you know, we provided projections. It's not the way it was this year. I apologize for that. I mean, next Tuesday, we were supposed to have a board meeting and that got moved. So I, for one, am available next Tuesday. If we get to the point that we think we need some sort of ad hoc committee that would be less than

099a majority to kick around some big ideas, then I think we should consider that personally. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Ryan, thank you. And I appreciate where you're coming from. And I think you make a great point, certainly going forward. I think we need to get further ahead of it for next year. I don't know that we're going to be able to dramatically or even minimally make a difference this year right now. But once again, I think we need to, I think, allow Nicole and Ronnie get, let's get to March 19th, see where we end up. Again, that's a tentative adoption. It's not final. Right. We made, we made adjustments between the two. Yeah. And then there's basically another month from then to really make any tweaks and figure out is there any. Yeah. No, go

100ahead. But I liked what you were saying. So I was going to add to it. Not every district does a finalized budget like we normally do by March 19th. Most of them still make changes from April to May. I hate that. Like once I do something, once I want it, I want it done. So and John was the same way and Ronnie is the same way. So we've always kind of used those two weeks to really wrap it up. But it is an option and other districts do do it. You know, by May 9th, by March 19th, we just have to say, yes, it balances. We have to have a balanced budget to get to for them to review. But we don't have to say how or where everything goes. That has to happen in

101May. Right. There have been, there have been years here where we just said, you know what, I've got to cut $400,000 and I'm taking it out of this line and we will look at it between tentative and final adoption and we'll figure out where it really needs to go. But we have to submit a balanced budget. You know, what I would say to Ryan's point, I think is we would, I guess, expect that if come next week and as we're getting approaching that March 19th deadline, you guys get to a point where you feel like you've exhausted everything and you're stuck, that you're coming back to us and informing us. And if we need to, as Ryan pointed out, you know, jump in and have an ad hoc committee meeting to see what we can

102possibly figure out, that you're going to bring that to our attention. Absolutely. You know, maybe maybe to Ryan's point, you know, I think Dave was saying, I don't know that we could look into specific areas and find areas to cuts, but maybe what would help and I don't know if you would agree with this, Ryan, is in addition to these pages, essentially getting a list of areas that are being cut or are under consideration for being cut, you know, in advance so that we can have that conversation, because I think that's where we would really weigh in is should we cut this, should we cut that, right? Like we're not going to know as you're saying, you know, take the money from here and move it there. We're not going to have a clue. Yeah.

103Wait, Dave, if I could just add to that quick. Yeah, I'm not expecting the board. I mean, our budget experts are Nicole and Ronnie, so I don't expect the board to have some magic solution. What the board has to weigh in on are the tough decisions. Like if it gets to us where we have to cut big ticket items, class size, courtesy busing, like the third rails of board budgeting, that's where we need to be part of the conversation, at some point. But you know, the impact on our district and our community is what we need to weigh in on. And that's what I want to make sure we're a part of. So maybe that can be part of this process. I can share with you just my initial spreadsheet has primarily supplies that are

104not in structural. So it has a lot with transportation, physical plant, that type of item, items that don't fit into clean categories. I had there was about $17 million in there, I cut about 2 million with the administration sub salaries, we had about 1.8 million. So far, I've only cut 100,000. Now that's to leave us a lot of room to just in case, you know, if there's a lot of maternity absences or whatever, our numbers have to increase. So that's being very modest at this point. Which includes summer programs, that type of thing, school day, we had about $1.1 million there, I cut about $86,000. I did not cut anything from the category dude, dues, tuition and travel, which is about 353,000. Because most of those are contractual obligations, right? Every time we make a

105contractual obligation that we'll pay for this, we'll pay for that, that goes into our budget, and we can't really cut it. Office supplies is that 108,000. I haven't cut anything from there yet. I usually, I think last year, cut 10% from everyone's account, it's about $10,000. But again, I've tried not to go there because I've cut them in the past and they're small. Instructional supplies are at 1.5 million. So far, we've only cut 62,000. Again, that had to do a lot with the wish list of what technology would improve. It hasn't cut any necessity of its supplies. PD was at 78,000, I cut about 9,000. So right now, that's what's making up the 3.5 million that we cut so far. It's unfortunate, but like as Nicole said earlier, the bulk of our cost in this

106district are human resource related. They are related to staff. It's between health benefits, severance, pension contributions, salaries, overtime, summer program. I mean, there is very, very, and this is something we've said, I mean, John and I said it for years and years and years. There is very little discretionary spending in our budget. There always has been. There's not been a lot of discretionary spending. The things we went up cutting are things like maintenance and now our buildings are starting to show for that. That's hence the need for the referendum. I think two part of the situation this year, not only being a transition with Genesis and with how we built our budget, there's a lot of uncertainty as to where we were going with the state aid number and some things I won't know. I

107didn't know until the state aid numbers came out last Friday, which is less than a week ago, that we had a $420,000 health benefit tax leave adjustment. That calculation comes with the state aid number. Parts of the budget aren't even released to us until the state aid is released, so sometimes those impacts you don't even know. I know some of my colleagues, one of them lost $10 million and didn't even expect a loss at all and they lost $10 million out of the blue. Another one lost $2.3 million out of the blue. Sometimes it's just hard to plan for this stuff. We really aren't in a position to really know what the state's planning on doing. I'd hope so much more for the stabilization aid. The time and effort that we put into that application,

108the days of work between me, Nicole, H.R., Jodi, tremendous amount of work to get $400,000 when we asked for 5.5. Really all they did was say, this is what you lost this year, at the end of last year we gave you $700,000 so we're going to make up the difference. It was like a simple formula. Why did we wait two or three months for that? If you'd given me that, I would have been more ahead here because we expected to get more. More than two or three months. They told us in February. They told us that we would have the number before winter break. We've been waiting since December for this number that came out a couple weeks ago. If I can just say, historically speaking, I've been here 10 years and Ronnie, when we

109get these papers, many, many times there has been a deficit of $1 to $3 million and between Ronnie and our superintendent worked diligently to keep cutting and keep cutting and keep cutting. Such as outsourcing, I remember one time with Dr. Marchante, the consideration of outsourcing busing and of course it was brought to the board to have the discussion and we sat down and we tried to figure out other options. And so I have complete confidence in Ronnie and Dr. Centauri to work to the very end and if there is an issue like that, I know you will bring it to the board so we can really voice our opinion and figure out and brainstorm, well, what else can we do? And there's certain, thank you, Christine, I appreciate that, and there's certain things like we,

110I try to avoid, I try to avoid outsourcing. Right now almost everyone in our schools, except for some instructional assistants, we have hired, we have chosen. I like knowing that everyone that in our buildings has met with our HR department, that we're vested in them and that we're vested in us. When you start to outsource things like custodial services, that means you call up a company, they send whoever to your building and then if you don't like them, they send you somebody else. I don't, I don't, I don't know, maybe because I was born in that generation, right? Stranger danger, right? I don't like strangers. No. Right. Around our children. Correct. I think we've seen also. The laws have changed too. The laws have changed as far as how flexible it is when we get

111to outsourcing. We just can't outsource when we feel like it anymore, correct? There's a process, it's a more involved procedure with engaging the union and it's not just a decision we just flip a switch, oh we're going to outsource. It's not that simple. Our staff is vested in our district and every staff member and I think once you start doing that, you lose that. The other thing is we did many years ago outsource our instructional assistants to MOSH. They changed how they build us. I contacted them. I said, you know, the way you've changed isn't really working for us, plus it could be costing us more money. They said, that's what we're doing now. So we did the sidebar agreement a few months ago back to hiring our own instructional assistants. I think we only

112saved about $300 a person, but again, they were now our people. More control and for $300 to us it was worth it. Who knows if their rates increase next year? And I've been vocal with MOESC. One of the reasons why we're looking into our out of district routes is for the same reason is they charge an agency fee. Yes, it's easier. Yes, we can't cover all those routes that we have, so we will always have to outsource some of them, but anyone's local that we can do in-house, Christine's looking to make that happen. I think ESY, we're going to pilot one or two runs and then she will gauge from there. Again, I also try to look at the other side of that. If we have an out of district placement that's let's say down

11318 and we're going to say, okay, the bus driver is going to do a MEMS run, then drive the person down 18 and then come back to do an ELC. I'm not going to go for that. My fear is, and all of us have lived in the area, but know for, sometimes 18 just closes. I don't want children waiting on a bus stop for a bus driver that's now in a standstill on 18. That to me doesn't work, budget, doesn't work. It's not worth the money. Right. Cost benefit kind of. Yes. Children's safety and their instructions are always going to come first, so we're trying to weigh that. Does that mean that's not something we can go to where we do all of our own runs? It's something we can look into if we need

114to, but at the same time we have to weigh those options. Hard to see busing too. I mean, it's kind of lost a little bit because we don't have neighborhoods, schools like we used to, you know, some districts have. We don't have, we have areas that are major roads without sidewalks, so it's impossible to ask a child to walk a major road to school. It's against the law too. I mean, as I got pointed out in previous discussions, if there's no sidewalk, we have to provide transportation. I'd like to just say that I agree with both Christine and Ryan. I have no doubts of what I've watched the last couple of years with you and Ronnie Nicole and the budget that it will get there. We have to have patience and trust. I also want

115to put out there that the school district is no different than personal income. Everybody has saw the cost of everything go up and they need to realize that. Also, when we do the final budget, for those of you watching on TV, please come so you can see the in-depth number where your taxes go so you're not on social media saying I pay an absorbent amount of stuff and the school is charging me X, Y, and Z. There is a reason for all that. You need to educate it and understand those things. I also agree with Ryan that maybe a resolution, not a resolution, geez, I got resolution on my brain, a finance committee might not be a bad way to look at, to have a workshop. We're progressing. The world is progressing. All those things

116that we need to be as streamlined as we can be. I do appreciate Ronnie and your work, Nicole. I have a question real quick. Do any of the items that we have in the upcoming referendum, will they offset the operational cost proactively next year for items like required maintenance and custodial grounds or anything like that? Not really. Well, some of it because the energy conservation. A little bit, yeah. So yeah, the energy conservation from the HVAC system should offset some of our costs. As far as like most of these things here are more routine maintenance type things that are not required maintenance, meaning that the state, and the fact the state tells us they helped us build some of our buildings through bonds that we've sold or through SDA grants that we've taken advantage of

117and they have contributed towards the funding, there is a minimum level of maintenance that we are required to do. Currently our numbers are well above, back in October or early November we did the capital, the long-range, not long-range, right in my head, comprehensive maintenance plan. There is a minimum requirement for funds that we have to spend within the budget just to satisfy the state's requirement of meeting that minimum level, so we can never go below that, but we still are above that level, but because we want the buildings to be nice, we want the buildings to be decent for the students. We don't want them falling apart, so we have been doing what we can to the best of our ability making good use of our funds, but it just, they're shrinking, and what's shrinking

118too is as the budget gets tighter and tighter, the amount of excess surplus that we have from year to year is decreasing, so not only are we starting out with increased cost, possibly you know in the past we started out with reductions in state aid, we also start out with that element as well, so there's not as much fund balance to use in a budget. This year we're several, like two million dollars less I think in state aid in an excess surplus than we have in the past, so that's beginning to hurt. There's no money, there's not as much left at the end of the year to roll into a following budget year. I wanted to add two more things. I would like the board though if you would like to email me or if

119you want to talk now to weigh in about the fourth grade Chromebooks and what you think about that, because like I said that is a decision that I am struggling with. Can you, just for, I don't know who else wants to, can you provide like in an email the numbers like that exactly, like what, exactly? That's what we're budgeting. Was that a full replacement? Full replacement for fourth grade, and is that something that we did every fourth grade is 172,000 every year? What we were trying to do when we did the additional spending question was to buy them for third grade and have them last three, four, five. The other thing I've thought about is, and if we did this, it wouldn't help this year but could help in the future, is we buy them

120for fourth grade and then we do not buy them for that group for sixth grade. And now instead of the Chromebooks having to last six, seven, eight grade, they would have to last fourth through eighth, which the warranties would be up after three years on some of them. At that point, we couldn't have, you know, we wouldn't continue. We wouldn't have insurance coverage to do the break and fix. But that's the other way we could go, and the first year would still cost us double because we'd still have to do sixth grade and fourth grade, maybe the second year as well, but then after that, it would, they would cover five years versus. But are we, because we're not allowed, because the second question didn't pass for the third grade Chromebooks, does that mean, so

121we're not allowed to purchase them. They never get new Chromebooks again. Never get new. Yes, they can have Chromebooks. But they can get passed down, right? So they'll eventually receive from the fourth grade or fifth grade. Yes. That's right. Yeah. Or we could, we could seek, you know, the foundation or the PTAs, if they were to donate funds to make those purchases. The statute is very, is very, it reads, if you read the statute, it delineates what you can and can't do with a failed question. Jesse. Bruce, what if Bill Gates wanted to give us a Chromebooks in a magical world? That's fine. We'll take them. I'm just, I mean, I mean, that's almost where we're at right now is we just, can we, I mean, right? Like, I mean. Is the justification of the

122effect it's going to have on testing and possibly the community with, with, with how we're testing and also for the children to have Chromebooks that update versus what that does to the budget and what happened with the additional spending question. The other thing that is not in the budget yet, again, it's something that we've talked about, we are, that I will bring to the board at a later date for a discussion. But if you want to know about big things that I wasn't planning on talking about tonight because I think it could cause chaos, but I eventually want to talk about is a small redistricting to some students to Lafayette Mills. It would alleviate some of the students right now in Taylor Mills, which would reduce transportation costs and would also allow when some of

123the other schools become overcrowded, Taylor's right next to Clark. It's right next to Milford, so it would save us some money, but that was something that I was going to save for the spring to truly disgust, disgust, oh no, disgust, people might find it disgust, but I didn't want to do that while we're working on this. But those are the two major areas where I would definitely request the board's input. So the one will come when we talk about potential. When the time comes for that discussion, we'll have the numbers of what those changes would actually. Yes, I just had the list of who could possibly be affected. I haven't went through it yet, been working on this. And the concept of the district looking different, I mean, I've been trying, I've been saying for

124months now, and probably the last year and a half, two years, is that it's going to reach a point where the district is going to look different. There is no real possibility of avoiding that unless something dramatic happens with the funding. Either they allow us to raise taxes to make up for some of the aid we've lost over the past five years, six years, or adjusting the tax levy cap or providing additional automatic adjustments for us. There really is no way for us to increase our revenue stream. It's static for the most part. Being that this is the last year of the S2, is there any talks or any rumors or anything, any information coming out of Trenton? They don't know. Even people in Trenton don't know. The part of it, we're in a governor

125election period, too, coming up, so it's like there's a lot on that. Nobody really knows what happens after S2. All we know is S2 sunsets. No one knows what that really means. So there was no additional language when it was drafted to reevaluate, revote, recast? Well, I'm sure there is, but what it looks like, nobody knows. We just had an article written in one of my professional journals that said there really is no idea what happens after S2. No, and just so the public knows right now, class size for projected for next year, depending on the school and the grade level, averages anywhere from 18 to 25. Now to get those 18s up, I would have to send children that are supposed to go to one school to a different school. That's something that we

126haven't touched yet because a lot of people want to be in their neighborhood schools. They have siblings, but that would be something that if we got to that stage, too, I would also bring to the board, but we're not there yet. Like you said, yeah, we're not there yet. And I don't think, I think when only one grade level, one school is at the two, are at 25 and it's fifth grade. So when you look at class sizes being at 18 to 24, it's very reasonable for. Yeah. OK. Anyone else have any other questions on the budget? Yeah. Thank you. It's always a fun time of year. Always. Always. OK. We're going to move on then. And thank you to everyone in the audience who's been patient. I know been waiting a while for something

127specific. OK. I don't think it's necessary. No, I think we'll have maybe, you know, someone read it. OK. OK. Well, let's let it be brought up first anyway. Right. All right. So moving on to new and old, anyone have any comments or discussions they want to bring up? Yeah. I'll start, hopefully. I think the trend that we're moving towards here on a district at the board level is to be active instead of reactive in a lot of ways. We've had a lot of controversial things come to us, always dealt with them appropriately. I wanted to point out a couple of things. One of our district goals is the district will implement strategies, resources to support all stakeholders in their social and emotional development to ensure a safe, healthy, equitable and inclusive school district on Nicole's

128pre-different cultures and inclusion. I've done a lot of reflection since our first meeting in February as I've worked through the resolution that I that I pledged to do and present for a vote through that reflection, through that educational process of learning, right? Because not only do we want our kids to learn in the school, we as adults need to learn so that we could educate our children also. It's not just our teachers, administrators' jobs to educate our children and make them good citizens as our jobs, as a parents and community to do those. As I've gone through and looked at these things, it's come to my attention that maybe we as a community, however you want to look at it, needs to recognize the diversity that is among us at all times. One of those

129is, you know, there's months of the year where it's designated certain heritage months and some get the spotlight, some don't. I'm not going to ask everybody to raise their hand, but being that it's March, it is Women's Heritage Month. We just came out of Black History Month. I learned in drafting the resolution that Muslim Heritage Month is January and that Jewish Heritage Month is May. And April is Arab Heritage Month. You know, Pride Month is pretty universal that people know that's in June. API, Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month is in May also. August is Diversity Awareness Month. September 15th through October 15th is Hispanic Heritage Month. November is Native American Heritage and Indigenous People Month. There's no true designation for the month of December yet, so maybe somebody will come along with that. But 10

130December 1948, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that day, 1948. It's still on the main thing. Everything that we talk about is diversity, inclusion, equity for everybody, and I'm sure people are like, why is Jesse talking about? I mean, even thanks to Jamie, I found out that May 18th is Haitian Flag Day, right? Like I'm invested in this. I want everybody to understand that. I think that some of the ways that we can do that is possibly having a workshop. Bruce, I don't know the legality of all this, right? So a lot of this stuff, if I'm going too far over the legal thing, please draw me back in so I don't break any legal ethic rules, please. All right. Maybe we look at having a community-centered diversity inclusion committee

131where all of the schools have representation that can meet with Nicole, similar to our PTO where parents can be involved in that also. That's just one situation. The second one would be, for those of you that don't know, Ramadan is March 10th through April 10th. One of the big centering pieces of that is an ifta. Ifta, am I saying that right, right, Diana? Ifta, speaking as an English town resident with the mayor of English town is hosting a civic ifta. I'm saying this wrong, am I not? Civil iftar, inviting community members from different religions to come and break the fast to celebrate Ramadan. That's why I'm asking you to tell me if I go too far, please. And so, you know, and then also to understand that some of our students, once they hit puberty,

132have to fast, and we make those considerations for them. And even the non-Muslim practicing a chance to have together. We could have parents reach out to you to work out with Mike and the principal there. Because I know there is talks of kids that are not Muslim participating in fasting this year. With that also said. Like, let's try to just, I'm trying to get where, like, where does the board come into all of this? That's, I'm going towards the resolution that we drafted for the vote. As we did the anti-Semitic one, and we did a workshop, and we discussed it, and we came to that. Drafted a resolution, sent it up. It needed to anti-Semitic resolution that we did. So, have a vote on that resolution, and then we go forward, and don't just say

133it's a piece of paper, and we hold the leadership accountable, and we make actions that go forward with that. Before we move forward, something you said about celebrating each month. We have shared this multiple times, but Jody, could you please read to us our monthly calendar, what we celebrate each month? That'd be great. All right, as I've shared a few times with the board, and it has been shared out monthly with our staff, this is for the second year running. Part of our efforts on more cultural awareness, and quite frankly, diversity, equity, and inclusion was starting last year, and this helps us to fulfill some state mandates as well, and to just make our students more aware and better people in general. We have created a cultural awareness calendar. It's commemorative days or awareness days,

134and what we did was we have taken... We've gone to a few sites. There's the New Jersey list of commemorative and awareness days. There's a federal list of commemorative and awareness days, and we've somewhat consolidated it to make it seem logical. You don't want redundancy either, and there's also an international calendar. We did not go with the international calendar. We stuck primarily with the New Jersey calendar, just to give you some context. In September, I will use the word recognize. We recognize and have activities that correlate with those awareness days that we send out to staff to do with their students. The following September, Patriot Day, Hispanic American Heritage Month, and Constitution Week, October, Italian American Heritage Month, Disability History and Awareness Month, Columbus Day, Week of Respect, School Violence Awareness Week, November, Veterans Day,

135National Native American Indian Heritage Month, December, Pearl Harbor, Remembrance Day, and other winter holidays, January, Community Helpers Awareness Month, Martin Luther King Junior Awareness Month, and we also now we have Muslim Heritage Month, which was added in this year from the state. We did receive information. February, Black History Month, and all the president's days that are celebrated or commemorated. February, Black History Month, and I'm sorry, I said February, March, Women's History Month, and Irish American Heritage Month. Got to scroll down. April, National Arab American Heritage Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Earth Day, Autism Awareness Day, May, Jewish American Heritage Month, Asian Pacific, it should say actually Asian American Pacific AAPI Heritage Month, and Memorial Day, June, New Jersey Arts, Culture, History, Tourism Month, Flag Day, Juneteenth American Night, Juneteenth Independence Day, and that is our current

136list. We reflect upon that and we modify as necessary for the upcoming school year. The other thing I just want to talk because I don't want it to be perceived that administration doesn't take these things seriously or does not take resolutions from the board seriously or does not actively make sure that we have a welcoming culture to everyone. When the last resolution was passed for anti-Semitism, we went through at one of our admin meetings and we looked at each of the items and we began to list ways that we reached that. So the first statement was the district will actively promote and embrace diversity, inclusion, and respect for all religions including Judaism. We listed things like no place for hate, weak of respect, our curricular matrix that includes the health curriculum, what Jody just mentioned,

137our calendars, the We Are Wonders activity. For the second statement, the district will continue to provide education training to students and staff members about the history and impact of anti-Semitism promoting awareness and understanding. We looked at developing which some are completed like the implementation of Holocaust lessons and health, social studies, and literacy but some are ideas that we are moving forward this year which is continuing professional development and counselor-based resources and large group activities based on our need which I had talked about earlier. With the statement regarding HIV, as you know one of the things we do is we investigate all biased statements. We create an intervention plan for repeat offenders. We had the training with the attorney to make sure we were looking at all incidents of the same context and we also were

138creating a lesson blank bank for HIV incidences. The only thing we didn't write anything for was the board reiterates its first its firm stance because that's the board reiterating their firm stance but we this is something we take seriously. This is something that I think over the last few years we've worked very hard at trying to be as inclusive as possible and I would also like to mention when I first came to the district there was a parent that did have concerns about our curriculum and it not representing all cultures and ethnicities. She had met with my predecessor regularly before I got there and once I got there I think I met with her maybe three or four times and then she didn't feel the need to meet anymore so we do meet with the

139community if anyone has con will content wants to contact us about specific concerns related to the curriculum or inclusion and Nicole to add to that I don't want it to be perceived that we just have this so-called calendar that exists but our social studies supervisor actually develops resources and lessons that are disseminated monthly to correlate to every single activity that goes to each of the schools. We've now mandated it's not just suggested activities but there's at least one required activity that they have to do for each of the recommended months and the feedback that Miss Gutierrez has given and is in the last month since there's been that mandated activity that she actually is very happy that the teachers have been very open and receptive and sharing their own activities to add to our bank

140so that's very productive and we're happy to hear that. Milford yesterday they have on their running board information about famous women and their contributions because it's history month in March so I think it was Ruby Bridges that was being displayed when I was there because I read it so that is something also that's just running in the hallways for children to see and take notice of or adults and their announcements in the morning. Thank you. Thank you. So what do we do for Muslim Heritage Month in January? As I said Muslim Heritage Month came out to us after we said out suggested afters but that has been added on moving forward but again to reiterate for April we have National Arab American Heritage Month so that came out that came out from the state and

141then we have updated accordingly. Right. But we're always as I said we're always improving this it's a work in progress it's not static. And that's why I made the recommendation that we have a community committee to discuss these things we're community members who can speak to it better than maybe a social studies teacher I say that as a social studies teacher right. As a social studies teacher I was educated in February that January was Muslim Heritage Month is what I'm saying. I'm trying to make us do better. I had a conversation with a board member yesterday and they thanked me for educating them on what I was talking about. We can always do better. Well you probably found out about it in February. Nope I didn't find out about it from the school my school

142that I teach at I even brought it up to my administration. I just trying to make sure that everybody has the recognition that they deserve and that people don't feel like they're not being hurt whether it's one person or a hundred thousand people. I don't want to minimize anyone's voice informing of certain things that we had in our conversation. So I don't know if you want to read the resolution or if Dave wants to. Both of you I know put in a good amount of time. And David I want to thank David and Jamie. Yeah so if one of you would like to read it I don't know if you have a clean version of it. I can just in case one I'll pass mine down. We jumped to that because I think Jesse I

143think you were kind of going in that direction and so regarding upcoming in April is I would say Arab. On the list that we created last year which it's April is National Arab American Heritage Month. I'd also like the point. So besides recognizing it as being Arab American Heritage Month what actually takes place is there are there any activities. So all right give me a minute because I don't have any of these memorized. Thank you. While we're doing that I'd also like to point out that in April we're going to have Easter Passover and Eid and we're going to be closed for spring break and for Passover. It's the reason I have stayed on the road because Eid was not identified on the calendar for next year. I think that if we're going to do

144this and we're going to celebrate religions that we need to have a workshop have something. I know this is something that I brought up over and over again with Veterans Day that we need to identify a way that our community understands that we visually see and understand them instead of saying it's an excuse absence keep your kid home. It should have at least Eid should have at least been on the calendar for the 24-25 school year. Of course Christine please. I think perhaps we can use a community committee because we're missing a lot of other groups. We have a large Russian community. We have a large Indian community. We have a large Latin American community. February was Dominican Republican Independence Day and so we are leaving out a lot of different cultures and perhaps having

145that community committee. This way we can incorporate everyone whose students do come to our school. We're leaving out many many different cultures and we want to be all inclusive and we want to celebrate all of the different cultures and our children should know about all of the different celebrations. So I think it would be beneficial to include a lot of the community members with the committee to help educate us and be inclusive continue to be inclusive. So Christine that's a really valid point and when we created the commemorative awareness calendar we recognized that as a strong possibility and a reality of what could happen. That was why we had to justify where would we get this information from and made that decision to use that calendar because we still have state standards to adhere to

146and we want to make sure that we are doing what we can to include that diversity equity and inclusion. That's required. There's state statute around that as well and that's particularly where we're coming from with many different underrepresented groups as well. I mean Dwali's not on there either or Kwanzaa. I mean I'm not trying to throw out all these things but like I know that there's people in this audience tonight that would raise their hand if we made a commitment to have community members join this to work together to make us more than just other things to make our students educated in the complexity of all of the diversity inclusion. That's a good idea for our board committee. I'd support that. I'll get with you David. I'd like to be the chair of that committee.

147Relations. That's an excellent idea. Yeah yeah absolutely and I think the conversation is you know productive and you know shedding some light on definitely some important things so thank you. For the record I would just encourage the board to not call it a committee because that could be confused. Really a committee is just a subgroup of board members. You might want to call it a focus group. That's why you're here. That's why you make the big bucks is to keep us out of jail and doing the right thing. So I just want to answer the question that was posed earlier. As I said a few minutes ago we were updating everything and starting this year primarily January 31st we were having that required lesson as opposed to suggested lessons so we haven't quite yet developed.

148We do develop it month to month but last year for Arab American Heritage Month we provided a list of resources that were based on different texts for grades K through 8 to help celebrate National Arab American Heritage Month and that's what was disseminated to staff so they received a list of different texts that they can read to their children so that there's that mirrors windows and sliding doors concept. We are updating that as we go along to have that required lesson so if you want to know in April what we're doing I'm more than happy to share that but based on last year we provided specifically a list of different texts to read to children. And that's what came out of one of the things that came out of the last resolution was we knew

149we provide the suggested activities and then when we all started talking we're like as an administrative team well are these suggested activities enough or they should be mandated so that's why we move to mandating them. Well that's we just we can just for the just so the records clear we just can't have people yelling out from the audience if you want to open the floor they're free to do that we just have to identify everybody. Oh I mean you're welcome yeah absolutely if you if you guys would like you know to express some some concern certainly but I would also implore you outside of this venue that you know if those things are going neglected or just not given enough attention you know it's certainly something that should be brought up during the school year

150either to the school principal you know and then take it up the ladder if need be but I think it's definitely something that you know our school staff would address and give attention to if it's brought to their attention but please please come to feel free come to the mic if yeah and can you just identify yourself so we have it for the minutes just so we kind of follow protocol I'm sorry thank you heritage information let alone I think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying with sending stuff home these are activities happening in the school we agree with you that's why we said we started mandating that they actually use the lessons back in January is when we started this because we agreed with you we were giving the suggestions but not every teacher was

151using them so that's why we went from suggested to mandated which are what you're saying is something that we all talked about as an administrative team we had all these great lessons but we weren't making sure anyone was actually using them and that's why it's mandate so that came about in a staff meet uh admin meeting in January and we made the change that we were going to mandate at least one lesson from the suggested lessons be taught also um you know I know that the calendar is being revised for next year uh you know like Jesse said it is unfortunate that you know um April you know there's Easter and then Hanukkah and then yeah that's I mean Passover we get back on Monday for Eve keep your kid home so excuse keep your

152kid home we're going to celebrate every holiday we're going to make sure we have six days off for the Jewish holiday but we can't even get one day free so please I hope that you guys can work on this revision because we will come back for every board meeting and we will reiterate that we need a day off for you and then you civilize that of course I know mayor has agreed with love would be part of that because I think it would be great for thank you anyone else although you know we'll give you anyone else the opportunity right now if you'd like to speak otherwise we're going to close public comments for the night please um or so just like I was wondering I was wondering um uh like I love my school

153please address your com please address your comments to the board I was just asking I wanted to know um like reading reading and math everything's great I I find that there's like no signs or history which is considered or even like my son doesn't know since fifth grade he doesn't he's not learned the states and their capitals like I I we worked that at third grade but um and then I asked other siblings and people and they were in eighth grade when they learned so it just concerns me that is that part of like could you can I just yeah jump in first I'll let you address that but we did have just I don't want this to run too far afield we did have public comment already on any item including agenda items this

154really was limited public comment to the issue of the diversity question that had arisen but nonetheless I think the superintendent or assistant do want to answer your question I just wanted to make sure to email miss pipchinski the specifics of what you're talking about because we don't have the curriculum in front of us we're not prepared just to answer that off the cuff yeah and I can also provide you a link to the district curriculum that tells you the standards it's not necessarily what we learned in the past it's very different yeah okay you had like a constitution week you can email me and I'll send you everything that you're looking for and answer those questions okay thank you is this about the diversity issue okay I appreciate celebrating all the cultures and they should

155all be celebrated every religion should be respected because it's a discipline I am Albanian by heritage but I'm Muslim so um when you talk about uh Muslim you have European Muslims you have Asian Muslims African Muslims you have American Muslims so you got to take that in you should take that in consideration thank you thank you I appreciate that thank you yes jan I just want to point out that the township has a diversity committee there are over 20 people different uh different religions different sex they're all in this diversity committee that meets once a month if you want to call a township up and and see if you can be a part of that and maybe it would help with the schools too thank you jim okay thank you everyone we're going to close

156public comments for the night um miss her if you go ahead and read the resolution okay so we have resolution of the manalapan english town regional board of education condemning islamophobia and anti-arabism whereas the manalapan english town regional board of education aims to foster and maintain a safe and welcoming environment where all students can thrive without fear of discrimination or prejudice based on their religion or ethnicity and whereas according to data published by routers in the three months following october 7th 2023 incidents of islamophobia and anti-arabism rose by 180 percent in the united states the figure is 178 rise from complaints in the same period from a year earlier and whereas islamophobia anti-arabism extremism and hate in all forms continue to threaten the safety and security of the muslim and arab community and our neighbors

157friends and colleagues and whereas the manalapan english town regional board of education condemns and will not tolerate any form of islamophobia or anti-arabism within our school districts now therefore be it resolved by the manalapan english town regional board of education one the district will actively promote and embrace diversity inclusivity and respect for all religious and ethnic backgrounds including islam and arab cultures two the district will continue to provide education and training to students and staff members about the history and impact of islamophobia and anti-arabism promoting awareness and understanding three the district will continue to promulgate clear glide clear guidelines and procedures for addressing incidents of bias harassment intimidation and bullying including islamophobia and anti-arabism ensuring a swift and effective response to any form of discrimination or hatred four the board reiterates its firm stance against

158islamophobic and anti-arab behavior within the district thank you so do i do i need them if we want to go ahead and vote on this right now in the motion yeah i'm assuming that that was moving it yeah and then we would need a second and then have i just want to check first the version history because there's an anonymous person right now that says it's editing the document so i want to make sure that um nothing's changed from what you first had sure they have editing rights because i who would be anonymous i don't know i don't know there is an anonymous no i see jamie in it i see ronnie in it and i see um dave ferber in it i see the anonymous i'm in it as well but i don't know

159why i'm anonymous you're in as anonymous and okay so are you making any choices are you anonymous anteater no i'm just i was just reading along i didn't change anything are you using your district google okay there he goes he just left are you using your um your district google account that could be it i mean i have multiple google accounts also we'll sort that out another time but we're good to move forward so yeah so we just need a second now if i if we can get a second jesse thank you okay so motion passes you need to vote no no we have to do a roll call vote jumping the gun i'm so excited yes we have a motion and a second on the floor it's been a long time coming tonight for

160everyone here and entitled uh resolution of the manalapan english on regional board of education condemning islamophobia and anti-arabism i will um add this to the physical board docs agenda after the meeting because of the time it takes to get it in there but not right not right at this moment sorry okay we have a roll call on the floor kevin mr ferber yes mr green yes this is her yes mr cain yes mrs pareese yes mr santoro yes mr dosetti yes thank you motion passes motion to adjourn um okay we're gonna continue on with new and old and i'm done jesse you're finished thank you all right i'll continue around ryan do you have anything no jamie no i'm good thank you nothing thank you okay mark i just wanted to congratulate all the kids

161that actually made the permanent art display i don't know if there's any left in the room at this hour but uh some of it was actually very impressive thank you ditto nothing else thank you go thank you jody just a reminder that registration for the summer program opens on march 13th the brochure has been sent out but it is not open yet it will open march 13th and i hope i'm not taking away nicole's thunder but i wanted to say congratulations to our enrichment contest winners were you going over that no i was gonna then if you are i'm gonna stop you started okay i wasn't giving names i just want to say congratulations to um children throughout the district i don't like to use names because of confidentiality but we did have video contest

162and music contest win winners from lafayette mills taylor mills clark mills and the elc so thank you for participating in our gifted and talented contests and congratulations to those students and their families great bruce any bruce you know it's nice to see you and have you back here thank you my turn okay um i know i talked a lot tonight i'm good um we did have two parrot nights this weekend both went very well they provided a wealth of information so um i'm sure that those who attended got a lot out of that and otherwise see in two weeks great um just uh one thing i wanted to point out uh some of you may have heard an announcement came out from the foundation from mers that they will be hosting the uh dance with

163your daughter dance once again in november there's actually going to be two dates for it at battleground country club um so it's pretty exciting news after a couple of years that that has not happened to manalapin um so really happy to hear about that and uh i want to thank members of our community for being here and coming out and shedding some light on some really important topics and and expressing you know some concerns to us so thank you for that and uh that's it our next meeting it will be tuesday the 19th at wembroke that's all we got all right a motion to close motion and a second motion to adjourn ryan christine thank you have a good night