Board of Education Workshop/Voting Meeting (10.28.20)

001i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation invisible with liberty and justice for all okay the first order of business is our recognition our student recognition good evening everyone i think that i'm going to get started with the recognition the following high school students are recognized as 2021 national merit program commended scholars for the exceptional academic promise demonstrated by their outstanding performance on the qualifying test used for program entry david badetti james burns and andrea lopez congratulations the following high school north and high school south students have achieved recognition on one or more advanced placement exams the advanced placement program offers college-level curricula and examinations to high school students whereby colleges and universities may grant placement and course credit to students

002who obtain high scores on the examinations we congratulate our students for their successful efforts to prepare for their college academic goals and earning recognition as ap scholars with honor and distinction faith ahern christian amicanjalo marco astorino gabriela auguste leyla a tricia bayless tabitha brandt jessica busello layla burke james burns sarah cassidy benkata shamalamalasetti maggie chesick stephen cetranglo naomi corboy katie craig matthew cunevolf emma danza gavin defina de george rachel dolman chris gamardella kyle gordina kimberly goldman tai hashemi brian huerta joseph kang ethan casaba nicole kelly olivia kelty caitlyn kennard kira colleen darren kisi caroline kolk david crademan matthew laporta shawn liner andrea lopez maya man paige mcgrath scott melsky colin muley michael murphy connor north ryan o'boyle emily o'keefe cree osner nicholas piscopo jorge rivera lauren rizzo savannah scalise patrick sealy lauren stone eddie strom

003gordon toth michael sai elizabeth welch nicole wolfe and maya yesolonis congratulations everyone congratulations that concludes our accommodations thank you okay i think we're going to proceed to our staff recognition at this time the board of education congratulates and recognize our administrators and educators who recently earned their doctoral degrees those include supervisor of social studies and technology dr wendy morales high school north assistant principals dr james falco and dr chris virginio bay shore middle school educational technology special specialist dr christina requa and leonardo elementary school special education teacher dr kristen mayer all completed the edd program in educational leadership at monmouth university thompson middle school assistant principal dr lindsay fox earned her doctorate of education in sport and athletic management from north central university we commend all of them for their perseverance and dedication which have

004culminated in reaching this tremendous milestone congratulations to all of you thank you next we'd like to move on to our student speakers from high school south kayla freebot good evening everyone my name is kayla freibot i'm a senior at middletown high school south on behalf of the student staff and administration we're all thrilled to be back in school on middletown high school south although things definitely look a little different this year the entire school community is making the best out of this unique situation we would like to thank everyone for all that they have done so far during the 2020 2021 school year um so first off with academics south is proud to have three national merit commended scholars james burns david bedetti and andrea lopez who all scored in the top 10 50 000

005scores nationwide on their psat from last year so congratulations to them on saturday october 17th the high school south south music department held outdoor performances for both the choir and concert band ensembles families were invited to see their students perform in the stadium at 11am the choir presented an open rehearsal and at 3 p.m the band put on a fall showcase both of these events allowed families to see the students the students progress and gave students an opportunity to perform together for the first time since last december the student council on executive board and i have met with milton's house as administrators to discuss ways that we can facilitate some of our traditional activities in a healthy and safe way our fall athletic season is very well underway and all of our teams are off

006to a really great start which is definitely great to see we are looking forward to the north south football game this friday night and this week we're celebrating a spirit week to help build excitement for the game all of milltown south clubs and extra co-curricular groups have begun to meet and we're all coming up with fun and creative ways to facilitate our activities as best as we can middletown south will host its first ncaa signing of the year before winter break to allow those student athletes to further their d1 academic and athletic careers and lastly obviously we know that sat and subject tests have been very up in the air so luckily s.a.t testing took place at high school south on september 26 and october 3rd and will be held again on december 5th and

007also in the spring and act testing took place on october 24th so we're glad to see that that's able to happen so thank you guys again that's the current state of milton high school south right now as we're doing our best to keep spirits high during a trying time thank you to everyone who has helped ease this process thus far we're looking forward to a positive and great year for our community thank you guys thank you kayla um and next from high school north sophia heber brock hi everyone i'm sofia heber brock and i'm a junior from high school north here are the highlights of the school year so far eager to plan and prepare for the year ahead co-curricular clubs at high school norris have met a total of 111 times in the first

00828 days of october to highlight a few of these meetings the diversity club has met several times to gather input from various stakeholders to create a high school climate survey on diversity equity and inclusion and discuss ideas to unite and promote cultural awareness within the high school north community the middletown high school north tech and esports club has met both privately and with the maker space club to discuss team formation the designs of teen jerseys a marketing and branding plan and competition space physical and virtual the arts academy kicked off the school year with introductions a discussion of potential virtual guest speakers possible t-shirt ideas and a message from district director mr graziano the stem pathway club has held their first career spotlight presentation highlighting the roles and responsibilities of a control system engineer the

009high school north drama club held an initial meeting to introduce new members discuss show updates and the brains and to brainstorm fundraising ideas they have started rehearsing for the fall virtual play the matchmaker by thornton wilder via google meet the high school north dance team has met several times to begin dance training and choreography via google meet and plan for the pre-game recognition of senior dance team members the lions roar our high school newspaper has met multiple times to discuss story prep and upload several articles topics of which have included fall athletic highlights information on the upcoming presidential election and recognition of the district website by the nj spra polaris a high school north the high school north yearbook club has met on a weekly basis to discuss fall updates and begin the process of

010organizing content the high school north green team was awarded the bronze certifi certification for the second time this afternoon october 28th at a virtual ceremony sponsored by sustainability jersey for schools the green team staff and students have been completing additional projects for the greenhouse and outdoor learning center as well as a landscaping work at the front entrance of the school miss jennifer smith and her civic leadership students have several initiatives planned for october including a pink out and a staff student spotlight they're also planning a battle of the classes for a tv film program we have our north news program that is posted on our website every month which i host recently i had the chance to interview filmmaker kevin smith actor filmmaker ernie o'donnell and ming chen from the show the comic book men

011on amc multiple students films qualified into the dances with film festival an academy award qualifying film festival in los angeles california as well as numerous other festivals around the country and even worldwide this past month conor kinch ran eighth fastest ran the eighth fastest time in school history for homedale park running 1649 in a dual meet versus niles ben connor has raced in four races so far this season and placed first in all four races applications were submitted for seniors for national honor society and the juniors took the psat in october thank you you sophia okay let's move on to our committee reports starting with technology with dave zuyak good evening um tonight i want to update the board provide a board and update with the recent wireless network connectivity issue we experienced last week

012um beginning october 15th we experienced a number of days where a wireless network can eruption uh started the morning about 9 a.m each day the interruption was caused the district to lose wireless connectivity from anywhere from 20 minutes to 40 minutes to an hour per day wired connectivity was unaffected as soon as initial failure was observed we invoked support from our wireless wired vendor as well as for the manufacturer in each subsequent day hardware and software configuration changes were made an attempt to isolate and resolve the problem our tech department along with the vendor manufacturer support engineers held active online sessions each day starting prior to school students arriving at school and monitor the network throughout the day for any of any abnormalities uh what made troubleshooting very difficult in this situation was that um

013we were unable to replicate the issue the issue would only occur naturally at 9am each day when our network would sustain its greatest client load it would then self-correct within 20-40 minutes like it should um so we would only have about 20 to 40 minutes each day to generate active logs and to investigate when it was actively troubleshooting by the second day of trouble we had the case escalated um with both our vendor and the manufacturer um on each day and each day monitoring and publishing session there was at least 13 members of support online trying to resolve the issue that included three people from our team um four people from our vendor including the vice president of operations and three senior level engineers from the manufacturer while we continued troubleshooting today in the event

014it was going to be a hardware failure we insisted that the manufacturer rmas a new controller which they did it arrived on set on monday and we had it configured in the event we'd have to drop it in and replace the uh replace the existing controller um on tuesday uh was our support teams were working together to inspect configuration log files and irregularity was found um the anomaly led us to determine that the root cause of the failure was a google chrome os 85 update it was a bug the chromium bug which was found in google chrome os 85 was sending out spoofed mac addresses and public eye pages torque controller basically performing a ddos attack internally on our equipment from our own chromebooks this was called the cpu's cpu to overload and then shut

015down each morning at the same time at 9am when we had our heaviest load on the network to resolve this we added a filter in a system that basically drops these erroneous packets before it accesses our network and from moving forward we contacted google and they are aware of the bug uh but at the current time they don't they do not have a patch for it um their say it's in development mode luckily our wireless network has a firewall built into controller that allows us to put this role in um basically dropping these these erroneous packets right at the door and they never access the system so while this bug is so active it does not interfere with any equipment or services moving forward once we confirm the issue was resolved uh over a course

016of a few days and connectivity was consistent we began to restore all the equipment hardware and services that we removed during of course of troubleshooting we completed that process up over the weekend and have been monitoring monitoring the network since um i have seen no anomalies and everything seems like it's working properly um just want to add what makes this a unique situation is we were the bug is on google chrome os 85 which is the latest and greatest google uh os version under all circumstance or most circumstances we never run the latest version we're usually one or two versions behind to avoid something like this in this case a few weeks ago we had some difficulties with some students being dropped from the google meets um we contacted google support and they recommended that

017we went to 85 and therefore as soon as we did we introduced a bug to our system and had the problems we did any questions hey dave it's nick um i have a question about um the fact that this is on our student's machine as you said that it would cause the cpus to fire up is that still happening so are the are the kids machines still firing up they're seeing performance issues as the students trying to do the work the the bug does not affect the cpu utilization on the chromebook side it would affect it on the controller side so if each chromebook for instance would send for example one or two packets out which is not uh i'm going to take the cpu down on the supreme side but if you multiply that

018by 4 800 chromebooks that are on a network around 90 m that's a large load to be sending to the controller got that okay thanks okay thank you dave we're ready to move on to student services with michelle tiedemann hi everyone so you'll see on the agenda our information items we had a committee meeting on october 21st and we had a meeting with the middletown township friends of diverse learners on october october 12th so going in date order when the administration met with the representatives from the uh friends of diverse learners we went over the inclusion grant update we did an update of the nj ieta grant that we have for harmony pre-k and leonardo k5 we're well underway having regular meetings with the representatives from new jersey coalition for inclusive ed and montclair university

019we have a team of staff in each building for harmony it's pre-k for leonardo k5 and we are in the planning phase of the three to five years systemic change for inclusion we also discussed at that meeting on october 12th dyslexia we addressed concerns about how the district screens for dyslexia the two-hour pd that is required and provided to staff and also where interventions are in each of the schedules particularly in the elementary school the attempts at doing it during the win period which doesn't always work out depending on the school but we did review all of that we talked about the phase four which has our resource students having returned to school five days a week and the social emotional support that is provided at all levels elementary middle and high school then our

020board of ed committee meeting was on october 21st we did discuss many of the things that i just went over because we did a review of the october 12th meeting with the friends of diverse learners we also at the committee meeting went over the phase four reopening of the schools the return of our resource students five days a week how we are addressing related services where we need to fill in some gaps there and we also went over of course the inclusion grant and the disproportionality i have talked about that at prior meetings that the district was cited for over-representation of black students with ieps having received out-of-school suspensions in the year 2016-17 17-18 and 18-19 we are required to use fifteen percent of our idea grant money which for our district is four hundred

021thirty three thousand seven hundred and forty one dollars to address the disproportionality so we have a number of things that we are planning with the biggest being the equity inclusion specialist um who will work with we're we're also moving in a direction of looking at some professional consultants who can work with our equity inclusion specialist to make sure that we address the disproportionality and dr tiemann if you don't mind i'd jump in real quick um just to to dr tiedemann's point um the job description for that uh equity and inclusion specialist is on this evening's agenda um and it's you know if you take a look at that you can see that that that person is really going to be looking at um you know how we can um reveal and start to implement some

022social justice and diversity um in all aspects of our curriculum and operations and school culture and climate um and they're also working they'll be working with our diversity and equity committee which is a district-wide committee that we've developed to kind of to take a look at exactly what's taking place in our buildings as well so this person's going to have a very important job and you know another piece of their position is also going to be providing professional development for our staff in the areas of social justice and inequity and diversity and working with our administrators when it comes to discipline because again as dr tiedemann had initially said that this is tied back to the disproportionality of um blacks especially at black student suspension um so they will be working with our administrators as

023far as um discipline is concerned as well so thank you dr team sure and the 15 of the ied idea funds allocated for the disproportionality will have no negative impact whatsoever on any of our special education programs we do have some voting item agendas uh we have some students receiving home instruction a number of out of district placements contracted services and one addendum to a settlement agreement does anyone have any questions thank you thank you dr tiedman moving on to facilities and finance with mrs daugherty thank you the facilities and finance committee meeting met on october 26 this past monday evening we went over a variety of topics just to touch on those topics we talked about a couple of things in the areas of facilities one of them being the high school north track

024the fact that the track was put in about four years ago there are some issues that we are looking to that we were looking to get addressed and that the installer came in the manufacturer came in and did a very intensive cleaning on the track to restore some of the original color and to clean up some of the rubber and so forth that we felt was loose but there's a few other items that we still need them to address and we're following up with them you know to do some additional repairs while the track is still under the five-year warranty period so that's ongoing we also talked about the nutswamp field project the field over at nutswamp that the township has incorporated into their normandy park project is pretty much completed the portion that's on

025nuts on property there is some remaining work regarding the grading of some of the soil that was moved during that process that is being used to level out some areas more toward the back of nutswan's property but they're working on getting that graded and smoothed out so that's in progress we also talked about a couple of the items that are on the agenda for this evening the comprehensive maintenance plan update that we do annually and the form m1 which talks about the maintenance budget and comparing it to our allowable maintenance reserve and so forth so we have those we've reviewed those with the committee and we have this on the agenda this evening you know we have updated the maintenance plan to include the items that we also included in our restart recovery plan regarding

026cleaning and maintenance on equipment and systems and so forth we also talked about some of the restart me and recovery plan or re-entry plan as it relates to facilities and supplies and we talked about deploying some additional deaths in some of the schools we talked about making sure you know and inform the committee that we were stocked with all of the ppe and cleaning supplies that we need at this time we did talk about ordering more death shields you know to prepare for more students coming back into the building so we are in the process of ordering more shields for individual deaths and also ordering shields that could be placed on tables at the elementary level so that's in progress we also talked about the area of or the idea of elementary snacks and that

027each elementary building is working on a plan for eating snacks inside when the weather precludes them from going outside whether there be rain or snow or extreme temperatures and each building is going to work on a plan that works for their building we also talked about upcoming for the upcoming budget and you know over the next several months looking at capital projects that we would like to incorporate in the 2122 budget and also the amy amy yes real quick um in terms of what they we talked about that as well in terms of some of the changes that we had to make there because of not being able to find people well we did talk right we did talk about how we were addressing the duties that were originally going to be assigned to the

028environmental workers and we even corp we had started out the year extending the hours of our custodial staff you know to cover more during the day with the disinfect additional disinfecting and cleaning as we've been operating now for the past several weeks and we've been able to incorporate those into the staff that's in the buildings the custodial staff that's in the buildings during the day so we're still doing a mix between you know the staff that's there and shifting and extending some of the hours for uh custodians to make up for that work so you know as we've been open for several weeks we've been able to hone what needs to be done and and get those uh you know get what needs to be done incorporate into everybody's schedules and uh one other thing

029in terms of i guess mr roscoe will touch on maybe she won't i'm not sure but in terms of desk shields um what we're doing with that i know that's something as i think more more students are in the school starting using those a little bit more i don't know if yeah i did that no i actually mr little i did actually just go over that i said we're in the i know you did but in terms of i think that's we're not currently doing that right like in the schools or do any of the classrooms have dash desk shields we're using them on a limited basis where it's needed if uh teachers and students are in close proximity doing certain types of work where they haven't deployed them across the district at this point

030so we anticipate further use across the district right now we're talking about the budget okay that's a new i don't know if the clarity is that we'll be using more of those you know we were talking about from a budget perspective um and an availability perspective but i think that's also part of i guess in terms of our as we move through the phases of the plan um as more kids come into the classroom so maybe that's something mr roscoe i think she's talking about the plan today no that's okay that's okay i'm sorry i thought i had i hate going over there uh so anyway as far as the capital projects go we had talked about the fact that we do have some funds remaining from our esa project that we have recently completed

031and also some remaining referendum funds from work that we had done over the past several years on a variety of projects and we talked about the fact that we there is some there's always a continuing work to do on our hvac system so we're looking at working with our architect right now to scope out uh with the remaining funds that we have you know possibly addressing uh even more of the rooftop units we've done a lot of rooftop unit work over the past several years at the secondary schools but to go back and pick up some of the ones that we weren't able to get to particularly at high school south and bayshore so we are actually meeting with the architect i believe on friday to start talking about that in earnest so that's something

032that we you know would like to move forward you know we we have about 800 000 that we can use toward that toward those projects so we're not sure how far that will get us but we're gonna get as far as we can with it and we're gonna pick up some more of those units that we that we have not been able to replace now we also talked about i'm sorry i'm sorry that's also we have to use that money for secondary schools right right because that's where so based on if you explain that a little bit that you know we can't use it for the elementary schools it has to be related to what the original projects were which were at the secondary school so that's that's the ecip and the referendum correct right

033in other words they require the use for specifically secondary schools correct so for the 2122 budget planning we have talked about things that we would like to look at incorporating into the budget and we know that prior the items you know mainly focusing in the area of health and safety would be the elementary hvac units fire alarm systems flooring replacement stores replacements and things of that nature so we are just in the beginning stages of pulling things out of our long-range facilities plan that we'd like to try to address in the 2122 budget between using whatever the available capital reserves are and also trying to build some funds into our operating budget to to address these projects so we will have a more detailed discussion at the november meeting and in the upcoming months as

034we develop our next year's budget that we then talk to the finance committee or the or the facilities and finance committee about just to recap some of the recent grants you know that we've been dealing with in the facilities area we there's been a lot of discussion about these uh alyssa's law securing our children's security future security funding the application was originally supposed to be due back in the spring and that was pushed off but the application is now due november 20th just to remind everybody middletown's allocation was 538 389 so we will be submitting a that would include a significant expansion of our security camera network that would touch on all buildings and the high school fields safety film for windows and doors and work on our intercom and pa systems throughout the district

035so we would be submitting those expenses and they have to be eligible expenses there's only certain expenses that are eligible these are all eligible projects for that grant we also are gathering information to submit for there is a water infrastructure grant that's now available the application for that is also due november 20th the allocation amount for middletown is not determined the way this grant will work is you can submit for projects anything done on or after january 1st is eligible for reimbursement if it's an eligible expense so we are working on pulling things together that we've done we've done a decent amount of work on replacing water fountains with bottle filling stations we in along those lines go filters we've done some water main replacement work and other things that would qualify for these funds

036so you know we will submit as much as we have done and we'll see what we get back if the amount of projects submitted by districts exceeds the available funds that the states have then the awards are made you know on a subjective basis you know they'll take a look at the merits of the projects and they'll allocate funds to the districts accordingly so we're working on that uh other funding updates we just wanted uh to go over that you know we had we did receive our extraordinary aid allocation back in july that was for the 1920 school year it always lags after the end of the year and our original allocation was a little less than what we had budgeted it was a million for and change and we had budgeted about we had

037budgeted a million five for last year uh however we did just recently receive an increase in that allocation again still it's from 1920 of 146 000 so that brought our total extraordinary aid to 1 million 613 000 for last year since the increase we received was after we had closed out our last fiscal year we will be reflecting this 146 increase in our current fiscal year even though it was tied to last year and that's that's what the state has directed we also have a corona virus relief funds available for 2021 middletown's allocation is 375 291 dollars these funds are recorded outside of our operating budget they're treated as a where we record our grants and it must be spent by december 31st uh 2020. so we discussed the possibility of using these funds to

038pay for the additional desk and table shields that we've been talking about and purchasing those for our classrooms if we don't expend all of the money using that we have a lot of other eligible expenses that we can apply to it to meet the allocation amount by december 31st but we we anticipate that most of that money will be spent on the shields because those it will be a good amount of money then we also have uh we've discussed before our cares act allocation which is 346 thousand dollars those funds need to be spent by next september 30th uh this september 30th actually 2020 2022. so the budget application has been submitted and approved and we've already been moving forward with that one of the other things we talked about was before we move on

039amy i think that one thing you know we talked about you know the aid that we're getting is you know it's nice to have some aid but it's probably going to be far short of some of the additional expenditures that we're probably running into um during the pandemic here right with accommodations and things like that something i think that we talked about as we get further into the year sort of having an idea where we are you know what our run rate is um in terms of where we are normally versus where we are now with the pandemic because you know there are costs to what's going on um and it's just a heads up to folks that you know that that cares act and the coronavirus does not cover you know we're not quite

040sure but it certainly doesn't certainly doesn't cover all of the additional expenses that we've uh that we're going to incur so as we get further in the year i think we talked about seeing when we're getting like flashing yellow if you want to use colors green yellow red uh when we're getting closer to exceeding our budget because a lot of this is hard to really gauge and to estimate um considering this is a sort of a new environment and uh you know week to week month to month uh things change just wanted to point that out for folks yeah we did talk about that i mean you know even though it's the end of october we've really only been up and operating for you know about a month and a half so far this year

041so we're hoping you know the next couple of months will really show us more how we're trending as far as personnel costs and other things uh to give us an idea of what adjustments we may need to make you know through june 30th and also we're hoping we'll have some indication of how we you know what what the environment will be to start building next year's budget as well so we the other another topic we talked about was the implementation of the new jersey educators health plan uh this is something that most of you have probably heard about just by reading the paper and so forth but it's a plan that has been developed and is being pushed out for a january 1st 2021 implementation date and the it requires that all new employees that

042we hire after july 1st 2020 must be put in this plan effective january 1st so even though we've had employees start after you know after july first and they've started with other insurance we'll have to transfer them over to the new plan our current employees can elect this plan for january 1st if they choose during a special open enrollment period that we're going to be holding starting next week so we've we had some discussion and we've been looking at it and we just we did get our rates uh pretty late in the game you know we only got the rates for this plan at the end of last week and we've been working very hard to get them from horizon but there was a big backlog in getting those rates so we do have those

043now and we're working on you know putting it out for all the employees but just to recap what we talked about the cost of this plan the premiums for this plan are basically more expensive than pretty much all the plans that we currently offer outside of our ppo which is offered on a limited basis so in in most cases if employees elect this plan you know the premiums are going to be higher for this plan and on top of that the contribution levels are different as well it's not you know under chapter 78 there was a set of contribution levels based upon the cost of the premium and a percentage that went up as the salaries go up uh with this under chapter 44 which this plan falls under the tables are different it's a

044percentage of salary you know and that goes up as well as the salaries go up but in most cases employees will end up paying less you know for this plan which is good for the employees however you know we have to determine you know what the impact is going to be on the district if we have a large amount of our employees migrate over to this plan we don't really have we don't we don't really know you know what what the what our staff is going to do we know who has to go into the plan but you know until after we do the open enrollment over the next couple of weeks we won't really know who intends to move to this plan there's some pros and cons as far as the plan design they

045also will have the chance to enroll in it july 1st so you know we may see some people not enroll at this time and decide to wait but we really you know like i said we don't really know so we're trying to and we're going to have to calculate after we do the open enrollment what the impact on us is going to be but you know i think the intention of the legislation was for employees to save and for districts to save but there's been a lot of discussion not just for us but in a lot of districts across the state that the premium cost is actually going to end up being higher for a lot of districts and you know as far as whether it's a substantial impact or not you know that you

046won't know until you actually see who signs up and and how things shake out but it's you know the initial analysis by a lot of districts is it's not going to necessarily be a saver and it could make maybe cost districts some money so that's what we're looking at right now uh another i think that's i think that's a great point in me is that that's that's a big deal right we spend a lot of time on the benefits of plans and uh part of that is the dens if if it's not to use that plan um i i think the indications are the employees don't have to pay things for the dental coverage is that is that correct so that's an additional cost and this is basically a horizon blue cross game right there

047they're the ones of the state has running it so you know it's you're playing against again it was always about blue cross running the table right so this could be something in our budget that could be a big impact i mean every year we talk about it so i this is definitely uh i guess i'll put it on a yellow flag yeah we'll definitely have to have to see and then there'll be another new plan uh the garden state health plan which will is being developed and that will be available july 1st so that plan is entirely voluntary nobody will be forced to go into that plan but it will if if somebody does elect that plan they will see a premium sharing reduction of up to 50 percent from what they would pay under

048the new jersey educators uh health plan so again we have no information on the rates for that plan or anything else but the only thing i really do know is that the network will be from what i understand entirely a new jersey network of providers so you know there it is it's going to be a lot more limited plan uh so i don't know how again how many employees would opt for that but you know on top of the new jersey educator's health plan this other plan is going to be coming along as well so we did we did spend a lot of time talking about that we're going to have to see over the next month or so you know what the impact is going to be for january 1st and you know keep

049that in mind as we go into our budget for next year we also talked about our end-of-year results for 1920 we're still in the process of finalizing our audit but however you know we it does look like we will be able to make the the board approved capital reserve uh deposits that we had anticipated in june so we should be we will be able to deposit uh another million five into our capital reserve which we can then purpose into next year's budget into some of these projects we were talking about and also uh add to our maintenance reserve five hundred thousand dollars now just to remind the board we did take 250 000 out of our maintenance reserve to balance our budget for this year so we'll be able to replenish that and add a

050little bit more to that and then additionally we will have some excess surplus to apply to the 2122 budget as revenue about 955 000 which again we discussed is a good thing we have eliminated the use of surplus in our budgets uh up until this point the last several years we haven't had that you know we haven't but this year we did realize some because we did have some savings that had occurred based upon you know the fact that we were not operating in person uh from march middle of march till the end of june so we had savings in various areas so we were able to to keep that and have it now to apply toward our 2122 budget and again just a reminder that we are anticipating that our state aid reduction for

051next year is you know likely to be in the neighborhood of about a million dollars so you know at least we'll have something to help start off setting that uh hopefully in next year's budget you know as we build that so that's that's really all we talked about which was quite a bit but it was um it was a very productive meeting aside from that we have a few things on the agenda uh in addition to the maintenance comprehensive maintenance plan and the m1 and so forth we have our financial reports for the month we have some non-public entitlements for security and i believe it was nursing and we also have the alliance for competitive telecommunications with escnj uh cooperative agreement that we use to purchase our you know our internet services and so forth

052through a cooperative and we have a couple of transportation jointers for students who are the responsibility of other districts but they're set you know they're attending our schools and we are providing transportation and doing a joint with them so they can pay us for that and that covers facilities and finance okay thank you i apologize amy i have a quick question just to follow up from a top topic from a previous meeting the um bond uh refinancing and the questions we had had about a delay and the filing of that has that have have we seen any resolution on that there hasn't been any any further movement on that so you know right now we're just status quo okay moving on to policy um amy i don't know if you want to take that i

053i would like to try to get another policy meeting on the calendar if we could i just want to throw that out there what do you think mr donald yeah okay go ahead amy uh we just have a policy that we have on for a second reading tonight that we reviewed last month regarding the administration of medication uh so again it's just a second reading on that policy it's actually i think it was just a regulation right mrs walker okay it's just the regulation okay great moving on to curriculum and instruction mrs pickus hey good evening everyone it's been a busy month in curriculum very excited to have the students back and see the curriculum in action um in alignment with uh the district's commitment to fostering inclusion and equity a committee comprised of administrators

054teachers and students have been meeting virtually over the last several weeks um today was our third meeting in the matter of about four weeks to to discuss ideas related to maintaining and enhancing our classroom environments in order to promote engagement safety and positivity for all students teachers and students shared their perspectives and experiences with district and building level administrators and the group determined the first initiative of the committee is to develop a classroom mission statement that builds upon our district's mission to empower students by upholding the values of inclusivity engagement and safety in our educational environments members of the high school each of the high schools respective diversity clubs these students will spearhead this effort which includes seeking feedback from the student bodies via a student survey dr morales supervisor of social studies and technology

055shared the progress that the district has made so far in the areas of equity inclusion and and diversity since the summer some of these initiatives include introducing new curriculum that focuses on global and or cultural competencies updating curriculum to incorporate more diverse perspectives and planning professional development for educators in addition the district is creating a new equity and inclusion specialist position mr vanella and dr cheetahman spoke about that earlier and i just want to say on behalf of the curriculum department we're really looking forward to this new partnership and the opportunity to grow with one of our colleagues who is being recommended tonight in expanding our programs offerings ensuring that they're inclusive to all students and improving upon our instructional practices as well as many of the members of the community uh know it was

056in our newsletter on friday and principals have been elementary principals have been sharing our students have done an outstanding job acclimating to the health and safety measures included in our district's reentry plan including building their tolerance and stamina for mask wearing or face coverings therefore students will begin to participate or they begin this week actually in live special area classes during previously scheduled wellness breaks teachers will continue to bring students outside to the greatest extent possible and have them maintain social distance so that students can remove their masks and get a break from those face coverings however the primary use of this time will be for instruction in special area classes um as it's been mentioned a separate recess or snack period will continue to be scheduled for all students uh lessons done during in-person

057specials in the elementary level will complement what is posted by teachers on the pe and health the art music and spanish teachers google classrooms each week students who attend school on campus will be scheduled for in-person instruction for physical education and health and either art or music until we until we return from winter recess asynchronous elementary spanish lessons will primarily be the uh will be the primary uh source of instruction for all students um as has been the routine since the start of the school year and we do anticipate uh that full virtual students will continue to complete their asynchronous special area lessons for all their classes as posted on their teachers google classrooms the current plan is to implement our regularly scheduled six day rotating special area schedule after the winter recess that will

058mean that between january and june all students at the elementary level will participate over two semesters they'll be reduced semesters but albeit equal in health pe music art spanish and digital literacy and design classes more details about our special area schedules will be communicated by the principals to their school communities as we get closer to phase six in december hopefully keeping our fingers crossed and the winter recess period um so this current uh environment has led us to do some unique uh planning when it comes to some of our annual events that we host out of the curriculum department one of two of those things are our academy and pathway fair for our eighth graders as well as high school north and high school south eighth grade open house so we're going to be combining

059the events this year make a super event um the directors and supervisors are have already begun to migrate our existing hard copy or pdf version of our middle school and high school course selection guides onto what will be a very new and interactive uh page on our district website our students and parents will be able to access all this content via our district website and they'll be able to read over it in preparing for signing up for next year's courses in addition to the course information there will be also updated information about all of our academies and pathways so that uh parents and students can can uh better inform themselves on those offerings as well we will update and post any relevant videos and information to a section of this new course selection website page

060we hope to have include student testimonials uh twitter feeds from our teachers and our administrators who are involved in those pathways in those academies and those different course areas and departments we're really hoping to make it an interactive and and live experience for students so that it's again transitioning it from a pdf the old hard copy paper uh course book to a much more interactive design at this time i mentioned before we're going to be combining our annual academy and pathway fair with our high school north and high school south 8th grade open house event we're planning for that to be held on december 17th so please mark your calendars more information will be going out to our eighth grade families and students about this we're going to be having our second planning meeting this

061friday with the curriculum department directors and supervisors and the high school north and south administration and guidance departments link it so this has been an ongoing prop initiative as many parents know in the district since last spring many of our parents created accounts through the student and parent portal in linkedit beginning i guess it was last february and march a link it has since changed how they will present the data to our students and parents and they have created a separate student and parent portal which is a welcome improvement and i really give a lot of credit to mrs orozco and also mrs alfone who has since left the district uh for spearheading and really taking this on we were one of the largest districts that link it partners with to initiate access to the

062student data for our parents via this portal and it's really been our feedback that has driven them to make these very welcomed upgrades students can now log in using their mtps email addresses and access their testing portal with habit without having to enter an additional test code parents and guardians will be able to access testing data for all of their children currently enrolled in middletown with one username and password once the accounts are established this will definitely streamline that process for our parents linkit will be emailing all of our parents accounts in the uh using the email addresses that they have in powerschool with instructions for how to create these accounts and a unique registration code link it form c of which would be a culmination of the previous year's content that students were introduced

063to in math and literacy has been administered in grades three to eight for mathematics and in grades three to eleven for english language arts teachers have been using the results of these assessments to determine where students need additional small group instruction based on last year's standards and the interventionists and coaches have been using this information as well to guide the intervention process we will be administering link it form a which is content based on this current year's uh standards that students are being exposed to uh in the upcoming weeks as a benchmark test for teachers to see which grade levels current grade level standards students may already demonstrate mastery in and that will really allow them to better differentiate their instruction and meet all of our students needs whether it's acceleration um intervention at at

064the on grade level area or remediation uh beyond that we will also administer linkit forms bnc this year to students in grades three to eleven uh at future points to track their student our students growth and properly prepare them for this round uh this year's uh in in regards to this year's standards that they are being instructed in uh in spite of the current health pandemic our arts departments are doing a great job of keeping our arts alive here in middletown um in spite of the fact that we're a little sidelined for some of our normal performance venues and means our drama department uh in high school north and high school south worked with the director of arts and business mr graziano to submit a proposal for a fall virtual show in each school high

065school north's production of the matchmaker by thornton wilder will be streamed on december 4th and 5th at 7 pm high school south students have created many productions of the zoom where it happened and the jesus saved me program and dolly and the intention is to release them via youtube on november 20th on or around november 20th high school south providing provided an outside rehearsal and two song performances for parents to attend in the sands at high school south um students also held an outside uh outside instrumental performance both of these took place on saturday october 17th high school north is also planning a virtual performance for both chorus and instrumental music to be released sometime in january and as of now a proposal for virtual course performances are currently in the works for link roth

066fairview and leonardo schools and they're being reviewed with mr graziano and more will come regarding our other schools as well certainly a work in progress but i really do want to applaud our teachers in our arts program again for keeping the arts alive and the students engaged and able to put on their performances for our community there's just one last update i wanted to share um with everyone uh november 6 is the deadline for our high school students to register for ap tests uh that's a very important date we've been working very hard to get that information out to all of our students enrolled in our ap courses at both high school south and high school north um another important footnote here for this year only college board is waiving the cancellation fee this is

067really important because even if a student is undecided at this time whether or not they're going to take the test it is to their advantage if they can to register and pay the re pay the normal fee because if they decide later on down the road that they want to cancel and they don't want to take the test they can get a full refund however if they delay in registering for the test there will be a 40 late fee that will be applied in addition to the normal cost of the test and that will be applied after that november deadline so um we just want to really encourage all of our students in the ap program to take advantage of that and um you know that's a way for them to potentially earn additional college

068credit um i've also been talking to the guidance departments and the curriculum directors and um something that we see as a general positive for the district in our students taking advantage of uh earning advance college credit is that at both high schools this year we see a uh increase in the number of students who are participating in dual enrollment programs and we've really done a lot of work to expand our dual enrollment offerings um we've been partnering with with new colleges and universities like kane um to be able to expand upon those those courses and this year we've had an increase at high school south of about um of about 121 students who are enrolled in at least one dual enrollment course and at high school north we're actually up about 174 students participating and

069taking advantage of that opportunity which is really a great thing it's it's an opportunity again to earn advanced college credit at a at a marginal price significantly less than what you would pay once you're on college campus and we hope to to be able to continue to expand upon those course offerings for being very aggressive and looking at new opportunities and i think mrs caruso is going to give us an update on our esl program as well good evening everybody there are currently 46 students this year participating in the district in our ell program taught by three and a half ell teachers in our district that number is approximately 64 percent of all the students who are eligible to participate in the program the students whose parents or guardians declined to have their child participate

070however are placed in a class that is taught by a psyop trained teacher in the district sciap stands for sheltered instruction observation protocol it's a research-based instructional model that is highly effective in addressing the academic needs of english learners and that protocol provides a framework for the teachers to design and deliver lessons that make the content more comprehensible for the ell students actually more comprehensible for all students has been our experience in comparison to last year there are approximately seven more students eligible for ell this year than last year and there are approximately three more students participating in the program this year than last year just as a reminder due to the pandemic the access testing that we give to all the ell students was begun last march but never completed when we went virtual

071however those students who were able to complete the testing prior to our going all virtual out of those we did have six students who were able to exit the program this past september okay questions and we do have two voting agenda uh items on the agenda tonight uh we do have uh a staff member who were enrolling in um a course for professional development on the agenda that's over 150 as well as our annual participation agreement with the monmouth county arts and education center for after school activities for middle school and high school students which is paid for by the families okay there's no questions um i know mrs dell and i are working on uh coming up with a new date another date for an upcoming curriculum committee meeting so we look forward to

072hosting that great thank you moving on to student activities with mr ranella yes uh mr russell is going to give us a update on the re-entry plan and phased-in approach absolutely good evening mr rotolo if you could share that presentation that i sent with you so everyone could see it thank you so much all right so just to give me a little bit of a backdrop while i'm talking um i think that we have had overall of you know a very positive experience coming back to schools this year um so much so that we were able to welcome more students back more of the time than we had originally anticipated so in order to do that i wanted to let you know a little bit about you know what the notifications that you're receiving are

073and how we're keeping track of all of um of any positive coven 19 cases that we see in the district um so on the next slide there is just a couple of basic definitions and just so that you understand who we are contacting and when um anyone who's deemed to be a close contact to someone who tests positive with covet 19 is contacted directly by one of our school nurses and or one of the contact tracers from the department of health but all of our school related contacts close contacts are notified directly by one of our school nurses and they are guided through a whole conversation about what they need to do you know why they were considered a close contact but those close contacts and how many people are under quarantine are not disclosed

074to anyone else and it's not a notification that we make publicly similarly we don't notify when a person is under quarantine or in isolation so people are under quarantine if they have been in close contact with someone who has been diagnosed with cova 19 and someone in isolation has either been assumed to be positive for cova 19 because they demonstrate a number of symptoms that have not been tested or because they come back with a positive test and again we've not been notifying for every case of a quarantine or an isolation that is not accompanied by a positive result what we have been notified what we have been notifying the whole district community for is whenever we have a positive case so we will continue to do that whenever there is a student or staff

075member and i will say we have even notified for um for people who are tangential to the district but who do have an association with either our students or our staff members we consult with the middletown department of health each time we have a positive case reported in the district and we consult with them to find out who we need to notify if we needed to know if we need to notify and i would say before yesterday i would say confidently that we have notified for more cases than we had to about half of the cases that we've notified for we actually didn't have to based on exposure to the building so the district has taken a stance of being very transparent with the coven 19 exposure to the buildings and to our district's students

076and staff um so i say that we didn't have to notify because i think that our quarantining procedures and our close contact procedures are um are pretty conservative to the point where we have had people home on quarantine when they are then diagnosed with covid19 so they've never been in the building since being exposed to covid19 and therefore there were no additional students or staff members who would have been exposed um let's see what else that i want to tell you we have currently you know we can look at the next one with a little bit of the graphic um we have had no evidence of any student to student transmission of covet-19 we've had no evidence of student-to-teacher or teacher-to-student transmission of cova-19 in our schools so we believe that again all those procedures

077that we're following are working um you know and that we are that we're keeping everybody as healthy and as safe as we possibly can um we also um again work with the the middletown department of health each time we have a case to figure out what we need to do and this is one chart that the new jersey department of health released and that we follow that describes when we would close a classroom when we would close a building and when we need to to do a little bit more of a deeper dig into where these cases are before we can figure out what to do with them um so i bring this up because i'm sure that many of you have seen the letters of notification that come have come out over the last

078two days again we look at each of those and we're monitoring the situation and we will continue to do that so that we can make sure that we can bring more students back for phases five and six so again we are using the data but we're also consulting with the middletown department of health each time um so that we know where you know where exactly we stand with those statistics um so our next phases are we are in now phase four so we have introduced more students to the schools more of the time um phase five is anticipated to begin in the middle of november so what we have done is we have sent out a survey to all of our all remote learners and their families to see which of those students would like

079to come back to school beginning on or around november 16th and again we will meet with the department of health to see if our statistics and data demonstrate that we have the ability to bring back more students but we also want to see what that would look like what is the effect going to be on our transportation what's going to be the effect on our classrooms and we are working with you know many stakeholders to try to figure out what's the best way to get as many students back in as quickly as possible so there are a couple of different plans kind of floating around that we're trying to figure out how to do that in the best way after phase five we are looking forward to phase six which i you know would love

080to see that december 14th start date occur um and again we will keep uh consulting with the department of health as well as in that case i believe that we're going to work with at least an epidemiologist and more than that to determine when we can bring back all of our students who are ready to come back for five days of instruction per week at that point parents will still have the option to continue with reduced in-person instruction on the two days that they were assigned but all of our students would be welcome so with that said as mr little mentioned um a little while ago there is there are some implications for bringing back more students so we need to make sure that when we bring back more students that we are ready to

081have students with less than six feet of social distance between them so in each of these phases we're looking at that ppe we're looking at those desk dividers we're looking at how can we reorient our classrooms to make sure that our students and our staff again stay as safe as possible so those are the things that our school-based pandemic response teams are looking at and they are each tasked with coming up with ideas and plans for again how to keep those classrooms as as safe as possible and how to keep students as separated as possible one of the other topics that has been in those phased plans and i only chose the highlights from the website so please go to the website to see more of those details the in-person dining and in-person lunch has

082been a big question so i just wanted to address the fact that lunches cannot continue or cannot happen on our in our schools until it's actually executive order 175 that would need to change and that states that every student would need to be six feet apart from one another in order to safely have lunch in our buildings so yes we are waiting for state indoor dining regulations to loosen a little bit but it would also have to come down to executive order 175. so these are some of the updates that i've been giving to schools pandemic response teams this week and last week as they've come up with their plans again to to incorporate snack time and how are we going to do elementary specials on premises um i'm trying to think of what other

083things they've been tackling but all of our buildings are trying to come up with plans for again how do we how do we get get kids back in the buildings and do it in a safe way i think that's where we are mr ronella anything to add to that just a a quick reminder to anybody that may not have completed that survey and has a remote learner that it does close this evening at midnight so if you haven't yet completed that survey we would appreciate it if you would go in and submit that for us mr roscoe can you hear me yes um so in terms of in phase six uh are those still half days or full days i because i know the dining is sort of an issue it what's the plan there

084in terms of sure so for phase six our phase six is when we can safely bring all of our students back to campus for in-person instruction five days a week the full day schedule won't return until we can then safely do lunch on our campuses so um since we haven't seen any indication of when lunch can resume on campus we don't know when full days first we're trying to get our students back every day um and then hopefully we can find a time when we can have them back for for full days like i said once that lunch can resume thank you uh mr roscoe i have a question can you hear me yes okay so there was a mention of snack and we mentioned it before so now that the weather isn't great um

085will the elementary schools have tents and will every single school have tents so that kids could possibly have snacks outside on rainy days each elementary school is working again with their pandemic response team to come up with a way for their students to have snack during inclement weather days for some of the buildings it may be tense for other buildings they are working on some creative solutions for how to space students out inside where they could do a quick snack so it not every school will have a tent but every school has been tasked with coming up with a way for those students to have snack now that we're experiencing colder and more inclement weather yep okay thank you okay thank you mr roscoe um next uh mr carroll's gonna give us a uh an

086update on the winter athletic season from njsi today thank you mr ranella as we wind down the fall here uh we have some guidance from the ngsi as far as the winter and the road map going forward so the winter season practices will start on december 3rd with the regular season starting december 21st running through february 5th and then the winter post season will start february 5th through the 17th uh the season will consist of roughly 15 games depending on sport and one scrimmage our middle schools have followed a similar timeline we're working on those schedules as we speak at this time njsa rules prohibit spectators to any indoor sport that may change in the future but as of right now it's only essential personnel allowed at all the indoor venues from there we moved

087on the season three which is gymnastics and volleyball uh starting february 16th running through the middle of april and then the traditional spring season would start the end of april through the middle of may so that's where we are now and it's all subject exchange thank you thanks mr carroll um we do have two uh voting items on the agenda this evening the nursing plan is on the agenda um that was uploaded for your review and that's basically broken down as a school by school indicates the number of students the number of nurses visits for each school also breaks down the level of nursing care for students from levels one through four and indicates how many students for each level at each building just one thing to remember obviously we had an abbreviated school year

088last year so the numbers are a little bit reduced from what we normally see as far as office visits are concerned trainings are concerned and some of the screenings um and the other item on the uh the voting agenda is our memorandum of understanding with law enforcement and that's just the uh the agreement that's signed between the school district and local law enforcement and that's just that we are going to cooperate with the law enforcement and law enforcement going to cooperate with the school to ensure that we have a safe facility for our students and staff i have a quick yes i have a question uh when it comes to the sports the indoor sports for the kids and the parents won't be able to come to watch them any chance we're going to televise

089it uh can we do that yeah i'm sorry mr nell i'm sorry uh all of our indoor sports will be broadcast on the nfhs network we have cameras in place um at this time yes so how does that mean that the parents get to see this i'm not exactly sure they they go on the website the nfhs network and there's a subscription fee but that they pay for one time for the year and they can see any game home or away that is broadcast on the nfhs network we've had it in place for a past couple years okay okay thank you we have mr carol correct me if i'm wrong but we have cameras in both gyms at the high schools correct so total four cameras yes any other questions all right thank you thank

090you we have no update tonight for uh shared services so we'll move on to strategic planning um i don't know um mrs dougherty if you wanted to speak on anything specific we have that rubric well the the meeting that we had on the 21st we did review a rubric that the administrative team had developed a draft of as a jump off point and the committee spent some time going over that and coming up with objectives to share with our consultant to guide the process of them developing enrollment planning scenarios so this is why i don't know if you want to add to that um you know we're still i think we're still working on the uh the rubric and we shared it with malone and groom our demographer um so they know the key that

091we're that we're looking to oops nobody heard that probably sorry yes we're working with room um um to to share the rubric and um so that they know what is important when they're coming up with their scenarios for us we actually spoke to them today about that right and the rubric did go out to the board last week too so everybody could could see it to the full board um and also there's the questions from the navising community about the numbers to reflect madness things decreased and some individuals had asked about it at pick and then you never got back to them we did speak to malone mcbroom about that they did and i believe we did share that in one of our other strategic planning committee meetings they they had they had that factored

092in but they took another look at it because they agreed that maybe the reductions were or the drop-off in the enrollment was uh maybe something that they should adjust so they took a look at it they did it they did scale it back a little bit and made some adjustments to some of the other elementary so we we did they did revise that in early october i thought we had we had shared that with the committee so they they did they did take another look at that okay we just haven't seen the new numbers yet but do we know when they're coming back to show new numbers we don't have a presentation set up for for them right now right now they're also working on the capacity of the buildings and had started to go

093over that so i think at the point in time when we go over building capacities you know they can revisit their projections and you know it's not big changes but it's you know they did revise it a little bit so i i would think they should probably speak about both things at once but we don't have that we don't have that scheduled at this point right now they were trying to finalize some of the building capacity information and then start planning the scenarios i want to know what they're doing okay yeah i i don't know that it's something that you know they were going to be gathering additional information on sales i know that they've gone by historical and they've built in what they you know have felt was appropriate uh you know i would

094say one measure you know that we could use in the short term is you know whatever is being projected for the first period of time that they're projecting you know we could compare that to what the actual is and we will know that you know by the end of this year you know what what the enrollments are going to look like for next year we can see you know where things stand i just don't see how we could go by because this is an unexceptional time that things have changed dramatically well it's not just historical you know they look at birth rates and they're looking they are looking at you know they they did look at the housing turnovers and so forth too i understand what you're saying that things are changing now too but

095there's really no way for them to you know they can only go with the information they have to make a projection but what can they do about trying to get more accurate information i mean again the only thing that you could really do is monitor like we did with the last enrollment projection you know after we got that every year we would monitor what they projected and where we were and it always turned out that we were you know we were pretty close there might have been some changes you know between some of the schools but you know as a district you know those numbers were always you know pretty much right there from what was projected i get what i get in the past but this is not the same as the past it's

096far different than the past miss gallagher didn't the consultant go to city [Music] yes they have all the development right they have all the development information i think what mrs manuez is talking about is existing stock the turnover and i guess we're talking about development right you talk about the overturning in the selling of the homes in middletown there's a huge turnover right now and we don't know how many people are moving well again i would think that you know if that's happening right now we would be starting to see the effects you know fairly shortly so again it's something that the the best you know all we can really do or the best thing we can do is to monitor what our actual results are compared to what these projections are and if it

097turns out that you know we see a trend that's significantly different than the projections then yes that would be definitely something we'd have to revisit i already have a question um we're eight months into the pandemic we've all seen the for sale signs coming and going around town to mrs mingwee's point do we have a readout on the increased enrollment in our schools from where we thought they would be in june to what the number actually was in september and how many students were adding on a weekly basis right now i can't give you exact numbers but i do know our enrollments have been reduced we've had students leave for private schools and for home instruction so we i do not believe we would show any increase at this point now um the october 15th

098snapshot we can look at that yeah yeah i would suggest to to address mrs point i would suggest that we use the information that we have on hand right because the the turnover in the township is definitely a real thing um there are people coming in you know they're leaving the city north jersey in the more populated areas and they're coming down here to middletown and so that should be reflected in enrollments as they move in uh and that would not that's not accounting for the new development if those are not being filled in each of the actual turnovers so i would think that you know the best tea leaves that we possibly have are to look at our increasing or decreasing enrollment numbers over the next few months we're not at the precipice of

099making any determinations on the redistricting right now this is a long long process and so we should continue to rotate it into this process and circle back with aluminum with what their models say and that way we can stay on top of it because i think mrs mingus makes an excellent point as people come in with kids they are going to be you know enrolling their kids in school and we will be the first ones to know can i just say something do you think that the census might help a little bit do you think that would help the numbers that we get from that no well do we no we missed it well i just think that the you know that would be a question for milan and mcbroom but i would assume in

100the census here they take that into account along with all the other data points i recall them mentioning census data as one of their data points so i don't know that we're going to learn anything new well it's going on right now that's right okay i just thought maybe that might help it a little bit okay didn't they stop the count at the end the count has already been stopped yeah so let's see if we can have um melanoma brome come in november to give us the capacity update and to answer some of these questions for us we also get a copy of the october 15th and moment i know i have work but i haven't [Music] mrs rogers i just want to remind you that we were planning also on having malone and mcfirm

101come in december you know to do a presentation i'm not sure you know if we want to i mean i guess we can discuss whether it makes sense to have them come two months in a row or whether yeah i'm just wondering if it doesn't believe us to have them come in november just explain the process of what they're going through because i'm sensing an unrest in the community any time we mention that numbers are down at a school people are concerned we're going to close that school um when it could just mean that they're going to take students from another overcrowded school to their school you know um this isn't being talked about um closing the school but i know that people do get uncomfortable and concerned so if we could just have them

102come into november talk us through their process what they're going through um in preparation for december that might be helpful for the community i don't know if anybody else has any other opinions on that no well they can come in november and december i guess right i think it'd be great okay okay um let's see so now we've got personnel which we discussed in executive sessions and so then we move on to our public comment on agenda items only so this is for anything that's on the agenda this evening i'm just a reminder that we do have a 30 minute limit and we have about 96 participants this evening so we're going to limit it to three minutes each so that as many people as possible can speak during that 30 minutes um please if

103you don't hear from us at the end of your comment it's not because we're not interested in what you have to say we just may not be able to answer your comment and this is basically to get your comment on the record it's not a question answer or a town hall okay um for those who may not know be familiar with the process um down the bottom of your screen uh there's an icon talk uh it looks like a hand we'll say raise and click that that'll indicate that you'd like to ask a question um we do have a hand raised it is uh joanne fanslau we'll bring her in now hi um i have a question i my son uh has iep and he hasn't had speech for two months already and i talked

104to danielle strecht and the speech teacher from leonardo grade school he's in um he's in third grade now um and she just said she's trying to interview speech teachers and she got nothing yet and i i pressed a virtual for the whole year by accident and i think he he's getting a little frustrated now and i i i have to wait until the 16th now but he's really getting frustrated with um the one class science and everything like that of of coming to school okay thank you i just want to addre direct that caller to the principal of her school to discuss this on a one-on-one uh one-on-one basis okay next uh don't have a last name so we'll bring in mike yes can you tell me what the law enforcement agreement is and what

105it what it has to do with okay mike um would you mind just providing your last name for the record please craig mike craig thank you can you tell me what the law enforcement agreement is and why it's necessary yeah mr craig um that's that's um a state mandate from the new jersey department of ed um it requires a cooperation between the local police department and the prosecutor's office and the school district and it the actual memorandum of agreement is issued by the state the town has the authority to make changes to it to add to it it cannot take away anything from the memorandum issued by the state but essentially um there's a verbage in there that requires um certain offenses to automatically be reported by the school to the local police department and

106vice versa if the police department has information that may have an effect on the school district they have a requirement to report that to the local school district as well okay um i'm seeing uh joanne fanslaw's hand has gone back up so bring her back in one last time so i talked to the principal and daniel shrek oh you guys are the board of ed aren't you gonna like look into it for me more since you guys are still contracting speech people though i mean you're he's a speciality as iep yes you know what we will have um dr tiedemann she is in charge of special ed um you know if you can call her office or she can try to look up your number and give you a call tomorrow to discuss all right

107because i yeah i mean uh like this is two months already without speech and stuff like that because they said they're spreading the species or din uh my number is yeah i mean don't give it out here don't give it out don't give your number out here we'll figure it out we'll look up in the system okay yeah we'll call you tomorrow okay from the uh special ed department all right all right thank you because i don't want to go to state like i called the state on garfield because they were trying to get speech from kindergarten i don't want to like you know have to go i called the special ed state to try to fight for speech and everything i mean i don't i don't want to go to you guys i moved

108from garfield to down here because like you guys are rated better than garfield there so i mean i just like i'm just a little aggravated like with the the speech and everything we understand we hear that we hear that so we'll we'll try to work that out for you okay okay next is catherine m farley hi thanks very much um i just had i guess one quick uh comment i know earlier it was mentioned um with the phases in the reopening about lunch and that executive order 175 would have to be revised in order for the students to eat lunch um i guess i would just ask i know you can't answer questions now but just for maybe additional clarity for the community um because looking at the executive order you know it kind of

109sets forth all the mandates about school and the six foot requirement says you know as it does uh for everything like what's being shown in a lot of classrooms right now because we just can't get to six feet uh it says we're practicable and it says if that's not practicable then you know you can use dividers and i know a lot of other districts are doing that and able to feed their children lunch in that way they have the dividers at their desks and you know they can eat lunch so i guess i'm just confused where that absolute mandate of six feet that was discussed earlier uh is coming from because i just didn't see it in executive order 175. so that's it thank you okay mrs rogers i'm not seeing any more hands raised

110at this time okay thank you chris so moving on i need a motion to approve the minutes from executive session on september 23rd and the regular voting meeting also on september 23rd so moved seconded discussion all in favor aye aye opposed abstentions for the report of the president tonight this is the time of year where we go over the code of ethics for school board members um ginny he has sent these um to you all to sign so if you haven't signed them and get them over jimmy please do so this evening i'll read it for us whereas the new jersey legislature adopted amendments in 2002 to the school ethics act to make adherence to the code of ethics for school board members mandatory for each board member and to ensure that board members understand

111what is expected of them under the ethics act and the code of ethics for school board members each board member must read and become familiar with the code of ethics for school board members each member must sign an acknowledgement that he or she has received a copy of the code therefore each board of education shall discuss the school ethics act and the code of ethics for school board members at a regularly scheduled public meeting annually adopt policies and procedures regarding the training of members in understanding the code of ethics and provide documentation that each member has received and reviewed it so this is what we are doing today every month at our meetings we do have the code of ethics for the public on the second page of the agenda all right moving on to

112b i need a motion to approve b one through four so moved second discussion all in favor opposed abstentions i need a motion to approve i'm sorry mariela did you have an update a superintendent update go ahead sorry first i'd just like to congratulate our students who were recognized for being named national american scholars and for our ap scholars and also congratulations to our staff members who have earned a doctorate i also want to thank our high school north and high school south speakers for um you know updating us on the great things that are going on in the school and the accomplishments of our students mrs orozco you know a little while ago just spoke about um the re-entry plan that we're in and we are excited that we were able to move to

113phase four just recently um added additional students are are students that need the most support back into school in person each day that was a great accomplishment i think and i think we have to thank our staff and our students our parents for following all the protocols and helping us get to that phase we're hopeful that we're going to get to phase on november 16th as anticipated and as mrs orosco said that's when our students who are participating fully virtually now have an opportunity to come in and i know there was a reminder put out by mrs orosco and mr ranella but i also want to remind our parents of the students that are participating virtually to go in and fill out that survey if you haven't done so yet that's important for our building

114administrators and our teachers to be able to plan for students who are coming back um so if you haven't done so do so it closes tonight our final phase six is anticipated on december 14th and that is when all students will have the opportunity to attend school each school day the cohort model will end um i was recently asked why we wait one month or about a month between our phases and that time frame which is 28 days at least provides a big enough window for us to monitor the health data and understand the impact of adding more students in person in each phase um it's basically two 14 day cycles um and when we talked to the epidemiologist um that was important um to wait those two 14 day cycles to see and and

115get a real read um on what was going on um this approach has been successful for us and we've only had to temporarily pivot to virtual instructions in two schools and although this is really a positive um data point especially when when like other schools haven't even opened fully or they've had to close temporarily for 14 days i don't want to minimize the impact that having to close two of our buildings had on our parents and our students in the communities that were affected that is you know something we didn't want to do and that is not the direction we wanted to go in so but we're hopeful that we can keep moving forward and hit phase 5 on november 16th um i also wanted to just say that friday night high school south is

116going to host the north south football game at you know it'll be out of high school south um i just wanted to remind everybody about the spectator policy that is in place because it's nj siaa rules only 500 spectators are permitted um and so the tickets for this event as they have been going for the previous football games go to the parents of the players the band the cheerleaders the color guard and then the remainder go to the students the same will be in effect for our thanksgiving day game that also will be limited to 500 um so again only the parents of the bands cheerleaders color guard and players will have the tickets along with students there are no ticket sales for either one of those events but the games will be televised the

117october 30th game this friday is going to be on nj.com and the nfs hs station that mr carroll spoke about earlier it is a subscription but it's a one time for the whole year subscription um and then information on broadcasting of the thanksgiving game will you know be on the website um as we get closer to that game and lastly i just wanted to remind everyone that next tuesday is election day and it's a fully virtual day for all our students as mandated by governor's order so um just remember that next tuesday and to see um you know what cohort goes what day especially when we have a day that's fully virtual just go to our school calendar on the website it has been updated and color coded so you can tell whether you're on

118a cohort a or cohort b day and that's it okay thank you so now i need a motion to prove c two through six please i'm i'm sorry mrs rogers we need to approve the items oh i'm sorry uh it is numbers it is letter c never mind i thought my mistake never mind you're good okay c two through six c two through six please the okay and abstentions okay number 13 a technology did we have nothing on the other no okay um moving on to b one through four so i moved second discussion all in favor opposed abstentions for facilities i don't see anything nope nothing on the addendum okay um for policy we have the second reading adoption of the administration of medication so i need a motion to approve 1a are we

119looking under policy are we looking to change our randomness we did that earlier in the year prior to the school year starting we still do we we've suspended the actual um testing the policy stays the same we just suspended the testing right now while we're in covid um for a few reasons um one is that the nurses are really busy right now and to test it takes a lot of time but also it's an it's a oral swab so to um have them have to do an oral swab in someone's mouth right now puts them at a little bit higher risk so while the pandemic is in place we're going we're suspending the the actual testing but we still are requiring students to sign up so that as soon as this is over they'll already

120be in the pool and we can still test at that point okay all in favor opposed abstentions i need a motion to approve e1 and 2 on the regular agenda and then e1 a on the addendum so moved second discussion all in favor aye aye aye opposed abstentions i need a motion to approve f one through four discussion all in favor [Music] i'm sorry no on one okay i'm sorry i think uh all in favor on one and abstention okay um for student activities you have nothing right and then person now we've got on the addendum i won through mrs rogers before we do the vote on this i just want to uh note that we are administratively withdrawing number four jay on the personnel report okay so all but 4j of i 1 through

12120. second discussion okay all in favor aye aye opposed and abstentions okay now we're moving on to old business [Music] um so i did my own research and i got the letter that was sent to the board and he said in here that the state has approved the closing not the program not the educational program but the facility itself so now i would like to know why the district was advised that they would be able to open it for if if you had an answer if i did say that i apologize for not getting back to you however um you could have called me or emailed me as you frequently do um but again that's no excuse if i didn't get back to my apology i haven't seen that letter so i'll be closed happy

122i'll be happy we need to reopen it and we probably have to go through the state to get permission i'll be happy to look at the letter um but if you read this letter it says that we can't it's officially closed by the state the facility not the program the facility so again i'll be happy to look at the letter i haven't seen the letter you're referring to you haven't referenced the date or who it was sent to or from i'm thinking i'll be happy to look at it and just for the record i don't believe that any of the other board members have seen this ladder either right i have not i haven't received any letter i got it i got into my board packet and it's dated may 26th and it went to

123dr george and he needed no one here does anybody let any board member recall receiving that letter i don't know but i will look through my emails again perhaps if you can afford that letter to the superintendent and it can be sent to all board members as well as myself i'll look at it thank you okay anybody else old business [Music] mike personnel right under personnel did you cover both of these sections of personnel because in here you have one through 20 and then on the other one you have one through something someone through and then 4j would be missing oh god you're right mike and then lastly on the student recognition we took that time out to recognize two groups but we didn't recognize the class of 2020 was there a reason for that

124no which recognition was that when we when at the beginning of the meeting when we did the board recognition we read the student recognition for the three students on top and then we talked about the ap exams and the ap scholars but there's another section here on the class of 2020. um i think the reason for that is we invited the students from the that are currently in the school so that's why we read their names but everybody goes into the booklet um the graduates would go into the booklet but they weren't available for us to send like our email invitations to come okay and we're trying to do virtually what we used to do in person so sometimes it gets a little lost in the translation and and i just want to clarify when

125we did do items one through 20 and personnel the initial personnel report i believe is 1-18 but you said one through 20 and and that just incorporates the addendum the addendum is just in addition to the items that were on there but when you said items the one through 20 that would incorporate the indentum so i believe it's fine okay okay i'm happy to do it again if we have to no i think we're fine okay all right um so that brings us to new i think i would business to bring up something for all our schools to look into the middletown library send all of our things for our kids um do and they're looking to donate books to our schools i would like to see a lot of this information go out because

126what a lot of parents are saying is not on their backpack and i can tell you that anything they sent us we put in the backpacks and mr rotolo they are we've only i think was only one that we got from them and we did put that in it was activities it didn't say anything about books i read it but it did say it listed all the activities and it went into all the backpacks what about the kids who are all virtual can they access that on our website would it be on our website um yeah so the backpack is you go through your school's website and there's a virtual right portal absolutely okay anybody else new business all right um we're going to open it up to public comment remember we do have a

127limit of 30 minutes and it looks like we have 78 participants so we are going to make it three minutes each and remember that we may not respond to you this evening this is for you to get your comment on the record it's not a back and forth it's not a town hall okay first we will bring in um irina hi good evening thank you so much for taking my comment and my questions although i do understand it's not a town hall uh forum i would still like to be on the record uh my questions pertain to some of the uh discussion surrounding equity and inclusion uh mr vanella mrs pickus and the job description of the equity and inclusion specialist uh that the district is seeking to hire all use terms referencing social justice

128uh and elaborating on global citizenship and i think that most academic sources define this agenda as a part of being a global citizen includes striving for social justice meaning justice in terms of the distribution of wealth opportunities and privileges within our society with this in mind uh the global citizen initiatives highlight courses that focus on social justice so i'd like to know what does this mean for potential changes to our district's curriculum are there any current changes being made that incorporate frameworks centered around critical race theory for example or the propaganda promoted by the 1619 project for example into the curriculum since these frameworks heavily support all of the aforementioned goals that have been discussed during the meeting if so will parents have the option to opt their child out of these divisive and poisonous

129teachings that inadvertently only promote and even create racism no matter how well intentioned they may appear um i just want to be clear and pardon me if i'm you know jumping around a little bit i wasn't expecting to make this comment um it's off the cuff because i wasn't expecting i didn't know what you guys were going to say so now that that you've brought it up i just want to be clear that i am very passionate about civil rights i fully understand the importance of promoting a fair safe healthy and equitable environment for all of our students i do um i want them to be free of social intimidation at school and i certainly want them to be free of any systemic injustice at school or in any institution i hold a master's degree

130in law with a focus on civil rights and i'm also the parent of one of the few black students in our district i say this only to express that i am not coming from a place of ignorance however i do hold a dissenting opinion about the efficacy of the programs that i mention and about incorporating them into the public school curriculum as a human and as a mother i assure you that i share in your desire for the best environment and outcome for every single one of our students no matter what walk of life they come from no matter their race their gender their learning abilities i'm on board but i know i'm not alone in contending that we are on the wrong track in achieving those outcomes if we implement the aforementioned programs and

131that's my concern because i see that that's where we we're going um and i know i'm not alone in contending that we're on the wrong track and that the district is going to meet a lot of opposition if these changes to the curriculum are made so just to circle back thank you for your comment thank you okay next is suzanne tardy hi thank you for taking my question first i want to thank mrs walker and other members board members who showed their support of the north and south community by reinstating the thanksgiving game this year so i want to thank you for doing that that being said i wanted to know if for this game this friday night if south will be reinstated their home tickets and the tickets will be distributed the way they

132normally would if it was any other opponent uh i i can just answer that quickly um the majority of the tickets um are for the south um parents um and and stu and you know students um but it's not an exact uh 400 100 as we had been doing um and that is because it is a north south game like the entire town but south does have the uh the the the biggest share of those tickets it's not split twenty two you know uh 250 each okay okay next is kelly broden uh hi thank you for taking me my my comment um i just wanted to piggyback off of what miss menu has just mentioned about the library um the library sends a lot of information to the schools uh the the monthly calendar various

133flyers about programs that are going on in children's department they have a lot of great um virtual things going on right now for students i did do a check of the school websites today and the only virtual backpack that had any current information from the library was middletown village elementary school no other school had any information from the library so i just wanted to make you aware of that and that information is sent over regularly to the administration to distribute to the schools in the district so thank you thank you okay next is jen brown hi guys thanks for taking my call can you hear me yes my question is to piggyback suzanne tardy's question actually on the ticket distribution to mary ellen walker you had said that it's going to be distributed how exactly

134will that be for middletown south being that it's not 250 250 how many exactly will south be getting for friday night's game i don't know the exact number but it is very close to the 400 number that you should be getting there might be 20 25 tickets less something like that in order for the uh for the players at north to have their parents come seniors get two and underclassmen get one ticket and i think that's all that went to north i don't know if mr carroll's still on if he could uh sure i can chime in yeah yeah i'm sorry uh yeah um basically every participant at uh south will get two tickets like they have all along and there's a few more north because we did have a student uh raffle and things

135like that so there will be some north students there but it's as close to the 400 100 as can be i don't know the exact number 375 380 somewhere in that range okay mrs rogers i'm not seeing any more hands raised at this time okay seeing no more hand raised i need a motion to adjourn the meeting please [Music] discussion all in favor opposed abstentions have a good night everyone