001I'd like to call this meeting to order. Roll call, please, Mr. Carotenuto. >> Mr. Accomando. >> Present. >> Ms. Barile. >> Present. >> Mr. DiBello. Mr. Auchello. >> Present. >> Ms. Iannello. >> Present. >> Ms. Roloff. Ms. Torbic. >> Present. >> Mr. Verso. >> Here. >> Ms. Adorelli. >> Here. >> Stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, please. >> I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> Adequate notice of this meeting has been sent to all members of the Board of Education and to the Bergen Record in accordance with the provisions of the Open Public Meetings Act, Chapter 231, 1975. At this time, please be advised that all cell phones and electronic
002devices are to be turned off. Um okay. All right, I'm going to turn the meeting over to the superintendent now. >> I'll wait until Wednesday. >> Okay. All right. Um then >> with BA. >> Okay. All right, so we're going to do a presentation of the 2026-2027 budget. >> Mr. Carotenuto. >> So at this time we'll ask our board members to please relocate to the chairs and we will have the budget presentation. >> Can we need a motion to open. >> Oh, sorry, honey. >> Oh. >> Okay. Thank you, Board of Education. Thank you to our school community. Mr. Crotty and I are going to present our 2025-2026 budget overview 2026-2027 budget overview. We rehearsed this presentation I don't know how many times. We We didn't We didn't catch the biggest part of the budget
003presentation. That's embarrassing. All All Thank you to our Board of Education, our Board of Trustees. The asterisks are the our board members on the policy on the budget committee, and we thank you for your support. >> Okay, so the budget process takes a couple months, right? We start in November. Um the administrators send in their budgets to us. They're due before the uh winter break. And then we you know, everything goes into the program. And then in the January we come back and then uh Mrs. Violetti and I sit with the administrators, we go through all the proposals uh pretty much for the month of January. And then we set up meetings with the uh budget finance committee, and we start setting them up. So they're going to go from February till till March. And
004then March um we submit a final budget or tentative budget to the to the full board, and it's approved it was approved at the March 19th meeting. It then gets sent to the county office when it's due. And uh they review everything, and they get back to us. They get back to us on April 23rd that everything was in order, and we can move forward with where we are tonight at the public hearing. So tonight is a public hearing for the public to ask questions. And then Wednesday the board will adopt it. Uh and then after that then July 1st starts the new year, new purchase orders, and we're on the move. Um the state requires that uh school districts submit a balanced budget, the revenues have to equal the appropriations. And as you can
005see the top number up there, uh we're a little over 49 and 1/2 million dollars. And that's where you that's where you are. That's broken into three funds. The first one's the general fund, um almost 47 million dollars is what you think it would be in there. That's all the salaries, benefits, supplies, textbooks, insurances, uh everything to run the school for that school year. The next fund, the special revenue fund, is a fund that's set up for any federal, state, and local grants and awards that we receive. So, the money comes in, and then it's earmarked for specific items, and then we do purchase orders, and that tracks those funds that way. And then the last one is the debt service fund. That's for pretty much all our prior referendums. Pretty much that was it,
006and then there was some like a retirement bond years ago, but pretty much like we did the 2023 now, right? 2023. Yeah, 3 years ago. Those bonds were paying off. Now, that principal and interest payments are recorded in this fund. So, there's tax levy and state aid that go against that. So, that's the three funds. The next slide is uh I want to get this out of the way early. This is probably the worst slide of the whole presentation. Um as you was reading the paper with many, many school districts, pretty much all of them, there's just huge tax increases, and um as you can see there, the general fund increase is a lot higher than the 2%. I'll get into that a little bit. Um but overall, what it equates to is on the
007bottom there, $399 to the average house. In 2026, that's a half a million dollars. In 2025, it it was $473,000. So, the annual taxes your taxes would go up 400 400 $399 on the average house. Um Shrewsbury has a rolling assessment. A third of the town is assessed every year. So, that just keeps everything um pretty much up to date as best it could be. And the year the the general fund increase in the calendar year levy, they don't match up because school districts are on a fiscal year, July to June, and the town is on a calendar year January January to December. So that's why things are you got to take half and half. It's it's too much to get into, but that's why these percentages are or different. Getting into the revenues now.
008This is just a simple pie chart showing you that as you can see there 89% of the revenues come from the taxes they saw in the previous slide. State aid is next. But tax levy's capped at like I said 2% but there are two adjustments that I'll get into a third one, but there's two adjustments that could exceed it. One is an enrollment adjustment. The state looks at our annual student enrollment counts we put in every October. They average it out through this crazy calculation and they project what it will be. So this year we had no adjustment for enrollment. So there was nothing there to to use. Health care with all the increases in health care costs there again another calculation go through the system. It allows you to exceed that 2% cap whether
009you need it or not. So when we're building the budget we're trying to build it on the 2% levy flat state aid and we'll look at these other adjustments later. So when these when these calculations are done whether a district can needs them or not they're in the system. If you don't need them they get banked for use in later years. So we had some money from prior years that was going to expire in this year and that was a little over $400,000. So when we were building this budget with those huge health care costs we had to use these use the health care adjustment and we had to use bank cap and that's why you see the huge tax increase. If we didn't do that there would be many cuts in the budget which
010we were trying to go through. I mean just cutting $100,000 in non-salary lines we I think we hit probably at least 50 lines. Um salaries is salary and benefits is where you're going to get most of the money. We don't want to, you know, cut staff. Actually, we need more staff if if we had more funds available. Um the next biggest revenue after the 89,000 state aid. So, with state aid, um the state has a funding formula and every year when we submit that enrollment count in October, they base our numbers off of that. So, there's a formula and there's like a formula for special education aid but a number of special ed students and then they give a dollar amount. There's security aid, there's transportation aid. So, when they run these numbers in the
011program, right? It comes to a dollar amount. When you add up all the When you add up all the states, I mean, all the um the board of ed, the the the the state doesn't have like we don't have money for everything. So, you could see where blue is the actual money received and the gold is the shortfall. We should have received more money. From 20 20 21 school year, the state was trying to fund the state aid formula a little bit more each year and by the fifth year, 2024-25, you see where we received everything we were supposed to get and we thought it would continue but it didn't because districts that obviously if we're getting more money, other districts are getting money taken away from them that are probably overfunded from years before,
012they you know, went to the state and they said, "How can they, you know, survive?" So, the state, I think the last 2 years has put in again, the formula and then they can't fund it all the way. So, they put in a cap. You could only go up 6% max. You only could go down 3%. So, between the 3% and the 6% is where everybody falls in that that category. But you could see the one year where we $600,000 in uh this current school year and next year is $590,000. So you see where we're just short funds. And obviously again, if they could fund it, we would have more money to use. I think that covers that one. So let's now go to the uh the expense side of appropriations. So 95% of our
013budget is is pretty much fixed in all these different categories and they're just spelled out. I'm not going to go through them all because you see salaries and and employee that means that eats up most of the budget. Um in fact, that's probably about 70% of the 95% is made up of salaries and benefits. The rest of the items are um required by IEPs, transportation, utilities. So it's it's there's not a lot of wiggle room. The extra The other 5% is where we have have to look or else you have to, you know, again, to find stuff is to cut staff. We broke down There's another pie chart. We broke down the budget into seven major categories. Um listed on the right there. If you could see that the direct instruction and support services, when
014you add up all those monies together, we're spending a little over 56% of the budget directly with the students. And employee benefits next because category makes up almost 20% of budget. And employee benefits is not only uh health benefits, but it's also pension, social security, and so forth. But uh included like I said was the benefits on the next slide. We did a graph here showing that uh they're pretty much doubled benefits going back 5 years. So we're up to $8 million in our budget for medical, prescription, and dental expenses. And that's that's net of employee contributions. So it's a huge hit uh to the budget and I'm going to go through on the next slide. Um This is a little bit Just want to talk a little bit about this cuz it's a little
015confusing, but there's an experience ratio. So, whatever he talks about, "Oh, we'll get out of the state plan. Go somewhere else, whatever." There's an experience ratio that were In fact, it was on a couple agendas ago. I think maybe December where we're asking the state for another report so we could see where we're at and where we could maybe shop for other benefits. So, what happens is we go by a dollar. Say we want to see everything that we're paying. How much are they paying out? Obviously, if you're a higher risk, you're giving them a dollar uh we're giving them a dollar, they're paying out a dollar something. So, they're losing money. So, what happens is you get higher uh percentage increases for the following year. In the state health benefit program, um everybody stays
016in there. They accept everybody. All districts stay in there, whether you're have a positive rating or a negative rating, and um everybody just it's all absorbed into a self-insurance fund. So, it's hard to So, districts that have a good rating can go out on their own. What's left are the bad districts, and it's just the it's just the endless cycle in the in the funds. The state is it's hard. That's why we're getting these huge increases. That's That's on the employee benefit side, but it's health benefit costs are going up all over the place. So, we're not able to go shop around to go to a different fund or somewhere else. Uh we just ordered the uh report again, and we should have it soon and see what we could do, but our over month
017after over month is just not looking good. For example, we uh been here for a while now. We went out, I don't know, 12 or more years ago, and uh we had a little blip where we went down a little bit, but then the next year we went up. And we went from coming out of state plan into another plan, did all that paperwork, and the next premium went up 46%. So, you want to have a good a a a little track record there of showing that you're paying less um you know, for the for the insurance company to give you a good rate and to stay out of it. But, we do have our eyes on that and um if we're ever to have a chance, we will try to do something else. This
018slide is just a comparison of the budget from the current year we're in uh to the proposed budget um on the on our website, uh there's a budget folder that has more of these lines in detail. Uh it shows the advertisements printed paper. There's also in the budget folder on the website a state user-friendly budget that every district should have on their on their website. If everybody goes there, if they could tell me if they think that's user-friendly. That's great. Uh we'll also put this uh presentation in that folder as well. So, if you're uh Who's tired of hearing me talk about depressing news on the budget? Let's I was going to switch. Okay. Three. Yeah. Let's wait. So, we're going to switch to Mrs. Violetti to give us some uplifting news. >> Thank you,
019Mr. Crotty. So, again, so with our budget for next school year, what we're looking at is we're retaining all our current staff positions and student programs. So, there is one position. We had two We added a middle school Spanish teacher this past school year. We were unable to fill the high school Spanish teacher position for the latter half of this school year. So, one of those teachers has requested to actually move to the high school Spanish teacher position. So, we're not losing any staff, but we did cut one position. I want to share that we are not in um we're not in that mindset of we we don't have any fluff. So, we don't have a director of guidance, wellness counselors. We don't have small class sizes. Um if you recall last year, we had
020two first grade classes at Franklin School that had 27 students. We don't have that where other districts are cutting staff because they may have 10 or 12 students in a classroom, we don't have that here. So, we're really kind of stuck as to cutting staff, what we're able to do. We were able to eliminate that one position, it did help us. Um but, we are adding a girls wrestling coach, that's actually a requirement in JSI, I A I A A. Thank you. It is a requirement to have a girls wrestling team that you do need a coach. So, we're able to add that to our budget as a stipend position. And we have our curriculum writing. So, again, in order to stay on top of everything and in compliance with QSC, we are updating our
021curricula. And oops. And our professional development for our teachers. So, we still you know, we want to make sure that our teachers are getting the professional development that they're requesting and what they need. Um you know, in thinking about this, we're also considering our special education programs and making sure that we're training our ABA classrooms, our MD classrooms, making sure we're starting off the school year strong with them because if we're going to house these programs, we realize that we need to have better training for them. As I shared, not only are we maintaining our student programs, but we're really excited to continue with the Amplify curriculum. You've all heard us talk about this. We had presentations. So, we've been slowly integrating it into our worlds and we started out with K and 1, then
0222, then 3, then 4. And we're really excited for next school year to continue it to grade 5. And our parents are excited, our teachers are excited. Everyone has totally bought in, they're all in, and we're really seeing progress across the district. So, we're really excited about that program. For technology, we are continuing. So, all students in grades 5 and 9 will be getting new Chromebooks. Their Chromebooks then got um moved down to the lower grades, the K1 and 2 students who are not testing grades. We are also in our budget, we have iPads for our providers, our child study team. Because a lot of the assessments are moving to online assessments for OTPT, all those tests that they need to do. So, if we didn't do the iPads next year, we would have to
023do it the following school year when it's mandated. So, we're ahead of the game there. And with our staff Chromebook updates, so our staff, you see our Chromebooks that we have for the staff, our board members have them as well. They're rather large and a little bulky. Um we're hitting that year mark where it's 4 or 5 years that we're ready to start looking at replacing them. So, we're going to start a slow transition um next school year of purchasing more modern Chromebooks for our staff and starting that cycle. This is a slide on our projects that we're looking to do. So, you see to the left it has through the operating budget. We have, you know, water fountain upgrades that we continue to do. Tyler Beatman we do every school year. The gym floor
024refinishing we do. New science tables and stools in what our middle school classroom. We only have one middle school, I believe, one middle school classroom that's truly a science classroom. So, we are looking one of the science classrooms has really old outdated furniture. So, we included in this budget new science tables and stools. And then Washington School new risers because our Washington School program has grown and they have been borrowing risers from the other buildings. And what happens is with that transportation of taking the risers from one building to Washington School and then back, they're they're destroying them slowly. So, we have decided that Washington School, especially our youngest learners, they need to have sturdy, stable risers. So, we are cleaning that in our budget. And then you see to the right we have funds
025in our maintenance reserve. And those are the projects that we're looking to complete. So, you can see we're we're still looking to make improvements to our facilities. I'm not going to go through each of them, but you can see that where needed. Mr. Crotty and I, we actually visit the buildings, we walk through. He's really good at taking pictures and he annotates what we need to work on the following school year. So, he's he's great that way. Um so, you'll see bathroom partitions, little things. He's very observant. So, he notices these things, he takes a photo, and then we add it to our projects for next school year. For transportation, we are looking in the new budget. We do have um a school bus that we are looking to still determine if we need it,
026but chances are we will, so we want to make sure we had it. Um a van, an electric van for student transport. This is mainly because we do have um with our cell program here at the high school, we have work-based learning where they are going out to the community, and they're working for a couple hours or a period a day. So, having the electric van to transport them eliminates the need for a giant yellow school bus to take them to these to these sites. So, then we don't need a school bus driver. You can just have a driver take these students to their placements, and eliminates the need for a school bus driver as well as a giant yellow school bus for one or two students. And then also, an electric van for food
027service. Uh financially, I think it makes sense. We do have a charger here in the district, and they're not driving excessively. Across, they're staying local. Um so, same thing for the food service to take them uh they start here at the middle school high school, and then they go to each of the K-6 buildings. So, absolutely. So, looking ahead, this is our final slide. This just says that we really just want to stress to the board and to our school community that Mr. Caddy and I, we we thank ourselves, we count our blessings. Your support is absolutely amazing. You allow us to do all these great things in the district, and we are really grateful. We're It's strategic. We want you to know that we do follow our strategic plan. We're going to near the
028end of that soon, but everything in this budget is part of our strategic plan that we created a few years ago. We are we sit as a team as a leadership team and we plan accordingly. So, we have members of our leadership team that they're doing whereas other districts may have a director of guidance, our director of curriculum is also overseeing our high school guidance department. So, we have our administrative team really goes above and beyond. They're doing extra duties and it's working and I thank my blessings every day to have every member of my leadership team. Um but I want the community to know and you don't know that nothing is just really nonchalant. It's planned, there's there's a purpose for it and we're really moving forward and there's lots of good things happening
029across the district that we're really proud of. So, just want to take this moment to just say thank you. And to Mr. Cruddy as well for doing our budget. >> Thank you. So, that concludes the presentation. We'll open up uh questions from the board members and then we'll open up to the public. So, what causes them to be a to cause the district not to be a good district? So, you're paying out that the insurance company's paying out more than they're taking in. They're collecting a premium from us but they're paying out more. Staff claims they have medical yeah, whatever medical uh procedures are going through. We're using it we're using it yeah, we're using it a lot. That's How does a district rank? Uh no, it just it goes by they go by a
030one like a dollar. So, you'll be like 1.1, 1.2. That means you're spending over that. But there's no like um It's just based on whatever district, whatever the staff's going through, you know, it's just the use of the the plan. We're ours is not ours hasn't been good for a while. We're not like really high over one. I've heard other districts with higher numbers than us. But we're still over it. So we're spending more than the insurance companies you know, getting from us. Yeah, some are they're under. But not like, you know, not like they're not using it, but it's not it's not over one. They go by this experience. They go by this this one. So some are maybe a point eight, a point nine. And that if you have that steadily, then you're
031you're good, right? There's there's breakage there. You're under a dollar. They're taking in more than they're spending out. So you'll get an increase. I mean, you'll get a percentage increase so every year, but maybe it's not it'll be better than when you're are when you're over one, but it'll it won't be like super good if you're like a a a 60, 70 like, you know what I'm saying? Then you'll get really good rates. And you could have could just have younger staff. Now it it depends. A smaller district might have better than a larger district. It just all depends on the years, but you know, we've had it for month to month. It does fluctuate and they just look at an average. It is. It's hard to to hard to to Uh yeah, I don't
032even know if that drives it. They know certain things that the claim wise, but it's more of obviously cancer ones or any kind of long-term medications and everything, but that's >> Any other questions? >> Thank you. All right, yeah, so we'll come back to the >> Okay. >> We'll come back to the table, board members. You can take your seats again, and then we'll open up the next public will be just for questions on the um budget. >> The year is coming to an end. Everything all at once. >> I know, it's busy. It hurts. Freezing. Jane >> Was I supposed to act surprised that I was going to leave early? >> Okay. All right, I'm going to open up the meeting now for public comment only on the uh budget. I need a motion.
033>> Motion. >> Second. >> Okay, all in favor? >> I. >> Would anybody like to speak? >> No, you're good. >> All right. I'd like a motion to close. >> Motion. >> Second. >> Okay, thank you. >> Yeah. >> All right. All right, um did Mr. Crotty, did you want to do anything for a business report other than the budget? >> No, I don't have anything else at this time. The budget's been consuming me. >> Okay. Although at this time I would like to say I want to thank you very much for being very fiscally responsible for our community and for all the hard work that both of you did. I we very much appreciate it and I'm very happy that we didn't have to cut any staff. >> Thank you. >> So, truly, I'm
034very happy. Um okay, so let's open up for agenda item. Okay. >> Motion vote second. >> Okay. Uh board action B2526.39 through B 2526.41. Any questions or discussion? >> We have the minutes, we have the hips that were discussed last month. And then point 41, we have the NJ SIAA to enroll as we do each year. >> Okay. I could go down? Okay, yeah. Okay, education curriculum. >> Uh E2526.61 to E2 526.67. Any questions? >> All right, so field trips. We have um grade one at Long School, they're going to Brother's Pizza. They did pizza making last school year, they had a great time, so they're doing it again. And then we have our marching band color guard coreliers, they visit our elementary schools every year to promote their program. Then we have our revised
035school calendar for next school year. There was an error on the original one, my apologies. We needed to add the three additional days for our built-in snow days, so we just tacked on three days to the end, which does affect our high school graduation for next school year. So, if you take a look at it, our high school graduation would be I need to zoom in, June 22nd. Then we have our preschool tuition rates. So, we were we have been stag- stagnant with our preschool tuition rates over since I've been here. Um we were at 7,400 for a full day and 3,000 something, maybe 3,400 for a half day. So, we did do a survey across the county and we are recommending increasing our um preschool tuition rates to a full day to be 8,000,
036a half day 4,000. Make it nice and nice and cut and dry. 0.66 is dual enrollment with the College of New Jersey. So, this one we have we currently offer a lot of dual enrollment courses at our high school. Um most of them are through Bergen Community College that we partnership. We have one through SUNY. And this MOA will allow us to have our AP courses also serve as dual enrollment courses. So, with that what that means is our students that are taking AP, whether or not they pass the AP test, they will still be able to get college credit for those courses. So, it was we we thought it'd be a great um a great incentive for our students and hopefully increase our AP numbers and at the same time just develop an additional
037partnership with a local college we're excited about. And then 0.67 is delayed opening for our NJSA NJSL A testing that has started this week. So, thank you to the Board of Trustees cuz I know I reached out to you. Uh we didn't want we're trying something different where we didn't want to do a full week and tire out our students. So, we're doing Tuesday, Thursday testing, which is why it's a little bit of a wonky schedule, but we're trying it out this year. Um it is a new platfor- testing platform that the state is using. So, what we learned with NJGPA was you can actually do all of reading in one day. You could do all of math in one day. So, instead of dragging it out over several days, which is what our original
038plan was, that's why we kind of went back and revised our testing plan and we came up with this and we're going to try it out this year and we'll see how it works. >> Who's up? >> All right, this is the >> have any questions or discussion? Are we good? Okay. All right, Mr. Accomando? >> Yes, um BF2526.91 to BF22526.104. No, I'm wrong. Um 21, I went to the wrong page, sorry. >> What the >> Keep going. >> Great googley moogley. >> Um to BF2526.122. >> No. >> Wow. >> Yeah. >> So, yes. >> Oh, yeah. >> Well, while you're looking at over so if I make comment, um the first three items are uh routine monthly uh actions we have. Starting from uh 0.94 um these are all uh our annual actions for
039the uh next school year 2026-27. So, if any questions going down the appointments of professionals and the the banks, the newspaper we use. Uh the only thing I have to look on uh 0.94 the tuition rates I'm not 100% sure I adjusted them yet, so I'm going to go look at them tomorrow. So, that's the only one that may change. Um going down the list uh through 100 that's the pet 104 is the petty cash accounts that the schools have. 105 bidding quote thresholds you know, who signs the the checks and authorizations. 108 is the renewal of uh food service management company, Pomptonian. It's within the allowable percentage increases and that's the state language that they need to see. 109 is the recommendations for uh uh the prices established for next school year based on
040the costs of items. And like everything else, everything else is going up. 111's the budget we just went through. 112's our school physician. Any questions on those items so far and I'll go through the rest of them. 113 is a bid opened up on April 23rd. This was part of um the current year budget and then we're going to transfer out some more money from cap reserve. Again, we're being squeezed with rooms and storage areas, so this was to renovate several rooms here at the high school, create an area here where a lot of the stuff that's on the stage and in the hallway can get stored, creating a room across from the main office for just technology since they're losing their space in this room that we're renovating. Give the middle school principal an
041office there where her administrative assistant and her are in the same room. And um and redo some area in the kitchen, you know, to do his office and storage areas. So, that included that. Um which was in a base bid. The alternate is to do Franklin School, their media center. Again, he was looking for rooms, so we went back and looked at that area with the architect. And we're able to to use half the It was like a media center and classroom area to turn into the one classroom side into three different rooms, a conference room, an ESL room, and a speech room. And that frees up some other rooms upstairs to to put different programs in different areas based on the student need. Um alternate two was the cafeteria and we're still determining he
042just reviewed it um a couple days ago. We've got a protest from the second bidder, which we're going through and working that out. We think everything's done and we're able to move forward with that on Wednesday. I'll put the numbers in there tomorrow. Um 114 and 115 are part of the, uh, school development authority uh, projects we had where we'll get some state funding. So, the first vendor had done the, uh, boilers at Franklin, Smith, and Washington, and we had some them do some other work while they were doing those boilers. So, that was a change to that contract of $15,000. And then in the other one that did, uh, high school long boilers, again, we had them do some stuff, but it ended up coming out to be, uh, a decrease in the contract.
043So, those are the revised contract amounts. 116 is, uh, list of equipment we're selling. I think that's mostly technology. 117 is, uh, we're coming through for our copiers. There was still some time left on the current lease uh, financing, but usually when it gets to, like, when you're in that last year, the copiers are starting to have more problems and stuff. So, we went through it, uh, with our copier company, uh, which is on state contract. We're able to reduce the number of copiers. We added some features on there, um, like the cloud faxing, so we don't have separate phone lines for faxing, and we're able to reduce the monthly cost going forward. 118 is a transfer from capital reserve funds. Once I do the, uh, 113 fill the numbers in, we had a bulk
044of the money already in this year's budget, 2526, but I need money to do Franklin School. 119 is in the 2627 budget. As we discussed before, Talabama projects. We just broke them up into different, um, uh, base with a couple alternates in case, depending how the, uh, funding came out. But, it looks like we'll be able to do most of of those rooms. 120's workshops. And 121, we're continuing to review food service meal account balances. And, you You talking to the state, there's no other way to do this. We we contact the families and try to collect the funds, but when we go through them, there's a lot of times where a family had a free reduced lunch application in the system, they're getting free meals, and then, you know, they don't submit another one
045for the next year, so then charges start going on their account. It takes us a lot of work it out, so a lot of them are just clearing up the balances like if they had an application in for the whole time. And the the amounts of are deemed deemed uncollectible. And the last one is just canceling old outstanding checks, an annual item I do and get ready for the audit. And the attached list has it from several funds and student accounts where checks are old and not cashed. Any questions on those items? >> I think they're very detailed. >> Thank you. >> We're good. All right, let's do facilities and operations. Mr. Dorbeck? >> Sure. F2526.12 to F2526.13. Any questions? >> On just on 13, I increased the hourly rates a little bit just based
046on, you know, salary increases for next year. And a couple of the fees for facility use, they're mainly used here at the high school. We don't We don't We don't get too much use at the elementary schools. So, I up the I think the field usage and and maybe the auditorium a little bit cuz they're the ones that are heavily used. Any questions on on that? >> No, I think they're quite conservative. >> Through the chair, I have a question. When a let's say a soccer team wants to use one of our fields, and they request permission and they're granted, are they They any kind of anything that says it's a permit or something that they have permission to use the field? >> They get a uh email back from our program that they could
047take and have it on them. >> Thank you. >> Does anyone else have any questions or discussion? Okay. All right, there is nothing for policy uh negotiations, nothing. Okay. Uh personnel um I will do that. Um we have P2526.67 through P2526.81 that we will be talking about in closed right? Does anyone have any questions though? >> I will say first you'll see a point 67 Mrs. Rippeth at our high school English department. She has submitted her retirement. >> No. >> We wish Mrs. Rippeth the very best. Um and Dr. Osborne, our high school vice principal, has also submitted his resignation. He is moving on to be principal of a district closer to his house. >> Mrs. Rippeth is retiring. That is a hard loss. >> And you'll see the summer hours for our school counselors.
048And then all the staff and summer curriculum writing that we can go over more in closed session. >> Does anybody else have any questions? >> Yeah. Do you I'm very very sad to hear Mrs. Rippeth is leaving us, but I'm very happy for her and Mr. Osborne as well. >> Okay. All right, so um committee reports. Do we have any committee reports? >> No. Do you want No, not tonight. Okay. Liaison reports? Anything? Okay. Correspondence? Nothing? Okay. All right. No correspondence. Okay. Old business? Anybody for old business? No. New business. We have the parade for Memorial Day. Okay. On May 24th, we'll discuss if anybody would like to participate. >> Yes. Okay. >> Yes, so I put out there the calendar invite. If you could respond to that or or send me an email, me
049and Mrs. Violetti, and let us know so we could let the rest of the board know who's who's going to be walking in there. >> Okay. Through the chair under the new business, did something happen to the fence at Washington? >> The fence at the corner of what is that? Market and it's not Westminster. I forget the other road. Anyway, that fence was taken down by us. >> Was it I Was it hit or anything? >> No, no, we just were taking it down. >> Oh. >> Cleaning up the property, getting ready for the sign. They dug the trench. Sorry. They dug the trench and then the sign The post of the sign I think is getting installed on Thursday and the sign may be installed the following week or so. They're also working on
050the one at Coolidge. I think tomorrow morning they're going to install the post if everything's on schedule and then that sign will be installed like the following week. But yes, the fence at Washington was taken down and it's staying down. >> I just didn't know if somebody hit it and we missed it or something. >> Good observation. >> All right. Can I get a motion to open the meeting for public comment? >> Motion. >> Second. >> Okay. Would anyone like to speak? No? Okay. Can I get a motion to close the meeting to the public? >> Second. >> Okay. All right. So, hold on. Where Where's my statement? Just right here? All right. So, we are going to go into closed session where is the Board of Education must discuss matters which are not appropriate
051for discussion in a public meeting and where is these subjects are within the exceptions of the Open Public Meetings Act and are permitted to be discussed in closed session pursuant to New Jersey SA 10:04 {dash} 12B and where is the Board of Education intends to discuss matters as follows. Where am I? Hold on. We intend to discuss um a head case, personnel, and a attorney-client privilege. Where is the length of the closed meeting is estimated to be approximately 30 minutes and action will not be taken. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Board of Education will recess into closed session for only the afforded subjects and be further resolved that the Board of Education hereby declares that its discussion of the afforded subjects will be made public at a time when the public's interest in
052disclosure is greater than any privacy or governmental interest being protected from the disclosure in accordance with the Open Public Meetings Act. Can I have a motion to adjourn the meeting? >> So moved. >> Second. >> Okay. Good night, everyone. See you on Wednesday.