001alce 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 it's a good thing Miss Hill roll call Mr Callahan Mrs chowski here Mr Fernandez here Mrs Hernandez here Mrs Maldonado here Mrs napalitano here Mrs pbone here Mr Smith here Mrs Bloom here okay um Miss Hill will you summarize executive session please the board discussed matters falling under under attorney client privilege Personnel including but not limited to agenda items was on the agenda but was not discussed any correspondence of note no okay uh we now need a motion to approve the minutes of February 18th meeting don't move second that was Mr Smith and a second for Mrs napalitano uh Mrs chowski yes Mr Fernandez yes Mrs
002Hernandez yes Mrs Maldonado yes Mrs npal tenno yes Mrs Pabon yes Mr Smith yes Mrs Bloom yes okay I see that our student council reps are not here tonight so I guess they didn't get the memo told them it was Monday okay um board president's comments um right now I have none I'll save them for the end Mr Smith saving all the excitement for the next meeting excellent Dr laby presentation thank you Mrs Bloom this will conclude our budget presentation so we're going to resume reviewing our proposed budget presentations with a presentation on Personnel Services and professional development and then move to our final one of the year on the proposed technology and security budget but as I said earlier let's begin with professional development and Personnel Services so miss ber can you take us
003through professional development Tess okay good evening Board of Education members central office team members um starting off talking about professional development and I'm going to be walking you through the 2425 school year and then um going into our 25 26 school year requests so as we move forward through the 2425 school year uh we look and reflect on our goals for professional development and I'm happy to say that we were able to meet all of our goals our first goal revolving around collaboration um of District staff District administration through uh staff input on surveys different meetings that we've held and discussions and we've met that goal we've also had the opportunity to meet our goal for Innovative and meaningful professional development for all of our stakeholders within the district uh at our November 2024 staff
004development day we had over 125 professional development sessions and you'll see as we get to see some of the options and choices that the staff had that we really do pride ourselves on making the professional development meaningful for all of our stakeholders no matter what our position is in the district uh our third goal was to begin building a virtual professional learning library and we've done that through utilizing a wakelet through sville University and I'm going to have the opportunity to show that to you tonight and in the end of June um the last week at after the students dismissed from June 25th to June 28th we had uh we rebuilt our we called it our PLC framework and that is uh when our teachers engage monthly on their professional learning communities uh we built
005a framework uh based off of existing uh feedback and talking to all our stakeholders to make it a more meaningful opportunity for our staff to conduct research and data analysis and to really um work on pass fion projects that would really help them uh you know test things in their classrooms and really uh utilize their data to uh improve their classrooms as well as uh student growth and achievement okay um up here I have a chart of our professional development for the 2425 school year and I broke it into four categories although some of them do overlap so the first one is new teachers support and training uh District training consultant and coaching support and internal District support and a lot of these I'm going to point out certain things uh throughout the chart uh
006but to sa time a lot of them are under uh another uh upcoming slide regarding our highlights uh for the district for 2425 so I'm not going to speak to all of them at this time uh some things I want to point out is that in our district uh we are very fortunate to have a mentor induction coordinator team and they really work very hard and diligently in each of our buildings we have one for each of our buildings and they really support our new teachers and staff novice teachers within the school district uh they are a critical part of our new staff orientation that occurs every summer in the end of August uh they support those staff members throughout the school year and it's from anything from answering questions to going in and uh
007watching lessons modeling lessons and answering any questions that the teachers have um pretty much on a daily basis and we do our best to make sure it's someone within their buildings so they have um easy access to that person and that support uh we have our district instructional coach which is really invaluable to our district uh Miss Rose Griggs she supports all of our buildings pre to 12 uh some of the things that she does she models lessons uh provides coaching support uh analyzes uh data in individual meetings with teachers and helps them and provides them feedback as well as she provides a um newsletter uh coaching uh coaching newsletter which provides a variety of resources and she really focuses it on um different articles and resources each month so that way she can work
008with all of our stakeholders and provide them all support she also is a huge member with Dr agues uh working with professional development and she is critical to that process okay um Ed connective falls on a under a couple different areas that we have here um and Dr ages I'm sure we'll speak to that too but we work with Ed connective in regards to um new teacher coaching leadership coaching uh they've provided really amazing professional development sessions for us on our staff development days and they provide coaching and um consultation throughout the school year in looking at our District's trainings um of course we always have our opening dayss of school our two staff development DS throughout the school year our summer learning went really well last summer we had three different consultants for a
009matter of two weeks where a lot of our staff came in and uh really had the opportunity to work on um you know different uh skills and standards in regards to math English language arts uh and they came in over their summer to engage in that professional learning and it was a really great um opportunity for them and they worked with a lot of the Consultants that we have throughout the school year Dr Kenneth Coons uh Dr Paul Rick amini who's a math specialist and New Jersey to teacher to teachers who you'll um hear more about in a little bit uh We've also had CPI and code blue trainings CPR trainings our uh mandated gcn trainings and then um moving into our consultant and coaching support uh we had the opportunity this year um through
010Grant funds we've had three through five uh training from New Jersey teacher to teacher but we've expanded that this school year um to also work with our k through2 um grade levels to have math support and coaching and professional development for all grades K through five we also started working with a new consult consultant who's provided amazing um professional development uh in a in a lot of different capacities um we've had um multilingual learner professional development which is ongoing throughout our school year uh we've they've also provided uh prek professional development on Executive functioning they've uh presented for our November staff development day and they've also provided professional development to our parents teachers and students for our career in technical education programs um okay moving into our internal District uh I can't say enough amazing
011things about our district professional development committee uh we have members throughout the whole District uh that are Representatives on that committee and they work with um myself and Miss Griggs and Dr agues on panting the professional development uh throughout the school year um and I'm going to speak to them in a little bit under our highlight we have our sville University uh which we run our professional development du um through during the school year and um I'm going to speak to this PLC committee as well in a moment okay so to go over our professional development highlights uh We've really I know prior to me uh coming on board in sville we had our sville University and after Co we've been working working on building and enhancing and building that backup uh and we've had
012uh increased our number of sville University offerings and workshops this school year and it's a combination of new teacher workshops uh workshops that are recommended by Administration uh I have the opportunity to observe uh new teachers throughout the school district and one of the questions I like to ask them is what professional development would you like to see offered so I high like to have that conversation so we can provide that support through sville University uh not just on staff development days but throughout the school year we have our um uh going back to our virtual professional learning library which was uh one of our goals for this school year Chris can so I'm just going to give you a small glimpse of it this is the wakelet that we created for seille University and
013we break it up into our different professional development opportunities throughout the year so this this particular screen is for November 5th where I mentioned we had over 125 offerings this is all the presentations that um the teachers have access to after the staff development day so they can go back and utilize those resources throughout the school year so this is our virtual professional learning library that we're keeping we're also working on adding and it is a continuous goal for us not just these resources but um teachers who are open to it uh during our staff development days we have uh cameras where if they're open to uh being recorded so we can record those sessions and also keep them on our V virtual professional learning library so you'll see that there's a plethora of um
014presentations that were uh presented on our November 5th and there's several sections to the wakelet where you have we have our new staff workshops and different workshops throughout the year we have it broken up into different categ ories but this is just to show you um November 5th staff development day uh we also were able to streamline our CPI which is our Crisis Prevention Institute professional uh learning so we're able to take and build teams within our school CPI teams and um instead of having them throughout the school year were're able to build these into September so they didn't have to use their staff development days and we um with the help of Dr Labby and Mr naster um schedule days within the September framework where everybody was trained at the same time so it
015really helped us streamline that process uh we had uh requests we did a lot of our meetings virtually last year um but it was really nice um to come together face to face and meet with our professional development committee so we changed our process a little bit this year and we moved to um some of our meetings being virtual and then some also being in person which I think was great for uh collaboration purposes uh we built our new vision for professional learning so that's something that um Dr ages myself um and Miss Griggs talked about we really wanted to have um specific goals for professional learning to really represent the sville school district so you'll see that within the presentation this evening uh like I had mentioned earlier we built our new PLC framework
016which has been um we've had a lot of positive feedback on throughout the school year um thus far uh in regards to uh RTI we have uh last year we piloted our intervention manager and this year we are working through our first full year of implementation and it's been very successful the staff's been doing an amazing job and Link it's been amazing with providing our trainings throughout the school year we also built a RTI and intervention manager Resource page so that is something that the staff has access to uh it's a link on a padlet they have access to our pilot trainings from last year all of our current trainings this year and then we also are building like a resource library of research articles anything that um is aligned with RTI and we update
017it um Can continuously so it's um a really great resource for our district RTI staff members I had already talked about our new consultant partnership and um our district instructional coach on our next slide I'm not going to read it to you but this is our vision that we built like I said um is a collaboration uh from everyone from central office administration uh to our district professional development committee we revised it several times um we came together talked about what we thought was important um I want to say in about three or four of our meetings and we talked about what was most important in our goals um for professional learning for all of our staff members uh we went through we revised it a couple times and then we had an in-person meeting
018where we went through the new standards for professional learning and pulled out the pieces of the new standards that we thought were really important to the vision as well then we came together um last month and we took our committee's feedback our district professional development committee's feedback and um finalized our vision which you can see here uh so it really does uh lend itself to student centered learning uh data driven decision making and really working collaboratively throughout the school district to provide meaningful and innov um Innovative professional learning for all of our staff with the end goal of promoting student growth and achievement and lastly uh this is for next school year for professional development goals for 2526 uh we will continue the goals that we had in 425 because we want to continue to
019build our virtual professional learning library for our staff we wanted to um continue to provide meaningful professional development uh continue to expand our saal University offerings and always um reach out to everyone to be collaborative about uh professional learning in our school district our budget requests are very similar to last uh school year in regards to having out of district and in District staff presenters to be able to fund them uh reimbursement for a travel for when staff go out to professional development uh professional development supplies for our meetings and our professional development sessions and then reimbursement um which is part of our professional dues and fees the two new pieces that um are part of the budget request are our Frontline PD catalog and Suite um this is a piece of front line that
020we saw which we really feel even though we feel that our professional development system is eff uh efficient we really feel that we can make it more cohesive uh Frontline offers the opportunity to um do the registration for our staff members online it offers the opportunity to print the professional development certificates for all of the staff um right from the Frontline system so instead of using Google forms and spreadsh sheets it really makes it more cohesive to have it through the Frontline system Frontline also offers um we use uh the gcn uh those are our mandated trainings it also offers and has a library of uh mandated trainings that we can use in place of the global compliance Network gcn and then in the past um we were fortunate enough to have ARP funding which
021was uh funded um a lot of our egg connective uh the coaching and Consulting uh but now that ARP has ended we've added that as a request to our local funding and that is all I have thank you very much bri can I ask you two quick questions absolutely for new teachers how long does a mentor stay with them because I know that's so valuable for a new teacher do they stay for more than one year with new teachers like all the way through their tenure year or so we have a database for the first three years okay and we support them through the first three years but the first year is obviously the most Hands-On um and then we've we're building um you know onto that where you know they're always invited to new
022staff orientation um their mentors are still in you know obviously in their buildings um but we've actually just recently added some learning walks um where some of the new teachers are walking with the district instructional coach and they're um getting other forms of support to add on to what they already have but we do look at and we keep um a spreadsheet of like all the first three years great that they're in District and now you I know just in the time I've been on the board when you've been here you've expand we've expanded our professional development incredibly and added a lot more options for how to do things have we noticed and maybe Dr aguiles could answer this too have we noticed it helps with staff retention the better job we're doing with professional
023development and mentoring and all these programs that you're putting in I believe it maximizes their support and I'm I'm very passionate about um you know the staff having Choice um in what they attend to make sure that it's meaningful that to them and um you know our sessions are a lot of the time based off of data and our district goals to make sure that um we're all coming together on on what's offered but as far as the retention I'm going to leave that piece to Dr ages yeah I believe that because we have so many opportunities for teachers to learn um I'm going to speak a little bit about Ed connective as well as their mentors as well as the opportunities we have for after school learning as well as uh in November and
024June it does help we get feedback that um especially with through Ed connective and that onetoone coaching uh teachers that we had any concern about or some concern about through that coaching through that one to one we've been able to uh not only help them but turn them around make them extremely successful so the principles are are excited about it and obviously anytime we don't have to um let someone go and we can retain them it's a win so short answer yeah I think there's a huge difference that's great and if I can jump in I mean if you look at the Empirical research on teacher attrition um first and foremost what teachers are looking for is to work in a place where they feel safe and valued um then they're looking for a place
025where the culture is very supportive and finally they're looking for a place in which um they're going to get that professional development support and are able to grow obviously compensation is a factor definitely but and it's a big factor and yes we have lost teachers uh for compensation reasons but I I believe because of fact that we do have competitive compensation but more over because of our professional development department uh because of the culture and climate of our district and our schools and because of the fact that we take great pride in providing what we feel are the safest environments that we can possibly provide for our students and staff I think that it goes along long way in retaining teachers no I I I agree because as as a parent in the district it
026it's great to see teachers bringing things back to the classroom that you know they've learned in in professional development in classes they've taken in you know peer mentoring whatever it be uh and I think it brings such great not only to the teacher but it reflects in the students and what they're able to do in the classroom as well so thank you yes and in addition to that we you know we survey a lot we survey after every new staff um Workshop after every staff development day um because I do think it's really important you know the teachers are the ones with the boots on the ground in the classroom um and we really want to give them everything they need to be successful so those survey results always support us um we Anze them
027very carefully uh to know you know what's very helpful to them and and what we might shift for next time I have a question um with the idea that just like in any other industry not everybody who wants to be a teacher is cut out to be a teacher you might not have the skills for it you know even though you want to be a teacher just not something that you're good at and you learn that by trying to be a teacher so do you use this professional development to identify people who really have chosen teaching as a career path but it's not cut out of them do you do anything to like encourage those people or do you just fire them like how do you get rid of people that aren't really meant to
028be teachers I'll I'll answer that question um so there is a there's a good amount of confidentiality that goes into the professional development side um we want it to purely be formative um we don't want it to be summi there is a process in place for summi of evaluation but when it comes to professional development we really want that to be purely in the best interest of helping that professional grow and develop however we all know um there's something called achieve New Jersey and the um the the the statue created under Governor Christie uh in which you know we have to provide a certain number of observations during the course of the Year those observations are also tools that we use to provide formative feedback to teachers on how they can improve but also those
029observations are used to evaluate the effectiveness of that teacher and as you know to achieve New Jersey there are other factors that go into it such as student growth objectives that play a role into their overall summative analysis and then um the uh um wrong a blank the SGP the student growth percentile ranking median student growth percentile ranking and that's based on their njsla results um that's a little bit skewed because it's only for teachers that are in tested grade levels um but all of those go into our portfolio of assessing where they are how far they've come and whether this is someone that we want to continue working with our students or not um but we try to keep professional development away from that where that's purely developing them based upon their needs and
030so forth and our Administration our principles our supervisors they conduct the analysis of determining whether this is if it's a non-tenure teacher whether to renew them or not and you know that every May by around the board meeting around May 15th is when we make determinations on who we're going to renew and by Statute we have to inform teachers um if we're not going to renew them before May 15 so a lot of decision making goes into that and you as a board members you'll you know that y um that's the process that we do that we undertake to determine which teachers to go ahead and bring back and obviously if you're a tenear teacher there's a process for that as well where in which the district would have to file tenure charges and there's
031actually a cut level in their overall score and if their overall score drops below that districts the languages shall file tenure charges so we don't even have a choice so if it's if a if a teacher for in consecutive years falls under that cut score we have to go ahead and file what are called inefficiency tenure charges so there is a process in place to achieve New Jersey having covered everything but that's just an overall summary of it Dr ages I if I missed anything feel free to jump in no you covered everything how long does it take to determine whether whether a teach is going to be a a success or not um you know so the teachers have four years if you're not 10 your teacher it's a they have a total of
032four years um to we don't have to tenure three no it it used to be three but that changed with um with the with the achieve New Jersey now it's four years um I would say that in this District we usually make that decision after the second year um there are some cases where we make that decision after three years and very few cases where we make that decision after four years um the one more thing the fact that teachers aren't going to have to take the practice and another test I think there's two tests that they don't have take any more so is that going to make you more like you know paying attention to no that really doesn't play a role right now and again Dr Agy can jump in and correct me
033if I'm wrong the only practice that they basically eliminated was this practice test that students had students had to take before they started student teaching and it was basically um basic skills or content area before they did their student teaching they had to take this basic skills content um practice proved that they could do it well that they had the content knowledge for whatever they were teaching and if they passed that practice then they were allowed to do their student teaching that's the only practice that I'm aware of that they've eliminated so no longer is that practice required for students in college to go on to student teaching that's what was eliminated but in order to get their license they still need to PR um to pass their practice in whatever certification area they're they're
034trying to get their license for okay I just want to make sure we're not you know we're getting weeding out the it's that was one of the decisions that were made to try to bolster the teaching candidacy pool um there is a teacher shortage there has been one for now probably a good 5 years and there is a task force right now in New Jersey consisting of school administrators and lawmakers their job is to look at what are the deterrents that are out there for young people to go into the profession of teaching and one of the first things that they eliminated was that particular practice that I mentioned did that you think people didn't do it because of that I think that was one of the deterrents another deterrent that was determined was the
035student growth objective um I think the task force made a decision that the student growth objectives weren't really a great indicator of of a teacher's Effectiveness and shouldn't be used um in that process they haven't completely said that but I think they actions where they've suspended them for now if you're a 10year teacher that action has been suspended ended you no longer have to do student growth objectives your last student growth objective counts so we kind of anticipate that at some point they're going to say student growth objectives are no longer necessary all right as long as we're paying attention exactly right and Dr Agy feel free to if I missed anything nope you didn't uh no more um some of this will come up in my presentation and I'm sure I'll get more questions
036and I'll be happy to answer them sounds like a chall any it C it certainly did to me too absolutely not Mr Smith I mean unless you want to stay here longer I got no problem with that but remember we do have some retirements just kidding um so if you want to cut it down to one page that'd be good are there any more questions from Mrs uh Burke no okay all right thank you Mrs bur great job job thank you all right Dr ages the challenge is on thanks all right thank you I'm I'm going to cover uh Human Resources goals uh before I get started it would be um I'd be remiss if I didn't say that really the success of human resources department really falls on the shoulders of uh the entire
037department uh the three people I have working along alongside me are phenomenal people one of them showed up today to support us uh the two others uh uh are here in FA I'm sure they're watching they're they're here in spirit um Jillian Flanigan has been a phenomenal addition to Human Resources her understanding of FMLA law her understanding of um certification uh along with what M babone was talking about has really sped up the process we really uh get our teachers what they need when they're here through ml uh and we're getting new teachers on board through certification emergency certification where necessary so she's been phenomenal uh Karen Havens has been a staple in the district for uh more years than she wants me to mention so I won't um but she's been phenomenal at making
038certain that our teachers are put in place as quickly as possible and our last uh person who's uh joined their team Valerie Bender um she makes certain that she contacts our substitutes people who want to be substitutes by the way we're looking for substitutes um but people who want to be substitutes she does paperwork on them processes the paperwork quickly so that we're getting uh more substitutes in and approved as you've been noticing over the last uh couple of weeks and that is beneficial because that that input has raised our coverage in the in the buildings from about 39% last year um to about 68 consistent 6 8% consistently uh this year so we're very proud of uh the work that we've accomplished as a team and we uh hope to continue as a team
039uh our goals uh the first goal all of our goals are ongoing they always have to be ongoing in Human Resources uh because we never feel that we've uh completed um everything but our first goal is uh we created a diverse Coalition of teachers uh of teachers uh to collaboratively develop an action plan that will increase diverse hiring and by that mean we're looking at we have high school teachers Middle School teachers you um teachers from this building the ues we have Elementary School teachers and preschool teachers all working with us to help uh understand that someone asked before you know the culture the climate what makes people come to to cbble and stay in cerebel and I always challenge teachers who I meet through career Affairs that if they come and they join us
040and they and they see what we're about uh if they don't if they want to be treated like a member of the family if they want to be treated like uh like someone who's valued they should come and join us um we're pretty competitive and I think that the support that Miss Burke gives them as well as the administrators I think we puts us in higher contention than most people think uh bullet number two better address varying learning social emotional needs of grade four and five for imple U and its implementation of Youth advisory Council we have a youth advisory Council now just like we have at the middle school and the high school um this is the lowest level that we go to and we're working with those students on uh things that we
041know will impact them at the middle school and high school this year working with Miss Kagan and Mr TOA we've really been focusing on student attendance uh and student um student bullying or student um um trying to decrease H hibs as well as trying to get students here um those conversations have shed light on some of the reasons students aren't coming uh to school which we know uh based on conversations we've had with middle school and high school students only get worse if we don't address them now so uh the things that we're learning here at the ues we're able to share with the the elementary schools and the preschools and uh so far it continues to grow we have one more meeting this month um later this month uh but it's been an excellent
042uh learning experience uh we're looking to expand leadership capacity within the next 5 years through creation of district and building leadership succession plans one of the things that Dr Labby uh did and when he first came on board and one of the things that I was first in charge of was a Leadership Academy where we had we recognized that we had a number of teachers that had gone to leadership uh for their their masters in leadership and we wanted to develop those those classroom leaders into building leaders District leaders so forth uh we're at that level now now where uh we're looking to make certain that teachers who have become supervisors and vice principles and principles uh continue to get uh focus on the future meaning running their own buildings running departments and so forth
043so we're working on a five-year plan to get those folks in place uh as Dr Labby has told you uh he's not going to be around uh forever uh neither are some of us in central office and we want to make certain that when we transition out it's not a void that's left open but we're confident that we'll be able to move the next person in obviously with the board support move that next person into that spot um and we're trying to do that we we feel that we have an uh excellent administrative team and they're working now with us so uh I'm mentoring uh a principal a couple of principles and supervisor uh the directors are mentoring a couple of Supervisors so that they get to know what our jobs really entail and I
044think that that's that's an important process and it's going to take a little time but we're working on that that's why that goal is ongoing uh as Miss Bert said we partnered with Ed connective what Ed connective is is a onetoone coach uh that's outside of the district so that the teachers brand new teachers and by the way brand new teachers to the district not necessarily brand new teachers to teaching um they have a onetoone coach that allows them to work and develop and grow uh in their classroom in their grade levels uh we we've also included this year A administrative coach uh and the reason for that is whether you're you know and I'm going to show my age but whether you're Wayne Gretzky or or uh you're Jordan uh all those folks had
045coaches and we think that just because you're a tenear administrator doesn't mean that you don't need uh a coach so we've provided coaches for tenur administrators as well as uh our non-tenured administrators and that's gone very well for us and we're seeing progress with both our teachers who are getting that onetoone coaching as well as our administrators we successfully ran two Career Fairs which yielded about 190 applicants between January and may uh we will be having another one this year uh we've already had one in January that allowed us to get more substitutes uh as well as non-certificated folks to work uh as custodians uh in the kitchen and bus a so we're very proud of our career fair we we have uh certainly put things in place including having somebody from one of the
046universities that works with us on the alternate route program to make certain that folks that want to be teachers and take an alternative path to teaching can do so and they speak to somebody within uh within a university that can help them move uh through that process so we're we're very proud of what we're doing with our career Affairs and again it's that extra step to go above and beyond to help our folks that are joining the our family here at cille to continue to grow and hopefully uh stick around for a while uh I talked about the substitutes I'm going to skip that that uh bullet uh our two goals as far as culture and climate and Dr Labby hit upon it a little bit before uh we want our students and our teachers
047to come to a safe environment and we continue to work in that in decreasing violent student behaviors that result in suspensions particularly long-term suspensions uh and we're using the this year uh 24 and 25 as a benchmark to make certain that we reduce whatever number we have this year we reduce for for next year um as I mentioned before we're looking to increase student attendance and decrease the number of students who are chronically absent uh from school and again we're using this year as a benchmark uh for that goal now on to the things that you really want to learn about uh need to replace that uh first bullet that first bullet has actually grown since I put this together we are now at six teachers who have announced their retirements uh we have uh
048one teacher currently on a leave of absence for the first quarter of next year we have three non-certificated staff currently announcing their retirement as well that need to be replaced uh and obviously as we move further into the year uh we'll know more about leaves of absences retirements and hopefully not many if any uh but any resignations requested uh through June and then in July and August the staff we're looking for to add we want to evening bombers Beyond campus monitor uh there are evening events that are happening at the at the bombers Beyond and we'd like to make certain that uh Mr Nas's uh bombers Beyond is as staffed as any other building uh so we're looking for that we're looking for supervisor security uh that would be somebody to help um to help
049Mr sprag uh Mr sprag is phenomenal but he can't be here 247 this person would assist in in supervising uh security throughout the district and at different times uh different times of the day uh preschool transition teacher and preschool transition par this is something that we're looking to um to help those those students who are not re really shouldn't still be in in preschool uh but not quite ready for kindergarten this class would allow us to move more of those students and get them ready in um to start in kindergarten um and lastly uh this is a stip in the position Eisenhower is looking for an extracurricular director basically it's a person who would help uh manage the extracurricular activities that they have during the uh afternoon and evenings and that's it I hope I
050was fast enough Mr Smith you're fantastic one quick question for you do sure so in addition to the career fares are we working with colleges and universities in the area to recruit directly with them or show opportunities to them yeah absolutely uh one of the best opportunities we have is the number of student teachers that we're placing throughout the year we got about a dozen currently working uh throughout the district uh that also includes with Mr Nas's help that also includes uh people who are looking to be speech therapists OT PT so forth so we're placing a lot of people and we found that uh placing of student teachers is the best is our best opportunity for two reasons one um we get to know them you know I I always tell them it's like
051Survivor you know there might only be one one or two jobs available and you have to be the best and you have to stand out um but it also talking about support one of the things that the universities have given us feedback on is that we not only take student teachers but we've try and place them in the same buildings whenever possible so that they feel supported it's you know it's very difficult to be a student teacher and walk into the faculty room and you're the only one there but if there's two or three or four of you uh it makes it a lot easier and then they're able to take that experience and go back to their universities talk about how successful they've been here so we're getting more and more placements uh through
052student for student teachers we currently work with about four that will give us uh quite a high number uh and then from there uh yeah I'll go to Career Affairs in fact I got three plans for this uh this month uh I'll attend career Affairs in in uh universities that are set in urban areas and rural areas in uh Suburban areas to try and get that diverse mix of teachers that's great thanks yep any more questions and again going back to that research I was mentioning before if you look at the school districts across the country that are successful in you know Finding and retaining teachers it's a it's it's a whole process and if you watch with Dr aguiles was talking about and listen to what he and Miss Bert talked about it begins
053with recruiting it begins with getting out there and actively finding the absolute best teachers you can you can you can you know you can find and and getting them to come into your school district and and then it takes an induction program you have to have a program where you're inducting these new staff members many of them are first year teachers so you got to provide them with that professional develop that mentoring that coaching all the support that they're going to need to feel successful that they they have all the tools that they need to go into the classroom to work with their students particularly in those first and second years which are by far the toughest as a teacher in fact many people would argue that the second year is more difficult than the
054first year because the first year you're just trying to survive and then the second year you think you got it all figured out and you realize you don't it takes five years to be what's called a master teacher so if you listen to what Miss Bert said our program takes them all the way up through four years um and we watch them very closely they start with a coach that comes out and works with them then they continue to receive coaching through egg connective but they're always working with those mentors um and they're and they're going to a certain number of workshops during the course of the year but then beyond that giving teachers the tools and support that they need to grow further and one of the things that I love seeing is the
055number of teachers going out to different workshops like are that are on the agenda this evening um it shows that we have so many teachers that just have this thirst for learning knowing that the little more they learn the little better they're going to get working with their teachers um and and it's quite the compliment so the creation of a program where you can find the best teachers induct them keep them growing and then one thing that Dr ages talked about and you might think well what does this have to do with Personnel Services he talked about culture and climate and that's also huge providing a culture that is rich in Tradition but also with high expectations for students and staff members that's huge but then a climate that makes people feel valued and appreciated
056and supported and one of the things the the Hallmarks of the the program that Miss Flanigan Dr agilise Miss Bert and our culture and climate committee have established is I don't know if you if you if you read talk I talk about it all the time we do these dollar for denim days and the different charities that that committee comes up with and our teachers generate funds for is incredible the number of families in sville that we've helped who have been in major need um is just inspiring for me to be a be a part of a district like that so that goes a long way all those things go a long way in attracting the best and keeping the best and we happen to feel um and and I'm very biased but I happen
057to feel we have the very best here in cille and that's the reason thank you Dr ages you're welcome speaking of the very best our very best director of technology is here to provide to you the proposed technology budget Mr Glock Malloy is with us literally right now virtually um he's already communicated to me he's corrected me on several items um so he is watching he is very attentive he wishes he could be here unfortunately um he's under the weather and he couldn't be with us today however um our amazing Dr warano and I I apologize that uh Michael um Michael just recently became um a doctor and we are very proud of him knowing the amount of work and dedication and commitment it takes to do that um Dr Rano itz I cannot wait
058to hear your presentation and uh continue to call you Dr Rano because I have to make up for the the one Mr Rano that I said earlier well I'll try to keep it short um but this is a uh technology and and security budget we'll show um both sides of that separately uh for this current school year uh many of the technology goals and projects are achieved um they were multi-year projects that we've been carrying for the past several years and will continue to carry forward um including maintaining a sustained device life cycle to make sure we have new devices current devices for our staff students and for our Network at all times um and a onetoone student and instructional staff uh devic Supply um that's all of our instructional staff take-home devices for our
059grade 6 to 12 students and inclass one:1 volume of devices for our lower uh grade students um increasing our physical Network security um although we are very heavy on cyber security that includes physically securing our Network infrastructure um that's somewhere that we were lacking a little more on the physical side but we've been uh working on on securing the physical aspect um we have a few more although we've achieved that we have a few more upgrades coming this current school year and then of course more planned for next year uh interactive classroom board Replacements uh we have we've had smartboards in most classrooms if not all classrooms they've been upgraded now to interactive flat panel displays much like this one that uh students teachers can in touch and work with rather than using a projector
060uh they have a lot more features there's an onboard computer on them so that they can use them without their laptops we have been replacing those uh broken boards older boards and then adding CL class rooms that had nothing with these interactive panels and we'll continue to do so next year again High School Esports lab is on the books for this year we already purchased equipment we have ready to go uh pending some construction at the high school but uh from the technology side we're ready to go we have what we need so we're kind of achieved but in progress waiting for installation uh this building samsil School the PA system was recently upgraded uh with the PA system split split central office from the school building and add outdoor coverage speakers so when the
061students are outside um in the playground or coming to and from the building uh We've added uh technology facilitator stiens to have a facilitator in each School building uh using certified instructional staff to help the other certified staff Implement technology into their lessons and help them using some of the uh classroom technology and educational technology resources we've expanded the bombers Beyond Network as you know Dr Mr naster is expanding bombers Beyond to include a store um and we've had to expand the network over there to accommodate and that has been completed and a communications platform upgrade we've uh moved on to parent Square now for our new uh mass communication and uh small group communication one-on-one communication between parents and and staff members instructional staff um which has been pretty successful on the security side
062we're maintaining Access Control communication and our security infrastructure our our camera infrastructure replacing broken components expanding where needed all buildings now have two shifts of Campus monitors so they're covered during the day and for evening events school resource officers that we've had at the middle school and high school for several years uh we now have at the elementary building so all of our schools are covered uh with a school resource officer from seral Police Department our reunification plans Emergency Management plans and protocols and those procedures are being drilled constantly every month as required and those plans are being refined uh consistently as needed um there's an enhanced uh transportation system with GPS tracking on all of our buses connecting those buses with internet access to manage those buses and keep um account for the students
063getting onto and off of the buses that was added this year uh and ID cards for all of our students which again the middle school and high school have had for several years now every school in our district every student in our district is using those same ID cards which also enable that accountability system where students swipe onto and off of buses so we can keep track of our students coming up for next school year on the technology side many of the items are maintaining what we have been doing so the maintain device life cycle onetoone devices for our instructional staff and students um the academic software that we use and re-evaluate every year um and a cyber security response plan which is always an in progress project because that is uh changing quite constantly
064um we'll continue to increase our physical network security to make sure we're secure throughout on the physical side as well as um you know the online cyber side um more interactive panels for the rest of the classrooms as we uh go through the rest of the upgrades from older boards or broken boards so that we have the newer interactive displays everywhere for every student to use at every grade level uh look look at a new professional development system which Miss Bert talked about from Frontline uh firewall upgrades uh kind of falls into the sustained device life cycle this one's on a longer life cycle so it's not with the rest but it is time for a new firewall for our system to keep us safe at our internet Edge uh not yet funded in the
065budget and in enhanced information analytic system it's a data analysis system for student data um that are instructional staff and our Administration can use uh to analyze student data on one or multiple data points like discipline or attendance uh to identify atrisk students and develop inter interventions that fall outside of our academic RTI process um and a multi-year plan for interactive signs at schools if you look at the sign at the high school uh this plan would be to upgrade that sign and to look at our other schools to introduce signs like that for the rest of our buildings similarly on the on the security side for the new school year some of the items are continuing to maintain what we have done this this school year and in Prior school years like keeping our
066exess control system our communication systems our camera systems up to date um and covering any blind spots that we have or or areas that we identify in need um continue to run drills and then identify um opportunities to better our reunification plan and our Emergency Man management plans um an enhanced security communication system to really tie in all the security components that we have together uh for a single managed system uh that can talk together that can um easily alert everybody that needs to be alerted in case of an emergency um keeping two campus monitors at each building but adding that one more that Dr aul spoke about for bombers Beyond who does not currently have an evening campus mon monor um and increasing the emergency supply at each building in the event that we
067have an emergency we were also looking at not currently funded an enhanced weapon detection system as far as Hardware think of the metal detectors that we have in buildings now these are enhanced systems that go beyond just detecting metal objects um as well as a weapon detection Software System that is a software BAS based um really uses our current security systems that can view the entire campus indoors and Outdoors to identify identify possible weapons or threats um additional security operations staff again that Dr agil talked about that would be um another supervisor an evening supervisor strictly for security as the security department has grown significantly so somebody to really oversee our evening security procedures and uh I think that covers it absolutely can I elaborate a little bit more so first of all on the
068hardware system one of the biggest challenges that we have in the morning is the bag checking um you know I I've actually done it when I was the interim principal at the high school I stick in my hand into the bags checking those bags and those some of those bags especially at the middle school are tightly packed but feling around making sure that everything's taken care of there's nothing in there it's it's quite laborious and it's also labor intensive but it also can be a little bit you know we all wear gloves but sometimes there's sharp things you get those spiral notebooks you prick your finger on and so forth so there there's a little bit haer to it and also it takes time so one of the things that we're continuously looking at is
069some of that Advanced Hardware where a child can actually walk through the detector with their backpack on they don't have to take it off and it's going to detect things right now the products out there are are not ready it's one of those situations where technology is just not there um even when you go to places like um you know airports and things like that while they do have certain Technologies um they're very expensive Technologies so we're keeping a close eye on that but that's something that I don't think we're ready for yet I don't think the technology is ready for school districts yet um however the software is a different story so the software is a software that we would call a secondary prevention method the first prevention obviously is making sure that absolutely
070no weapons get into your school this is a secondary system in which if for some reason a weapon were to get into school and it's brandished the software will pick it up and alert someone of that that it's happened interestingly enough this is the same software that was being used in that um I think it was was it the North Carolina was it North Carolina the latest shooting was in North Carolina right so yeah so that's they they actually had that software uh but for some reason it didn't it didn't alert them um but it's it's secondary software it's a secondary system for detection of weapons you're first and now they're doing it they still have it but now they're doing like we're doing now they have people checking for weapons when you come in
071so that is something that we're considering we have what's called emergency reserve and if we were to go ahead and decide to include that we would probably pay for that through the emergency Reserve System just wanted to clarify those two points there two quick questions enhanced security Communication System I thought we upgraded our radio system not that long ago so you can communicate with svlpd EMS fire if you need to and we are on the same borrow system for 2-way radios is this something we are I mean I think that's just expanding it to the number of people Mike it goes beyond that but it's another it's another system that integrates that and several other other of our systems to communicate together so if something happens um hav forbid something happen here and Miss Mah
072has to call a lockdown for the building because something's going on it will will notify even on these interactive displays this is a lockdown um with strobes with not just the audio but visual means to let everybody inside and outside the building know that we're going on a lockdown and make those automatic Communications out so she doesn't have to trigger this and then pick up a radio and go hey seral PD we have a situation this would be all automated so it's really enhancing the system by tying everything together okay makes sense and the additional School Bus cameras is that for new buses or are you putting more cameras on buses or it's the more cameras so school buses have cameras these are for additional views inside or outside of buses and even if there
073are new school buses um budgeted with those buses is the standard amount of cameras so we won't get a new bus in without cameras without cameras this is for additional views beyond the standard that we would have okay thank you just a a question about the uh secondary system that you're referring to and I don't know who to direct this question at so the system that you're talking about do you know the the efficacy rate of it do you know how effective it is if there is someone who brandishes a weapon in the school a percentage of success that at you know I'm not sure how that technology works but I'm assuming it's it's in conjunction with the cameras in the school that it would detect different types of weapons and identify it quickly but
074how accurate is how effective is it they you know the the software systems that we've looked at claim they have high efficacy um the software system that most people are looking at including us is one that includes the software as well as a live person so they actually have someone monitoring your software um we had talked about that years ago having someone monitor our video surveillance well this software system is inclusive of that so not only is it the software that detects you know for instance if someone stands up and all of a sudden they pull something out it detects text it but then you have a live person that's looking at that and then makes the phone call or alert make use what whatever protocol is used to alert the school that a weapon's
075been branded okay so um again it we're in the situation with all these products where you're you're just monitoring them you're comparing them uh and so forth but it is a secondary system the first system is not allowing them in in the first place yes and I know that um you know we've had conversations where we worked out the math how many students how many security Personnel that we have that are doing those bag checks and what was it it was uh less than 10 seconds that they have really uh per bag to be able to check those bags yeah I mean once you get down once you get the hang of it yeah um you can probably check a bag pretty thoroughly in about 5 to six seconds and those the systems like you
076mentioned the airport you know obviously begs the question when you have you know we put our bags on those conveyor belts at the airport they detect you know um you know biou substance or material and then also you know it can identify that is that out of the realm of our budget to be able to put something like that very expensive and not made for schools yeah you know I mean that's a whole system that they're using I think at one point it might be yeah that's what we're waiting for there there's and Dr warano can speak to this there's a a portion of this where you're waiting for the soda you know pardon the expression the fruit to you know ripen and with technology like this you don't want to go ahead and spend
077$100,000 on something that hasn't really ripened um to the point where you're comfortable that you're going to get a return in your investment so I don't think that we're in a situation at least for that Hardware to go out and ex and spend that exorbitant amount of money where it might not do exactly what it's saying it's going to do which to your point is efficacy so we're pretty sure that the Software System the efficacy is pretty good um because it combines a human with a detection um but we're we're not sold yet on the hardware efficacy yeah that may still be a couple years away yeah and and and also again Dr Ran can talk about this you know again we we see technology prices drop too um you know when something becomes more
078mass-produced and so forth so I don't think we're ready yet to jump into that I think we have pretty I mean I think our system is really good right now can it get better absolutely are we committed to turning over every stone possible to keep our students and our and our staff safe yes so there might come a time when we are ready to go to that but right now we'll just stick with what we're doing if we don't go ahead and choose that to to to fund that software the secondary software for next year I have a question how often do you find something in the bag checks and what is the most frequent thing that you find um Vapes probably the most frequent thing we find marijuana Vapes or um you name it
079yeah there there have been times um I would say second is um pocket knives yeah so Vapes and then pocket knives um thank goodness we've never found anything more lethal um um but we we are pretty Vigilant and our campus security monitors are the best and I can't thank them enough for what they do because again I've done it sticking your hand in that bag is it's not easy because you don't know what's in that bag yeah there's some inherent dangers with doing that with only a rubber glove on because well they have they they have special gloves they're not rubber gloves yeah but you still you still can get poked by a lot of different things and and to do it in the fashion that they do it so that students aren't waiting outside
080in the rain and in the cold and so forth I give them a lot of credit for what they do they they get the kids through and um they they they do what they need to do to preserve the safety of everybody in those buildings well the complaints have certainly died down about the length of time that it takes so it must be going well and God bless any security monitor that can actually get their hands in my stepdaughter's book bag with how tightly packed yeah and you know occasionally you got to pull stuff out in order to get your hand in there uh and and I got to tell you the kids are wonderful um you know you know we we ask the kids before they they come up to do the best that
081they can um you know to open their bags and get them ready for the checks and 99% of them are extremely Cooperative uh when doing so know that when I was doing legisla to day that's one of the comments about school safety that the kids said hey we really do feel safe here so it is making them feel safe at least yeah it's a huge and it's a huge thing and I'd love to say that it's 100% but if I did I'd be fibbing to all of you um but what I can tell you that is 100% Is our commitment to doing everything we possibly can and that's why it's important to note to you that we are looking at these Hardwares and softwares um because again we want to be that school district that's
082turning over every stone that we can to preserve the safety of our students and staff um I had a question about the technology um the proposal for the technology the last one where it comes to the uh interactive School signs there's no dollar value there do we have an an idea of how much is estimated to be I'm not sure if you have an idea um yet and they I think they'll all be different because they'll have power requirements and then the land around them uh like the Middle School's up on a hill so they'll really vary um so we'd really have to look at what the cost would be and what type of signs there are and then even from manufacturers the pricing wildly varies um so this was a a somewhat recent addition
083um but we would really have to look into that to see what the costs are if they're really um you know unachievable in the first place or if it's something that we could look at and then develop a plan to keep those on a life cycle also thank you and and just a little update on what I said Mr NASA just corrected me it wasn't North Carolina it was Nashville Tennessee that was that school shooting there and Mr Glock mooy just corrected me that um the software system is not the same as the one from Nashville it's it's a different vendor so uh inherently then it's a different Software System but still does the same thing but um different vendor Yes actually that's probably relieving to know in either case with the software systems they'll
084only be as good as the data that you feed it and they do work with your camera views uh if they didn't have great views we could see why somebody could pull out a weapon and even the system couldn't see it um I'm happy to say that you would be hardpressed here to not find a view of anywhere inside or outside of our buildings so really adding a software system like that it could see everything except for bathrooms any more questions all right thank you Dr ranard thank you very [Applause] much Eric did you hear that they're all saying thank you to you too only I bring okay all righty now we are on to board discussion governance committee Mr Fernandez if you please thank you we reviewed several policy and regulations that were up
085for approval following policies are scheduled for first reading tonight and second reading on March 18th R 5600 student discipline P 8601 student supervision P 5710 student grievances p8500 Food Services and a new policy P 9163 spectator code of conduct for in Scholastic events one key discussion point was The Spectator code of conduct we explored a progressive approach to addressing inappro behaviors from parents and other adults at school sporting events the proposed policy include Progressive bands for attending future events and required anger management classes for repeat offenders this ensures that we maintain a respectful and safe environment for all of our student athletes coaches and Spectators additionally policy 5111 eligibility for student residents and non students is still pending review by the county we also discuss potential updates to bylaws 16 7 public participation in board
086meetings focusing on ways to enhance public engagement while keeping our meetings productive finally we reviewed some recent legislative updates that may impact our school district policies moving forward and if any board members have any questions or need further clarification Dr lbby is right over there Mr Gman I'm prepared if you'd like an update absolutely uh last Tuesday evening the student achievement committee met I began by reviewing the curriculum guides that we are asking for your approval for this evening US History 1 US History 2 pe2 pe8 and grade seven pullout resource mathematics we discussed the um format and template for our curriculum guides which is uh comprehensive but I I promise it's because the state requires it um and we talked about the different parts so we discussed the way that a lay person would
087best look at a guide for review is that unit plan because it talks about what do we want the students to know what are the activities how are we measuring what we're learning and um it breaks down the assessments that are going to be used to measure that learning so we talked a little bit about getting through them and I know that's going to be further conversation we uh spoke about the fact that the revised guides that we've been working on are due to some 2024 uh 25 standards updates that were delivered by the New Jersey Department of Education for foundational literacy mathematics climate change data literacy and other things that the state now requires us to have in our curriculum in addition to preparing for the qualitative single accountability Continuum um evaluation that we
088are going through in District otherwise known as cusac um kind of making sure that we have all of the requirements for our curriculum guides ready for that review taking place in April I discussed the um we're in state testing mode waeda access testing is going on actually we just wrapped up the other day uh for our multilingual Learners in grades K through 12 we have our NJ GPA which is the graduation proficiency assessment that our 11th graders will be taking this month in March and the njsla which all students in grades 4 through N9 for for language arts mathematics and then Science grades 5 8 and 11 will be taking in May and the all the ways that we are preparing our students in the classroom in addition to out of the classroom support programs
089that we have I provided an update on the amount of students that earned the Seal of biliteracy for or they qualify to earn they will earn it upon graduation we have 28 seniors one of whom is earning a trilingual seal of biliteracy portug PES Spanish and English and 20 of our Juniors um got a head start by taking the test this year as long as they take it after January of their junior year it qualifies for the requirements so we have 20 students already for the class of 2026 which is very exciting the class of 2025 currently holds second place for the number of students qualifying within one graduate class we had a few years ago we had a group of 32 um I wrapped up with talking about a assessment research program that we're
090running in District looking for a kindergarten through third grade literacy screener that is going to be required by the New Jersey Department of Education for implementation beginning in September 2025 we've um taken a look at our assessment plan and what we do in District currently we are waiting for the guidelines from the New Jersey Department of Education I was told spring so whatever day spring starts I'm going to start harassing them for it um but once we have the guidelines we'll be able to clearly identify whether we have a tool that identifies all of our students that are demonstrating difficulty with acquisition of reading skills that test um we have current screeners in place but it's not as extensive as the state is now requiring we will have to test over 1,700 students in grades
091K through three um so that's we're working on that and then I uh asked Miss Bert for an update and she provided an update for our high impact tutoring Grant um it's an extension of the original grant that we awarded where we are working with 51 students here at samsil upper elementary school and providing them some uh small group tutoring through a partnered company Imagine Learning where we're supporting them in their math we also talked about our climate change Grant programs the assembly where the biodome was inflated at the middle school and all the kids got to go in there and climb and feel like they were out in a biodome and then the field trips which are also on the agenda for this evening where they are going to be looking at um different
092ways that humans impact the environment and ways that we do it positively and ways that could use Improvement and that is all related to the New Jersey Department of Education climate change initiative and uh we also had an update for professional development which we heard a little bit about during the presentation and for our ourti programming where we provide Interventional services for our students and the new software that we are using through linkit and the preliminary plans for the F uh staff development Day in June where our teachers will have the opportunity to participate in two sessions in the morning and then our afternoon is going to be dedicated to our professional learning communities but different people will be doing different things and that's it wow Miss Gman the student achievement committee does so much
093more when you give the update than Mr Callahan um I I'm gonna I'm gonna plead the fifth because I was using Dr labby's summary um so if it's wordy don't blame me and I have a question and a comment your summary not first of all first of all is the rumor true that Paulie Shore was in the biodome you remember that movie in the 80s I I was young but I barely remember no not in the biodome and in terms of comment I want to commend to congratulate U Mrs Hernandez daughter because she was one of the Juniors who receiv received that seal of biliteracy endorsement yeah congratulations we did speak at length it's not an easy test we talked about that any other questions no thank you very much M Rosman great job as
094always okay now uh middle sex County School Board associ iation update I'm very honored tonight to be able to announce the unsung heroes that have been chosen from sville Dr Lobby has given me their names our junior is Nicholas Bernardi and our senior is Sarah Torino so they will be honored at the unsung heroes banquet which is being held on March 27th at Oldbridge high school so that will be uh a pleasure to attend and then the next meeting will be in May and that will be the voting meeting for an officers for the middle six County but I'll remind you of that at the next board meeting okay public participation anybody on any presentation or agenda items seeing none we will close public Dr Labby superintendent report okay and I will go quickly as
095possible I let's go to finance and infrastructure first if I can bring your attention to item number one on page two again once again we cannot thank the DuPont Corporation enough for their very generous Grant of $3,000 so that two of our science teachers can attend the national uh science teachers convention on March 26 and this year it it'll be in Philadelphia PA so the DuPont Corporation has been so generous to us with this and with many other grants that they've provided us so uh we can't thank them enough number two which you can find on page three we're asking you to approve a new three-year contract with light path which is our cable vision light path which is obviously our internet provider and number 12 which you can find in the addendum we're asking
096to approve an agreement for Professional Services with the spel Architectural Group our architect and that'll be for $47,000 to uh update our longrange facility plan which I don't believe it's been updated in a couple years it's been just a little over five and we're supposed to do do it every 5 and now with all the referendum work being completed we need update the entire thing because there's a lot that needs to come off and just be as completed projects any questions on those or any other items on finance and infrastructure one oh go ahead I'm sorry so with spel is that with all the referendum work going on are they doing as builts and future plans or no this is a state required um document it's a long range facility plan to go over our
097current state of facilities and anything we want to do in the future um so it's a lot of hours to get it updated is really what sorry just a quick question on item number five regarding the uh light path is that the total for all the schools for the whole District or is that like per per building that is for and Mr Dr orano do you still here yeah I think that is for the total District I believe that's for the district it's monthly yeah that's the uh renewal for the Internet contract for the entire District right thank you any other questions okay if I can bring your attention to student achievement on page eight we're asking you to approve some long-term suspensions unfortunately as well as what Miss Gman referenced earlier in her report
098some revised curriculum guides any questions on those or anything else on student achievement I have a question I was still reading um the curriculum at history to and when it talks about the president is I think it's the unit 11 the New Millennium and it talks about of the president I just felt that when I was reading that it wasn't neutral you know a little bit it was you know like talk a little bit like it highlights a lot of the positive thing of President Obama not that much from President Bush and president Trump I just want to make sure how this translate to the classroom you know just trying to the kids have you um a balanced perspective so in do do you have a specific example that you did you remember see if
099I have it um the bush of um talk about the political divisions that occurs the domestic agenda the Pol Pol polarization in shape of public opinion um about trumps um the political I'm sorry ass say political and social division that emerged during his [Music] campaign evaluate political polarization and public re reaction to Trump's presidential focusing any ISU of Russia investigation impeachments and approach to the media and then Obama is described all the major domestics and foreign achievement of President Obama including a for the milare ACT um the impact that he has in and fuses on his effort to address racial division is racial division let me see the achievement he has in um economic recessions and debate on and the efforts that he does and it talks about the let me see I'm sorry I
100just haven't can I see it in here no worries the one thing I can say and I'll let M Grossman talk a little bit I mean when it comes to the the curriculum guides um and it comes to a presidency um you know on a historical basis it takes a good 10 years to determine you know the progress that's made in any type of presidency um So based upon curriculum guides and the standards that are written um I don't think the analysis is quite over yet with regard to our last two presidents in terms of the impact they might have had um as well as I don't know I'm not sure if there's reference to a lot of what went on during the last two presidencies in our current textbook I do know that in
101terms of you know you made the comment about being neutral um I I do remember from When Miss grman sent that out earlier to us it does talk a lot about President Clinton and some of the negative things that occurred during the Clinton presidency that affected the country um in fact you know the the attempt to impeach President Clinton for um some of the things that he did while he was in office that is something that is discussed I believe in the curriculum from what I can remember that stood out my memory but m grman so the um New Jersey student learning standards for history and social studies are specific in that we look at the two areas of civics and that we look at geography so for the US history 2o when we're looking
102at Civics and when we're looking at historical events and facts they they look at major events that happened within some presidencies right so we there is material in there about President Clinton there is material um in there about President Trump's first um term thank you I couldn't think of the word uh and we as you're correct it does not include um President Biden and it does not include obviously anything there we do cover some things related to current events but we look at more than the person we look at the events that happened within the country related to Civics so what challenges came up during that time period period so the history courses are organized by time which is why we're about 10 years behind um from our US History 2 course so it really
103isn't um it it's not partisan Politics the teachers aren't deciding what they teach you know it is the major events that take place during history that are identified by the New Jersey student learning standards and what's highlighted and what's considered in a historical perspective across the board so there isn't a there is no room nor is there tolerance for individual bias or opinions when it comes to politics in fact the New Jersey Department of Education and state statute is very specific that it is not a teacher's job to undu influence student thinking when it comes to Civics so most of our coursework is developing students to be able to read and analyze and look at um media and look at primary sources and to form their own opinions about things so when they're covering some
104of the topics in us to they're looking at highs and lows of different time periods and some of those um they almost saddle different presidencies but they I would disagree that there is a bias within our guide about any president it is just purely based on um events that occurred during those time periods during those decades so we are very careful that we do not present a bias when it comes to social studies in any way as a matter of fact it's um part of the regular Department conversations that happen with our history teachers is how are we going to discuss things that are happening in current events or things that happen in history without that personal influence we want the students to see the facts to see the prime Ary sources to see the
105events that happened and to be able to form free thinking for their own civic's minds I go ahead are we saying that Clinton had his downfalls and different things Trump had his things what we're saying is these nothing going wrong in his P presidency doesn't that's not true though what she's trying to say is the major events that took place during their riots police all is that a part of the curriculum truth it's the truth the part of the curriculum it's the facts of the events that took place so Obama is not put over like he had nothing wrong with his presidency no we do not have partisan bias within our curriculum and within our classrooms good any other questions on student achievement I think and I thank you you for elaborating so thoroughly and
106you know we do we are aware of how much work goes into putting the curriculum together and the teacher guides is tremendous amount teachers do it right um you know I I personally I would be interested in looking at just that lineup of which events were selected to highlight because I understand what you're saying that when when the uh you know there's a selection of events that are chosen for each presidency to highlight let's look at this historical event um but I would be you know I just would be interested in looking at what selections were made for each presidency um you know but I do understand that with each one an unbiased presentation is given but also you know to acknowledge the point that if one particular presidency it's only uh highlights so to
107speak or positive things and another presidency that list is you know for whatever reason might be a negative list of things it could we do want our students to be independent thinkers and you know arrive at their own uh conclusions and decisions um and convictions but if we are presenting you know uh only a positive list for this one and and maybe this list happened to fall into a negative list you know that will affect how they look at you know that presidency versus another so I would just be interested in looking at that just a little bit more closely not to police it but just I would be interested to see what all of you received the copy of the curriculum the curriculum that Miss Hernandez is referencing or let me rephrase just to
108take a little bit more time if we could maybe just with the that particular one to uh yeah if we could put that on hold yeah just to table it for for uh the next meeting too like to be able to look at it more I mean you you have the right as a board member to vote Yes or No to anything that you want to vote on so if you're voting no then you can vote no yeah but I don't want to just vote no because I didn't look at it the way she said it and now she's saying that one presid two presidents are viewed negatively one president is not I want to I mean but it's it's inherently important that you know we that we take the time to to read things
109so um obviously if Mrs Bloomer wants to go ahead and you know pass a motion for us to to pull that we can but I think she doesn't I think she doesn't understand the word no I mean I don't think I don't think you need to I I just again um if you're not comfortable voting yes for it then um if you have to vote no for it you can vote no for it if Mrs Bloom as the board president wants to ask us to table that particular curriculum guide we can do that too um I think everybody had an opportunity to read it would that create an undo uh problem if we tabled and what are we talking about one uh history to they're coming out on April 2nd to audit our curriculum well
110earlier than that I have to submit so the US History to um CP and core guide was updated because we acquired the um mcra Hill textbook Series last year and we pilot it so the writing of the curriculum guide has been you know being worked on since last June if the board does not vote to pass this curriculum guide it is not something that I could submit to the qac committee on March 16th I believe is the day that I'm giving her the binder so um it would look as if we had an outdated curriculum guide okay um I think then we just vote and if you are not comfortable please just vote no and and while I I respect that and I understand it I think I've stated that our teachers it is the
111professional responsibility of our social studies teachers to not demonstrate a bias we do not lean towards either political party we present primary sources we present um the facts that take place we have a textbook that is um noted for its neutrality it was one of the things that we looked at in selecting materials and I I would also like to to point out that we did look through the guide with Mr Howard and I went through it to make sure that we do that because it is something that we take very seriously that we do not express a bias and I read through each curriculum guide that Miss Gman provided us and I don't find any bias at all in that curriculum guide or the history one curriculum guide just a final comment on this
112topic um I understand you know given uh what was shared about the timeline and the fact that if we were to you know table this which would be any board member's right to to uh table it and submit that for a motion not just the president but if we I understand if we do that it's going to affect the timeline and the time that has to be approved and submitted whatnot but I will say that um it's not unreasonable for any board member to ask for a little bit more time to look more thoroughly at something because we are the final you know step before it is approved and it is utilized in the entire District so um I just want to say that it's not unreasonable for for someone to say I'd like some
113more time and it's unfortunate that you know we actually don't have that time available to say hey can we just take a couple more weeks to just you know read through this we're not questioning ing anyone's diligence or you know or even saying that you know it's it's uh everyone makes you know the decision about the curriculum to make sure it's nonpartisan and I trust what you're saying is true um and as I said before if you're looking at you know for example the you know two presidencies it could be just a list of historical events that are chosen to go over but it just might happen you know to work out that the one is all positive and the one is negative and it could present as a you know an impression to students
114we're not saying it's deliberate so we would just I would have been interested to see that and just look at that list and just see what list of historical events we're talking about but in the interest of not hindering the process you know I'm willing to go ahead and just uh you know cast my vote on it tonight um but it's unfortunate I would have liked to and yes we're given the curriculum to review but when someone brings up a particular question it kind of moves the Highlight there and say h yeah I'd like to look at that more closely again as well so um you know I'm okay with with moving forward with the vote as well tonight any more questions on student achievement sorry just um further to that I just had a
115question if it were a scenario where we were to vote and we voted no like let's say board majority is no what would happen then just for our edification then it would have to be revised and recommended to you again understood thank you and if we vote Yes is there any chance and we do look at it again and we decide hey this is is different than what we originally assumed can we revisit it again or no if through motion you asked us to go ahead and take another look at it we could do that the future can I to assure some of your feelings I have the guide in front of me um so we're talking about unit 11 and one of the activities the Key activities that's here because you you seem to
116be concerned that Donald Trump um first term president Trump's first term doesn't highlight any of the positive so we have analyzed the key domestic and foreign policy decisions made by President Trump including tax reform immigration policy and US relations with North Korea all three of those are considered to be accomplishments of his presidency so I again urge the board to understand that um negative like even for Clinton I don't care so much just about Trump so it's it's not necessarily I mean I don't like to use the word positive and negative those are it's just things that happened during presidency so it highlights his impeachment which is NE but does it also highlight some good stuff about him it again it's all a matter of what you consider to be good or bad it did
117happened they had a vote to impeach President Clinton so what is that's part of the historical events that took place that's noted in there so okay so again are we saying that nothing bad happen happened in Obama's term no that's my question is we're going it it reviews the key events that took place during their presidency in relation to Civics right it's not for our it's not our place to say that they're criticisms or that they're accomplishments we it's just the events that factually took place that are viewable by our eyes they're on it's up to people to determine their own analysis as to whether that was an accomplishment or something you know not and so for here it says assess the political and social impacts of Obama's presidency focusing on his efforts to address
118racial divisions Healthcare and economic inequality the way that that's done is by reading primary sources it's not the teacher isn't lecturing on what their expertise is it's it's not like a college course you know they are looking at the different challenges the different accomplishments the different impacts that um different presidencies all the different presidencies had during that time period so students are presented with balanced primary sources people that thought that you know um there was a a response to um you know International Affairs for different presidents that were positive that were you know negative we're presenting primary sources and we're presenting laws that were passed and legislation that was changed from both points of view this isn't a teacher standing up there saying this is what my opinion on this is and that's why we
119chose curricular materials that we're unbiased and why we present things using primary sources and we you know de we require neutrality from all of our teachers and that's what the New Jersey Department of Education expects in history course I mean it I'm not going to say it's easy it's it's very challenging to talk about you know um I mean every single day there are conversations that take place you have students that have different political views I mean these are students that are in 11th grade will be taking this course right so you have kids that very you know very well could be voting coming out of these years so we teach the students to look at the events from their own perspective looking at what is available to them in the media what is available
120to them from primary sources and making their own decisions and it's something that we take seriously and I our history teachers are really you know I've spend a lot of time in the classroom seeing what goes on in the classrooms and I I think that we do a really good job of being neutral and creating students that are going to be Civics minded and I think if you look at history 1 it it demonstrates the same thing the same level of neutrality is demonstrated in US history 1 as in US history 2 so maybe I can make a suggestion so we can all move forward with this um obviously we have a deadline we need to vote on this tonight but perhaps after we vote on this can we have a small group discussion so
121we're not about five five members just to go over it and lay some concerns um and everyone then can feel better about this Define a small group discussion below F five board members certainly can be discussed it certainly can be discussed in committee wasn't this already discussed in student achievement committee it did did this just subject didn't come up during student achievement but curriculum is discussed in that committee yes and so it can come up there but again the reason why I asked Mr Fernandez to Define small group you have to be very careful you if you have more than four board members in your group then that's considered a quorum and you can't do that you can't have that discussion unless it's in public like we're doing right now right and that's why I'm
122saying perhaps that's another reason why we're discussing it now too because we don't have the ability to call each other and say hey what did you think of this and go into the room and say hey what you think of this so this is really our only time we can talk about the curriculum as a full body of board members and asking questions so nobody should be judging us or thinking hey you guys are asking questions because this our only opportunity to do so I don't believe anybody is I'm not I'm just saying not you I'm just saying that in general you know like Carrie said we do have the right to ask for it to be adjourned or to put off and we can't do that because of the timeline however you know as
123a board we do have the right to discuss things like we're doing now and I always felt before that we didn't do enough of this like you voting yes yes yes yes and nobody's really talking so I'd like being able to talk about it like this a little bit before we vote on it no and I I app I also trust let me just say something also trust um the curriculum because you really have done a good job with all the curriculum so I'm not going to say oh this one little piece you don't care about I think you care about it completely and fully and you care about the students but it all just from what she had said made me think like H you know what I mean so that's the only reason
124why we're talking I think in more detail that we all thought that and for me is was a question that I had I felt it what I read it as you explained it I trust what you said I know you know all the time and effort that you you you and your team put in the curriculum so we trust in that too so but I it was just a concern that I want to and I want to know if someone else read it you know and felt the same way or not well I think the key here is as Miss Gman is stating is that they are presenting facts to the students so if the facts of my presidency were bad and the the facts of Jeff's presidency were good they are the facts so
125that's what we present to the students and they are capable of drawing their own conclusions we're not feeding them information saying this president was better than this President we're simply stating the historical facts okay so that's historically even did good stuff but I think it's important to note that that's it it's fact teaching it all in the Civics kind of perspective because we've got haven't done that in a long time we're kind of getting back to Civics and how government works and how policy affects things and I think that's what the history department is kind of moving towards instead of tell me telling you Reagan did this great Clinton did this horrible I'm going to tell you how government worked and how it impacted society and let you make the decision yeah but let's be
126honest they all well we all do but but the other all you can do is look at but the other thing to the other thing that you need to keep in mind is you're talking about many years you're consolidating many years so you know we'd love to be able to list all of President Nixon's events that took place during his presidency okay but what I'm trying to say is you're consolidating many many years where many many things took place that's where we use the standards to help us Define the most what is considered by the New Jersey the most important events to include in our curriculum that's where they do lean on the standards in that particular sense to determine that because again all of our presidents have made you know have done many things
127within their presidency it's just consolidating I mean US History too starts in 19 is it 1950 when does it start um Us 2 starts in closer to 1900 I mean it covers a long SP of even more than that so I mean consolidating all those events from all these presidents it's it's it's it's not an easy thing to do no we're covering over a century right and nitpicking whatever the standard High you know Zar out of it in nine months right and I and I think that what you said about the district moving towards being Civics minded you know it's what the state has moved towards you know gone are the days I mean I I would I would bet it's um students would be hard pressed to see which side of the political party
128our teachers are even on because it is something that they are very cognizant of they you know our our history teachers take it very seriously that they are not it is not ethical to apply you know undo influence on things I mean I we have teachers that are um you know that are of all different political parties I I don't want it to be under the assumption that they're all one political party either so when you look at the guide and you're covering the the topics like I and if you look at the Pac and guide that is to the left for each day you know you might be looking at a period of time for for 5 days you know something that's very quick and again it's not lecture it's students reading it's students
129exploring it's and one of the things that we do have to provide Assurance with is that we are providing both sides of controversial issues all along the board you know it is in in all of ours that the New Jersey Department of Education takes it very seriously I hear and I validate that I will try to give as much time as possible with the curriculum guides I did share the guides um the Tuesday after president and stay with the student achievement committee I do kind of try to give as much time as possible for a thorough reading and for conversations during it and I know that we even spoken about it at student achievement this time that we've had a lot to do because of qac and because of the anytime the Department of Education
130changes a standard it immediately throws curriculum work into overdrive you know every little thing that they change you know one we want every student to learn about climate change in multiple subjects and you're like like oh great that's 14 curriculum projects so um I will be cognizant and I will try to give the student achievement committee as much time as possible I know that um Mrs Ayanna con is wonderful at uploading everything to the board um work folder for everyone to review and again I'm always open for conversations and questions that you have about any of the guides um I I have faith in our curriculum writers I believe that the two teachers that worked on this guide um did their due diligence and they really Ood the task their content area supervisor went through
131it with a fine tooth comb um sat down I went through it with a fine tooth comb I take my responsibility very seriously as well because it's up to me to make sure that we are compliant with the expectations of the doe that we are impartial unbiased and supporting our students to become freeth thinkers to your point about about the um you know is there any additional window like how much more in advance because I know that uh in talking with ktia you know she is you know diligent to do you know uh due diligence and to go through five curricula in the time that she had received it was tremendous because you know we are um you know we don't want to cast an empty vote especially with curriculum we're not doubting anyone's ability
132to put together excellent curricula but you know we do want to know what we're voting on so I do know that the job that she had and other committee members had to go through five curricula you know um in the time like if they were given it on President's Day you know to now is not a big window um you is there any room for them to get a little bit more time to go through it so that we're we're at this meeting where we're voting on it and there's no time so I I did it did come up in committee and we did discuss it we I said that I would try to give it to people as as early as possible and we talked about how to you know look through the guide
133and and what parts of the template are um repetitive and what parts of the template are there that you know we have to um for each unit plan that's there we have to tag standards that are related to it um and understanding that the curriculum guide is created for a teacher for interpretation these don't go out to the students these aren't syllabuses they do not go out to a student for review we do have them on our um public website for parents to be able to review but in ways of looking at it and kind of speeding up that process um cusac years are hard and years that we have to make sure that we're prepared um my colleagues would probably laugh because I have talked about the binder eight million times um but we
134have a you know 6in ding binder that has a curriculum sampling that has to be given to the county for review for and they have checklists for every guide so that's why we've been on that short timeline and that was one of the things that I explained during the student a achievement committee but I am cognizant that this is volunteer work for everyone here and that we all have other responsibilities and I will try to get it to people as quickly as possible um you know we don't have uh hard deadlines for the curriculum writers that are preparing the materials so it is something that we've been working on as well is kind of making sure but in a course like US History 2 we might have six teachers that are teaching that so we
135had two of the teachers that were working on the but we always want to make sure that we're getting guides into the teachers hands as well so I will do you know my best to get it to the student achievement committee as you know quickly as possible um so that they do have time to review that and speaking to someone who who reads uh you know hundreds of curriculum within a month I can understand it can be a a large task it's a good task it's a worthy task but yeah thank you thank really quick so for example like I saw the curriculum yesterday because it came through your weekly summary it since I'm not on the committee I'm waiting until like yesterday to read it it was in the board folder on Friday I'm
136saying so it is early on so you had the meeting Tuesday it's already going to be on the website by like at least Thursday Friday right you know what I mean like it's going to be there as soon as we put it onto the agenda it goes into the Boe workspace so it was on it was in the workspace as well as on the website on Friday that's what I want to know I go ahead and remind you about it in my summary but it's on there wanted to know for you guys to say that well today is a no today is a Monday meeting too and that's makes it a little bit more difficult I just wanted it out there that it's put somewhere right after the meetings I I can certainly ask for
137it to be put into the Boe workspace folder coming out of student achievement once it's decided that it'll be moved that way if you would like that Dr Labby we can do that I was just wanting to let everyone know that is on there early okay and this is where as a board member I do really hope that the committee members on every committee because I know I do in my committees if you see something that doesn't sit right with you you raise a question the other thing in the progression of our meetings um normally if we have one meeting that month student achievement in governance are after the um the the board meeting so you you have at least least 3 to four weeks to review anything on student achievement and governance uh it
138just happens to be in this particular case that um student achievement was held last Tuesday um prior to this meeting and it happens to be that we're trying to do the best we can to get a lot of curriculum guides revised so that we can have a favorable grade during qac now we could have gone about just throwing 100 curriculum guys out you but we didn't we pieced them so that everybody had the chance to digest them prior to cusac coming so as Miss Gman said earlier it is a little bit of an anomaly that we're doing it in this way but we are doing it to prepare for qac and these our these are revisions that we have to have in there in order to get our assessment rating that we need through qac
139and again if you do the math I don't know Miss Gman how many curriculum guides have you approved since the beginning of the this school year to get us ready for qack I think we're over 50 at this point so she did her best to piece them so that you could digest them in small amounts that's good but I just think it's also good that we sit and have a discussion sometimes about things like this versus just assuming you know that we're all in agreement nobody has any questions so I'm glad we had this discussion okay moving along to governance number two which you can find on page 10 we're asking you to approve several new revised policies and regulations for a first reading I think that Mr Fernandez spoke about those when he gave
140his committee report any questions on that particular item because the other item is our HIV you're asking about any questions about the number two the Amendments on governance page 10 it's that's where the motion is yes yes I do have a couple questions if I may um with regard to uh student grievance policy 5710 uh is being amended I understand it to be uh number one first level uh is the student or parent May submit a grievance to the teaching staff member most closely related number two the second level is to submit it to the principal or the design if they're looking I suppose to appeal we're talking about the appeals process here and the third level is uh to submit it to superintendent or designate um so my question is previously this policy had
141a step where uh number three the written grievance may be submitted to the building principle the superintendent and the Board of Education in that order and within a suitable period of time is there a reason why we're removing the appeals process going to the Board of Education if they're not satisfied with the appeal decision because there's only two reasons why the Board of Education would hear an appeal mhm to any problem and that would be HIV as well as long-term suspension I'm sorry can you elaborate so you're saying that that so by Statute there's only two and if you look at Board of Education ethics right there are only two types of decisions in which the board will go ahead and hear an appeal to okay right and those are h IB mm and long-term
142suspensions okay so this is not referring to those types of grievances is that what you're saying so correct because that's not part of this process correct got it okay thank you um another part that was removed was at each level the student will have the opportunity to be heard personally um uh in number four the grievant May summon the assistant the assistance of his or her parents or legal guardian at any step and number five was removed a student grievance that proceeds to the board well that one you've explained but those other two points were um the student will give an O given an opportunity to be heard and that they may summon the assistance of his or her parents that was removed I I think that was removed because that's in inherent in it
143um in the process of need any parent or Guardian is basically be going to be conducting the appeal right on behalf of their child under unless the child's 18 the child can select as to whether to have their parent or Guardian appeal with them okay and doc Dr Le this policy when we talked about it in governance the examples we were given is it's most commonly heard in the middle school and high school level if I want to form a coffee drinkers club and the principal says no that's the most common type of appeal that you guys are hearing is related to clubs and Student Activities this isn't appealing grades this isn't appealing anything like that it could also appeal um they could also be appealing um a class they wanted to be in a
144particular class and they're not eligible to be in that class we have we happen to get that a lot a child wants to be in an honors class but hasn't met the criteria to be in the honors class so they would appeal it to the teacher then they would appeal it to the principal and then of course it would go to me as a superintendent okay um I had a question about no I appreciate it um Food Services number four uh it says that if a school district does not receive an application or a sign card from the parent the school district shall make at least one attempt to contact the student's parent and request that the parents submit either an application or assigned card um you know when I look at that I think
145it would be reasonable to allow two attempts to contact the family because looking at this uh it could you know situationally we're talking about a student that might arrive at school and this has not been processed yet and they might go to the lunchroom and you know uh that could create a situation what would they do in that situation if they didn't you know if not processed uh an application this is with regard to the lunch program or the breakfast program and this is if the school did not receive the application the sign card from reduced lunge yeah this is for free and reduced lunge right so so in this particular case you're asking why would we why only one attempt to contact the family because at that point you have the student in school
146so I'm just trying to look at it in my mind how this plays out so every every parent has the opportunity to apply for free and reduced lunch right right um we send reminders to parents we try to contact parents to say Hey listen make sure you go ahead and file an application but for us to have the the labor to continuously ask people more than once to file that application that's just too much um we do our best to get parents to do it but think about the fact that over 40% of our our our students now are on free and reduced lunch right so that's a lot of people so we send out as many reminders as we possibly can PRI to it individually calling that's speaking to individually calling a parent or
147contacting a parent individually we don't have the ability we don't have the the the the labor to do that so what we do is we put out as many reminders to all parents as we possibly can um and we also try to incentivize it through other things like subscription busting oh that's free if you got free and reduced lunge um and those kinds of things it only benefits the school district to have more students on free and reduced lunch sure um but it doesn't impact the child in the sense of like if child just moves into school um and might be eligible for free and reduced lunch first of all we don't know that we don't know people's you know socioeconomic levels so if Billy moves into school all we can say is here's our
148free and reduced lunch application please take that home to Mom and Dad but we we we don't know if Jimmy's eligible we wouldn't have that information we're not supposed to have that information unless they apply for it so what we try to do is remind parents over over again especially those parents that were on free and reduced lunch previously that's one of the things that um Mr cadino who is our current director Food Services does pretty well he reminds we have a we have a a group of parents that we you know know that you receive free and reduced lunch last year remember because you have to file it every year please remember to file your free and reduced lunch application uh and we'll send that as many applications as we can but calling individual
149parents they just don't have the time within the day to do all those things it's so important that we send it out because doesn't every year the state raise the thresholds so you may not yeah you may not think you're qualified for it um so just so that everybody's aware in the registration process every year that the parents have to complete there is a link right there to complete the free and reduced lunch application so we make it very accessible it's online we do also provide paper copies and we never turn students away from getting food so I don't want you to think that students go to the cafeteria they didn't fill out the paperwork and they can't get food we never do that yeah that's what I wonder about was that point of the
150process yeah no that does not happen we're not allowed to do that no and once students have a negative balance then we we do have a very proactive way to continue to reach out so while we do send out reminders we have the registration process the schools send out reminders once you hit that negative then you're getting constant reminders so if people aren't doing it they're just acely choosing not to isn't the threshold like 80 bucks or something didn't you go crazy with that threshold I'm not aware exactly what it is but the threshold for the negative for us to send the reminder no it's not that oh the threshold for the negative Oh I thought you meant the threshold to receive free and red oh no to to to we allow them to owe
151us money before we cut them off we don't ever cut them off cut them off we don't ever cut off what I'm saying so there is no thresh balance is the threshold is not something that they're going to hit in a minute they they could you know there is no threshold Eileen so you if you don't have a lunge and you don't have money you get a lunge but it just it gets recorded as as a balance now unfortunately unfortunately we have we have students in the district that have well over $500 on their balance and we've personally contacted their parents to plead with them to fill out a free and reduced lunch application and they refuse to and they also refuse to send in a lunch with their child or to provide money and
152they just keep going ahead and building onto their balance and there's pretty much nothing we can do about it thank you um with regard to 8601 student supervision After School dismissal um I don't know if it's two different uh sections for for referring to two different grade levels and on in the beginning it says it's re it's changed from pre kindergarten to grade three uh and then in a couple of paragraphs down it's pre kindergarten to four so is it different no that was a mistake that Mr Glock Malloy did fix on the clean version of that okay all right and then I want to ask about number three being added in is that so if a student is on uh campus so to speak at one of the schools uh and the after school
153program has ended so what's being added in is that student would then be transferred to the police department by an officer so it can so this happens quite often we'll have parents that decide for one reason or another or or not I shouldn't say decide that's probably the wrong word to use they forget to pick up their children from school it happens quite often and when we try to contact them we can't find them or we can find them and they say I'll get there when I get there and this is pre prek to uh third grade we're speaking about that age group this is the the the preschool through third grade yes and we'll get there when we get there and there were times when our principles would be waiting until 7:00 for a
154parent to get there and parent not care feeling like this is you know your job um so we have a procedure in place that's supported now through the policy that if you have a case where a child is for one reason or another not picked up by their parent after a certain time period we place that child in our leading Edge after CARE program and they've been very gracious and I can't thank them enough for doing this they take the child so that our principal and our teacher can do other things that they should be doing after their hard day of work um whether it's continuing with where their work or going home to their families um and the parent is then build by the Leading Edge Aftercare service and Leading Edge then takes responsibility
155as to uh recouping those funds however Leading Edge closes at 6:30 so in that particular case or actually 6 o' in those particular cases what are we to do with the child the parent still hasn't come to pick up the child and when I tell you that this is not like an anomaly this happens on a regular basis guys so in that particular case those people have families those people have lives that's when we request the assistance of the sville police department to take the child in custody to the police station where they're kept safe until the parents arrived to get them do we have information about what the police department's particular procedure is for that situation no I don't have the specifics on that but I do know that they cooperate with us with
156regard to that um they basically supervise the child to make sure the child's all right um we do call the Department of Child Protection and permanency on cases like that because I in many ways I feel like that's child abandonment um but again I'll emphasize this is not like an anomaly yeah I don't know what they're trying to get Eileen I don't want to be presumptuous I don't want to be judgmental I'll assume but I I I I I just know that it's become such a problem that we have to have it supported in policy and this is bus children too bus children when then we bring a CH we bring a child to a bus stop and there's no adult there to take that child off the bus and we what so what we
157do again our bus drivers are amazing they recognize that there is no adult there and guys that's not easy by the way they know the faces and if they know that someone's not there um they they don't let the child off the bus and they bring the child back to the school we call the parent the school calls the parent to see where the the parent is and the child is you know goes back to the school in most cases the parents there within half an hour and 45 minutes to pick up the child for one reason or another they weren't there at the bus stop to pick them up in other cases child doesn't show four hours where in which they're picked up from Leading Edge child care and then in other cases we
158have to send them to the police station because there are no adults that are going to be in the building to supervise and take care of their child is this the first time that the option uh you know of sending them to the police department is this the first time this is being put in the policy first time being put in policy yes not first time done okay in practice now it's official yes now it's supported in policy and just a little impetus for that um the previous policy basically stated that a child in prechool through third grade could walk home from school all by themselves without an adult and the only in our policy because it was a standard policy there was an opt out from that so if you wanted to opt out
159from us releasing your child alone you had to fill out this opt out we said we recognized that this was this was something that we weren't in support of because of an incident that occurred so we decided that we needed to change our policy to reverse it now your child has to be picked up and by the way that's the practice that's been going on since I've been here in Saville we don't allow any child to walk home alone in preschool through third grade so he was just um but we didn't have it in policy so we made sure now that it's in policy and if you're wondering about the law there's nothing about the law in fact here's the scariest thing there's nothing in the law about what age a child can be home
160alone New Jersey it's parental Choice whereas other states Define how old a child has to be before they're left alone so that's why we're go we're taking this precaution again what's our highest priority the Safety and Security of these students so we're making sure that all of our kids um that need that supervision and we Define that as being preschool through third grade are getting that supervision a couple more quick questions I do appreciate your patience as I you know newly to the board and and newly going through uh you know uh policy um for student discipline our 5600 uh it says that when there is and this is a reference to counseling uh letter b number three that the the counselor May refer the student as appropriate for additional counseling evaluation intervention treatment or
161therapy referrals may be made to the child study team the school's intervention and referral services team a public or private social agency a legal agency or any other referral service that may assist the student um so I had a question about you know and just to clarify in my mind what is the uh procedure with Ard to the parental involvement with the decision to refer to outside entities um you know those decisions with regard to outside agencies um specifically speaking New Jersey has something called New Jersey's children's systems for care um you might have heard some of the the programs in it perform care mobile response we are not permitted to refer anybody to that parent has to do it okay we have to tell the parent you need to go ahead and fill out
162a referral for per form care or mobile response um it is Our obligation to do that if we really feel it's necessary however there are certain circumstances when we can go ahead and make referrals to other programs for instance intervention Referral Services the child struggling academically the teacher will refer them to that so that we can provide them what are called multi-tiered systems of support um we have a duty to inform the parent of this but we don't have to get parental consent to do that um in terms of a child study team evaluation okay again if we have children that have been receiving interventions in school for years and we're not seeing any response to those interventions otherwise known as RTI our building Administration does have the ability for that and for other emergent
163reasons to make a referral to the child study team for an evaluation however Mr NASA is jumping at this right now to talk we can't go ahead and evaluate that child though unless the parent cons sends to it so we can make the referral to the child study team for that but we can't evaluate unless the parent consents to it okay we also have another program effective School Solutions which is for our children and Mr naster talked about this during his presentation that receive a higher level of clinical care if they have some form of emotional distress um maybe it's leading to outward behavior in the classroom maybe it's relating it's leading to suicidal ideations maybe it's um you know causing the child to be school avoidant we do have that program but again we
164can refer to that program but we can't do that without the consent of the parent okay there are types there are occasions when we have a crisis student is in a crisis um and we we have our called crisis response teams and if a student we feel is in crisis we can go ahead and refer them out for a psych an emergent psychiatric evaluation and require them to have that and for a a psychiatrist to say that they're permitted to come back to school so you're you're commenting on the academic and and that uh you know this is also referring to remediating problem Behavior so in those situations where the counselor May refer the student to and and it could be into that could be irrs I intervention referral services for Behavior it could be
165intervention ref referral services for attendance right so the referral recommendation going to the parents and then no the for intervention Referral Services um there is no there's no you do not need parental consent for that for the child to go into what's called Intervention Referral Services we do need to make parent aware of it though okay thank you I appreciate it um the last question and this is a quick one with our uh 5600 student discipline it has the chart that's uh listing um with regard to weapons violations that that require a mandatory police report um I'm just curious grades K through three on the first incident of a weapon's possession without intent to use K through three 4 through 5ifth and 6 through 8 is an automatic police report but 9 through 12 is
166not so I was just curious as to why the absence of a police report for high schoolers that are found with a weapon without intent to use I'm I'm thinking it might be just a a typo or that that might be a typo that line okay that might be a typo because that's it's an automatic police report no matter what grade level you thank you I appreciate it I appreciate your time in answering all those thank you she's making sure that I turn my microphone on um okay moving along to Personnel Services um we do have some retirements that I'm G to talk about real quickly because I I know it's getting very late um so first we're asking to graciously accept the retirements of Maryann Ford uh a third grade teacher at the Truman
167school and that's affected July 1 and then Stephanie Pudo who was also an elementary school teacher um but most recently um is an English as a second language teacher and that's effective May 1st so Maran Ford it is with great pride and gratitude that I announced the upcoming retirement of Maryann Ford marann has been a passionate educator for the past 33 years for over three decades she has provided countless opportunities for her students to learn and grow during this time she shared her valuable knowledge of teaching with countless mentees student teachers colleagues and friends she has served on numerous committees and spent countless hours volunteering her time to support School functions she has been dedicated to her students both in the classroom and out by showing up at various events such as birthday parties and
168sporting events she kept her students engaged in many ways in the classroom such as singing dancing and making personal connections that utilized her lessons she has made an incredible impact for countless young minds and inspired a love of learning that will be that will last her students a lifetime we thank Mrs Ford for making a difference in the lives of so many children in the sble community over the many many years while we are saddened to see her leave we are excited for the new chapter that awaits her so please join us in thanking Mrs Ford for her exceptional service to the sville public school district we wish her a happy fulfilling and well-deserved retirement thank you Maryann for your years of dedication you will be greatly missed by all those who have been fortunate
169and privileged enough to call you teacher colleague and friend and on a personal level I am one of those people that can call Marian Ford a friend as well as a colleague um I've had the opportunity to to to know Maran since I've been in the district and she's everything that I just said and more um she's the consumate professional but she's one of the most student- centered Educators that that I've ever had the privilege of working with um more over she's just a great person wonderful person um that cares deeply about the children that she serves impeccably but also the teachers and support staff members that she works alongside of um every year to to meet the needs of the students at the Truman schools so I'm going to miss her terribly uh particularly
170her bright smile and uh wonderful demeanor Stephanie Pudo Stephanie began her career 23 years ago in sville as an elementary teacher and most recently for the past nine years as an English as a second language teacher in the district her career in Saville began as a third grade teacher at Wilson she later transferred to arith teaching second and third grade she remained at arith for 15 years and I think she worked with Dr agues then um as well as four actually three other principles during that time she is remembered for the enthusiasm and creativity she brought to the classroom after seeing an increase in the number of English as a second language students that were enrolled in Cal she decided to pursue a second degree as a teacher of ESL and sought a position at
171the high school for the 2016 and 17 school year as an ESL teacher at the high school as well as the middle school and this particular School the samel upper elementary school when enrollment dictated she demonstrated diligence and dedication in supporting some of our neediest students as they acquired English and acclimated to life in the United States just one example of her genuine concern for students was when her High School multilingual Learners were taking their High School graduation proficiency exam she could be seen pacing the floors at the high school anxiously awaiting for the results and celebrating the success of each and every one of them while equally Adept to supporting those who are still not there yet outside the classroom she shared her expertise for this content area with the district as a leader
172in the English as a second language department and a mentor for other teachers as well as a curriculum writer lastly she serves as one of the district's teachers for the adult ESL program for many years and again we've talked about that program before if you ever have the opportunity to witness that program and the teachers that working it in terms of teaching our parents English it's phenomenal uh it'll Inspire the heck out of you and she was one of the Pioneers in that program along with I think Mr vogle was in that with her the Legacy Stephanie Pudo leaves behind is something she can be proud of we definitely are proud of and certainly something we are all grateful for definitely we wish her a long and happy retirement in this next chapter of her
173life and can't thank her enough for everything that she's done for her students our staff and the greater cerebal Community number eight which you can find on pages 14 and 15 we're asking you to hire some non-certificated staff for the school year numbers nine and 10 which you can also find on page 15 we're asking you to proove the transfer of non-certificated Staff of the school year 13 and 14 which you can find on page 16 and 17 we're asking you to appoint pay code Coes with their stiens and volunteer coaches for the spring season number 17 it's that time of year again U we're asking you to Pro Staff to work at the 2025 Camp Excel extended school year program on an ad as needed basis based on enrollment and Mrs Bloom this that
174concludes my report microphone microphone microphone oh we need a motion in a second to the super report Sor I'm sorry I'm sorry okay we need a motion to accept the superintendent's report please so moved iano and Mrs pone as a second okay Mrs chowski yes Mr Fernandez yes Mrs Hernandez yes Mrs Maldonado yes Mrs napalitano yes Mrs pone yes Mr Smith yes but um have to abstain on page three number six okay Mrs Bloom yes uh but I also have to abstain on page three number six and finance okay okay uh now anybody for public just please state your name and address for the record thank Steven chowski five Road Street been a serval resident since 1966 graduated from serville 1984 played with me Mr Fernandez's brother he was a fellow defensive lineman he was
175the left of defensive guard I was the right defensive guard and uh good man anyway uh Kya Hernandez um thank you for looking into the curriculum as a seral resident I appreciate the fact that you're doing due diligence and I would love to see what the students are being taught as well I was going to speak last board meeting but uh Mr spado he got up and he spoke in in deference to him he seemed very heartfelt about his son being bullied I just want to leave it there but tonight's a good night to speak I know it's late you guys want to go home number one uh a couple thoughts I have a question for Mrs Bloom at the end Mrs pado was concerned about there being a ton down in rhetoric that begins
176with you guys um during the campaign there's a 10-minute uh Facebook unhinged event calling certain members running who are now on the board uh bigots in races that's bullying it's not really uh proper behavior I've also seen videos where people here at the table when people would come up and speak would put their earphones on and turn their chair and not listen that's also not proper behavior for someone to do when we're looking to communicate with people Mr pado himself during a campaign uh although I believe he's a good dad and a heartfelt person um he doxed two senior citizens putting out their personal information to intimidate them that's called bullying so everything starts with you guys right so you're supposed to be the voted election people pardon I'm sorry we just lost the timer
177hey going just start at three minutes keep going anyway so it all starts there everyone wants to work together seral wants to be better that's why you guys are doing this right so amen work hard but you guys be the example another thought I've listened um Miss Herz Burks I'm so sorry I tried to pay attention um Dr agis I thought so you guys talked about uh teachers tonight I've talked to a number of your teachers they're burnt out they uh feel that they all they have to do is constantly do administrative follow-ups and they're not teaching like they were and some are retiring some are leaving um so I know it's tough to Human Resources but you guys got to find am I done already almost oh okay I was like wow anyway Mrs
178Bloom yes sir so tough job but you guys got to figure a way love to have a question for Mrs grman seral resident G out talk to hundreds of people for the campaign that was there went to their houses talked about what they were interested in taxes and being taxed and also is am I done I I will allow it go ahead you're the only one keep so taxes and being taxed and also the um the school system when we talked about 5756 uh parents were perplexed that this was happening whether they were Jewish uh Hindu Catholic Buddhist um Muslim and no one seemed to agree with that now in light of that it was being done here and 5756 now in light of the fact that the president is now said that there's going
179to be there's an executive order and I do understand that you guys were all told we told in the past that there couldn't be a change in that and there were 30 school districts that have changed it as a taxpayer I am now concerned that if there is an executive order that you guys don't follow you're going to lose Federal funding you're going to go into unnecessary litigation that's going to cost us more money and all you guys have to do is change it into something that conforms before it goes to litigation and before it loses Federal funding because taxpayers are already upset in serval right okay okay but anyway thank you guys I'll talk next time God bless thank you yes we we will close public now and I will take a motion to
180agend oh don't we have I'm sorry comments any comments for the good of the order one at a time please and go all right I would like to say what is the policy 5756 is what we're always debating or talking five what 5756 yep 5756 all right so I would like to recommend that the board actually makes a vote on this because it's every single time we come here this is what we're talking about we have people coming from out of District talking about it we have um car's husband now talking about it I'm sick of debating it it's nothing to be debated it's either yes we're going to get rid of the policy or no we're not and every bringing it up every single meeting having people traveling here to breed it into our
181brains is really annoying and we have other things that we should focus on so we really need to I think as a board bring it up for a vote and make people vote Yes or no because it's really getting ridiculous I don't think we should eliminate it personally I and I want to just make it clear to the other board members and to the public that the reason I do not agree with that making that policy getting rid of it is because one kid could be sent home to a parent who like some of the speakers that have spoken before us believe that religious interven ion behavior modification that that's going to change this person's sexuality and it's not so you know the the idea behind what's going to happen to me if I send
182one kid home to a parent who's going to not accept them make their life you know hell I can't do it and I will not vote for that that that's the only reason that I will not vote to repeal 5756 and the the more I listen to people in the public and I've said this out loud and you don't agree with me so I don't really it doesn't matter if you agree with me or not because I'm here to protect the children is that you know they act like oh we're wrong protecting one kid if only one kid is protected that's enough for me so I'm just tired of hearing it every single time we're here we're volunteers I'm just tired of it if I could comment on that I think that we haven't had
183uh a discussion so to put it up to vote when we as a board have not discussed this at all we have not had a discussion about it in executive session we haven't discussed it at the table here so I think that yeah we need to talk about it but having the public come to the microphone and share about it does that's not our conversation that's us hearing uh you know the public speak about their opinion about it they're for it or they're against it but we haven't discussed it yet so I would say that I'm not prepared yet to cast a vote on this because we do need to you ran on Appeal on repealing it so how could you not be prepared not the conversation with the board either you know we are
184and and I'm firm in that promise because we got over 21,000 votes between the three of us based on that thing that we were going to try to accomplish so the community is behind us in this endeavor the majority of the community and we're going to do due diligence and continuing but we have not had an opportunity yet as a board to discuss this well that's why we need to do it because I'm not vote on it tonight but I'm not saying vote on it tonight I'm talking about we need to put this to rest as a board you know what I mean let's me and Carrie just talking Lucy we're not fighting please don't say saying what I'm saying Carrie is that we need to just get it done either yes or no because
185I'm really tired of every single time we come here that's all we it's it's a it's a good thing to you know the public coming out and Shar in what that the public is not here the public coming out and sharing about it it's that is the community of sville and we are their elected officials that is them bringing concerns you know to us to talk about so I agree that we we should add it to the executive session agenda in order for us to discuss it and start the conversation you can't talk about during executive session because it's not a matter BR you can't talk about the only time you can talk about it in executive session is if you're asking the attorney a question about it oh so then here at the table
186so you cannot talk yes the only things that you that you talk about during the executive session are Personnel matters or any matters protected by confidentiality okay that particular matter is not protected unless you are asking our attorney a specific question about it which we yes so you know let's let's do we can add it to agenda here to start to talk about it and I do appreciate what you said about taxes in this town cuz we're all taxpayers here so I do not vote lightly on any time we're spending money I seriously consider it uh on the finance committee I'm very much aware and very excited that we got the state aid that we get because it helps offset the spending and what we need to burden the residents with and if we learn
187from our state representative lives or from our business administrator or from anybody that we in danger of losing funding for anything I will be the first one to vote to keep that funding anybody else okay take a motion to adjourn so move second meeting is ajour