001very very few things we put on here but just to remind everyone of what this budget helps us to accomplish and so one of the nice pieces of recognition that the district earned this year was the new jersey lighthouse award and that is a culmination of a number of years of work towards our culture of diversity equity and inclusion in the district and actually we also recently had one of our 12th graders reagan miller named student upstander of the year by facing history and she also earlier this year earned the joy prescott humanitarian award for student leadership and dedication and then just some of the other highlights of some of the the great things that our students are doing um our girls soccer team did earn the conference championship this past fall we had uh
002our seven national merit semi-finalists were all just recently named as finalists our math league continues uh to do really really well um and this was as of last week so i'm not sure if their rankings have changed i know they had one more competition and then you know some of the other recognition that our students earn we have a student that is going to be participating based on their regional performance in the national neuroscience brain b we had a student recognized in the coca-cola scholars program we had another student participate in the pioneer summer research program for neuroscience we had a student selected for the economics for leaders program another student serve as the ambassador for league of women voters our students earn a lot of recognition in the fbla regional and state competitions as
003well as mock trial and these are just uh you know a little snapshot of some of the the wonderful things that our students are doing that are supported by the budget that our our board approves so now uh i'm go oh actually here's just another um some other highlights of our district accomplishments and i know that uh mr morrison has spoken about this and i i think it's a credit to the board and this district that we have been able to stay open since we reopened in uh september of 2020 after being 100 virtual for the beginning of the pandemic um we always do really well with our bond ratings and we refunded bonds in 2021 saving taxpayers approximately one million dollars over the life of the bonds our aaa bond rating continues as well
004as our clean audit we're four years running we have no audit recommendations and we do utilize shared service opportunities for transportation insurance buildings and grounds and food service and we you know as the board has talked about we're always looking to expand those so now i'm going to turn it over to tim and he'll continue with drivers thank you thank you doctor i'm going to do the same thing because it's uh it's hard to talk with the mascot when you're doing it anyway um just so to go back on some of the dates just so the board's aware so march 10th march 8th is the governor's speech um if you have some time it's only about an hour or so long um a little boring but it's you know it's actually there's you can parse
005a few things bits of information that are important to us so you know it's not it's not bad to listen to what he has to say on march 10th we'll get our information we'll turn that around quickly and try to get the detailed booklets out to you right tonight i only give you the the new budget items i didn't give you all the detail only because one or two numbers change it'll change the whole book so so rather than give you the book i'd rather just wait till all the numbers are in put it all in and then give it to you so we're going to try to turn it around real quick we don't anticipate a lot of changes but i never quite know what to state so i'm just always a little leery
006some of the things that we were they're usually the same type of things every year dr jude talked about the strategic plan which is number one on our budget list um everybody has to adhere to the plan to make sure you know we're we're in that frame where we're supposed to be enrollment projections and the board is aware that is it has been dropping i mean you'll see that in a slide later and then our resources which i always look at right away to see how much money we're going to have to fund the things that we need to fund the tax levy uh that's day-date which we don't we'll know in march 10th and tuition with our send receive greenbrook which i almost call part of the tax levy it's actually part of greenbrook's
007tax levy if you think about it but you know so those are major items and then salary and benefits obviously 65 of our budget technology is always a big big thing in these in this particular time we're in capital maintenance big dollars and you'll see those and there's always one x factor it's either a storm a pandemic but this year it happens to be inflation the supply lines those things are problematic and they have been problematic prices are going up particularly in transportation you will see that some of the things we want to order where we have to stay away from because we may never get them it's been that some things have been that long that you know some of the lead times some of these things that we're ordering are ridiculous so we
008kind of move away from it so those are items that we have to look at when we're putting together and enrollment was one of those and as you can see the enrollment it it's dropping again on a small pace but over that three year period it dropped almost about 200 kids so it's a little bit every year but it definitely is it's a factor and our salary and benefits 65 of the budget um i have we reduced 12 positions over five years i went back eight years and it was like 20 that many that but which coincides with the drop in enrollment currently we're negotiating with our largest union the njea the wh rea the local group and that's always tricky because we have to estimate what that salary settlement might be and we work
009with the negotiations committee to do that and then since joining the school health insurance fund our premiums have pretty much actually the last two years have been flatlined it's never been over three and this year a little bit higher at four percent um our and i expected an increase i thought it was going to be around the eight percent so that four percent was a welcome um a welcome number uh it was four percent because um the shift itself did very well so even though we had um higher claims we were able to because we're in that pool we're able to share some of those um benefits of being in that shift so it dropped it to four which is good um that's a reasonable number if you go back years when we were in
010horizon and then went to aetna it would be it wouldn't be uncommon to go to 10 to 15 in some of these health care numbers we haven't had that and i'll knock on wood when i say that in the school health insurance fund and then for our academic and co-curricular additions a couple of things that we're adding within this budget we've been on a plan to replace um our furniture uh the student furniture in some of the classrooms we pick about five to six per year and we're in year four of that and that's 205 000 we're trying to remain committed to that to change all our furniture there's a new book series english english electives there's a and if you have questions on that dr jewett can answer those um one of the things
011that's not specifically in the operating budget but within the entire budget is learning loss and social emotional learning that we a multitude of programs that we have in the esser arp grant that's the federal money that we got as part of the pandemic and we are using that for social programs we have rutgers behavioral here with an additional individual to help our students for mental health we have before school after school programs for the students that are behind and i know what's the name of that program empower thank you and we have that program so those are the things that that are in that grant that um are and we're going to have them for two more years so they're very helpful to the students and i just wanted to make sure that the board
012is aware that these programs are part of this budget albeit there in the grant funds but they with something that will we will have services we will have um in terms of co-curricular we have our uniform program which we renew uniforms every three years and we're looking at a new box truck now that number might be a little low or look we started looking at a used one but i'm noticing that somebody's used trucks they um they're at a premium right now and a used truck is not much at that price is not much better than the one we have which is over 20 years old and the frame is starting to rot a little bit the box truck is used by the band by robotics and a multitude of athletic teams and it's able
013to carry a large uh number of things particularly with the band and robotic robotics has a big robot and a little um i don't know what it's called it's like a it's like a big wooden field yeah and the robot climbs up it and throws things it's pretty cool but um anyway so it's something that we do use for our co-curricular program um and it does need to be replaced i just have to figure out how we're going to do that but there's a couple of options that we're looking at so that might change and the aeds we bought about i'm saying six or seven years ago if i remember right so they're they have to be replaced and we worked with our new athletic director and our nurse who's fairly i won't say new
014but she's been around i think she wasn't around the first time we did it so we we've tried to redo where we want to put the aeds and how they want them distributed throughout the building so we came up with a plan and we and that number right there is for 17 aeds some of them are outside and they need temperature boxes i guess weatherproof boxes or whatnot and they also we tried to cut back on some of the ones where we we had a lot of handheld ones and they weren't being used as much so we felt it'd be better to have them on campus at places that in strategic places that either the coaches can use the teachers can use so anyway and it has a two-year warranty that price includes that warranty
015uh for technology the crew were in year six of the chromebooks um that price has gone up um that's probably part of the inflation but we also are getting better chromebooks um the the earlier ones had connectivity issues these do not so that was a and that was a key issue that we found during the pandemic 80 teacher laptops now everybody is either one or two years old we have 10 new classroom smart boards that will outfit all of our classes with either smart board or a projector most of them have the smart boards now the firewall upgrade that's more of an internal network item um and two new security servers we have about 130 cameras throughout the district well those security cam their servers are on there they're almost over capacity so we need
016to update those and by the way those security cameras aren't valuable we find out we we solve a lot of issues with those security cameras and they keep people safe so um anyway that that's been a terrific thing for this school um the capital needs and this is something the russia asked me i think at one point in time so we we have year one of 15 a lease payment for our ecip that's the energy savings improvement plan that the board took on let's see if a year and a half ago i didn't remember anymore um so as part of that plan we're paying a lease but it's offset by savings in electric some in gas and also some maintenance so you'll have less maintenance because we'll have new rooftop units like that one right
017there that's a fairly new unit and you can see how large it is but we have about eight of those in the ecip uh we have solar panels on our roofs they have been delayed they're supposed to be they're they're supposed to be done already customs has held them up it's been a problem we expect them to be done this spring though we're hearing that they're at least here in the country so they should be done in the spring from what i hear once they start that project they end it really quick they move fast and we have to do it around the students what makes it tricky so it'll be after hours weekends and we'll have to cordon off sections for the sports but we're pretty confident that we can get that done we
018have new interior lighting which again is around the students so these here in this media center are led lights we're going to outfit the entire school with led lights the main advantage for led lights if you have them at home is they don't go out as much the old lights all the time and you're constantly replacing them so the maintenance cost of replacing those lights will greatly drop and also the energy savings that you get for these lights is fantastic so that should be happening relatively soon they've done all the planning i know they've ordered the lights so they're just scheduling now to when it's going to get done they're also doing building envelope insulation that's 90 done doors windows so a lot of the stoppers and things and the doors that they had to
019shore up and if you were around our doors on the outside you could always inside you could always feel the cold air coming in the bottom of it so they they did help that out quite a bit and then improvements to our building management systems so they can better manage the when the things are on when they're off there's there's a whole bunch of components with that that are extremely helpful and our capital needs there's really only one item if you look at the total numbers and capital it's dropped quite a bit that's mainly because our revenues have dropped but this is the one item that we've been trying to figure out a way to do this it's the long jump pit and if you look at that picture it kind of tells you what
020the issue we're facing the underneath is is bad the mechanim underneath when we did the track we didn't do this i kind of wish we did we ran out of money at that point so we just did the track and and that's all we had at that particular point we thought we could get away we did get through this thing for about five or six years so that's not bad um it's just but it's failing as you can see the kids can't use it it's the state doesn't allow it the bubbles are it doesn't look as bad now but in the summer when it's hot the gas is from underneath those bubbles just pop up so you can't literally can't walk on it and then they pop and you see the one that's popped on
021that picture so this has to be replaced it's it's a pretty large area but the problem is it's one area and for the contract to come out we're struggling to get good pricing on it that's where that's why you see a significant price on that it's one spot i would love if we could do the entire track and that but quite frankly the track doesn't need it so this is this just has to get done or else we just don't do long jump here at our school um yeah i'm a trekkie so i have my assumptions um and if anybody can name that episode i'll be impressed but that so some of the assumptions we have um the state aid we think is going to be flat i don't see the governor making significant changes
022it's just not the time for him to do it he hasn't certainly hasn't made any comments publicly even privately that suggests that so we we're assuming state aid will be flat there's a piece of the budget software where you can actually have a reduction in your tax levy based on savings from the chapter 44 health benefits law that was something that was signed into law a couple years ago um that that applies to districts who actually save the money from that we did not we actually lost a little bit however i can only tell you that the calculation was done by the department of ed so i always a little nervous and skeptical as how they're going to interpret what i'm seeing so we'll we'll see i don't believe we'll have that adjustment but you
023never know additional charter school students we do have one uh each charter school student is about 26 27 000 so you get a couple of those that can make a big difference but i don't anticipate that um any other significant changes that the state might make i again haven't heard them talk about it i haven't seen it i don't think it's going to happen and then the final thing of course the lingering covet impacts i hope there are none of those i think we all hope there are none of those ever again and then just looking at some of the totals this is the preliminary totals and i think these numbers could change a little bit i don't you know i don't i don't want to this is closest to where we're going to be
024but just so you guys see where we're at at the moment uh use of surplus is down about 16 and that's if you remember we added 290 000 to this current year budget for the science lab otherwise we'd be pretty close the tuition revenue as i said was down because we were getting fewer greenbrick hits about 30 less miscellaneous revenue is up the federal revenue is very minor in that by the way it's only semi-money which is about 17 000 that's not a lot but what i didn't do this year as i didn't plan for rental revenue because of covet we didn't know we were going to have rentals we are so next year we actually budgeted for rental revenue because we suspect that we'll be able obviously things won't change we'll be able to
025have rentals here full-time state agencies are flat and then tax levy is at two percent uh the total operating revenue budget is just a hair under one percent or a point five percent almost flat down just slightly on the operating expenditure side the salary benefits i told you the four percent health care and then there's a percentage we have in there for salaries uh so it's about 2.7 percent uh there is a little bit of breakage we did have a retirement supplies are down 7.9 not uh there was more uh items last year in our instructional thing one-time items that aren't there and athletics actually had we had more uniform purchases if you remember last year we moved away from the symbol of our our school and we had to buy additional uniforms not not
026a ton but at least enough to drive that number up and we had a lease payment come off the books so that drove that number down a little bit uh special intuition is up a little bit um and that's something that the board has talked about when you're talking about regionalization consolidation that's something that would help if we all had one big happy family to drive that special ed bus so we can kind of be on the same page because we do get a number of freshmen that come up that are out of district and that's something we would like to minimize if we could operation transportation the transportation is up six percent uh which is high um and the other piece of operations going up is we have maintenance projects that we didn't have
027last year but it kind of is offset by the capital projects we're not doing next year that we did last year so those numbers aren't too far off the transportation is you'll see it in the sheets that we give you the transportation's up there's just no question about it and i i can tell you that the a single route a couple years ago was 26 000 maybe 27 000 in that range and now it's well above it's like 30 30 34 35 for a single route so it's gone up and that that unfortunately is the way it's going to be the cost of the drivers is going up the cost of the fuel is going up so it's that's going to be tricky and overall on the operating side of budget is again just about
028break even these numbers are actually the same as last year because the state hasn't updated their numbers yet but the next couple slides are just comparisons with schools that are very similar to ours they're from bergen county bergen county numbers are always going to be a little higher i'll tell you that morris county hundred and hundred and county schools that are just similar to ours you can see we're on the low end i think gary vincent said that for the audit but that's total budgeted cost per pupil this is uh instruction just instruction cause we're still in the low one it actually would be like like to be to the left on that one uh in terms of administration who are actually moved a little bit to the left we do have a um i
029don't wanna say older administration i want to say experienced and then uh with our co-curricular we're actually one over from the right but you know still relatively well um tax allocation change and i have to slide in here only because uh just for the folks that are new we every year we get as part of that state aid we get an allocation from the state of where where our tax levy goes within these three towns and they use two things they use the change in enrollment for the elementary schools and the change in total valuation for the town and those two factors will dictate how our tax levy may change for next year so it's very possible that one town will get a tax decrease another town will get a tax increase which drives some
030of the town's nuts and it's always tough to explain but um anyway so so that is forthcoming we'll get that on march 10th and we'll know that then i can calculate what the tax rates will be for the three towns it's hard to do that in fact i can't do it without it i would it wouldn't be fair because if they change significantly which i've seen in the past then i'm misleading you and i don't want to do that and then this is the tax impact side i don't have any numbers yet they're still waiting for those but once i get those numbers on the on the tenth then we'll get that book right out to you guys and you'll see that and that's basically it for this edition of the budget does anyone have
031any questions yes mr broomberg thank you you mentioned something about special ed out of district coming into the high school does that mean we're taking kids who are not in our school i mean in their towns and our seniors i'm talking about the students that come from our sending districts warren wachong longhill and greenbrook they they come in here as freshmen and when i say out of district they'll go to a private school for a disabled so or a public school right are the kids reevaluated when they come here or we just accept what we're given all of them the eighth grade iep meetings have somebody from the high school there for the transition meeting but the iep is written by the k-8 school district because the student belongs to that school district and there's
032sometimes a certain level of apprehension if you're coming from a very small k through eight and the perception of a big high school and so more often than we'd like to see students go to an out of district school for students with special education programs dr shan dr chand if you could please turn on your microphone so i have few questions on slide 13 okay the ac program so it was approved more than a year ago and a lot of things were to be done like changing all the thermostats or you know vending machines and a lot of things slide 13. i actually put it up yeah so and the the question is that this company honeywell i mean a lot of things they make themselves right and more than a year ago so are
033they giving us least priority in this case i mean why is that a lot of things have not been done yet so honeywell's been here um the building envelope piece is 90 done so that's one piece the lighting piece you know that's been planned and they're buying the items and that should be done relatively soon it's got to be done around the students though so meaning meaning the students can't be physically here when they're ripping out lights and putting lights in so that should be done relatively soon at the latest probably be done by the end of the summer the solar has been a problem that one has been an issue getting the panels themselves there's been a delay and that's one of those delays you hear about in the news but that is also
034one year you know it's almost one year since we you know approved them well they were supposed to do the work in um actually february was when they were going to start it which is honestly the weather is so bad anyway i don't mind that they delayed it i'd rather do it in a little i'm i'm always a little worried that snow will be involved and that becomes a mess and you're dealing with a roof and that makes the roof problematic so i'm like honestly the spring is okay as long as it's done before the rooftops now the rooftops are a problem the rooftops i i will tell you and these are staggering numbers some of the rooftops have a 42 week delay 42 weeks that's nuts i don't even know what to say about
035that that's absolutely insane but i i'm hearing it all over though this is not the only place who's dealing with this it's us i can tell you piscataway has the same issues so it's it's part of this this these supply line issues that you're hearing throughout the country they're coming here we're we're dealing with the same issues you mean uh looked over you mean a track they did that a while ago but 42 weeks is 42 weeks that's a lot of time i see i think that's insane but the excuse they give you the customs that is not a valid argument because customers don't have space to keep the things you know panelists are huge you know you pay the customs duty you get stuff out you know so i do not know they are
036making excuses but for commercial is different and the question is uh my slide number 17. so last time when i came i saw that a lot of our buses they were empty yes so and you said the cost of transportation has gone up six percent so it's not something that we could find some clever way that gives some incentive to students who are not using the buses but you still have a place guaranteed to them so which is a waste right i feel that that if these students could be given some some sort of a incentive and you can use that space so you would be not needing many buses or many drivers and the coast may not go up so it's something that we can work on you know it's tough for the high
037school high school busing is tough because you got a quarter of the kids who are going to drive you know and but you you we are required to have a seat for them because if a student let's say if there's bad weather blah blah blah they got to have a seat available to them now when we plan the buses the bus routes we plan it with more than 50 kids on that bus that's a trade secret so for a high school not anymore because everybody knows it but so because we assume that there's gonna be so many kids now the cr the coronavirus the covet stuff has definitely added to parents driving kids in there's no question on my mind about it the kids don't like wearing masks they don't want to drive on the
038bus and our time makes it easy for parents to come here so if you're here at 7 30 in the morning right about 7 20 to 7 35 go another way because it's a little brutal in the morning there's a lot of traffic here we would love to have more kids on the bus it would make it simpler in the morning the numbers also decrease as the year progresses because students are getting their licenses now so if you notice the parking lot on mountain avenue which two months ago had no cars in it now has cars in it in the morning so the numbers change as the year goes on it's a difficult thing to tackle and i understand the point i don't like to see empty buses here that drives me nuts but at
039the same time i you know i can consolidate routes that's the best we can do but we also triple tier with the other schools so that makes it a little more difficult i got to be conscious of what they need so i can't have five buses and they have eight it makes it really tricky so i really need coordination with them we were able to do that with long hill and watch young but not so much with warren warren i would like to do but i can't do without their cooperation i need them to help me with that other questions i have one more question here so if i see that slide 17 your total budget is like 44 million dollar and you have the enrollment is uh 1879 so if you divide that number
040then perfect cost is much higher than you show on slide number 18 you show only 18 311 right i don't know how do you calculate that number so the numbers on those slides that i gave you are state calculations what they do is they take pieces of the budget so they'll take they'll take certain sections of the budget and then they'll divide it by the number of kids i those aren't our numbers it's from this taxpayers guide they also have a number there though however that says it takes the total budget including debt surf and everything and they call it total budget i never put that on this slide i just do their operating budget but that's this is how they report it i can give you the specific i'll give you the website so
041you can take a look on how they do it they actually explain they have like 17 indicators and they explain each and every one of them and how they do it so it's the best comparison i have with every other school district other questions mr gallic yes sir a couple questions one is i i think you explained this before but it's worth just touching back we look at the green brook numbers they're paying per child so if they sent no one they would pay nothing but we still have overhead associated with those kids so their green book looks like they're getting a great deal so i'm wondering what your comment to that is so so greenbrook so there's a specific formula in the state code on how to calculate how to calculate tuition for ascend
042receive which greenbrook is um and it's it's embedded in the budget software so it calculates overhead costs for every single kid you know the cost for transportation it's all a piece of it and it's not just let me go back to transportation certain transportation costs like for example going to um sports clubs that sort of thing greenbrick transports their own kids we don't but there's there's overhead costs there's lots of things in that formula that encompasses everything we have and it's her it has to be per student the number one all the students they send so there isn't and they they also pay a interest on the bonds that we um that we have not the principal the interest so there's there's a load of overhead costs in that formula so they to me i
043mean you know i i don't know a better way to do it if the state code tells you this is what it is and it has all those costs in it i to me i think it's it's reasonable and the board last year you weren't on the board but we have a three-year deal with them in and around it's it was based on one of the formulas from a couple years ago um and we're just giving it a trial right now because the increases and decreases were we had wild swings so we tried to just make it this is the base cost plus two percent plus two percent that that's a three-year deal we're in the in the midst of right now that's to try to flatten the curve a little bit with both of
044us we're going to see how that goes after three years and then we'll talk about it but if you're asking me do i think the formula is fair yeah i actually do the numbers look i i think it's a reasonable approach and i think they do peg so to that logical point where they pay per pupil and they pay looks like a million less or per pupil but our budget isn't going down with less students our total budget our total budget isn't going down but they're paying less for people and i'm not saying that i'm not commenting on the greenbrook formula but simply the logical reference that you brought up where they're sending less kids the overheads covered etc etc but the rest of the school the three other towns do not see a reduction
045in overall expenses even though the student population has gone down yeah well i mean our budget's almost flat so you see a slight decrease but yeah you're you know it is a point we have we have items that have gone up for example your salaries your benefits so those things those costs have gone up and we're still within that two percent cap um it's not a a huge decrease i understand what you're saying um but yeah it's you know we we were able through i guess careful budgeting we have a lot of one-time items which were able to eliminate this year for example capital items like two classrooms that we were doing they're over a million dollars we don't have to do those capital projects so they were one-time items if it was if i
046didn't have those one-time items in the budget then you would be seeing specific decreases within the budget so if we eliminate them we'll see a decrease in the budget if i didn't have let's put it this way if last year we didn't have those one-time items those capital items we would have to cut programs i mean there was no there's no other way that doesn't mean that we can't that doesn't mean that we don't look at programs we don't look at staff because we do we just take a look at the numbers like we're dropping 50 or 60 kids should we drop two teachers you know should we drop a teacher should we do so those things we do look at but we're looking at the overall numbers of two percent tax levy increase and
04750 kid or 50 or 75 kids down is that something we should do we have to look at both things the programs and the taxes and at the moment our thought process as well we can we maintain the programs we have and have some other one-time costs which we need to do you know your classroom furniture your track that i was showing you those kind of things we still should do those but at the same time we keep taxes still relatively low two percent is a reasonable number even though i understand what your greenbrick point is i get that right right um it's a fair point so i'm trying to stay at a macro level here so because we're preliminary so just general discussions the um so our school population is decreasing you mentioned uh
048how many kids over the last three years so it was about it was almost 200 kids and how many reduction in staff did we have so so i went back eight years we had almost 20 um but the last four or five we had about 12. so we should be looking for more or less reduction in staff or is that not at all i think where we've been in terms of reduction of staff is what we're looking at mainly attrition um you know it's always tricky when you have to start cutting positions where you have talented young teachers and as you might be aware when you're cutting staff you're not cutting you you have to go to the uh little folks on the totem pole meaning the ones that just came in so it doesn't
049so that that becomes a little tricky for us and we kind of have to make decisions sometimes looking at that we are still looking at staff um that's something that we were talking about just a couple days ago and we plan on talking about this week that's why i said the numbers you're seeing may not be the final numbers but it is something we need to we absolutely look at one last question i wonder if you could put up the last slide the tax slide no no so it has increased increase for warren decrease increase for watching probably because christine that's it because that's last year this would have been kind of making the point where i just didn't want i represent warren it just has the only one with the increase increase now it
050does change from here that i'm here and i'm looking at it that's all yeah i don't want to have to explain it that's all yeah i thought i had this yeah i only had this as a placeholder just so you so increasing increase is a placeholder yeah thank you just want to make sure we understand at the moment okay honestly i hope they're all decreases other other questions from mr stein yes if i can just make a couple points and mr president if i can ask you when we go into the committees if i can go first operations go out of turn because my operations report ties directly to the uh what we've been discussing now just to make an easy transition but that's your decision yeah absolutely this one address a couple of dan's
051points valid points items we did discuss in operations with regard to greenbrook and it's an interesting comment because we certainly discussed that at length when we set the number several months ago uh with daniel they're getting a great deal and there's some chuckling because greenbrook thinks they're getting a raw deal so right so janine i saw her chuckling even under the amount right but just so that you know that there's two sides and and then we also had a discussion with respect to the teachers in the drop in enrollment and whether that could uh mean dropping uh teachers the unfortunately we had this discussion it's not linear it'd be nice that if uh a student population dropped teacher would drop precipitation whatever but unfortunately the teacher world is more a step because if we're looking
052at 24 students in the class and they go to 22 you still need a teacher not until you're really eliminating the class that's where you get that benefit so that's why looking in the long term makes more sense so i think you said over the five years there's about 12 teacher reduction in eight you just mentioned it's about 20. and there was some discussion with regard to the student-teacher ratio and i had asked administration to give us some numbers with respect to that to look at uh class size because when you look at our ratio and again had mentioned that we're about 12 to one uh teacher student little misleading because some classes have aids in them due to iep and it's or it also included nurses guidance counselors right non-teaching staff in that ratio
053so it's a misleading number right so you really need to compare i mean so dan you bring up it's it's not a very transparent ratio so to speak right so we're going to get the information to show really what the true like average class size and how many classes we really have between 20 and 30 and if there's really that many classes that have eight kids or even 12 kids but i just want to respond now because that's where the discussion and i'll touch upon a few of those things thank you any other questions from studies miss dr chand dr chandra if you could uh and just a reminder to everyone because we do have people that are watching at home to please when you speak to use your microphones so uh my comment is
054that because there are a lot of people senior people are leaving the state they're selling their home real estate price going up so younger people will be moving in so don't you think that enrollment will go up in coming years wow that's what we're going to do if i may miss on that one i think that's one of the things that we are going to find out when we do a demographic study as part of the regionalization study well that's how we'll get an understanding of what is the projection for our enrollment moving forward and i think warren's doing one now yes uh warren k-8 is doing one now so we'll get some answers from them to be honest other questions from mr styles great seeing none then we will move to the operations committee
055report sperm berg thank you mr president i appreciate you taking me out of turn this way because again my report really acts bags with mr sties and dr jewett's report so the predominant part of the meeting was discussing the budget as mentioned we're on a very tight timeline with regard to the budget presentation the preparation of the budget we decided we're going to stay with that tight timeline even though we are not we have not gotten the state aid numbers and we have not gotten any indication what those are as you can see with the numbers even a slight change in state aid normally you don't get more but a reduction could really throw us back some of you might remember several years ago governor uh christy knocked out a huge chunk of the state
056aid and uh i was on the board at that time and we had emergency meetings we were meeting in the morning and we got to make some severe cuts and you know we're going to do what we have to do we're going to live with the timeline if we have to have an extra meeting to go through things we'll do again what we need to do with respect to the budget one of the benefits that we have had as noted on several occasions we have had a reduction in teachers with the enrollment going down that has good or bad afforded us to continue with that two percent cap because although we may be able to go for a waiver that's never really been an issue or something that we wanted to do so again that
057two percent cap uh and again saving 12 positions where i guess an average position maybe 80 90 000. that's a million dollars that's been a savings in five years so even two positions you know it could be 150 60 or if they're on the high end that breakage could be a couple hundred thousand so that is significant um and we talked about the student-teacher ratio and we're going to get those numbers there were some other discussions uh dr chandler made some points about dual certification and whether or not that was feasible where in effect teachers can teach multiple classes and do some other things so we could get the benefit of that but again at the end of the day so many students so many classes and they have to be taught and where we
058do get the benefit nothing's ever been mentioned is where some of the teachers are flexible and they've accepted taking on an extra point too because if we get a teacher that just will teach that extra class even though it may look like it's costing us money if we don't have to hire an extra teacher at one full unit we're ahead of the game uh i don't we didn't really see much and there wasn't much discussion this was just more an operating budget but we did certainly discuss about the referendum and uh we are planning on a an 8 million referendum and again just to reiterate most of that money we have in the in our coffers so to speak but we go to or a good chunk of it but we go to referendum because
059if it's done and if it's approved then the state gives us about one-third of the money so if it's eight million dollars we'll get say two and a half million so it only costs us five and a half million if you don't do a referendum we got to pay the whole thing just the way it works so it gives us an opportunity to work off the uh the state and get eid and most of that is there's a chiller in the south building which is a giant in effect the refrigerator sort that pumps all the cold air into the building uh which is in dire need of uh replacement that's 1.3 million dollars hard to believe and then also the pack lighting projects another 400 000 so there's some significant projects that really need to
060be done that have been pushed off for a little bit and this is really the time to do it then there was some also discussion with regard to their science labs and whether or not they are where they should be whether they are state of the art and that's something that we're going to look into a little more closely so that was it with regard to operations are there any uh questions yes ms lee um on so wachong as you know just tried to pass a 14 million dollar referendum and it might have failed but some of the things on it was the air the hvac systems and they were just able to get a grant from pseg that is going to pay for 80 of that have we looked into something like that to
061pay for what we need done uh mister i think that's uh mr size do you well first of all it's very impressive to get a psc g grant of that amount of money um that's significant it just came out this week it was all over yeah so so what we're no so what we're doing is we have the esip program is a program we we get a number of rebates um that offsets some of that cost uh so that was with our rooftops and what have you so that's that plan is already in place and 80 grand from psng is fantastic i mean i have to talk to rich about that one but again we're certainly going to look into that and we certainly look at any opportunities but i just want to reiterate and
062i've said this and we've said this on numerous occasions that just because we're going to referendum that doesn't mean that we're going to add more debt or require the taxpayers to come up with more money we basically have the money i don't know about that 14 million if they actually had it or they didn't have it they're going to have a tax impact ours is a different right right so that's why i keep reiterating that and making sure it's important that when we do this we get the word out to the public that yes it looks like a ref excuse me it is a referendum which means it looks like a tax increase or tax levy or an assessment if you will but that's not going to be the case we got to make sure
063it's very clear that again and mention that why we're doing this is to get that state aid which is about one-third and we have the money that's and that's the difference because i've been up against referendums where you're really saying hey town you know 10 20 30 million if you're building a new building you now have to pay for it over the next 10 15 years whatever it may be that's not going to be the case yeah this is a no tax impact referendum that we're going forward to so we have the benefit of getting the money from the state to help and i just want to make one other comment which i forgot and tim alluded to that briefly one of the big issues that we face every year and that's the biggest unknown
064to mention it is the special ed population and even if knowing what's coming in from the eighth grade there could be someone who moves into town in 10th grade and by law anyone who moves into town is our student whether it's a special ed or a regular ad which i'm sure now i've said something wrong but we're responsible for every child so that's oh you know and that could swing that could be a hundred thousand dollars one way or another and even though there is some state ed above a state aid above a certain amount it's not required to give that to us and that could be significant and that's always you know it's always a balancing act that tim and every va has faces so he certainly alluded to it i just wanted to
065re-emphasize that other questions from her mr bird all right seeing none we will go to education and ms overall thank you the education committee meet uh met on february 23rd to discuss the empower program the nj gpa spring testing a change in the hours for the learning commons and updated mandated policies mr sabino provided an update on the empower program beginning with an overview of the program for the newer board members the program provides participating students with instruction to strengthen core skills in literacy and mathematics recover academic credit toward graduation and support for post-secondary planning and wellness it's aligned with our strategic plan goals particularly our goals for social and emotional growth and wellness and to provide pathways for educational success for all mr sabino reported that the program is working very well and that
066the students participating are making good progress and seeing a lot of success 23 students participated during first semester and all were able to recover credit in a wide range of courses the staff includes dan scanlon who's an ela teacher who provides full-time instruction for credit recovery and subjects including english social studies and science as well as intensive academic support in the areas of executive functioning time management and organizational skills reese kirshover a veteran wachong hills math teacher provides one period of math instruction for credit recovery the students the student assistance counselor emma gintisco routinely works with mr scanlon to provide individual and group support on topics related to social emotional wellness further support is offered by the school counselors and case managers who regularly meet and communicate with students parents and caregivers and mr scanlan
067to discuss individualized support and to monitor progress also the rutgers school-based clinicians work with students individually and provide daily support to groups of students during lunch time the program utilizes the edgenuity curriculum software and funding is provided through the arp esser funds for the current and next school year mr sabino reported that we anticipate continued needs for this program into 22-23 school year and beyond and may consider an additional period of math instruction and credit recovery support once we have data from year-on performance the new jersey gpa spring testing mr libera discussed this new new jersey gpa ela and math assessment the nj gpa stands for new jersey graduation proficiency assessment it's going to be offered march 14th through 18th sitting for this assessment as a graduation requirement for the this year's junior class the
068class of 2023. the length of each unit increased from 60 to 90 minutes so it'll be administered over the course of a week uh the learning commons hours uh dr jewett reported that the offering for after-school tutoring has not been well subscribed to by the students and after much discussion and observation of students the administration is looking to move the additional support to the morning before school students can utilize a section of the learning commons to work in groups on projects work individually utilize the podcast group room etc we also talked about new mandated updates to policies dr jewett provided an overview of the updates to policies and regulations and they're on tonight's agenda for first reading all of them are mandated the first one is p 2431.4 and r 2031.4 which are revisions um
069to expand our policy regarding prevention and treatment of sports related concussions and head injuries to include intramural sports programs uh the second r 24 2 24 60.30 as a new policy which expands how long we'll provide services to special education students p r 2622 is a revised policy and new regulation pertaining to student assessments and graduation requirements and p 5541 is a new mandated anti-hazing policy our next meeting we will be discussing our summer offerings for credit credit recovery and enrichment um and does anybody else have anything they'd like to add any of the committee members michael anybody have any questions janine dr chan so my impression was that that some of the sending district students coming they are not meeting the requirement of math and other subjects so after school instructions was mandatory for
070them i thought so that is not the case you said there is not enough subscription to the after after school services i'm sorry do you want me to address this question so we can't mandate outside of school time um that's you know outside of our jurisdiction so to speak but it's not for students coming unnecessarily you know coming in as freshmen it's for any of our students um that it was open to any students who wanted to come and get support from the teachers but we also had reached out guidance counselors were reaching out to students that they knew were struggling in classes um you know that could use additional support but as you are all aware our students here are very involved in things outside of school hours and so after school is very
071difficult for them we do though have a lot of students that get here either you know they're dropped off by the buses well before school starts or they get here early um and are looking for places to to work either you know to collaborate with friends on projects that they might be working on in class as we know our district spans many square miles and so um sometimes the students are working on collaborative projects you know it's nice for them to have space and time um to meet some of their their friends you know from class to work or to come in and get you know additional support so that's why we're shifting it to the morning because we think there'll be a greater demand was your question about the empower program or about the
072epidemic report oh okay sorry i misunderstood quick question um you mentioned the anti-hazing policy right um and it's uh on our um for first reading for first reading i don't know that um i know i didn't see the policy so is there a way where the board members can see that it was on our within our board packet so all so um it's everything everything is in uh the google drive uh share drive folder and when you get your agenda um everything will be in as the part of the board packet so it will be you will and and also if let's say you don't want to wait for the board packet um it's you can also go into the committee report folders um to get access to that stuff but if any dan if
073you or any board member is just looking for a quick way to get to something don't hesitate to shoot me an email and i can send you the link so that you can get right to it i'm always happy to do that because i know it's a lot to navigate but i was also going to ask you dr dude if you wouldn't mind just giving a summary of what the new policy is well the anti-hazing policy unfortunately i mean i think it's such a shame that we actually have to put in writing that that's not okay um i mean i but unfortunately we've seen what's happened in schools around the state and not far from here so that's what that anti-hazing policy just outlines exactly what is not allowed and not okay you know with
074regard to any you know any clubs or activities or sports in schools again i i think it's sad that we have to actually specify that but i do also think it's very important in light of what's happened we had the same issue when we had to do bullying years ago same concept for the record my question was on procedure [Laughter] any other questions for the education committee right seeing none personnel we did in executive session uh negotiations there is no update for the public at this point in time on the regionalization committee just a quick update that the application has been filed um uh mr sties did yeoman's work in getting it formalized and submitting it online through the state system so we now start the clock and uh we'll look forward to hearing back
075from the state uh hopefully with an approval in a uh sometime in the next 60 days so uh thank you again mr stives for for doing the bulk of the work to get that over the finish line for us um which was just about a year to the day of when we started talking about this so you've been talking about it and then on that note um uh before we move on uh just a couple things uh apologies for folks that are watching at home i know i understand we had some audio problems uh with the beginning of the first few minutes of the meeting those i think have been corrected uh and uh so uh what i'd like to do at this point in time um is turn the mic over to dr jewett
076uh to cover some upcoming updates regarding policies uh and masking requirements as we move into the next week dr jewett thank you i did have a question on regeneration oh i'm sorry my apologies dr chan yes sir so i i saw it i think last week in one of the magazines which come from leadership or something that one one region has already completed their study i don't know if you are aware of it i have actually meant to send a copy to send you that so there's the islands regional i don't remember that but i remember seeing that that one region already completed their study yes so i do not know whether there is something to learn from that study yeah actually thank you dr chan the pinelands regional study um that was released back
077out i think in over over the summer uh and uh we not only did we take a look at it but mr steiz was working with the business administrator in pinelands to get insights on how we structured our own applications so the the good news is we were able to benefit from what they learned at least in the structure of our our own proposal and hopefully when we get our report we can look to see you know what were things that they learned what were things that we learned and how that all can collaborate with one another great thank you uh dr jewett okay uh so as you may or may not be aware on friday the cdc did adjust their guidance for masking on buses we had sent out notification a couple of weeks
078ago that as of march 7th masking in school would become optional however as per the federal guidelines it was still going to be required on buses however that has now changed so we will be sending out an update uh likely on thursday just to remind everyone that as of monday march 7th not that i think anyone needs reminding i think they're well aware that monday march 7th masking becomes optional in school but it will also become optional on buses at that point the doh has recommended uh that we wait until the seventh to um to change the masking guidance on buses and we feel that makes sense since it's only a few more days and it would just be very confusing if students were weren't to need to mask on buses and then had to
079put a mask on in school so as of monday masking will be optional for everyone and we are also making it very clear that it is everyone's individual choice and right whether they decide to wear a mask or not and so anyone that is you know infringing on anyone's right to do so or not to do so we will certainly deal with that swiftly because everyone needs to be tolerant of everyone's choice whether to wear one or not to wear one uh so uh we are looking forward to that this coming monday thank you mr morrison great thank you dr joe so i have a question here in your in your weekly update every week i see that there are some covet cases in the school i mean this week like last week seven cases
080or something like that not in the school reported to us at school i just want to make that what's the difference that those students are not in school and usually they've occurred you know they've all occurred outside of they are coming to the school right no they no no no no those are what are we they call us to let us know that's why they're absent oh i see they're absent or they're not coming to oic okay so in the school we don't have the cases in that school or those students do not come to school correct that has always been the case i see but i hope that they are not taking advantage of it that just to get the time off to stay at home they report that that they are no i
081mean are generally um they give us that you know their test results are you know confirm it so we're not we're not concerned about that okay right uh thank you this is the first opportunity for public comment the first public comment period will be limited to agenda items for this meeting only the second public comment period will be open to any topic all comments are limited to five minutes first opportunity for public comment seeing no one storming the podium we will go ahead and move on to board discussion uh first item is a discussion on any of the future action items in section seven is there any item within section seven that any board member would like to discuss at this point in time you may take your time to look through no items for
082discussion all right seeing none um we are all familiar with our board goals so at this point in time i would welcome a motion to approve our agenda items mr president i move items a1 through a6 second uh discussion a1 through a6 seeing non-roll call mr size sorry about that mr burnberg yes dr chan yes mr gaelic yes lee sober yeah potter yes and mr morrison yes carrie mr president i move agenda item a7 second discussion seeing non-roll call please exercise mr burnberg yes dr chand yes mr gaelic yes uh miss lee sober yes mr president i move agenda item c1 through c5 second discussion yeah i clarification for item number c1 so c1 is uh it's a kind of a long-term substitute right for two weeks so this person does she have math certificate
083she's one of our uh retired math teachers she's been filling in intermittently for one of our teachers on staff who has needed to take um some leave time so she's coming back to fill in for a couple of weeks thank you are there any other discussions seeing non-roll call please mr burnberg yes dr chand yes mr gaelic yes lee silver yes cotter mr morrison yes mr president i move agenda items d1 through d3 second question dr chan so questions regarding d2 um well i have question regarding all four items here but the last item ceramic supply the clay for ceramics two thousand five hundred twenty seven dollars so what kind of place that is so expensive that you have to eat you know 2500 and what kind of quantity i mean it's i mean we
084have eight ceramics classes that run all day long with you know that are packed with students so he's got quite a few tons of play you are getting here i mean something i don't i'd have to look at the order to see specifically it's it's a lot that's like interesting yeah it's a lot i see then the other items you know what is the batting case or disaster recovery stories so we have a a very very old batting cage um for the baseball team and it's it's a mobile unit so you can move it and batten different spots like you could bat there you get that in the outfield so you can you can split the squad and do different things and the one we have uh it works but it's almost impossible to move
085around it is it's it's almost like a lead tank i mean it's just you can't it's hard to lift it's very old and it's just the wheels are not doing too well so it's it's just not yeah so it's time to replace it this is a lighter version i was a little skeptical of that one myself but the ad and the coach brought me out there they showed me the thing and i could see their problem they can't move it's hard to move so and what is this disaster recovery storage yeah so the the suit well the clean well the shoreline cleaning is pretty explanatory we had a major problem that we had to fix in uh south building and the storage is um uh oh oh okay so just in case anyone at home
086couldn't it's for the cloud backup i said oh if there were exactly okay but for the sewer line do we have the steam make the steam flow through the sewer line to you know weekly or bi-weekly to clean it up or you don't do anything no well no no we don't run steam through it generally the lines are the problem we have with the line sometimes is things go in there that shouldn't go in there okay and it it creates the issue and it's i don't care how much you steam it when things go in there that shouldn't go in there it's going to create a problem so you have to we literally had to dig up the pipes and find the issue and get it out of there i see so it was a
087problem it was it was a major major fix like it doesn't always get that big but this one in particular did it was it was bad it was coming back into the hallway so not good thank you any other discussion seeing none roll call please mr dice uh mr burnberg dr chan yes mr gaelic yes miss lee sober yes potter rasa mr morrison yes this is the second opportunity for public comment seeing none we will move to other business any board member have any other business they would like us then i will accept a motion to adjourn there we go thank you all right told you