February 1, 2022 Board of Education Meeting

001violated a particular provision and i'll give you some examples of that as well so section a of the code i think is pretty self-explanatory it says you're supposed to uphold and enforce all laws rules and regulations of the state board of education as well as any court orders pertaining to the schools as you all know when you get sworn in as board members you take an oath to uphold the constitution of course that includes some enforcing and upholding the laws of the state of new jersey that govern school officials section b says that you're to make decisions in terms of the educational welfare of children and you're seeking you're going to seek to develop and maintain public schools that meet the needs of all children all children regardless of their ability race creed color sex

002or social standing you're here for everybody section c this is really important this really defines what the role of a board of education member is the role of a board member is policy making you develop policies for the school districts i know we use strauss esme here they kind of set the framework for us but we have the right to tailor those policies and rules and regulations to meet the specific needs of the district some of our police policies we have a lot more discretion than we do with others because some of them pretty much track the laws and the regulations of the state and again in others we have latitude to shape them to best meet the needs of the school district so policy making planning for the future of the district and appraisal

003taking a step back at the end of the year and saying how are we doing what did we do well what didn't we do well we set goals for the school district we set goals for the board we also set goals for the administration as well and then it goes on to say that you will help frame the policies only after the board has consulted with those who are affected by them and typically with the way this is done is through our various committees next this is an area where board members frequently get confused i would say oftentimes get themselves into trouble and that is that you are to carry out your responsibility not and i want to highlight the word not there not to administer the schools but together with your fellow board members

004to see that they are well run board members should really not be involved in the day-to-day operations of the school district that's what you have this wonderful administrative team here for they're the ones who are supposed to be running the school district running the school district is not the responsibility of the school board members but seeing that the school districts are well run is your responsibility so if somebody were to claim that somebody violated that particular provision what would they have to show so to show somebody administered the schools the code says that a person would have to show that a board member gave a direct order to school personnel or became directly involved in activities or functions that are the responsibility of school personnel or the day-to-day administration of the school district by way

005of example in this particular case from 2005 the school ethics commission found that a particular board member violated the administration provision when he asked for copies of sat reports directly from the guidance secretary decided he was going to go and inspect the school lockers then saw some of the pe teachers and basically told them how they should be doing their jobs and that they weren't properly supervising the students this is a clear example of a board member really getting in the weeds and administering the schools instead of if there was an issue or a concern going to the superintendent and referring that complaint to the superintendent which we'll talk about in a second so section e says you're to recognize your authority rests with the board and you will make no personal promises or take

006private action that could compromise the board of education as board members you have the authority to act when you're sitting here at the dais at a duly convened meeting you have the authority to do certain things through your work on the various committees but once you step out of this room you're really even though you're always of course a board member you're you're a private citizen and you don't have a right to speak for the board you don't have the right to take action for the board you don't have the right to bind the board of education to decisions and so forth you shouldn't be taking your undertaking your own investigations into matters those sorts of things and what the code of ethics says is that your action doesn't actually have to compromise the board

007to violate this provision it's enough that it had the potential to compromise the board having the potential is enough to state a violation so section f says you're to refuse to surrender your independent judgment to special interests or partisan political groups or to use the school for gain personal gain or for the gain of friends now you know i've been asked before i'm i'm a vocal advocate for special education students does that mean i can't advocate for special education students anymore that's not what it means keep in mind the words say refusing to surrender surrender your independent judgment that means that does not mean i should say that you can't advocate for a particular group and so forth again just be careful on how you do it but refusing to surrender your judgment essentially means

008you've lost all objectivity regarding the matter and that you've now kind of crossed over that line but advocating for a group or having an interest in a particular group is not a violation of this particular provision so as you all know as board members you're going to come across a lot of confidential information confidential information regarding student matters confidential information regarding personnel attorney client privilege matters litigation and so forth and what the code of ethics says is that you're to hold confidential all matters pertaining to the schools which if disclosed would needlessly injure individuals or the schools and then it goes on to say that in all other matters you're to provide accurate information and i always um beat the drum on this with a lot of my school board clients and i tell them

009that you know you have the right by law to discuss matters in closed session that are confidential you know that right and i explained to my board clients that if the board does not feel confident and the administration does not feel confident that what is discussed in closed session stays in closed session it completely undermines the ability of the board to be an effective working body because think about it nobody's going to want to have an open and honest discussion for fear that as soon as they leave that room it's going to be known that this board member said this about the staff member this person had an opinion about this particular student matter and so forth and again it's going to completely impede your ability to be effective so i'll pound the dias here

010a couple times and just remind everybody in the clearest terms possible that please please respect the confidentiality of the information that you come upon it's important it's incumbent on you to do that with respect to your fellow board members in the administration and so forth and you're also reminded that your spouses and your significant others and your kids they are not bound by the code of ethics you are so it's not a justification that well i i tell my wife everything i didn't know that she was going to go on facebook the next day and publish this sort of thing so it happens so just be really mindful of that next um you were to support and protect school personnel in the proper performance of their duties uh to show that somebody violated this particular

011provision it would have to include evidence that a board member took deliberate action which resulted in undermining opposing compromising or harming school personnel in the proper performance of their duties this means we should not be evaluating our staff members publicly does this mean you can't ask good questions does this mean you have to rubber stamp things no of course it doesn't you have a right and should ask good questions it doesn't mean you have to be a rubber stamp but you should not be publicly criticizing and publicly evaluating our administrators our teachers and so on and so forth section h says you're to vote to appoint the best qualified personnel after considering the superintendent's recommendation uh the law actually says that a board of education should not withhold its approval of the superintendent's recommendations and

012it says for arbitrary and capricious reasons and so what that essentially means is that generally speaking you should support the school superintendent's personnel recommendations by law the superintendent is charged with all personnel recommendations whether we're talking about appointing people transferring demoting terminating and so forth the board of education cannot act without the recommendation of the superintendent that's why on the agenda it says you know resolve that the board of education appoints mary smith to the position of x upon the recommendation of the superintendent because without that recommendation the board can't take action and again the law says that you're supposed to support those recommendations section j section j says you're to refer all complaints to the chief school administrative officer and act on those complaints at a public meeting only after the failure of an

013administrative solution this is a good opportunity for board members to punt when you're at the local supermarket and somebody comes up to you and complains that their kids teachers given too much homework or they don't like the condition of the athletic fields you thank them you tell them that you're a board member you're not to be acting on those complaints but you're going to tell dr jewett that you got in touch with her and that you're gonna refer that complaint to dr jewett you can either refer the citizen to the superintendent or you can um speak to the superintendent directly and follow up with the person to let them know that the complaint has been registered but again you are not supposed to be acting on those complaints yourself isn't that a great phone i

014i think i have to update my slide and get an iphone in that picture let me just go back because i did forget something in this prior slide about the confidentiality that i i just wanted to highlight also the last sentence there about providing accurate information and we're going to talk about the free speech rights of board members but i did want to highlight that when you speak uh whether it's the days or in the public community about matters pertaining to the district it's important very important that you provide accurate information failing to provide accurate information is a violation and i'll give you some examples later next okay so who can file a complaint if somebody believes that somebody has violated the school ethics act who can file a complaint basically anybody can file a

015complaint but there is a six-month statute of limitations for filing that complaint that means it has to be filed within six months of the time of the alleged offense the other provision that i wanted to talk about briefly is indemnification under new jersey law and what new jersey law is this is not part of the school ethics act by the way this is just part of title 18a which is the education statutes and what this law says is that when a civil administrative criminal or quasi criminal action is brought against a board member a person for an act or omission arising out of the course of the performance of his duties as a member of the board the board of education shall defray all costs of defending such action including reasonable attorneys fees and expenses

016together with the cost of appeal and so on and so forth what does all this legal mumbo jumbo mean what all this means is basically that if a complaint is filed against you as a board member for something you did as a board member whether you did it or not the school board has to indemnify you it means it has to hold you harmless we have to pay for your legal fees and costs and you don't have to be by the way found innocent of the offense for which you are alleged to have committed so for instance if somebody files an ethics complaint against a board member claiming that the board member voted on something that they shouldn't have voted on the board has to defend you and indemnify you for that they have to

017appoint you counsel essentially and the theory is that nobody would ever run for a volunteer position like being a board member if you would have to be out of pocket yourself for these types of cases the only time you have to be exonerated in order for the board to have to indemnify you is for a criminal case so if you're charged with some sort of crime arising out of your duties as a board member you would only be indemnified if you were exonerated acquitted of the charges but in a an administrative matter or a an ethics case for instance like the example i just gave you don't have to have been found not to have committed the offense in order to get indemnification so i did want to put your minds at ease a little

018bit there are over time in my experience lots of frivolous cases that are filed against board members ethics cases if you look as a matter of fact when you read all the cases and i'm going to take you through them in a second some of them anyway the vast majority of the cases believe it or not get dismissed you know it's actually it was challenging when i you'll see in a second we're going to go through some cases where i was trying to find cases where board members in 2021 were actually found guilty i would say 80 percent of the cases actually were dismissed i was shocked to learn so the point is you at least have some peace of mind that there's indemnification if such a complaint were ever to be filed against you

019for something that you really were not guilty of okay so the school ethics commission is the only entity they're part of the department of education they are the only entity that can determine whether a board of education's conduct violated the school ethics act i can certainly give my opinion i've read most of the cases but at the end of the day my opinion is just that only the ethics commission can actually officially determine whether there was a violation of the act or not if there's ever a question about a particular course of action should i do this is there a conflict certainly through the administration you could reach out to me and you know we can put our heads together and generally figure it out but sometimes there's complicated questions and they necessitate going to

020the school ethics commission for an advisory opinion as a matter of fact we did that here in wachong hills a couple of years ago with a student who got on the board and there was a question about what were the ethical limitations of that particular member it was a very unique novel question and we got a written opinion from the school ethics commission setting forth what that member could and couldn't do so if somebody's uh violated the act what are the penalties so at the lightest end of the spectrum you have a reprimand which is a letter from the school ethics commission to the board member basically admonishing that person for the violation accenture is a resolution read at a public meeting very embarrassing it gets posted on the places where we post notices we've

021got suspension obviously that's a suspension from the board for a particular finite period of time and then lastly in the most extreme cases the school ethics commission can remove a member for violations board member free speech issues question i often get do i lose my first amendment rights by virtue of the fact that i'm on the board of education now and the answer is no you certainly have a right to express your opinion and you have a right to express your opinion should express your opinion on matters pertaining to the school district however there's a couple limitations first of all you can't disclose information that's not accurate so you can't say i'm not supporting the budget next year because we're adding 10 new positions in wachong hills if the truth of the matter is that

022you're only getting two new administrative positions that would be a violation you just said something that was not accurate you can't discuss confidential information we talked about that were you can't do things which has the potential to compromise the board and lastly we talked about supporting and protecting school personnel things like evaluating the staff in public that would be a violation what the school ethics commission says is that you also and this is set forth by the way in our board policy you should not be representing your own personal opinion as the position of the board of education and you have to include in all formal communications whether you're giving a speech writing a letter to the newspaper a lot of board members like to post on social media and by the way there were

023a lot of cases last year involving social media so just be super careful when it comes to social media and if you're somebody who likes to tweet you've got to make it very very clear that you are speaking as a citizen and you are not speaking as a member of the board of education or on behalf of the board of education and it's important that you have a disclaimer in those communications and here is the model language that the school ethics commission likes to see when you post when you write letters when you give speeches and what it is is that you have to say the following statements are made by me in my capacity as a private citizen and not and not in my capacity as a board member these statements are also not

024representative of the board or it's individual members and solely represent my own personal opinions and the reason for this is they don't want people to be confused is mr morrison now speaking as the board president or is he expressing his opinion on a an individual private issue again you don't lose the right to express your issue your your voice on private issues you just have to make it crystal clear in what capacity you're speaking okay so every year and i'm just gonna we'll do it by show of hands this year every year i basically take cases real cases from the school ethics commission and i try to some of these cases are 20 30 pages long i try to boil them down to basically a paragraph and get your opinion about whether you think these

025are true or false and some of them are really really complicated even even when i've read some of them i kind of shook my head at the outcome so we'll do show of hands on this one do you think this is true or false a board member and i handed it out for everybody saying we can look at it and for the benefit of the audience a board member violated section i of the code and that says you're going to support and protect school personnel on the proper performance of their duties so did a board member violate section i of the code when he attributed the alleged poor reading results on teachers in lower grades by stating at a board meeting quote i know that the conversation started with the high school ranking we must

026look at what's coming to our high school if we're not doing what we need to do at the lower levels we're going to continue to get these results are they students that have been in union that's the name of the town since kindergarten are they students that have been in union since kindergarten that would indicate to me that there's something wrong with our teaching staff was that a violation true or was that not a violation false raise your hands if you think true that was a violation raise your hands if you think it was false not a violation not a violation and what the school ethics commission said was and i'm reading from some of the language of the decision right now it says the board members comments did not identify a single district's teaching

027staff member by name or grade level as being bad or the sole reason why student performance may be stymied instead respondents simply question what could possibly be driving the results educational outcomes for students in the district and cited the quality of teaching as a possible source thereof as such the commission finds that an alleged violation of section i should be dismissed dismissed it again i think if this board member started calling out individual teachers totally different result how about this one a board member who was a deacon with a local church and received an annual two thousand dollar honorarium for his services violated section c of the act now this is the section dealing with conflicts of interest section c says no school official shall act in his official capacity in any manner where he

028a member of his immediate family or a business organization in which he has an interest as a director in direct financial involvement that might reasonably be expected to impair his objectivity or independence of judgment and so did a board member violate that provision when he received a two thousand dollar honorarium for from his church and then he made a motion to approve his church's use of district facilities true violation or false not a violation true how many think it was true true absolutely clearly a violation and what the board member said was look it was only two thousand dollars and the school ethics commission said you have to list any honorariums that you get over 20 250 this was 10 times that amount so we don't want to hear that it was de minimis how

029about this one section j says you're supposed to refer all complaints to the chi school administrator so did a board member violate section j when he served as an administrator for a watchdog facebook group where some community members routinely bashed the district's business administrator and made negative comments about the superintendent as well the complaint alleged that the board member at issue had complete control over the editorial content of the facebook page and should have taken action to stop it how many think that that was a violation raise your hand true the answer was false it was not a violation believe it or not and so what the what the school ethics commission said was merely serving as an administrator of a social media page which may have included complaints or posts by third parties that

030were unflattering or critical of district administration or employees does not give rise to a violation the person has not provided any factual evidence that the board member while serving as an administrator acted or attempted to resolve a complaint or conducted an inquiry relating to a complaint in violation of section j now i personally think that the person who filed this complaint cited the wrong section of the school ethics code they cited the section dealing with referring complaints to the chief school administrator i scratched my head and wondered if the person section violated the section involving supporting protecting school personnel would the outcome have been different you know so who knows um you know they the ethics commission only deals when you file a complaint you actually have to cite the section that you think has

031been violated so again maybe the outcome would have been different i don't know how about this one a board member section violated section b of the school ethics act um which says no school official shall use or attempt to use his official position to secure unwarranted privileges advantages or employment for himself members of his immediate family or others so did a board member violate section b of the act when he when she made a motion to change columbus day on the district calendar to indigenous people's day stating that her vote was due in part to the good example she wanted to set for her child it's a case that i personally had to deal with last year in this district because i represent them and it caused a lot of um but we got a

032lot of attention let's put it that way there was a lot of news trucks outside our board meetings um so do you think this was a violation of section b uh true or not a violation false true raise your hands we got a few it was false it was not a violation and what the school ethics commission said in this case was even if the board member made a motion to rename a district holiday and voted in favor of it because she may have believed it was right or a good example for her child because of the outcome of um let me try that again um may have believed it was right or a good example for a child because the outcome of the motion was decided by the entirety of the board and not

033by her alone the outcome did not result in her family member receiving an individualized benefit in violation of this such subsection and it cannot be substantiated this is important what it says is that as a general matter board members are oftentimes guided by their own personal opinions and beliefs about a particular issue or cause and unless their conduct or action exceeds the scope of their authority or is otherwise unethical which is not the case here board members are free to do so so again you're allowed to have personal feelings about issues you can say i'm doing things because i'm setting a good example for folks that was not a violation how about this one a superintendent violated section b of the ethics act that's the same section we just talked about about securing unwarranted privileges

034advantages or employment for himself or members of his immediate family when he allegedly became aware of the presence of extra coveted vaccines within the communities our first ethics covid case and did not inform the association didn't inform the union about the availability of the vaccines but these are allegations but he allegedly informed other other people in the community about them but didn't go to the union leadership was this a violation true or not a violation true yes it was not a violation they said look there's nothing in the ethics act that made an incumbent upon the superintendent to reach out to the association leadership about the availability of extra coveted vaccines how about this one an executive director of a charter school violated section a of the act which says that no school official or

035member of his immediate family shall have an interest in a business organization or engage in any business transaction or professional activity which is in substantial conflict with the proper discharge of his duties or the public interest so did a board member violate that when she posted black lives matter heart-shaped logo and a statement on the school's website endorsing black lives matter do you think that was a violation true false was not a violation and what they said was there was no evidence that this uh administrator had an interest in the black lives matter organization that she was associated with the group and so on and so forth again they go by the language of the by the act and again they said that there was no evidence at all that this was a business transaction

036or that she had some sort of affiliation with the organization whether it was a good idea or not a good idea to do that totally different story that's not the issue in the case how about this one multiple sections so section e of the code of ethics says you're going to recognize your authority rests with the board and you're not going to take private action that could compromise the board section f is refusing to surrender your independent judgment to special interest groups and then g is holding confidential matters pertaining to the schools and in other matters providing accurate information so did a board member violate this when he along with other township officials distributed a flyer requesting that they vote for the candidates in the 2019 democratic primary election flyer mentioned among other things that

037the person named in the flyer support south asian persons and culture and this was sent to by the way to people in the community who they believed were of south asian heritage and stated that the opponent was the leader of a radical group the board member signed the flyer and the signature indicated his picture i'm sorry included his picture and his name followed by the words board of education no disclaimer true anybody think that's a false all right good we're doing well true absolutely you should have had the disclaimer he probably could have said it i guess but needed the disclaimer now you might say how does this implicate the accuracy provision they said he violated section g by not providing accurate information because there was no evidence that this person was a radical from

038some radical group so that was completely fabricated as well a few more a few more slides and then we're almost done so a board member violated section i which is supporting and protecting school personnel and g is confidentiality so again another facebook page this board member shared on her personal facebook page information that casted the complainant who served served as a substitute teacher employed by the board at that time in a negative light namely the post alleged that the substitute was removed from her position as a result of unspecified misconduct identified the staff member by name true absolutely true nine oh i just gave you the answer a board member violated section b of the act when she voted to approve a resolution acknowledging that the superintendent had completed a miracle the board member's child

039was employed in the district as a teacher as such at the time that her she voted the superintendent had supervisory authority over her child true the answer is true of course you have to abstain on if you have a relative employed in the school district or an immediate family member in the district you have to abstain on all matters pertaining to the superintendent and pretty much everybody up the chain of command so for instance if you have a a child who's a custodian in the district who reports to mr sties you have to abstain on anything having to do with mr sties and the chief head of custodians all the way up to the superintendent of schools so everybody in the chain of command because you're deemed to have a conflict of interest and then

040lastly this case that hopefully you all get this one right and it just i scratch my head every time i see it a board member violated section e of the code and e says that you will recognize your authority rests with the board and you're not going to make personal promises or take private action that could compromise the board so did a board member violate this when he posted on his facebook page many anti-muslim sentiments including a picture of congressman omar omar wearing a hijab and referring her to as terrorist 100 in another post he shared a photo of a doll dressed in a hijab the doll appears to be a woman has a black eye and a bruise on its chin the text under the photo stated sharia barbie comes with hijab bruises in

041the quran stoning accessories available of con additional purchase violation clearly a violation and i thought the language from the judge in this case was great and what he said is that it's not a stretch to consider that students or families of muslim student faith may fear that their culture or faith may play a role in adverse decisions by the board based on the board members public expression of a negative attitude towards muslim culture and faith furthermore they may well be discouraged from even seeking redress to the board if they feel there's no point the judge said this is a clear example of conduct that would cause members of the board to lose the confidence and respect of the people and create an unjustifiable impression that such trust is being violated very well said you know

042nobody's going to feel confident in a board member that expresses such extreme hatred and prejudice anybody on the board or administration have any questions about anything i covered today sir discussing that particular case no so that's a good question so these the cases that i discussed this evening um are all public decisions yeah and so and i should have mentioned this before you'll see at the end of each case that i cited here and you have copies of the powerpoint and for some reason i think i broke your remote um but you'll see that there's a citation at the end so if you go to the new jersey department of education just google new jersey department of education school ethics commission all of the cases that i cited here tonight are public available for inspection

043you know when i talked about penalties before i forgot to mention that if you're found guilty there's going to be a published decision out there stating that you committed this violation so no violation in publicly discussing these cases that involve board members at a public meeting in this particular case there's nothing unethical about discussing it because they're published decisions yeah okay oh yep yep well yes yeah so the and that's where so the question was you know the question was you know how does the board consult with the policies and plans that you're being asked to develop what is the mechanism in your opinion i think i heard you say was that you don't think there's a true mechanism and that's a good question right right yep right and that's that's where the administration comes

044into play that's where you rely on your administrative team your superintendent who in turn relies on the folks that are on the front lines with your children and your staff members to provide that feedback back to the board generally through your various committees so that you can create policies and frame plans around the input that you're getting from the administration you're right board members should not be directly interfacing with students and staff members about various things so that you can develop policy i think you're going to end up getting yourself in in trouble even if your intentions are good and so that's why i strongly recommend you rely on your administration to do that yeah that's a great point so any member of the public can come to the microphone and hear and weigh in

045before you finalize the vote and as miss barone mentions there are two opportunities generally and sometimes even more to do that any other questions for mr zitmer just one quick one if you if you would yeah um could you briefly review um uh the issues around board members volunteering in school functions because there was obviously a lot of discussion and an odd interpretation of of how that works so just for particularly for new board members who may be involved in in with as volunteers at the school it would be helpful for you just to quickly do that you know board members by their nature are volunteers and sometimes board members like to volunteer other than being board members and the school ethics commission has been directly confronted with the issue about what are the ethical

046limitations for board members who like to volunteer in other capacities can we still serve on the pta can we go into classes and read books to kids at the not in high school obviously but in some of the lower schools and the answer is yes you do not lose your right to be a volunteer the only caveat that the school ethics commission um gives is that if you have a lot of direct interaction with staff you have to be super super careful because even though you might say i'm an individual i'm here as a citizen i'm here as the pta mom today you're always wearing that board member hat and so anything you say may be construed as being board action private action and so forth so just be careful if you have a lot

047of direct interaction with staff we need to question whether that's really the right volunteer position for you because you could be putting yourself in harm's way but as a general rule it's absolutely allowed and permitted thank you very much my pleasure thank you nice to see everybody and nice to meet the new faces new folks and good luck thank you thank you mark so we have uh boy do we have robust committee reports that we have to get through so we're going to first start with uh no we're going to start with tim yeah i was i was leading i was i was leading up to mr sties who will provide a uh preliminary budget presentation yeah i'll pause so uh thanks for uh being a committed guest here for the uh the original preliminary

048budget presentation um you'll hear from michael later we had an operations committee we discussed some things in the budget this is an overview of things that we see challenges that we have and what we expect in the budget process and things that are going to impact what we're going to put in that budget i always thank the board thank all the board members the committees for all your guidance and your help uh it's always very much appreciated last year we actually remember right we only had nine in the beginning because carol you weren't on yet it took a little bit of time to yeah so starting out with the budget time frame we we actually start the process back in october we send departments information that they have to gather and get back to us

049typically mid to late january we receive the budget guidelines it allows us to calculate send receive tuition the board at least the board members who have been here know that we have a three-year agreement with greenbrook board of ed with fixed rates for the next three years and at the end of that three year period we're going to look at it i can tell you that i calculated them and the rates that i came up with are very close to where we are so it wasn't a big change but you'll see later i'll talk to you about the number of kids from greenbrook that are coming this way which does impact the budget beginning of february today we do a presentation uh just this very general presentation around february 22nd i don't have the official

050date yet the governor gives his state budget address and then we receive our state aid a couple days later and i'll talk about that later what we're expecting on march 1st we do a preliminary budget presentation to the full board and at that point we're looking to submit a tentative budget to the county now you guys and for all the folks that are new you get a big pretty fairly sized binder with all the details of the budget so you'll have a couple of weeks at least to review that if you have questions you can certainly call us bring it up at the board and on march 15th the board makes a takes a vote to submit the preliminary budget to the county office and then they have a couple of weeks actually almost a

051month to review it and approve it they usually get it done mid-april and on april 6 we have the public hearing on the budget uh did i say 26th oh 26th not to six thank you uh and just a couple of key things that that's gonna have an impact on the budget um transportation and i will apologize again to uh parents we actually had a call this morning at six o'clock we had to let parents know from wachong that there was not a driver there's no bench and you know the bus driver shortage is becoming an issue there's no question um every week is a little different for us how it impacts the budget is that the rates for drivers are going up statewide our rates we used to have triple tiered routes for about

052seventy five thousand dollars for the three routes they're all 98 or above now to give you an example so that certainly has an impact it's impacted us this year well next year and i'm hoping things get better as we move away from that second bullet point covet 19 which i hope we can put that in the rearview mirror and next year won't even be an issue but it still is i mean it's still a factor uh it certainly impacts certain things we do and i'm hoping that next year we can get away from that but we'll see it doesn't seem to want to go yet um and you hear about inflation and supply lines well we're we're getting that too um prices are going up um even though they're bid upon it doesn't matter it

053just you know as we bid and as the co-ops bid those prices are going up in line with what your you're experiencing at supermarkets gas stations and that kind of thing and also the supply line issues are creating long wait times so we kind of almost have to look at you know what type of things we're going to get and the delays do hurt us financially declining enrollment i put declining enrollment building and i apologize if that's confusing but what i meant by was our enrollment is is continuing to decline and warren is our our town that that um eventually that goes it'll start kind of leveling off and going back up but as of right now for us it's still declining um and what i meant by building is although that the enrollment is

054declining they are building new houses um now i don't know um from what i've seen from what the reports that we've got in our last demographic report it doesn't look like that building is going to impact us for at least four or five years and we'll see you know it's hard to tell from just i'm sorry or at all would be good but you know i yeah i i think in time though i think the phenomenon that spectacularly warren you do get you tend to have that emptiness and then those folks leave and then you get new folks coming so i think that would be something that you you'll probably see some type of increases in time anyway so uh rising health care costs is an issue um i talk about this with my family

055and if you try to get a doctor's appointment these days it takes you about two weeks to a month to get a doctor's appointment so um that means they're busy so when they're busy then your claims go up your claims go up your rates go up and so forth and so on so we are seeing about an eight percent increase of projection we are in the shift if we weren't in the shift it would probably be closer to 10 to 15 but we are seeing healthcare costs going up and one of the things that you don't see in the budget but we are in the midst of a solar solar plan that should be done within two to three months from now so our roofs will have solar panels uh right now we have um

056folks insulating doors windows that's part of the ecip plan the lights in the hallways and the classrooms will be like these these are led lights so all of those energy efficiency things you'll notice a large drop in the energy budget now it's offset by the lease to pay for all these things we're getting we're getting the solar panels are not part of that cost but what is is we're getting about 10 new rooftop units and the rooftop units we have in this area i think it's four seasons or seasons four whatever one of those two they're very efficient they're very good units and we're going to have them school wide now i think the board members have been around and peter knows we've had many board meetings where we were cold we were hot but

057these are pretty consistent as you so that's something that we're looking forward to but that's a big impact on the budget in terms of energy and that lease payment and finally i just did want to bring up the regionalization study it doesn't have a direct impact and it may not impact us next year but part of the study that we were talking about the board has and the committee has is not only to look at the regionalization but also some shared opportunities and shared opportunities are a good thing it's a good thing for the taxpayers it's a good thing for the schools and i think it's something that will certainly have an impact at least somewhere down the road if we can incorporate at least some of those things in there obviously if we went

058regionalization that would have a huge impact um and this is the declining enrollment i talked about um actually that number is a little high i'm going to drop that a little bit uh it's a little bit under 1800 that's the projection that number is a little bit more than i would but anyway so it's yeah so it's you can see the last we were over uh 2300 about seven or eight years ago and we've been steadily dropping by bits and pieces every year it's not a lot but it's enough that's quite a drop from 23 to 1800 overall on the revenue side the 2 budget cap is about 654 000 uh total tax our total tax levy is 33 million um only five percent of the operating budget is state aid we're starting out budgeting

059flat we could get a slight increase um if you remember there was a the state was providing a incremental increase every year it was something that um senator steve sweeney was pushing and that he's not there so i don't know there's been talk that the districts who lost money during that they're going to try to make them whole and i don't know if that's the case it's all hearsay at this point in time but if they are going to make those districts whole then districts like ours who were shorted for years on state aid won't get that little extra bump so that i'm not 100 sure of i don't know we're just going to budget at least for now that's flat i mean if we get a little extra more than great um the send

060received tuition that did take a hit this year and that's going to have a big impact on the budget we are prepared for it but uh the declining greenbrook enrollment hit us all kind of at once it's about 30 kids that went down from last year so we had about a little over 400 like 407 and now it's about 380. so if you multiply that amount of kids times 18 000 which is the tuition rate that's about 500 thousand dollars that's a pretty good slide but again we were we were kind of see we knew that was coming uh based on their enrollment so just have to deal with it and then the use of surplus um we don't have the i know they the state changed the um excess surplus designation anything over it

061used to be anything over two percent was excess if i had to get back to the taxpayers and we've been kind of moving along that path so even though there is no excess we still plan on using our surplus to offset taxes and then we have a tuition reserve of a hundred thousand dollars and on the appropriations side the board knows that we are in negotiations for a new contract so that's that's always a little tricky when you don't know the number yet so you kind of have to guess what it might be and then the as i mentioned health benefit projected increase eight percent which is brutal we've almost been flat for the past four years which is phenomenal um but you know eventually the good things always go away so that's the way

062it works so we have a possible reduction in head count um we're still looking at that we're not 100 sure yet again a drop in enrollment but again it's just tiny bits so it kind of makes it a little tougher we're looking at class sizes and it's always challenging for high school because it's not like you know you have so many kids in a class there are electives and things like that that you have to kind of take a look at instructional needs we still have our one-to-one laptops uh it's about 260 thousand dollars uh the classroom furniture upgrade we'd still like to if we can fit it in we still like to do it we're allocating about 200 000 a year for that if we can keep doing that that would be great the

063furniture has been terrific the kids like it the teachers like it so that's always a good thing we did have in the budget this year one of our supervisors put in an outdoor classroom which i thought was a great idea right out in the courtyard behind my office um there's a nice little courtyard out there and what they wanted to do is they felt it was something that would be nice to break up a day but also with certainly with the covid still in play that would help too so we we came up with the thought process of moving that to the grant funds that we got from esser arp and then special ed costs as our enrollment is dropping the only piece of our enrollment that is not dropping is special ed so we

064actually have a higher percentage of special ed classified students and out of district students which is unfortunate when it comes to cost because the cost is tougher i mean it's just more that's all so that's a little bit of a challenge um and then on the capital improvement side i mentioned the lease payment we have for the ecip plan that's about 500 000 and it's offset by energy savings and maintenance savings on those units and we have been talking about uh the ref a referendum vote in september where we're going to use our own our own capital reserve surplus and state money to pay for a project that we're looking to do one of the things that the committee discussed and michael can bring it up later but the committee discussed taking one of those

065projects that we had in the budget and moving it to the referendum and it's something we get 40 or 35 aid for so that's a good thing and like i said as a district that doesn't get the state aid that you're really entitled to i think it's always a good idea to go for a referendum like this where it doesn't hit the taxpayer and you're recouping some of that money that you lose every year that you deserve my opinion and that's that's basically the overview i i would urge the board if you get a chance take a look at the operations committee folder in that folder there's all the new items that we talked about in the operations meeting and that michael will talk about any questions for mr sties mr chand i'm sorry so

066tim shouldn't we have a cap of green brook that they had to pay at least say students suppose you know we can't reduce our overheads here in the school right and if tomorrow suppose today they are reducing 30 tomorrow could be 50 or 100 but our overheads will not go down so our cost will go up so shouldn't we have a cap that a you have to pay minimum for students you know regardless how many you're saying i don't think greenbrick would go for that honestly the the law is whatever student the students they send here they pay for so we can't charge them for students that don't come here correct then then the our cost should also relate to how many students they send right you say if they send 350 this is the

067rate if they send 400 this is the rate so the rate should change with the number of rates the rates are formula driven based on our our entire costs not just green brook students so it's the cost of pieces because we're again we're canceling sports at times we're canceling routes at times we've had you know a couple of weeks where we didn't have a full day so those things do have an impact on that cost per pupil so actually that cost per pupil is actually going it's actually more steady than it was even though the number of our kids are going down because we're actually spending less so that it's odd but it does when we spend less it does help it actually lowers that rate yeah and the other thing to keep in mind

068is that when we reach an agreement with greenbrook that covers the rate at which they'll be paying tuition initially when the kids are there but under state regulations and state law what what they actually get charged in the end is based upon as tim said a formula for what cost we can put into it divided by all of the kids from all four towns multiplied by their number of kids so we have this process that we go through each year basically a year in arrears you recalculate true up thank you and do an adjustment so we even if we charge them more at one point we'd have to give it back thousand numbers would go up right but then they would be paying more yeah yeah this is it's an estimate right now and then

069when the audits are done then we come up with a certified rate and that's the rate that's charged now for the next three years we're not doing that though we're going with one rate and there will be no true up the only true up and i hit this is like a bruce terms but the only true up we're going to do is the number of kids so in other words if greenbrook actually sends us 390 kids well they owe us for 10 students and the other way around too if they only send us 370 we owe them for the 10 students they didn't send but the rate we're not good for the next three years we've decided not to go after that that adjustment rate and we'll see how that plays out that's why i

070only did it three years by the way any other questions from mr stein yes go ahead dan and then michael oh i'm sorry are we going you need to use your microphone sorry is the cost ever done um per pupil so that we see like as the enrollment goes down i'm assuming the cost per people goes up and then with that is there uh like how many students per teacher and that ratio is that changing because that's 500 uh kids less than a couple years is a big number it is a big number so yeah so what we do we do within the audit which i think is in the next month there is a line in there that there's a statistical page that shows you exactly what you're saying it has the number of

071kids per teacher or teachers for kids and um some of those other statistics that you're you're asking it for so when they when gary vincent comes that's probably he can i'll have him take a look at that page and show the board so they see that our cost per pupil does tend to steadily go up as you're losing students what we've done and i said we've prepared is incrementally when we've had positions where a teacher retired we haven't replaced that position so we're down probably about five or six in the last four or five years yeah so we've been we've been steadily dropping our staff members our our numbers but you'll see it in the audit it'll give you like a 10-year look at look back and i'll tell i'll tell gary to point that

072out when he when he comes to the board yeah tim i'd like to ask a series of questions with regard to the referendum so it's clear to everybody why it's not in effect having a tax impact how much is the referendum going to be approximately so right now we're looking at a six or seven million dollar referendum okay how much of the surplus do you believe so um offhand it's it's probably about 65 percent so you know right you're good at numbers but now it's about four or five million that's about four or five and we have that money sitting in the bank so correct we do and then the balance of the money as you balance other needs as you refer to is going to come from the state correct so and the reason

073why we have to go for a referendum is why is that it's we don't really it's not a we have to it's just we have places to get the state aid but the benefit the benefit is the only way you can get state aid through a capital project is a referendum project that's it now they used to have grants but they did away with the grant so now we can only go to the referendum i mean the only reason why i wanted to ask the question so it's clear what we're doing because what typically happens public hears referendum that's scary in public so they'll see you know voting on approval for seven million dollars let's just say and their immediate response may be no why are we spending money so it's important that hey we

074all understand the public all understands no no additional taxes right and and also that the last two referendum and this one is projected to be a one-year referendum where it'll be fully paid back in less than a year so we're not incurring excessive borrowing and to peter's point we've the i think the last two referendums that we've done uh were done that way where was basically we funded it we went to referendum so we get the match from the state there was no impact on uh on the community but it's always important to reinforce that every opportunity that we have as we prepare for it's very important absolutely so i'll go with ms zober and then yeah my question doesn't involve a large dollar amount but what is the tuition reserve of a hundred thousand

075dollars i don't remember seeing that before and it's under use of surplus yeah so in june we we were allowed to put money into tuition reserve we put it into um it's almost like a separate account if you want if you will it's like a separate capital account right so you're allowed to put money into maintenance reserve capital and tuition is that for the money we spend on out-of-district students that we pay tuition now all it is is you're putting money aside that i plan on using in this year's budget so last year in june we put money aside that i was planning to use as a revenue in this year's budget from greenbrook right i always put and i always put a small amount in there just in case there's a again the true

076up part that may hurt us now it's not the true up that hurt us it's what's hurting us is the fact that there's 30 less kids coming this way but yeah so that's going to help offset that right yeah dr chand so that my question really is to the pilot program my understanding is that that school gets a percentage of the taxes collected by the town the pilot program these residents will not be paying any tax but the developer would be sharing the revenues with the town and that will not go to the taxes so are we holding a meeting with the town hey you are making this money which will not go in this particular bucket but we deserve a share in that have we started a discussion with the town so that we

077are not affected because those people will be sending their children to school right so we will be incurring a cost at the same time we will not be getting a share of the taxes well i i i know i think bob wants to answer i'm just going to give you a general overview on that when it comes to our budget we're held we're ahead held by the cap that i talked about the two percent cap okay so you know another source of of uh township money and by the way we're don't forget we're we have three constituent towns not one and we have greenbrook which is ascend receive okay so so in a regional um it is a little different we don't we're not in one town just be aware that because there's multiple towns

078here or building okay um and they the townships themselves and i'm not gonna i don't want to get into the weeds of the discussion but we we represent four separate towns uh whereas a township has like township warren represents warren and warren residents watch watching residents you know what i mean so it's a little tricky when it comes to pilot with a pilot funds with a regional that's that's just one thing but the second thing is we are bound by the two percent cap so i i don't know how the pilot money would really change that and i think to to add to that at the end of the day you know based on our budget based on the number of pupils that we have the towns collect the taxes we send a bill to

079the towns correct and they pay that bill so you know i think you know where the revenue comes from how it is managed at the township level you know that's at the township level um but you know we send them the bill they write us a check covers our expenses and and yeah our bill is the bill based on our budget and our students and it's split up that way that uh they give us the percentage of the taxes they collect and and just one other one other thing related because you asked if there were conversations um that mayor sordillo you know has certainly has um reached out and offered to meet with us to talk about uh what it is that they're doing with the pilots and how things um you know what the

080plans are from the township standpoint and what if any thoughts that they had regarding education i haven't scheduled that meeting yet i haven't actually been able to tell the administration because that just happened recently but certainly we are always willing to listen to them on what their plans are as it relates to taxes controlling taxpayer dollars uh and things of that nature uh mr galact there's some misunderstanding of what a pilot actually represents um it's a payment in lieu of taxes and specifically what happens is a developer will come in with a big piece of property and say and the town will make special permissions for them to do something that uses the property in a beneficial way for the town and in order to do that the developer said yes i don't want to

081do this i want to do that and what the state does it allows the home rule the township has a right to say well if you want special things then the township is right to take all the taxes including the county taxes and this is the important point so if you if you took 100 of the taxes the county taxes right now i think are about 28 so in a in a pilot program that 28 doesn't go to the county it goes to the town also the 58 or 60 of the education also goes to the town but the vast majority of time that education money comes back the vast majority what doesn't go back is the county money so we basically pick up 28 on what would have been sent down in the county

082or beneficial use of the property so a pilot it usually gets a bad rap sometimes it's used inappropriate i have not seen it used and i'm fairly knowledgeable if i could just ask you just implied that the payment in lieu of taxes is equal to 100 what they would pay in taxes yes and there there hasn't been any any discount and with the town collecting only a portion of it no typically that's the case the township has a right to collect zero or a hundred percent or seventy percent or fifty percent can do anything in a pilot program typically how it's done in most towns certainly warren is that 100 or close to 100 with you know trades on public improvements that the developer does would we actually could go over the mechanisms if you

083have a waiver uh which there are not many opportunities for waivers and certainly with districts within declining enrollment like ours one of the waivers is enrollment our enrollment's going the opposite way so we're not going to go over there health care is another one but they go by the state rates and the state rates are dropped their health care and don't ask me how they did that but they did so that kind of makes that ineligible and then after that if you have banked cap now our district has bank cap we were fortunate where we didn't spend up to the cap for a couple years so we have about three hundred thousand dollars available that's something we talked about at the uh the operations committee um and i don't want to steal your thunder on

084that one no go ahead that's why i'm okay so so when so we talked about is that something the committee wants to consider based on where we are and we all kind of felt the same thing that that it's kind of a tough time to be asking people to pay a higher rate of taxes particularly when your enrollment's dropping inflation's up i mean everybody feels inflation everybody feels the gas prices so we we kind of felt stronger that we should kind of move in the direction we have to make some cuts within the budget to fit within that cap we shouldn't do that at this time but we do have banked cap available to us to use but that would it would increase that two percent up and it could it would go as high

085as four percent which we don't want to do thank you right now one brief question if you could um just particularly for the benefit of our newer board members talk about the health care plan that we're in and how that has benefited us over the past several years because eight percent you know is way higher than anything that we've seen over the past four or five years yeah so we're in a school health insurance fund it's a large uh pooled fund with about i don't know 50 districts or so it's been very successful for us it limits the losses that you do have uh based on your claims um when we got in it was a usually the the fund itself kind of settles in at a certain rate uh increase or decrease and then

086you are plus two or three percent beyond that that's as far as you'll go um they do have if your individual claims are very high um you you might be higher than the pack or you might be lower than the pack depending on where your claims are however it's been very successful for us that like i said for the past four years we've been almost dead even and like i said it's a it's a it's about a 50-school pool and it's self-insured to a limit they have they do have uh insurance in case for the larger claims but it's it's a self-insured chef and it's been very successful for us and i think we've been able to do a lot of the things and fund a lot of the things that we have over the

087past four years because of the fact that we had such great control over those health care costs so the fact that the fact that we're getting hit with eight percent now while is certainly uncomfortable it's not like we haven't made out over the past several years in this particular fund yeah for the past year and a half our claims experience has shot up um i'll tell you it's been over 100 so and usually they want it below that 80 line but we've been pretty high but one thing for the new board members before four or five years ago when we went over to this shift of the years we were looking at 10 to 15 even 17 increases in health insurance and with the size of our budget if you get about a 14 or

08815 increase in health insurance that uses up almost all of two percent tax levy increase that you can get in here and so we had to you know find other efficiencies in order to be able to afford that so it's you know it's it's a very this is a very different and even even the eight percent is very different from the types of increases we were experiencing before we got into this shift excellent thank you mr size i got one i'm sorry regarding the the health insurance because we are self-insured so if if at the end the expenses are less than the revenues do we get some back yes we do if yeah in in about a year's time they look at it and you can get a dividend we have had a couple of

089cases of dividends lower lower totals i mean i think one year was about forty thousand dollars one year was thirty and uh the year before the last year was 150 000 we got back i see and but the commit the the shift trustee the board of trustees has to vote on that um and they usually come up with a number based on the amount of cash they have and what their claims look like at a certain point in time yeah we have and it could be other way also that the expenses are more than they can ask us to pay more yes that is the risk yeah we've had a pretty good i can tell you that the the cash reserves they have are they're comfortable i see then we have this this outside company

090we pay them hundred thousand dollars so what what is their role in that so we have we have a um we have a broker who who assists us in um shopping obviously this uh the school health insurance fund our dental and they they kind of help us during negotiations so yeah they they serve a lot of functions but we are self-insured right so what is their role in saying that not entirely it's it's it's yeah it's not it's self-insured but there's a reinsurance after you hit a certain limit brown and brown also provides services to our employees in connection with uh yeah in connection with with with claims and other other matters in the health and compliance as well i mean there's a lot of compliance issues with health care and they help us stay

091on the straight and narrow affordable care act is still a thing so you still have to comply with that excellent thank you mr sties thank you great discussion uh we will now move on to committee reports first up is the education education committee and this is over yes the first time in a long time you haven't made the education committee report so the education committee met on january 26th to discuss changes to the 2223 program of studies the calendar changes to include homework and assessment-free zones to follow up on our start strong results and to discuss proposals for new curricular clubs so starting with a 2022-23 program of studies changes members of our administration presented updates to the 2223 program of studies you can find the updates linked to the education committee agenda and the

092board shared drive folder the program of studies will be on the february 15th board agenda for approval the most notable update is the expansion of what had been our culinary arts program to the new hospitality program which will broaden the program's focus we're adding two new courses foundations of hospitality and hospitality financial management both semester-long programs which will be prerequisites to the full semester hospitality leadership course which is previously known as culinary arts 3. another change or update was our music technology course will be changing from a full year course to two semester-long courses one is foundations of music production and another is intermediate music production which we believe will attract additional students to those classes we are also exploring offering a dance class uh regarding homework and assessment free zones dr uh mr d'alessio

093and mr aquavia presented a proposed schedule and guidelines for homework and assessment free zones for 22 20 23 well they begin immediately but they presented a change of our calendar as a follow-up to the discussion of making accommodations for various holidays throughout the year on which the school is open it's also an effort to advance the district's strategic plan goals for social emotional growth and wellness and for diversity equity and inclusion the updated calendar is included in the link to the education committee agenda along with a description of homework-free and assessment-free zones homework-free zones occur during thanksgiving recess winter recess and spring recess and assessment-free zones occur on the first day back from thanksgiving recess winter recess and spring assessment free zones will also occur on the day of and on the day the first

094day after rosh hashanah yonkapoor diwali lunar new year orthodox christian good friday and eid students will not have assessments on or assignments due on the uh students will not have assessments on or assignments due on on or assignments due on assessment free zone days um homework and assessment free zones are mandatory and apply to all students our start strong results you may remember that on our that mr d'alessio um made a presentation on our start strong results at our november 9th board meeting this discussion was a follow-up to that presentation because now we have state results to compare a spreadsheet that updates those results are included in the education committee agenda and as expected our performance is well above the state average in all areas except for two one is algebra one we underperformed the

095state and as we've discussed before we're a regional nine through 12 school district and so our more most of our more accelerated math students take algebra 1 in 8th grade so they're not part of these results and then the other area where we only slightly um outperformed the state average was 12th grade science and we feel that it's likely that our 12th graders and the 12th graders who across the state who take this assessment i may not have taken the test seriously because it doesn't really account you know count for much uh finally we discussed three new co-curriculars uh proposals and the proposals are all included in the attachment to the education committee um agenda uh their active minds club the latin x alliance and the solar car club the purpose of the active minds

096club is to raise awareness of mental health and to provide safe spaces for students to open up about their mental health the volunteer advisor for that will be kevin rice and i noticed on our personnel report there's another kevin rice and emma giantisco will be the volunteer advisors the latinx alliance will serve as a safe space for the latinx alliance is another new club it will serve as a space safe space for members to learn and appreciate the diverse culture of the latino community its members will explore the many traditions of latin america as well as issues facing latino nations the volunteer advisor for that club is joseph toy and finally the solar car club will provide students with a way to explore the stem field using solar energy they'll form teams to design to

097design small model solar cars using recycled materials they'll compete against other teams in areas of creative design speed and use of recycled materials and present forums on social energy the volunteer advisor is michael d'alessio do any of the committee members have anything to add do any members board members thank you dr chan the solar club will there be some competition will this club would be competing with some other collabs in the state that would be the intention yes mr fallon i'm just confused as why we're not calling them homework free and assessment-free days rather than zones uh we're open to it's like it's start it started as zones i think because they're multiple days that's that's what it was called when we started this several years ago i don't think there's any better reason than

098that because it's blocks of time we can easily change it to days i think that was just the terminology that everyone's used when we started it's sort of a zone because it involves yeah many situations the day that's just what it's kind of like how the blue room even even periods is it's oh don't say periods between periods and blocks and everything that's still a cold huge source of confusion it's kind of like how this we can it's kind of like how the blue room became the blue room somebody said that and it just stuck so the zones that's from a couple of years ago so we can easily make that days that that's and we'll take that i'll make a note of that and we'll discuss we'll take that under advisement mr fellow fair

099enough any other questions for the education committee saying none we did uh personnel in executive sessions oh excellent and any questions for ms brown seeing none going to operations uh mr berg thank you mr president uh i clicked it i thought quick no i'll try to oh yeah we'll get out of here by 11. uh first of all i thought this is why you asked him so many thank you i thought this is why you asked him so many questions peter for stepping in last but two weeks ago for uh reading the report peter did a fantastic job so less and i got to be honest i'm extremely nervous to take over this committee and take over peter very large shoes to fill but i'm going to try my best so if i don't do

100a good job tonight uh bear with me we all have projectiles by the school no less so we uh there's a lot going on in operations that's all i can say and it's going to continue that way uh so we met a few days ago a bunch of as you can see with a bunch of items on the agenda first we met with mr melusa who talked about the cyber security and as alluded to earlier ransomware in just a thread of security individuals taking over our technology is a major risk and there's a lot of time effort and expense associated with doing that and today we've been doing a great job so mr malusa explained the various programs that we were part of the work he's done the different backups that we have cloud service

101and that sort of stuff also very important was the encryption for the emails with regard to staff and all the other sensitive information i spoke about that with authentication i'm working that out and report it'll come to the board members very shortly so that our communication also is protected to some extent also with regard to technology the security cameras fall onto that replacing certain cameras and adding some various locations to help us in that area again mr steiz as i just alluded to talked about how ransomware threats have hit a lot of districts a lot of companies in general and because of that we do have insurance to protect for that but those insurance premiums have been increasing and that's uh unfortunately that's going to be here to stay that's my personal view but that

102appears to be where we're at but again we are on top of it we're doing everything we can a lot of expenses people hours resources into this area because it's a major issue uh then we moved on to construction update mr vic explained a couple of projects that were underway or will be underway as well you know a lot of our projects are done during the summer so there's no interruption with respect to education uh most of those are as of right now planning to be accomplished during summer as tim had alluded to with regard to the budget supply lines that certainly could potentially hit the construction but with regard to the solar panels uh we're going to start that shortly and we hope to be able to finish all that timely manner then we

103moved on to budget and i intentionally was asking tim some questions during his presentation directly affects the public as well as all the other constituents and students and the teachers as well tim has already talked about the reimbursement green book the fact that that's going to affect us a half a million dollars i specifically asked them about the cap and the 2 one of the benefits one would argue that the student decline the fact that we've had some breakage we haven't discussed that but we've had a few less teachers that with less students hopefully need less teachers that helps us unless our biggest expenses are personnel if you reduce that number because the student drops then we get it better you talk briefly about the bank cap tim also spoke about that i don't want

104to repeat everything that tim already said i apologize then we talked specifically about various we haven't gone in detail over what we're going to do again with technology for instance adding some more laptops for the features chromebooks for the one-to-one initiatives stuff like that and see what we can fit in the budget what we can't fit into the budget get very preliminary discussion we haven't decided one way or another we're still getting some numbers together again as tim alluded to discussing negotiations and everything plays a whole part into this 30 plus million dollar budget where we have money obviously we're going to do the best we can because we truly believe that a lot of these capital projects it's really beneficial to students what project we can put into that referendum so that we can

105get a bigger bang for above 40 30 35 40 reimbursement from the state again some of the capital projects included the theater lighting the long jump track has some issues maintenance with regard to equipment so we certainly went through that and i'm sure what tim's going to provide us with all the different departments provide their budget what they're hoping for and then that will funnel up to us and we'll go through that any questions for uh mr right seeing good none thank you uh negotiations uh anything i can nobody really cares i can say in public that both sides have exchanged initial proposals that's as far as we've gotten thus far excellent any questions from mr fallon all right on the regionalization committee update the committee uh met on january 24th and discussed and agreed

106upon uh reaching out to a consultant to assist us in the completion of the application the committee was comfortable with tim reaching out to dave hespe dave hespe is a former commissioner of education in the state of new jersey to set up an initial meeting via zoom with mr sties myself and dr jewett we also discussed rolling any of the consultant costs accrued into completing the application into the actual grant itself um dr jewett's going to convert the current application to a google doc and include updated objectives and shared with the committee which she has done um as i alluded to we did meet with dr dave hespe on thursday of last week and had a had a very productive conversation with him uh in reviewing the application going through the guidelines and uh you

107know following that conversation uh he has uh supplied additional information and actually an outline for tim which he will be able to follow in the completion of the application um mr size i don't know if there was anything else you wanted to comment on regarding that conversation uh just one of them oh [Laughter] he was able to summarize the the new law the new legislation that was recently passed and it kind of gave us a lot of information on on what we should put into the application to make it successful that's really what i was looking for with with hespe was to make sure we had the correct information to make sure that that what we were going to give to the dca was going to be successful i don't like to send out an

108application i know i want it to be approved so um he was he he summarized the law perfectly and it laid out exactly what we you know what what kind of outline we should uh perform to make sure that the application is approved by the state and i think it's very very helpful i thought anyway so at this point you know our our goal um is to within the next two weeks have the application complete provide that back to the committee for review and then then out to the board the board does not need to take any further action because we already approved the resolution to move forward with the application process so that's already in place but certainly want to make sure that you all have the ability to take a look at this

109by the time that we ideally by the time we meet at our next board meeting the application draft would be ready for everyone to take a look at and following that meeting uh the intention is to then submit the application um as we play out the timeline further um the application has to go to dca for review and approval uh that could take up to 60 days maybe a little longer uh once we get uh the application approved we would then have to select the vendor that would be working with us to conduct the feasibility study that may take another 30 days or so to sort out so we would be looking at the study commencing sometime in may or june based on this loose timeline with the goal of being able to have a

110study back and the ability to do a public presentation based on the study results prior to the end of the calendar year so that is the timeline as we know it now you know it could shift obviously we will have you know reports coming from the committee working on the regionalization study throughout the process to the board and and the board will be able to review information before we do a public presentation so i would suspect by september or october we would then be looking at information before then uh whatever formal report would be uh presented to the public so that's uh that's the rough outline on that i'll go dr chand and this is over so bob do we have a cooperation from the sending districts because my understanding was that they were not

111cooperating before they're they are not uh they are not participating as it relates to uh the study itself um but they will cooperate so they're not going to be part of the committee that's overseeing the application and the goals and objectives of the study however they you know they will cooperate and provide the information necessary to complete but if they are not part of it is in their study then you know has meaningless you know if they are not no not at all it's you know because we're going to get all the information that we need to make available to the public everything everything from what tim talked about earlier are there ways that we can share services that you know provide economic benefit and programmatic benefit to our students all the way up to

112including options for regionalization and within those options it could be what does it look like if we do a full regionalization where it's all four ascending districts and the high school com combined to become a single regionalized k-12 district what does it look like if it is a partial regionalization say that warren and the high school combine into a k-12 and long hill wachong and greenbrook are ascending what if it's wachong warren longhill and the high school combining and green brook sending so the idea is to look at all the variations and what are the benefits what are the upsides and and what are the uh what are the barriers or obstacles in those environments so the whole idea is to get a robust thorough evaluation of the benefits for shared services partial regionalization complete

113regionalization and be able to put that before the public so that they decide i mean it is ultimately any anything regarding shared services does not need to go to the public for vote you know that's something that our administrations can cooperate on come to an agreement and we can execute you know right away anything regarding a regionalization either partial or full regionalization would have to go to the public for vote and the public would have to approve so the fact that they are that the sending districts are not on the committee does not mean that we are not getting their cooperation as part of the study i see but full of question here is that because this idea has been around for some time i'm wondering whether some other regions have completed their study already

114and we have access to their findings um could you repeat that please if anyone else has completed a study there might be some other discussions that's what our committee did actually yeah we've actually looked at several of the studies that have been completed including the most recent one which was down in pinelands that was just released in the fall as well as not only completed studies but completed regionalizations uh the most recent one which was the the south hunterton uh regionalization that occurred about 2014. so we've looked at all of that the difference now is that with the law that was just passed by the legislature and signed by the governor there were a lot of barriers that existed in state law and code that made it difficult if not impossible to even consider this

115now with all those barriers removed including issues around the tax allocation and hold harmless provisions for districts uh as it relates to their uh their their tax uh base um this now creates an opportunity for a real serious look and a real serious report to the community on the the benefits both financially uh but more importantly the educational benefits to our students to consider these these ideas um i just wondered if there are a lot of vendors who provide this service it sounds kind of specialized is there a specific pool of consultants or research firms who the work that they're doing translates to this kind of study yeah i mean it is a limited group and i think one of the things that they were talking about at the state was actually creating a clearinghouse

116at rutgers university where rutgers would actually be the entity that would be matching up the the qualified consultants with the districts that were doing these studies um that has not come to fruition which is why we reached out to actually the uh the group that uh that we've been working with that dave hespe works with actually did the study for pinelands so we're actually working with one of the experienced groups right now to help us with our application but i think there are two or three other groups that have done the limited feasibility studies here in the state so far uh potentially because they're providing us with um you know just some limited guidance on the development of the application itself but they'll be able to bid on the uh rfp once we get to

117that point yeah to follow up on that one susan so i i did check with mark zunimer and i asked him does your firm do this kind of work uh mark said no um they don't and he did say that there were a few he only knew of a couple um out there and espy was one of them i i just knew has to be he was a former commissioner but i i knew of his work from pinelands i read the study so i mean it seemed they they were pretty good about completing the application and getting the process going when i talked to the va who did the work with them he was very satisfied with what they did that's why i wanted to reach out to them because i was i think i

118was like okay i think we need some assistance on this because this is definitely something that's different um and he's been very helpful and like bob said it's right now he's giving us a little a little bit of a information here and there but it's all free because at some point they won't i'm sure they're interested in an rfp we're going to put out no no not yet right right now the study any other questions all right seeing non this is the first opportunity for public comment uh that's right uh the 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 uh any public comments seeing none i'll move on to board discussion uh

119obviously we have our board goals and we want to make sure that we talked about the regionalization but also a reminder that we want to get our board evaluations um in um additionally we have uh our future action items so any discussion on the future action items that will be coming up at our february 15th board meeting yes dr chan item number 11. do we pay parents for transporting their children sorry which one yeah so in a limited capacity we usu we do in some cases we have parental contracts this particular one is in the beginning of the year we had we were not providing a route in fact it was possible we weren't going to provide it all year it was the vocational school route so they're coming back in dribs and drabs of

120parents they they transported the kids for about uh two two weeks three weeks so we we gave them the opportunity like if you did that you can submit and we will pay you and i think reach of the parents was like 220 yeah that's part of our transportation is there a typo here because it says gerg arch right and the route only one is stored and it says gupta so the names do not match so i'm wondering whether they type over here one where he says yeah i can see exactly what this what that is i'm i'm not i'm never quite sure with names so well these are i mean by the way i happen to be both gorgeous any other questions or comments on the preview items seeing none we'll move on to action

121items mr president i'd like to move resolutions a1 a2 and a3 any discussion on items a1 a2 a3 seeing non-roll call miss barone yes mr burnberg dr chand yes mr fallon yes miss lee yes is over potter rasa mr morris yes mr president i'd like to move resolutions a4 through a8 second discussion seeing none roll call ms brown yes mr burnberg dr chand yes mr fallon i'll abstain on a6 and yes on the rest okay uh miss lee yes it's over yes rasa and mr morris yes mr president i'd like to move resolutions c1 through c7 second any discussion seeing none roll call please miss brown yes mr burnberg dr chan yes mr fallon yes miss lee yes sober yes connor and mr morris yes mr president i'd like to move resolutions d1 through d5

122okay discussion yeah uh dachshund the item d4 yeah you're rescinding this because they they took their um their their wood back they took their wood back so they yeah they did they they rescinded it the only reason i'm i'm making you approve a rescinding is because i sent them a form with i signed it said thank you for the donation and then they pulled out so i don't i wanted to have it on record because i do not want someone taking an illegal tax deduction on us so i want it on record if they want to take that chance take the chance so they took it back they took it back but i'm wondering whether it was not legal to give a number because normally i mean i had donated few cars you know in

123the past but the the receiver will not give that dollar value they would say that is up to me what do the value i put in there so if they have given us some stuff we are not authorized to give any dollar value to that item we we didn't give a dollar value they they they gave a value based on what they paid for it right i see they ended up being able to use it that's right yeah it was some it was something that the builder bought to right any other uh discussion on the items seeing non-roll call who made that was that peter made the motion yeah you made the motion what's that who made the motion you made the motion right just assumed who's gonna make the motions when peter's not here

124i know miss barone yes mr burnberg dr chan yes mr fallon yes miss lee yes sober yes otter rasa mr morrison yes second opportunity for public comment seeing none other business i would just like to add a special thanks and congratulations to the administration for uh being so responsive to the changing conditions that allowed us to get our school back in full time a week ahead of time so i think that was well done and also just continued thanks for the flexibility and adjusting to the ever-changing environment with the focus on doing everything that we can to keep our school open to keep our activities and athletics going to keep the educational opportunities there for our students while we work to get back to now full days and hopefully we can get back to full

125days with reduced mitigation as we move into the spring so thank you and i'm just going to echo that on the other side that the um leadership team actually wants to say the same thing about the board that they've been very appreciated appreciative of the support from the board um and the leadership team is fantastic two of whom find members i have sitting next to me that are you know been tremendous in all of this um but so has everyone especially our building principal mr librera um but they are very appreciative of the board's support through this so thank you and we are ecstatic to be back uh to full days um with our numbers way down of students out you know for covert related reasons so it's it's great but you have some code

126cases last week right yeah it was actually really nice we reported 15 instead of several hundred so that was very exciting i don't we'll never i i'm i don't think we'll ever be down to zero i i think you know this exactly yeah yes yeah exactly any other business seeing non-motion to adjourn great thank you for a very robust conversation tonight lots of good stuff oh thank you i was you could see i was like