good evening everyone we're going to call the meeting to order now 6:30 Monday evening the 18th welcome to a meeting of The Hunton Central Regional High School Board of Education please be advised that this all meetings of the board are open to the public and media consistent with the open public meetings act and that advanced notice required therein has been provided meeting notice was also provided posted in the boardroom of the upper school campus sent to The Courier News Star Ledger Express Times And The Hunton County Democrat and sent to the clerks of Delaware Township East Amell Township Flemington buror Ron Township and Readington Township the public will have an opportunity to be heard as shown on the agenda Mrs Spitzer could I have a roll call please Mrs blutfield here Mrs dougen here Mr Fowler here miss gong here Mrs Kellogg here Mrs odonnell here Mrs Peterson here Mr Rhymer here and Mrs santangelo here thank you may we all stand for the flag salute M zonna would you mind to read the mission statement for us tonight I to 100 and Central is an Innovative educational Community dedicated to the intellectual social and emotional safety and growth of all students while fostering curiosity and promoting Wellness we aspire to create power ful learning experiences establish strong Partnerships and serve as contributing members of society thank you very much all right uh minutes from our February 22nd meeting can I have a motion to move them please so moved second second any comments or conversations around them adjustments hearing none roll call vote please Mrs Peterson yes Mrs cogg yes Mrs dougen yes Mrs blutfield yes Mrs odonnell yes Mr Rhymer yes Miss gong yes Mrs santangelo yes and Mr Fowler yes all yes motion carries thank you I do not have any correspondence received in the last month so with that I will turn it over to you Dr Moore thank you Mr Fowler um before we get into our business and we have a couple presentations tonight uh just a couple of thoughts back on the nth our Unified sports our unified basketball team won the group a state championship at the rack uh fantastic thank you um the rack I understand is a challenging place to play uh what is it it's the Jersey Mike's arena is that what it's actually called now okay uh but uh 39 to 38 over euwing Township um amazing and it was back and forth the whole game until I guess just inside of the last 20 seconds and Nate had a layup that just pulled us pulled us to the front uh now um Unified sports as you know uh this has been a project we've championed for several years uh joins students and special education with students in general education to compete together to learn together to grow together uh they train together uh building friendship building um just a Cooperative spirit and it's uh wonderful to kind of look at that and then say our team is among the best in the state so um the students incredible group of students uh Mr manio and Mrs deala who coach and and work with them um Mr Spencer who coordinates all of our Athletics njsiaa treats unified Athletics just like any other athletic competition uh Mr Brandt for his tireless uh uh support for our students cheering them on at the game and um Dr Webb and Mr Reb Holz too in the in the special education department for basically bringing this program to us um just a lot of uh lot of people working on just one of our efforts to make sure that all of our students have a place in which to grow and and ways to call this home and and we Endeavor to do that with all 2400 of our students so it's it's Monumental efforts so that Victory on the 9th kind of put a spring in my step last week and all week was walking around on Friday had a what I call a forgiving calendar so I was able to get out and around about a little bit to classrooms um Good Friday spring Vibe last Friday it was the end of a good week here um but it was the beginning of uh it felt like to me the first of my last weeks here because it started to become very real last week as we were talking about um our interim superintendent and I began to introduce myself uh to him and and begin to talk to him about getting up to speed things like uh cleaning out corners of my office these are the things that start to happen now um I just need you to know that uh I'm going to miss hun and Central so so deeply uh and uh miss all of the places that I've come to know here all of the people I've come to know that good spring Friday Vibe is something that happens just about each and every day here because of all of the efforts of everyone students staff alike here and I can't ignore heroic things that everybody did here uh over some very difficult times that not just hun in central had over the past seven years but we all had over the past seven years incredibly difficult times and the last thing anyone who worked here during that time would want to be called is a hero uh but uh they were my heroes everyone who came here every day and not just for getting the school through those things but continuing to innovate continuing to invent continue to focus back on that very thing that I was talking about earlier about just making this a home for everybody students Excel here they find themselves here and we challenge ourselves every day to do better at providing the supportive environment that allows that to happen for 2400 students day in and day out so I want to thank Central for always teaching me and I've said this a few times and I've said this to folks and I just want to make sure I say it on the mic on the stream on record that uh if being done learning from the people here were a requirement for leaving I would never leave but I don't think anyone would so this is a place that many people carry with them forever after they leave and I will be no different than they are thank you Central thank you board for your support uh and thank you students and staff at Central for not just the monthly Mission moments that I may will share through the microphone here but the on that I got every minute of every day thank you [Applause] than so I'm going to introduce Dr Monica Brown of hya to come on up and talk about the superintendent search for um for the next era of Central's leadership me can you hear me better better okay um well Dr Moore it sounds like you had a wonderful run here at hunterton Central um I to am a retired superintendent I retired after almost a decade in the same place in 2017 so I share your um I can feel it uh from everything that you said that this is a wonderful place to be and I wish you the best in whatever comes next um when I'm here to talk to the board and the public about is um what are the next steps for hunon Central because getting a wonderful superintendent is a very important part of the role of the of the Board of Education um so I know that you all have this presentation so I'll scroll through it uh for the public too um you all realize this is an awesome responsibility um to find the right person to lead the district into that next era and to and to take what's going well and make it even better um so uh it's important throughout this process for you all to understand what your stakeholders want in a new superintendent and to find a leader that's the who is the best match um this is the team we are recommending help you to do that um we've worked together on several searches in New Jersey and Beyond um far as far north as New Hampshire as far south as um Florida this team um Bill and Stacy Adams they are a dynamic duo they are married um and uh bill was a longtime superintendent in South Jersey I represent the other part of the state was a longtime superintendent in Bergen County um and Stacy we are all um we've worked together um over several searches and we hope to bring you all a wonderful um group of candidates in the near future so why hya um we are 35 years of educational um executive searches in our um in our past we are we have over 1 1600 searches over a hundred uh Associates Nationwide where we all Network to help find the right person so you have a local team who's very familiar with New Jersey but also we have the Outreach to reach really nationally for uh potential um candidates um we do comprehensive Community engagement with which I'll talk about in just a minute and we use research and analytics as we move forward so we do have four stages or four phases of our search process the first phase is to engage your stakeholders and you I'll go through each of these in a little bit more detail but then recruit select and then transition um we as a team will be available uh if selected to you all 247 um for any questions and then we have a corporate headquarters um out in Illinois where we do have a project management staff there if there are any questions or problems throughout the W throughout the search so during our engagement phase um our goal is to get to know you all as board members and your community um and your stakeholders to put together a leadership profile and a list of desired characteristics so how do we put those two um uh pieces of information together we uh have a planning meeting with the board we we interview each board member separately we ask all of you the same questions the same questions that we ask the focus groups but we're trying to collect a qualitative um we're trying to collect qualitative data um it's a modified SWAT analysis so that we can put together a leadership profile for you um we'll do individual interviews with other uh either cabinet members or um other officials that you'd like us to talk to we'll do up to 15 focus groups I'm sorry more than that that's for our strategic planning um we do up to two full days of focus groups Community forums if you'd like us to do that and then of course our stakeholder survey and after we get all of that information together um you see the the arrow here we produce two um pieces of literature that we ask you to approve the first is a um a leadership profile and the second is a list of desired characteristics and once we've presented this to you and your community based on the input that we've received through the engagement phase then um we use um once those are approved we use those as really The Guiding um The Guiding documents for the search we use them to recruit candidates to vet candidates to eventually recommend a slate of candidates to you and then we bring these um uh documents back to you especially the list of desired characteristics and ask you to use those desired characteristics as a guide when you're choosing um the next superintendent um so then moving on to our recruit phase um again this is something that we believe sets hya apart we have a national reach but very much local knowledge um we we utilize our Associates Across the Nation we publicize your list of desired characteristics and Leadership profile as far as as far and wide as you would like we decide that at the planning meeting how how far and wide you'd like that disseminated um we do um uh what's interesting about our recruitment phase um is not only do we recommend an advertising package for you um and we do get basic because we're one of the largest firms we do get some better rates on that advertising but we also will put your posting on our website and um what's in what's great about our website is it's become a real go-to place for people in the industry who want to become superintendents um and we do that because we post every available um superintendent s uh superintendency open superintendency around the nation of course we highlight ours first but because we PR we present all the openings we have over 21,000 email subscribers to our newsletter and O almost 6,000 registered candidates within our system who will be checking our site and looking for new opportunities uh so to select the um candidates what we will do is during our planning meeting you'll tell us how many candidates you'd like us to slate so after we recruit and vet and check references and Google search what what Bill Stacy and I will do will come together with a slate of candidates um usually between 8 to 12 candidates and then we will take you through a scientific process um to narrow that set of candidates down um so that you can decide who you want to interview we then recommend that you have at least two rounds of interviews initial interview and a second interview possibly more depending on what you decide as you would like your process to be um and again we will help you throughout the process to look at the information objectively whether it's on paper or through the interview process to indicate your preferences and then through our um techniques we then are able to gather your your initial thoughts present it to you as a board what you're thinking as a group and then start the conversation from there and we do find that this process does bring boards together even those who may not see eye to eye on many things when looking at candidates objectively using the um list of desired characteristics we do find that our process can bring people together because really the goal is for everyone to support your next superintendent um once you have decided on your superintendent we don't leave you alone and by the way we will be with you for the interview process we'll come on site and we will help um facilitate the logistics of the interviews we will be there the entire time um with you making sure that the process goes smoothly and then again um we won't leave you once you've decided on a candidate um we are very familiar with um the process in New Jersey we will help to make sure that executive County Superintendent um has a contract that will be approved and we'll walk with you through that process we also recommends that we are invited to a transition meeting where you appoint the new superintendent and then all those notes we took as part of the community engagement process we recommend that we pass that along to the new superintendent so they can have a great sense of what your constituents are feeling and what they really want to see in a new superintendent so we'll be there with you through the transition phase um so I put some some contact information up here I know that you have it in your sheet but are there any questions that I can answer can you just um take the rest of the board through the general timelines sure so during the the planning process um we would we would present a calendar to you um and I believe you're looking for a July first start is that correct or you You' hired the interim those would be dates that you'd give me so I'd know going in but yes I present you with a a calendar that fits with how long you expect to keep the interim um we can expand or contract a search for as long as you give us we typically like to have at least a few weeks for the community engagement piece ideally 45 days for recruitment but we can do it shorter but we like days um then to gather the information and come to you it really then depends on how soon we can get everybody together for the interviews because it's important that all board members are there to attend um and then we can work backward from your appointment date did that help okay yes Mrs K so what is the the candidate pool looking like in our geographic area um so it it really does depend on the um the position but we are finding that um that New Jersey in general um since the Caps have lifted is attracting more candidates both regionally and um throughout the state for some Some Mo some movement um at the planning meeting we will also present to you with some research done um with comparable districts for a salary range and I will tell you that depending on the salary range you choose that does heavily influence how many cand candidates you will see so it there's some um there's some work that needs to be done there but we are finding that the boards we're working with if they're keeping Pace with their like districts as far as the range of salary that they're willing to offer we're seeing some great candidates great candidate pools come in um we're doing one up in Bergen County right now where we have over 30 um we've um done uh we were in um we did a few in Somerset County in the past two years where we were over 40 in each as far as candidates were concerned yes in the uh other handout that the board has you talk about the uh internet portal and the information that you put on it so I was curious what what information goes on for the community and how do you define the community yes so first of all um it I would be working with you and your representative to determine what information does go up on uh on the this was with this would be what our dashboard might look like for the engagement part um it might list the focus groups and when they're meeting it might have invitations for the survey that type of information um and I would be working with Heather and probably some administrative support to make sure those invitations go out and we get as wide uh we cast as wide a net as possible recruiting there's not much that we put on on online for that um but we would put the job posting so if anyone comes to your site they could then also um but for the board um once we are uh the the portal just for the board would then receive uh prior to the Slate meeting you would receive the the slated candidates their information their applications resume um references Etc but that again is just for the board um for the selection the same thing uh just for the board would be the schedule for the interviews all the information that's needed so that you all can have a good idea of who's coming to see you and then in the transition phase um it would be any information that you need for um uh when the transition meeting is if you are deciding to uh allow to the new the selected person to have the information um from this from the focus groups but again that does depend on on you but as far as the board portal is concerned that's where we put all the information about every step of the process that needs to be known by the board and then we would work with your um with your administrative staff to put the posting the advertisements and any invitations to the to the to the general public great thank you you're welcome any other questions well what and final question so take your as a board has to be fiscally responsible so if we actually found the candidate and said here hya please do your vetting process do we get a discount I wish I could say yes but no no it is it is a process um what we would then do is then compare that candidate to a larger candidate pool and make sure you found exactly what you're looking for so the process would still be the same on our end good try though I I like that hey I I I understand any other questions I do hope that um we get a chance to work with you uh Bill Stacy and I are very excited to begin the recruiting process and to work with you to find the best possible um superintendent for the future of hunt Central so thank you all right thank you Dr so uh next for us um is our budget presentation and I'm going to ask for Heather Spitzer to join me up at the podium she's going to do most of it so um Which comp is that computer for us up there yes sir okay so you're all set there's my baby lot folders yeah I do I do now how do you make it into a slideshow and then this from beginning just no please please not at all because I can't see it either good you're good there you are sir so they have a pronounce as well so I think they're in good shape okay um so so tonight is is uh Mrs Spitzer and I will share our tenative budget uh so with your approval this budget gets submitted to the state goes through that process then it comes back to you for final approval uh so this is just one of the steps in the process but and it'll be mostly Mrs Spitz Miss Spitzer talking about it as I mentioned earlier but um whatever you want to say about spending whatever you want to say about the cost of public schools whatever you want to say about anything there's something very important to remember about our budgets here at Central this is the second proposed budget last year was the first this is the second budget in a row in which we are proposing to land below the state's 2% cap on property tax increase below that's a that's sort of unheard of it's unheard of to the degree that I joke that when I go to superintendent meetings people are going to sort of uh take it out on me um because not many districts can achieve that that's her goal so shrewd management um we are leaving some of that money that the state lets us take from the taxpayers on the table we're letting that stay in our taxpayers pockets uh the second thing to remember is that this is our third budget in a Row Third budget in a row in which proportions of our taxpayers are seeing declining tax rates uh for many of our residents the question of you know why are my property taxes going up is not going to be best answered by us here at the high school where we've kept level or declining tax rates it's going to be best answered by their municipality or their K8 School District so we're very proud of the fact that we've been able now three years in a row to offer budgets in which tax rates for many of residents go down now that happens as a result of the whole formula uh which Mr Spitzer will go into a little bit tonight um but we don't have control over all of that either uh but we're still focused and and managed to deliver focused on and managed to deliver a budget that that uh tries to tries to to to shrink the the the burden so we present this budget for next year with no hesitation uh and with all the confidence that even with with the adjustments to stay shrewd to stay Frugal to stay uh tightly controlled that we're going to continue the tradition of Excellence to offer um the best education the best opportunities to participate that we can and I'm deeply proud of the work that we've done not just in this budget not just what Mrs Spitzer and her and her uh business office folks and all of our supervisors and everybody directors principle who have contributed to this um but over seven years and many decades before I even arrived the the his the history and Legacy of of strong budgeting that has put us in such a good position now let's be clear um again responsible stewardship at the same time that we excel at the same time that we grow in our programs at the same time that we continue to offer ever broadening comprehensive opportunities for our students it's no accident you know that we continue to be ranked highly in the state and in the nation we're the number one high school in the county we are the number two large High School in the state by large High School I mean any high school that has 2,000 or more students and in Statewide Statewide rankings this is all US news world and World Report by the way in Statewide rankings we are right there with our Pure communities if not besting them in those rankings we are ranked higher than Morristown in South Jersey we're higher than West Morris menum we're higher than Hillsboro we're higher than Bridgewater Ron we're hire than hundreds and hundreds of school districts and we do that by continuing to offer broader and broader personalized programs for our students and continuing to offer responsible budgets that not only fall under the 2% cap but also show declining tax rates for many of our residents so our residents are getting an uncommonly excellent education cuttingedge mental health and wellness supports opportunities to participate in sports and clubs over 100 clubs here uh as we've expanded those opportunities under tightly managed expense so it's the Wizardry of Mrs Spitzer it's the the skill and passion of all the folks at the business office but also everyone every office every classroom every space every hallway every nook of this building in which people are uh exercising the kind of ownership that leads to the sort of responsible budgeting that we're talking about here and it also is through a focused model of Education where we are laser focused on operationalizing our mission in the classroom so let me just move ahead a bit we have the mouse is the best okay so our mission is not just a thing that you read at the board meetings every month and I alluded that in my opening remarks that this is something that I see playing out day in and day out of of our school uh and the way that we do that is by connecting it through both board budget goals which you adopted at your last meeting and by uh focusing our efforts on educational Innovation that brings us to The Cutting Edge of of where we are uh in our profession with our peers so if you can see here couple of the things that you've approved Innovative program to fulfill the New Jersey student learning standards one of the things that we say often is that compliance is the byproduct of better work that we do so compliance is not our only goal never should be our only goal compliance happens because we're doing other inventive passionate and creative things to ensure each student can access the full range of that program so in that second goal our Equity efforts our efforts to ensure that every student has access to the personalization to the passion seek into the skill building that we offer for our students sustain and nurture staff and grow capacity through staff development in the past couple of years you've also heard me talk a lot about shared decision- making I'll mention that a little bit more later and then facilities we have incredible facilities here uh and again um the stewardship of our business office but also Mr Thorton are uh director of operations and his entire crew just an incredible love for this place that shows through uh day in and day out so fiscally responsible budget under the 2% cap minimizing tax levy increases now the image on the next slide and you've seen me talk uh heard me talk about this before our our model for Education the way that we link our daily activities up to our mission and the therefore the things that drive our budgeting are again tightly align to our strategic priorities so we're focused on through our mission statement ensuring Wellness Partnerships in our community and Powerful learning experiences for our students and when we start to blend those together we get to uh strategic efforts in in um personalization in service learning and equity and so these are the items these are the the the thrusts that have been governing our work since our first strategic plan uh back in 201819 now our strateg IC plan expired in 2022 and covid happened in the middle of our strategic plan uh one of the things that we came out of the pandemic realizing is the need for a more Nimble kind of framework and that's where things like this began to develop and to really encourage and harness the expertise and passion of our staff uh and our students in our community Through broader shared decision-making tools so the next strategic plan as f folks build it and and I will leave it to uh my successors to continue to to develop that um I would encourage for continued openness shared decision- making and a regard and respect for the expertise and passion that everybody brings to this place day in and day out so Mrs Spitzer I'm going to turn it over to you now to take us through all the nuts and bolts thank you Dr Moore although I appreciate the credit in um having such a tight budget um um it would be remiss in me to take full credit for that um there were many many years of very um strong Boards of Education strong business administrators long uh strong administrators that helps to make my job a lot easier on the day-to-day and it makes it a lot easier also to put this budget together um and it it gives us a road map on the future with or without me in the business office with or without Dr Moore in the superintendent's office and and as things continue to change as we go forward um we do have a really strong plan here and we always look ahead we're not going to you'll hear me talk about things today that maybe look like it's just a one-year flash but we really look at five 10 years going out and what that's going to mean not only from an investment in properties but also from an investment by your taxpayers to be successful going forward so what is a budget a budget is our financial plan to deliver and maintain the district's facilities and maintain mandated and non-mandated programs to to provide students with a thorough and efficient education that's just by definition it's so much more and it's so much um of what we do every day from all different aspects of of of the district the budgeting process starts a really long time ago it seems like we we do this 247 12 months a year um but officially it began last November um where we begin talking as an administ ative team we start planning facility um improvements we start looking at curriculum and new initiatives and we start to put together a plan where all of those things are going to come together um as we do a short-term uh look in terms of what we can do over the summer to improve those and and and make those uh Stronger um right down to Staffing that's required to supplies that are required um I wish I could see I apologize the um evaluation of spending and identifying additional and evolving needs again happens at the administrative level we sit around a table and we talk about these things it's then brought to the board um through the ENT committee we talk about it a lot at nauseum they will tell you then what happens in in November before we go um home for Thanksgiving break I send out um our our uh budget documents it's a big Excel spreadsheet and uh they try to get that back to me before we leave for the holiday in December once that's all returned over over that holiday break and as we go through January we begin to start looking at what requests are made what that means to the budget what needs are and um new new standards that we need to look at new new initiatives that we need to look at and then we kind of build from there we talk about Department priorities that is is requested um the assistant superintendent of curriculum in HR sits with each of the supervisors to go through what their their their looks are if you will for each of their departments we do get the budget requests back uh right before we leave for holiday break and uh I start to look at them over that over that time period then it comes back to the uh the administrative team and we look to say okay these are things that look like with they're within what we can do and these are things that might be outside what are the priorities so we establish priorities we have a lot of discussions in each of the committee levels a lot of it happens in operations because that's where we talk about transportation we talk about buildings and grounds and we talk about Finance so it does kind of all come to fruition in one in one team there is a lot of conversation as well through Personnel because of course as we as we go through this uh that's one of the biggest expenditures in our budget the governor typically doesn't do a state of the union I called state of the unit the budget address until the end of February that's when we know what our state Aid's going to be I'll talk more about what that's going to look like um and I'm sure you've read the paper and you've seen all of the impact we've been very lucky here and we'll talk about what that looks like as well once all of that information is compiled it's put into the state budgeting software tonight we're um hopeful to approve the tenative budget it's due in the county office on Wednesday so that will be all prepped and ready to go at that time as we start to look at um these are some of the challenges uh Dr Moore was was um uh clear in in in where we were able to end we were able to successfully um only impact our taxes 1.75% which leaves us about $147,000 that we'll be able to put into bank cap uh for and it gives us three years to use that so if something happens over the next several years and we need to budget overcap which hopefully we don't have to do but again the state funding formula is a little volatile right now but if we ever need to it will be there for our future to be able to do that so we do recognize additional Cuts I'll talk about that a little bit more in additional slide we do additionally have declining enrollment right now at the high school level if you look at the elementaries we do have the five sending districts they are experiencing in increased enrollment So eventually that's going to come up here right now we're just kind of in a in a transition where we're waiting for that to kind of hit hit us Staffing vacancies continually throughout the state whether it's teachers or bus drivers or any staffing needs that we have in our district as well as many throughout the state it's a challenge to fill the positions we've been very successful here um because we have a great school district and we have a lot to offer I think that has helped tremendously in in allowing us to be able to successfully fill some of these positions we also have something that's called we have a votech system a program in county and we have a Polytech uh program in County the Polytech program is what they Callies those are program programs that are offered solely for a full day at the Polytech School these students actually go either to north hund oror campus right now even though they are students that live within our sending District they don't count for us and we'll talk more about that as we go forward through the presentation and what that means to our budget as well as our funding formula we also have votch students those are students that we share with the votch so they're here for their main subject matters um they're English their social studies and they may go to the votch for things like uh uh shop or nursing or different programs that they offer we're able to count them as a 0. five student I know that sounds crazy but every half counts um utility costs continue to be a challenge uh this is actually a much better number than it was comparatively last year um because we were successful in bidding these services so they're starting to come into a a little more stable area but they're still extremely high we're going up close to 26% over the last two years Property and Casualty Insurance also is projected to go up some of that's the remnant still of Ida we're still paying for that additional to as labor costs continue to rise so do some of our workers comp those types of things that are associated with that number cyber Insurance goodness for all of us it's going up we're going up about 30% this is the second year in a row it's gone up 30% Transportation Route costs um this is an interesting part of our of of what we do every day we transport between six and 7,000 students a day obviously not just high school students we um also transport for fem rare East amill and Delaware Township Readington does do their own transportation we only transport their high school students transportation is a challenge just like teachers it's very difficult to get bus drivers um in addition to that there's not a lot of competition in terms of if you need to bid rout what that means is typically with an ation our size you want a nice mix of contracted routes compared to in-house routes to give you a balance a little bit of a balance on each side of those costs um we are tending more towards our own employees we've been able to retain some pretty strong staff we've got some great incentives in order to be able to recruit and retain them um and the reason we're doing that more now it seems to have been a cycle is our contracted routes are going up substantially 40 50% because there's no competition so routes that were previously costing us 30 $40,000 a year to do are costing us 50 60 $70,000 and that's for single route so that has been an a substantial um hit on our budget year-over-year and will continue to be this is a challenge that we really need to watch other employee benefits again as labor costs continue to rise these things just naturally go up with them health benefits chapter 44 for those of you that um were here last year as well this continues to be a thorn in our side um this is a law that was passed by our government um that limits the um the coverage if you will it it it's great in in concept it didn't work out exactly in in practice that we were hoping for um it does continue to be a loss to the district and I'll discuss that more as we go forward this is also the first year that our rester grants are expiring so all those wonderful grants that we had um through covid and after in order to help uh boost up our budget and and and get things uh kickstarted again if you will expire this year so at the time that we were using those grants we were able to put some phenomenal programs in initiatives in place those programs have had to be um absorbed into this budget some of them are a lot of them are based on assessments um where we're able to um assess how students are doing how they're progressing as well as to be able to Target um some of the supports that they need in order to continue to to improve and get back on track after we've gone through the last several years of of covid and and um recovery so approximately $115,000 is has expired in the Grant and it will come into the budget for next year um they include such things as an i EXL subscription again it's an assessment tool link it which is another assessment tool and PSATs is a big one we offer that to all of our students here and it gives our staff an ability to be able to to to map where they are and how they're progressing and then the other thing the other big ticket item if you will that includes is um we continue to manage Google workspace and what that does is it allows the teachers to still have a virtual learning space in each of their classrooms so again those are things that are expiring through the Esser grant that are Incorporated in the budget that I'm presenting to you tonight this is the big one and we've all heard about it um we're lucky we went down $3,227 year-over-year um I think a little tiny District in Warren County went down $575,000 um on a k6 district we're really lucky here um that doesn't solve uh what we've experienced over the last seven years we're down $1.1 million in in in funding from the state of New Jersey what that means is to each of us is that in those places where we weren't able to cut um some we've been successful in doing that but mostly it's it's absorbed in taxpayer contribution to our budget sadly that's the only other way we can raise money so um just to give you a quick overview without going into too much detail because I don't want to lose all of you you'll all glaze over and and that'll be the end of that i' I'd like for you to um get something out of the rest of the presentation but simply what happens is local districts are responsible for a of our school funding and that's obviously to provide a thorough and efficient education for all of our students which is which is obligated by by our New Jersey Constitution the local share is calculated individually by each municipalities we have five so each of those municipalities those funding formulas are calculated separately and what they consider in the and then what the state is supposed to do is they're supposed to make up the Gap right um but what's considered in the funding formula simply is that in increased property values uh as well as other factors such as declining enrollment leads to the calculation in what the local share of the district is so if you think about where we've been in New Jersey and many states throughout the country over the last seven years what's happening to our property values they're going Sky High that doesn't equate the tax dollars being collected for either the schools or the municipalities that all that does is it increases the amount of funding or increases the amount that the state based on the funding formula says we are able to pay when I say we the municipality so they're determining that you're as a wealthier municipality are able to pay more in addition to that we're experiencing declining enrollment with declining enrollment it has a double whammy it says okay I don't the state doesn't need to fund us anymore we have less students so those are the two things that are driving really where we are with our state funding and you'll hear a lot about funding the formula the governor has said he's funded the formula and you see crazy numbers out there this year no one really can understand 100% how to calculate that formula um but this is the result for us and and I'm I'm happy I'm really happy we were able to to absorb this um we're in a perfect storm even though our valuations go up our enrollments going down our local share is going up state aid is going down we're not collecting it so that's the challenge that we're going to have and we're going to continue to have until the um the government either reworks the formula or somehow finds a more friendly way uh to be able to fund school districts and ASA Assa enrollment what this is is a flash of where our student enrollment has gone over the last several years this slide's important because you can see we continue to decline in enrollment but we don't necessarily continue to to to decline in Staffing and there's lots of reasons for that um the biggest being what's unique about a high school district is it's not like a first grade classroom you you know you lose 15 students you lose an entire classroom that includes teacher supplies Etc we have a very robust course catalog here students really dictate what their programming is going to be and that doesn't always equate to eliminating staff but what we have been successful in doing is evaluating Staffing as staff members retire or resign and leave the district so through natural attrition we've been successful in recovering um some expenditures um and creative scheduling to be able to absorb some of the additional costs even though we do have declining enrollment this is our Pro uh projected count for um the 2425 school year if I look at the slide before I think this is approximately 40 or 50 students less than we have on our asssa from October 15th of this year and you can see it's about 110 students and as you can see this is the first time in several years where we have a larger n9th grade class coming in and the 12th grade class were graduating so that's a really good sign for us this is where I'd like to talk a little bit more about the poly techies because this is a really convoluted process that we have um in the state of New Jersey because this program exists in our County they're treated differently from an enrollment perspective so remember I said our enrollments declining this 155 kids is part of that because what's happening is they are enrolled in another hund County school so because they're not enrolled here we don't get credit for them so it impacts the funding that we get from the state of New Jersey but we pay tuition for them in excess of a million dollar a year um I think the cost this year for each of those students at a district is $11,000 to another County School in addition to that we transport them so for every 30 40 50 kids we add a bus as I just said before those buses are costing us 50 or 60 Grand a year it adds up since the Inception of this program in 1819 it has increased 44% over seven years we don't see it changing anytime soon so this is a big challenge for us here um and will continue to be because this is a robust program that's offered in our County if these students went to Somerset County we'd have to transport them we'd have to pay tuition but at least I'd get to count them so we kind of are getting a double hit here the goals of some of the things that we've done um and continue to do in our own district is to build programs that mirror these so these kids are encouraged to stay here so we'll continue to have that as one of our priorities as we continue to grow and go forward chapter 44 this is very interesting this was signed into law and was to be effective on July 1st of 2020 what this did is it was an agreement with the government and um teachers if you will about offering a less robust benefit plan for a lower contribution so conceptually that sounds wonderful what it was supposed to be is prior to this we were livering under what was called chapter 78 so on an average salary about 60 to $65,000 a year the contribution for chapter 78 was about 20% of the cost of the premium so as the premium went up your contribution goes up right our medical coverage and prescription coverage for family right now is about 45 or 46,000 a year so 20% of that number is a big number and as your went up your contribution went up so they negotiated at the time it was with uh um Mr Sweeney um they said okay listen if we agree to a less robust plan we would like to somehow reduce that contribution to less than the 20% cost of the premium on average great concept great concept so they agreed they agreed to offer What's called the ehp or the employee health plan or and the second piece is GSP or NJ GSP which is the um a guarden state plan the difference between the two plans is the Garden State Plan only has an in network in New Jersey the ehp plan it's it's very similar coverage to what we have in our Legacy plans we waited more than a year for them to come up to the with the design of the plan and lo and behold when we got the plan design the cost of the plan was less than $1,000 a year than our legacy plan however instead of contributing that 20% of their premium on a $60,000 salary I think on a family plan they contribute 1.2% of their salary so we're not only paying more we are paying a little bit less than the cost of the premium but we're losing substantially on the amount that we're being reimbursed by the employee for their contribution so this has been I don't want to say disastrous it's been a challenge to deal with um in our budget and we'll continue to do that as we move forward effective July 1st of 2020 any new employee in the district can only enroll in one of these plans they can no longer select a legacy plan which means that this is just going to continue to compound over the last couple of years we've lost in total about $240,000 that needs to be made up in the in the budget side so these are one of the challenges that we continue to live with with from our benefit benefit perspective this law is in effect for seven years it cannot be negotiated again until July 1st of 2028 so with all of these things discussed you go how did we come in at 1.7% we did it and the first one is confusing after what I just told you but what we did at the same time we went to chapter 44 is we through um through lots of negotiations with our broker um we negotiated to go from an at a private plan to something called a shift which is a state health insurance fund and what that does it's the way the state employee health benefits plan plan conceptually is supposed to work is the more people in the plan if you will hopefully that drives down your your um your cost due to better um experience ratings so basically what happened in effective 11 of 21 we went um to the shift by negotiating out of the Etna plan private plan that we had at the time going to shift we saved just in the transition $954,000 after that and I'm going to just skip ahead this is easier to do it from this slide after that we are renewed in the shift each each year due to their bylaws we are obligated to stay in the shift for three years there's lots of reasons for that jumping in and out isn't going to help the program at all it's not going to help us get good grates rates and you kind of need to balance out over time where your experience rating is going to be but we saved the $954,000 in the 21 school year in 22 our rates went up 1.4% in 23 our rates went up 3.4% and in 24 which is in this budget Year we're projecting 7.8% now compare compare that to the state employee health benefits plan and this is really important because this is the the state's plan of choice in the year 2022 they did seem to go down 1.6% if you do any research at all on the state employee health benefit plan take a look it's called the Aon report a AO n and you will see how these rates are manipulated year-over-year in order to make it look like what they need it to look like to keep people to stay in but if you remember last year 2023 you see where it up went up 15.6% that was for teachers municipalities went up over 25% and if you remember last year all the news articles and people were jumping out that's why it's it's not sustainable they're projecting effective January 1 of this year they went up a 11% so where we have been successful in controlling our costs even though our contributions aren't as high high as they used to be right we're able to control it on the cost side so that helps to offset some of that $240,000 we lost on the contributions so cumulatively over three years we gone up we've gone up 12.6% state health benefits plan has gone up 25% this is really important to always keep in the back of your mind and and think of this when you're reading those articles about the state health benefits plan but that's the plan of choice for the state of New Jersey and that's where they want us to be because they're losing money so this is a success and a failure if you will the chapter 44 cost us money we were able to save it on the premium because we have really really good um we do really good market analysis and we plan ahead another thing that helped us to come in under cap this year is that um and I think I discussed this a little bit last year last year we had a difficult time uh with the number of students that we still had in District that were out of District placements from a special ed perspective that's kind of cycled out in this budget so we have um a smaller number of incoming uh ninth graders if you will that are in out of District placements compared to students that are graduating or aging out of the program so that is again it it just happened to be the cycle that we were in that helped us to budget below cap again because this district has been so successful in saving for a rainy day whether it's Capital Improvements or maintenance projects we have reserved money what that Reserve money means to us one is we don't have to go out to referendum if anything big happens we were very successful during Hurricane Ida um we lost an our complete alternative building and I was able to do a temporary emergency motion to move $300,000 out of a reserve and get the project done and cleaned up and those students back in there by Christmas we were able to to do that with a it was September 1st of 2021 it was my first day of as the business administrator in the district if that wasn't a sign I don't know what was um but we were able to do that where other people needed to either float a bond or they we were able to do that here because we have the funds but what that means also is with interest rates at 5% we're really funding our budget with our own money so that's another huge amount and the I had the county office say to me how are you doing that I said have you looked at my cash balances so that not difficult to do when we have a plan for our future also too we do this all the time here I like to use the word zerob based budget we're somewhere in between here we really look at our departmental budgets we want to make sure that the spending is reasonable based on what we're doing in the classroom and we're very successful at that and again the last one as we we talked about briefly in other other slides is due to declining in enrollment some of our staffing has also kind of fallen in behind and that's starting to come to fruition with the last two budgets that we've had so this is the add of District um placements I think last year we had 19 full-time students at a district um and this year we're down to to 19 I could be wrong if I do the math wrong what is 19 + 12 31 maybe not I don't know I don't have my C calculator um so this is kind of how we work um because this has also helped to contribute uh to our budget uh successes this year Revenue sources this is fund accounting our revenues equal our expenditures those of you in business there's no retained earnings there's no profit and loss it goes right into fund balance so what's important is that our revenues equal our expenditures as you can see here this is always so devastating to look at this this big piece 76.7 n% is paid by taxpayers there's very little else that comes in here Capital reserves you see this 9.76 that's just as much as the budget that we've planned for the upcoming summer but we have very little little coming in as special Revenue funds all of our all of our grants have expired um this is a little um I don't want to say misleading but it's equal on both sides it's what I call fund 20 if we if we get $100,000 in fund 20 for example for an idea Grant we get it on the expense side if we don't spend it we don't get it so it's kind of a wash there so that's a little misleading 5% is fund balance that we've saved from prior years this little tiny piece here this green guy thank you state of New Jersey that's what we're getting from the state of New Jersey 5.87% of our entire budget and then 1.64 is coming from from local sources that's my interest income that's my tuition that I'm receiving for students that are out of District that are coming in District and this is just the number graphic you can see our budgeted fund balance year-over-year is down $400,000 this is the money that's left over after we do the audit local tax levy is increasing 1031 that's 1.75% of the tax levy we're allowed to budget that to 2% $147,000 is going into bank cap for the future other this $312,000 a majority of that is interest income year over year this is the $311,000 you saw on the other slide in terms of what we were losing in state aid this year federal aid I'm sorry federal aid is is monies that we received for what's called semi and that's a federal program for students that are eligible for Medicare reimbursement and this is a a a program that we have have to to go through here as well we don't have Debt Service haven't since I think 2020 we paid off our last last Debt Service payment and uh we have not we have no need uh for referendum here we are well funded going forward capital reserves so what you're going to see here and I'll give you a little bit more detail as we go it looks like it's a big decrease year-over-year but again this is this is our own money that we're using for Planned projects in the upcoming school year so we're planning a lower um fewer projects if you will for the summer of 24 than we did for the summer of 23 I'm sorry I'm lying the summer of 25 compared to the summer of 24 the one we're going into so overall you'll see that we're really the number to really look at is here we're pretty flat $925,000 year-over-year change in my general fund balance you see such a big increase in EX in revenues you'll see the same decrease in expenditures um but a bulk of that is because we have less capital projects planned so it's a little misleading I mean it's a great statistic I love to say yeah that's because we cut cost we didn't we're just not going to do as much in the summer 25 that we're doing in the summer 24 and in additional to that those are Rod grants so they're going to be funded by the state at 40% so when I talk about general fund these are the things that are included in the general fund budget our regular and instructional program programs we have um done some some pretty wonderful things there um in this budget as we continue to grow um we have some new ini initiatives which include expanding our AP programs and um writing C curriculum and investing in professional developments for all of those programs so we do have some great things coming up we have um continued to expand um our technology educa educ engineering and design program it's what people lovingly call Ted um that's a program that's dictated by what the students want to enroll in so we've added programs for next year an additional class at a higher advanced level um for social studies we've also increased the number of courses that K students can take with our dual enrollment program the dual enrollment program is a program that offers students an opportunity to take college level classes while they're still in high school and get credit currently we offer about 50 courses with our partners um at the college level that students are allowed to take those programs continue to expand so all of those types of things are included in the budget so also included in the general fund is all of our special education pro programs instructional support which is considered our libraries our Counseling Services Health office curriculum supervisors and staff training administrative expenses operations which is our maintenance custodial grounds and security Transportation employee health benefits equipment is any asset that we purchase or one item over $2,000 has to go through what we call fund 12 which is an asset and then the capital projects capital projects are solely funded through capital reserve that's the 7.6 million you saw in the previous slide why is am I talking a lot I'm so sorry it just seems like the lot they're not ending um this is the pie chart if you will um of our expenditures category and this is much nicer because you can kind of see it's a little more balanced right we want to spend a lot of our Pro program money on on things that are happening in the classroom so most of that's all right here so we're in pretty good shape in terms of the amount of money that we're spending on students in classrooms this is a detailed breakdown of what those things um look like um and I think we've hit on most of it um year overy year so I don't know what happened to my real pretty pie chart there there it is all right my predecessor my my predecessor right Jim was my predecessor always used to say this and I love this we're supposed to be in the education business we're not we're in the people business right we're in the education of students which are people and we also have a lot of people in our business 77.6% of our budget which is pretty close to your tax levy contribution to our budget all is due to employee salaries and employee benefits so that's a pretty amazing look if you will at what actually operates within our budget we talked at Great length about capital reserve funds these are rainy day funds these are things that we save for our future and it's all dictated by the long range facility PL so whether it's improving football fields or putting in a science lab or you'll see in the projects coming up under our Rod grants we're going to be doing a lot of HVAC renovation and roving um those are things that are funded um through what we call a capital reserve fund a lot of districts aren't as lucky as we are and a lot of times these things need to be funded with a referendum we haven't had to do that here maintenance Reserve is similar in the sense that it's things that aren't necessarily um educational space if you will for example we just approved to do a project on last meeting where we have to do a renovation or an upgrade to our project Adventure Course um that's going to come out of Maintenance Reserve so again that's money that we have on that isn't necessarily budgeted that through the approval process through committies we um approve to go ahead and do these projects and then at the end of the year if we have funding available we just put the money back in this is um capped also at what we call an M1 and it's based on a certain dollar amount of our square footage so that's capped at a certain amount as well these are the projects that that are included in this budget this is the $7.6 million I think that's what that says $7.6 million um for projects for that we plan to do in the summer of 2025 these are all what we call Rod grants we were successful in applying last spring I think well maybe it was last fall I think we're almost through spring um what's called a rod Grant the state did put an opportunity for us to apply for money um it's a rural operating District Grant and what that allows us to do is put certain it's there were certain levels that they approved and when they ran out of money that's when it kind of kind of ended um we haven't had these projects available to us since 2010 so this is a rod um opportunity where we were successful in applying for um over12 million almost $13 million worth of projects again all en Roofing whether it's going to be Replacements or resurfacing and HVAC projects that need to be done uh within the district and the state has approved up to 40% reimbursement of that so we took the opportunity to use the state's money um at 40% so we did get approved for 12 grants the county was not amused with me by the way um and that 40% is about 5.1 almost $5.2 million that the state will fund seven of them we plan to do next summer the balance of them will do in the summer of 2026 general fund tax levy we've talked about this we did not go over 2% we went to 1.75% the 147 39988 will go into bank cap for district use within the next three years the stock the clock starts sticking at the end of this this budget cycle we also were successful in putting some money in for 2324 or leaving us with $263,000 in Bank cap that can be used in the future so if all of a sudden we start to see a big influx of students coming up into the nth grade this is an opportunity for us to be able to fund that over over um the 2% tax cap in the future all this is where it gets tricky it's always very dis difficult to explain how the tax rate is calculated there's a lot of different moving Parts here we talked at Great length about Equalization and enrollment those are those are um because we're a regional district that's the allocation based on your Equalization or valuation in your home municipality as well as um it considers the number of students you're sending to the high school level there's a calculation that it goes through this is the calculation so you see the equal Equalization value the number of enrollments and the percentage at the end is the share of the total tax levy that's allocated or appropriated to each of the sending districts so that's how at a minimum your tax levy is allocated once that happens then the next thing in order to get the tax rate is you consider your ratables so those are the real values um based on the municipality and what that does is it takes the ratables divides it into the amount of your tax levy and that gives us a tax rate so this is a really cool cool side I mean it's good news and bad news it changes dramatically based on the number of students and your Equalization values as we talked about but we've been really successful over time because we've contained our budget and our tax levy that over the last three years Delaware Township has gone down $27.98 per $100,000 of assessed value so if your house is worth $100,000 which we know it's more than that um it it's costing you additional over the last three years it has costed cost an addition $27 decrease 98 this year it's going up 1.92 so it's going up 1093 that's been our biggest impact East Amwell over the last three years this is a cool one East Amwell um has gone down $25.32 there's a lot of reasons for that most of it's enrollment over the last three years for every $100,000 of assessed value it's gone down $130 Flemington is down 3541 this year 7723 over the last three Raritan is is up $28 this year they're sending more students over the last three years they've only been up 1773 and Readington is down 1164 up $841 cents over the last three years this is a combination I wish I could give you more specifics in terms of the exact Wise It's a real convoluted calculation but overall the biggest success is we're able to control our taxes that we're asking to raise and in essence this this is really what's controlling these costs what's next hopefully tonight we'll approve the tenative budget it'll be submitted to the executive County Superintendent on Wednesday um our budget hearing it has to be advertised we advertise our our userfriendly budget on April 25th the public hearing will be on the 29th of April um we need to um post it on our website within two days of the public hearing and op option and then we certify tax levies to each of the county um uh Boards of Taxation so we still have more work to do um but overall a bulk of it's done thankfully any questions I don't have a question but I I just I know you are humble about your this is effort to do this but I I it's clear that you know where every penny is and where to squeeze and that you really live and breathe it so appreciate especially right now given the difficult times for a lot of people to see coming in underneath the 2% I think is really just a huge Testament to you know that we're not here just to take from you know the community but we're here to you know really be fiscally responsible and and try to help out where we can so I really appreciate your work with this thank you and I'd like to just add thank you for such a detailed presentation it was way too long no idea what time it is Tak a long time to put together so thank you so thank you any other questions that's because I tell them this over and over and over and over at nauseum so thank you so much thank you yes all right I don't even have to show my baby can I close it from here no okay all right she's critiquing herself under her breath right now as she's sitting so um and again just focusing on stewardship tight control over our budget making sure that we offer the best possible program in the most responsible way that we can for our community and and I think just uh it's it's unheard of not only to come in under the 2% but to see to see uh such level and declining tax rates over three years and we have to present those as three years because they do go up and down each year um but in the long look of things you know the the the ask is is is uh is getting lower which is which is wonderful to see um and still being able to produce the program off of the program that we have um the last thing in my report today is just the the Hib and suspension report we have uh a bunch of incidents and recall I presented those last month uh and there's a break in the numbers there because two of the incidents that are reported occurred outside of the district they occurred with other school districts so we don't have to take action on them they have their home elsewhere uh and then um as far as organizational items that's the only thing that I have for you to vote on tonight so with that um and with thanks for all of your patience turn it back over to you Mr fer thank you so much would anybody like to go through the budget presentation one more time because that was really invigorating it's great job thank you no I do yeah um all right so public comment uh if anybody would like to say anything about tonight's agenda or topics on tonight's agenda now is the time please feel free to come up to the podium seeing none we will roll into the the rest of our agenda organizational items back to you Dr Moore all right so we have a multitude of hibs that I presented in Clos session last time the executive minutes from last meeting have the summaries on those and uh uh so so with uh with your approval we'll be able to stay on the timeline for those good yeah thank you all right Mr Rymer student life and program good evening uh for student oh sorry I was that's what I was wondering about yeah um I don't move it you have to move that's yeah so I'll just jump in and say uh I'll I'll move for the the hi report for approval for this month is there a second second thank you any conversation about it okay roll call Mrs blutfield yes Mrs Peterson yes Mrs dougen yes Mrs santangelo yes Mrs Kellogg yes Mrs odonnell yes Mr Rymer yes Miss gong yes and Mr Fowler yes all yes motion carries all right sorry about that everybody formalities Mr Rymer back to you all right well student life and programming have five items to move this evening the first is for tuition and transportation for special UC for the first one is Midland School to the tune of $2,579 and the second is is for North hun Vorhees Regional High School $ 7,396 the second item is the approval of a research project by the College of New Jersey where a uh Professor would come in and and observe a classroom for one day number three is a new club HOSA for the future Healthcare professionals a club dedicated to exploring the opportunities within the healthcare realm number four is an overnight field trip for the Youth and government Club down in East Brunswick and the fifth is uh an overnight field trip Amendment for the marching Red Devils indoor Color Guard in Wildwood New Jersey in May I'd like to move that we move those five items thank you second second any conversation broll call vote Please Mr Rymer yes Mrs odonnell yes Mrs santangelo yes with exception to number two is that a no on too yes Mrs Peterson yes Mrs dougen yes Mrs blutfield yes Mrs Kellogg yes Miss gong yes and Mr Fowler yes all yes motion carries thank you Miss dougen on okay we've got 12 items tonight the first is the financial reports that we see every month second is the invoices and the third is transfers number four is um asking this was included in the tenative budget that Miss Spitzer uh shared tonight it is um to in the amount of $200,000 to basically make that the maximum expenditure for the school year for um sorry that's taking me a long time to get around that travel expenditures number five is travel and related expense reimbursement this is a preapproval for any expense that's up to $150 so we're just kind of giving a rubber stamp on that and then we'll see that after it comes in the future number six is a budget withdraw for Capital reserves for the capital projects that we just recently saw for those Rod Grant projects for the summer of 2025 number seven is the tentative budget that we just saw tonight you can see all the details number eight is for um emergent and capital maintenance needs so the funding provided by New Jersey school Development Authority it it um let's see so this is for a grant of $67,400 keeps on giving number nine is bidding out the 20242 Transportation routes for the next school year number 10 is the Chromebook purchases to prepare for the 20 20 let's see 20242 school year number 11 is a jointure with Burlington County Special Services special service School District so that's to move one student stent and then number 12 is the first reading for a policy called choice of vendor and this is really um it's just talking about the bidding process for qualified purchasing agents so with that I'd like to move ENT items one through 12 thank you second second any conversation comments questions seeing none roll call please Mrs dougen yes Miss gong yes Mrs Peterson yes Mr Rymer yes Mrs BL Fields yes Mrs Kellogg yes Mrs odonnell yes Mrs santangelo yes and Mr Fowler yes all yes motion carries thank you blutfield Personnel committee always coming in with the biggest number yeah well we have a light agenda tonight we only have 17 items um the highlight of tonight's agenda we have items number three and four where we are appointing our interm superintendent Dr Charles Shadow and actually it's on the agenda twice because we have to do one contract to finish out this school year and then one contract for July 1st till June 30th 2025 um we hope to hire our permanent superintendent before then but just in case we have the contract um I I don't know if everyone's seen the announcement hopefully you have but Dr Shadow brings a wealth of experience to our district he's uh also very familiar with hun and County he spent 17 years as the superintendent at North Hunter and bores and he was interim Superintendent at South Hunter in back in 2020 so we are looking forward to welcoming him to our district and hopefully everyone will have a chance to meet him soon other agenda items we have two retirements of two long-term employees we have Judy galini who was a duty who is a duty release Aid with 25 and a half years of experience here and Rowena redlick who is a special ed teacher with 20 years with the district so I wish them all well in retirement we also have one resignation we have two appointments in item five we have an HR specialist and a replacement foreign language teacher then we have our hourly appointments chaperon we have a proctor Mentor test coordinator couple of substitute teachers in item number 10 we have um we are approving instructional design assistant program development staff this is a fairly new program where we have staff who work with peers and they help with things like technology and other Innovations and what we are approving tonight is um grant money to provide hours that they can work to make adjustments to the program make some improvements uh then in 11 we are approving two climate and culture study coordinators to work with Mr Brant this is something that we do every year and again it's Grant funded in 12 we have schedules uh One Schedule C unpaid advisor Schedule D we have some coaches including for girls flag football which has become very popular we have an unpaid volunteer for robotics in 14 some student teaching observers from TCNJ and 15 some professional development including the business administrator annual conference and uh we have two AP Chemistry readers listed there that's in 16 and then finally we have some FM lasas in 17 so with that I will move Personnel items 1 through 17 thank second second thank you questions comments just real quick um Judy and Rowena thank you for your service to the district 45 and some and a half years combined there right um we'll miss you as you go on to uh your next chapter so thank you um the girls flag football head coach and assistant coach I just wanted to mention those are noted here as being funded through Esser grants for this spring and as uh Mrs Spitzer shared Esser dries up this year um on top of that uh we can fund them through grants but after that if we were to fund any coaching positions through local money they would have to be approved in the collective bargaining agreement with the staff so um if flag football proves to be successful and we want to look at it another year um there may need to be a conversation about how to incorporate that within the collective bargaining agreement so that it's covered under their schedule d uh aside from that I did want to mention also um i' begun some conversations with Dr Shadow I know Dr Shadow a little bit from his time at South so I got to work with him in the county a little bit through our Round Table uh started conversations with him and with your approval tonight he'll come tomorrow for a meeting with me to begin talking about uh the transition and and beginning to meet everybody um so over the next two weeks we'll be spending some time with Dr Shadow with your approval tonight so thank you thank you anything else R Mrs dougen yes Miss gong yes Mrs Peterson yes Mr Rymer yes Mrs blutfield yes Mrs Kellogg yes Mrs odonnell yes Mrs santangelo yes and Mr Fowler yes all yes motion carries thank you Peterson policy committee we intended originally to have uh three items for approval um at this on this agenda um we were intending in the interest of transparency to bring to the board a vote to have a um audit done by both njsba and Strauss as May to get as much information as possible regarding um all the different policies Dr Moore I guess didn't feel that that was um necessary so we are um basically just announcing that that is I believe our intent to do that just in the interest of the more information the better um more sources of information better the better it is um we have one policy on for our first reading this is an amendment of our um nepotism policy which uh it's got a proposed new policy this is actually one that's a little confusing there's nepotism policy currently on our books as well as a collective bargaining policy at some point it appears because the collective bargaining policy was last updated in 2002 it appears that at some point that was folded into our current nepotism policy but not ever abolished um this amendment to the policy um brings us in line with the law and is um a little bit more thorough for the use of you know board members um since bylaws are for the general public bylaws are the board's policy for our operating structure and this is one we are required by law to have so um this one brings us in line with what we need right now and then it'll be abolishing the uh 0176 which is the collective bargaining and contract approval which has already been wrapped into the nepotism policy prior to this so with that I will move uh items number one and two okay thank you is there second second all right um I'll I'll add a little bit of color so um two comments I guess first Dr Moore and I did discuss the the motion about um the manual review and uh first of all stra estimat is already underway and almost done um so it' be kind of repetitive to do a second vote of that and because there's no cost to the district they're both part of our contracts um from both providers there was no need to really do a motion um but it was good to at least discuss it so that everybody has transparency um the other thing that I'll highlight is um if you read through the wording of the policy that we're putting up for revision you'll see that it is um a lot of wording from njsba not from Strauss smme that's just because as as I understand it in conversation in committee because we had exposure and availability of the wording of NJ sba's policy we didn't have anything new from Strauss smme even though uh we recognize both of them have been updated recently we took the wording from the most recent so that's the purpose behind that any other questions or comments or thoughts in regards to these motions yes I have comments please I'm glad you said it was uh confusing Mrs Peterson so you just heard a summary of what the policy committee has been working on at this month's meeting uh I'm going to read from my notes because I want to just make sure I capture all of my points so I'm a member of the policy committee Mrs Peterson is the chair Mrs santangelo is a member Mr Fowler attends as the ex officio member because he's the board president uh Dr Morris schedule conflicted with the date of the last meeting so he couldn't attend um so in the spirit of transparency I want to share some information about the work that we are trying to do along with some of my concerns um I exchanged several emails with Mrs Peterson concerning the agenda and meeting minutes so none of the none of what follows should be a surprise to any of the committee members as they were copied on these emails but first I need to say this with all due respect Mrs Peterson is a policy geek she is she loves this stuff um and Mrs santangelo is uh not far behind in that respect in fact Mrs santangelo reminded me that I should be better prepared before I attend these meetings first um the committee has uh not yet agreed on a mission statement that outlines the purpose of this committee per reg 0155 all of our standing committees have a statement that describes their purpose so we've not put together our framework we have not determined how we will function how agendas are set how we interact with other standing committees the administration or a board attorney who is necessary in reviewing our policies we also have to reach out to our board attorney to make sure they'd have the time time to review our work we also need to have the funds Mrs Spitzer to uh pay for this work at this last policy meeting I handed out my suggested wording along with Mrs Peterson's wording for rig 0155 we've tried to discuss this at two meetings now we've not come to an agreed upon wording that should guide this committee you might be asking well why is this so important well without a mission statement we really have no boundaries no limits to what we can and cannot do Mr fower to his credit suggested we table this discussion until our new interim superintendent could attend a meeting but as I've thought about it we might borrow some language from the board member code of ethics it reads as follows I will continue I I will confine my board action to policymaking planning and appraisal and I will help to frame policies and plans only after the board has consulted those who will be affected by them these words might be a good starting point for us second item recall that at the January 4th reorg meeting I was assigned to this committee by the president by the way I hear that sometimes it's a right of passage for a new Committee Member to be on the policy committee but I digress at the January meeting Mrs Peterson encouraged this board to resurrect a policy committee because we have outdated policies that should be updated for example there's a pay telephone policy that should be updated to date to date we have not had any discussions about any other outdated policies my third item we discussed the nepotism and collective bargaining policies at length at this last meeting I didn't understand why out of the hundreds of policies we have and then we do have hundreds of policies why we would focus on these two policies when we still have an outstanding request from the SLP committee I spent more time this weekend rereading these two policies and I'm still perplexed I'm not a policy geek Mrs santangela said that she heard a lot of concern about these two issues at her njsba govern one training session she heard that board members in other districts were concerned about nepotism and collective bargaining I attended a different njsba governance one training in a different month but did not hear the same concerns at my training session there was discussion about overall board governance board Behavior board interactions and improving communication between board members I don't know if nepotism and collective bargaining are a concern across the state of New Jersey but I want to narrow the scope of this policy committee and focus on those policies that are of concern for central standing committees my fourth and last item the committee discussed creating a school climate policy and I think that would probably be pretty good the minutes state that this policy would address the board's concerns I think we need to be clear about who on the board has concerns and what those concerns are I'd like to see our committee meeting minutes include more specificity to help us arrive at good decisions around policy again I say all of this in the true Spirit of transparency I'm trying my best to Be an Effective board member and as learn and learn as much as possible about Central's policies we are in this together thank you if I could just respond really quickly to some of that um why you asked about the nepotism now yes and what I said was this one is not in compliance with the law um now at the time you hadn't read these yet so I understood you weren't ready to get into the full details of them but uh per definition we are required as a condition of receiving state aid to have a policy about nepotism and in that policy we have to have a definition that is consistent of relative that is consistent with njsa 523d 21- point2 and NJ a6a 23A 1.2 and a definition of immediate family member that is consistent with njsa 5213 d-3 and N jaac c6a 23 A- 1.2 our policy would did not have those definitions as such we were at risk of losing State funding now if um anyone else has any questions about why there are some other reasons um that this was just a little bit more of a thorough one uh the one that we've adopt that the one that we've proposed for adoption further um you know there's a lot more updated advisory opinions from the uh School ethics commission for benefit of our board members and the future board members who sit on this board so as far as why legally that one because we were at risk because we did not have an updated policy and because we already pay for njsba even though they are not our policy vender we have to pay for them annually we are mandated by law to pay for them we have a wealth of resources available to us and since it was there you might as well use it I'd like to start by saying that I voted to approve the creation of the policy committee and I support the mission of creating consistency across policies removing outdated material and references and responding to requests from Comm and board members setting policy is the primary responsibility of the board and our policies create a Common Language we all refer to when operating our district at the last board meeting the policy committee chair reported that the committee had met and identified that ensuring sufficient definitions and definitions that were uniform were priorities when I began reviewing the changes in policy 014 2.1 and realized that the text and citations have been copied and pasted word for word without even corrections to typos or grammatical errors from the New Jersey school board sample policy site I assumed that the policy language must be perfect and support the state mission that there is sufficient definitions and that the definitions are uniform however that is far from the case the dictionary definition of nepotism the title of the policy is the act of granting Advantage privilege or position to relatives and friends in an occupation field but the first definition in the policy defines nepotism as the existence of a conflicted relationship and further defines conflicted relationship as any relationship that creates a justifiable impression that the public trust may be violated this definition conflates nepotism with conflict of interest further the policy does not define or explain who determines what constitutes a justifiable impression or who would be responsible for raising or resolving those concerns there are many additional inconsistencies within this policy for example the definition of nepotism specifically references only board members and the chief School administrator but other sections of the policy use terms conflicted administrator which could include the principal Vice principls and other school administrators or School official which doesn't have an obvious meaning and isn't defined under the policy re the rewrite of of the policy also fails to reference or supersede policy 0163 or Quorum when discussing the Do Not necessity creating additional confusion there are also references that are out of date or that have been withdrawn by the school ethics commission the last definition on the list is other which includes the language any other personal or professional relationship that creates a justifiable impression that the public trust is being violated this is simp similar to the definition of conflicted relationship but expands to professional relationships and removes the word may I'm concerned that this definition could Pro prohibit the superintendent from recommending internal promotions because the superintendent by definition would have a professional relationship with anyone who works in the district and with this policy in place recommending that promotion could open the district to potential legal challenges or grievances when I voted to approve establishing this committee it was not my understanding that the committee would be authorized to unilaterally revise and combine policies I believe beginning the work without reviewing the policy audits having the administration involved or receiving input from board counsel or the policy vendors is irresponsible it appears that the committee made no effort to review the copy and pasted language or consider the impacts of this policy language on our district this effort does not represent the the diligence that the board members owe each other and the district and it undermines any insertion assertion that the members of this committee are qualified to undertake the effort of updating the policy manual I move to table the first reading of policy 01421 and policy 0176 and I respectfully request that any future policy revisions that don't originate from a committee referral are reviewed by board counsel prior to being bought brought to the board for first reading I will second that motion to table um I I actually had a lot of the same concerns um I think Miss gong and Miss kog have brought up some good points and some legitimate concerns um what I would like to talk about are is my greatest concern is with process I feel that we cannot gain the Public's trust without having a transparent process and right now I feel like we have no process um I'm starting to feel a little bit like this committee is working by putting the cart before the horse that um the first step in any new committee should be to sit down and come up with your mission come up with your functions and duties and that is that is what we have for all of our other standing committees if you look at it's required under our policy it's um it's in there in our regulation a155 has a list of all the responsibilities of all the other standing committees and in fact um you can see in that regulation that every other committee right now actually has the responsibility for recommending policy and action so I think very first step you need to sit down you need to come up with that mission you need to come up with the responsib ilities the functions and duties and um the process of how this is going to work I actually felt like last month we were heading in the right direction when it was stated that the policy committee would focus on getting input from other committees and the administration to see what gets brought to them and then I was kind of surprised to find out they were working on redoing a Personnel related policy without ever going through the Personnel committee I mean I'm the head of the Personnel committee and I did not know anything about this it certainly did not originate in that committee we have not heard any concerns we had no discussions and it seems like there was no administrative or legal input either um I don't think the policy committee can work in a vacuum and that's sort of what it feels like is going on here I think we need a transparent process process to answer the following questions I wrote down a whole bunch of questions that I think um I I would recommend you go back and next next month that you work on coming up with your mission and answering these questions first question what is the purpose and goals of this committee that's the the very first question that needs to be answered who or what will determine which policies are being reviewed how will you get appropriate input from other committees administrators and our attorney should the policy committee recommend policies for other committees to look at or vice versa why are certain policies being reviewed what is the rationale an issue or concern that was brought to the committee's attention so sort of the who what where why when uh without maybe the the where and the when but um there there's a lot of questions that need to be answered and I feel that until those questions are answered until the regulations are updated and we have a process we should not be voting on anything out of this committee all right thank you um I guess I'll I'll add comment that I'm really glad that um my feelings and my response to to Dr Charney two months ago are coming to fruition that it takes nine people to vote something in at this board and it can't be done unilaterally it can't be done through a minority of of people working in the committee it comes to this table it gets flushed out if there's disagreement things get tabled and they get addressed appropriately um I feel this is the good checks and balances of a board like this and I'm happy that these discussions are being brought to the table and being worked out um I agree with the sentiments that we've been challenged to come up with a mission statement and how the uh committee would work um unfortunately the last two months we've struggled to to get administration to the meeting I don't think that that was done with any purpose it was just a a mismatch of scheduling and hopefully as uh we move forward with Dr Shadow we can iron that out and have appropriate representation I'll also comment that um our meeting minutes did reflect that Our intention is not only to just have the superintendent but any Administration um representative that is going to be helpful and provide good input to our conversations in the committee so uh look forward to um having further conversations taking all this feedback back in our our committee conversations and figuring out how to uh to move forward with this so I've I've heard that we've had a motion in a second to table do we need to just for we need to go to vote on tabling correct all right can we do a roll call vote on that one please this is specif this is specifically to table to table the two first reads correct Mrs blufeld yes Mrs Kellogg yes Mrs Sant Angelo no Mr Rymer yes Mrs odonnell yes Mrs Mrs Peterson no Mrs dougen yes Miss gong yes and Mr Fowler yes can I just make one more comment uh as to what Mrs bloodfell said these are bylaws which is not currently within the purview of any committee which is why we sought to address them because as we recall last year in our first meeting of 2023 we were made an our vote was illegally done when we voted for Vice president um because our bylaws were not kept up to date the bylaws um involve the functioning of this board which is why that is where we started and we discussed much of this at length in the committee it's unfortunately that Mrs gong doesn't recall much of this conversation we discussed that we discussed doing the um the the bylaw I'm really thrilled that everybody is reading the policies that's that's a great shift um in this board but I would love love to see everybody building some bridges and trying to maybe have a little bit of faith and take away their personal animus just a little bit all right so with that let's move on to additional business any other uh committee reports or layers on reports please um we did have a a short Communications committee meeting uh this month following the personnel committee um primarily to make sure that we had an understanding of who was covering the duties of the director of communications um as we're transitioning uh from Dr Moore to Dr shadow um primarily we talked about Communications around graduation um we talked about Communications focusing on the introduction of of Dr shadow um and we did also talk about the the programs um the technology program the broadcast technology department um that is usually led by that Communications office um and we do encourage uh the new superintendent to make a priority of identifying a new Communications officer anything else I guess I'll give one one bit of transparency uh from our operations Transportation conversations um as I've actually reported as a chair of that committee last year um there's been ongoing conversations with the joint Transportation committee JTC um with flamington Ron on its structure moving forward um throughout much of last year we all collectively looked at the bylaws in that committee and how we could uh rewrite those bylaws to be more efficient for the committee to be working moving forward working better um I'll remind everybody that that was originally established in 95 and the bylaws and the contract for the JTC have not really been revised hardly at all since 95 so it's great news that it's it stood such a test of time um after going through a good number of conversations and reworking of bylaws we presented it to the JTC um Council and uh we received some guidance back from um our our lawyer that um we're working under an Antiquated model and the model really is something that was was a good idea back in 995 but since has been replaced with a shared service model which is more akin to what we have with um with Delaware Township in East Amwell where there's a provider and a recipient of the services and he suggested that really instead of rewriting the bylaws um for the standing JTC that it be restructured to a full shared services model where there's one group running the service and everybody else is essentially customers of that service um we've been kicking around that conversation in JTC on and off for the last couple of months between that and again going back to Mrs Spitzer's very um thorough review of of the need to manage our budget and seeing that we were challenged to forecast the budget with a lot of confidence because of some of the changes we've seen as a result of the non-shared service structure of the JTC today um Hunton Central board had a good conversation last month and we presented to our Flemington Maron counterparts on the JTC that we would like to formally begin conversations to restructure the JTC to a pure shared services model um we feel pretty confident that that's going to give us a better ability to manage uh the forecast of budgets and and costs going forward for Hunton Central and uh we feel that it'll be very minimal if any ongoing change to the cost of running business for each of the schools um it really just allows us to really have a better insight and control into the forward-looking financial spend so we started that conversation with our our Flemington R and counterparts at the last JTC meeting they brought it back to their board they're going to be talking about it and then we're going to have ongoing conversations hopefully the next couple of months to see if we can structure that to something is more aligned to what our our Council provides us guidance for and what is commonly found throughout the state so should have more updates on that in the near future um any other additional board business from the table yes we voted to table table okay yes and it's being tabled okay Mr Fowler I have one more update on March 12th Mrs Spitzer and I had a zoom meeting with uh the two representatives for the 100 Central Foundation um I was introduced to Jim Finn and Frank Barlo uh Mrs Spitzer um was is included as well since she has some history about the foundation we discussed the generous awards that have been given to students at Central we also discussed a series of asks that the foundation would like this board to look at going forward I think it would be a good idea to look at what they're asking for which is more involvement but I also said that this board has some very serious and important things to accomplish in the next few months so that we would get back to them sometime in the future thank you very much yes if I board comments um yeah I just briefly wanted to really just um thank Dr Moore for your your time here um so we're gonna do it after public comment it's board business sorry that's okay looking forward to it any of the board business did R me did me okay if not was just I was asking no we didn't not meet yet all right with that we are going to open up to our next Open session of public comment anybody would like to speak please feel free to come up to the podium we will have five minutes per address here and uh again a reminder if you have any comments for the board or the administration please direct them at me uh good evening my name is Jim Vargas resident of M Beach long-term resident of uh riton um it's funny over weekend I was thinking about this talk here I had a song that I really like it's by Sting it's called it's a new day and that's what I see that you're facing you here right now you've been a couple months in here as a board you got a new board that's balanced and you have a new superintendent come in you can kind of do what needs to be done in the world so with all the work I've been doing at different boards with the work I've been doing with the legislature all this week I had some thoughts that I wanted to share with you that you may want to carry forward um number one clean up the past there's a couple things that need to be hung up there one of them again is the Pagano incident if you're not going to publish a full report on it at least put a summary and have a good idea of how you going to manage it how you face the things what's allowed and what the ramifications are for acting out those type of things and number two I bring up this one a lot is on uh uh Paul Tango right Paul I understand is there train issue that goes on that has to be run by the board that's good but when the letter came in that said he put people in ganger he did not that's just a assault on character it's what woke and left people do and it's just wrong to do so if you can fix that that would be great um number two be fair in your decisions okay both Mrs adonald and Mr P made statements that were offensive to people all right some people said this some people said that I think it was free I think it was free speech and you should be allowed to say what they want to have but one person was charged one person wasn't have a policy if we're going to talk about policy if one person gets charged both of them should be charged if one them are free both of them should not be free okay um I've picked up in the past when I've been working on you your teachers are afraid of you okay you're afraid of the administration that afraid of speaking that word go fix that make sure that that people feel free to share their opinions um treat issues equally okay a student made a comment NE a comment about somebody's dress and right away he was chastised and said he would be re-educated we picked up here in the last couple board meetings where a student was going through being harassed actually was a fiscal thing where a plate was thrown and it took months to clear it up it's good that this board cleared it up but do it faster number three um the obligation for diversity inclusion and Equity all the lesson plans have to cover that make it public make it electronic I've been working with uh this I don't know if you saw it in the legislature but the oper new rules coming out are being largely uh confest contested the people who have the part want it in the people that need the information don't want this thing in here this thing had 125 different organizations that signed a letter not to pass this bill so get out of that plan make it public make it access on the thing on when you call with with with the pronoun that that students can use it but per parents can't be in don't have to be informed inform the parents you already made it make it a formal policy that comes out that you will do it and then in third part in the six Edge standards um that is when you look at it it is a tenant of of humanism and secularism it doesn't s s all religions uh Christianity Judaism Islam are all against that they are all tenants of religions they should not be should be forced on people so move from a policy of opting out to a policy of opting in I think that is that meet the needs of both the state and the meet the needs of what people should have um number six I want to spend some time on this protect your children I have a reports here that come out from uh Psychology today that says 11.7% % of the students graduates in college day said they were victims of some sort of sexual approach by a by a teacher here is a note from us news report that says the feds are asking boards to turn and teach more and be more stringent on it type of thing and then the last thing I'd like to talk about on is the transgender environment right it needs to be served it needs to be taken care of right but I've pulled a report here the LGBT community is not one Community I know G and lesbians they are very conservative they have a view of family they have different they they don't have the same issues that people have bisexuality is is a way of living your life when I looked on here here's a report from uh the um uh survey that comes out and says the population of transvest is 1 1.0% they came up and they call me cisgender 49% of CIS genders are female 47% are males it's only 1% and driving our our efforts on 1% they should be taken care of they should be addressed but not overwhelmed what we're doing and the C in that and the last thing I know I may run over a half second but it was a tragedy that the young woman committed suicide I have a I have a a niece that is transgender and we always felt that she was going to commit suicide we supported her she went through all the changes she got everything she was but it didn't fix her problem she now is addressing her mental health issues and she's getting better but it's not the issue of what they're dealing with sexuality there's a mental health issue there address the mental health issue and then work with sexual but but keep focusing on those type of things thank you for your time you did you take I da was a gift I'm sorry good evening Sandra D'Or Ron Township first I am following up from an email email response I received from then board president Lisa Hughes dated October 5th 2023 she stated that m o donnal with assistance from board counsel will seek an advisory opinion regard regarding her role on the advisory committee of njpc Mr fer has Miss o Donnell sought an advisory opinion I take that that no one knows the answer to that I remind the board that M O'Donnell has not used a disclaimer with regard to her position on that committee meanwhile some within this community and selected board members Contin have continued to persecute Rebecca Peterson for her alleged which I would like to remind everyone means innocent until proven guilty in this country and we just saw that on display a few minutes ago comments but has never addressed M O'Donald's association with NJ PE we Contin continue to hear about NJ project being a quote unquote hate group however they don't address the statements made on the njpc website and here are some of the comments as rightwing extremists continue to gain seats on our school boards they are attacking our teachers Librarians and administrators forcing hardworking qualified Educators to resign they are attacking our children's education with hate intolerance and racial bias attempting to whitewash American history and ban award-winning books in sewing Division and pain in our communities second at the previous Board of Ed meeting M Hoff spoke about next Benedict being beaten by three students and dying from those injuries this past week the coroners report dispelled M Hoff statement the teenager's death was ruled a suicide by overdosing on flu oxene an anti-depressant and diah Dien hydramine and antihistamine loss of life is tragic and should not be used to fuel a personal narrative this needs to stop in fact the CDC published guidelines on how not to discuss suicide which includes the method of the suicide personal details over simplifying or spec or speculate the reason for the suicide sensationalized details overstate suicide as an epidemic I highly encourage all that are doing this to read these guidelines and hope you realize how irresponsible and dangerous this can be on our youth we do not want this to become our social contagion during the last meeting Miss bage warned against speaking on this matter before all the facts were presented she reminded us that just because you may not agree with what someone is saying it does not constitute misinformation will M Hoff and others who spoke about this tragedy retract their comments and acknowledge their misinformation after all Miss Hoff talks about kindness in her speeches and how we should be kind to one another she even wears it on her shirt my question to you is are baseless accusations kind Miss Hoff went on to say that we should prevent this type of tragedy if so I would like to remind everyone that the only student in the last three years and maybe in the history of the school that has been attacked for standing up for her beliefs was a white Catholic female standing for the right to life why isn't this talked about why does doesn't this count is it because the student doesn't fall in line with mob's narrative we have many students at Central who have firmly held religious beliefs including Central's Christian Club so is it okay for them to be attacked should we not be concerned about their safety and inclusion as well and lastly I would like to quote A very wise man who said we need less of more and thankfully 100 in central is finally seeing that come to fruition thank you m dor please don't take my lack of an answer as me ignoring your question I'll only answer questions that I know I can answer with a ton of certainty and Clarity we'll take that question back to the administration and get back to you just clarifying just clarifying that's all anyone elseis please make sure you state your name and where you're from I'm joking I'll be sure to do that Lisa Hughes Readington Township I'm a parent of a current student parent of a 2022 grad sat on this board for six years last two was President uh it's my pleasure to be here tonight I'm here simp simply for one reason and that's to thank Dr Moore for all that he has done for this district for the past seven years I worked very closely with him my entire six years on the board and I saw nothing but tireless efforts on his part to make this a better place for our students and that's what the focus should always be on and he always kept the focus on our students I said that in my last meeting and I'll reiterate it here again as a parent I personally witnessed the improvements in this school district over the past seven years and the change in culture to a Kindler Kinder more supportive inclusive place so I just want Dr Moore to know you're leaving this place better than when it when you came here thank you for all you've done uh I wish you the best in the next stage of your career and to Dr Shadow I know he's not here tonight but we welcome him we wish him the best of luck uh it's a wonderful school it's a great place with fantastic people many of whom are sitting in the back of the room uh but he's got some pretty big shoes to fill thank you everyone hi uh my name is Wendy berer I'm from Readington and I provided the music a little earlier and I apologize for that I'm here for one reason also I am a parent of a current student and I'm a parent of a student that graduated a few years back I have never been more proud of a school I am so thrilled that we have been blessed with Dr Moore for the entire time that both of my children were here they both are well adjusted they are balanced they've had the best possible High School experience and my daughter extremely well prepared for college um they were safe they were comfortable they felt just a beautiful beautiful experience I love this school I am a very active parent in this school I enjoy being part and seeing everybody here Dr Moore I we I was heartbroken to hear you leave but I am thrilled that you have an opportunity to do something wonderful because you did wonderful things here thank you very much and good luck and thank you all and good luck with your new s your new uh thing and sorry about the music thank you good evening uh I do want to also stand up and uh say to Dr Moore we wish you all the best uh you have been uh an enjoyable uh superintendent to work with uh I represent a the uh 2023 graduate uh of central uh who's doing very well at Sean Hall you all prepared him so uh uh very well academically as well as on the athletic uh uh fields and Dr Moore uh you have been a compassionate competent um uh caring individual and we are going to miss you here in this school district we wish you all the best in your next Endeavors and uh we can just hope that we can find someone who is as uh as as enous as you are and uh uh and we we say congratulations to [Applause] you anyone else seeing none we will close public session and open board comments so now sure go ahead um I just want to Echo the really um thoughtful comments at the at the podium tonight for for Jeff Moore because he's Dr Moore what youve brought to this school has uh just reaffirmed my faith in public education um I remember a meeting one of my first meetings and I walked to my car with Lisa Hughes and hearing you talk about emotional health and and relationships for students with faculty and teachers and and staff and employees and and meaningful experiences and I actually said to Lisa on the way to my car I was like is this real because that had not been my experience for any of my kids in school um so you absolutely leave this District better than when you arrived and um I'm sad and mad and I'm happy for you thank you I have a couple of comments I'd like to make as well and thank you also for everyone who spoke those really kind words um I actually have some prepared comments I think you're going to see some very common themes here um back in January when I reluctantly made a motion to accept Dr Moore's retirement I mentioned that despite all the challenges he faced over the past seven years I felt that Central was in a much better place than it now than when it was seven years ago what I didn't mention then is that I am the only current board member who was here in the pre doctor Mor days who was able to witness the positive transformation of the school and I didn't just witness this as a board member I also saw the transformation through the lens of a parent I have three children who graduated hun and central two of them graduated before Dr Moore became superintendent but my youngest graduated in 2019 two years after he came here I think longtime staff members who are still here today will know what I'm talking about when I say one of the many positive changes Dr Moore made during his tenure here was a significant Improvement in the climate and culture of the school Dr Moore has created a much Kinder and more respectful supportive and student centered hunter in central being a superintendent is not an easy job there are long hours sometimes going from very early morning till very late at night which we all witnessed last board meeting where we were here till almost midnight with Dr Moore but it's also a job where you can't possibly please everyone you just can't Dr Moore though has put his heart and soul into this job because he cares about Hunter in central he cares about the staff and students and everything he has done for this school has always been with the best of intentions and with the students best interest in mind so I'd like to thank you Dr Moore for all your time hard work commitment and many many positive contributions to the school I'm going to miss working with you and I wish you well in the future I'd just like to add my personal thanks um you know joining the school board was a huge leap um coming in in the middle of covid and and not having any idea what I was doing and your patience and guidance and um willingness to answer all my stupid questions just made has made this such an amazingly fulfilling experience and um I all of the work that we've been able to do together over the last three years is is going to be one of the things that I will remember as a really proud time in my life so thank you um just to change the topic so you can take a deep breath I saw something rotten and I hope other people saw it was like one of the best funniest musicals I've ever seen so thank you to the students and to the um Administration teachers for putting that on that was really cool um this is my 75th day as a board member on this board sometimes it feels like the third day and sometimes it feels like the 750th day um I wish I had the opportunity to work with you for the rest of my tenure whatever it is um but I wish you well um good luck to you and uh you know I wish I was sitting up in B marinac good luck anyone else all right I don't usually prepare words I usually speak off the cuff um but I figured what the heck I'll type things up um I guess I'll be always transparent we have not always seen eye to eye um that's never a bad thing um I recall our very first sit down in conversation where you asked me why do you like Central and I said It prepares you for the real world and part of that is learning how to work with people that you get along with and people that you don't get along with um so as you prepare to leave your position as superintendent of our school district I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for your leadership and dedication you've been an inspiration a especially during the challenging times of the covid-19 pandemic even though I wasn't on the board I was watching you have shown how to navigate uncertainties and difficulties with courage compassion and creativity you've always put the well-being and learning of our students first and we admire your advision and commitment to that Excellence um your presence your guidance and your support will be missed you've made a lasting impact to the school and community and I wish you all the best in your future endeavors thank you for being a great superintendent a great person and when necessary a great adversary it is what makes us get stronger and makes us be better people so thank you so with that I believe if we're done we have some cake and some other nice things that have been brought in to celebrate no you're not allowed to talk I'm going to censor um after M Dr Moore is done we will be moving into executive session we have to do a motion for that and we will be returning with some decisions uh and some action go ahead Dr Moore I'm just uh I'm a little overwhelmed um that's not very comfortable for me all of that but but I appreciate it and I will carry that for a long time um hasn't always been easy to be at work but it's always been easy to come to work and uh again thank you for your support and um you walk around a place like this and you run your finger along the counter or you knock on the the metal pillar for the the Breezeway and you just say to yourself I love this place um and uh I do uh so most of my thanks again go to you all for your support but also certainly uh the staff the folks in the back there um students of course and I'm just I'm I'm for cl is that what we say uh thank you so much for for this opportunity uh it's been an honor to be here through difficult times um thank you so with that I'll make a motion for a 10 to 15 minute break for cake and cookies and then moving into an executive session where we will come out of with action all in favor any extensions any NOS e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e all right can I have a motion to reconvene to open session so moved second second all in favor any extensions all right so uh I have a motion regarding the superintendent search provider um I'm going to make a motion move to approve the following resolution effective March 18th 2024 whereas njsa 18a colon 18 A- 5 A1 and chapter 440 of the laws of 1990 specifically exempt professional service contracts from competitive bids and whereas the district has received where applicable political contribution disclosure forms 10 days prior to contract award pursuant to chapter 271 of the laws of 2005 n therefore be it resolved that the board secretary is authorized to execute a contract with hya Corporation to perform Super superintendent search Services an amount not to exceed $31,250 as outlined in tonight's presentation anybody like to second that motion second thank you any conversation about it hearing none could I have a roll call vote please Mrs P Mrs Peterson yes Mrs cogg yes Mrs dun Dugen yes Mrs bfield yes Mrs odonnell yes Mr Rymer yes Miss gong yes Mrs S Angelo yes and Mr Fowler yes all yes motion carries okay anything further from the board seeing nothing can I have a motion to close tonight's meeting second second all in favor I any knows any extensions have a good night