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 board of education has been meeting an executive session pursuant to njsa 10 colon 4-12 the minutes of this meeting will be released when the need for confidentiality no longer exists so we'll open um the public meeting with a roll call Mr Donnie absent miss clock here miss mcau here Mr mmud here Mr Brogan here please join me in a pledge of allegiance I FL the United States America to the stands one nation God indivisible so we will go um into a public comment if there is anyone who would like to make a comment I don't think let see if there's anyone on remote not at this time we have another com uh public comment um period at the end of the meeting so um I'll close that um um we have a presentation Dr Shores yes uh first we have with us I believe uh Mr Matt Lee from The New Jersey school boards Association Mr Lee thank you so much for being here with us today and he is here to present on the uh Schoolboard self evaluation welcome thank you good evening everyone nice to see you all again um so tonight we're going to review the board self- evaluation document uh all of you should have a paper copy of that and um I believe you were given a digital copy a little bit earlier today as well um just a couple of sort of reminders about how the document works and what it's purposes um similar to how you evaluate your superintendent on an annual basis it's always encouraged by njsba that you take the time as a board to reflect upon your own performance as a governance team and this evaluation tool is meant to help you do that both from a full board perspective and also from an individual perspective as board members do contribute individually in certain ways as well um couple of reminders about its format it is a um basically a self-rating system with a scale of zero to four um there are two or well I'll start with the first page the first page is um detailing about nine facets of board performance and uh what we ask you to do at the beginning of the evaluation document is to kind of rate the importance of each of those aspects of being a board member um and then we use that U sort of Benchmark to have you um assess your own performance in that area so as we go through the document you will see that each area is broken down into a top and bottom portion the top portion is where board members rate the performance of the board as a whole and the bottom is where board members individual contributions are evaluated by the board member him or herself um Matt could I just ask you in on the first page yeah what what's what do you see normally if you could um or averaging on other boards because when I look at the list like everything seems vital to me and for me it's is that you know how do I write that but do you find that that's not the not the norm response do you find that it's it is more um more numbers than other it it's very rare that we see 4.0 all the way down okay right what we typically do see is that when boards um board members I should say um have comfort around certain areas of boardsmy they tend to you know rate that a little bit higher and where they feel a little bit less comfortable um they may rate that a little bit lower there are also some board members who look at certain areas and think well that's really more administrative than it is uh governance related so they may rate that a little bit lower based on that um almost never see 4.0 and everything although you are correct I think all of these are very important to how a board conducts its business yeah I think I get stuck on vital versus very important yep agre thank you for that it may um may or may not make a difference at this point but um we are in the throws of putting together a new board self- evaluation instrument that should be available to boards in January so you'll see this approach a little bit differently based on our assessment of other Schoolboard associations documents and some of the things that we see through this um evaluation instrument as ways to improve it thanks sure okay um so as I would typically do I'm going to go through the document one facet at a time um we will just sort of note the score that the board has given itself in that area and then I'll give you a moment after each of them to read through the comments that were supplied by the board members um one other piece as to format uh the last two questions of the document are verbatim questions where we ask you about the three most important areas for the district in the coming year and also what are the areas that the board may want to do additional training in or place additional focus on based on their own performance of their evaluation or excuse me their performance um and um yeah so I think we're good all right any questions along the way please um just let me know and we can uh address them as they uh arise so uh the first piece is on page two uh and it's about planning um planning of course is one of the chief responsibilities of the board as they are responsible for the long-term vision of the district uh the board uh applied a score there of 3.2 we have comments in that area on the bottom of page two and top of Page Three so I'll give you a moment to read that not can you talk about the comments um are are these edited in any way are there any editorial judgment that goes in or whatever board members po it gets translated to here that is correct with one exception um we will typically and it actually occurred in this document if there are comments that may appear evaluative of Staff those are redacted um this is for the board to evaluate itself not to evaluate staff other than that they are as written by the board members and just so I know um the new um eval that's going to be available in January of 2025 um when was the last time it was done so like I mean the last time this board eval um format or questions was revised I I couldn't say for certain I know that it goes back to my own board service which ended about eight years ago so at least that long all right and when I see eyes up I'll take it that folks are finished reading I think okay section two policy of course policy is one of the other Chief responsibilities of the board they adopt the policies that are put in place so that the Administration has some framework for how they run the district uh score there 3.1 comments at the bottom of four top of five e okay section three page six section called student achievement rating thereof 2.9 comments at the bottom of six top of seven you know I would comment and Mary me mention this too uh that in doing this we were doing this in in March um and um I think we've seen significant progress uh throughout the year so it it just be interesting of course this year would be a benchmark for next year to see if there are changes or whatever so to me this is a you know sort of the first level we hadn't done it in a few years um so and next year build on it but we could certainly look at uh the score here to say you know is this this is the think would our scores be the same at this point in the year as they were you know in mid-march yeah yeah and and as I mentioned the format will be different next year but not withstanding it's it's great practice to reflect upon your performance annually and find the areas in which you may want to you know focus on either training or um just you know sort of establishing goals in those areas in order to improve the board in the spirit of continuous Improvement that we expect out of our staff and our our students as well just actually to add to that um I did I I said to Sheila I don't know if I would answer everything the same now you know um yeah which is a good thing because it shows you know that things have improved and changed um and I think it's important you take your entire each of us takes our entire experience and vision into account but I also think it's important as we're looking at these numbers and it might just be that because the 2.0 kind 2.9 kind of stung a little bit for me is that we didn't have 100% participation in this evaluation and it's important because that might change those numbers when you're dealing with five people right y you know there's a lot of room to change if there's everyone had participated so I just think that's important even though we use this as a as a Baseline yeah to know that you know we need to move forward with that and be committed to the Improvement right you know um I was looking for the last time we did this and just to see is stored in our profile somewhere no right like when I log into my njsba my profile I was looking for what I wrote because I couldn't remember or like you know what yeah where is where is this information captured other than right now I have the compiled documents yeah for each year that I've brought this to you so if someone wants one of the historical documents I can easily send that to you P them here no okay that's good to know thank you no they sit on our server and and certainly you're welcome to keep your own personal files of them there's there's no sort of secret there but it's been off and on for the last few years yeah yeah yeah there was there was not one last year I know that for sure um I'd have to go back and look at my files to see when the last one was was that was in blah blah blah okay okay um page eight section on finance score there of 3.6 comments on eight and nine I I rarely see that the the board score is lower than the you know the bottom score is lower than the top score so good for the board for really looking at their role and responsibility yeah yep okay moving on to section five board operations this one's a little bit different because we have a little bit of a interruption in that top chart uh when we talk about committees uh but the score there is at the bottom of page 10 at a 2.8 and comments are on page 11 heav okay next section on page 12 is board performance score there 3.2 comments on 12 and 13 really funny funny all right page 14 section seven board superintendent relationships score there of 3.5 comments on on page 15 e section8 board staff relationships score there of 3.1 comments on 16 and 17 just 16 and finally section nine on page 17 board and Community score there 3.4 all right the last two questions are both on page 19 we'll start with the first one the first um asks that with the idea in mind that student achievement is the board's highest priority what are the three major challenges currently facing the district and there are a few listed there some of which are kind of common um certainly finance and budget um academic achievement facilities and Staffing are all mentioned and I'll give you a moment to read through those and at the bottom of 19 in the second question we asked we're um having boards identify what areas of governance might need additional Focus or training and some of the areas mentioned there are training on roles and also uh asking the board to have a renewed focus on the board's real Mission as opposed to um other concerns internal and external and the last two pages are are simply uh visual representations of the data that's been accumulated in the report the first one basically compares the the upper score or the board score to the first page which was identifying the uh the importance of each of those areas and the second is where we compare the upper score and the lower score so the team score versus the individual score so that is the board self evaluation and of course the idea here is that at this time of year similar to what you would do with your superintendent evaluation um the board has the opportunity to take a look at the results of this instrument and think about areas that they might want to set board goals in for the coming year and so um for members of the public they don't see this so they've just been watching us look at the document um based on what you're seeing here um in your mind what what do you think are the areas that may we need to you know I I can I can summarize it but if you have some guidance I'm all yours I mean I think that the last question really is um the most pertinent okay and the one that really sort of um identifies areas where you can sort of make some improvements um and I you know I'm pretty sure that none of this was a surprise to you all so um I I wouldn't have anything specific to add after that other than I do think that training is helpful no matter what stage of board service you're in I'm 20 years board member eight years doing this job and I still learn stuff so what do you think the Cadence should be so that we keep this going um so we have this is now uh July when should we um um talk about discuss our board goals and finalize it etc etc so we don't miss the boote so you know the cycle usually runs uh July to June right so you finish up your CSA evaluation in the June time frame and that's all signed sealed and delivered by July one yep and most boards will coordinate the formulation of uh board goals along with the formulation of District goals the idea being that once September rolls around uh the plan is fully in place for all of the district goals that need to be acted upon and if you stick with the same cycle for board goals uh it's usually helpful because you're you're in that sort of pattern and and you get to kind of evaluate and uh report out on progress on those goals on a schedule so since we didn't do goals last year we did um goals in January and then and um we at that point said they would be for uh 2024 for you know January to J January to December certainly um I think we can uh look at our progress that has been made in the first six months and then determine there could be one that I think we can we have accomplished completely so we can go ahead and take that one off so we can be looking at them but there were two that are still in progress so um assume these are board goals you're talking these are board goals oh yeah we had our district goals um very clear y um but we because um a new superintendent this year we we're not exactly on that timeline but I think this year we can we can certainly do that and we should look to August to begin uh to do our um District goals and review our Board of Education or um our board goals and see where we want to go from there yeah It's Not Unusual for boards now to set their board goals on a January to December time frame because it gives the board a full 12 months working together to evaluate uh it just sort of throws you off that cycle that you're in when you have them on the same sort of time frame as the district goals yeah so we can discuss whether we want to absolutely do that um y certainly in some ways it made it I I can see that um January makes sense because you're reorganizing yep may may have new board members on and then you are looking towards the future so yeah an interesting thing I definitely think the district goals though should follow the school year agree yeah y but that would be the board discussion right and I would just add to that that if we're going to consider the January to December then we would probably want to do delay the board of evaluation till maybe May or June as opposed to March I'm just thinking you know because there's only a couple months M and and perhaps um Matt you can guide us in that because you have the superintendent right a lot of time doing it may and then you know sometimes it's hard to get everybody fair enough to find the time to do it so generally if you put yourself on that cycle um you would do your board self- evaluation in the November December time frame so you'd have those full 12 months that's interesting that might make more sense yeah all right so that's something to discuss that's helpful thank you and I I will tell you that the intention is that in our new evaluation instrument boards we will have section dedicated to board goals where you review your progress on your board goals as sort of the the Capstone to that oh that's a good idea oh so that really that brings that's a nice package yeah yep because board goals are not statutorily mandated it's nice to do which is why we skipped it last year it's definitely nice and necessary to do unlike CSA EV vals which are mandatory so I think we do have flexibility to go move move it to more art the board development cycle yep absolutely great well this was really helpful thank you thank you very much any questions you have during the year reach out I do thank you I'm glad the weather cleared up for you in your drive thank you for coming um Dr Shores we have another presentation and the 2024 testing results yes thank you Mr Lee and uh we're going to do a presentation here I I know it's the summer so we'll try to make this quick but um there's some there's some good data in here that I want to share with all of you um let me just pull this up here real quick uh while I'm pulling it up uh Mr Freedman would you mind just give a little context to the data we're providing today while I'm pulling this up yeah this is just the annual report of the NJ GPA data so it's data that's get gets presented before August we really the end of August but the um the end date was before our August meeting so last year we presented this data um in August this year we're presenting it in July and it's High School data that goes over um you know Ela and math and also there's going to be an elll presentation as well which I'm going to jump in with because um we have some interesting things that we're doing moving forward with our elll program so I'll let Dr Schwarz get started and then um I'll jump in I think towards the end which is where the ell part is great thank you Mr Freedman so yeah so the NJ GPA some some things to note before we get into this presentation first of all this is a mandatory report so the state requires us once we receive our our results we have a certain window of time that Mr Freeman mentioned but I just want to point out that this comes out of cycle from the rest of our state of the schools addresses and other activities because it is effectively uh it is in fact a um a requirement similarly when we get our njsla scores that's the test that's administered in grades three through about 11 uh those will go out um we'll have another presentation following that to satisfy the requirements but it works well because it's effectively like a first look at some of this data as it's coming in from the prior year the other thing that's important to note is that the NJ GPA specifically only really applies to our junior class so when we compare their scores from year to year there's going to be a natural level of fluctuation and variation and that is because they're two completely different cohorts of students so it's not like you can where the njsla we can do some analyses or we can track certain cohorts and see how the same children took the test one year and how they did the next year we don't have that option with njpa so what we do instead is we use a state average for comparison so you'll see what I mean by that so um we're going to go ahead and start with just a few overview items here um this is available I don't know if this is on the website yet was this been shared with you uh yet okay then we'll see if I'm actually Mr Freeman I don't if you can if you can access it via the email if you can share that with Miss coreless and she can put it on the website for everybody um but um again administr to 11th grade students it's a language arts and Mathematics assessment um it's designed to test for uh Readiness to graduate so it was launched as a pilot test a couple years ago last year and this year it was a mandatory graduation requirement um you may remember that if you follow NJ doe news and the State Board news there were some conversations around where to set the cut score and it was decided by the Department of Education to actually lower the cut score on the NJ GPA um which caused an increase in the amount of students that passed it um but there are alternative Pathways to passing the test you can also submit ACT scores or SAT scores or sorry PSAT scores um the mathematics components aligned to Algebra 1 and geometry um you can read all the rest of the details if you so choose I already spoken to a lot of these um yeah that's more or less what I've already said U there's also a portfolio appeal if if the student doesn't pass any of those tests that I described so we're going to start with oh sorry about that so we're going to start with a a bit of a comparison here we're going to compare ourselves to the state so this is the students who took the NJ GPA in Maroon is the amount of students who passed in Ridgewood in 2025 and in pink is the students who did not pass the test and again almost all students took the test we had a high participation rate in mathematics uh we had a few more students who were who were not ready to graduate but you can see that there is a big difference between the amount of students who passed the test for ELA versus the amount of students who passed the test for math at the state level as well so obviously this basically says we're performing much higher than the state but some of students still are not uh still do not pass this test Mark can you just go back to that I just want to make sure I understand this right so in mathematics the the within our district almost 45% of test takers are not deemed graduation ready no no that's the state that's the state okay great yeah so I mean but that's alarming right that's alarming across the state right so yes about 45% or so of our uh of test takers across the state of New Jersey are not ready so you know and we talk you know people talk about just as a side I don't want to go we don't to go crazy here but people talk about learning loss related to the pandemic but remember districts like Ridgewood generally speaking were able to maintain a pretty high degree of instruction throughout the process but much of the state was not so sometimes if it seems like there's all this talk about learning loss but we don't necessarily see it here there were pretty significant uh disparities across districts across the state with respect to the pandemic's impact do you want talk to the microphone so just in followup if a student um is uh in the pink right not graduation ready then they would use the alternate meth they may use the alternate methods to um establish their Readiness right so it could be portfolio could be an ACT score show some yeah yeah and if you think about pass uh you know generally speaking uh for the njsla like a pass rate of 85% is quite High um they're rigorous tests um but here you know our pass rate is much much higher than that but remember there's actually a lower cut score so we'll show that in a minute so here we showed the cut score and we showed our three different cohorts of students taking the test and we're basically going to disaggregate this data just slice it up a couple different ways so you can see what the trends are so you can see that what that 725 is if you moved it up to 750 you would see that it would uh that our average our averages are much closer and we're looking at our our mean or average scale scores in this particular graph so these are not these are not students who are proficient this is what their average scale scores are but you can see after the first year um our scores got much higher but it was also but the first year uh it was not required it was required to it was required to participate but it was not a requirment to graduate so uh so we definitely have our students taking it more ser iously as they know they have to take this test to graduate and they have to pass the test to graduate and you can see across the state generally speaking in ela the proficient the the averages are fairly high so next we'll look at math again you can see that these averages are much lower math is particularly lower across the state but you can see it's a little lower here as well again I I just want to uh just urge everybody I don't you know all these assessments are stand are standards based um but it's hard to necessarily draw a lot of conclusions from them because this is a relatively new test it's rored from year to year so I can't I can't tell you with any degree of confidence uh you know how just how rigorous this test is as it is so new here's our here's a comparison of our subgroup data and uh and this is this this is this is a pretty interesting this is a pretty interesting data set in that um uh we seem to have a relatively tight cluster compared to what we might otherwise what we might see certainly in the class of 2025 in our performances so I think this might be an anomaly of just a class of 2025 but typically what we would see is our highest performing groups are Asian students um and then our and our lower performing groups are Hispanic and black students as a group again we're not talking about individual students this is a very common thing that we might see uh you know that that is just that is in society and there's economic and social reasons for that being the case so what we want to do here in Ridgewood is we want to see how we're how what impact we're having on our students especially if we can take a economics out of it so we've evaluated these these racial categories specifically excluding economically disadvantaged students and we see that when we actually cycle out the students who qualify for free in roduced lunch from all groups there's a little bit more of a narrowing of our performance it's a little bit more of an apples to Apple's comparison and this is a particularly interesting and so this is one of these positive notes is that in the class of 2025 our white students are Asian students and our Hispanic and black students um all performed fairly close together here you can see it again in uh in math as well particularly and actually our black in is the the state average is not that out the state average oh you know what that's a good question I don't I can't say that um i' have to double check that I think she might have T I think that was taken out of the state average yeah because the DAT the all the data that we get that can easily be done it's all reported so we'll have to confirm that but uh but I believe that this is all Apples to Apples um and interestingly when we did the same thing in the math we actually our Black and Hispanic students in the class of 2025 and it's again it's a smaller cohort it's a smaller group but actually outperformed our white students we actually uh that's that's uh that's not typically what we see in the data so we actually drilled down to confirm that and we had some really interesting Trends in this particular data this this particular group of students uh who represent the Hispanic and black population were particularly strong in their performances and again the reason why we show these slides this way is because you we want to try to see if there is any kind of negative Trends by race that are impacting student performance it's a better it's better to look at it by growth because you know we can't control where kids start with us and we can't look at growth on this assessment because it's one cohort to another cohort but still it's worth taking a look in this way here we have the ELA mean score um we're looking at the class we we actually decided to to to group together so that we could study the economically disadvantaged students in general uh the class of 20 3 and 24 there were small sample sizes so we grouped them together so that we can see like kind of one big historical cohort uh because we have to suppress scores for students under 10 um and we and we do have very few students who qualify for free introduce lunch which is how we determine economic disadvantage so here we see that um that from the class of 23 and 24 the average of the two to the class of 2025 that we've seen uh unfortunately a lower performance among our economically disadvantaged students so unfortunately so that particular cohort of students again small group um it's about 11 students um they were they were performing lower than the prior cohorts and for whatever reason I I fact checked this as well the state did not release all of its economically disadvantaged data um particularly um they didn't release data for I believe it was 2024 yeah um and they haven't released the 25 data so it's hard to compare I will say though but reason another point to pull out of here is a question should be both in the E the racial composition and in the state and in the um and in the state composition to what extent do our do student economically disadvantaged students in Ridgewood perform better than economically disadvantaged students throughout the state that's an important way to look at it and here you can see in 23 24 it does appear that our our econom economically disadvantaged students Fair better in Ridgewood than they do around the state here's math same thing in 23 and 24 economically disadvantaged students fared better than here although the class of 25 cohort um those those students in the free lunch program did not perform as well as the prior your students here we have students with disabilities um here we see a relatively this one's a little tricky to interpret because um as we know and we've had some conversations with folks from our cpeg uh Group which is our special education parent advisory group um there are pretty different Trends in the classification rates from District to district and my exper experienced districts that um that that do not um that do not reevaluate students sufficiently often don't declassify students and their classification rates get higher um but in so doing that and not declassifying students who are performing very well it also can inflate the stores of their special needs students so these are a little harder to interpret but we do need to report out on them regardless and here we see saw that in 2024 the students with disabilities at the state level uh performed our student our students disabilities performed a little better than those at the state class of 2025 data they didn't release and they did not release data in 2023 for whatever reason math scores same thing special needs students again slightly better than around the state um but again we don't have data for the current year so this is just some more information if any of you want to look at it about the different Pathways we have some this tells you the different assessments that people can use that students can use to demonstrate proficiency um so you can feel free to read those if you want but you see sat PSAT act acup Placer um but we're going to focus on an analysis there's also a portfolio appeal process we're going to focus on it for analysis on the PSAT and the and the act and um and we had very high participation in these assessments as well so uh so here you can see we had um uh uh what's this is uh so I'm sorry we don't I got to go through a few slides I remember what our participation rates are but you can see in terms of oh no this is it this is this is participation rates sorry we we we ended up slicing this data so many times I'm forgetting what I'm looking at so this is uh the number of test participants you can see the quantity of students in each class taking each assessment so if you remember our state of the schools address we saw a declining Trend in act participation and we saw a declining Trend in PSAT participation but we did not see a declining Trend in sat participation so we're talking about doing more to promote students taking the PSAT because it's also helpful for things like this um you can see our numbers and Trends over time when we spoke last time one of the um there might have been a logistical hurdle which is that um other other schools other districts they've administered the test during the school week ex so do we change that Ru that's we're we're looking at that for the coming year oh for the okay yeah we I that's not we haven't finalized that decision but that is that is on the top of our mind on that one I don't remember what the final decision is but most but it's more common for kids to have taken the PSAT by this time because it's their junior year so I think it was I think it was a discretionary call do you remember that Mr Freeman yeah that's what it is that um you have the PSAT data and not everybody that's interested in taking the SAT has taken it yet so this is an easier comparison to go with with those is same logic for the AC for the uh Act Act is a smaller percentage I think um you know we'll follow up off the top of my head I think that was the discussion yeah it didn't for whatever reason that didn't that of all the questions I had when we went through this I didn't come up with that one sorry and there's duplication because if you add up the PSAT and the ACT to over 450 right so you have some people taking both yes yeah yeah we're not yeah we did not this is a total test takers so we may very well people taking both well we and they certainly are all taking the NJ GPA all right so here we have uh graduation proficiency assessment comparison so we're looking at math and language arts we're looking at the number of students who were graduation ready by each test the percentage so we can see that again Ela math think again this is class of 2025 so this is our last year juniors are rising seniors very high Proficiency in ela quite High Proficiency in PSAT actually very high proficiency rate in all three uh math little less so in njpa but a comparable performance in PSAT comparable performance in act which again raises to me the question of is the GPA for math assessment a little more rigorous proportionately to the ELA here we're looking at a three-year Trend uh so we're looking at again different cohorts so these are not the same kids taking the test from year to year but as you can see threee Trends uh pretty high obviously the exception was 202 with the NJ GPA that was the pilot year when the kids knew the test didn't count we looking at AC when we're looking at act when you say the cut scores that's the 17 or 18 or whatever this is the ELA threee I'm sorry it's the Prof it's says at the top it's the proficiency Trend so how many kids passed the test so this based upon criteria for college readiness that the state gave us how many kids GPA scores what percentage of kids NJ GPA scores pass were passing what percentage of students PSAT scores were passing what percentage of students ACT scores were passing based upon that rubric that you gave us before yes yeah yep I just want to make they lowered the cut score so they made it easier to pass it for the class of 2025 as comp 23 and 24 as a class of 24 but we also saw that there was a lower mean score I believe that's why we said that before as well okay okay thank you but yeah but they did there was a different cut score in that first year too so that you're right that would impact this all right uh cut score proficiency Trend again here class of 23 24 and 25 see that's what I think that the I have to go back in the history of the cut score but either way here we saw uh on the math side uh reasonably High proficiency Mark can you go back to the last slide I'm just trying to reconcile for the class of 2023 we are 64% for the cut score yet we have a if you go to an earlier slide on the NJ GPA statistics we are quite high for 2023 yeah for the class of 2023 on this slide it shows where like 64% and the other one we no so so so you look we have so that was the ELA one that was suppressed not the math one so if you so so here if you go ahead I'll jump ahead sorry I'm making everybody dizzy but here so math is pretty straight across right so see so see the class of 23 it's still pretty high again this is just anomalies and how they calculate the data Ela is low right okay so if we go back so this is but again this is cut score proficiency right but if you go back to this one all right so here's math there you can see it's again this is mean score so it's going to read a little differently and then ELA mean score here is lower for ELA yeah but it's still it's still high yeah but but but it's so we did this is why we did that extra analysis that I was saying because you have to see the the variance the distribution of scores so there's a tighter cluster here so so meaning that the mean score is 754 yeah theoretically the mean score you could have had you could have had every single kid get a 754 and we had 100% proficiency oh right so that would mean would stay the same but the distribution would be different I had to do the same thing and actually I wanted to see the data myself because we had a few anomalies like that so great question all right so here's graduation Pathways assessment by subgroup um and this is this is where that was really interesting now again I I don't know if I mentioned this before we combine the Black and Hispanic groups because the numbers are pretty small particularly with the black students so we combine them all as one group so we can report out on all of them and we don't have to suppress any of their individual data so um the Black and Hispanic group actually had this is the twas of 2025 but excluding economic disadvantage students so if we take out every student involved in free R lunch and we look at them separately um our students our growth rates across uh our Pass rates across categories are really really strong and it's kind of interesting um one of the lower lower Pass rates was our our white students here so this would seem to indicate to me that uh that we'd want to kind of look study these Trends a little bit more over time because it seems like we have some really good Trends in terms of we don't see some of the negative trends that we hear about in society but um but we want to make sure that we don't have some other kind of weird weird reverse Trend math very math performances are very similar so if I'm going too fast just tell me okay I'm going to change slide so so key takeaways for NJ GPA were uh we had participation rates that were near 100% so this is uh this is a full representation of our populations so that's a from a statistical standpoint that's gold rhs is above State average in all measured categories that I mean we would expect that with the rules of Economics are pretty clear that our students are going to perform well above the state average PSAT and act participants are rising so and they seem to be and they're strong indicators of passing scores so uh so I I would continue to encourage our kids to take the PS at it seems like a really worthwhile test and that it seems like a produces pretty consistent scoring outputs um and then next steps uh we're looking at completing an analysis of students who did not pass GPA that's we already did that already I got a nice drill down which it's got names on it so I can't show it to you here it's very specific but gave us some good Insight we want to study evidence tables to evaluate the strengths of our programs uh evidence tables are outputs of these tests they basically show the standards and the indicators that were used to determine students Readiness against the standards and the evidence the evidence tables basically show us what the kids actually responded to and what areas of evidence they weren't they they they they struggled with even though they they seem to do quite well um we're using a program called linkit we've been using it in K5 and we're expanding linkit uh to the height to the middle school and the high school actually we already moved it to the middle school and it's at the high school so we'll study those Trends in K8 and then um and then we we kind of this is I guess this was kind of left on as a bit of a hang on develop a comprehensive state of the school address to develop picture student outcomes we already did our state of the schools address but we'll integrate this data into the next time around now that we have some some longer term data as well so we're gonna move so any questions about the NJ GPA before we move on again it's a limited data set but I mean especially with last year's uh cohort of students is really interesting so our Rising seniors definitely have a very interesting uh profile access for Ells uh there and this is a 2.0 assessment this are the results so basically the access for L's L stands for English language Learners depending on where you go to what state you're in they call them differently there's actually been some change in language here the test is still called access for L's but New Jersey is using the term multilingual Learners to describe students who are learning English language um there's another term ELD that is used around the country some of you might see that's English language developing um so it's a basically computer-based adaptive test which means that as the kids answer questions it adjusts and gets harder or easier and it measures students ability to understand and produce English used within the school setting so that's that's pretty that's a fair fair assessment right all the kids who are taking this test all go to school and their ability to understand and produce English I said that already um and they're testing their languages in four domains listening reading speaking and writing and overall score of greater than or equal to 4.5 out of six indicates that you are proficient in English and then they have these different varying terms to describe how they're language skills are developing so in 2024 we had 123 123 of our 126 students took the access test uh and then we use these tests as one of multiple criteria um as as one of multiple criteria but 15 students were able to exit the English as a second language program so if you're not familiar with ESL programming the way that it works is that students are in it for a limited amount of time so you're only in it for a maximum of five years and uh and actually I don't I don't know if that's if that's a rule but generally speaking students are in the program for one to five years and um and B when they reach proficiency then they're exited from the program obviously because they're proficient so they don't need to be in the program any further um but your scores from year to year and your enrollment from year to year can vary based on the amount of students you have testing out the amount of new students who are moving in so it's a very challenging group to assess because it's like you're constantly dealing with moving targets it's very fluid you also have students coming from various parts of the world so may have a child coming in from uh from one actually not even parts of the world just various life circumstances so you may have a child who comes in who is the child of two University professors in another country and obviously their their base academic language even in their own language is going to be very high generally speaking those types of students who have a high proficiency and high literacy in their own language learn that English much more quickly or you could have a family of Migrant workers who don't who who are not very proficient or even literate in their own language and their child is going to be obviously have many more challenges to learning the English language as well additionally as the world gets more complicated you have different social emotional experience that uh children are coming to our country into Ridgewood with so some um I know we had Ukrainian students coming here from the war and then we have high-powered Executives relocating here for a number of years so their experiences are different and we're looking to meet everybody where they're at yeah great examples great points so here we have a visual here we have a table explaining our three-year Trends and again I I I've not been able to find too much meaning in this except for the fact that you have to connect the proficiency rates with the with the number of students who are proficient and the number of students who exit the assessment so you can see that uh in 2023 we exited 35 students and we had a fairly High proficiency rate so this year we're exiting 15 students and we have a lower proficiency rate again a lot of that depends upon on what the needs are of that specific group in that specific year and from one year we might exit many of them because all those that are proficient are now moved on those the highest performing students are now no longer a part of the uh of the next year's uh group so it's a little it is a little bit hard to assess so but if you look at the number of students that are exited the percent proficiency and the number of students that are entering it can give you a sense of the story uh we also felt uh after some conversation I I I thought that it might be helpful to see the number of students starting at level one so we added that middle column there so you can see just just how many kids came in and it specifically came in at level one we have students come in at level two three or four um but when they're coming in at level one you know that that's there's really no exposure there so this is a percentage of percents of our multi multilingual Learners scoring 4.5 or higher on the access for elll test as I said before 2023 we had a pretty good amount of students uh testing out uh which is great and our and our number of students scoring high is much higher than the state again we know that we do have a lot of people who are very well educated in other countries coming here um and that's and so many of these students are very are poised to be very successful nevertheless of course it's a definitely a that's a that's a data to celebrate in 2023 but in 2022 we apparently had a very different subset um and we graduated all and we had fewer students scoring that high we have our mean overall score by subgroup here again this is why we want to make sure that we're having Equitable outputs regardless of where people come from what their contexts are and here we saw pretty fair performance pretty even performance in 2024 um obviously you know they're always growing so our average is going to be always below proficient because they're working toward proficiency and then once they hit proficiency they're they're exited but you can see here especially in 2024 a very tight cluster of performances and are economically disadvantaged students um at at the same level as many of the others um we also wanted to look at um a little we wanted some sort of growth metric here so we took a look at um how the number of students going from starting proficiencies uh to ending proficiencies over the course of the 2023 over the 2023 school year we wanted to look at the me English proficiency score from where they started and where they ended so of course as we would hope we would always see growth um they refused there were a few students who did not see growth um but those were unique cases the vast majority of students all saw some pretty positive growth um and you can see that the new multilingual students in their first year had the highest rates of growth which is one would one would expect that and then here we have our proficiency growth and we did indicate that there was a small percentage of students that had negative growth as I mentioned um and there were a handful of students that had no change remember El students may also have disabilities there could be and there could be also very serious life circumstances as well but of course we ideally would want to see that all students would have meaningful growth so that's something to look at there so the takeaways there's an increase in multile and level one multilingual Learners in the district so we've seen a pretty good increase recently 87% of our learners demonstrated growth but some of them have not so next steps we want to enhance oh actually rich I'll let you talk take over here I'm sorry Mr Freedman because I know you had uh you've done a lot of work in this space yeah I want to let everybody know we're working with Dr Fernando nich he's an MSU Professor specializes in linguistics um and works in the school of education so he worked with us last year and he's also using some of our s funds I'm working with us through September and we have a whole Continuum through the year and a couple the things he's so that's with enhanced professional development he's we have experiences where he's working directly with the teachers um we're also going to have them in October 14th with a a broader view for people to be able to work with them and um so that that's the professional development that we're doing and we've been pick I mean more than picking his brain so been an audit for us and one of the areas that we've identified um that we need to work on it there's multiple types of language we seem to be good at Social langu language but we're not as good at academic language so we're changing to the focus of our um of our instruction to help our our newcomers with more academic language and that's one of the things he was able to identify and and point out to us we're also doing um information sessions and reach out in um in August we're using elevated education we're using an online platform because um you can then have it speak to you in your language so every background will be able to to communicate and you know participate with the program there was one other thing I was looking at oh um yeah I wanted like we don't need to go back to the slide but you might have noticed that three years ago I think we were at 25 students and then we were at uh like 48 and 50 or 50 and 48 so why I'm bringing this up is that this is a growing population um right now if I'm remembering correctly I think um our our Japanese population is our our largest at the moment that could but it's a growing population for Ridgewood we've added a teacher an ell teacher at the elementary level because you always want to um you know you want to have that that pyramid model um and certainly um you know have the program start when kids get here is fairly obvious statement but that's what we're looking at BF rhs and Orchard are our um are not hotspots those are three uh most dense areas for arel program uh BF and the high school and the high school is getting an increased uh number of level one students coming in so that affects the program as well have to adapt and uh yep those are the three ask you a question um you mentioned before that you have um you want to meet the kids where they are um because you know especially like the level ones they come in with you know a variety of experiences right so I've meant to ask you this a couple times just generally um with the professional development that you're doing here and and also I know later on in the agenda we're approving some of it um does that include what they call trauma informed education does am I saying it correctly you know what I'm talking about yeah I I know what you're talking about through the the um experience does not our special education PD does if we have um a math provider come in it's not usually a part of it right okay but we do because you want to feed it through these other more appropriate channels interesting okay but but it is something that's on your radar and something that we've been doing and including in our curriculum generally okay thanks yeah and I when I did that slide I just want to just restate that again because that's a really good point I'm sorry we're talking about all the different metrics of passing and exiting but when we talk about a board of education and needing to allocate funds and recognize the trends in the district I'm sorry that I didn't point that out initially but you can see in 2022 we had 25 new students arrive and for the last two years we've had almost 50 students well 48 and 50 students arrive um so that's a that's double the rate and if you look at our exiting we we're not exiting we can't exit him that quickly so it's interesting to see if that Trend persists we could see our Base number our ml count go up significantly which is going to increase our need for teachers in that of of MLS yeah it's also why um on October 14th we're having our regular education teachers and our elll teachers do training together so this has to spread Beyond you know identified ell teachers all right anything else from that concludes the presentation uh you know I forgot to say just want to give a thank you and a shout out to uh our our grant specialist honor fryberg and our testing coordinator she does a lot of this data work for us she accesses all these data sets and uh she's she's does a really nice job so thank kudos to her and and of course for uh uh rich and um Miss Charlene leenda who uh who really all collaborated on this presentation grateful for them just one last cudos to Amanda zenas who's our uh El coordinator she did a great job too oh you know now I'm thinking too we had some of our supervisors I think uh help out with some of the take key takeaways to everyone everybody team effort great job [Laughter] everybody thank you very much um Dr schw do you have a superintendent report yes of course just keeping it quick as usual um we had a superintendent coffee last week I'm really great for the summer even in the summer we had a lot of folks come out so about 25 folks I think I saw was about a peak um yeah and some really nice comments just some good conversations some cool reflecting on the prior year following up on a few topics of concern I tried to follow up I added a portion to the superintendent coffee where I follow up on prior coffe updates so I've not been I do that informally but I think I've been defaulting to like waiting for people to ask the question again and then I give them an update so I triy to be proactive and actually write in some status updates on some of people's concerns and requests so feel free to go back and look into that if you've asked some questions I may have answered some of your questions um but we had some nice conversations as I said some people had some individual concerns some more General concerns but I feel like uh everything was like somewhere on our radar and I feel like we're making some progress in that respect it feels good for there to be fewer and fewer things that feel new to me when I hear about them um and it's it's also nice to have so many familiar faces who joined so if you're not if you're listening right now and you've not attended a superintendent coffee you know please feel please do so in the future um we've had a lot of activities at the schools a lot of times people think things are very quiet here and uh whereas they are much more quiet uh there still is quite a bit of activity so we've got great summer programs going on we have many many faculty members in want to thank all of them for their great work um but the schools are definitely buzzing with activity um we have Athletics kicking up in August as well way before school starts um but keep your eyes on the calendar because that first day of school is coming up we also have the mandatory student information update that's going to be going out in next couple couple weeks and that's going to be something important for all parents to complete um uh we also had a fun thing recently for those of you who are NFL fans probably know that young wayu uh who is um uh a kicker for the Falcons um is a is a is a rhs Alum and uh he came to us uh wanting to do a uh a special Camp a clinic for kids in the community um Miss Christine corus really put the really saw the thing from beginning to end so thank you for that Miss corus and uh it was a really really positive experience for kids and I just I thought that was worth shouting out because it's pretty cool um we are wrapping up 2024 pretty much completely at this point and we're shifting full full bore to plan in for the for for for really finalizing the plans for the coming year and in that Spirit we have a couple of uh really important and high-profile uh announcements here that we wanted to make so as we get up on our human resources section um I just wanted to just share with the public anybody's listening um I just realized early in the meeting that we hadn't posted we do have an addendum that uh does satisfy a placeholder that was placed on the agenda for a school business administrator who will be who will be uh will be naming to the meeting so I'm going to go ahead and welcome Mr Richard Matthews here he's going to be uh recommended to the board for for an appointment uh Mr Matthews and I had an opportunity to work together many years ago and I was very pleased to see him uh do a really fantastic job in our interview process uh we had uh we did not have a very big pool there are not a lot of folks who have the qualifications that we're looking for with the ba with to to to be a business administrator in the district however in that small pool we had some very excellent candidates uh we had three really experienced uh uh in great standing uh business administrators and other districts and as we worked through them uh Mr Matthews really shown we had a nice big stakeholder panel where he gave a presentation and answered impromptu questions and he did a really wonderful job so we're really grateful to have you here with us and welcome uh and I look forward to recommending you to the board Mr Matthews we also have with us here tonight Dr Michelle malucci you probably know Dr malucci because she is she's with she's actually physically here with us I don't know if you can see her right now but uh she is uh she has been the assistant principle at George Washington Middle School for a few years um prior to that she had play she had been an been a been a uh a varied educator and particularly was a was a supervisor of mathematics so she comes with a great deal of experience she does a lot of work over it GW she's uh in she's very involved in the master schedule um and really really kind of uh as one of the key agents keeping the district the school running behind the scenes and and very much in the front of things as well um and we're recommend we're bringing her tonight and recommending um an appointment for her to be the interim principal of Ridge Elementary School uh we had a vacancy when we received request for a transfer from Mr Penza so the so Mr Penza and Dr maluch are going to be uh Trading Places Mr Penza has asked to to be able to return to GW where he had uh he had been an experienced assistant principal and uh we're really excited to give Dr miuchi an opportunity to uh to join Over join the ridge school and lead the ridge school so uh very grateful to be uh to have her have her leadership in the district to give her this opportunity and to uh and to well to recommend her to all of you for for a transfer to this new role and I think that's enough for me for right now okay thank you okay we'll go to consent consent items uh regular and routine uh so I move attendance at conference may have a second are there any questions Miss quack uh yes Miss M yes Mr mud yes Miss Broan yes Administration and move Administration second any any questions Miss qua yes Miss mcau yes Mr Mahmud yes Miss broken yes curriculum instruction I'll move curriculum instruction second um I just want to point out that we will be um we're approving a dual enrollment articulation agreement with Bergen Community College and you you saw the list of um of courses uh that students may do the dual enrollment at the high school we can go ahead and vote Miss quack yes Miss mcau yes Mr mmud yes Miss brogen yes Human Resources I move human resources I'll second and I would just like to acknowledge one retirement uh for the purpose uh resignation for the purpose of retirement that's Joan Kelly a special ed resource teacher at Travel after 24 years of service to the district but she'll be staying with us into the beginning of the school year through November um and there's just a note we not there's um an additional appointment that was a holding place that we're not doing anything um so with okay so I um move Human Resources with the addendum yes yeah can I have a second for that do that over again I'll second that I just want to clarify we have to we're adding it with the addendum but do we need to also amend what's already on the agenda to remove the placeholder in that chart you have that you're talking about yes there's one line under so separate and apart there's a there is a there's a holding place for um an assistant principal that we will not be moving forward this evening there's no name on the agenda there's no action I'm just making a note that that will be I just want to make sure that clear that's right okay so do we need it'll be struck struck okay do you want to read um into the record um the addendum that we have a print out that other people may not know may not know what we're approving so if you could read that into the record public appointment the Rood Board of Education upon the recommendation of the superintendent of schools approves the appointments listed below uh subject to receipt of appropriate documentation and the New Jersey Department of Education certificate if required uh Richard Matthews School business administrator board secretary um education center effective September 23rd 2024 through June 30th 2025 as approved by the interim executive County Superintendent um and then the annual salary is listed at at at $221,400 on the account number Miss quack yes Miss mcalli yes Mr Mahmud yes Miss Brogan yes and welcome [Laughter] officially oh oh good that's the only way you can get into the Ed Center well no you can ring the bell so we look forward to working with you of September I move Finance e second who was the second I'm sorry me okay and before we vote on this accepting um acceptance of restricted donations uh and they are from Somerville home and School Association for $1,824 77 to be used to pay for student birthday books at Somerville Elementary School Richwood High School student activity account $2,167 25 to be used to pay for the elps ski club summer trip over night chaperon stifen uh Sustainable New Jersey $2,000 to be used for environmental initiatives at Haws elementary schools uh School Haws home and School Association for $10,000 to be used to pay for curriculum based field trips during the 2425 school year Bridgewood Education Association were they're returning a donation approved on our May 8th meeting um and this is uh because the the grant uh didn't require it right yeah it's it's not impacting the program it's just a question of uh of returning some funds that at this time aren't needed and Ridgewood High School ma band Association for $2,200 to be used to pay uh the statement for the nurse at the 2024 band camp so we thank our Community for their um and our home and school associations for their generous uh donations are there any questions on uh Finance I think the finance committee and Facilities committee really did look at these um so we can go over that but I think we can vote Miss quock yes Miss maau yes Mr mmud yes Miss br yes we have no resolutions and motions not included in consent agenda so approval of bills I reviewed the bills um and I make a motion to approve the bills as listed on the agenda may I have a second I'll second miss clock yes M mcau yes Mr Mahmud yes misss Brogan yes board member announcements quiet um I had just one acknowledgement that I wanted to say um I thought about this for a long time um so this week the community lost um someone who was very very important and special to the district her name was inz bunza um I know Sheila knows her uh inz was for a very long time I think she was the president of Federated but for a very very long time she was the president of what was then known as the lssa and inz was a tireless Advocate unbelievably dedicated to the community and to the children of our community that needed more than they were often provided she was the one who championed having all the hsas every year give a certain amount of money to the ls HSA so that the teachers needs could be satisfied because they couldn't do the regular fundraising um I worked with inz un Federated I worked with her for a very long time um at the Ridgewood uh Education Foundation and she was an extraordinary woman inz was a force I think that's the way she was a Force for good and kindness and I was really saddened to see that we lost her this week that she's passed on and I just wanted to acknowledge her because she was one of the people that makes Ridgewood the community that we are all so proud of and her Legacy is still very much present here I just wanted to say that so nicely said yeah she really was of course right and I remember when um just the wonderful um resolution that was read when she uh um finished uh serving as president of the lssa uh so heartfelt and I think everyone who had the opportunity to work with her I had opportunities to work within the school but also out in the community doing um some other things and um intelligent kind wise um an advocate as you said uh and just really a delight to be with than I I did um you know as I sit here July 22nd um I can hardly believe that we're going to talk about convocation which is August 28th so um if you haven't don't have that on your calendars make sure that you do August 28 for the board uh to be at our all staff convocation last year uh we had an introduction really to uh Dr Schwarz who played the guitar with the students and um made huge impact and we were like wow this is going to be fun this year so um but anyways uh you know it it will come faster than we actually are wanting it to come I think and then school starts the Tuesday after Labor Day so um and I know there have been questions uh from parents I've gotten some and I know there's a little chitchat on on face on Facebook about when our back school nights are so already I see some people beginning to think about the beginning of school and so Summer's going a little too fast uh but I had a little conversation Email exchange with Christine and and those dates will be coming out so that everybody can plan appropriately uh to be at back school nights so I thank you for that and the back to school nights are on the website to be clear me the back to school night dates are on the website corre yeah yeah yeah so they're there but we will also send out a communication just highlighting these things I think it a little spotty last week about it but they're they're this week yeah um no other announcements oh and uh the high school uh new players Chicago this week sold out I think uh yeah so good for them uh board committee reports uh we had uh um all the main committee Finance facilities and policy um meet um this month so hu do you want to report on finance is there anything to report I know we've got them not um that yeah hopefully the minutes um you all have them and a lot of what and I think this the way committees um you can tell that we're doing the work uh a lot of the approvals that you see on the agenda today have been reviewed uh within the committee to the extent that we can as much as possible for example um we've been talking about the wood shop collection bid so that we discussed um it did come in higher than what we had originally budgeted but given that we've gone through several rounds um to get this done in a second shift basis made the most sense for us so um you see that this you know we did approve it um the other thing we talked about was some of the you know whatever you see is what we discussed that we had uh reviewed it so um that was really about it thank you uh facilities um you also receive the minutes from facilities and again it the committee discussions are reflected in the in the board uh agenda tonight so we will be um resurfacing the tennis courts and um every expectation is that that will be done uh believe it's August week of August 12th I believe okay um wood shop dust collection uh project we discussed boiler repairs at uh BF uh Middle School um the steps parking um you might have seen some emails about parking and with the town and the police Dr schores uh good Minds thought about some uh some things that we can do to to ease that and make sure that the bus hasn't loading and yeah yeah able to students are able to get off and on sa yeah did you want yeah I just there's been some followup today I spoke with Mrs nudish they've made some progress they've removed some uh some planters that were there that work obstructing things and they're just going to continue to Monitor and work together to just make sure that it's problem is that if they even if they clear some of that space and there's a there's no there's no there's nothing that would stop a car from parking there either so they're just trying to make sure that it's uh it's as accessible as they can possibly make it and I like um you know it's this was a coordinated effort and so we're in partnership with the village the police and all trying to look and resolve any issues that are there so that's right I think that's a a real positive for the district and I thank you for your leadership on that oh to follow up um I had a question I I'm I'm I don't this is just reminded me because we're talking about steps um this does come up for approval and we've already approved it uh which is the uh the space it's in the basement um and it is on an annual lease basis um um for the business Adat it's one of those things that we have um discussed because it does come up for board approval um it's a lease it's a rental space for the 18 to 21 um uh extended uh special education uh students and it is in the basement but it is in downtown um Ridgewood and conversations uh perk up usually very close to when um the rental agreement comes up for vote again um when we first struck the deal um it was rather advantageous for us at that time uh but because as you know the the state requires you to have an exit clause each year give the board the the right to get out of the lease at that point the negotiations um uh changed so that we had um we were assess the higher rate of annual increases than what we had originally struck with the landlord so we are um we've negotiated down a little bit from that but um just want to be mindful of of that agreement and just to make sure it's in the best interest of um the students it is in the basement we've had some feedback it's there's no windows obviously so and just just to be clear on that to you because we I've talked about this kind of Full Circle and I think it came up at my coffee the other night um and it's just just to be clear just being very transparent about it um it's a really it's a great um it's a really positive program with really awesome Educators and the space we keep saying basement here it is in the basement but it is like it is fully fitted out the drawback of being in the basement there's no windows so um but it but so there's two there so we are very open to other spaces but there's two challenges one we have to everyone loves a location because the students are able to access the whole village just by walking out the front door um and they're right in the center of downtown which is really helpful but the other challenge is to relocate to another space requires a lot of work and money to to to set it up so we are kind of perpetually prospecting for other spaces that would meet our needs so I just want to make that clear because I don't know we haven't talked about this in a while some since I got here usually comes up right around renewal time well just to be clear like like I we're very open to conversation Dr Fenwick and I both and just uh and that we'd love to get in a place where we have like some natural lighting and all those other accommodations but there's limited limited sites that that would offer that yeah and you know what it you this I'm bringing it up because it's going to come up at some point and also because um there was I think a report I think at Village Council talking about um uh vacancy rates in downtown and so it was a little bit yeah so that's I'm just putting things together yeah was it was a much higher vacancy rate than it was year-over year but you know I'm just wait this is this is just a don't you know helpful thank you um finally oh I was just going to add and maybe you've already done this with the village but on the issue of the the access of the bus I'm I'm back to the original like the access to the bus to pick up the kids where you said that um you know car you move the planners and then Mary comes and Parks their car and obstructs it anyway right so um I I imagine we could talk to the Village about some kind of you know no parking During certain hours or and we have them all over town where right where you can't you can't park on Brookside between you know eight and three you know September to June and I know this is a full I think it's yearr round program SE program isn't it it is they are looking at maybe a loading zone well that's what I'm thinking loading yeah like my my point being that that might be something there's no parking but it could be a standing right right students right I was just thinking it might not be too obstructive to the rest of the business that goes on and it might just alleviate those concerns that's all yep yeah that's in conversation as well kind of doing one step at a time great and finally we did um mention and you'll see it the water filtration systems um filters that are going into the um into our schools so they are operational Yep they're in uh and they're uh yeah so every every school has at least one bottle Filling Station water fountain station that has a posos filter in it so we we've opted to just pay for our own testing to just do control tests so I think we're doing two different sites we're doing a treated Fountain and a non-treated fountain just to see like to what extent it does reduce the posos levels because I don't want to be telling everybody like oh these are filtered and it like reduces it only by 10% so uh so we would like we're just trying to get a measure on that so that we can be careful with our claims about how efficacious it is but we certainly wanted to give uh folks that that option and we got very fortunate actually was our architect who uh was able to find that there was a way to retrofit our fountains with an ex with a with a with a brand with a filter from the same company and the same brand great uh just as another note what you might you might see we did have a little bit of an issue where because it's a retrofit some of them weren't designed to read that to read that filter and so and I'm if you're in a school and you're looking for these fountains they're actually going to have some level of signage because um some of the red there's a indicator light when you put the new filter in the indicator light wouldn't stop being read so we actually disabled it and we're posting the date of the next filter change as a sign there so it's going to indicate this is a this is a posos filtered fountain or something I I don't think we've worked out the exact language but we'll have some sort of signage about that and then we'll say you know please alert um please alert uh the the the the school office once the number Hits this so that way as soon as anybody notices that number they can just let them know and we'll get it changed it's a pretty high number too yeah yeah they'll be they'll be yeah but I mean I also figured you could have everybody in the building trying to prioritize that one Fountain right so so they could go it could go pretty quick yeah so that um you know there's been some real progress made we're still we're still in discussions about the hbac uh system for uh Glenn and ridge but I think um uh we're fin we're collecting some data yeah we've been doing a lot to evaluate that yeah um so you'll probably see that um in the next couple of months um some resolution on that yep we anticipate doing that though I know that we're still trying we looking now ATM till next sum no it's not gonna be till next summer but in terms of uh in terms of like just just what the like what the concern is that um it first of all they're big projects so it's not really feasible and second shift work I mean we could but it would drive up the cost a lot um you know do a functioning hbac there it's just not ideally what we want it to be um but it really comes down to a bigger question of do we want we do we want to focus on a more complicated more complex complicated system of hbac and ventilation that is much more sustainable or do we kind of want to go with more of a traditional system which is going to be much more efficient than we have now but isn't going to hit the same level of efficiencies that that that a really state-of-the-art kind of system would be so say there probably the wrong terminology but a very a very efficient system would be so um I was not really familiar with the two different types of system I was much more familiar with the traditional I understand that there's been an engagement and an interest from folks in the community who are very involved in sustainability who want to know that we're making as sustainable choices as possible so I'm just getting a handle on that um we did I shared a research paper that reviewed um for those familiar it's called variable refrigerant flow systems um and they're very efficient because they take Heat from one classroom and deposit in another classroom and they can actually pull heat out of the air down to like20 degrees Fahrenheit and it's all electrical so it's very very efficient it doesn't have ventilation so you have to have a separate ventilation system but um but theoretically once you have the two systems together if they're managed well um some ways they're simpler and they're and they're certainly uh they're C I think they yield something like a 14 to 24% uh efficiency savings over a traditional system that's brand new so um so it's a little bit more complicated so we kind of have to I think make a decision as are we is our priority to have a more simple kind of traditional system that is that is more efficient we have now but doesn't quite achieve these same efficiency standards or do we want to or are we really interested in like our sustainable Jersey certifications and really trying to trying to be boost that up as much as we possibly can so uh so I'm just trying to I'm at a place where I'm I'm starting to frame the issue for you here you can hear it um but I but we want to get it I would really want to consult with some of our local uh sustainability folks um before we before we repr present the conversation all of you with all detail do we have an idea that was my question my question was is there an what's the cost differential between the two options well that's another important piece of it as well and right now we're actually just we actually thought it was going to be best to uh bring in um bring in uh the actual providers of the companies to actually because one of the things that I realized is that is that when we is that when we went to estimate and rough out the costs um there were many more options than I even realized that there were so um so we decided it would probably best to go with the manufacturer who exclusively does this to R then to rely on our architects who do it sometimes um to actually get the the best estimate financially so uh so we're we're in the process of of uh Mr Smith our our facilities manager has been um working directly with daon and Mitsubishi to make an appointment for August when I'm when I'm back from my vacation um so that we can actually go to the site and they can give us an actual assessment based on what the actual site looks like we expect though it'll probably be within the rod Grant estimation though right like I guess that's my question is right we got a rod grant for for this yeah and we we always is what 40% or 60 40% yes 40% from the state but there's there's a maximum amount but generally speaking when when you put in those Rod grants you usually overestimate but I mean you know where are some time is going by and this has been a really crazily inflationary environment I know so yeah you know I'm not gonna I'm not gonna I'm not gonna make predictions on that we're just GNA get numbers yeah they're not I I have some concerns but and I don't know if they're valid because it it's not Apples to Apples but the window estimates um from vendors who provide Windows versus um our Architects oh and initial did you did you get an answer to that by the way I did not so so there so the there there was a so the the method that we got our quotes with anybody so our our our window quote if you looked at the if you looked at the uh the minutes the window quotes were way off and The Architects had a much higher number and we asked them they said well we just did the same thing you did we just asked the windows provider but what happened is I guess they they there was a miscommunication around the scope of what the windows were supposed to be so they just came in like literally like more than double um so so the only difference was just the input that was given to the actual window installer they don't they don't generate those quotes themselves yeah so the lower number is the more accurate number that's good so that's very good and do we have to do the window we we do not or is it highly recommended that you know you can do a real great job heating your house but if your windows aren't efficient we actually did a site visit and I actually stood there with the Architects and we looked at it and there's a way to Retro there's a way to retrofit it to the current windows that doesn't necessitate the windows being done at the same time okay okay thank you but eventually the windows do need to I imagine I mean they're they're all over 50 years old right so okay no but I just wanted to you know it's hard to put all those pieces together when you don't sit in the meeting so um I appreciate the clarification thank you yeah know when we all talk about like all the different kind of things that we try to do at the same time particularly me and my role Yeah well yeah I mean yeah it's kind of whiplash sometimes we're going from from mildly different topics back and forth and I think this speaks to um one of the ongoing um needs that we've been asking for that I think would help guide some of these decision making is we still don't have a very comprehensive blueprint of of all our physical plant needs yeah Master PL master plan by you know like a real diagnostic of our entire 201 and the reason why that's a lot of work and why it's really important too is that like there's a lot of decisions that go into that master plan right so before we try to peace meal everything out like let's try to figure this like how stateoftheart do we want them to be from an energy perspective you know how like what is our learn ultimate learning design and layout like what are our dreams about using the site but I'm going to be very happy to employ Mr Matthews to take over a lot of this work for us here fantastic uh so um Mary policies so policy um we had a h a pretty comprehensive policy meeting last week I thought we did a good job if I can Pat us all on the back right um so you will see that under discussion items uh is the result of a lot of the work that we did and I won't go through them piece by piece but essentially a lot of yeah now very really that would really ruin everybody's night but um essentially uh they mandated policy changes that are that come from the state and that really just makes sure that our policies are consistent with the language changes in language that the state has um given in its its statutes um Andor just what's really actually very efficient is a lot of the policies are instead of uh enumerating different things that we need to be sure that we're doing in curriculum or something like that if they're just referring to the statute so that'll make our lives a lot easier moving forward so um substantively with regard to that I think that covers what we did in policy you can correct me right if I'm wrong the only other thing that I just wanted to add is we had a very helpful conversation and I wanted to thank Eliza sudol publicly because she sat with us for a good hour and really gave us a lot of really good information we're on this fact finding Mission as to how our facilities are used who's using them how policies that we have in place are being implemented what what's happening that is not necessarily coming from a policy and it's really giving us a much broader picture uh which we need as a policy committee to have so that we can really tackle this issue with regard to facilities use Fields use um who's using them and of course costs so uh I have a meeting um on Jan July sorry July 31st um with an intern from the village who has done some work on just uh charges that are done for Fields uh so I'm just going to kind of tag on there and get some information for us um but we're working hard I think that's a fair way to put it right so yeah thank you thank you um let me see just on a you know about uh facilities I just want to mention um and you may have heard that the village is beginning to explore um a rain barrel project where they would uh put rain barrels um roll it out so that people in their um homes could could install a rain barrel and that the village buildings might have a rain barrel they asked if maybe uh schools would consider at least one rain barrel at each school um and we're just beginning to have that conversation and uh it came up at um facilities and uh we'll be looking at that a little bit more um to see if that's viable okay um discussion item uh can uh we're just going to do um these are um just the policies and it's just I I don't know if anybody had any questions I mean they were pretty straightforward when I read through them and Miss Murphy I think these policies and Miss Murphy helped help facilitate with the policy committee right and Miss Murphy I think if I remember correctly you're run you gave a rundown on these policies and these are all pretty minor citation changes and updates to comply with the law is that right correct yeah it was really helpful that you did the summary on top of the policy um that thank you to Lucy for Luc stre so but this was really easy to go through and you could see that a lot a lot of it wording the majority statute updates and it's there's been work going on with the majority of these policies actually for I think almost two years at the state level so um these have we've been waiting for for many of these to to come down to us and these these documents are publicly viewable so if anyone's interested and they're looking just please note the language at the top that's the summary comes from Strauss Esme our policy provider so just for anybody who's actively involved and interested to read all these policies um so that's that's not the policy language at the top that's introduction and that's also not our introduction that's the that's uh that's our provider's language I move to acceptance of minutes um I move June 10th and 20th regular public meetings um I just wanted to put in a request I can't vote on uh the one that I was not present for but when I looked at the minutes I just have a request in in education but there's a lot of acronyms and uh we forget that people are not going to know what rea is and what ra is and there was an agreement with that um with your Education Association so if we could spell it out um that would be great so was that that was the 10th 20 so why don't we just take them separately um they have a I I'll move um June 10th may have a second second all in favor all June 20th I'll move second second all in favor with the exception of ofu other business oh I just wanted to um make uh make everybody aware it's already on our website um this year uh will be the first year what we will start a sequence where from this November onwards we will have annual School Board elections which means three seats are up this year for for November um two of them will be threeyear seats one of them will be a one-year seat being a board member is really rewarding there's a lot of zeros in terms of pay there is no pay but it is really rewarding for anyone and everyone who is interested um please do consider um putting your name in the Hat uh the nominating packets are in uh on our website they also publicly available through New Jersey Schoolboard association.org um the packets I think it's 10 signatures one of them could be yours they are due next Monday the 29th and hackin Sack not here um and any one of us here would be happy to talk to anyone who's interested in what the role entails but it is really rewarding in the community be really grateful for having um people step up I mean I I feel in general uh competitive um election choices are a good thing so don't be afraid thank you for that um comments from the public there's no one here um but we do have something um the last uh three uh digits of your phone number 252 you're on with the board if you'd like to make a comment please state your name and address and be mindful of the four minute limit good evening this is Ann Ling 342 South Irving Street can you hear me yes we can thank you thank you first of all I'd like to thank you um for the opportunity to call in it's always very much appreciated that you allow remote access I'd also like to congratulate Mr Matthews on his appointment um that's great news that we have a new ba and the other thing I wanted to say is something that actually trusty um quock pointed out that whole first half hour where you guys were going over the self- evaluation whether we were home or there you couldn't see anything nothing was being said we don't know what was in the evaluation forms it it was an utter um I guess waste of time for people that were trying to to watch or listen um I if you don't want us to have the information of what was in the self evaluation then you should probably just go over that privately in Clos session and if you do want us to know what was in the self- evaluation then I think you might prepare a slide pre presentation so that we can all see it I spent most of my career in higher education I personally think that self- evaluations like that are pretty much worthless um but uh I mean it's just an exercise in well it's just something that Educators do but I think it's kind of worth L but it's even more worthless if you spend just over half an hour going over everything quietly we were just watching you silently so it's just something you might want to think about for next time is either share it with us or don't go over it in a meeting and thanks again and um for all your hard work good night night there are no more comments so I'll close uh close that and with that we are um GNA go into executive session um and just going to read that I hear I I hearby uh we will go into an executive session but no action will be taken so we will not be coming back into public section just just to make sure that is clear um I so we're adjourning our public meeting and I hereby move that the board go into executive session pursuant to njsa 10 colon 4-12 to discuss matters pertaining to Personnel the minutes of this closed session will be released when the need for confidentiality no longer exists may I have a second all in favor great thank you thank you good night we're um back on on August 26 at 6 o'clock