to the flag of the United States of America and the rep One Nation on God indivisible with liberty and death fall excellent so we do have a couple of special presentations uh we are trying to get the um the technical side uh coordinated properly so but today will be the persons of the Year Awards as well as the district Communications committee presentation as well so uh the next the next meetings on June 10th there will be uh representatives from Valley View Athletics uh to celebrate their extracurricular and Java Juniors on June 24th Dr Forte Dr Cullis and New Jersey school boards will be uh discussing and presenting District goals for this year and also to set goals for next year uh and we'll also do a self- evaluation at that point as well and then July 15th we'll have uh another presentation for the full year Hib data Hib SSD data so as we have folks come in we'll go ahead uh yeah once the dust settles we'll get started okay everybody thank you great to see everybody we're going to do the persons of the Year first and then we're going to have uh Miss Marinello's Communications committee give their um report to the board so we're gonna start off I'm gonna move over here so I can stand up feel weird sitting like this let's start off with um Mrs theodoropoulos and Mr mccab if you wouldn't mind come on up and if you have any other people that you want to bring up with you that's fine off here because we got a lot of thank thank you yeah yeah all right got the whole team up here and a whole lot more we could fill up this whole room but I'd like to talk a little bit about officer kerer uh I asked him to write a bio if he could for himself he gave me four lines okay so I'm gonna read those four lines John ker served as a police officer for the Linhurst Police Department for 25 years he retired in December of 2017 as a detective lieutenant John was hired by the denbo police department on August 24th 2020 as a class three law enforcement officer to work in the Denville schools John is married to his wife Heather and there are three beautiful children Grace Michael and Olivia and that's what he wrote all right can you hear me Tim I can all right great we'll do it it'll be a little Echo but we'll make it work sorry about so let me speak a little bit about Tim Tim is an attorney with Einhorn barbarito who has worked with our our mock trial club for 15 plus years and also arranged for $1,200 donation for all that time and Tim is now leaving iron horn to move on to a different job and he will not be working with us anymore he has been a tremendous asset for our valy view students and I just wanted to make sure that we got a chance to talk to him he's out of state right now at an important business so we can't really speak to him too long but I just wanted to make sure we got a chance to say hi um maybe you could see the award Tim we're GNA put we're gonna put that in the mail you also have $200 gift card to cazabella in Denville thank you very much it's thank you thank you for everything and I know you're pressed for time but if you want to say something quick it's that'd be fine sure absolutely I appreciate the honor Dr Forte the Board of Education uh I've been blessed to have the opportunity to work for approximately 15 years and volunteer in the Denville schools I I can certainly say for my time that the students uh and the citizens of Denville are fortunate to be part of such a wonderful District it's been a wonderful opportunity for me to be able to volunteer and work alongside the faculty the Board of Education and all the students so I appreciate the honor and the recognition I regret that I'm you know I'm no longer with Einhorn barbarito my understanding is that the firm will continue to support the Denville schools um and I will do whatever I can to continue that support as well but thank you once again and I appreciate the honor thank you so much Tim we don't want to keep you too long I will mail your stuff out tomorrow thank you everybody thank you Board of Education thank you Dr Forte thank you take care hello good evening um as you guys know I'm Sue Marinello I'm a communications consultant I've been working with the Denville Township School District for about three years and uh last spring you determined uh a a goal for the district and as a result of that goal Dr Forte reached out to me we created a Communications committee three of our members of the communications committee are here this evening with us and this is the uh final report report and recommendations while an overview of it you actually have a very big report and recommendations but I'm going to try to move quickly through um the high points of what's in that report okay so District goal number four develop a plan for consistent and streamlined Community Communications that was the um goal that Dr Forte reached out to me regarding and we talked about it and thought there were two components that we really wanted to put together for that and one was to create a survey and one was to have a Communications committee to help us to analyze that survey so the communication committee had goals to identify uh District communication strengths and areas of improvement and to identify needs and potential solutions to enable consistent and streamlined Communications and to come here tonight and to make that presentation um and I think that the the understanding that we had coming into this the communications committee and myself is that there are a lot of platforms for communications that are happening throughout the district and that's not unusual because districts start to find new things to uh to new tools to work with and they start to implement them but it's not necessarily consistent across the district so then lots of different forms of communication the first Communications committee meeting was in February that was a fantastic meeting everybody came to the room ready to communicate and ready to analyze and ready to look for the best path forward and they left there actually doing research and coming back with with lots of different ideas sending emails back and forth saying what do you think of this what do you think of that so when we came together in March we really drilled down on those recommendations and started to create the recommendations that would be uh given to you in this report that we're presenting tonight and um they created sort of their dream idea of what communication should be and then we met again in April for that final meeting and then we're here tonight so the communications committee 10 people there they are in a room sure yes on the Google me yes cang when go back one oh not me I'm good yeah okay great all right so um the 10 members of the committee came together uh for the very first meeting and I just want to point out that at that meeting when they came in uh with so much excitement and and really ready to look at at what we were going to present they started to really analyze the data that came out of the uh survey they discussed that data in terms of their own experiences and this is where the committee was invaluable to form this committee was what really forms the foundation of how we can move forward because we can look at data when it comes in it didn't actually tell us the whole story because some of the ways that people were responding to the survey they were confused when you asked about Facebook they thought one thing when it was actually something else this committee was able to really drill down on what those comments meant what they were referring to and helped us to to identify the platforms that we were going to make the recommendations for so the survey that went to the community 286 people responded to it um the survey was about what communication methods are being most frequently used which methods are preferred and how people are receiving those meth methods in other words do they like it does is it working for them what is their response and their reaction to them and then also what um recommendations they would have so the 286 people were primarily parents and then uh 16% of them were faculty and then we had other people in the community as well and you can see on the side there Valley View Lake View riverv viiew entire District central office Morris NOS people did participate from across the community and our Communications committee which was put together by our administrative team Dr Forte um and they were 10 people plus the technology department sent a representative to each of our meetings which was extremely helpful because the communications don't happen without technology and what's happening on the back end to put those Communications in place really relies on that particular team of people so when we had questions we were able to turn to them and say well what happens if you're pulling this kind of a list from Genesis or what if you're using Constant Contact or how are you dealing with YouTube or whatever the question was and they were there to help us again this was a group of parents faculty and parents who are faculty and a community engagement partner and the big picture of all of this that we all the surveys 85% of the respondents felt that current Communications are effective or very effective so that's a pretty good uh stamp of approval and I know from having worked with you for three years that this is a goal for every member of the board for every member of the administration and I actually believe for all of your faculty to communicate clearly with the students with the families is really important and my favorite absolute favorite quote that I've ever seen on any survey is I think communication is very thorough thank you for asking so we felt really good about that but again we brought this committee together to look at where improvements and streamlining could occur so the committee looked based on the data and the comments and how they were able to interpret those comments what they were really what those comments were really referring to they were able to come up with rationale and recommendations for streamlining and consistent Communications based on procedures and platforms procedures being how we do something something platforms being the tools that we would use to to put the communications out into the community and sort of the foundation of from the survey that was created was um these types of comments that came in Consolidated information found in one place rather than bits and pieces from multiple people and sources there are too many platforms of communication it's better to simplify so that people have one Outlet there are so many ways to find the information it can be overwhelming to know where you read something and then try to go back and find it again and I wish there was school specific communication so that was really pretty much our foundation how do we meet those areas 85% we're really we're working really well and things are going really well but how do we help the people who are somewhat confused or how do we help to make the platforms that are somewhat confusing more direct of note simplify streamline consistency develop a source of information adhere to the oneclick rule standardize communication options choose platforms that are easy to use and consistent across the district and that should help to alleviate some of that confusion and again as this committee was talking we actually found some of the holes in the procedures where for example email your school messenger email that alert system that seems to be working really well but sometimes administrators or faculty members are using different types of communication and they might be trying to communicate with the same group of people but for whatever reason it's not consistently being pulled into that other platform so to look at what the internal procedures are what the um there also can be human error I mean I myself deal with this every day and I I just this week had a parent call and say I'm not getting the emails and I looked and they had unsubscribed so to help the community understand what the procedure is and what their role is in that procedure too to make sure that across all platforms the procedure internally is pulling the names and the data incorrectly and to make sure that if someone is not receiving the information that they know where to go and how to talk to the district to make sure that that can be corrected so again big book we have here lots of rationale lots of recommendations but I'm going to take a minute on the website because the website uh the the comments that we had were very um that it was confusing that the website is very confusing and that the website and the app are not really giving people the the information in a friendly way or that it's difficult to navigate and the website is is could be the basis of all of your information so if you think of the website as the umbrella of information where people know they can go and find that information then whatever you're sending out should be accessible on the website so that's the basic recommendation for the website and a couple of things to keep in mind about a website is that it is the information for your school Community but it's also the information for the community at large for example if grandma wants to come to the play tonight in Riverview but grandma doesn't really know where Riverview is because she lives somewhere else she ought to be able to look and see where that is um if the calendar isn't up to date then she can't find that information and it's also your website is also really important for people outside of this community who might want to move to this community because the reason people choose to come somewhere is the schools and they do check that out so again you want to really keep that up to date and in this we did also include resources and research one of the things that I did because we had talked about it is I reached out to a web designer and asked her to map your current district and school websites and because of the amount of information she really couldn't easily dig into it but what she did do is look at what she thought the goal and intention of the website is and she created a sample map for the district and each of the schools this may not be exactly what you want it to be you may find you need to change it but it gives you a way to think about it one of the things I I find with the website is it's like a filing cabinet if you put everything in it then you start start to have so much in it you can't get more in it and you can't find anything so you want to clean things out along the way so that the information is current and that when people are searching they're not finding something from 2005 they're finding something from today the mobile app interestingly a lot of people don't know it exists um those who do find that it's not really working the way an app the way apps are they're used to having apps work so in other words the technology has changed whenever the app was created it was probably rather Cutting Edge for a school district to have but apps have changed so when people come to this app they're seeing something that's not really working the way other apps work so it's it's something that could be updated it's something that could be um again current information and to identify the things that the parents really need to see forms lunch holidays calendar events all of those things and make sure that that information is what they can get at their fingertips learning management system this was the biggest surprise I think for us we didn't ask in the survey about a learning management system because denvil doesn't have one but what we discovered is one of my kids teachers uses Class Dojo to send photos and reminders It's a Wonderful value ad to the district communication and a faculty member said I wish there was a universal communication tool that stretched across all three schools for staff to share information to parents aside from email I use remind and other teachers use other apps but a universal messaging system would allow consistency across all three schools this may be the the most effective communication tool you could put in place your community likes it apparently your faculty is looking to communicate in this way because we got a number of comments that indicate that that is so and it could be the thing you know we're you're struggling with social media I mean everybody is not just this District but everybody's thinking how do I get the information out there but a onetoone learning management system might be the thing that could help you the most and the interesting thing about this is there's lots of different kinds they do they fulfill many different um possibilities within your organization so we recommend that the district really look at the different platforms that are out there see what might meet their needs talk to the survey the faculty and see how they're using it and why they think it's important and then evaluate if there's something you'd like to put in place and one of the big things about it is it keeps a record of those conversations that parents are having with faculty and the faculty are having with parents and also many of them translate so if a faculty member wants to say you know Johnny's having some difficulty with multiplication could use some extra support when it gets to the parent and that parent speaks Swahili it translated and the parent can be typing in Swahili and it gets back to the faculty member in English so it's a really powerful possibility of tools to use across the board your school messenger alerts are working really well School messenger is your basic alert system here in the district they do text phone email texts people love they absolutely love them they're used by 77.6% of the people they they're preferred by 80% of the people who took this survey and some of the things that people ask for were more texts they want and again we're going to recommend that you do a survey and make sure that there's total buyin across the district but in more than one uh instance they mentioned you know we just want to know quickly with a text what's happening in Valley View tonight and this may be the way to let people to remind people that there's a parent um program going on tonight or that there's a concert and just a quick little text to let people know what's happening important to remember don't tell them in a text to check an email because they may have unsubscribed from email they may not get the email this is where that website overview if you want them to look further for more information give them the link to that particular page on the website some people did say that um they've tried to sign up for text alerts again they had a problem this is again where you want to really educate people on what that procedure is and make sure that they're getting it sometimes people people can be difficult sometimes people think oh they didn't send it to me because they don't want to send it to me and the reality is that is absolutely not true in this District you want them to get everything so to just keep communicating that with them so that they understand you're trying to get it to them um and then School master M email we've talked about email on that procedure it's working great on school messenger it's some of the or it seems to be but it's some of the other email type platforms that there seems to be some confusion with so just to drill down on what that is and also with email not to attach a PDF for several reasons one is on your phone the PDF is really difficult to open and then get back to the email some people can't do it at all on their phones I don't personally tend to have a lot of trouble with that but I meet people every day who just can't make it happen so they're not getting the information additionally a PDF attached to your email may be flagged and sent to trash so then they don't get any of the information um and then two a PDF is not translatable but an email can be as particularly through school messenger so if you have information rather than attach it put the information in the email that way they can get it they can open the email they can read it they don't have to do another step and phone calls people it's working very well people um appreciate them across the board with all of the school messenger alerts if it's something like snow they want the official notification to come from phone call email text rather than be put on social media first so that's one thing to keep in mind we got that comment several times and particularly from The Faculty because they're not allowed to go on onto social media during the day in their classrooms and then they don't really know what the answers are and the answers out in the community and they they're kind of in the dark so to try to uh change that particular procedure would be helpful um and then there is a little bit of conversation about the nature of the phone calls so the district brand is some fun phone calls and people love them or they don't it's split very very much down the middle so you have to decide which way you want to go as a district on that some people think they're really fun some people think it it sort of interrupts their day and they're not getting the information they have to listen to too much while they're at work to get to what the point of the call is and I don't think that's always because I don't think you use that all the time but that is a comment that did come up and of course today you can also do Ada with AI ADA compliance with AI so you can type it out and then it can send that phone call in any language Facebook again our committee they figured this out people came back they were like yeah we love Facebook 43% of the people use it they think it's really great what they were talking about is the PTA Facebook pages so great let's see if you can create a relationship with the PTA to put out the information you want to put out to have them re re um to share to repost everything that you put out that Dr Forte puts out on Facebook just ask them if that can be part of their procedure so that information is really reaching more people on the platform that the people seem to be looking at Twitter and YouTube um Twitter is really not getting a lot of play but it is actually stronger for Dr Forte than most um Twitter feeds currently are for school superintendent he has a good following and people do like and repost what he puts out there but it's a small percentage of your population that's looking at it still in all I think it's not a bad thing to have that presence and if you needed a a social media platform in the future for some reason you don't want to lose what you already have so I think that this is probably a really good way to keep that information going in terms of YouTube we know that this District uses YouTube sort of as a repository story of the official meetings this is going to be on YouTube um and that's great but there are people who actually would like to see some student things if there's organically something happening in the curriculum where you are filming and you think it's something that could go up on YouTube that would be another possibility I don't know you know as through the work that we did and as a communications consultant I'm not sitting here recommending you make sure you get every student out on YouTube because I don't know if that fits with your curriculum and your mission but if it does it could be something that really sort of shows people showcases the kinds of work that the faculty is doing and the kinds of achievement that the students are um making Friday folders again this comes back to the website maybe let's simplify it into the website as a page I know they're right now in folders the PDFs don't seem to be working for people it's that PDF problem again on your phone trying to click through so to revisit that and streamline that into um a page on the website and we did a lot of research on that and put some information together in that research section of the booklet and email newsletters um people like certain ones they actually looked the committee looked at what people were saying about it and then looked throughout the district at the emails that are working and suggest that that would be the kind of format to look at such as Dr Forte's Friday email or I think there's one from Valley View that has a lot of bullet points in it um so mostly emails are fine people are fine it's just making sure that those platforms are getting to the correct People based on that procedure of how to get your name in the right list so that's basically the booklet and then just to highlight again there's lots of examples of research um how to work with the Friday folders the newsletters we also put worksheets in there with the rationale and the recommendations and a column for implementation so that you can look at the possibilities for moving forward on the items that you choose to move forward with overall look at that website centralize the email procedure simplify the Friday folders rethink social media get those ptas on board for reposting possibly look at the learning management or onetoone messaging system and use the one-click role and I want to thank an incredible incredible team of people who gave a lot of time and thought because I really do feel that what you do in this District what they're part of is important and they want to share it with as many people as possible and I've really enjoyed working with them because their dedication was over the top so thank you great thank you very much um I do think a round of applause is H thank you yeah before I open it up to the board uh for questions uh I really want to thank you and the committee as well um the the amount of time that you must have put into this is uh astonishing because it the delivery deliverable that you are presenting today is very thorough very comprehensive and um um you know uh I'm very impressed with uh what you have presented so you know I deeply appreciate the time and energy that all of you have put into this so thank you very much for that thank you uh yeah any board members I wish to uh open up with questions uh I just want to thank you guys uh as well um it's kind of nice to have all this data there's a lot of uh conclusions you came to that uh I kind of suspected or were gripes of my own so I appreciate actually having um data to back it up um you know in particular I think the mobile aspect of things is something that really gets overlooked you know there's a lot of things that I try and I can't I can't make it work on my phone and that's my primary uh way of uh you know getting information and uh I like that you you stumbled on the calendar issue and things too because I remember trying to find uh dates for things and finding plays from 200 from 2000 when I'm looking it up and not being able to find the the current play that I want to find out when it's when it's at so um yeah I'm gonna sift through this for for a while uh but I I appreciate having all that that ammunition thank you thank you nice job thank you and I think that um 85% of the responses Bel the car Communications where effect or very effect that's a real high score when you do this type of survey so that's really good we're on the right track obviously there's always some opportunity areas which you highlighted here so the 12.9% I'm I'm guessing that some of the comments some of the finetuning came from that group of people well I there's some commonality and consistency they all said this the same thing right we actually went through come through and categorized every single um comment that was made and looked at how they related to each other whether they were talking about the same thing or whether there was confusion in what they were talking about and and analyzed that and then really drilled down on what they were talking what platform they were talking about yeah my last comment was on the duplicate info um I've been around a long time and that was a probably a bigger problem in the beginning when I when I first started just you know it was Here There and Everywhere You couldn't find it so I think it's improved but it should be perfect you should you should be able to get the information in one spot it's current it's it's correct and it's easy to find that is always the goal I will say it's a challenge for school districts because you're not you're not running a website it's not Amazon you're not making a billion dollars every second and you got 200 people working on your website to make sure you can make a billion dollars every second it's a school district that's here to educate the students and the mission is to help them Excel um but this is something you have to have so to look at the ways that you might be able to make that happen so that you can reach for Perfection that's what we're all going for thank you yeah Susan I was gonna make that exact same comment that I'm actually first of all thank you to everybody for pulling this together I think this has been a project we've been talking about for a long time um and the the outcome here is just uh wealth of information so I truly appreciate it and I think I thought the same thing I said we're not we don't have anybody that's sitting here trying to like feed all these different buckets and we've talked about this I think Dino and I had this conversation quite a few times about like you know you n single source of truth that way and how do you relate it back I think you've come with some great suggestions and give us a lot of good data um and some of it I could have predicted some of it I would not have predicted so I think that's the great part here is that I think there's some things that came out that and I'm only one person right so I I I don't see um I don't see as much and I think that things that I thought were more important to me weren't as as important to others so I really appreciate it um I guess my one question is any suggestions on how to distinguish like like the PTA it's not even the PTA groups to be honest with you they're literally just private parents that are running certain Facebook groups how do you distinguish certain pieces of it so they know like this is the District this is the PTA this is a you know group of parents that are just trying to do the right thing and get communication and dialogue going but how do you distinguish the different groups or do you or do you try to pull them together and say let's just try to work together more closely particularly the ptas I think we could probably do a better job of that I think um first of all social media is that it's exactly what you say and you know some districts even within their District the official the official platform that they're using the official page that is theirs there might be 10 of them because there's an official in each School each coach has one etc etc so it's really important to stop and think who they are where they are what they are what's out there what exists and identify what you would consider to be official obviously if your coach has one we're going to hope that that's an official voice from the district so so you want to identify them and then figure out how they can work in in um concert with each other and it's not it's not so simple necessarily but your ptas you know people you know people are looking at those and it's almost the same as if they sent out an email newsletter called you know every Tuesday or whatever if you wanted to have information in that you would ask them put this information in that email well now really where they are on Facebook so ask them to share everything that you post officially and that's one way to get that information out there also talk to them about putting the events out consistently whether or not it that can be done within the district and then that information gets shared too or whether you're just saying hey can you make sure that all of the official things that are on the calendar actually happen and are seen on your Facebook pages yeah that's that's really helpful and then one other thing I would just mention is the challenge of Oprah and the challenge of a board and what we can communicate as individuals versus a board becomes very difficult um I feel like I've been on the board for 10 years now and every time I think I understand it I read another like case law about somebody that posted something on social media from a board member perspective and how it comes across so we try to do just that I think that's that's great advice because I think that's what we as board members try to do is just put links and repost because that's official information and as opposed to kind of trying to get once you get into a dialogue on social media as you know gets really kind of tricky for us so um I appreciate the feedback and appreciate all the information I'm gonna spend some time reading the 81 Pages you've pulled together so thank you in only three meetings but they did a lot of work on their own I have to just admit though that I just liked our own Denville Township Schools Facebook page and I'm just like how have I not like this page I thank you for all the work that you've done definitely goingon to dig into that 81 pages and I'm honestly excited to see how we can improve moving forward so thank you for all your hard work thank you um yeah no I'd like to also repeat uh you know thank you to the entire committee uh this is tremendous and I think as other members have said some of this we saw some of this we thought some of this is a surprise one of the things that is my biggest takeaway and I felt this for a long time is that we have too many channels I mean I experienced this at work did somebody slack it to me did they email me did I get a text and then I have to go find out you know where that thread was so I mean I think we can make some you know with your data I think we can make some choices about things that maybe we can win away um you know one good example and I wanted to ask your opinion about this was the website versus the app like if we had a mobile responsive website could we do away with the app like does is that something that maybe the app is just like a bridge too far to get people to download is that something that we then have to keep up um and it depends there are a lot of platforms out there right now AP is a website that came from an app it the guy who founded it just he wanted to make sure he knew where his nephew's concert was so he created an app and then said oh I need to have a website to go with that so that is sort of their business model um and they seem to do that pretty well some platforms do it really well others are just literally pulling from their their um website platform and it doesn't translate over as well so it's a matter of looking at what you have and two I do want to point out that with all of these things it means your it department has to really be involved because you already have systems set up are those systems going to have to change dramatically if you make a huge change and if so what does that mean because you only have so many resources in terms of man hours in hands that can do the work so it's it's not just one variable there's a lot of things but yes you may find that the app doesn't work for you although people are trending towards only apps and something like 63% of all you know looking at a website or through an app is happening on the phone it's not happening on a laptop or a or a um desktop so you do want to keep in mind that people are picking up their phone for just about everything and the website has to really be usable on that platform yeah no I app appreciate that uh the last thing I wanted to point out is the I'm really interested in the findings on the learning management system that's really interesting to me because again my experience through now you know 12 years of of my kids in school has been um I have some that use uh you use all those platforms that you mentioned remind and all the different ones the play uses one my her the English class uses something else so I mean standardizing on that alone I think would really solve you know solve a lot of those one you know one to many Communications yeah and I think too again they all offer lots of different things so they can offer uh if they if you need to just speak with the parents on bus three because the bus is late that's a possibility right there so that could be just one platform across the district that might meet your needs might it depends on what your needs are but they offer a lot of different variables as well and then you know you're only going to look in that one place for all the information great thank you um just uh again I apologize for not having all that information but um could you tell me just quickly or if you know was there a request from within your survey or an expression of the parents looking for information directly from the school or directly from the teach teachers they mentioned things in different ways and we sort of broke them out that way but the the real enthusiasm I would say in terms of the um the responses was I just really love hearing from my my kids teacher like they really like that and they take that as official information which we were gonna we're going to say that that is official information it's right there from the classroom teacher just add one thing I I I'm actually impressed with the survey considering the amount of technological advances we've had in the last few years right I mean think about preco and now Google Classroom is just normal and right we've had a huge amount of advances so with all that considered I think this is actually more impressive than I really thought it would have been um that being said I think it drills down to our need to kind of simplify and like you said kind of streamline into into certain platforms so well and again just with that thought quickly teachers had to find a million ways to communicate and so they're using it because it worked and people like it but as a district you found you also found things but now there's a lot of platforms out there so that streamlining might be a really helpful way to move forward yeah Susan you mentioned something earlier um uh regarding stakeholders there's a literally a number of different stakeholders that are going to be effective with any kind of change change so one thing I do want to is to say thank you to all those who currently created this system that we have now right I mean this just didn't appear overnight Friday FL folders you know uh Steve I'm sure you're highly involved with that and whoever uh you assign it to and then the IT department not only do they have to worry about the hardware side of things or cyber security side of things you know if if there's something more complicated or convoluted do is it appropriate for it to be managing something like this I mean I think uh Dr Moore and I had a conversation where you know it can represent both the hardware like all the Chromebooks and everything and then the software side or the you know the information side and I think that in itself almost is another potential expense and you know um commitment that that is going to be required and that we would have to sort of analyze financially to see how that would fit within our budget so I think you were alluding to that earlier is that if we as a district take on any changes that you may recommend it's a lot more compr we we'd have to take a more comprehensive approach because there's so many other stakeholders that would be uh involved in this right so exactly and also with that what they've already built because much of what they're I mean it's working you know your your your school messenger is working pretty well it's the other platforms that are getting getting lost in there in that procedure and that may be because they don't even know that platform's being used right so they can't really speak to that because it's happening somewhere else uh so just to kind of to make that standard but your current um website is school messenger it's been bought by power school Power School just bought schooly which is a sort of learning management system some people like schooly some people don't but there's you know there's Evolution Happening Here you may already have what you need in place because the platform you're using may have what you need you have to look at it and evaluate if it meets your needs and yes it's going to affect people who have to service that so you want to keep that in mind because we don't we don't I mean everybody's stretched you don't want to BU anybody you know you want you want to make sure that everybody can work towards the goal there's there's a cost to it right so then and then we have to decide how much that cost uh will be so the next thing is I mean the amount of information like I was fortunate to get one of these color copies the amount of information that's in here is tremendous now the next question is how do we make this actionable and then sort of uh get some end results out of that you know we don't want this study or this all this work to go to waste and so I guess some of the next question is what is our next steps you know if if the board reviews it and you know we we like the recommendations then how do we then take that next step you know where do we uh put it under finance committee or something or Ops so that uh we can see how much it might cost uh one other question I also had is that um with the workshop coming up in October New Jersey school board's Workshop uh they have uh hundreds of vendors out there you know and I'm wondering if we can get like a a one sheet paper that I could take down to school uh to school boards and when I go talk to the vendors I'm like oh yeah you know I need this this and this is this something that your company capable of or some you know that's something I would love to have if that's available um um but uh Steve it looks like you were about to uh jump in as well no I I think um going from this larger report we have to set up a couple goals for the next few years right things that we can Implement over the course of uh say three years and also include the so maybe the first year might be all free things things that we already have that we just need to clean up and then we budget for the new things right and so on so I already sent Susan an email to set up a call with her and what we'll do is we'll just look at it because you know even so with 80 Pages we have to like you said break it down to a page where there's some actionable items some goals and then start you know shipping off some of those things like we do with a strategic plan basically a strategic plan for technology so that that should help us so we'll work on that and I want to thank you guys too I went to one of the meetings and uh probably just was annoying to everybody right but but I you know just bothering people then I you know riled them all off and then walked out just like I do in the prek rooms but uh imagine Ste everybody else has to get everybody back in order you know but uh these guys were they were they were having some great conversations and uh I appreciate everybody doing even though I was joking around a little bit I do appreciate what you guys what you did all the work you hard work you did and and uh yeah if if 85% are happy and and we could do something about the other 15% you know that'd be great and I also think let's face it some of this isn't brain surgery some of the stuff we do we could do better right we we do have things all over the place and some of our stuff's a little bit outdated we could we can do some work on that so uh again appreciate all your time on this great do any other board members have any last comments or thank you so much again uh for uh this presentation and all the hard work so thank you thanks so much [Applause] um so we'll go ahead and continue with the agenda uh superintendent comets Steve are you ready yes I'm ready okay so let's see what we have here um I sent you an email about the mountain lake superintendent looking for some help on some research I got back which is nice if we could get two that' be great I think it's a pretty cool study too I don't know if you saw it if you read the email about the study it's um it's perceptions of superintendent board member relations so I thought that I thought that might be a pretty interesting uh I know Dino's like we perceive it's good but you know I don't know he only lives down the street for me so it's not that good might have garbage in front of your house tomorrow I'll volunteer for that one sure so that that would be cool I'll let him know that that we're we have some people Dino if if you're good I'll let him know about you too and thanks Mike if anybody else wants to do it he said as many as possible but he really would like to have at least two so uh yeah he's a good guy he he did he is retiring at the end of June so he's moving on and the new superintendent is a guy I mentored a few years ago from upper settle River so he'll be starting in July um and remember we have a few things coming up right you have your D graduation ation coming up you have uh that's that's on the 14th at Lake View Valley View's graduation on the uh 17th at Mars nulls the last day of school is the 17th that's the uh this is June by the way and it's uh the last day of school's the 17th we have um still school this Friday because that was in the calendar so no school Friday Monday for Memorial Day and um I'm going to go see the lake view students sing the Memorial Day um event in marown Wednesday it's the first time I'm getting a chance to do this so I'm happy about that and uh that's that's it for my comments thank you very much Dr Forte I see that Dr CIS is not here I hope she feels better Miss Kowski uh business administrator comments please one comment uh this coming year we will have two opening for Board election and the deadline to submit application is July 29th by 400 p.m. applications and information is on the district website hopefully you can find it Miss Miss the [Laughter] deadline um maybe if you can print it for us or well anyway uh we will now open it up for public discussion uh it is 8:42 PM right now so seeing no one online and no one in the chambers except for our wonderful Patrick uh uh we'll go ahead and close it at 8:42 pm. old business action to be taken miss a Dallas could you take us through that please surely uh the following resolutions have been recommended by the superintendent of schools to the board of education for approval I move to approve the following resolutions under old business uh a resolve that the board approved the following reports from April 2024 the treasury of school monies and the board secretary reports B education reports report of student enrollment for April report of Health cases from April Hib cases uh vb13 bb14 and lb 05 and the minutes from the April 8th and April 29th meetings I'll second thank you questions or comments roll call please Dr Moore yes Mrs Adelis yes Dr Arun tassin yes Mr Cass yes Mr Anderson yes Mr Capello yes Mr Kim yes M Dr arason can you take us through Personnel please certainly um there is no objection I'd like to move the following items uh under personal uh item one I'd like to move uh as a block a through n don't think we have an addendum so and then item number two uh is the Denville administrators contract and item number three is uh the Keen University for the nursing departmental clinical program um and number four is the esy program and number five is uh leave of absence number six uh there's a um employee uh resignation and a settlement agreement uh to go with it and uh to Res in the earlier resolution as of April 29th I'll second thank you questions or comments uh Mr Kim if I may I just want to congratulate uh Susan styles on her retirement from lakev yeah I wish to Echo that as well thank you Mr capella all right seeing no questions or comments roll call please Dr Moore yes Mrs hellis yes Dr Aruna datass yes Mr Cass yes Mr Anderson yes Mr Capello yes Mr Kim yes okay uh moving on to the agenda Dr Moore instruction program please uh sure I'd like to uh move for approval the following resolutions under instruction and program number one workshops and expenses uh 1A is a literacy coach uh going to the writing Institute at the reading and writing uh project um a teacher to attend virtually the best Cutting Edge strategies for teaching fifth grade and another teacher to attend a star lab training certification course through raron Valley Community College I'll second thank you any questions or comments roll call please Dore yes Mrs Adelis yes Dr Aruna dessen yes Mr Cass yes Mr Anderson yes Mr Capello yes Mr Kim yes policy revisions Mr Capello can you take us through that please I'd be happy to if there are no OB objections I would like to move the policies and regulations listed uh they are all for second reading and adoption and uh they include equity in education sportsmanship Equitable education opportunities bilingual education curriculum content uh equity in schools guidance counseling um reporting student progress education uh Equity policies and affirmative action uh equal employment uh and anti-discrimination revising our policy around code of ethics and secret societies also the prevention and treatment of sports related concussions and head injuries and finally uh policies and regulations around vandalism and School District security one seconder thank you any questions or comments roll call please Dr Moore yes Mrs aelis yes Dr Aruna dessen yes Mr Cass yes Mr Anderson yes Mr Capello yes Mr Kim yes Mr Anderson def Finance if you will sure under def Finance I'd like to move uh as a block items number one through 11 include our typical checks list uh as well as the tax money uh schedule for the year um Garden State Environmental as our environmental consultant Professional Services for our architect as well as Professional Services for our audit Services um Professional Services for Legal Services Professional Services for Legal Services special education legal council um what else do we have here social uh Professional Services broker of record as well as a broker of record services for health benefits and then finally um board approved the donation of $1,200 to the Valley View Middle School Mock Trial Club from Einhorn barbarito attorneys uh Dr Forte mentioned that earlier today when the uh person of the year award was given and then uh also approved the attached service agreement for eate Consulting for the 2024 2025 school year in the amount of $4,500 I'll second thank you questions or comments roll call please D deore yes Mrs Adelis yes Dr Aruna datass yes Mr Cass no on the milk fund yes and everything else Mr Anderson yes Mr Capello yes Mr Kim yes Mr Cass operations please glad to nothing to talk about or approved for transportation item two building and grounds 2.1 I'm asking the board to approve the attached agreement between guard State Environmental and the Delma Board of Education in connection with the ah NJ rtk and nj- P compliance services for fiscal year 2024 2025 item 2.2 for the board to approve the attached agreement with Westchester environmental LLC for lead and water testing districtwide for the 2024 2025 school year in the amount of $4,085 item 2.3 asking the board to approve the attached bid award 01 wsf d224 item 2.4 asking the board to approve the Pat quote from Cashman Landscape Management for the district landscape maintenance services school year 2024 2025 on Thursday May 9th 2024 at 10: a.m. the Board of Education received one response to its advertisements SE can quot for grass cutting and fall and spring cleanup for the period of July 1st 2024 through July June 30th 2025 so the Cashman Landscape Management quote price was $ 42,3 40 I 2.5 asking the board to approve a donation of $24.50 from the devil Municipal lines to Dee some of the cost of the Michelle Dickinson staff resiliency program a keynote address for the 2024 2025 school year can I get a second second oh thank you questions or comments roll call please Dr Moore yes Mrs sellis yes Dr Aruna jassen yes Mr Cass yes Mr Anderson yes Mr Capello yes Mr Kim yes okay uh next part of the agenda is for the good of the cause committee reports correspondence discussion items such as meeting highlights and uh classroom space considerations Dr for do you have your three bullet items for the meeting highlights I was asleep with the switch over here I'm doing it now what do you have I was going to do the uh persons of the year and what else uh the communications presentation and maybe the mock trial donation does anyone else uh have anything they would like to share I'd like to submit something for discussion sure um I know that we have finance committee which includes technology but at this juncture is it appropriate to create a technology ad hoc for specific software website redesign and looking into this um report um love to get more details and where what direction you might be headed at I mean I know Steve and I talked about cyber security as well uh so you know I I I do feel that there's that soft side of uh it right like the the software side and everything else um definitely open to it we have a lot of we actually have two or three uh ad hoc committees right now so you know being that it's almost June maybe we can start something in in January but I'd love to see the next steps after this committee report you know you know I'm wondering what the board member thinks but I think it's a great idea so I mean um does any other board members have comments I do I can tag right on the back because I jted a few notes there our goal setting is coming up I know sometimes we uh search and search to find out the appropriate goals so um I and I just jotted a couple of things down here I mean first of all there's a wealth of information in there so um I would see that as a as a goal you know we get to it there might be some other things that have a higher priority but um and a couple of key areas I picked up was like you got to get rid of that duplication it's terrible and it's inconsistent sometimes you have like the same topic and some of it's old some of it's half-baked uh some of it's new um and Dino talked about it too reduce the communications where it makes sense to do it I mean we want to make sure we communicate with everybody but when you have all these like like an octopus all these tentacles out there um which is the one that makes the most sense or a couple that makes sense and also the other thing when you have all these different types of communications are they all current at the same time so um you know um you know and there's probably some other things that we should adopt them Implement let's get them done so you know we're you can kind of cross them off the list you know they made recommendations we listened and we got it done yeah from my perspective I it it's my belief that it's going to be if if it was a perfect world from my perspective it would be um and and of course money was an issue uh it would be an all-encompassing project uh that might be from a third party or third company and they would manage the communication you know maybe not the content itself but you know the the connections between you know social media with the website with the teachers classrooms and Google classrooms and everything else all under one umbrella and it's it's synchronized and it's smooth so that if Dr Forte needs to send out an announcement everything can go or if a teacher wants to send something to your classroom it would all be funneled and and uh disseminated to the appropriate parties or the recipients so but that to me means it might be a pretty penny it might cost a lot so uh well that was going to be one of the things that I I suggested maybe we should do is bring some some vendors in to talk to because the vendor I spoke to it was not expensive at all it was well under 20,000 to have all that accomplished including the the website design and the yearly maintenance was only a few thousand and they were claiming to handle everything but uh I don't have all the uh um right questions to ask perhaps so like if maybe even if we had Susan here and we just brought one of these vendors in and grilled them for a while to find out if it's what we we're really looking for because it you know as I said at our meeting earlier they would handle the data migration and everything and it sounds like the more we could get out of the hands of the IT department here so they're not overworked um makes sense why not let people who you know specialize in this do it all day long all the time only that handle those sorts of things and that particular vendor was a was a website with an app and I believe like push notifications and that sort of thing was part of it you just told them what you wanted to send out and they they took care of it so like you know to me it's a no-brainer to bring somebody like that in and and ask them questions yeah I think I think it's all good dialogue and I think I think we're all focused on the same thing I think this report has given Dr Forte some feedback and I think until instead of us getting into the how I would almost just kick it back to the administration not that Dr Forte I'm trying to give you more work on your plate but you know like let him come back with some ideas and plans to us on how we can kind of you know options we can look at I think he's probably inter in or you know kind of consuming the 81 Pages too and kind of thinking have probably some great ideas so I was going to remember what I said before I'll be with Susan we'll go over this and we'll sketch out like a three say like a three-year plan what what can we do what kind of funding we need what are the vendors things like that kind of like a a High um a high level um overview and then we'll bring it to the Committees because there's going to be money involved right and then uh if if the board wants to have a committee to look at some of these things we might be able to do that or we might be able to use one of our standing committees to do that or two of the standing committees maybe one handles the finance I.E the finance committee and the other one handles the uh the educational side that we probably put that in the curriculum committee or if everybody feels strongly about it we'll start a new one for that is this something that we would have to go out to bid it would depend on a few things right number one if they had a contract number two if if it was a uh a Professional Services thing right and then the other thing would be if like if they have a state vendor contract or if they uh if it's over a certain threshold which 46,000 44,000 44,000 so if it didn't meet those criteria then you have to go out the bid and most likely this is Professional Services this will be an RFP where you put the request out to the public and you do not have to select the lowest bidder but you have to analyze it all great thank you uh no the only other thing uh I'd like to add is is that I mean it it a lot of what came out here does sound policy related right so this would be at some point like you know discussing what kind of policies for communication um need to be in place in terms of you know what how how teachers should be communicating or staff are communicating um you know what uh I know I wrote a list of of things down here that sounded you know sort of policy Rich so um you know it makes sense for us to to look at that and I will say again I think it makes sense to well I already said so but I will say it again anyway I think we should look at vendors it makes sense to to not have the same people overworked trying to do the trying to peace meal it all together when you know it can be done by someone you know relatively inexpensively so certainly less than trying to hire someone new to do it yeah and I think I think we have some of those policies but it would be really good to take it off the shelf and look at them again because they were probably some years old I I brought a couple of concerns on staff social media to Dr for not of our staff in any way shape or form actually quite the opposite there was another school that it looked like it was a coach's page and it was actually a bunch of kids that created it and it posted some inappropriate content um and it it was very it was impossible if you looked at this social media page to be able to tell whose it was so coming up with some this may be a time to kind of look at it and maybe some wording needs to go in if it's going to be like official page or something it there is some policy probably to look at but I would say it probably just a matter of kind of once we have the plan we can maybe understand a little bit more as to kind of where we need to go as a you know board itself but really good point yeah know I was just gonna add um this strikes me as a conversation that we had when actually when Mike and I first joined the board and and Steve was trying to Wrangle in all of the at this time at that time it was more Hardware than than anything else it was we had teachers that had bought I IP ads or had had been gifted iPads and they had other devices and we kind of had this collection of of different Technologies going on and it was very hard for us to manage but it was all with good intentions it's just that it had happened ad hoc over time um I get the sense that I think we're there with our Communications technology we have teachers kind of doing things because they can and they can do it and it it solves an immediate problem but we we really need an overarching strategy and we need to step back and think about that appreciate it thank you I agree 100% on that so okay um any other comments that anyone else wants to share all right I was at the um delegate assembly on Saturday uh 14 resolutions uh was reviewed and uh I don't know how what the average is Dino but um there was a lot of people saying that that was um unusually high uh had some interesting ones uh some of which I believe uh we do need to uh that we should be concerned about but the Denville the Denville resolution was passed so uh I'm very happy about that uh there was one about AI you know policies and how districts should uh handle uh AI stuff and um one other resolution that I actually personally wanted uh was the whole uh virtual learning um so the school boards is going to take the position that you know it shouldn't be limited um but we should have if it's a reasonable amount and it makes sense the district should be able to uh instead of like if there's emergencies or snow days or whatever the reason is uh be able to have virtual learning sessions in instead of uh closing school so uh the school boards is uh going to take that position so thought that was interesting um Mr Cash you mentioned something about goals um I'm going to be sending out an email uh for us to self valuate as well I had a meeting with Charlene and during our June 24th meeting where we'll be setting new goals uh we I do believe that we should be also self-evaluating our ourselves so I'll send out emails to uh everyone uh so that you can um provide your your feedback on how you believe we perform this year um and I think uh committee minutes I didn't see any but for maybe for the next month if we can uh make sure I I know I haven't sent my governance committee minutes out as well so I am guilty so uh but if we can make sure that the next month's minutes are out that'd be great all right so we will open it up for public comments at 9:05 no one on the Google meet great thank you no since no no one's online and no one's in the chambers we'll close it at 9:05 as well okay it sounds like we do have a need for executive session so um Mr capella can you take us through executive please I would be happy to as soon as I can find the language uh I move to convene an executive session in accordance uh with Section Eight of the open public meetings act the purpose of this closed session will be to discuss negotiations legal security or Personnel issues minutes of the session will be made available to the public when the need for confidentiality no longer exists second thank you all in favor hi any nay any Nays or abstentions okay we are an executive at 9:06 p.m. and we will have no need for