##VIDEO ID:cLy7BlWhrus## how are you and running e e e e e try yeah my arms stop getting I can read all this no no it's fine it's my phone just talking roll call M kigo here M here DRS Hayden here M gunderman here M clay here M bro here Mr Walsh you have a Corum join me in the flag salute i al to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all this is a public meeting of the Board of Education of the bur of New Providence adequate notice of this meeting has been given in accordance with PL 1975 chapter 231 in that a notice was made in conformance with Section 13 of act whenever the business of the board requires it to convene to close session the session will begin no later than 9:30 p.m. at the conclusion of the need for closed session the board will reconvene to the public portion of the meeting at that time the board will complete any other business that may be before it and the public will then be given the opportunity to be heard before the meeting is adjourned good evening everyone um I'm hoping everybody had the opportunity to enjoy that nice long weekend that we just had uh little rest and relaxation a little halfway through here um last Friday Friday was one of our first of four half days that are being used for Teacher professional development this year um for those of you who may not be aware that professional development days are an opportunity for our teachers to collaborate with with each other and grow their knowledge and sharpen their skills which can lead to better student outcomes when the calendar committee met last year we looked at changing the calender in addition to observing holidays that better align with our community we added these half days for our teachers and we're hoping that um the staff made great use of the time which I'm sure they did I'd also like to thank the board uh for setting aside some time earlier this month for our board mini retreat here in the media center and Dr zerle for facilitating the evening uh the retreat was the opportunity for board members to discuss the coming year and to do some self-reflection at the regular board meeting in November uh we will be discussing the the strategic planning process and lastly um some construction updates all of the HVAC units were put in place on the roof of aw on Monday when schools were closed and work was continuing on the new Varsity Softball field here at the high school and the JV baseball field at Roberts thank you to everyone who has so graciously donated to the project to make it reality the weather has certainly cooperated during the field Renovations which will allow them to be used for the spring that's all I have Dr zerle thank you Miss kakaro I will turn it over to Vince at this time thank you Dr zley um hello everyone uh once again it is a pleasure to be here with you all to begin I'm going to start with a little recap so let's get started right away the club Fair on Friday September 27th was a big success student advisers and leaders helped facilitate and peer leaders assisted our freshmen and new students to have an opportunity to see all of our wonderful course offering in the PSAT was on Wednesday October 2nd for all sophomores and juniors shortly after was the week of respect it was the week of October 7th to uh through the 11th the character education theme for the school year was released and it is respect is homegrown the whole District watched the character education video with a number of middle school and high school students and staff in the video it was played to start the day on Friday October 11th in order to announce the theme for the year coming up is the PHS open house on Wednesday October 23rd all grades 5 through eight parents and Guardians are invited to take part in student Le Tours a presentation by Mr Henry and Miss shanus as well as meet with all of our department heads to hear about the extens of course offerings and happenings in each of our departments excuse me uh on the following day there will be a faculty recital on Thursday October 24th um another event to look forward to is the homecoming dance the theme theme is Mama Mia it is on Wednesday October 30th from 7:00 to 10: p.m. definitely going to have a great time as a student body we are we are about a month away from another big school event our fall play come out to the fall play deadline which is a murder mystery comedy which will be held on November 15th and 16th to support our wonderful actors and actresses the marching band performed the first three parts excuse me of their program at the football game on Friday October 4th during halftime uh it was a great performance and we are excited to see all four parts with the complete performance at the home football game on October 25th it was also band night and senior night for the band on the 4th 27 marching band seniors were recognized for their incred incredible dedication through marching band and we will certainly miss their talents and Leadership there was also a highly successful competition on Saturday October 5th at Somerville High School in the world of Athletics here uh a major achievement was Gian Culver who finished first in in third singles in girls tennis for the county girls tennis won the state sectional on Tuesday October 15th and hot off the press our girls tennis team won the ngia uh group one state championship this afternoon over Glenrock this makes it a three repeat for our girls tennis team congratulations on this amazing achievement boy soccer is seven and four right now and undefeated in the conference during the regular season they play Highland Park at leader field this Saturday girl soccer has a record of 871 and our three and2 in the conference their next game is against Cranford next Thursday our cross country teams had their senior night yesterday um the girls finished third in the 5,000 meter run for the Union County conference with Miranda bournique finishing second out of 46 people in the race the football team is 5-2 right now as they take on Bound Brook tomorrow at 7 as a season is winding down the team is looking to get a home playoff game and um as I wrap up this report I'd like to end with a tremendous accomplishment by the girls volleyball team they raised over $20,000 at the Dig p uh dig pink game for the side Out Foundation let me say that again over $22,000 absolutely remarkable way to go volleyball truly the epitome of pioneer spirit thank you thank you very much Vince I'm going to turn it over to Mr ugio at this time to do our enrollment thank you Dr zerle good evening everyone at Allen W Roberts we currently have 639 students at saltbrook we currently have 584 students at New Providence Middle School we currently have 394 students at New Providence High School we currently have 652 students that's for a total of 2,269 students we currently also have 32 students in out of District placements for a grand total of 231 students thank you Mr U um I'd just like to um update the board on a couple items and also thank them some of it may be uh repetitive from Miss karo's report as well as our student rep's report um but as Miss kakaro said we did have a board r Treat on October 2nd here in the media center and I would like to thank all of the board for participating in that as we discussed um I have put together A needs assessment that we will send out next week for students in grades 5 through 12 as well as teachers and parents I do plan to send that draft to each of you tomorrow um please contact me if you have any questions about that um I'd also like to thank U Miss Morano as well as Miss gunderman who will work with me over the next couple weeks to prepare for a presentation um on our strategic planning process moving forward and I just like everyone to know that our first strategic planning will be during the month of November after the board meeting um as soon as we have that date we will release it for our community so that they could get it on their calendar um this month there has been many awareness campaigns such as anti-bullying week Red Ribbon Week Unity day and school violence awareness week so as as such uh last week we did have our character education kickoffs at each of our four school buildings I was very excited to be a part of a parade at saltbrook school where I did drive in the back of a convertible for all of the Tigers and it was very exciting so thank you to uh Miss Stringer Miss Kowski and their staff over there for inviting me and Mr you over um as uh Vince had said this year our theme is respect is homegrown in this week's newsletter that came out today you'll see that there are videos of each of our schools kickoff so I definitely encourage you to view those the theme this year is for our entire Community to nurture respect for one another to Foster kindness and to cultivate a sense of belonging lastly I would like to wish all of our families who are celebrating dwali a happy dwali um this year our district will have off on Friday November 1 to honor this celebration that's all I have Miss kakaro thank you Dr zery uh right now we're going to have a presentation from Mr Keeny uh the director of curriculum on the assessment report Mr Keeny good evening members of the Board of Education you will find in front of you uh the full achievement report plus an extensive deck of slides with my analysis of all the data that we have available to us tonight I will provide for you an abbreviated version in the interests of brevity and try to highlight for you the most important points the most significant points highlight to you those points I feel like it's worthwhile celebrating because of our achievement and also highlight some points which I think are areas where we would like to see some more growth okay so let's go on with it so I'm going to start off by talking to you about the programs as you know we've had the Essa programs for the last three to four years um and they're based on federal funds and I think it's an appropriate place for us to start because the programs we've been able to provide for our students using oura funds have really helped us address their needs and uh contributed to Performance amongst a whole series of different metrics so I think it's just important for us to understand that as you may recall highlighted at the Top Line there in in the red lines we did receive three sets of funding from 2020 onwards uh the most significant being the S ARP funds in March of 2021 those those are the most significant that's the most amount of money uh that we did receive and as P the per the federal mandate we then divided that money up into five major sections and budgeted accordingly and you can see those five sections included in those five boxes in different colors for your viewing pleasure when we look at that what we did with these par with this particular money you you can see that with the learning loss programs we did address the needs of over 350 of our students through a whole variety of different programs such as our summies which started as large group and then became much smaller and even became individual as we moved away from the pandemic we also provided programs during the course of the school year small group and individual instruction in the spring and then in the fall to really try and address student learning loss we also had an accelerated learning and support program and we did use those monies for the math coach that we had for a year if you remember back to that a couple of years ago to give professional development to our teachers in the new I ready program to address that accelerated learning and we did provide some additional opportunities for students with music art and stem when we look at our mental health programs we were able to address over 200 students and help them with any mental health issues that they may have they may have had through mini camps through summer camps and individual counseling we also uh were able to access a K3 5 SEO curriculum and we did bring out in some outs outside consultants and experts to help us with mental health issues and suicide prevention Etc we're also lucky to be able to get Spanish speaking counselors in for our multilingual learner population we also had beyond the school day programs which we held after school as a name would suggest and we were able to provide that for over 120 students in a whole variety of different subjects uh and some cultural experiences for our ESL students and then lastly we we were able to provide summer enrichment programs for over 200 of our students including onetoone ESL programs robotics camps stem camps art enrichment camps and then we did use some of that funding for some camps as well so all of that put together enabled us over the course of the last three or four years to really address our students needs and also as I said to contribute to the achievement that we see across a number of different platforms so let's have a look at the njsla scores I want to start 30,000 ft let's look from quite high up and when we combine all of our scores every grade level math and language arts and compare them to previous years you can see that 81% of our students met or exceeded expectations this year that's in the totality of all the testing we did and compare that to the uh two previous years you can see some some growth there which is encouraging for us to see the benefit of doing this testing however in these chief is that we start to dig a little bit deeper so we can start to look at the individual areas so as we divide that data up now into how students performed in ela and how students performed in math you can see that in both Ela and math that we performed better this year than we did last year across all grade levels when you bring all that data together encouraging is the math creeping up you know math is traditionally you know we haven't achieved as high in math as we have in ela but you can see a little bit of a a larger Improvement in the math than you do see in the ELA as you know we did introduce the I ready program this year K through six things a bit too early for us to tell whether or not that had the significant effect but over the course of the next two to three years as we start to look at the uh our math scores we're hoping that the implementation of that I ready program will really start to improve the math scores there and show us the growth that we're looking for so we've gone from big picture to a slightly smaller picture then we can start to look at the individual grade levels okay we can start to dig a little bit deeper down into the grade levels and the achievement this is the achievement uh for language arts and a comparison of the last three years with the state average that you can see in green as we've always done we always perform well compared to the state average but what I like to do when I'm looking at this data is to see how closely linked together our scores are and you can see that our blue our red and our yellow columns are really quite closely grouped together shows a consistency of programming from one year to the next know students in third grade are getting a consistent program with whichever school they are students in fourth grade are getting a consistent program to the year before and we're having real consistency in all our programming across grade levels we can also use this data to to track progress and track the cohorts over time okay so for instance you could decide to look at Blue here 70 until the next year 81 until the next year 88 the state does say that the tests are not vertically equated which in essence means that if you got 750 here it doesn't necessarily mean the same same as a 750 in the next year however when we take this data in its totality and we aggregate it together I think we can show that we are experiencing growth across our language arts as we move from grade to grade to grade which is encouraging we see that from grades uh 3 through six we also through see it through grades Seven 8 and n in language arts when we look at math um we have cited smaller figures as we said sorry lower values as I said that's traditional but we are seeing some increases now as we look at some of these higher numbers the 84s the 84s the 883s that we see here okay suggesting that we are getting some momentum and some growth within math I want to focus on the next slide because it can be a little murky okay when you look at it immediately you think hm what's going on there as you may recall preo when we put our math committee together we made a commitment to try and get as many students into algebra one so that they can use that as a Gateway into calculus which we thought was an important component of our math program consequently if you look at the algebra on here this algebra one is made up of these scores are made up of the performance of seventh graders our highest achieving seventh graders our high achieving eighth graders and also ninth graders okay so that's a real mix so after we get through seventh grade the math uh courses start to get mixed up with different students so this seventh grade scores here again we've got that consistency of programming from one year to the next these are all our seventh graders without those highest Achievers that were taking alible one which would explain to us why we see this you know what which are low low scores for eighth grade and something we need to be concerned about and something that we are working on but these eighth graders here are the students who are not taking algebra and not taking geometry okay so this is a constant source of of of looking at how we can get that growth how we can use high impact math strategies and algebra one strategies to try and address the needs of these eighth grade students we've been looking that for a couple of years now and we continue to look at those best strategies that we can use I think in a couple of years as we have had our fourth and fifth and sixth grade students go through I ready and we will start to see some growth in these areas as well and that was always the intent behind introducing those programs so when we look at science you can see first of all how low the state does in science okay those are really rather low scores for the state as a whole we perform we perform much much better and we did see growth in fifth grade eighth grade small dip in 11th grade which I've addressed with uh the department head and something that we are working on but overall you know some positive growth within math within Ela and within science important thing then is for us to do a little bit more of the data analysis to dig a little bit deeper so how do we do compared to our neighboring schools so if you look at our performance here an emphasis to you I just discovered I can use this tool that's quite nice and you can also see that I haven't had that much caffeine this year because that's not wavering from side to side okay so this is the 20232 sorry 2223 so it's not the the scores we've just been talking about it's a year back because we get these scores from the New Jersey student reports uh that we do for for every school so in terms of our Ela and math performance uh it looks good and then when we highlight scores here you can see that we in ela end up as third out of our nine neighboring schools in terms of our performance and in math we end up second out of the nine in our of our neighborhood schools in terms of our math performance but performance isn't the only story and one of the things we started to look at in a little bit more depth nowaday is growth so we can also get from the uh the school performance reports the district performance reports we can get growth data and when we start to look at the growth data a little bit you can see in language arts that we are second in terms of our language arts growth but then when we look at math we are actually six out of nine in terms of our math growth so that is something that then becomes an area that we need to focus on with our growth this is something we need to look at and how can we grow grow our math students a little bit more the introduction of the I ready program I think is really going to help with that and what we started to do is now is to start to identify individual students who showed low growth in math and then start to address their needs a little bit more as we'll talk about when we get into the subunits into the subgroups so we can do that analysis and then we can start to look at our subgroups and these are the same the students are same consistent from one year to the next results I've talked you about so far have been third grade students going into fourth grade or seventh grade students going to eighth grade and they're different sets students these are consistent groups of students and you can see um we have good consistency there um I am especially kind of tentatively excited about the fact that our female and our male math students are getting closer and closer together okay if you look at two years ago there was a fivepoint difference now we're down to a onepoint difference I think the was something that we were trying to achieve when we introduced our stem program that's one of the objectives of bringing our female math students up and I think we're seeing some of the results of that which is good to see so when we look at gender we're uh quietly uh pleased about that when we look at our economically disadvantaged Learners we do have a little bit of concern down here and that's something that we're going to be looking at with our Title One funds uh and what what programs can we fund using those and but we are getting some improvements you know again in various areas there if we look at our students with disabilities you can see the consistency of our approach with regards to uh helping our students with IEPs and 504s and we are seeing some growth in our 504s and our IEPs especially in these little areas of the math as well which again is encouraging for us to see I think it does suggest this consistency of our approach that year in year out we're consistently providing these students with the services that they need this one is a little bit of a concern because with the English language Learners and we're seeing really quite a big drop here and when you look at that that could be a little bit alarming to start with however you know remember this is a transient population we did graduate 12 of our multilingual Learners this year out of the multilingual learner program the program has increased but this is certainly something we're going to be look at looking at and coming up with some strategies using our total three funds we do get as federal funds to try and address you know how things are what's happening with our language Parts here even though we are seeing some improvements in our math which is again is encouraging for us to see as we look about all our ethnic metrics here there's 10 different groups here we have gone up in eight of those 10 the big concern being the performance of our black African-American students in language arts however we are seeing quite large increases in the math performance of our black and African-American students so that's something that we we just need to keep an eye on and that can be very uh transient from one year to the next so we look at our um we look at our subgroups and try to kind of dig down to that data a little bit more and start to see the areas of concern we can also use our I ready data and this is our first real set of I ready data now starting with our I ready data last year at saltbrook and Roberts and then highlighted in the green there the data from the end of last year so the growth that we've seen over the course of time and as you can see here what we've been successful in doing both in Roberts and in salt saltbrook is taking these numbers of students who are at early grade level helping them grow so now they are becoming more mid-grade level to Advanced grade level so we're reducing these numbers increasing these blue numbers and also in decreasing the numbers of students who are one grade level below and push pushing them and causing some growth there which is encouraging to see again only the first year so difficult to isolate completely the reasons for that but as we move through the I ready program I think that we're going to see more and more of that okay PSATs and National Merit Scholars okay when we look at our PSAT scores we consistently are above the national and the New Jersey averages which is always good to see when we look at our Trends over the course of the last couple of years we did go down a little bit with our PSATs this year um because we we did introduce digital testing you never know about the effects of of changing the way the uh the test is is um is administered but you can see consistency over five years with regards to our language arts and our math scores there but I think what's important for us to recognize is we still have Merit commended Scholars and then when we start to look at our Merit Scholars for the first time in the last five years we do have is that tool again that's great isn't it finalists we have two finalists this year we haven't had finalists you know any other years apart from 2021 and we do have two fi semi-finalists here we hadn't had that in the last five years you know so some encouragement there when we start to look at SATs and the acts I think it's important for us to realize that we have gone through some transient times in the last couple of years you know sometimes it was test optional other colleges weren't test optional was it going to be test optional in the future the pendulum swinging back a little bit and more colleges now are asking for test scor you know so one of the things we're doing with our SAT and our acts is really emphasizing to our students moving forward how important A is for them to take this test but B how important it is for them to retake the test and take it again if their scores are not what they are looking to do and to Super score their tests so that they can potentially take math again just to get their score back up again so we' always got that in the back of our mind and we've been talking with the High School administration about some strategies we can use to alert parents more to some of our free and online testing resources to create some email blasts that we can send out so we can really work on our SAT and our ACT scores having said that our SAT scores did go up from last year um and if you look at the trend line here for the nation and for New Jersey there's a gradual Trend down whereas ours have gone up and down up and down up and down it seems but have stayed fairly consistent with regards to the trend okay which is encouraging to see this is a data that we've collected for uh the SATs that are taken in New Providence you may remember about 3 years ago we decided that we were going to provide sat testing on site in New Providence for our students so they didn't have to drive to morrist toown I think is one of the big sites but nowadays we're hearing of people having to drive two or three hours to get to a testing site on a particular day so the Ed committee met uh couple of week a couple of months ago and we did report this at the last board meeting that we decided we're going to keep the uh sa at new Provence High School to provide our students with that opportunity and some students may use that as just a first time to take the test to get comfortable with the test before they may go somewhere else to retake the test or to take part of the test so I think we we think as we try to promote uh the SATs in our district that's something that we we're going to keep in place and is really going to help us moving forward when we look at the acts we remain fairly consistent over the last couple of years just a small uptick there in our uh AC scores from last year and when we look at compared to our national and New Jersey averages the composite score here you know we are higher than the national and the New Jersey averages and there's consistency across the four component parts English and math reading and science okay so all of those are you know encouraging okay consistency but as I said we really are trying to push the SAT and the acct and to provide strategies and online resources and exposure to the community to the online resources that they can use most of them being free because in essence the SAT and the ACT does require a lot of work outside of school you know there's a lot of preparation outside of school so how can we best expose the parents and our students to these resources how can we best make them as accessible as possible and that's something we've been working on and been talking to the high school administration with regards to doing that the uh PTO has also introduced an ACT SAT boot camp uh which is available to our students as well which I think will be very useful moving forward let's have a look at the the advanced placement an AP Scholars I think this is an area where we really have shown some fine Improvement and some fine growth over the course of the last couple of years this is a summary taken straight from college board and if you look at the total number of AP students that we had taken assessments last year you see a significant increase from the year before 97 to 235 when you look at the number of exams that were taken by our students 397 to 531 you know that's a large increase we've been trying to promote AP uh tests and AP courses over the course of the last two to three years and we've really seen the fruits of our efforts here in increasing the number of students increasing access to the rigorous AP courses that we provide at the high school increasing the number of students with scores of three plus and then percentage of total AP students with scores of three plus 90% And that's a really nice high number okay and again it's a credit to the work the administration of the high school has done the department heads meeting with their teachers myself and Mr Henry last year met with a lot of AP teachers and the and the focus of the AP teachers of really making sure these are rigorous courses that are really going to promote academic achievement and success on the AP exam so if we start looking a little bit more detail at those stats we can see that we had 531 AP exams taken last year and we passed 469 of them you know a success rate of 88% which is really you know what we were looking to do and those are increases over previous years as you can see on there so we're really pleased about that and this is an important point that I I I really want to focus uh you on our scores have stayed consistent our AP scores stayed consistent even increased just a little bit here so we're maintaining the academic rigor of our AP courses while increasing tremendously the number of students taking those courses so we've increased the access and maintained the rigorous academic performance okay which I think is really quite impressive and and kudos to all the teachers and administrators that are involved in that in addition if you look at the number of total AP Scholars we had this year number has increased is it 43% just a rough estimation in my head okay 57 to3 43% let's go with 43% in that region okay uh so that's a big increase in uh the number of AP Scholars this next graphic I think brings it home even more really large increases in the number of AP Scholars increases over the year before AP Scholars with honors and then our AP Scholars with distinction went from 23 last year up to 41 okay that's quite an achievement and again comes back to the hard work of the high school administration the counselors the promotion of these courses the department heads the teachers in really making sure that the AP program is a rigorous AP program so particularly happy about that so as we go to Project Lead the Way I did include in your packet a little overview of Project Lead the Way because I know we have some new board members who may not have been aware of what that that was when we introduced it we've had it in in play for a couple of years we still have success with our project lead theway courses across the four um particular courses that we have environmental sustainability did not run last year because we introduced AP environmental science if you remember and those flip-flop with each other by the way AP environmental science 100% pass rate all at fours or fives which is a tremendous achievement and congratulations to everyone involved in that we had a 98% pass rate in Project Lead the way across the three courses Aerospace intro to engineering design and principles of engineering showing that though now we continue that rigorous uh performance of our students and one of the things we like about the project lead the way is that we can get into skill clusters and the teachers now can start to Mr chrisell is nodding his head because he used to teach one of these courses and you can start to see actual individual points where we can see areas for growth so I think those are encouraging as well so how like how do we measure the success of our school district ultimately you've seen third grade fourth grade scores language arts math you've seen some AP scores SATs PSATs you know our district has always been heavily focused on career and college readiness and I'm delighted to announce this year 98% of our students are continuing their education 94 uh 95% of them are a four-year College which I think is impressive and some of the highest numbers we've had in the last couple of years maybe even more importantly when we look at our portrait of a graduate and all the skills that we're trying to promoting our students from the academic preparation all the way through growth M excuse me growth mindset and social skills know that's where we're trying to get students to this is what our final goal is okay and well how are we doing with that when in 202 to 87% of our students in the class of 2022 entered a four-year College okay 16 months later 94% of them are still at College okay which I think is a really nice statistic to round everything off with regards to Preparing our students for career and college readiness we can get very granular with all the scores at different grade levels and how we're doing and are we showing growth and that's appropriate we can talk about all the different Strat IES that we're going to use to try and promote growth and to highlight areas of need ultimately this this community is about going to college vast majority of us and we are maintaining that and students are staying in college so I'd like to end on that if that's okay okay thank you I'm happy to say I'm happy to take any questions or if you want to ponder and ask me any questions outside of this meeting you know email me tomorrow I'm more than happy to uh to respond Mr Keeny um regarding the ACT have we talked about well what did we where why did we land on not offering it here and just the SAT we do offer the ACT here we do yes okay we had talked about a preac a couple of years ago but we do offer the ACT got it so just the PSAT for now no we off for the PSAT but not the P Act is okay yeah okay yes yes Mr Keeny thank you so much okay thank you okay now we're going to I'm I declare a public hearing on the 2023 2024 School self assessment for determining grades under the anti-bullying Bill of Rights Act Mr U thank you Miss kakaro The anti-b Bullying Bill of Rights Act requires each School in this in the school district to complete an annual self assessment on how well they implemented the various components of the Mandate the anti-bullying specialist at each School met with their school safety and climate team members this fall to complete our District's self assessment process the self assessment even though it was done this fall reflects the assessment of performance from the previous school year so the scores reflect their assessment of their uh performance in 2023 2024 the self assessment contains the following eight core elements core element number one is Hib programs approaches and other initiatives core element two is training on the board of education approved Hib policy and procedures core element three is other staff instructions and training programs core element four four is curriculum and instruction on Hib and related information and skills core element five is Hib Personnel core element six is school level Hib incident reporting procedure core element number seven is Hib investigation procedures and core element number eight is Hib reporting each core element contains several specific indicators for which each school safety and climate team determines a score the total possible Points each school could earn on the self assessment is 78 the 2023 2024 self assessment scores for each of our schools and our district average were as follows New Providence High School 70 New Providence Middle School 73 saltbrook Elementary School 75 Alan W Roberts Elementary School 73 and the district average was 72.5 thank you I declare the public hearing on the 2023 2024 School self assessment for determining grades under the anti-bullying bull of Rights Act closed now is an opportunity for the public to be heard on any specific agenda items seeing none declare the portion of the meeting closed I need approval of the minutes for both the business meeting and the Clos meeting for September 26 2024 roll call M kigo M Karo hi Dr H Hayden hi Mrs Gman hi Miss Kay hi M Morana hi Mr Walsh that's good okay Mrs Morano Finance I'd like to uh move to approve items one through nine on the agenda sure we are just some highlights to call out we're paying bills for September number three is uh just the amount of money we're allowed to put in our local reserves for maintenance and uh Bond projects and then two call outs uh for generous donations for the saltbrook up playground uh fundraiser from Mr Mitch Dowling and his family and two second graders Grace lavy and Juliana Stango and the uh non-public school Technology Program planning and the non-public school security program spending for the Academy of LP roll call M kigo M Carol hi Dr hson Hayden hi Mr gunderman hi M clay hi Mr Morano hi Mr Walsh hi Mr Morano facilities I'd like to move to approve items one through two State mandates um regarding our maintenance activities which we have quite a few of roll call M kigo M Garo hi Dr Epson Hayden hi M gunderman hi M clay m Morano hi Mr Walsh hi Mrs gunderman education yes I'd like to move to approve items one through five as listed um and just to point out a couple of things uh one is you know with both education and communication and Personnel committees we've reviewed the communication plan um everyone has a copy of it we do this on an annual basis um no major changes um and just a reminder it is a living document so modifications can be made as new situations you know um occur we want to make changes um the other thing on the agenda is we're very excited to approve the high school trip to Spain and France which is scheduled for the spring break of this uh this coming uh spring in 2025 um this is the first time it's being run since it had to be canceled uh during covid um so it's exciting to see that come back thank you roll call Miga M Caro hi Dr M Hayden hi Mr gunderman hi M Kay hi M Morano hi Mr Walsh hi Mrs Coniglio Personnel like to move items one through seven who was that okay um just some appointments resignations and um leaves I don't know if you want to say anything no roll call M kigo M Garo hi Dr Hayden hi M gunderman hi M gay M Morano Mr Walsh hi Miss kigo Board um there's one um on for first reading and one on for second reading and I'll let U Mr you explain them we just need a second real quick oh second thank you Stacy all right thank you uh the following policies or policy and is on tonight's agenda for first read it's policy 1550 equal employment anti-discrimination policies this is a revision and it is mandated I'd just like to say to the revisions to this policy are mandated and they ensure that our district remains in compliance with current federal and state anti-discrimination laws and regulations one significant revision to the policy is the expansion of protection from discriminatory practices to any and all of the protected categories listed in New Jersey Administrative Code 6A on tonight's agenda for second read or the following policies and regulations policy and administrative regulation 2423 on lingual education and policy 5516 use of electronic communication and recording devices thank you roll call Mrs kga M G Caro hi Dr Hayden Mr Gman hi M clay hi Ms Morano hi Mr Walsh hi committee reports curriculum instruction technology nothing new at this time thank you finance facilities safety nothing new at this time Personnel uh we did meet and we went over the communication plan as uh Stacy mentioned and just one other thing that's sort of important from that was that uh the website is really um where we should find all of our most important information and we're all really working on that so um thank you to uh Katie for always making sure we are well informed um so look check out our website if you have questions and concerns and you'll find your answers there thanks and the app thank you uh any old business Jim anything new business nothing uh now is an opportunity for the public to be heard on any subject at all seeing nobody I need a motion to recess to close session for student matters related to Hib and Personnel thank you