##VIDEO ID:zQyG24ILWEc## e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e in our exec session but we are back now and ready to start our meeting so we'll call the um meeting to order and we'll do a roll call Mr Donnie Miss qua miss m here Mr mmud here m here please join me in flag salute pledge have to read statement the Ridgewood board of education has been meeting an executive session pursuant to njsa 10 col 4-12 the minutes of this meeting will be released when the need for confidentiality no longer exists pursuant to the requirements of the open public meetings act advanced notice has been given to the Star Ledger the record and the clerk of the village of Bridgewood in addition notices were posted in the office of the board secretary and all school buildings um and we'll start our meeting with a really some good news and um information which is um our advanced placement Scholars um we have a remarkable number uh again this year of 228 students at Ridgewood High School have been named AP Scholars by the College Board in recognition of their exceptional achievement on the college level advanced placement examinations the College Board recognizes several levels of achievement based on student performance um on the AP exams so I'm not going to read all the students names but just to summarize it it's on the agenda we've got 72 students qualified for the AP scholar with distinction award by earning an average of at least 3.5 on all AP exams taken and grades of three are higher on five or more of these exams we also have 63 students qualified for the AP scholar With Honor Awards by earning an average grade of at least 3.25 on all AP exams taken and grades of three or higher on four or more of these exams and then we also have 90 students qualified for the AP scholar award by competing by completing three or more AP exams with grades of three or higher so um really congratulations to our students um I think many of these have graduated these were uh taken last May but um really um great work and to our staff for leading them through it uh we'll go now we have we have one of those recipients right here with us right now so great job Harrison congratulations Harrison as a junior yes had right so usually we GA a breakdown of how many seniors how many Juniors I didn't see it in our packet this weekend but oh congratulations then thank you okay um Dr Schwarz presentations right back over to Harris and Harrison thanks for uh thanks for being here with us tonight we look forward to hearing your student representative report glad to be here hope you're uh all doing well and enjoying your October um so after weeks of of Buzz and deliberation uh homecoming festivities uh have finally been announced for rwood high school um kicking off will hopefully become a uh a longstanding tradition um activities will begin on Saturday the 20th with a uh Hall decorating competition from 4:00 to 7M uh and then all through that week uh the Monday through Thursday uh will feature a spirit day uh with new themes uh each day for students um and then that Friday uh the 25th will be a sunrise breakfast uh a senior car decorating contest and a pep rally at 2:15 p.m. uh before the uh the last home game of the season which will be that night uh at 6:30 uh the game will be a blackout and students are encouraged to wear all black all day to support the team and um uh you know black homecoming t-shirts will be available for purchase for just 10 bucks uh so students can match each other in school pride for the last uh full Friday of festivities there um and then the stretch of homecoming fun will conclude with a maroon Pride themed uh semi-formal dance at the high school on Tuesday the 29th at 7:30 pm um tickets will cost just $10 and will be on sale um all through this week I believe uh and a little bit next week too um in the all around school during launch so um rard High School had 25 students from the class of 2025 commended um by the National Merit Scholarship corporation uh meaning these students placed in the top 50,000 out of 1.3 million test takers on the PSAT um rid High School uh the rid high school learning commment uh celebration of Hispanic heritage uh month beginning on September 15th uh concluded um on well will conclude sorry tomorrow on October 15th um this featured a display of works from Hispanic American Authors uh available for students to explore uh in the learning col um 80 members of the class of 1974 recently celebrated their 50th Union at rhs looked like they had a blast of saw some pictures um ridgewood's own senior uh Maggie Zoo uh recently uh co-authored two peer- reviewed uh papers that have been accepted for publication in prestigious science journals uh which is a significant recognition of her work uh one work is a culmination of her year-long research uh to enhance a robotic system um tailored for assigning uh or sorry assisting surgeons uh during neuroendovascular interventions uh at Professor Yang she's uh mechanical engineering Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology uh and her other paper is due to be presented at mit's undergraduate research uh technical conference under the sustainability track in the fall so shout out to her uh it's a very impressive Pak uh and then moving over to sports and activities uh project interact members recently volunteered at the Hermitage in Hocus uh members helped with check-in uh activities and Museum tours and cleanup active events there um the r of High School football program uh and rhs staff wore t-shirts to show support for fellow rhs student Johnny Jackson in his uh battle with lymphoma um he's he's for those of you who don't know he's kind of a a local Legend at the school uh we call him Johnny buckets uh he's a fantastic uh basketball player for the team and recently he he had his diagnose uh with lymphoma and so uh you know the student bodies really kind of rallied to to show their support uh for kind of a you know a school legend there so um Richard High School begins a long uh tradition uh with the inaugural inaugural sorry uh ASL interpretation of the national anthem uh at sporting events this year uh Friday night's first home football game featured Brianna Lutz singing the song alongside the jambur um rid football defeated Hackensack 18 and0 at their home game Saturday the 6th uh so they're looking pretty good I I saw in the Power Rankings today they're number two in the state I believe so they're looking pretty solid uh girls tennis have won their past two games placing them uh seventh in the big nor conference with an 8-3 record uh boy soccer leads the big North conference with a 10 And1 record and the cross country team uh is headed to a highly competitive Invitational meet uh I think this past weekend actually the past couple days they were there um I have some friends on that team it's apparently a very competitive uh highly selected meet and they were invited to compete there so uh shout out to them as well it's pretty pretty cool they get to be there uh and that's all I have for you so thank you we'll now um open the microphone to comments from the public um as you if you've been listening to our board me meetings the last two board meetings the requirement is uh that we have established just now until we get a new policy um is when you come to the microphone just state your name and your municipality don't have to say your address so if if any anyone would like to make public comment we'll start with those in person and then we'll go to uh those in remote okay not seeing any movement there so uh we'll go oh hi my name is megdan beerly and um I live in the area of Orchard so um it's impossible for me to share my concerns relevant for tonight's meeting and four minutes so I'll share several key points that I feel need to be highlighted as significant concerns for our community I was encouraged at the last Boe meeting um with Dr Murphy's remarks regarding curriculum and inclusion of his ideas and acknowledgement of supporting teachers through these changes and um developments in the district um as well as including Boe members and the community in learning as we make those adjustments so thank you um and this aligns to the community's continued request for a committee with parents and teacher voice included at the table to bring practice and implementation both the strengths and the concerns to the table where decisions are made it also would provide the opportunity for Boe members to build a working collaboration with parents and teachers that may help facilitate a culture where parents and teachers feel safe to share their voice I also o wanted to provide an update to the Boe and the public that despite my efforts to work collaboratively and advocate for improvement in literacy and special education my voice and the continued concerns of parents and teachers that use my voice because of fear of being dismissed or retaliation uh when we share information about or my voice is also being dismissed now is what I want to share so when we share information about the systemic issues it seems the district wants to easily dismiss our concerns and claim there's no evidence of our claims I've shared little of the specifics of my child's trauma and the violations of Fai while attending one of our district buildings I've shared specifics and documented evidence with the administration of this District I've been bullied that the district would work with me if I did not bring a lawyer and then told by other Administration that we should follow the process of due process formally I've been told that my child's anxiety and Trauma is a result of high expect expectations of parents and that my husband and I's denial of our child with a disability and that she will always struggle fortunately my child has the benefit of a mother who has training and expertise not only in trauma counseling but also as a school psychologist she's also fortunate to have a family with the resources to support her which many in our district do not with appropriate supports when we pulled her from this District within three weeks we started getting our daughter back she was making academic progress to the point by November she had to be moved to a different classroom so not only had she started a new District or a new school she had to then move classrooms within three months because the data provided by this District did not inform the school of her ability level she has made so much growth in three years we're in the third year she's made so much growth her goal is to come back to this district for nth grade I will do everything possible to make that a reality for her but this District needs to commit to making changes not just hearing parents but actually acting on following through so it brings me back um to the commitment to the administration and the board to hear and act in addressing the concerns of special education and specifically Ela programs and supports in our district so the third key point the audit of special programs and the proposed self- audit is of significant concern to the community um in addition to that the proposed Administration organization chart that's being discussed tonight I also I was just made aware of it yesterday so I don't have information other than what was presented as a link in the b in the um agenda but I'm very concerned with the tasks that the administrators have in the roles and being shared and split to take on more supervisory roles with the changes and the the concerns um that need to happen to be addressed in the district that it's a lot to ask of those administrators so I'd really like the board to think about understand the experience expertise and the roles they're being asked to do and is it possible yeah come up to the microphone hello uh my name is Sean sapan uh from Somerville Somerville District uh we have two boys uh one in kindergarten in some with an IP another at p3k Glen School uh we would like to the bo to study how much the attorney how attorneys are used by the district how much it costs and with who makes the decision to bring them in um the general tone we felt with in general is that the district is trying to reduce Services aggressively for our child with I AP before our child uh was ready to have them removed um we based on our son having been denied initially for to Glenn school and only getting accepted a year later after his condition had declined uh we are thankful for Glen school's help we with our child afterwards cly but it has been a difficult process at times um this has come to a head when the district escalated and involved their attorney du due just du the scheduling conflict on an IEP eligibility meeting at a time when uh we did not have our own attorney uh so this is unilateral ass from their side District threatened to hold an IEP meeting without us which is in violation of our parent rights according to the pridee guidelines from the state the district's attorney took a very aggressive approach with their child advocate who has worked in this area for decades and said to us and I quote why are they manhandling you at which point we were forced to hire an attorney uh this experience took months this just happened this year it took months for us to resolve in in the end and it was a significant cost for us financially and emotionally we would much rather us us and the district spend our student are are spend on our students and our staffs and their staffs inste of attorneys stad we have very high speak very highly of the people we work with at a school our are the staff the teachers case managers so we'd rather focus on them instead of our attorneys and we where we can feel safe that our kids can get help in the school that they need and not have Services pulled prematurely thank you is there anyone else um here who would like to comment if not I'll go to the see if there's anybody there are we've got two hands raised the first one is Laura Laura you're on oh hi uh this is Carolyn Holt I'm sorry I'm on a a zoom that um has another person's name on it's Carolyn Holt and I'm um live in Ridgewood um I am calling in tonight to follow up on a letter that I sent to Dr Schwarz and all of the Board of Education members on behalf of the field feasibility committee we are a group of concerned res residents who have student athletes past and present and it includes leaders of all the Ridgewood Sports organizations that use fields we are concerned that despite raising money in January of this year and meeting with some of you including the facility committee members and the district's engineering and Architecture Firm in March that there is still no recovery or backup plan and the board has shown no urgency to find solutions to minimize the loss of our children's Sports Seasons and the increasing cost caused by flooding in the district um every time a storm is announced many of us um fear for the worst and hope for the best um and at the last Board of Education meeting we learned that the district's insurance deductible had been increased tenfold from 50,000 to 500,000 which effectively means unless we can find an alternative insurance plan that we're probably going to have to self-insure and I believe that further highlights the need for alternative field Solutions immediately um to be clear our committee discussed with the superintendent and the Board of Ed facilities committee members in March that we should prioritize maximizing use of the district's best alternative fields which we included in that meeting were BF middle school and then Somerville based on their size and location with input from the district Engineers also in that meeting we concluded that a full solution of flooding you know to flooding issues would be cost prohibitive and that the field feasibility study should look at tactical Solutions only um in the meantime all of us participate in the field committee meetings monthly and have discussing the need for more fields and better playing conditions for residents where there is and there is also Board of Education represent representation on that committee as well um so we waited for a follow-up meeting which finally occurred at the end of August and learned that no progress had been made rather the scope of the work was expanded and there's no clear deliverables so I'm asking the Board of Education and the superintendent to make this a priority um and that it be taken seriously impacts thousands of students in our district and their families and many other residents and since you're discussing the Board of Ed District goals I strongly suggest that you make field Solutions a clear part of them thank you for your time Emily you are on with the board hello can you hear me yes hi thank you uh my name is Emily Cathcart I'm a resident of Richwood um in the orchard District um I was just calling in to voice my support for the parents in the special needs Community I'm a a parent of um a child who receiv receives special education here in the district um and I just wanted to show my support for the parent community and um encourage the board in the district to um work collaboratively with parents um so that we can continue to build trust between the the community and the district and ensure that um our kids are getting um you know the the appropriate education and supports um I apologize that I can't be there in person tonight I would like to but it's I think it's a tough time for a lot of parents to get away but especially for um parents of children with uh special needs um getting out um around bedtime or or dinner time can be very difficult so I know 's a lot of uh people in our commun our community who share these concerns um that aren't able to be here tonight or call in tonight but um please know that they're out there it's just kind of difficult for them to connect sometimes um thank you very much thank you uh next we have um phone number ending in 252 you're on with the board yeah hi Boyd Ling Ridgewood resident just a small housekeeping detail the um email that was sent out last week announcing the board meeting for this week had its September 12th agenda instead of the agenda for tonight and the email that arrived today has a link to an agenda that the the link is dead so if there's any way that that could be fixed so we can see the agenda those of us who are at home for tonight's meeting we'd appreciate it thank you very much thank you for letting us know that I I was not aware of it oh the um agenda is on the website right now yeah I know it's yeah yeah we'll see what happened thank you um that is it for public comment I will close public comment and uh we'll go to um presentation um unless Dr Shores did you want to have any um and share any information yes if I can just just give some quick acknowledgements as always of our public speakers thank you all so much for coming thank you for sharing your concerns um again we've been speaking about this at the the coffees I attended a cpag meeting recently with uh with Mr mcau so I just want to speak to anyone who's here with concern or listening with concern regarding special education and that is that we are deeply committed to doing the best that we can for special needs students um again I've only been here for about a year so I certainly can't speak to the way that things have always been here but I can assure you that we are uh doing a lot of diligent work to make progress with respect to creating a system where we are accurately reporting on how things are going with the data that we're that we're actively collecting be working with the board with respect to that I also just want to acknowledge the fact that again I'm everybody has their own unique personal experience everyone uh any any any all parents with any student know they know their child and they know their they know their child experiences and people all have and we have 5500 students or so in the district and that makes for 5500 unique experiences in our schools so I just want to just pay respect to the fact that um we do recognize that people do experience our schools in different ways there's no way to make sure that we have perfect consistency but it is important to me part of my whole mission for why I do what I do is that I believe in public education making sure that we're doing it as right by as many students as is possible um and the way that we do that is by building in systems uh that are self- diagnosing and autocorrecting and transparent uh especially as Public School Systems so we look forward to delivering more on that um and we certainly hope that we and I just want to encourage folks to just continue if you have any kind of concerns regarding your child um by all means if you have General concerns you want to be a part of solutions we welcome you out at these meetings of course if you're involved generally we'd encourage you to go to the cpag meetings we do attend those meetings and also but if uh if you're listening in the conversations here and you're having any kind of difficulty I just want to encourage parents who have any kind of difficulty to please reach out to your teachers reach out to your school reach out to your principles um and we certainly want to do everything we can to help you and support you um I also just wanted to acknowledge those folks who are concerned about our Fields thank you for joining us Mrs Hol we do have a we are going to get into our presentation uh for regarding District goals and we do call that out and I just want to ensure everybody that we are making progress I want to thank Mr Matthews um and the team that that and actually and really everyone in central office because um not only is Mr Matthews been putting together a good team but there's been some good work to get a team together even before he he's arrived here so uh so we're really picking up in Steam and efficacy we have surveys that are going out um and we're looking forward to making some progress with respect to to those fields um and and in the meantime we do have some some mitigation strategies in place uh at Stadium Field this year hopefully those will prove efficacious um and then Mr loving I thank you for calling that out I did not know that the link was dead today I just want to remind everybody if you're looking for the agenda you can get it on the website so if you go to RPS nj. us on that website you will find uh under the links for the Board of Education uh you can find all the agendas and they are there um and just a we actually are missing um our uh public information officer is on a very well-deserved vacation and she does these push notices so uh and she just she just happened to make an error and she usually catches her own error errors um but she was away uh and so then then the error today must be somebody else I just apologize for the delays in those um but if anyone if you're ever looking for that link um we do post the agenda at the same time that we send the email so if you ever want to see the agenda and you're not sure where the email is or the email is delayed or it's late or it's wrong it is always on the website you can catch it there if you want to see it thank you for the opportunity to respond thank you uh we'll go on to now uh presentations um Dr Schwarz I guess we have a student safety data system yes so we have a we have a we have a member of our administrative team who I am very grateful for who has decided to step up and be our students student safety data system administrator um the student safety data system has evolved it's a requirement by the new New Jersey Department of Education it's evolved quite a bit over the years um it's a I don't know the the full origins of it but I know when I first learned it um it was called the electronic violence vandal and substance abuse Reporting System uh once the anti-bullying uh Bill of Rights was passed and the anti-bullying laws were put in place reporting on bullying was added to the system they've since added reporting on suspensions and seclusion and a variety of other data points um but really one of the benefits of having this information is that you can track your incidents that you're seeing over time and that's beneficial for the state to know and make sure that they're holding schools accountable and that schools are doing well by kids um and so we're going to look at some data here today I do want to couch the conversation a little bit first of all I don't want to steal any of Mrs Miss car's thunder so she's she's she's very she she's been working really hard at giving the presentation but I think uh one of the things I'm going to give a little little bit of a take little bit of a takeaway here is uh you're going to see that from uh that last year the last couple years we've seen an increase in reported incidents and and uh let's say reported incidents and last year particularly there was quite an increase in reported incidents um and I just want to be clear that um you know we're we're not shying away from any potential issues that we need to take responsibility for but I can tell you firsthand that in general um I've been received some feedback that we are a little more proactive about responding and Reporting incidents here um as a former principal myself um I think I'm I am generally very concerned about any actions that involve um kind of downplaying something that may have occurred so we do take things seriously sometimes it means we take we maybe do an we do we do a more formal investigation like in a bullying matter um where maybe it maybe we have instincts that it's not but I would rather document those cases um also when some we also have done a lot more training over even last year so when we started and this data refers to last year we have been taking a proactive response that said we are also seeing trends of behavior in kits so I think you're going to see a combination of factors where we have um almost certainly an increase in in reported incidents due to increased vigilance and us us us us uh being um diligent about reporting but also we do know that right now especially in the postco world many kids still continue to struggle to self-regulate to be distracted by cell phones uh to be distracted by social media um and to and to um kind of find a place in this world where we have devices on us and connecting us all the time so so uh so we're open to any feedback any thoughts way you look at the data um but those are some of the overarching themes so uh that said Miss Carr please please walk us through what you've done here absolutely thank you and thank you for that introduction um because you definitely touched on a lot of um the data and some of the trends that we're going to see tonight um so thank you all for having me I'm Lauren Carr I'm one of the assistant principls at Benjamin Franklin Middle School um and so I'll just show you some of the data from this year last school year and over the last um five or six years so just a little background um I know Dr schw has already went over this but we collect incidents of violence vandalism substances weapons harassment intimidation and bullying and other incidents that may lead to removal um meaning suspensions so detentions are not listed in here but suspensions as in removal from class because of suspensions are included um also uh incidents of restraint and seclusion HIV trainings and HIV programs um and trainings are for teachers and the programs are what we provide to students um so all of that information is also collected as well um so this is the report for the 2324 school year um and then we're going to continue to look at the data for this year as we go throughout the school year so here's our last year's summary um we had a total of 74 incidents um and those include violence vandalism substances we weapons HIV that were confirmed um and then as you can see there are um varying columns that show us some of the HIV that were alleged so those those means the hivs that maybe were brought up that were not confirmed um and then you can also see our Hib trainings and our Hib programs um I just want to point out that we do have a very significant number of Hib trainings for our staff members um and a significant number of HIV programs for our students as well um so they are definitely educated on HIV um and then you have some other incidents that are leading to removal those may involve language um basic I hate to say basic but basic rudess um anything that isn't categorized as violence vandalism substance weapons and IB um would go into that other incident uh section so here's our information for this year yeah understand when you say removals is that a suspension yes those are suspensions so what would uh if they are not HIV or violence uh what would rise to a level can you give us an example that like 32 students were removed um so an incident that maybe wouldn't be violent um or vandalism would be a student maybe using highly inappropriate language during class or to a teacher or to another student um that would require them to be removed from the classroom but um wouldn't be categorized as violent alut insubordination physical aggressiveness those are things that don't necessarily rise to the level of assault but would require but might result in a suspension and do those scenario in those scenarios do those students have any formal way of appeal or uh to to contest that no they're code of conduct violations so so from a it's there's the HIV would be its own formal procedure but the rest would fall under code of conduct violations so code of conduct is uh you know there could be the code of conduct could depending on the severity incident could be detentions but it could escalate up to suspensions so for example vaping at the high school is something that we've had some students have suspensions regarding that's not going to that doesn't trigger these um and as would um and insubordination is something that happens from time to time you know student is given a directive and for whatever reason they don't comply that's actually a safety hazard um especially if it's outright open Defiance in front of other students so that will that will sometimes lead to an inch school suspension yeah thank you what oh up sorry okay what is restraint seclusion especially in the elementary school context can you give me give me an example of that it's quite high in certain buildings so I just wanted to get some more context sure and actually you know what I would love we have a Dr Fenwick here Dr Fen do you want to provide some context because it's actually pertains to a special education programs see got it okay yeah and then Willard hi there so certainly we have um a number of student programs of programs of ABA with students with uh autism we also have the ER program uh our Pearl program program for emotional regulation and learning at our our uh Summerville school and also at our middle school there are times when our students um in those um programs have not been regulated um to an ability where they are um and at times are a threat to either themselves or others and certainly we have a level of um non-abusive physical intervention programming uh safety care where we use deescalation First um as a means to you know disregulated the child if those are not successful in a Swift uh appropriate amount of time there may be a restraint that is used the restraints are trained they are highly trained professionals um have to be certified parents are um you know given good description of when those events happen and certainly we work to replace it with appropriate behaviors when necessary so if there's a um outside of um what you described if if a child is a student is so distraught um cannot be a functional productive member of that classroom and the student um upon the recommendation of the teacher or maybe voluntarily decides to go to the nurse and and seclude himself or herself for a period of time would that fall under seclusion or leading to removal because it's not itself how do where does that classification happen is there some kind of overlap well leading to removal might mean that that's a consequence of a of an action of a you know violation of conduct or other reason seclusion um you know we typically don't seclude students um if a student needs to be secluded we we look at our restraint data very carefully we have post meetings to look at what was the Behavior if a student needs to be removed for seclusion we look at the frequency the intensity of of that time period and we work to have a a careful Behavior plan to reduce that if we're unsuccessful we may have to look at other programming additional supports and then if unable to then we look at other placements that might have um space for that seclusion so one more followup question on that um what would what would require HIV programs and HIV training if there were no HIV incidents in and if there were no HIV alleged so for example Willard there are zero HIV cases there are zero allegations but there were 13 training and 42 programs um I think if I may I I believe the um the reasoning behind that is just because it didn't occur doesn't mean that it can't so we want our people to be highly trained and have all that information uh up front instead of so the these are General training not not specific to counseling a student who was identified right these are training programs for our teachers and our staff okay yeah prior to any agent and and our students yes to be clear yeah and if I if I'm just I'm just going to just put a little summary for anyone who's listening it might be a little confused um you know we we we educate students from all different types of backgrounds and and and and U and positions and we do we do seek to service all as many special as many any special needs student uh who we can service we want a service and so we we do have a variety of programs in the district for students of all types but there are some students who have so much difficulty self-regulating for whatever reason whatever their disability is that uh and en Envision a child who really can't self-regulate and who for any small any any kind of any kind of seemingly small event could be become triggered into an escalated episode and can't be de-escalated through through through traditional means of conversation and talking through and structural change um they will sometimes engage in behaviors that can be very very uh problematic uh for the for the other human for their students and adults in the room um if you've ever been in a circumstance like that where you witnessed a person especially a child having an experience like that it's very distressing for everyone because there are people fearing for their own safety but we're also we also recognize that that's a really difficult place for a child to be in so we try to have as minimal of an intervention as possible because no one wants to put their hands on a student you know and no one wants to um you know like hold a hold a student down so that they're not hurting themselves or other people but I want to be clear it's as much about the other this the student hurting themselves often as about the other people it's usually some it's usually fairly indiscriminate can be targeted but generally the behaviors are fairly indiscriminate and uh they're not rational so the struggle is for these for these these kids who have some difficulties you know we want them to have as normal of experience as possible but we have to be mindful of their safety and the safety of others so so when those behaviors occur and traditional methods of deescalation don't work and a child is is is is in a distress State and is intent on engaging in behaviors that are very dangerous the only safe option is to actually is to actually restrain them so the teachers who work in these spaces are trained specifically in proper techniques for how to restrain a child who who's having an episode like this without allowing them to hurt themselves so it's it's um uh and and I've sat in these trainings myself they're very helpful um and they give you a framework by which to recognize that the goal is just to hold the child without hurting them sometimes it requires a couple people because the kids can be quite strong um until they just naturally sort of calm down and then we transition out of the we transition out of the restraint and we do our best to get back to a normal day sometimes kids can get back to a normal day sometimes restraints actually a part of their IEP although we TR we again we always want to be very careful about how we use it and actually I don't know if we actually write them into IPS anymore but but but we want to be very careful because we don't want it to ever be overused that's why the state requires us to report it because obviously you can invi imagine an environment where that then becomes fairly normal and then that's become something people you overuse it's very important that it's not overused but only used in those circumstances seclusion is a very different model that involves having a special room that is a seclusion place where children are placed when they can't even actually be be be controlled or restrained um that is a level of uh of accommodation that we don't typically do in schools it requires specialized rooms um and for an someone who's not familiar with that kind of environment it it might even seem inhumane but the reality is that the level of disregulation that some students experience are beyond what we can really handle in schools so when we talk about out of District placements again there are a variety of reasons for out of District placements but but one of the primary reasons why Why students do find themselves um I shouldn't say primary a common reason why student might be placed out of district is if they're in a place where they do have those kinds of needs because we really just can't reach that level of need so I'm I just we don't talk about this a lot and I'm just realizing that like it's if you haven't been in a circumstance where you've actually witnessed a student who's so disconnected with their own sense of reality that they're like really actually a threat to themselves um it's a scary situation to be in and our professionals who work in these spaces um they have really special jobs and they work with kids who really need really need that support so we want to see these numbers small but they do correspond with places where we have classes where we service these types of students four yeah so the first four columns show number of incidents and the fifth and sixth column if I'm reading it correct or if I'm hitting it correct they are preventative they are trainings they are um what we are doing it to um prepare for that so maybe maybe State requires it in this format but when we reporting it to the community maybe because these like HIV programs 361 if we are looking at it as an incident report that number looks big and that number maybe that these should be two separate slides one that what are we doing as preventative or or for trainings because they don't correspond with the number of incidents and they they are not um same for all elementary schools for example hos we only had 14 HIV programs versus Orchard we had at 55 so that that would be a normal question that are do we have consistency of trainings and programs across all the schools or not so from that perspective if these two data points are reported on two different slides and then some rationale that why one El Elementary School only had 14 and the other one had 55 no agreed I think yes these are raw data outputs um when we specifically uh Mr Monahan used to do this report for us you might remember um and of course he's moved he's uh he's his life has taken him to Connecticut and we miss him greatly we're grateful that that Miss Carr stepped in and was interested in picking up this role so she's pretty new to it which is why we why we're not not not not leaving her out there with some of the more complicated questions but uh but I think we appreciate that feedback we do have to give this report twice a year we would give the report twice a year I agree there's room for improvement so maybe if we uh but I think that you have the information that you need for now at least with explanation to understand where we are yeah yeah it's it's totally I'm just but but I agree it's it's inherently confusing because two are proactive positive trainings and the others are the others are are incidents and actually like the the um there's hi alleged but then the HIV confirmed end up in the incidents if I remember am I remembering that correctly so so yeah so it it is uh the and the HIV alleged are the ones that are alleged and not confirmed so I think it's a little bit inherently conf I think it's a little confusing so this is the raw data and that's so you know when in doubt we always air on the side of given the raw data but I do think that uh moving forward these are some things that we can look at improving for the next cycle and the next report would be for the first half of the year in January yeah so this is our summary for this year just in comparison um this is our summary from last last year you'll see the same column same information um I apologize on my first slide I must have deleted the slash between restraint slash seclusion so it looked like it was one thing um two separate things obviously um so this is our data from last year or no I'm sorry two years ago 2223 school year um very similar information um we did see a rise last year as Dr Shor spoke to um and so these are our incident totals over the last six years um you can see 1819 was prior to covid 1920 was when we shut down in March 2021 was obviously our lowest our students were were in school the less frequently um a lot of them were remote so we had a lot lot less incidents in 2021 and then you could see they started to become back on the rise again um over the last three years um as Dr Schwarz spoke about you know there are so many so many reasons um that went into what could be behind the rise in the 23 24 school year from last year um you know I think we we talked a little bit about the turnover in administration at the secondary level this was primarily at the secondary level that we saw the increase um and we did have new principles new assistant principles um and then of course we had you know new super intendent and and um Dr Freeman as our assistant superintendent last year um so we did have some um some changes just kind of inherently within our structure um that could have contributed to to that um another thing that I think Dr Schwarz mentioned was our uh vigilance in reporting um over the last few years we've gotten a lot more training in it and so um that may lead to us filling out the paperwork more and really looking at situations more closely um so it's a little bit of a a a chicken or the EG kind of situation are there more situations or are we reporting more situations because we're so more much more knowledgeable now about these situations so those are our um incidents these are our confirmed hivs again you saw a big drop in during the covid years and then this was last year the first half versus the second half of the school year so we did see more from January to June which we would have liked to see decrease but again for whatever reason so um the first slide that you saw was uh a combined um column for violence vandalism substances weapons and HIV confirmed and this breaks it down a little bit more um so this is for last year you can see all of our incident totals and then you can see where it all gets broken down into violence or vandalism substances weapons and hivs this just gives you a little bit more um of a breakdown of each of the numbers you see it again if you if you go to the next slide yes Yep this is 2223 so this was the previous slide was last year this is the year before I think it would be helpful just for the future ones to see the Barra comp the sub groups categories okay thank you yes absolutely go back to the other for a second this is our last school year okay thank you this was the year before oh so the hip alleged really increased that's yeah 23 see look 44 oh you're saying the total of the two yeah 20 was 30 37 37 or so was it 32 no yeah I that's I think we'll just need to check that data there appear something wrong with the prior slide may maybe maybe maybe the data was pulled from this column oh from this one yeah you go back to the last one that looks that looks like 17+ 10 or 17 plus 10 which be other that 27 right right right am I yes that's correct so we'll have to we'll have to check with that there seems to be an error there this is the raw dat this this is the raw this is most likely to be accurate this is more raw data right yes yeah so there must have been something wrong with the this slide so this is the breakdown from all the previous years just so anybody has any questions yes that would be helpful so obviously 2021 was our lowest um so to summarize what all the data that you saw um we did see an increase in reported incidents in the 2324 school year um the most notable change was at the secondary level um the middle school and the high school uh we did have new administration at the district level and the school level um that could result in increased reporting and increased vigil in reporting um and and looking at behaviors at school um it's possible that there was still a need for Behavioral supports postco um and maybe a need for clarifying um some classifying certain incidents we did have a confirmed incidents that increased in the second half of last year um and then we did have also some great trainings and programs for students and staff last year as well so again the more educated we are the closer we're looking at everything so that could all come together um and where are we going next so um here are our trainings and program so you can see those are significant um but here are just some of the things that are going on in our schools right now last week was the week of respect um so we had assemblies at BF we had Jordan Toma in talking about um his presentation is called I'm just a kid with an IEP um I reached out to all the schools and heard about all of their assemblies they had Spirit weeks they had classroom conversations and follow-ups in their groups um we also implemented a new social emotional learning program last year both at the elementary school and at our middle schools um so that hopefully will help increase um our student behavior and expectations and empathy um and all the things that we want to see from our students at the middle school level we also implemented a new course um that I know I've spoken to you about in the past um it's a course that's dedicated to managing the transition from elementary into Middle School um and some of those units do include adjusting to middle school and coping in middle school and giving kids those coping techniques um when they first start at the secondary level may be a good strategy to um to help them with all of these behaviors and and what they're struggling with as they grow up as well um we've also continued with Hib trainings um at both GW and bf we had the Bergen County prosecutor's office come in and do their um bias and hate crimes presentations um and we also now have um more police presence at our at our buildings at all three we have class three officers at both the middle schools and the high schools um so we are continually working to uh increase uh positive student behavior and then work to support our teachers and our staff um to make sure that we're all staying Vigilant and checking our students behavior and really looking for a decrease in all of these you Lauren great job you uh one one just thought for for a future ones it's a little bit more work but it could kind of give us more insights right U could be worth it to take time to research other comparable uh districts in New Jersey that compare to us in terms of uh performance and size and just see how their HIV Trends have been the last five six years if we see that hey all these four or five other districts are seeing the same Trend and it's not a matter of our Administration doing anything new Administration or increased reporting then it's just a bigger Trend right of just kids having more issues right and how do we fix that now that's a different conversation versus if it was but if we see that they've been improving or stagnant and we are having that it's a unique anomaly for us then yes we have our own maybe it is increase reporting right so it will give us more insight into the cause if we compare with other districts okay excellent thank you questions for okay thank you thank you I guess I look at this and I um again it's just um the counselors and how involved they are um and so at your next presentation which I think will be in January we look at that a little bit more detail would be helpful on um the specific types of training we're looking at and um the involvement of our counselors um because we added counselors in our um elementary schools middle schools but it does appear that this bike was mostly in our middle school so want to look take a little closer look at that okay thank you thank you Miss car we appreciate the time and we'll uh forward to to having some fun with some data visualizations together all right looking forward to it thank you great um sure you're going to um review the 20 2425 District goals yes please thank you very much been going for a while do anybody need a bio bre or anything before I get going everybody's good all right all right thanks so much everyone so this is a presentation that I put together to make a a proposal here regarding our district goals and uh a way that we can reallocate some of our res resources in terms of our human capital and our leadership at the Ed Center to I think be in a better position to meet all of our goals and to be responsive to all the various topics that we speak about so regularly so uh there's this is quite a lengthy presentation um I don't expect to be I'm so I'm going to uh try to move with a reasonably brisk Pace if I'm moving too fast let me know if I'm talking too much you can also give me the side eye and I'll try to move it along okay all right so three main goals of the presentation here I want to I want to review the 23 24 District goals and their outcomes and a couple prior meetings we were talking about our district goals and um from last year and how to propose this year we really need to crosswalk the prior year to the current year right so uh I think Mr Donnie was was uh was recommending that strongly so here we've got some of that I also want to present the actual final draft of the 2425 goals so there's a link in the presentation um you know what I'm just wondering uh do we have this I don't know if this is available for the public yet so you're going have to watch along but this will be we we'll post this after the meeting so that way the public can have a chance to actually view this all um and then I'd like to propose uh to present the 2425 organizational chart uh in its proposed format which and I'll show you the current organizational chart and why I think this change is important so first let's start with reviewing the 23 24 RPS District goals uh so for starters we did go over these goals when uh in um an executive session at the end of the year last year uh in June with the board uh we also went over these goals at a at a board at a at a superintendent coffee so we so these are pretty thoroughly traversed so I am going to talk about them a little bit but I am going to move through this part a little bit efficiently and board members if you need want to want to rehash anything just stop me okay so District goal one was evaluate uh and update the district strategic plan so well let me just let me let me just back up real quick so our district goals last year remember last year was my first year in the district um we were in a quite a state of transition uh we were in quite a state of transition in a variety of ways but the the the um the district strategic plan had uh was just expiring it was going into its last year we had a variety of community concerns that were really top of mind at the moment and uh when I was uh being interviewed and was ultimately being hired by this board I believe if I remember correctly we talked a decent amount about measurable goals and the importance of smart goals I'm a big believer in smart goals and measurability I do think that we need to get to a place where we can get everyone agreed upon some some goals and really focus on something specific and tangible but um right now uh I think that best best place for that is coming out of the strategic planning process um because that's really a unifying process um the the downside of having smart goal based goals is that they don't necessarily they're not necessarily procedurally oriented and so sometimes you might say oh well this output would be great but in reality I really care about like flood mitigation in the fields like we heard about earlier right hard to present a Quantified smart goal with respect to to uh to to to being proactive there so we went so we had some conversations at the beginning of last year that really we needed some procedural goals that were focused on things that we could all agree on that we should do and some end some outputs that we wanted to try to achieve particularly getting a baseline particularly the state of the schools address was a big part of it but also a budget presentation with the healthy where we actually sat financially so those that was the context for these goals so let me go through them so number one we wanted to evaluate and update the district strategic plan so um I created this table based system to be able to report out if you look this is how we structured the goals we had a goal topic we had an introductory statement and then we at for each goal we had what we called U actions that would indicate progress towards attaining the goal so I found it helpful to from when reporting out to use like a color coding table based system to IND indic at what some of these items were um so this is the this is just the color coding system that I used so the blue is basically it's established I didn't want to say done because nothing's ever really done so we said established green was it's in process so like green it's going it's good uh yellow is it's initialized so maybe we've started some preliminary activities but like they but but but we're really we really just started and then not yet begun is just we haven't begun at all and then obviously red is tabled like we just we're placing that on hold so um I gave two reports I gave one at December 23rd third last year and then I gave another one at the end of the year so uh so you're going to see that there each each goal is going to have a table like this and it's the TW it's the December 23rd version and it's the end ofe version so I'm going to skip over the the midyear one because that's just not we care mostly about how we ended right so if you want to see where we were as of December last year you can see but basically what we decided to take away from the strategic planning goal was that we were going to move forward with a consultant um I developed uh I I divided up the administ ative team into committees to lead each of these goals so uh Mrs Murphy was in charge of our inclusivity goal which we'll get into uh we had Mr fredman who was in charge of our Ela and math goal we had Dr Fenwick who was in charge of our strategic planning goal and our business administrator last year was in charge of our finance and Facilities goal so this is strategic planning the committee after doing going through the process they actually heard from several different Consultants they recommended to me and then I recommended to the board that we worked with would work with Hazard young Anda uh to to lead our process um we also did we mentioned here the state of the schools address we did deliver the state of the schools address and we did do a considerable amount of work or Christine corus did a considerable amount of work um uh promoting our promoting uh our district cleaning up our website migrating our website um and doing a lot of really great communication work so again all these are established meaning they're ongoing um and then in terms of incorporating priorities into the Strategic plan we didn't really begin the strategic planning process so we couldn't say that it was a established it was really in process goal two was to re-evaluate and formalize the RPS plan for inclusivity so this was a focus on Dei related topics so again this was our midyear point and by the end of the year we really had gotten some of these actions in a good place we had done some proportionality work we had done some proportional work for students and employees with respect to students experiences in school and also some demographic analysis we also looked at um we we we looked at a we wanted to have an employee advisory committee um and what we ended up doing was um we focused our uh something that had been that had not been working in the district for a while the Personnel policy committee uh we reinstated that and we expanded its scope and we want to uh include that group to advise some of our processes that was at least some of our intentions at the end of last year and then we also identified that really what we wanted more than anything else was we wanted some sort of an objective audit of how we were doing across the district we knew each school have Dei committees that was that was the middle that was the green one there um but there was there's really a lack of consistency around division for what Dei or inclusion means in our district so we talked with some different Consultants um some of those Consultants the private Consultants could be quite expensive in this space um but uh but we ended up Landing with a recommendation from the committee for a university partnership and Monclair was who they recommended um with there's some data here I know U Mr Donnie I know you Rec you you requested some additional data Mr Murphy do you want to talk about the state of our some of this data analysis here with the proportionality studies sure and I'm still working on breaking down this data so that we can see it um from your requests by school um however you know this data was based on a snapshot in time and it's it's not always entirely conclusive when it comes to staff because this is self-reported data um we do not ask staff for this data um but we collect as much as we're able to um right so I think that is a default understanding that it would be a point in time every year when we report it so if we reporting in June every year it would be June every year and we can see year-over year improvements or changes or uh if it say stay static but um so we don't have to report it for in the last year's report we don't have to report it today's dat it would be still the same June survey that was run and anything for this year would be new data that would be Improvement yep very good and the idea is to establish Trends over time and specifically by location right yep and that's and that would certainly be the goal and that's what we're trying to establish last year when the state the schools addresses doing a look back to whatever extent we can but then the idea is again any any snapshot data can be informative about a basine but without context of Prior years it's hard to know exactly what it means and some of that data may not change for some years that that would just show stability in our shop that okay that nobody like people are not leaving quickly so it will not change so that's fine that it doesn't change it's it's just a snapshot every year very good thank you so we left some of the this was this data was included in the prior presentation um so if you haven't seen it you can take a look at it but basically it's a variety of different lenses by which to look at it none of these are necessarily uh they're they're not necessarily all particularly useful but it is data sliced and diced a few different ways so can I if you look at the was the slide before it showed this is also self-reported so here it's 517 okay what percentage of the staff then actually filled this one versus if you look at the other one self-reported in terms of ethnic makeup was 600 in total oh when we say self-reported meaning it's collected upon the person's employment okay okay got it so we it wasn't we didn't send a survey it's just when they come in they just toal they fill out all the forms so it's inclusive of all staff um and then we had some analysis here of um and again when we say student self-reported what we mean is their that's what their parents filled out when they filled out their information right so it's parent reported student demographic data but you can see obviously the goal in proportionality would be to say that you'd want your your the representation of your administ for those who haven't AR familiar with the concept proportionality the idea is that if we serve a diverse student group student body which you can see on the right we do have a fairly diverse student body um we would want our the diversity within our professionals to be something comparable to that that's not to say that there's not a benefit to having even if you had a homogeneous student body there's not a benefit to them having uh having having diverse uh diverse Educators but the idea would be that um in a that that we would want to at least have that level of diversity we obviously can't control all this directly but uh we can be strategic in trying to sure that candidates from diverse backgrounds feel very welcome in joining us in our schools I think Dr shortz from where I come from it it doesn't have to mimic the student diversity in the staff but within this staff a certain type of profession um should have diversity yes right so if if all everybody that is uh doing a specific job are same and then everybody that is doing a specific other job they are same then anybody that doing other job so that they so it may not reflect what the student body is that chart this chart just shows that we are a diverse community and this will um demonstrate okay what are the diverse needs and our holiday policies and our language uh curriculum and so this may um guide our curriculum and others things but from the staff perspective whether we are hiring diversity in a role yes yeah so to be clear if I'm hearing you correctly we're talking spefic specifically about looking at and being interested so that's what this slide is this slide Focus breaks that out a little differently so this side focuses only on facult certified faculty and administrators and the idea being like that's that's one of those groups that you're talking about right and and and and the concern being I think if I remember correctly the concern you've shared me before and it's a concern that many of us have is that sometimes just due to the economic socioeconomic factors in our area uh we end up with a certain job class that might be predominant L One race or or people from one particular ethnic group and another job class might be people of another ethnic group and then you have in your highest paying positions people of the representing primarily the most privileged groups and so you end up kind of seeing social stratification within the different classes of employees and that it would be really great if we could shake that up a little bit and have more have it have it be more diverse is that is that not accurate representation your concern right and that is I agree and I and uh again this is uh this is this is a community community effort to help shake that because that forms the perception at elementary school that okay all the jobs of a certain type is done by a certain yeah exactly it should be economic it should not be race agreed agreed again if you've got a if you got a go-to answer for how to fix that I'm happy to hear yeah so so my my go to answer is when I hire contractors or when I are different uh Tradesmen they come from all races so there are people in the society that do the work that we are doing in schools from our races but when we hire we we are only seeing one so there is a there is a certain like maybe we need to look at our hiring practic because it's not that we don't have people working in different trades uh in our society in our even even in Ridgewood or Inon County or surrounding to like within commutable distance within 20 miles but we are hiding this what type so just to be so I hear what you're saying but to be clear we are proactive to whatever extent we can in terms of diversifying particularly our faculty and certified folks something that we have to look at and be very real about is that the vendor services that we work with right that's where I'm more focused are where we're seeing some of some of this and again I think that well that's another conversation but the bottom line is that to be clear there are district emplo employes and a lot of the classes that we're talking about are vendor supplied classes yes I understand that they are vendor employees but that's where I'm thinking of that more diversification is needed I hear that thank you okay our next goal was on uh was on Ela math programs uh specifically we really focused on K5 but we decided to expand that to be districtwide so this was our mid midyear update and then by the end of the year a lot of these items really were not resolved they were we reported out that these were things that we had focused on so uh we we did do a lot of good work with data systems and we're still expanding out those Data Systems um I want shout out to our Tech Team here who's built a really fantastic dashboarding system that we were able to use over the course of the year to help uh make decisions and understand where we are um Dr Murphy is well aware that we are do a lot of work that we want to do in terms of uh scope and sequence and and clarifying uh and evaluating resources and program evaluation I want to be clear you know we uh I'll get to that at the end but suffice to say that um we have a lot of great things in motion but we can see pretty clearly that there is good work to do to ensure consistency of practice across schools and to make sure that the right resources and supports through the curricular resources and the curriculum office um are are made are made more standard and more robust um habits of work it looks like it's getting a little cut on the screen here I apologize about that but habits of work were actually something that was concep ized in the last strategic plan and although we don't hear about it very much I actually say this to the administrators I really believe it and the teachers too I think the habits of work is some of the most interesting stuff that we have going on in our district in terms of being Forward Thinking research around what makes students successful is pretty clear that there are certain behaviors that highly successful academic students engage in and so the district as part of their strategic planning built out a framework for the habits of work that really make students successful so we're actually going to we've been talking about doing a presentation for this for the board so you can see this really cool work um and uh and it's really about finding a lever by which we can really improve student achievement by actually helping all having common expectations for parents and students around what makes students successful and we're actually looking at integrating it right now actually at the high school I know it was just just integrated into the comments section so reflection is one of the themes this year so if you have a high schooler and you look at the comments um they're all themed to the habits of work this year which I think is a really cool thing anything that can really beef up uh the quality of feedback especially at the high school level is really important so looking forward to sharing more about that but that that was an example of a project that came out of that last strategic plan despite covid and it's I think it's a good example of why strategic plans are a good idea because because our our our staff and faculty administrators really were bought in and they so they kept that work going despite despite a lot of transitions um and of course we the district does professional development very well we do a lot of robust professional development for our teachers uh we had natal Le Wexler here today we had Molly Nest doing trainings a couple weeks ago um so lots of great things in place and Dr Murphy I'm going to give you a chance to chime in in a few if you just bear with me for one minute um and then the uh District goal four was to reevaluate the state of the district's finances and Facilities if you remember this time last year we were kind of kind of working in a murky order we didn't really quite know where we were financially we could we could wager some guesses based on prior year budget Trends and kind of where where we found ourselves with Surplus at the end of the year and major cost drivers and their changes but uh what we really didn't know for sure so we built these objectives around uh the idea that we would have basically a very clear budget picture going into this year um and a and a a better picture of 23 24 before the year was out so mid year this was our progress and at the end of the year um we had changes unexpected changes in our business office so we needed to table um the detailed uh budget projection for 23 24 instead we focused on getting a clear picture for 2425 um and that the 2324 budget projection will be made clear as we go through we finalize the audit process which Mr Matthews is working on with our auditor you guys are just initiating that process right now right fantastic um but of course we did end up we were able to produce a 24 25 budget presentation um we did have some good sense a good sense of where we were going for the coming year uh we have budget concerns that we need to keep our eyes on which we'll be talking about over the course of this year but in terms of having a picture we ended up with a decent picture we focused on security um and then we've had some concerns regarding vendor Services Mr Matthews I joined the team a couple weeks ago and and it's it's been been a blessing to have around and just getting the ball really moving with our vendors and uh and and providing support there we also have a new position that we created this year uh who is responsible for monitoring our vendor services and that's been really helpful so I shared this with the board an executive session when I gave them my self- evaluation in the end District go board report last year um and basically I've shared this with a few folks but I just thought it' be helpful to add here to talk about kind of where we are and why we got to where we are so really my key takeaways coming out of last year being fairly fairly uh pretty much a stranger to to Ridgewood I mean I'd heard of Ridgewood being a a great an amazing Community I've been through the town before um and I I had a sense as to what the district why the district was wonderful place in a place I'd want to work but I really didn't have any of the nuanced understandings as I worked over the course of the Year these were really my key takeaways and that first of all the district success in Ridgewood is really attributable to the reputation that Ridgewood has uh we do a great job of attracting and retaining high quality Educators and when I say we I don't mean just the schools I mean we work to retain high quality folks in the schools that's important to me to make people feel valued but I mean that really is like a that's like the Royal Wei for all of Ridgewood uh Ridgewood maintains a very very prestigious reputation in New Jersey but especially in Bergen County and as a result of that U when we can can have a sense of clear Direction and a good sense of order and focus and and service for kids um we're we're a natural magnet for folks who want to work in a great place and I think it's been like that and as a result of that we just have we go around the schools and I have to tell you I mean I mean we've I mean no place has you know you can't you can't you can't have a a Place full of people who are just all thriving a 100% of the time but man our proportion of of of of professionals who are just really top of their game uh Pro doing great things for our kids is higher than I've ever seen um I I shouldn't say I've ever seen but I've never seen just kind of in a natural state I guess it's probably not a natural state right this is the phenomenon but uh but it's rare to find a place where you have so much excellence in the in the talent and the faculty um and uh and part of it is having just a really long like really a more than hundredy year history of of a highly engaged parent Community but that said sometimes you know your your greatest strengths end up becoming a little bit of uh kind of set you up to for some other weaknesses and I think that sometimes we're so used to people being so successful and so good and so efficacious that we forget that even awesome performers can perform better in high quality systems and you can have the a team of the absolute best best Professionals in any discipline and if they're not really working together in a coordinated way with systems that ensure that even even again even top performers make mistakes uh with systems to ensure that if we have variability or we have and mistakes is probably the wrong word because because uh it's not just up to our performers it's also up to students and families and things that are outside of our control like we have we're always going to have kids coming to the district we're always going to have kids leaving the district we're always going to have kids who go through difficult times and they can't be in school they have illness uh we have students who have individual needs for over wide variety of reasons and we can't just rely on great people to just magically figure them out and solve solve things for them we really need systems um so that's really my big takeaway was we have great people and we need some systems um and we also need to be thoughtful about working smarter not necessarily harder and and allocating our resources appropriately so I basically so I said at the end of the year we need systems for ensuring instructional alignment consistency of student experiences and academic outcomes and appropriate procedures with regards to things like budget process HIV investigations student conduct and we really need an or structure to support that uh we need improved situational responsiveness um last last year as things different things would emerge I found that uh this district is very much oriented around the superintendent's office so if anything were to go wrong kind of in almost any way I would get pulled into those situations which made very hard for me to stay focused on the tasks that I had um we also uh I'm also responsible under the current model for evaluating all of our School principles um as well as our most of our central office administrators um and that is uh it's it's it's a is far too many folks for me to be able to evaluate effectively for anyone to evaluate effectively given the other responsibilities in this role and also uh I've observed that while we have amazing principles we have fantastic supervisors um their their their efforts don't always line and that's not unique to Ridgewood um and that's also that's partially because of separate reporting lines between those those folks so the principal is report to me directly the supervisors were reporting through to the director the um assistant superintendent and then if we if ever there was misalignment between the principles and the supervisors that would require the assistant superintendent the superintendent to resolve that and I'd like to be able to see those systems resolved more closely to their source and also we have great departments in the district but they kind of sometimes depending especially the at the secondary level they can some especially at the high school level they can sometimes exist in silos um and the schools themselves can be silos so it says District departments but it's also that was intended to mean schools we want to make sure that our schools and departments are aligned well so my recommendations are that we we look at our our organizational chart to align our efforts better um that we would initiate a new strategic plan that we'd establish an inclusion partnership with the university that we would leverage a multi-te system of support as a quality assurance framework which I'm recommending where we conceptualize through our strategic plan uh we wanted to expand our data analysis which we've been doing at the high school to get a better sense of our special program so you can see even back in June we were talking about uh wanting to have us be able to explain the strengths uh and areas for growth for our special programs as well as College admissions Trends and of course budget expenditure Trends uh we talked about a comprehensive facilities assessment which we've launched uh we talked about expanding security Personnel procedures and we've added uh additional class three officers and we've uh wanted to make sure that we had a plan for potential e needed efficiency measures for 25 26 and the reason we shared this is that um we the district has been the beneficiary of the S2 adjustment to the school funding formula many districts if you haven't read the news have been actually losing funds year over year over year they've just been uh just cutting teachers and increasing class sizes and eliminating programs to stay to stay uh stay solvent um we have been on the winning side of that and we've been it's been nice to have that benefit of having extra estate Aid every year and every year it's gone up but last year was I'm sorry this year was the last year of that adjustment which means that as we build a 25 26 budget we are not going to be seeing uh a significant increase in our state aid um we're budgeting we on one we've been we've been operating under the assumption that we're going to be budgeting flat for state aid um and I've heard some grumblings which I've asked people to try to chase down for me that that we might even have to be bracing for some sort of a state aid reduction so that's not that's just that's that's what I'm hearing through the grap Vine no one really actually knows until the governor gives his uh his address which of course comes at the very last minute every year but um but we'll be having conversations about making sure that we're prepared should we be in a circumstance where we have to have some sort of a cut of course we want that to impact the kids at the least that reduction because of our reserves or is that external to our control uh no so so what I was just referring to was not a commentary about our reserves and our specific financial position it was purely about state aid um and the and the the the potential uh the potential shortfall in funds uh the the the the the grumbling that I'm hearing and the hunch that I have is that um there were a variety of of districts that had a lot of concern about the impact of S2 and so they went out so then they got special permission to go to their tax BAS and to increase the tax levy by sometimes like eight I think I forget the cap was something like 10% something like that right so a lot of districts went hard at their tax base so I think there's going to be a lot of pressure to even rebalance further the governor was actually saying that once well first we have to correctly fund the current Formula then we can reconsider the formula so I I don't know what that means if that's would be something that would impact this year or next year but um but when it when it comes to State funding I just know to always exercise cautious caution I don't think that this is necessarily a time for financial optimism in that respect I mean the good news not the the one I don't know how to phrase it exactly but what happened the um work that was done last year was exhaustive work but we actually have a zerob based budget so the accounts have been cleaned they've been hundreds of counts have been really scrutinized so the Baseline is solid so that's at least um a good launching path for the projections so that work has been done yes absolutely and I appreciate you bringing that into perspective too because there was a there was a considerable amount of work done last year yeah to to to work from a zerob based and to uh but nevertheless we know that we were we were using some of our reserves to fund operating costs too so we also have to that's a it's a reality we have to we have to deal with moving forward as well um Dr Schwarz could you just elaborate on The Leverage of the mtss as a QC framework yes so I wrote that fairly Shand for our conversation but let me clarify so just so the natural progression for understanding what a multi-tiered system of support is it starts with just acknowledging that we could do our absolute best effort to develop a really concrete and coherent curriculum but that's Bas but but the idea that students would be successful in a standard curriculum would be would be based on the assumption that number one all the kids come to school all the kids experience the curriculum without interruption and that if they do experience any issue they're going to have parents that are there to support them and help them get tutoring and things like that to be successful um the reality is that some kids when they're not when they're struggling have parents who get involved and help them some parents pay for tutoring um plenty of schools have things like extra help for students but the reality is that invariably even in Ridgewood Public Schools we have students who struggle and they are struggling for a variety of different reasons potentially sometimes it's very clear that they have a disability sometimes it's not clear if they have a disability and so the the the first and initial reaction that schools make and this is going back now decades and this is actually required by New Jersey code is you have to have something and you probably heard this acronym before it's a weird acronym it's I and rs lot people say I IR NS because that just seems to make more sense but it's actually and rs which stands for intervention and referral services so imagine yourself the principal of a school and you've got a whole bunch of kids throughout that school who consistently fail the ass fail the state tests and consistently struggle academically and they just keep getting promoted year-over-year because they get just just enough to pass they're never really actually meeting grade level standards we just keep doing that moving those kids up year after year after year then eventually by the time they get to high School we're kind of we're cutting our losses we're trying to do anything we can to try to get that get those students on some level of track but they they they develop so many cumulative gaps over time that they're really they're really in a bad spot obviously the sooner we get ahead of this the better but the reality is that unless we have a system that knows that this is going to happen um there are far too many kids who struggle for us to be able to do this through this inrs format so IRS used to focus on only the like most struggling kids but the reality is it's just a committee of people who basically study why a student might have issues so you have a team of experts the parents come in and we all look at this child's profile and we say well what's wrong and what can we do better it's and and the idea is that we're trying to treat every child like a unique child but the reality is that if you ever run an IRS committee as a principal you start to see that you see the same Trends over time you see the same profiles of kids they're they're missing some math facts they they they really struggle to read they really struggle to to uh to to be able to like organize themselves in writing May their handwriting is terrible their executive functions are terrible they they can't keep track of anything they're losing things and they're fine in class but they but they can't complete homework or or they're an emotional wreck because they've had a series of things happen to them and they just can't hold it together in school or they have constant behavior issues or usually a combination of some of these things it's very inefficient for a group of people to do this for every single kid who's having this many struggles in school or any of those struggles in school that long explanation I'm sorry is where the concept of a multi-tiered system of support comes in also known as a response to intervention program and the idea is that whenever that it's just gonna happen we're not going to be able to be 100% making sure that every single kid learns everything they're supposed to learn at every single grade level it just won't happen so we we accept that as a reality we figure out the different types of supports that kids need and we build them to be existing in the day readily available through flexible scheduling and then we also engage in regular measurement of how our kids are doing over time which is called progress monitoring it's a very common self-explanatory term but we monitor progress in Reading we monitor progress in math we monitor progress with respect to any kind of behavioral needs we monitor conduct data um and any other data that we think might be useful and depending on the age of the kids there might be other different there might be different data that we look at but for the most part those are the main areas and especially the language arts and math over time because that those have a lot to do if you don't have if you don't have reading and writing you can't access the rest of the curriculum and if you don't have if you don't have if you don't have math and arithmetic math you can't access algebraic thinking so those are like two Gateway skills that's why they're always so important on our radar so if along the when not if when along the way we identify that students are off at all we're always just Tri there's not the goal is not to have to triage the goal goal is just to have it be automatic if a student's not meeting grade level expectations or is in danger of not meeting grade level expectations we have sophisticated data software that figures out why like meaning what are they missing specifically we we adjust their schedule as part of their normal schedule we have time in their schedule where they can miss something that's not essential get some extra help with somebody who's qualified to help them and who works in the school and who knows them and fix it as soon as possible and get them back on track so that's the idea of a multi-tiered system of support the tiering means tier one would be tier one is like stuff that the teacher can do in the classroom so like preferential seating um some additional support for the student um even if it's like extra support from a teacher um maybe some some um it's mostly principles known as Universal Design for Learning like design the classroom design the curriculum so that way it's very accessible for students not creating false barriers within the classroom tier two is what I'm talking about where you identify where you're going to you're going to identify some kids you're going to pull them out for like for a for a for a um for a focused and specific but but relatively modestly disruptive intervention and that could be for many many students that could get they could get tier two if they're off that could be like up to 20% of your student body or more and then you have something called tier three interventions and that's where it's like very intensive like like for whatever reason we have a student and they are really off of their reading levels or they are like they are they're they're supposed to be at pre-algebra and they they're missing basic math facts right then what we would do is we would then we might have a little bit more of an intensive setup and then of course within that system if because students would already be in that system if we're identifying that normal interventions are not helping that student then we might then that might be a point where we say well hold on a second we'll keep with these interventions we want to help the student but there could also be an underlying disability here that could be that could be causing the student to have difficulty so that doesn't take them out of the mtss system the mtss system is for for all students until they are it's determined that they do need an IEP in which case then they might then they would just be given an opportunity to have a an individualized program which could include some of those supports but often will include something that's that's more intensive and specific for them and then specifically includes the use of special education professionals so I'm sorry that was a long explanation but I wanted to take the time to to to to go through that from like kind of the starting point to where we are because it's not really a question of if we should do it in my mind we've been doing this for a long time and I just think it's just common sense you can call it what you want you can use acronyms what you want but the reality is it's like it's quality assurance like you and it honestly like I hate to reduce this but it's people they often say in schools well school's not a factory school is not a factory we don't produce widgets for kids right Kids come out in all different shapes and sizes but whether it's whether you're creating a good or a service you have to have some sort of a system to ensure that you're producing a quality output a high quality organization is going to produce some level of consistent output and so so really just thinking about it through that lens I think is naturally leads us this way but the reality is that to get to this point it's hard it takes a lot of forward thinking we got to be talking about through the right now we got to be shifting our conversation this way to talk about building next year's schedules and setting next year's budget so that way we have we're being thoughtful about getting that flexibility in now to be clear just to be very clear uh our schools are doing this as a natural outflow of a lot of their inrs efforts they're not doing it in a systematic way there's different pockets of schools that do this a a little better than others I'm not going to sit here and call out individual schools but I can tell you that there's like this concept is already very much in place in different places and it starts with progress monitoring because the next step is you monitor progress you say wow these kids are not progressing what do we do and that's the way that we lead into the conversation but we need to start thinking about now as we're building the budget and as we're thinking about the Strategic plan about we know what types of kind of flexibilities we're going to need next year so we need to start working we are working with our teachers but as we're right now this year they're still focused on the stuff that's up and running this year but as this year gets up and running we start talking about next year we have to engage them in conversations around given the resources that we have given the Staffing that we have given the schedules that we have how can we create how can we take the steps to to to to really start building what it's going to take multiple years but to build out a truly robust system to ensure that all students um at least it strives to make sure that all students are meeting grade level expectations and and and thriving in our schools I I think um some of the issues are um that that some parents don't understand this process and so as they as they see uh issues with their children's learning um it we're not acting fast enough so again when you're looking at this we need to look at the timeline and I know I know that's individualized for every child but during that intervention we need I hope to be communicating clearly with the parents as to what we're doing and what we're seeing um consistency is what I do hear and we need to work on that and progress monitoring we've talked to talked about for years but again is it being done with Fidelity and consistently throughout the throughout this uh District so those are just a couple of thoughts what I've been hearing from parents for for a while now yeah and to be clear again these are systems even progress monitoring it's a it's a system and we have some good systems in place especially with Lincoln but there is there is more that we can do especially as a kids get older uh Dr Murphy I've been all over your space with this conversation is there anything that you uh that I that that I did not clarify well or that you can add that would bring more life to this conversation more life no um but um I want to give credit to Dr Schwarz and the administration and the board for this type of Upstream thinking that is needed which is trying to solve the problems before they land on our um door feed or at our Board of Ed meetings um but it does take time it and and not just time it takes a commitment from this board of aded and future board of ads that this remains a priority because what happens is when you change leadership and you change Styles many of the initiatives get lost along the way so I want to give credit to Dr Schwarz for identifying it as a problem and keeping it on the radar screen when you have uh the average life of a uh or tenure is not life of a superintendent of being less than two years you need time to put in these systems that Dr Schwarz is is talking about so but it is to use his phrase quality control is ultimately our end goal and this system's approach that he's taking I think is spot on can I um ask um thank you Dr um you know my head is full of thoughts as I understand all of this you know as someone who's you know new to it and um rather than taking the next three hours you know to do that um I would love it if we had a um a a comprehensive discussion about it at curriculum where we talk because what I I'm sitting here listening to mtss and I'm think and you know sometimes we look at curriculum as very separate from any special ed issues or gen Ed and special ed are really you know sometimes considered separate when in reality they really aren't or they shouldn't be and um it would just help me a great deal if we could put on the agenda for the next curriculum meeting kind of um a little bit more of a lesson for Mary if you don't mind um because I think that would help a great deal in just informing where we go you know in the future with I'm gonna name my next podcast lessons with Mary there you I think it's important to know I do not have a podcast but my next one will be lessons for Mary there you go well I appreciate that Mary's very common I think it nicely lessons for marriage does thank you Dr Murphy I just wanted to on on your last statement about two years of average that may be the state average but for rwood it has been long and I hope that remains longer thank you and uh this sounds a little bit like a connected actual road map road map conversation doesn't it what I'd love to right it's make I've said it before it's the coherence that we need to build within curriculum and instruction and assessment and when systems aren't coherent you have silos you have inefficiencies you have ineffectiveness yeah well said so and again even among great people so I'm actually going to just kind of wrap up that last whole conversation by just talking about like just just touching back again because I I know we have faculty that listen to this like we have awesome faculty but when you're a faculty member you can't control the master schedule of the school you can't control the everything that everybody else does all you have is enough is your time that you have in the day and teachers don't have a whole heck of a lot of time this is not a problem of practice among teachers this is a this is this is a an administrative effort that we need teachers support on but it's something ultimately that we have to do to set them up for a success better all right so I'm going to keep going here so this is so let's talk about the proposed 24 25 goals so spoiler alert they look a lot like the last year's goals but they are updated so I changed the buckets uh following our conversation I I rebranded them based on the conversation but the buckets are roughly the same as what we talked about uh this was only two weeks ago right that we had this conversation but we did have an administrative team meeting and and and we broke them out into we broke out into teams again just so you know the way I do that is I actually like for people to choose their team because it gives them agency over whatever committee they're part of so we created uh four teams uh we didn't call them this at the time it was strategic planning it was student support it was academic goal and then it was finance and Facilities that's all I gave them everyone broke out into different teams um we gave them the updated the language that I brought with all of you with the notes from our meeting and then I just set them to task hey like like we're good with these buckets but we'd like to hear from all of you do you recommend any language changes are there ways to improve things are there things that we're missing so I think we incorporate I think we still have everything that everybody recommended that we include in here plus there's some changes in language and some updates on a few things but it's relatively as I think I said in your message relatively about semantics but I think that these are the right ones because I think you have to be strategic in your planning that comes down to working smarter not harder comes down to like using evidence basis evidentiary basis for building your budgets and building your master schedules and that's how we organize all of our resources to get things done um the science on the importance of empowering students I know sometimes uh you know sometimes we get a little lost in conversations I've just talked about this recently on local podcast this idea that sometimes we feel like our support initiatives for kids like seal initiatives and mental health initiatives are sometimes at odds with academic initiatives and I really don't see that um I see that when we empower students and when we when we uh set them up for Success we make sure that they're well-rounded whole human beings that have all their have their their needs met um that they're ready to to be to do things and to accomplish things and to be successful and I don't mean everybody has to be an All-Star I mean that we shouldn't interpret this as like com as intense competitiveness and melanism really what we're looking for here is for students to just experience the joy of growth of being able to to to develop and grow and in whatever way is appropriate for them so that's about setting them up and then I changed I was using I think academic achievement for that third one and as I was reading through it and I was thinking about it I felt like you know what I don't know that that's exactly what we mean by all those efforts I think what we really mean keeping with our conversation here is that all our kids deserve really strong academic systems they already have really we we most of the I mean we already have really great teachers I'm just going to say that as a blanket I think it's very safe here we have great teachers here we've got great we we're full of great people but it is and and and we have great growth every year we have kids who I mean again if you compare us to other districts uh our students do very well but we know internally that we can do even better and so and again as I said it comes down to systems and when we talk about things like even like science of reading we're doing a lot of really great training for evidence-based literacy practices for our teachers right now I mean we're giving them we're connecting them with with some of the best folks out there but as we're talking with our principles and talking with our teachers we're realizing that even the systems the kind of these these transition systems we have in place we know that we need to and Dr Murphy and I talk about all the time like we still need to be yet clearer with our with what our systems actually are and we need to build what is it a blue apron plug for Blue Apron here you want to throw that out there he he's stealing my my I was gonna say hello fresh that's the that's my family's brand let me give you a little background knowledge 27 years ago I married a beautiful young woman who cannot cook she was the reason Blue Apron was created it's the all-in-one curriculum is not a scope and sequence it is a deliberate plan that talks about what we want our students to understand know and the skills the assessments that progress monitor monitor the progress along the way and then the learning activities that should all be in one bucket okay curriculum should not be a scope and sequence or something that you have to log on to see it has to be all there thus Blue Apron we don't we don't want to take away the teaching Artistry of being in the classroom but we want to make sure that our teachers aren't going on Sunday night to teacher PID teachers and Pinterest because we want them to concentrate on how to teach not what to teach so it's that coherence that we're going to strive to to bring in the next six weeks but seriously though no it is but it's about charting of course and although you're not gonna be able to see it through for us I'm Greatful that you're here to be able to see that but that's what I mean by academic systems it's not just about a curriculum it's not just about a scope and sequence and it's not just about any off-the-shelf resource it's about a whole system of how Stu of how we set up teachers for success in teaching kids and students learning and then finally I didn't really have a jazzy or fancy way of just saying that we're going to evaluate the district's finances and Facilities so I just called it what it was so do be clear when you say facilities is that including fields that is including Fields okay should I oh facil oh it doesn't necessarily indicate that does it well I mean I would I would they be okay how about finances in properties I think um I think we can call it what it is I I to be clear I do I do call it out in the in the goals here no it's it's in the goals in the bottom hang on a second oh this one I would like yeah but I mean but do well maybe maybe we can adust the title all right so here we go so effectively the format is very similar but the language is a little different so if you look through um this honestly it's very similar to what we saw last time but the idea is the the I did call this the division 230 strategic plan that's the name of our initiative thought you summarized this all oh you good you don't mean to go through it all again okay so yeah so this is the work that you've done there's a few updates in it but it's really not anything significant to keep you honest you to keep you you did you did you did you did all right and I've definitely been talking a lot so just that is a I want that I when I leave I would like that little clip sent to me enough Dr Schwarz that's what they're tell Mrs Schwarz is saying oh I wish I could say that to him too that's great all right so I did I just I want youall see I counted for intramurals we counted for intramurals yeah um and I think I think we got everything else do we still have um Elementary School gifted and talented on the radar we do uh yep right here F two F perfect okay got K in talent in there we did add fields we called that out specifically all right yep evaluate the use of athletic fields to ensure the responsible use and maintenance of District property including exploring opportunities to mitigate the impact of flooding events perfect thank you okay then let's get back to the rest to this so then uh going back to the presentation just uh go back to my full screen mode so everybody can view so um is your expectation that we will vote on these goals right yes and I'm sorry we don't so I didn't want to be presumptuous and put on a resolution telling you that you should adopt them now but if you're all good uh so under administr I guess under Administration we could make a we could uh under um things that aren't oh yes yes of course what's that called items resolutions and motions not includ yes not included on the agenda yes that's the one got it see how everybody's feeling about that but I think we're I'm ready to vote good to go okay so so Dr sh doesn't say in April that I did not have enough time to implement them so the earlier we adopted the better right yes that's right you're taking that's funny I I didn't hear what you said he's saying he he doesn't want me to have the excuse of it took us too long to adopt them yeah that that you guys did not adopt it until November well played all right right or chart right all right yep so on the or chart so so here's my point about the or chart this is the or chart that I interpreted and In fairness this could probably be represented a little bit more in a little bit more of a coherent way but this or chart uh basically the the the the common theme Here is that all these different positions report to the superintendent and even this looks like one box but that's principles there's nine principles so this is a this is a very this is a lot uh it's it's it's it's a it's and you know what I feel it you know I came here and I just uh it was very clear that people and again I think some my I think uh I think some of my predecessors especially were really I know especially those who lived in town were really like Allin and really like wanted to be in everything and I love that I think that's great but um but where we are right now especially in a postco world and in a world of social media and email and everything I think uh and especially with all the things that we clearly all want to accomplish here I think that we can um I think a tweak to this environment will free me up to be able to be more focused on seeing some of these things through I'll use an example we heard it we had a we had someone come on tonight talk about frustration that things didn't get that that certain things that thought were that people thought were going to be done relating to Fields weren't done as of August right we heard like nothing was done right well big part of the reason why we had why we couldn't get things well we couldn't get as much done as we wanted to get done was we had a really significant change in in our business office particularly and uh and even in addition to that when we went into trying to retrieve records over the last several years with so many transitions our records room has just fallen into total disrepair to the point that it's I've actually we put up a sign I don't want anybody in it um it's got moisture issues it's got asbest issues and it's and it's really in disarray so we can't actually even find Our Land surveys um so then of course before we go out and spend thousands of dollars on land surveys we want to do all of our due diligence to figure out if anybody has them and surely someone must have our land surveys Village doesn't have copy of our land surveys our record so we literally couldn't find any copies we found we found schematics of put portions of our property like we found a schematic of the BF property where a BF field when the when the T when the track field was put in in so we had to get to a point where we're like okay no we we are going to spend the money for for land surveys so that way we actually know what our property lines are because that's the first place of we're going to evaluate what we can do with our properties we have to have that but that was an example of you know my team is just not being where I need it to be we also just had with a year of transition we had a handful of issues and I'll tell you that that you know sometimes things don't go as we want them to go and sometimes people get really concerned about something that their child might have experienced or something they're perceiving in this school and depending on how far that parent or that that that stakeholder wants to take that concern um that can be a lot for us to to to actually manage and with this model anything that goes gets appealed above a principal lands in my office now I took last year to trying to use our human resources uh manager our uh special special programs person Dr Fenwick um Mr fredman uh I tried using people for different to kind of jump in try to help be like another level of appeal so I didn't have to hear every single appeal no matter how small it was um but it was hard because um most of the appeals are multiple multiple disciplines meaning there it's not just a special UC education issue it's not just a human resources issue it's not just a transportation issue it's usually a combination of things so often if if an issue became complex enough the whole central office staff would be tied up in them so suffice to say this is sort of a hub and spoke model and it's it leaves me spread very thin so after a lot of time and consideration and a couple different visualizations I ultimately came up with a couple different models this was one of them and effectively the signature change changes are really in this assistant superintendent proposal here this director of curriculum proposal here and this is this assistant superintendent for secondary proposal here and the idea of this is that again as I said when something happens at a school level and there's an issue that needs an appeal and in a district this size you it's kind of hard to explain just how many appeals people request um there's all kind there's everything from bus stops to uh to class changes to bullying complaints to you name it there's there's a wide variety um and and anything in between and some things you wouldn't even believe so rather than all of those things kicking up to me when meanwhile I'm supposed to be connecting with all of these folks and very involved with the schools as well and and the board as well that we would have a level of uh of management between where I would have trusted people operating in a capacity where they would be responsible for some for for for a division of schools like the elementary level where the elementary supervisors and the elementary principles could all report through that person and if we had a curricular issue or we had any other type of student issue that matter could be worked out with the princi principles the supervisors and an assistant superintendent if then for some reason that matter would not was not able to be resolved then of course I would be happy to hear that appeal and I'd be happy to to to try to provide and find some resolution same thing at the secondary level whether it's something that's being appealed to the principles or whether it's a curricular issue either way both groups would report to an assistant superintendent and when it comes to planning their efforts both at the elementary and the secondary level often it can be a little challenging to coordinate the efforts of all the super visors and all the principles but by report having them all report through one person and again this is this is about um this is about knowing who your who your boss is effectively reporting through that one person working out resolutions issues that need to be kind of smoothed out that can be done at that more closer to the school level and it wouldn't have to come all the way up to my office as it so often does now an obvious issue with this model is that if we have all the supervisors with their efforts and we need to have a culum office what does that interplay look like so I was explaining in my experience having been a supervisor that one of the challenges of being a supervisor is that you're closely working with principles but you're often reporting through someone who doesn't actually report to the principles or the principles don't report to you're often reporting to a director of cck and instruction and because there's separate reporting lines the principes have one boss and the supervisors have another one so this resolves that issue but the director of curriculum instruction does need to work closely with the supervisor visors there's a real close coordination issue there so what I'm proposing is in this model that we would have a director of curriculum and instruction position who would work very closely with the supervisors and the principles for that matter but especially would work to coordinate the efforts of the supervisors and would contain this dotted line is here to indicate that there would be a role with respect to ensuring that uh they were part of the evaluation process so when a supervisor is being evaluated the assistant superintendent wouldn't complete that evaluation without taking consideration the guidance and the feedback from the director of curriculum instruction and similarly the director of curriculum instruction can also help with some of the observations there are just like we have to observe teachers we also observed administrators so that would help with some of that load and provide a diversity of feedback for administrators the other issue that we had with this model was special special education how would our special education staff and our special education administrators be supported in such a model so we had uh in a existing FTE that's a full-time equivalency that's a position that was vacant last year that was budgeted for and I was asked by the board when I came on to really consider if that position was necessary observing our uh our programs over the course of last year observing um the workload of our administrators in special education it was very clear to me that we definitely needed another administrative position within special education our elementary supervisor is responsible for Glenn school but also is responsible for supporting curriculum uh programs ac across prek 5 and then we have a secondary supervisor who is responsible for 612 uh programs in 612 our director of special services Dr Fenwick is in a position where she is basically working in this model right now where she's very involved in the schools she's very involved in our programs she has to go to the schools on a regular basis and provide that support and we'll be very but she also provides the highest level of special education leadership so when it comes to high level programs when it comes to especially special education disputes she's she's H she's watching and working with the board working with me working with the attorneys to make sure that we're doing everything we can to ensure that we're doing everything we can for the child but also paying respect to the parents who might be having a concern or an issue um it's also special programs um and actually I'm just realizing we call this say special services but really that's a this is actually I'm G to call this out as a typo really special programs because within special programs we also have English language learning so the idea of this model here would be that we would take that FTE that we had as a supervisor and we would use that to to uh to help flesh out basically what is four positions so we have two positions here and you can see on the agenda my recommendation is for uh Mrs Murphy to be the assistant superintendent for secondary education and Personnel because that's within her she's already really effectively doing this work for me right now she's been acting as my designity for secondary education while managing personnel and it involves uh moving Dr Fenwick into an assistant superintendent role for elementary education while also maintaining high level oversight for special programs that would free up the the new director of special services which would be a vacant position and this and the specifically this position would free up this position which is a role that she currently sits in from having to deal with uh some of the highest level um uh challenges within the work which can be quite timec consuming so the idea of this director of special services would be able to be more focused specific be less distracted from from the highest level concerns up here at the central office we'd be much more focused on the schools and the programs in the schools another feature of this such I didn't really get into just before was just the role of Human Resources we know that in the district our teachers um and our administrators value having a human resources department I I I would I recommend that we maintain an independent human resources department but again for the very highest level Personnel issues like when we deal with the things I mean let's be real administrators the highest level stuff we deal with when things really don't go right and particularly go quite wrong and it happens sometimes and our goal is to try to mitigate that and stay ahead of that so do so Mrs Murphy would still be very much involved on the Personnel side with some of those very high level issues if we ever have to do a staff investigation or we have uh very high level policy issues she would still be our lead for those things but when it comes to a lot of the ways that people need support so for example a classic thing is that teachers need to go on leaves sometimes they deal with some difficulty in their lives maybe they're expecting um or maybe they're planning to be home as a as a as a uh as a as a paternal father who wants to be have some time at home as well they have to those are hard decisions they're financially involved and they're they involve some some good math and some good interpretation of what the what the law says about what they can and can't take so that is hard but it's not but it's not the kind of thing that that Mrs Murphy Miss Mrs Murphy should be stopping what she's doing and and and doing that all the time like she has to now we'd like her to be able to be more focused on the higher level matters and be focused on the schools so it also includes uh the elevation of an HR officer um with this is a current this is a current employee uh who's doing good work for us right now she's actually has a big a long history in uh working in corporate world so she's very experienced uh has a lot of potential and uh we'd like to move her up to a position where she's taking on more of that higher level responsibility help supporting staff members with leaves and things like that and then of course some of the positions that might be a little bit unfamiliar to folks um I will say all the all the roles and positions that are here other than the ones that I mentioned are all existing they all have they're all currently filled uh we're not dramatically changing anyone's assignment except for uh the two assistant superintendent positions and the Human Resources officer position all the other positions um are not represented with change um and you'll also note that I have three direct reports up here some people don't always realize that these are my direct reports but if you've ever met Lucy papamichael she's my assistant and she does a lot of work for the board as well she actually does all the agendas and all the minutes so every time we have a board meeting that's basically her life for about a week and a half and um and we have a public information officer Christine corus who's uh who's who's who's finally taking a well-deserved vacation I'm very happy for her she didn't take any time this summer and we also have a security officer Mike ranky uh who is just and everywhere monitoring Safety and Security in the district who does a great job Shores thank you uh first thing I want to say is is sorry was there uh I was going to say do you so I think that that paints the initial picture if you have any questions I'm happy to do my best to answer them no first I want to say thank you I know this has been a couple of months kind of thinking and brainstorming progress so thank you for taking the time to do that uh and and you know it's not easy the usual course of action is status quo right why should I you know rock the boat too much uh but these are the kind of changes we need to keep the district moving forward on a better path right Ming and it doesn't make things easy for you I think it makes things harder because you have to sell this idea to a lot of people um and change is not easy right I mean as humans we don't love change the first thing that we think of when we see something like this is a million questions right but um I see why you're doing this to me the selling points are are few right I mean I think you're you're going to have more focus on each of the individual uh educational categories right more focus on our elementary education that includes um you know evaluating principles and staff and really getting into the weeds of what's going on there more same on the secondary education side so we we actually put a larger focus on those individual areas uh I think that frees you up for the more strategic things we need to do as a district whether that's you know just basic Fields thing work that needs to get done but it's important for everybody or longer term um thinking so I appreciate that piece of it as well and then it keeps the focus on special education and special programs and not losing focus of that um which I appreciate as well so and and then also like you alluded to I think having just a um single point in the OR chart where folks roll up too on the for example on the elementary side uh where your supervisors and your principles rule up to a single point of of in an or chart makes a big difference and brings more alignment in the field as well C idea so again thank you for for putting in work for this thank you for that I too am um supportive of this and and and like Muhammad I I see the value um where we have an opportunity to have more consistency and so with our elementary schools there um not that they have to be locked step but there's consistency in the instructional program and that our our supervisors are really closely working with the principls and um for for Elementary uh and in our middle school and high school you know we we're struggling with that transition from middle school to high school what does it look like what do our students have to have how do we prepare them and again um there's this constant maybe BF does it this way and GW does it that way and we're looking at a consistency but we're really looking at how a child travels through the school district I always say if you start with us in kindergarten and you go through 12th grade your child will be fine and they will graduate with the skills needed to do you know um a whatever they um need their desire is to do after graduation but they um it's that it's what we've been telling and talking about it's it's um working with Fidelity having consistency and and looking at the data to make sure that our um students are performing in in in what we all hope in a in in a high quality instructional program with curriculum that's that is um implemented well um so I look at the science of reading and I thank you for that book uh reading aloud um boy too bad I can't do that to my children anymore but maybe I'll try uh but in any case it's so fascinating a and the what you brought to the knowledge that our our children need to have context and knowledge um in order to have that comprehensive uh comprehension when they're when they're reading a book all of that um we have been doing to certain extent I'm sure in our classrooms but this this is expands it and then now with um an assistant superintendent looking directly at our elementary and middle school I think we have a better chance of implementing it with Fidelity and consistency so I am liking I think we're good to go then we will um we'll have that um we'll will'll come back to the goals to for approval as um we go through the agend after the uh things that are already on the agenda so I have one last slide if that's right I have a yeah after the final takeaways I want to ask you a question oh okay so so just final takeaways so the idea this is this is this is what my takeaways work of this presentation that the 23 if if if you're taking nothing else away just know that the 23 and 24 goals really really focused on a establishing a baseline last year so so the state of the schools addressed in place where I didn't mention this year we're also looking to do a special education state of the schools we're acting on our most urgent priorities we've been trying to do that all year last year but we're also trying to build capacity and that's really what this is about that's what the order chart is about I want to build my all of our capacity to be more successful 2425 goals balance long-term planning with near-term action so goal one is all about like that 2030 planning and vision but we're also Focus we're not we're not losing sight of all the things that we have to do now and then lastly the or proposal is about reallocating our existing staff so we're not add not really this is this isn't um this is there aren't much in the way of addition here um it's really about aligning folks to a chain of command that's going to improve our Effectiveness so thank you all for for taking the time uh to to hear the presentation Miss qua you had a question yeah um so on the or chart um we have had some um indications you know this is not um that much it's it's not a surprise I mean this has been in the works and to see it come to fishion um it's it's exciting I just want to understand that this requires um buyin from the Personnel who are exact who are will be directly impacted what has been the process and the timing in which that they have that the Personnel the administrative staff that they've been aware of this and the actual um um expectations and the spe specifics of this or chart it's a great question thank you for that so recognizing that we're impacting people with these changes is really important I appreciate your attention to that it's hard because some of these changes can be a little delicate because we involve moving people around but I've also wanted to be very sensitive to the the the team that we have here um I mean I I this is not my first organizational change that I've LED and uh and you know last time you know I think with the changes that we made in my prior District were necessary changes uh given the context and the circumstances of the district but you know hindsight's always 2020 and uh I definitely realized in retrospect that there were things that I could have done to really had had made that process a little softer unfortunately that particular reorganization it was done at the end of the year so there could be a nice smooth transition to the next year and it did involve eliminating some positions so no matter how I might have wanted to communicate that that would have been hard um but here nevertheless I knew that it'd be really important to help people to understand that that this is uh that their goal is just to really reorganize to be effective truly reorganization not elimination so I did signal uh over the course of uh really this summer and into this year um that this that this is something I was thinking about at our administrative Retreat over the summer um I did want to start because I I've purposely been sharing with some of the leadership at the Rea and the Raa that this was on the horizon I'm looking at it it was very general no information and over the summer at our administrative Retreat I said I knew that I wanted to start the year trying out the system a little bit before I made made the recommendation to you I'm sorry I should have clarified this so so over the I when I when I believe that this was a way direction that we wanted to go in I had a conversation with Dr Fenwick and with Mrs Murphy about me wanting to use them more as designes for those specific areas so as we we started wanted to start the year with Mrs or Dr Fenwick really being uh coordinating all my all of our elementary matters and Mrs Murphy coordinating all of our secondary matters because that's pretty close simulation to what I'm proposing here we're not giving them any relief yet they're still all their responsibilities but we were trying to have them coordinate um and so to see how that would work truly I had to make that clear to the admin team so I told them that I'm I'm strongly considering recommending a reorganization and right now the way I'm thinking about this is potentially having um someone to oversee Elementary and someone to oversee secondary and I just asked for their patience and i' asked for them to work with Dr Dr Fenwick and Miss Murphy um specifically in that capacity so we had some conversation about it of course there were some questions you know in a prior in my prior District I eliminated some supervisory positions um and I think that given the circumstances given the context and where we were there were some there were some good reasons to do so in that particular environment um but I will tell you though working with far few fewer supervisors brings a whole other set of challenges so here in Ridgewood especially as I got to know the supervisory team um I really kep come to feel very strongly that we're really blessed to have that group they add a ton of value and I think um they're and and they're they're really integral members of the team and I knew they be a little nervous as soon as I started talking about reorganization based on my history and based on my prior organizations so I wanted to make it very clear to them that like we're I'm not there's not even any conversation about eliminating positions so um so that was that was well met and I think we had a great start to the school year but you know as time goes on people want some finalization and it was starting to become pretty clear that people are like is this going to happen or not what's going to happen so so uh so again nothing concrete I knew I needed to come to the board and you all to get it to give you some a clear sense as to what we were talking about so I so my first conversations making it concrete uh were uh with were it was really kind of concurrently it was with all of you and Mrs Murphy and Dr Fenwick um and uh to talk about like what some of those models would be so really this came together pretty well last week because um we needed to I was we kept having to push it off because there's so much going on um and but it was very clear that we really I wanted to do this sooner than later so uh so last week really was the week where we really rolled it out in in a concrete way actually showing people the the visualization the different different models um and then we then again the timing of things is hard because we want to keep things confidential up to a certain point so the board has a chance to consider it um there's no way that I could have broken this out with the the uh Rea total membership without at least I couldn't conceive a way of doing that without subverting all of you because you had a right to see it first before I did something like that but I did want to set it up so that way the Raa didn't feel totally blindsided by the whole thing so after I had met with all of you and we got things together the last thing I did on Friday was I met with the general ra membership and I showed them the the the the models and um uh including the one that I'm recommending to you here and um uh so that in an effort to keep them connected as far as the rest of the staff we'll put out Communications tomorrow we'll let them know about the change make sure that we're just transparent about it and I'll invite them to be a part of a session where we can have some conversation and then of course obviously we need to transition to the model which really actually isn't going to impact the teachers very much but nevertheless we just want to make sure that everyone's really clear on who's reporting to who and how this is working it's also going to be a little bit iterative it's just important to me not to majorly disrupt people midy year um you know when we start if we start moving people's offices around or reassigning clerical staff to folks that can be really disruptive and disorienting and right now we've already the virtue of what we've been doing is we already are all kind of working together it's really very much been a team effort so as as Miss Murphy and Dr Fenwick have been overseeing those areas or at least acting as my designate in those areas there's been lot of sharing of the support so we'll we'll have we'll have to have some conversations and talk through what the next phase is as we organize our our the Ed Center itself and the the and the clerical staff in the Ed Center um but uh but I think we're on a good track here in terms of trying to let people know without sharing too much information at once but now we're here we are if the board if the board uh approves the the changes tonight put out messaging and make sure that it's clear to everybody did I answer your question what was the um feedback like uh from your conversation with the raia leadership uh it was quiet I don't think it was too shocking uh we've been talking about it for a while so I think I and I think there might even be a little bit of relief just in the fact that it's concluded when I opened it up for questions no one really had any questions but again as I said I I I I kind of dropped this with them back in August and along the way you know I've been communicating regularly with the Raa leadership and because it's clearly not a secret I know that they've been doing a lot of communicating back and forth so in terms of for this year uh maybe we're getting more into the the weeds but for this year in terms of of this is because this um transition this or chart if approved will be um effective almost immediately the evaluation will at least you will still be highly involved in the evaluation process for this year but then going forward it'll be more of a oversight kind of function right correct yeah so so I'm so a good way to think about it is like I don't currently evaluate direct I don't directly evaluate supervisors or assistant principles right talk talk about the principles yeah so I'm I'm using them as an example like I don't directly supervise them right now but when it but but I'm regularly in conversations about their performance and then of course as the year goes on and we're we're evaluating and we go to Summit of evaluations it's very important to me to see all Summit of recommendations for folks um I think that the evaluation process is a really important way where we impress upon folks what we like about what they're doing and what they need what they where they can improve you know and if if there's an underperformance area that's critically important but even for our for our strong performers I still want to see what's being involved there so I would be more focused on overseeing the evaluation process for all of them and along the way seeing how they're evaluated as opposed to being the one who's directly writing evaluations great thank you very much um that was a lot of information done well thank you um okay we'll go to um consent items regular and routine um I move attendance at conferences wait I I I'm supposed to give a superintendent report too may I just but I have one one quick announcement just one quick announcement you got a minute okay one minute one minute I just want to say I mentioned her before but Christine corus has been doing a lot of great work for us right she's on vacation right now very fitting a well-deserving vacation you've seen our website you've seen our social media you know it's going really well we just got word that we won the New Jersey Award of Excellence for media coverage from the New Jersey school public relations Association so one of the biggest state level Awards you can get so it's an award for all of us but it's certainly one that that that we have to thank uh Miss corus for so I would be remiss if I didn't bring that up as my superintendent for so at uh the next meeting when she is back from vacation I think we ought to celebrate that yeah terrific nice news and welld deserved she's uh done so much work uh to improve um our Communications all right so I will go to is that all now that's because that was like you know about an hour and a half I'm Never Gonna Leave This down no um anyways so attendance at conference I move attendance at conference would I have a second for that please second are there any questions questions but when we vote I have to abstain from the very first yes attendee at a conference Mr Donnie yes Miss quack yes unless I'm in one of them just realized okay good miss m for everything except the first one correct Mr mmud yes Miss Broan yes Mo Administration I'll second we're in first reading for the um policies so that so that means next uh on the 4th assuming they're past we will be okay officially and we'll be able to change our um agenda uh to just U for public comment for people just give their names and their um municipality I love it that um our some of our speakers tonight have given their schools not necessary um so we have a first any questions are we live are we are we are we live he does add levity to our meetings you'll be missed okay we're live though right yeah yeah great all right so uh we have a first and second on Administration any questions let's vote Mr Donnie yes Miss quock yes Miss mcau yes Mr mmud yes Miss Brogan yes um curriculum instruction curricul instruction a second any questions field trips okay Mr Donnie no Miss quack yes m m yes Mr Mahmud yes M Brogan yes Human Resources I move human resources and here we have the new and uh revisions to the current job description job descriptions and our appointments for the assistant superintendent uh both uh Mrs Murphy and uh Dr f um second thank you any more discussion questions and and we're also appointing Mr day pardon me we're also appointing Mr ad thank you yes we're appointing Mr aday as the uh assistant principal at Ridgewood High School so uh I think that is um we're all finished with the oh no we're not finished yeah so a question on that Dr Schwarz can you clarify on that High School the re restructuring there or so that way a clarification on the will that assistance of and also oversee the guidance or not thank you that's that explanation is warranted um that request is warranted I should say and an explanation is also warranted so um the uh we've been having some conversations uh about the high school um one of the points that came out of last year and reflecting with Mr niyas is the fact that the need for uh administrative support at the high school um we've been operating with two assistant principles but one of those assistant principles was Mr Bailey who also was responsible for all of our guidance functions and overseeing all of those so really for a high school that size to only have one and a half assistant principles effectively was is really is really a challenge and Mr nias I observed myself was very frequently getting involved in in all very similar experience that I had very involved in day-to-day things our grade advisors are fantastic it's an excellent program I love that we have them working with the students um but unfortunately they can't uh there there are a certain level of matters that they can't get involved in they can't suspend students they can't do certain it's hard to have them involved in certain levels of Investigation because they can't uh make full they can't make full decisions about like again like like like cases of with high like high level concerning behaviors um and and also they're meant to be advisers so we don't want them to get too too deeply involved in those types of things um and um so when Mr Mr Burke left which was really really a bummer he's a great professional and and a big part of uh Rood High School um it did however uh give give some spur some conversation around whether we were better off hiring that position as another GA or to look at the position as maybe shifting to a model where we use two gas and two assistant principles working together so right now the model that we're currently uh that we're we're planning to employ here is to have two assistant principles um we're evaluating the director of guidance position how we're going to structure that but the idea is that this would not be Mr Billy's position this would actually be a different dedicated assistant principal and right now if you're not aware of Miss Wood's position of assistant principal uh which remember she took the she she she filled in um uh she took the place and has done a really great job trying trying to do the impossible task of filling basil bajitos bidos excuse me uh um big shoes um but she's doing what she can but but uh but the model has always been that she would be the great level adviser for ninth grade in addition to being assistant principal so even she's not really a dedicated assistant principal so right now they're looking at a model and I should really be leaving this for you Miss Murphy you've been advising it but they're looking at a model where there would be two assistant principles working in conjunction with two grade advisers and they would each have they would share two grades did I say that well yes that's the model that we will be moving to for next school year this school year because of the transitions happening mid year they want to provide consistency for the students so there have been grade levels assigned um ninth grade is being shared by the two uh grade advisers currently and then each also have a 10 10th grade one has 10th grade one has 11th grade and then uh right now miss Woods Miss Wood has the 12th graders and then we'll be sharing that with Mr day when he comes on board in December and then they will shift again for next year where the assignments will change slightly again sorry I'm a little confused so what is the current model and what are we moving towards so for this year because of this the shift and transitions this year you have two gas that each have their own independent grade level and they are sharing the ninth grade class so that there's there's consistency split like by letters um and then miss wood has the 12th graders and we'll share that responsibility with Mr ad day as he comes on board for in December especially as this is a transition and learning year for him as a new administrator moving into next school year right now we're looking at model where a ga and assistant principal work as a pair they handle two grade levels together and then that way lower level issues can be handled by the ga and then rise to the to the assistant principal just as we're we're sort of the same kind of structures in place so that not everyone is involved at the nitty-gritty all the time and you know issues our students need more support and by doing this this will provide then they will have two adults that they are they are connected with not just one um and will allow parents to also have more Connection in that office as well got it how would the guidance office change if anything just address the some little changes in the guidance right so we looking at a we have a a lead guidance counselor yes right now well we have a a coordinator of of of guidance right now um who is uh Miss Salerno who is uh filling in and is doing a great job and and we have a an interm school counselor that's that's working in the department filling C position that's been in place since the beginning of the school year um we will be we're looking at the director of School counseling position or director of guidance whatever you would like to say it um there will be a focus of course on a high school but also hopefully an expansion so that there's more consistency and articulation K12 I think that's that's the where we're headed and I and I don't know Dr Schwarz if you want to add I would just add to I think I think that uh you know I think we're going to take it as we go like right now we're also working with uh with uh with with um uh Miss Sero as like a as a lead counselor of sorts right um so I'm not opposed to that model but there's certainly a ver potential virtue of filling that model fully as a director of counseling where especially if there's another assem principal of the school to Mrs Murphy's point there might be a little more coordination with some of the secondaries with some of the the middle schools and potentially down to the elementary school but to be clear the Lion Share of that focus is the high school regardless of how we structure it I know it's kind of a work in progress but I want to understand are you contemplating then that the head counselor is not only looking at um College admissions or post high school you know continuing education or something like that or you know where then it actually becomes larger and is looking at other things as they kind of come up the pipeline I'm not sure how that would it's like it's it's in terms of it's about aligning it's about articulation K12 so regard so I mean so so there's more to the RO than just College admissions right A lot of it is a lot of it is well but it all leads to college admissions right or or rather rather post like like um right postgraduation planning right so the idea is that kids have needs educational needs and social needs but particularly educational needs and programming needs especially as we go through from the Middle School to high school transition right they T they're on much more of a narrow track they're on a common track at the elementary level but it does start to break out at the middle school level and then especially as go to the high school level so articulating the expectations the efforts and the communication and the messaging through all the guidances guidance departments we'd like to be we'd like one person to be clearly responsible for that yeah that makes sense okay but but but again it's for the purpose of making sure that they're that they're hitting the high school on exactly the right foot right okay so one um issue that I've been hearing is some concerns about case loads for our guidance counselors and um so as we're evaluating and we're going through the Strategic plan we're looking at the profile of our graduate we're looking at the documentation we use the the um and we have to really look at the parents expectations for what we are doing um at the high school in terms of counseling and college admissions so I hope that will be part of the evaluation as you uh begin to do a deeper dive into that to the high school um and I guess the other um position is Donna G right right uh to be the uh human resource officer and of course staff will want to know that because they'll be um I'm sure she'll be a welcome information for our staff but thank you for all your work um this is Murphy again you you've taken over the agenda with with human resources we do a lot of stopping so let's vote Mr Donnie yes Miss quack miss Ma yes Mr mmud yes Miss Brogan yes and thank you Mrs Murphy and thank you Dr Fenwood for um taking out this Challenge and moving us forward so we look forward to working with you in these New Roads thank you I does that mean you'll also be joining us at the meetings too okay we'll expand the table uh Finance someone like to move Finance I'll move Finance second um acceptance of restricted donations um I would like to thank Deca for the $527 38 cents gift and kind a gift and kind of slate of slat walls shelves for the school store at Ridgewood High School and Orchard home and School Association $116,000 to be used to pay for field trips at Orchard Elementary School for the 2425 school year um that is it are there any questions on on finance all good take a vote Mr Donnie yes Miss quack yes Miss maau yes m Mr mmud yes M Brogan yes okay resolutions and motions not included in consent agenda we have two resolutions um affirming uh the decision of the superintendent on two HIV investigations so let me read the uh first which would be labeled uh 10A or XA y um resolution uh number X a uh Ridgewood Board of Education resolution affirming the decision of the superintendent pursuant to njsa 18a colon 37-15 b6e whereas the district received a report of an incident of harassment intimidation and bullying Hib whereas The District in investigated the the report pursuant to District policy and njs a8a col 37-15 B6 and determined that an incident of H IB had occurred whereas the parents of the student involved requesting requested a hearing before the board pursuant to njsa 18a col 37-15 b6d whereas at its meeting on October 14 2024 the board heard from the parents and principles and whereas after considering the positions of the principal excuse me positions of the parents and the evidence presented by District administration the board has determined to affirm the determination of the superintendent now therefore be it resolved that the Ridgewood Board of Education pursuing to njsa 18a col 37-15 B 6E hereby affirms the superintendent's decision from June 2024 in the Hib matter involving student number 99130 um I'll make a motion to um accept this resolution if I have a second second we'll take a vote on this one and then we'll go for the next resolution Mr Donnie yes Miss qua yes Miss MC yes Mr Mahmud yes Mrs Broan yes second resolution would be numbered 8xb Richard Board of Education resolution affirming the decision of the superintendent pursuant to njsa 18a col 37-15 b6e whereas the district received a report of an incident of harassment intimidation and bullying whereas the district investigated the report pursuant to District policy and njsa 18a Poland 37-15 B6 and determined that an incident of HIV had not occurred whereas the parents of the student involved requested a hearing before the board pursuant to njsa 18a d uh col 37-15 b6d whereas at its meeting on October 14th 2024 the board the board heard from the parents and principal and whereas after considering the positions of the parents and the evidence presented by District administration the board has determined to affirm the the determination of the superintendent now therefore be it resolved that the rigid Board of Education pursuant to njsa 18a colon 3 7-15 b6e hereby affirms the superintendent's decision from the September 2024 case in the HIV matter involving student number 99130 um I move that resolution second Mr Donnie yes Miss qua yes Miss mcau yes Mr mmud yes Miss Broan yes and then our second um resolution motion not included in the consent agenda is approval of the goals presented by um Dr Shores and uh the reorganization chart but I don't think we have to do the reorganization check because we already did so yeah so it's just the goals um and we thank you for all that work I know it was a lot and U well done second Mr Donnie yes Miss qua yes Miss Mall yes Mr Mahmud yes Miss Brogan yes okay approval of bills and that's Mr Donnie so I reviewed all the bills and I move them for um for a vote um I just wanted to mention one thing that during the when I was reviewing the bill I realized that in August we uh renewed the contract for our special attorney for um the ethics litigations and any pending litigations uh but when I reviewed just the list um all of those were concluded before August so I don't know why we voted on August so I looked at my bills there was no there were no bills from that attorney in my cycle but I just wanted to give a heads up to everybody else who's whoever is going to be reviewing the bills to be look on the lookout that we don't get any bills we have or maybe we can just resend what we voted in August but until we resend it if you see any bills we need to question that because there should be no pending litigations with the priority that's my understanding so are you moving your bills yeah I moved second Mr Donnie yes Miss quack yes Miss M yes M mood yes Miss broken yes okay uh board member announcements uh I don't know if anybody does it's just a reminder that uh this week is um access week um and there are a lot of great um activities and programs going on starting with uh Tuesday which is tomorrow a couple hours no it's not really a couple hours from now but tomorrow uh there is dinner a sensory friendly dinner at steel wheel and that starts at 5:00 and goes to seven and our young adults if they would like to participate in that of sensory friendly dinner it is they've created an opportunity from s to 8 uh for that so this is uh cpeg and um the access committee working on that together uh there is a program for our senior citizens or older adults in Ridgewood on Thursday um and also on Thursday there's a safety program called pull over properly that's at Graden pool and uh this is through a group uh called spec wir Ridgewood plus the police department and access Ridgewood they've all come together to off a program designed to assist drivers with developmental disabilities and this program will educate and reinforce proper behavior if you are stopped by a police per policeman police woman police person an officer that would be better and then on the 18th of um there is sign with me and ASL Story Time a family program from 4 to 5 at the Ridgewood Library uh join us in learning the basics of American signed language with a reading of the very hungry caterpillar uh and um and the sign signer will be signing that as they're reading it alloud so it's a great program and then on Saturday the 19th there's the access talent and fashion show from 11:30 to 2 celebrate families and individ individuals of all abilities as they display Talent ambition and individuality refreshments and Community fair in the village Courtyard immediately to follow so and then on Sunday there is a um a friends to Friends Church is opening up at five o'clock uh for uh activities and then at seven they're having a a service uh again celebrating um access in Ridgewood so it's a a full week it used to just be a weekend now it's it's really close to a full week of activity each day so um so that's uh great I have something to add um I have something to add I have two announcements um the first is um I I don't know actually if this is the right place for this one but I'll just say um I attended the New Jersey School Board Association fall labor Summit and it is um for contract negotiations and I found out two really interesting things one one is that um should a contract negotiation get to the point where there's an impass and you have to go through um the public employment relations com commission which is Park which is based out of Trenton I found out that they are the only state agency without the governor on the letterhead they are supposed to be completely neutral so this um the head of per does not doesn't have any direct line nothing to do with the governor and what it's very nonpartisan completely neutral so I found that to be very reassuring so there are a lot of um you know interesting um landscape of of an interesting overview of what the labor landscape is in the educational field and we're not the only District that a had a longer contract than usual um and two that had the salary enhancements which basically lifted the negotiated rate so New Jersey school Association will look to seek data on not just your stated rate but also inclusive of the salary guide enhancements which ends up being um a pot of money gets distributed around the membership and effectively raising the contracted rate um and the feeling was that uh that the longer duration of the contract settlements that they're seeing recently has maybe to do with the sunset of um chapter 44 so tip it for you and then um also related to New Jersey School Board Association as we have our annual Workshop coming up we October 21st through the 24th and you have Dr Murphy who will be presenting every day right here you have a track three of the four days so uh congrat you can listen to my podcast I will give out the details later and um um I also have a track there if you're in in on Tuesday uh it's uh I think 10:30 to 11:30 um myself and another board member out of uh Greenwich Township in uh Warren County it will be our third annual API Board of event members and friends and it's a Meetup um a way to talk about implementation of the API curriculum and just a chance to just connect and um recharge so that's a open to everybody so um it'll be a lot of Administrators will be there and um trustees and that's really for me when I go is when I understand how special Richwood is really because you see all of the hundreds of districts uh and how what we've been able to do as a district is really you know just it's it's very uplifting to go to the Workshop so that's all want to add um that there is a cpeg parent social on the 24th okay at McMurphy's so uh board committee reports I I don't I think only maybe jrc is the only committee that might have met um can I add one thing real quick just in case uh just because um I can't let Dr Murphy just carry that off um I will also be presenting several times at the K Workshop so although it'll be over two days it will be three three sessions we'll be timing you so challenge accepted three three sessions and you're three but they're the same presentations I have three separate that I have to plan for they are three separate present please don't make it up as we go along separate presentations I need videos of all of this now you know we'll have to thank you everyone sorry The Gauntlet is down um okay so committee reports any no jrc did meet uh we uh beginning to get back into that uh um every month a different School this um month uh we we virtually visited travel and um the principal was quite satisfied with um the work that the custodial work happening in his in this building um one issue that did come up and needs a followup is um increasing the number of black seal licensed uh custodians we have enough now but our contract calls for a higher level in case somebody is out or whatever so we do need to follow up on that but other than that um things seem to be okay yeah um and we will be um also the other thing that came up which comes up every fall is leaf collection and making sure that we don't have piles of leaves uh out in the street where parents are dropping off their their students that discussion items oh please no oh no I just do I I wanted to um there was one in uh on the slide and I thought this a good time to follow up is they expand security personnel and procedures was that um we've already accomplished part of that with the class three or is that going what what was that vision for 20242 so so generally speaking um I think that we as a district just need to refocus on security we haven't had an acting uh we haven't had a consistently meeting District security committee uh so we formed one last year um we have another meeting coming up this year we're going to be meeting at least on a on a u on a uh quarterly basis is what our goal is um I've also been meeting um been trying to have we we can't get together every month but we do try to get together with uh fire and and police and Mr kasmar over there so who try to get some work work work uh working lunch meetings um we've had some really nice things come out of that the fire department does a lot of nice things for us uh they just did a recent um uh I guess it's an annual program that they do and that's an example of something that's really positive in the district is they they come and uh they run fire drills at our schools you might have noticed that there were like fire trucks all over Ridgewood the other day um it was because they were running these fire drills and then having a lunch lunch in about fire safety but in terms of the security of our building um generally speaking it's good practice to not talk about specifics in public but there are a lot of opportunities for us to improve the security of our of our it's not just uh it's not just about build building hardening it's also about practices and training but there are some things that I think we need to do in terms of just making sure that we're shored up better so our uh class three officers certainly were a component of that but there is uh but there's more there's more that we want to do and I'm I we there's just some initial lwh hanging fruit I'm looking at right now but once we get some some of our we already have once we get to a place where we've done some of that low hanging fruit work um I think it would also be a good idea for us to submit to a um to a um uh to well no I was going to say to the state does free audits security audits so if you want to have somebody come in they'll come uh they'll come in and they'll just do a free of charge and they'll just do a tour of all your buildings and they'll ident make recommendations for ways that you might want to configure buildings or change your procedures um to be to be more more secure so I would I I think uh we live in an age where um security is something that um it's obviously important uh it's important because obviously we want to be safe from from external threats but we all and and even potential internal threats but I think that what the research shows in effective school security is that a lot of it does come down to the human component so it's about relationships it's about getting to know like knowing what's going on in the minds of our community and the mind of our students staying ahead of things in that respect but also conditioning the behavior of people to just be to Value safety and behave in a safe way something that's been very frustrating for all of us this year that we've been dealing with is um just a culture of propping doors open um and just being something I we're all over that so to be clear that's not like a that's been a constant theme because um you know we bring a lot of things in and out of buildings there's a lot of functioning functional and and all of our doors lock so but it's a but it's a problem when people don't recognize that as a safety issue so those are the types of things that were it's a wide variety of things um I just wanted to bring one topic for under discussion items is um so um Dr Char you mentioned that you and Mary already met with the CPAC Community uh parents uh recently but so maybe that was already addressed there but I heard from one parent um that the understanding was or impression was that that we are not hiring an external consultant to review or audit for cost reasons or budget reasons and I just wanted to clarify that from where I have heard I have not heard any requests for budgets or money and it's it's primarily your decision based on the process that first you want to collect data internally and then if there is a need then engage an external person because if we engage an external person now and we don't have data then that doesn't help that was my understanding that it's not budgetary reasons because that is an impression that I received from at least one parent so I just wanted if you can clarify what was irrational that on your decision of internal only uh and not hiding an external auditor or external person sure yeah I appreciate that and yeah no there's no there's no I mean we didn't budget for an external audit but we do have some funds set aside for various consultative purposes which we could allocate for an external audit um again I what I was trying convey and I'll convey here is you in the same way that I'm saying I would recommend a a security audit once we've gotten once we've taken care of once we've gotten a good handle on where we are we've pushed the boundaries of what we're able to see for ourselves that's when you bring in the outside person to help you see even further so we may very well decide in a in a few months that we'd want like to bring in someone to help us with an external audit but right now again in the spirit of lwh hanging fruit there's so many good things that we should be doing to paint a picture making a good faith effort um to understand where we are first and then we can go ahead and do that to be clear it's not as though we're Flying Blind you know I you I visit as administrators we're always monitoring our programs I visit our programs um and frankly when when when things are wrong you know we hear about them um so to be clear I think that there is definitely in a spirit of of self-management and self-improvement um that we need to be doing everything we can on that respect but no I wouldn't there's not a it's not as though we have a budget limitation that's why we can't do that but I I think what I said I probably said something the effect of before we would allocate District funds we would exhaust everything that we could do ourselves first and then we would go forward from there I might have said something like that that would have made yeah maybe that came from the coffee or somewhere but there was an impression that it and I I just wanted to clarify it's not budgetary reasons no it's not for budgetary reasons thank you accept acceptance of minutes uh September 12th regular public meeting um I move those minutes be accepted have second all in favor all right great other business good silence all right comments from the public um we'll open comments from the public again please um just give us your name and your municipality again so congratulations uh Dr Fenwick and um oh there she is and Mrs Murphy um on your positions and um the explanation from Dr Schwarz was helpful in understanding that it wasn't just absorbing um additional rules but there would be additional staff to support those rules and the responsibilities so that was helpful thank you um I had Parents uh reaching out to me uh during the presentation earlier today about the restraints and some concerns I just want to clarify my role I'm on the cpag I'm speaking as a parent right now but my professional experience is a school psychologist and I was in public education for 15 years um and in Pennsylvania where I practiced the roles I covered in that are consistent with New Jersey are a school psychologist the school social worker and the ldtc I covered all three of those roles facilitating um special education and behavioral and emotional supports for children so I want to clarify that um my view of behavior is from uh that behavior is a form of communication and in the world of special education and with children with developing brains like every student in our district um when a student displays Behavior we need to determine what behavior um they may be trying to Comm uh what be the behavior may be trying to communicate and how do we meet that need so um a few things that came up for me um going back to the state of schools like address and then the presentation that Mr Schwarz provided to the cpeg was um we brought when we look at those um behaviors uh increasing over the years there's been a change our special education numbers and the way we're providing support so looking at data of are any of those numbers connected our children that we brought back from out of District placements that needed specialized programming are they getting appropriate supports or any of those kids the ones displaying some behaviors um and then we also have a lot of parents sharing um that their students have either been denied or dismissed from special education supports um so just questioning if behaviors in my experience when children's needs aren't being met we will often see behaviors and those needs may be emotional those needs may be behavioral executive functioning um and it may be academic and come out as behavior um and then also the mtss um present or conversation around mtss um I'm excited and that was something when Dr Schwarz came on board I was really excited with his background and focus on data because that program in our district I don't think has been functioning um as well as it could and we really need to be focusing on progress monitoring um valid tools and assessments to be available to our staff appropriate training and how to use them um and how to use the data that that's provided through them to inform instruction and support meaningful progress uh we need to make sure that our administrators are also appropriately appropriately trained in these tools so they can support our staff um and then able to ensure that the implementation um of uh the implementation of guiding that instruction but also I mentioned uh there's been some inconsistencies with the reports from parents on the guidance of uh njcie and the supports that they Prov that like what we see in presentations isn't always happening consistently in our classrooms so just aligning all of that um that the things are being implemented with Fidelity and integrity um because I don't think that's been consistent um from from across the district so that's it thank you I'm Spencer Watson I live in Richwood and I am writing an article for tap into rwood about this meeting so I was wondering if any of you had any quotes or comments particularly about the school safety data and the district goals Mr pran before you adjourn I just have one request for next agenda I forgot um in the prior years we also recognized National Merit semi-finalists I think on the agenda so if we can include those like we had the AP Scholars today so at the next agenda if we can right if we can include the national marit ones for the next one good yeah thank you all right com I have a all in favor you everyone have a nice evening and we are back November 4