##VIDEO ID:DdpiexLYZeM## here select here Regina eer here board member Bill gford board member will Mario here board member Shaina sack Gable here Bo president gu tford here board member Aaron VOD lamani here board member Caitlyn Whit ller that's it all right we would' like to invite in the Maplewood Middle School select choir and then we'll do the Pledge of Allegiance e good evening my name is Mrs Bradshaw and this is the seventh and eighth grade select chorus they'll be performing a piece called dreamers which is by Jun cook from BTS which the kids like kop some of them and uh this was the 2022 FIFA World Cup Song are are it look who we are we are dreamers we make it happen we can see it theion respect oh yeah alled how we do what we do we are we are Dre we make it oh yeah imagine respect oh yeah we are we are the dream we make it we can see it theion respect oh yeah the oh yeah the w wait for them to f all right let's stand for the Pledge of Allegiance all right please take notice that adequate notice of this meeting has been provided in the following manner that written notice was sent from the office of the secretary of the board at 3:38 p.m. on September 27th 2024 that said us was sent via email to mwood and South orangen Township clerks and the editors of the news record Star Ledger tap into Soma and the Village Green whereas while the senator Byron M be open public meetings act and JSA 10 4-6 requires all meetings of the South orang maplehood Board of Education to be held in public and JSA 10 4-12 sets forth nine types of matters that may lawfully be discussed in executive session without the public being permitted to attend and whereas the board has determined that one of the one issue is permitted by the njsa 10 4-12 to be discussed without the without the public in attendance and shall be discussed during an executive session to be held on Tuesday October 15th at 6:30 p.m. and whereas the nine exceptions to open public speaking act outlined in njsa 10 4 10 2-4 are listed below and next to each exception is a box that will be marked when the issues to be Prov privately discuss fall within that exception and after each exception is a space where additional information that will disclose as much information about the discussion as possible without undermining the purpose of the exception shall be written um any matter which by Express a federal law state statute or rule of Court shall be rendered confidential or excluded from public discussion the nature of the matter described as specifically as possible without undermining the the need for confidentiality is attorney client privilege hip reporting and Personnel any collective bargaining agreement or the terms and conditions of which are proposed for inclusion in any collective bargaining agreement including the negotiations of terms and conditions with employees or representatives of employees of the public body whereas the length of exe executive session is estimated to be 45 minutes after which the public meeting of the board shall reconvene and proceed with business where formal action will be taken now therefore be it resolved that the South War Maple Board of Education will go into executive session for the above stated reasons only be a further resolve that the board hereby declares that the discussion of the affir mention subjects will be made public at a time when the Public's interest in disclosure is greater than any privacy or government governmental Interest being protected from disclosure that like to make a motion to go into executive session to Second thank you board member Callahan all in favor all right it's unanimous now we uh board member Callahan all right all in favor I yes and now we're going to Executive session e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e there okay um just make a motion for approval of board minutes for the special meeting minutes of September 10th 2024 exact a session and regular meeting minutes on September 26 2024 second uh thank you former saaka cable all in favor I unanimous all right next we'll have the actually we'll do the superintendent update and first we'll have the special education audit and we'll have Patrick kinoi and from Bryant gemza kenoy and cosc LP thank you I'm Paco um founding partner of Brian gam Kino and Klick we are an educational Consulting agency that specializes in special education audits we do everything in Special Ed we've been doing this for over 10 years uh probably about 15 different districts as well as follow-ups closer how's that okay okay so about a year ago we were approached uh that the district was in need of an audit we came in over the past year we did the a rather in-depth review it lasted pretty much from November through June going into a lot of depth so if you look let's go okay so the task was to examine all areas to really look at a comprehensive view of the special education department going through everything in terms of files in terms of State compliance the referral process um you name it we looked at it now we looked at the files in a couple different ways uh both electronically and physically we looked at patterns in in terms of uh classification and placement we looked at the curriculum and program Effectiveness how the students were doing we did surveys for parent satisfaction staff satisfaction we viewed all the view all the files we observed classes and we looked at the different kind of um statistics in terms of classification percentage percentage of students placed outside the district how they didn't State Testing Etc so first of all I want to commend the Board of Ed and the superintendent Dr Bing you weren't here yet but I'll still commend you for actually being forthright and looking at the uh process because one of the things that's happened throughout the years um in South Orange map is there been a lot of turnover and I think that's one of the things everyone was concerned about in terms of what happens if you keep having new people into positions and how do things get uh moved forward versus standing still or going backwards in some cases I want to tell you that you have a very experienced and dedicated staff your staff want to do the right thing and want to do well they're very invested in the district you rank well within the state your special education students do very well above State average they perform well your classification rates a little high but um that happens a lot okay so there's a commitment to doing things in the least restrictive environment I lost something here okay um now the real issue is though what is the least restrictive environment and when you look at that there's many misconceptions about what the least restrictive environment is often times people believe that the least restrictive means you're in general education classes and usually that is the case if you're in general education classes you're probably in the least restrictive environment but that's not necessarily the case depending on what you're doing in those general education classes if you have a person attached to you at the hip that's not least restrictive anymore that's actually the most restrictive and what I'm talking about is par professionals there's definitely a need for par professionals and there's now a process I believe to assign and fade par professionals but what's been going on um over the years here is that par professionals assigned to help students they stay with the students year after year after year when you look at par professional they should be looked at in the fading process you bring a power professional in to help the student get through the things they're looking at and move forward within the curriculum because that's what all students should be doing is moving forwardin the curriculum as time goes on there becomes very much of a dependency on an adult with you that makes it much more difficult for the student to move forward in the curriculum but we'll get back to that shortly the biggest thing and we go through some of the things here you've got good programs you have the full gamut of programs so you have all the opportunities to do least restrictive you've got class in autism multiple disabilities learning language um emotional regulations preschool handicaps you've got all the classes you need now the placement in them is something that you got to watch in terms of when the student goes into the classes what they do in those classes how they you know from the classes and how they move forward curriculum wise you've got class support and pull out resource in class support would mean that you have two teachers in the class for that particular subject or area both a general education teacher and a special education teacher okay this should help in terms of Team teaching it can sometimes be lead and support caution you about lead and support lead and support sometimes leads to one student teaches the other teacher keeps the person on task which is also how the T professionals are characterized by most of your teachers they say executive functioning keeping the student on task and keeping them in control behaviorally districtwide multi-century reading Pro uh programs all the related services that you're supposed to have you've got all those pieces as I said earlier comparison wise you're ranking very well you've got good teachers you've got good administrator you got a great team now from what I can see with the new people you brought in what you need is consistency um what's happened over the years is that and parents and the staff all feel the same way staff retention is an issue the way you help staff retention is to make everybody feel part of the team I'm not sure why they're leaving I have a feeling it's because they don't either they think they can do better somewhere else which I kind of doubt because it's a very good school district or they just don't feel like they're invested enough into the program so you've got a group that have been tenured here for a long time and then others that come and go administratively looking back at your um person who's in charge of special services whether it be a director or superintendent over the years there's been a lot so the oversight has gotten lost it's almost impossible to walk in and take everything and bring it back in and no one seems to stay long enough to do that so what you really need to do is to have very strong policies and procedures in the department so it's matter who there they can follow that blueprint and go through those pieces and that's where you really need that standard op operating procedure you have an IEP program Frontline that's the most popular program without the state almost I'd say over 50% of the districts in the state utilize that program what that program does is it leads you through the IEP process in writing the IEP it also has a repository for all the necessary documents that you need for special education it's not being utilized to its full extent the repository has almost nothing in it and repository should have all the reports all the documents everything that you need to support your decisions should be in that repository we looked in there found nothing so we came in and we looked at the files because if it's not there it's got to be in paper in your files files were in poor order again you don't have the procedure to make sure everything is there to keep keep immortally this is one of the reasons why you didn't do very well in state monitoring it's also one of the reasons why you end up with lawsuits because you don't have the pieces to support it special education is an area that's so highly structured in terms of code and law that if you follow the pieces everything will work if you don't things break down rather quickly so you need those pieces the Frontline system can do everything for you but it's I don't want to say garbage in garbage out how about we say um highly uh important information in highly important information now let's look at that direction of but basically it's what you put into it it asks all the right questions if you look at the IEPs the answers that are um taken verbatim out of the system are correct but that doesn't individualize things in the proper way you still have to know the student you still have to put the pieces in for that student you still have to substantiate everything you do you have to show why the student is classifiable what classification is required and how to meet that criteria what program is needed and why you're doing that program too often in special education and not just here I can tell you in many many districts most districts that we look at start out this way the classification happens and they get a program the program is a stock program do you get oh you're going to get resource room for this you're going to get inclass support for that but each point of those pieces has to be substan that as to why and what you're going to do differently in that program versus the general education program because a large majority of special education is good teaching and what the IEP does is it outlines how you're going to teach well and what you're going to do it takes that students needs and transforms them into what they will get in order to move on in the curriculum that's one the pieces you got to work on with that power professionals we started out earlier let a m mention of but you have a large number of power professionals most of the reason is there's no criteria for how you get a par professional no one seems to know it we've asked we asked administrators we asked teachers we asked child study team there's no really set procedure as to what requires power professional now I guess around may your assistant superent at that time did have a form and we saw it and it's a formed that in terms of how you analyze and look for a par professional it's good form we could not find any evidence of it being ever completed so that's the kind of thing that the oversight that has to start she was starting that at that point she's now gone so now the next person who seems like a very very um good inist super prend looks like it'd be very you know have a good way of following her she has to now incorporate things but but they have to be incorporated you have to get those procedures going if you don't do that you're just going to have people becoming very dependent on others um tell you a quick story about power professionals and where they can be a detriment versus an opp positive after I retired as assistant superintendent I worked a little bit for Mars un Joint Commission as their assistant superintendent and there I started at over 21 program so that students that needed programs Beyond his 21st birthday which is when Public Schools finish would be able to have a program to do something and move on what we found was none of the people in the program could go in unless they could have at least a 3:1 ratio three students to one adult not one agency would take a child at that point really an adult unless they could handle three to one so all the students that were leaving public schools at the age of 21 that had an individual Aid didn't qualify for a program they all went home that devastated me that's when I really started talking about let's let's really look at what we're doing to some of these students when we're putting a par professional and saying you can only function if this person tells you what to do 24 hours a day now many of those students had to work their way into getting into a program took two or three years some of them never got into a program but that's when I started really emphasizing you need to look at what a power professional does and how we fade them out the other piece is added District placements added District placements are there for one reason only if you cannot educate the child within the district so if you had no programs if you only had Resource Center for example you might have a lot more add atis placements you've got all the programs that's the only reason for a specialized program that you can't do here you have autism programs you have multiple disability programs you have the programs matter of doing the correct place ments and looking at why the child needs it now there are students that need an add replacement don't get me wrong but it's a small percentage and from what we looked at in terms of the out of District placements in this District quite a few were initiated by a parent which is fine but child study team didn't see the student until after they were placed in the program that can't happen it's a team approach everybody has to come together first you have to look at what you're doing in a district what can't you do in the district that the child needs and going through that so it's another Pro process you need to have a set criteria as to what's the procedure for placing a child anywhere whether it be Resource Center self-contained classes add a district program it has to be a criteria for what you're looking at and the criteria is in the code it's all there you just need to follow it so that's the second piece um professional development that tends to be a recommendation every time because everybody needs it but where I would suggest it here was definitely for the child study team because they need to learn the system better how to do the front line what's needed how to individualize the program how to write a present levels of educational performance and functional analysis you have to have that there that's the core to an IEP that's how you show what the child needs what they have done what you have tried now in that same token when you're looking at 504 many services are given to 504 students that are special ed services there's a difference between 504 and special ed there's a reason for that I believe you're if I'm correct Dr bang you're starting a program with multi-tiered approach and looking at uh understanding by Design excellent so that's where you need to go with 504 504 is accommodations special education of services so if it's an accommodation that should be a 504 but looking at Services through 504 that's a rarity shouldn't be an an all time uh let's see what else oh so the other thing I would suggest is besid professional development for child study team members teachers the best way to have a child in the least restrictive environment and make the most progress is in General Ed there's no doubt about that General Ed will give you the best teaching 90% of the time you might have to support that and you should support that but one of the ways to do that is you need to look at what the general education teacher can do for a special education student and what they can and is it something we can teach them to do or is it something that someone else has to do with them and you can do both of those through inclass support you can also do it through um Support Services okay there are different ways but every um if you walk if I walk into a classroom and they have two special education students in that classroom I should be able to look at that lesson plan and see those students those two students names and what they what we have to do differently for those students in that lesson because whenever we're planning a lesson we're planning for the class I need to know this student here or that student there need to have things reread it needs to have this pointed out or it needs to hear it um uh in a louder face or might have to repeat whatever whatever you need to do differently should be in that lesson plan so what I would suggest and usually works very well and I did ask um couple of principles about this and they don't seem to have it happening right now is think about cross obser ations instead of having all the special education teachers observed by the special education professionals and all the general education teachers observed by the general education professionals cross them if you have an in-class support class maybe the special education administrator should observe the general education teacher and vice versa if you have a resource center class general education teacher do that because what you need to do is make sure you've got that connection between general education and special ed because it's the same curriculum there is no special education curriculum it's one curriculum just a matter of how we teach it let's see is so anything else I wanted to go into uh oh one of the other things that seems to happen um is that you sometimes get students that hadn't even enrolled in the district yet but they bring lawsuit against the district that they live here and they want to be placed in that placement that they've already Chosen and placed the student happens everywhere what you might want to think of doing and many districts have started doing this is having re-registration every so many years because people come in have it then move out I can tell you 15 years ago I had it happen back then where someone would live in the district okay classified went to a program and then what tends to happen is you kind of lose touch with that student sometimes and they're out of district for multiple years parents sometimes move to a different District but never tell you the bills keep coming but the parents not paying taxes in your District anymore so it's a lot of things you just basically need to clean up you've got a great District you just need to clean that up and retain more people to keep them going questions yes guess I'll ask a question um one of the things that you mentioned well first thank you so much for the presentation and for the audit I know that was a substantial amount of work um one of the things that you mentioned was just this idea of a strategic plan and So based on the information that you have and where you think we are to incorporate all the recommendations do you think that strategic plan is a 3 to fiveyear window oh yes absolutely yeah we Crea I guess it's like do you think it's three or do you think it's five well it depends on how much you one sorry that was yeah no serious saying um it can definitely be done within three years the ticket is creating the model and have following it because once you got now it's going to you're going to get some um push back because people don't like change so what happens is the people have been here for a while say well that's not the way we do it here and the new people like well I don't know they told me to do this that's where you're going to get the biggest push back but once you've established that and you create this as a as a community then you here it is here's what we're going to be doing this is the way we are doing this this follows all the compliant regulations and this also helps you to teach the students which is what you want and I I do believe your teachers really do want your students to progress and they they are very dedicated they've just been kind of let loose a little bit they need to be brought back in so but yeah I think three backing off of that so do you think that step one is really like the paperwork piece of it and the inputs into front line you need an operational manual yeah we standard operating procedures yes okay yeah thank you okay so thank you so much I have a number of little questions on things but I think one big one is you know in looking at this audit uh and talking to some people who have connection to special education systems here I think one thing I heard from some folks is look we'd love to be able to get all these things done but realistically with the staff and the money we have there's a lot of these that feel like niceties that we'll never be able to accomplish what is your view as far as what resources are needed to provide to our special education infrastructure to be able to actually achieve all of these things okay um well the first is creating that standard operating procedure that can definitely be done with the people you have looking at that going through the code pieces um I could probably even send you some models for it you could use uh and work off of that but it's got to be something that everybody here believes in because otherwise it's not going to work so you can make it a team effort look at those pieces make it south Orange mboard okay you got the the basic now you change it to the way it becomes yours that's the first step second step is many of the resources that are being um they're taking up most of your budget now can be redirected uh the money you're spending on services in 504 you get no reimbursement for that 504 you don't get any any Aid so and you move that back into general education those resources then go into special education which is where they are coming from that's then you start getting reimbursement again so you will get state federal money for those pieces second thing is your power professionals um looking at the number you have and how they've been assigned and looking at the IEPs now it would take a lot more to look at to see how many of them which which ones are really ready to go which ones are not Etc but you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars um you contract out for your par professionals so every day every day every hour that that par professional works it's going so that's a that's a lot of money and when you start bringing the things together and saying okay now we got the procedures you don't want to take anything away from someone who needs it what you want to do is give the people that need it what they need and the the extra things you were talking about those are extra things that don't necessarily have to be utilized through monetary means working with other teachers teaching them different operation procedures different uh strategies giving them a larger toolbox lets them to teach more students so yes I think that's how you'd have to do that I guess I one question I have is how best do you think the board can support these efforts um in terms of I guess providing oversight and guess any sort of yes support for the ensuring that we can move forward well I mean from working with Board of educations for the last 25 years to me what a board of education can do is to support the superintendent they hired and the people that he hires so having those people work in explaining things to you and and actually also doing um professional development for parents so that they understand why the things are happening that that the job of a board pretty much is hire your superintendent and support him that's that's the superintendent gets all the hard stuff so but that's what I'll would say consistency yes so so one of the things that concerned me the most in the in the report I I read the whole report is that parental concern concerns were either scarce or absent in the sense that that's like a statement that's put out there is that how can we ensure or what guard rails can we put to ensure that we follow our own processes and parents are not left out of the whole equation especially when it comes to information right MH well once you've created that operating procedure then then it gets disseminated down so what I would suggest is you get to your special education department together start out with a model procedure and then go through it with them have them do it over a couple of days and look at every single piece of it because then what's going to happen is you're G to say okay we're going to follow this procedure for classification and some of the child stud members say we can't do that no we got to do it this way okay let's talk about it if we're looking for this let's go through this pleas let them Buy in let them say their peace because they might be right on some things and some things might have to change off of your standard piece and make it something tweak it um give me an example of uh the observation process few years back everybody had to go to some new observational process whether it be Danielson or the different ones where I was working at the time we thought we could do it better but we still had to take that model so we took Danielson and we went through all the different pieces and we quote at the time Livingston is them I call it you make it yours that's what you do you stand your operating procedures you get the pieces you make them yours what works for your community what kind of special things does your community need and that's where you work off that once you get that buying I can't tell you how how much that buying is needed because right now in interviewing your study team members they're not b in they have their ideas of what they need to do and they're different depending on what school you're in your principles need to buy in tell you right away the biggest person that's going to keep you from getting rid of your AIDS is your building principles they're going to want those aids to stay so it's got to be okay well what are they doing and how can we accomplish that do we actually need them here how can we do that how do you make your resources work your for the best for the district that's explain that okay hi thank you so much um so we've talked a lot so far about the role of I guess our senior leadership the board CST teams but what we haven't spoken um about enough yet in my opinion is is our teachers right so we talked about it from the perspective of needing professional development and certainly that they're they're really strong in what they're doing in classrooms but they bring probably the most robust institutional knowledge and direct student impact perspective and so I'm curious from vantage point in your experience how can we leverage our teachers as we look at the creation of new Sops and kind of making all of these improvements in our department I'm guessing you could probably already identify the general education teachers that are strong with special education students because they're the ones that get them all the ones that aren't so strong don't usually get those students okay and same thing with do uh special education teachers the thing is there's where your teams come in and what I found is the uh in-class support teams are the ones that can work the most for you in that way because they already understand in a lot of ways what the two parts are and how they can marri together um so getting your teachers together with that again making them part of that piece the general education teachers when we interviewed them said that um they really had no idea for example of how power professional was there they had no input into classification processes or declassification processes but they had a lot of input in terms of what modification needed in their classroom that's good because that's what you want from them but bringing them in together see special education is one of these mystery fields that everybody knows it's there but nobody quite knows how it works so as soon as somebody tells them that they just believe them well sometimes they're not telling them the truth or they're telling them their truth so getting them is all the process I mean general education teachers should be very much involved in special education because they they're the ones that have the content knowledge when you look back at um the education profession in general from college when you go to college you're going to be a teacher okay if you're going to be a science teacher you learn some basic things about how to teach and then you learn science if you're going to be a math teacher basic things in math if you can be a special ed teacher you learn strategies you don't really learn much content you learn strategies general education teachers tend to learn content not so much strategies so that's where you get that blent when you bring the special education teacher and the general education teacher together they teach each other and what tends to happen out of a good in-class support pairing is they both get better the special education teacher that's why you want in-class support paired with Resource Center for example if I'm in an in-class support class for U language arts and I'm a special education teacher I'm learning as I'm going with that language arts teacher as well I'm learning that content and I'm saying you know what they had trouble doing it this way I think if I did this strategy that could work for them then general education she says you know that worked I'm going to do that for all my students because strategies for learning work for everybody not just special ed students everybody learns better with the different strategies so now as a uh special education teacher I take that back to my resource center and I'm now teaching more content general education teacher even when I don't have the in-class support teacher with me I'm using those strategies with other students because it works for everybody so that's where I think you use those resources to move everybody forward so um quick question um thank you for the presentation and um for those who are watching this audit was 58 pages and I read it a long time ago so I apologize if this was answered within it but I'm curious um we have so many programs in our district um I was surprised to see um all that we do offer and I'm curious if you found that some of our programs are underutilized because we have so many students that to your point are out of district and are getting out of District when maybe we could have kept him here so compared to other school districts would you say that we could be keeping more in our district or that some of our programs are underutilized which is a missed opportunity and also a financial hardship for us I don't think it necessarily underutilized but I do believe you could bring some of the added students back into in the district um the only program I saw that we really felt probably needed to be tweaked a bit was your md program great program all the way up when you get to the high school level it becomes a catchall and the combination of students you have is not the best way to teach any one group because you're kind of teaching everybody something and everybody nothing you know I mean so it's it's kind of lost in that I think you probably want to tweak that a bit um the autism program is working great you got a u bcba on staff as well as a consultant that are doing very good jobs with that um your counseling programs are fantastic in terms of mental health throughout the district you're doing a great job with that I think that helps a whole lot of a lot of the pieces but yeah I think that you could definitely bring people back but I don't really think you're underutilizing um what I would suggest is you want to look every year at a projection three years down the road here's what we have now here's these students what do we think they're going to need next year the following year the year after that because what you want to do is you might find that um right now I think you're transferring students to programs versus having the programs in the in the schools and you do that when you don't know where people are coming from where they're going um I'll give you a non-special example that's easier to understand kindergarten I'm guessing that every August you have parents coming in and saying we need another kindergarten our school is going to have too many students in the kindergarten know the you never know how many kindergarten students you're going to have Because unless they've registered in advance they could walk in the day before school and register and suddenly you're over that number and you need another kindergarten or something because you can't go over the number with kindergarten matter how many staff you put in there so I used to always say the best thing to have for kindergarten would be a centralized kindergarten because they can all come in doesn't matter how many numbers are they can split up by there put it in one school have a kindergarten school it's hard to do when you don't have the building but that's the way you would solve that so but the idea is you need to be able to project most of your special education students you're classifying so you've got them here you got to look at what's going to happen next year and the year after and you plan accordingly you look at say okay what is what is this Tri probably going to need how are they doing Midway through um when I used to look at scheduling and scheduling is is a nightmare for special ed but it's the most important piece in terms of getting everything together looking at the scheduling and seeing what you need where and what a student needs and how you can prepare them for that next school or if they're moving but you you try to keep students in their home school because those are where they're going to have their most um interaction with their peers because that's their neighborhood and you I know you made a big process last year I believe of going to Neighborhood schools and how what they were going to be I seem to remember uh lots of uh talk about how many how many miles it was to the school and if you were cutting through yards or going around streets or whatever so you did a lot of investment in this let's tryangle with that but that yes I think that that's what you need to do yes yes yes okay go go I mean just like we do a physical kind of annually many of us do that I mean how often would we recommend we do an external a like what you've done I mean I understand you're selling your own businesses and you know you're obviously go to say every six months but what what is a good time to get this honestly honestly we have too much work I turned down two districts already this year um no uh I suggest every five years because that gives you enough time to make the changes you need and then we come back and see what has happened and we've done four districts already where we've done them two or three times but over a fiveyear period us sometimes if if a lot of things have changed and they ask us to come in earlier we'll say okay but in general i' say 5 years gives you enough time to make the change so we can see what's happened have you followed the recommendation do you need this what's happening now are you where you want to be that's what I would recommend so one piece I was wondering is we talk about developing an sop and we're doing a lot of that discussion right now across every area in the district we had an interim assistant superintendent special services maybe three you know leaders back who had created anop and then I think as other leaders cycled through it went kind of on the way side I don't think it was carefully followed I'm not sure there's a good answer to this question but what practices can you recommend for making sure that after we invest the time in developing these are the best practices this is how we you know make sure we're we're tracking every jot and T that we're actually continuing that practice even when it becomes difficult MH um about gez too long now 15 years ago uh the organization I was president of the New Jersey Association of pupil service administrators the directors uh Association we created a trial study team manual that was adopted by the state it's been revised multiple times I'm old so it's been revised multiple times since then to uh move towards the future but it still exists um and it's still free you said if if anybody's part of that organization which I usually your assistant superintendent probably would be um you get all that for free and you can change it to where you have it but once you've got it and it stays in two offices assistant superintendent for student services and the superintendent it's there everyone should have that thing you can give it to your principal so they can see those pieces well but that would have all your forms in it that would have all your procedures in it it's all there in one document and you f South Orange Maplewood Tri study team manual right on the cover here it is that's what I would suggest okay um have you seen a lot of homegrown par professional programs and the districts that you've worked with and what has the success of those programs been yeah you know it's um it's an interesting uh comparison when you look at homegrown versus um hiring an agency personally I always look to Homegrown because I think then you know the people you have you're hiring them you're doing it but then you're also talking about how are you going to set it up because the biggest problem with homegrown is you're paying for benefits so unless you consider the hours how you going to do that benefits are more costly than the salaries um if you look at a normal salary it's roughly just under 50% of what the total cost is so it's hard you have to really be careful with those um by the same token when you're looking at agencies you're still paying for the benefits you're just having agency run it because they're hiring to people or they're hiring to have time with making sure they have just under the man of hours I always believe you can do better if you do it yourself because you can make it the way you want it to be for your students but again just be careful a lot of it is scheduling a lot of it is looking at those pieces um you tend to get more in town people working as power professionals when you do your own that's a two-sided street it's great because they're invested but it's also I'm entitled so there's there's pieces to both um I don't know I guess it really comes down to what which one works better for you or always worked better for me was homegrown so great so we've talked a bit about the child study team itself as you know we're working on Sops for a number of things and that is definitely on the radar um in terms of just having a handbook having a manual and cleaning up those practices one thing I did want to note is that that is another area of our department that has suffered pretty tremendous turnover over the last couple of years and so one of the the potential reasons right is Cas load size we have a number of our uh CST members who are carrying case load sizes that are you know upwards of or around 60 students um and so I wanted to get a sense from you because you have insight into other districts what are the trends that you see in New Jersey and in terms of case load sizes for CST members is there um you know a normed number that you would recommend where you see folks be most successful in their role successfully case managing students um and then any yeah any tips or tricks that you could provide just in terms of um things that you've seen folks do successfully in other districts with kind of managing case load size um and planning for that with any forecasting strategies too A lot of that depends on your population um what I found throughout is that case loads tend to be smaller in the elementary levels because there's much more involvement um they tend to be larger at the secondary level because now they're spread out more the students have usually been in the program longer there's um okay don't take this the wrong way but classification that special education goes through a grieving process it's no different than the grieving process for a death when the child is first classified you go through all those same stages about what happened blame Etc you go through all the stages so since most students are classified at the elementary level it takes a lot more support for the parents and the students at that level by Telly reach high school parents have kind of said okay I've done my top take over now so that tends to happen and the students have become more independent at that point and don't need as much so depending on the programs you have um I've seen districts have teachers be lead teachers that help out with some of the pieces like that that can work if you have the right teachers um and you have the right support but 60 is not overwhelming um especially not in the middle school or High School level 40 is a nice number for elementary hard to do yeah it's it's it really depends on the needs of the district at the time uh one District could have when I was a child study team member 30 years ago I had 110 that was back then this is not now you know so it depends on if you've got your procedures working great and you become a well-oiled machine and you're addressing things right away and you're not getting called to emergencies every five minutes you'd be surprised how much you can get done and what you can do and especially if parents understand this process as well that's why I the parent training the more the parents understand the less time you need to explain those pieces to what's going on and the more parents help as well it's a it's a group effort okay wish I give you an exact number but you okay um so I guess I I don't know if there's going to be anyone after me but something that's been top of mine for me is you know I think it's clear that we we have work ahead and I do believe we have a real opportunity here with new leadership we have an incredibly strong CPAC in our town I full disclosure I'm also a special educator so I get to work with cpacs across the state and I have to say ours is one of the strongest I know of so kudos to our CAC members to whom are in the audience this evening um and so with the audit results from this as well as the federal monitoring both of which have been embedded um into our district goals I feel that we really are well POS position to make some meaningful progress um and so I wanted to take some time I know you had mentioned some positives but if you could kind of drill down on some of the the highlights from your visits here and where we have points of strength that we can leverage as we kind of move into this period of growth and really starting to build and improve our program because we do have dedicated students and families um and I want them to get the recognition that they deserve and also ensure that we leave here with a sense of hope for the future based on the hard work that we've committed to doing for this Department okay I mean just looking at the lack of oversight you've had throughout the years and looking at where you've achieved is phenomenal it's all because of the dedication to the teachers the parents involvement and the programs like I said you you've got everything here usually I'm saying okay you need this you need you've got it you just need to utilize it better um some of the you know youve some of your resources are being put out in the wrong direction if they brought back in you can have a super program very quickly uh said your programs are good I like I love the counseling piece I love the um the way the teachers can work together you just need more strategies everything can always be better but you've got you got the bones now it's just a matter of putting those pieces around it yeah okay you know my my final comment on this is that we rarely get to hear anything good about what the district is doing or what the board is doing so it's nice to hear that we at least something good obviously we need Improvement of course G given that but uh it's uh thanks for the feedback though oh you're welcome all right thank you okay next we'll have the ssds data hi everyone okay all right you're going to miss me saying next slide because Keith got me a clicker I'm very excited um so uh just to recap on what ssds is ssds is a um a program through the New Jersey Department of Education where we have to report um violence and vandalism to the state twice a year we do that once from um in January and we use September through December 30th data and then we do it again in August and we use January through June's data and we report it twice a year year we report period one um from January to June at some point and then we report period two it has to be done through from uh December to January so that's or sorry September to January so that's where we are right now so these are all of the incidences that we would have to report they are everything from um violence vandalism sub substance abuse all the way to kidne napping so there's a lot of different things on this list um our reporting is generally in about five categories um which we thank goodness for for that um I do want to note that things where students are not identified are not included so if we don't know the student who and I'm going to show a slide about this who did a vandalize vandalize something that then it wouldn't be included in this system even though we have a whole procedure on our end to deal with that situation okay so this is uh this is as you know a lot of slides so I've picked a few to share with you tonight on the data and the rest is going to be posted online um or else I'd be here till about 12 uh so this is our overall data for the 2023 24 school year by school and I want to point out that uh the high school has has the most and there's also the most amount of students there and we see less um infractions at for younger students so uh South Mountain and Marshall and Montrose are always going to have the least amount of infractions uh per school we also normalized this data so that you can get a better comparison and we did that per school and then per grade band okay so if we look at period two this is all of the um all of the numbers that we inputed for uh each we had violence vandalism uh substance abuse weapons and we have to do every confirmed and alleged HIV um and so all of that is tracked and our totals are in the gray column I don't include the alleged hibs in totals because they were not founded okay so these are our total incidences uh per for period two January through June and this is the incidences per grade band and this is if we normalized that data for period to and we still see that elementary schools um have the least amount of infractions which is typical in schools across the country this is uh the tree graph for for period two for the entire um School District as you can see uh confirmed hibs are still uh the largest amount of uh infractions and then we have a graph comparing the grade bands and hivs as you can see on the right um elementary schools most of the infractions are hivs whereas you move to the high school um substance abuse was was most of them and the middle school hivs as well this is hiv's alleged versus confirmed for period two there were um an increased number of hibs as we talked about in our last presentation for ssds because of the change in policy and that oh is shown here about 20% of our investigated hivs um were founded that number generally is between 15 and and 23 I would say over over the year so that's about average to show you some trends at the high school substance abuse accounted for most of our incidences more than and then hivs were next at the middle school the largest uh amount were hibs then violence was next and at the elementary school hibs accounted for almost all uh categories and again 20% of our hibs were founded this year uh this is just a note about our vandalism we do know that we had significant vandalism last year at the high school um because we did not find out who they were they were not in this system however we did um send reports as appropriate to uh police whenever that was deem they were deemed bias uh area to support we want to support additional um additional supports for tracking and accounting incidences uh we want to make sure that um all of our cases are uh investigated properly we want to make sure that we're looking at cell phones and how we can support students because a number of our hibs are attached to cell phone use um and that's a a trend that we're seeing across the country I know we started talking about that last year um and we're already taking steps to to support that um additional support for substance abuse would be beneficial and supports for students who engage in Behavior that's not appropriate um which requires removal we want more support for those students over the past year we did did recognize that there was some additional support needed for tracking and collecting all of our infractions and putting them into the ssds system so we started last year and are continuing this year with with support in that area so the high school is now using Power School to track all incidences we're moving in that direction for K8 next year um ssds training was provided last year uh in the 23 24 school year to secretaries and administrators we did that again in September I will support again in December right before we uh we have to input um we created an sop manual this Summer that all the secretaries and administrators have uh we updated the incident report document in the spring of 2024 so that when big incidences go to central office it's aligned with what information is asked from the ssds system um and then we have a new procedure for collecting all of that information for the secretary so that they can uh properly report out to me these are my favorite pages so I'm really excited about the work we're doing to support our students um so all students in grades prek through 9 will receive five HIV lessons prior to October 15th that is today students received those lessons last week so we were super excited um we've always done the week of respect but there was a huge push in prek through 12 to do these lessons um and to get them done early so that kids have an expectation of what they should do and how how they should be upstanders and what bullying is and isn't um additional lessons on bullying are planned for the fall of 2024 um we have lessons specific to civil discourse land in grades 6 through 12 um we know that when students learn to talk to each other with respect even when they disagree bullying can decline um we have a new tiered Seal program which was implemented in 6 through 8 uh through wayfinder so it has a lot of social emotional lessons for students for all students but they have just implemented a new counselor program which gives tiered support for students who need a little extra so we're really excited about that our counselors are already digging into that um we have created a njss support manual um we just finalized the social emotional learning portion of that and are just finishing up the behavior supports so that our Administration and N jtss teams can use that um we have a tier 2 program for grades 6 through 12 I already talked about the middle school we also are using um seven mindsets based program for our Middle School um and that is for students who need help in certain areas such as uh social emotional um self-management decisionmaking so that when a student needs a little extra help a school principal a vice principal a school counselor can provide that support um and in that same program is a new substance abuse support program so we have a ton of resources now that we didn't have prior to really support our students who are having um some issues with substance abuse so I'm really proud of that work um and just some some support for our students we also wanted to just highlight some support for families so we did um start increasing our parent information regarding HIV lessons so hopefully uh by Friday but hopefully before uh you have if you're a parent you've received some information about the lessons the kids took part in last week um we also are having uh we just had our Hib uh family session for K5 and we're bringing in some digital citizenship parent seminars so that we can really help uh families understand the um the risks right that are online when kids are interacting um and also we're having October 24th October 24th is our is our ntss night um so families will be able to learn a little bit more about uh thank you NJ uh TSS finally our support for teachers uh professional learning um around students who are most likely to be bullied we included that this year uh professional learning is going on for prek through 8th grade uh around restorative justice we have a group of 40 teachers and 10 students that are all taking part in restorative justice training this year um we're supporting teachers in morning meeting um and seal there areal lead teachers in each school that were trained last year um and an ntss manual was created uh like I mentioned to support teachers so that's that's what we're doing very exciting um I had does anyone have any questions specific T ssds just to remind you I have HIV after this so I'm happy to take them now or or after thank you Miss wble and um like you I love to see the planned uh pieces of action that's really helpful and we saw that at the high school substance abuse accounted for most of the incidents um in addition to thinking about how to support students I wonder if you have any thoughts around what else we can do to also support parents in these situations both on the preventative side as well as um supporting them as they help their children work through these situations I'm sure they can be really difficult yeah thank you for that um so we have um new students so when we have a subst abuse when a student has a substance abuse uh situation we uh work with what we call our Student Assistance counselors so our sacs um so we have a new Sac this year um and we're really excited they should be coming on board very soon um and so once we do that we really want to look at what are our existing practices and what can we beef up um and so parent communication will be key in that um there's also some parent communication as part of seven mindsets um so I'm hoping some of that will also align and we're also looking right now at what are the outside resources um we've been doing some of that work in SLT is what are some outside resources that parents can have in the in the community at large right so not everything might come from the school but there might be other resources that we can reach out to so we're P pulling that all together also um because we're so much better when we when we all work together so thanks great thank you um and to Echo what Shaina said it's it is those are the most exciting pages are the how are we moving into support mode and what are we planning for um in addition to the factors that were listed in terms of the um substance abuse I did want to just note this is as you said the second I think consecutive time that cell phones were mentioned as a factor in our Hib incidents last time we discussed a little bit about our cell phone policy and how it's currently structured as a way for the day which aligns with our current policy 5516 um Beyond policy though digital citizenship is crucial right it's it's a hand inhand effort and so realistically both students and adults need to learn responsible use of Technology CU it's not going anywhere um so it was really exciting to hear that parents will have this content just in terms of what we internalize what we model and how we approach our presence on social media um but could you share any other insights you have into how the district plans to address this Beyond just kind of like what we have to mandated through the state kind of address with digital citizenship um are there areas or places that we could partner and just kind of beef that up knowing that has like you said it's not just a trend here but really is a pervasive Trend in in schools for kids today yeah so I think what's really important is um you know I look at technology as as a pencil right it's a it's a it's a tool um and so having those digital citizenship lessons embedded into the curriculum is really important um I know we use common sense media lessons throughout the district and I think that's really important um but I also think it's really important for our teachers as they are teaching um during the school day to bring up conversations about digital citizenship um so that it's it's just part of our breath right and so that it's continued um so that's an area where we haven't started yet but will be uh part of next steps um because that's it can't be an add-on right it has to be the way we do things and so that's an area where we need to look for next thanks um thanks for that presentation one question and just one comment what um do you can you tell us what the trends were with the substance abuse was it mostly one substance over another are you allowed to share that I'm just curious what that what what the trending issues are when it comes to substance use in schools and then the comment I have is um something we talked about in cni when it comes to cell phone use in the Yonder program and how we're going to track success and pull data I think it would be interesting to see um for I believe one of the middle schools is is one of the pilot programs uh MMS so it'd be interesting to see during that time if there is a decrease in hibs and that would be a huge success um if so if it's if the program is long enough which is it Mr Bing is the Yonder program going to be all year how long is it gonna how long is the pilot for Yonder it's it's all year okay great yeah so please track that thank you yeah so our climate teams will track that data so we already have a data our climate team is our data Hib data team so we'll already be able to do that um I would say what we're seeing for substance abuse predominantly is marijuana um and uh I think that's pretty typical so just to piggyback on what Nubia said while I totally agree I think it just will be important for us to note when we're looking at the data that the Yonder program is is a parent option program and so to evaluate the effectiveness of it we'll just have to kind of keep that in mind when we're looking at the data that it might have a smaller impact as opposed to if it was mandated um and then can I sneak in another question while I'm here Dr um So currently can you talk us through um one of the pieces that you mentioned um was about removal of students so could you talk us through what training and support is available currently for teachers in terms of deescalation techniques are there additional supplemental trainings to what we use with Handle With Care for verbal deescalation that are available to teachers so not that I'm aware of right now um I think part of what we talk about and and next steps we just had our um I we train I train the anti-bullying Specialists um three times a year and one of the things that we were talking about um and this is specific to HIV but I think it has broader implications is how are you interrupting bias in the classroom or microaggressions or things like that things where students can get uh heated and escalated and so that's our plan for our next steps for for teachers um our Hib training is about 2 hours every 5 years um I try and sneak in a little bit more than that because I think it's important um but a lot of that is is classroom management but we do we are looking for what are some ways we can interrupt things in classrooms so that we can deescalate uh situations so that's that's our that's part of our next next plan which uh the ABS and I are we're already starting to work on thank you so I know that for ssds data it's often you have the offenders so then that's how it's collected um is there a way for us to start collecting data on you know when we don't have as clean information because that would give us I guess a I guess a broader picture a better picture of what's going on in schools yeah so I think um for for a for bullying situations we would still input them so those are all it vandalism is one of the few that we wouldn't so we do track those and I'm I'm happy to share that information um the other ones like fights you generally know who they are but it was the vandalism one that was was the tricky one because it's a it's kind of a ghosting um infraction right you can do it and just disappear but um yeah I'd be happy to include that information so I have a couple questions about the HIV HIV portion of this are we asking those now or are we getting to that later just want to I I think that's up to you all well then I'll just ask it right now because my mic is turned on um in looking at the uh the confirmed and alleged 2324 Period 2 there are looks like there was one alleged zero confirmed for Marshall which is uh very different from the rest of the graph and I wanted to see if there was a particular reason for that is that data or is that like a big difference in the schools so Marshall is was a K3 school last year and so really we're we're seeing most most of our bullying infractions in elementary school in grades four and five um and so that's really where I think um you know there there has to be um there there's a level of critical critical thinking or or developmental appropriateness not appropriateness but um that you really have when you're bullying someone there's there's an intent piece um so just a lot of those little kid conflicts are um you know you separate the children you have a conversation and it's over um what we're seeing is most students are getting cell phones in fourth and fifth grade we saw um a larger number of bullying situations than I had seen in the past around the cell phones last year in fourth and fifth grade so um what used to be a seventh and eighth grade issue is now going down to fourth and fifth um and so I think that's what you're seeing accounting for that I think you will see Marshall possibly uptick next year right because they're getting uh fourth graders and then fifth graders so I I think that's um um I will also say they do a beautiful job in in uh culture and climate there but I think a lot of it has to do with just the great bands great and because my mic is still on say one more thing with regard to the professional uh learning and training for teachers are you and to what degree are we doing similar training and learning for our other staff lunchroom recess staff AIDS par professionals Etc so every person that works in the district even if they're cont contracted are supposed to get this present to get our training um so what we do I actually sent an email at today our custodians and school Social Work interns are all getting the presentation in early November um so we work with we work with everyone secretaries have to go to the training because everyone is a mandatory reporter and so that's really important that everyone everyone gets it thank you I think I'll just save my question for the next presentation any more questions for SSS data yeah thank you um it's actually I think quite timely as you talked about Marshall and how it's been K through three we could potentially see an uptick so the normalized data tusin and dilia Bolin stuck out to me and so regarding the support for the students is there anything that is maybe more specific to schools seeing the numbers seeing all the data that's coming out of there so yes we're going to be working with those administrators I do think that the rise in some of that was um uh if if someone said there was an HIV the other there was there was like a immediate reaction um and similar to a retaliation now we don't allow retaliation but we have to investigate every HIV so um there was a little bit of that which which seemed to happen at Tuscan a little bit more than other schools um and a few situation exploded into four or five hibs um and so that's really what that uptake was it may have been one or two situations but then it became four hivs yeah yeah um so so I think it's that was more the issue there when we dug down into that data so this is like probably the third or fourth whatever two years or more that you've come here and presented us data can we get all of that data into one table so that we can look at Trends across time I mean like you know like for example mean we look at a stock and you say what is the price you can say I want to see it for one day one week one month one year Max whatever the max is right so that would be I right well okay then we already have it but but yes that would be and the second part to that question is that since it is reported data to the state why can we not just put the table up on our website and let people do whatever analysis they want and come back to us can I answer that question quickly there are tables and information for all past data that you would find but you'd have to go to the actual meeting but I do think it would be a great idea if we could have a database where you could easily access that but yeah sorry so I can definitely talk to Mr Bing and Dr Gilbert and see if that's possible and also um I know I got a question yesterday I did include in the new in the this was draft that you received so the updated version does have a five-year analysis for the year not just period two because that was a question that was asked so that's included in in the uh present ation for you all right we'll go to the Hib presentation okay oh okay so um I just want to remind you that you will see this very similar presentation again in um these are these are the grades and then we have to do it again in May with the same exact information because then it's been submitted to the state and they require us to do it again so um this is the self assessment so just a little bit about that our climate teams come together um in every school they normally start this work in June and finish it in October and they assess us on a rubric scoring 0 to three um for all indicators around the the actual law so how are we complying with the law so the anti-b bilding self assessment reviews all of these standards um so programs approaches training and policy instruction curriculum Personnel incident reporting investigations and HIV reporting standards it's a total of 26 categories that they assess themselves on and then they have to put evidence in a folder for every single indicator so it's a it's a big job but it's really great because they will see where they need to improve over time because they're able to score themselves on that so um this is just the timeline to say we're going to meet again in May okay so we can give ourselves uh does not meet requirement partially meets requirement meets all requirements and exceeds requirements one of our focuses over the last year and a half was to be um to see how many indicators our our staff could uh get a three in and that's because the three really means that not only are you meeting but you're you're using best practices in the school so our climate teams have really put a focus on what they can do to change their practice so that they can use best practices everywhere so that's been a push for our teams uh these are our scores uh this year um I'm really proud to say that a number of our schools um got a 78 that's that's 100 um so they've really been working hard at doing that um and our scores have gone up significantly over the last 5 years so this is a look backward so our average is a 75 um just pointing out that in 1819 our average was a 58 um so we've gone up almost 20 points in the last uh five years um and our teams have really really been working hard um so I'm proud of them okay so several highlights and commendations I always like to go with the good first so 10 schools increased their scores from last year um all schools exceeded expectations in Hib programming all schools exceeded expectations in in core elements three four and six 11 out of the 26 components everyone got a three for a week of respect everyone uh deemed exceeding expectations which is really great and this is this is a low bar one but everyone went up above and over the 52 that's required um but that that to me is a low bar so um areas to grow I did add some areas that we didn't necessarily see in assessments but I've heard from families and from community so um investigation timelines were not met uh last year uh all the time and we did notice that that was due to eliminating preliminary determination um technical or sorry teachers and staff professional learning around special populations so we're looking at that uh continue to standardize professional learning across the district so that everyone's receiving the same information and student learning opportunities uh needed Improvement um around HIV so we've set forth the following goals and these are broad Strokes so we want to increase protected time for learning opportunities and increase those learning opportunities on school climate bullying prevention and seal um and help students who are bullied so what are those learning opportunities we want to expand training for staff and teachers around social emotional learning um and students that are at higher risk for bullying that was a real Focus area this year we want to expand learning opportunities for families and we want to expand training and support for anti-bullying Specialists and administrators so to meet goal one um we did the Five Lessons during the week of respect which was early and robust uh we have additional lessons being planned for the fall um around students that are likely to be bullied and how do we interrupt that um specific time is being set aside for social emotional learning specifically in grades 6 through 8 and we're piloting um uh several ways to reduce students use of cell phones as you know so in order to support goal number two around expanded training um teachers are being uh given a new HIV training around students at who are at risk uh teachers in K through five are having training around restorative justice uh the Restort of Justice philosophy uh lead teachers on our Middle School are going to have additional training around theal resources they just received um we're providing opportunities for administrators around parent collaboration and teachers in prek through 5 will receive seal resources around morning meeting this year oh hold on okay uh for goal three really supporting our families and their understanding of our HIV process we want to continue to provide learning sessions around bullying we started creating multiple Communications for families that's one thing I think we were lacking is how do we really talk to Families how do we give them information multiple ways around the area of bullying and again we're doing uh digital citizenship um parent seminars um our anti-bullying Specialists and administrators also need support uh and training always so um we specifically did a presentation around students with disabilities 504s and ml Learners and how they need to be supported in the investigation process um our case our abss have already been doing this but we wanted to uh increase their awareness and give them more tools to support our students uh our most vulnerable populations um we provided training uh to anti-b building specialists around um around those populations we also did calibration training so an Hib uh in one person's school should if any ABS saw that they would come to the same conclusion um and then provided learning opportunities for administrators around family collaboration um week of respect as you know it's uh a week last week we celebrated character education and pre bullying prevention and this is just uh a capture of all of our schools and some things that they took part in which is really exciting and now I'll hold for questions so I do have one question about um so when we talk about cell phone use have you found that hibs occur throughout the school day or is it something that occurs in the school day or is it mostly something that happens off campus cuz I know that we're talking about the Yonder um program and you know wanting to curtail cell phone use and so I'm wondering if that's something that we see where there is cell phone use where there is where there are hibs occurring during the school day and then it continues on or is it something that continues outside so I would say it's predominantly after school uh at night and on weekends but there is there are definitely points where it's happening in school um but predominantly it's it's it's after school or or it continues or it starts and then it um but but a lot of it happens you know between 3 and the next day for sure so I'm very happy to see the chart that you have up here that shows all data from 2019 to today I mean it would be awesome to see a similar one for the ssds data so that way you know we can draw some conclusions over time we can do some longitudinal studies and say this is why it's happening or maybe not you know whatever the story is thanks thank you so I apologize I probably asked this at our the May presentation but can you explain how the self assessment uh takes place as someone who thinks very highly of themselves you know how do we make sure we and we have you know three elementary schools that score themselves a 78 and I'm sure they're doing A+ work but just the irony that the school the elementary school that scored themselves the lowest is the one that had by far the least hibs um can you explain how it works sure sure so um I would say just just to be clear the self assessment does not you don't self self assess yourself on if you have hibs so that's not part of it at all um so basically what happens is the state in June will send out a rubric to about 30 pages and each indicator there's 26 um there's 26 indicators each indicator will say and I'm going to I'm going to give the example of Suicide Prevention um so suicide prevention is did you provide Suicide Prevention staff training right and you either didn't for a zero you kind of did for a one you did for a two and a three you did and it was by a licens professional so it wasn't by me because I'm not a mental health professional and so you would get a score three on that one um the same holds true they break down the entire uh anti-bullying Bill of Rights law into all types of indicators like that um and so that's what they're scoring themselves on in order to hold accountability because the state can come in and check at any time every one of our indicators has to be backed up with a piece of evidence to show that they've done it um and so I collect all of that it's due on October 29th um because I have to push send on October 30th and I want to make sure that I have all the information um and so I review all of that um but what we do do is if there are um areas with High bullying we will say okay is it is it a particular class is it a particular grade and then we'll go in and say okay the administrator not what lesson do we might we need to do and our administrators sometimes they just go on and do that you know they're really great they like I had a class meeting I had a I had a grade grade four meeting um to kind of help support the whole grade if it's a whole grade issue or they'll do some supports um individually um one of the areas we need do need more support in is what do we do with that particular student who was the offender um and so that's where we're really growing some of our work uh that we're working with so that we can support students so it doesn't happen again thank you just a to build on that what are our structures in place to monitor what happens after a bullying event to kind of track what are the inputs what is the progress um that students are making and ensuring that they do get support after an event on both sides right whether it happened to you or whether you know you you have some growing to do in terms of how you're interacting with your peers yeah so I think it's really it's really an individual question but generally because our anti- bling Specialists are also our social workers we have a few different Avenues um so students will be given a lesson around whatever the offender will be given a lesson around whatever the issue was so if it was decision-making if it was a bias statement if it was um mean words but continued over and over again so we kind of look at what is that student need that student might have counseling they might have a conversation with the principal we might have a family conference so it really depends we might have a Social Work intern work with them on interpersonal skills or uh social awareness right the kid might not be aware that like oh when I say things like that what happens to other students so we really look at those seal competencies and try and identify um so for for the victim we then look at do they need continued supports and what what does that look like so they might just get a check-in um they might have a few meetings and then we we say all right you're going to have four meetings over four weeks and then we're going to check in and see if you continue to need this and that's where our social workers and Social Work interns do a lot of great work thank you thanks can you speak briefly with regard to uh goal number one the addition lessons are being planned around students who are most likely to be bullied and how to interrupt bullying as I understand it that goal is student facing so how does Maybe I'm Wrong how does that goal work yeah so I think um you know looking at um talking to kids about Prejudice and talking to kids about discrimination and talking to kids about um being kind to one another when there's differences um students who are most likely more likely to be bullied are um you know students with dis disabilities students who are multilingual Learners um Global majority students so we have to we have to be aware of that and then we have and specifically you know that's across the country but we're also seeing that here so we want to make sure that we're providing lessons to our students um that are that are targeting those areas and also helping students to how do you interrupt that so if you see that going on what are some things that you can say um that will interrupt uh a mean statement because not every mean statement is going to turn into a bullying investigation but how do we get it before it turns into that so thank you just to to slightly build on that piece of it I think one that would be um that feels like an excellent one to also turn key to adults as well for a parent learning night um in support of making sure our schools are inclusive right the more parents have the language to make sure that they can talk about learning differences can talk about really any kind of differences with their kids and are equipped with that language the the stronger we are being really preventative and and kind of backing up that Interruption process so with that in the spirit of um of inclusion um in terms of communication with family just is there a normed process across schools in terms of how communication does go out around something like the week of respect I know did come up at a recent uh CAC meeting just making sure that all families get the information about something like the week of respect and so I just want to make sure that as we're talking about interrupting it for our multiple vulnerable students that are most vulnerable students in classrooms do receive that information so that they then can be also included in in all of those activities as well yeah so we did um and I believe it's it's the first year because we just created them this summer so we did a series of five letters uh to families around um around the week of respect one of the things we're looking to do is expand our ability to provide all of that information uh in multiple languages um so using s'mores so um I know uh Mr Draper and I uh he he's a big s'mores fan so I love that um and it has a lot of other accessibility um Support also so um but that was our first step in communicating that we've also normed um some of the communication that goes out to families when there is a bullying situation what information you have to include um what do we want to make sure we hit home um you know we want to make sure that victims know that counseling supports are available even before the investigation starts right that's really important because it might take 10 days for for the investigation I don't want a student not having support for 10 sorry you can't see a counselor till we're done right we want to get them in if they need it um so so those kinds of conversations were also norming um and we have uh over the last few years we have a 50 a 50 page because I write a lot um manual that includes all of this information so thank you thank you and now move on to District goals thank you Carrie I just some quick shout outs uh I do want to note that uh Ace and Oliver did want to be here but they are at a cross country match so they could not so um they are mothers they are fathers they are friends mentors coaches leaders Community Builders therapists team Builders confidants professional Liaisons Advocates uh and much much more um personally and I I also speak for uh our senior leadership team uh cannot express enough of our gratitude for our principles and their tireless efforts and dedication to the district um October is National principles month so uh we did want to shout out uh all the work our principles do on a regular basis and dedication to this district and most importantly to our our children so uh big shout out to our principles um we do have a New Jersey school boards coming up next week if I am correct October 22nd to the 24th 25th uh we have been uh informed that one of our students former students I believe Lucia Manchester uh will have uh a short film uh being presented uh at New Jersey school boards it'll be part of the uh New Jersey Statewide student film showcase um at the convention and workshop in Atlantic City uh that be held on Tuesday October 22nd and Wednesday uh the 23rd at 10:00 a.m. uh the short film will be shown uh to over 6,000 school board members uh principal School superintendents and business administrators so a big shout out uh to uh Lucia and her hard work um we do want to also point out out uh that I believe on Thursday um we have been working uh with the Coalition on race and also local realtors in the area uh and we'll have a meeting with them on Thursday uh just to discuss the school district uh and to make sure that the information they're giving to to new families moving uh to our communities uh is correct and they're well informed so I it's the first time we've done this in quite some time so I'm excited uh about that virtual conversation um do want to point out and I see Mr Draper is here um we have been uh getting along with many other school districts not only in this state but in this country uh more cyber attacks that has been increasing over the last I would say 3 to 5 years significantly um for those you who are not aware the healthcare industry and public education are the two largest targets for cyber attacks um because uh often the information that both of these institutions hold is very personal uh and about 95% of the time public education and the healthcare industry will pay the ransoms to get that information back so uh I do want to point out the work that Keith bonds and his Department uh is doing on a regular basis to make sure uh we are protected I do receive emails every now and then about um emails going into spam uh firewalls and things of that nature um they are more than necessary uh in in in in the world we are living in right now and especially for the information that we have to protect as a school district so um I did want to just put that out there that you are we are seeing more and more cyber attacks whether it's Edison Summit Manchester Washington Westfield hackin saac uh all targeted within the last 6 months um so uh I think this will be a regular occurrence for school districts as we move forward uh so um our due diligence around cyber security and safety uh will be vital for us moving forward we are holding our third Transportation town hall on October 17th uh we've had some pretty pretty good turn out I think over probably 120 130 people over the last two meetings um so uh we look forward to our third meetings um uh what I can see from the emails I'm receiving and conversations with our Transportation uh Essex Regional Commission um I see our incidents have been significantly declining we still have two bus routes that as I've discussed with the board we are struggling with uh as of today uh we've reached out to the bus company again to see if we can split one of those routes uh when we tried that earlier in the year they just didn't have the bus we're hoping six weeks in now they will have the bus to be able to split that route which honestly will have a uh a big effect on not only that route but multiple routes uh uh for that uh Transportation challenge so I'm hoping uh that will be addressed uh within the next week we did have a meeting with Chris Jordan our transportation person who has been wonderful uh and he also noted that uh our auditor will also start joining the team I believe next week and start riding buses and going to stops uh as we start looking towards January and really looking at redesigning our entire Transportation structure for uh 2526 I do also want to note uh we had a traffic incident about two weeks ago one of our our children was struck by a by a vehicle uh injuring her ankle that needed surgery uh she is doing much better uh we are working with South Orange and Maplewood we had a meeting with the Mayors today uh to really develop a a safety campaign around uh our Walkers and also around our drivers uh so you should be seeing some fruits of that labor over the next few weeks uh as we develop uh a safety campaign uh along with uh resources that will make available for our students and and Community uh District goals so just to give everyone some context around goals and the process uh you know there's board goals there's District goals and then there's school goals at well as well and there should be some continuity between those three bodies I think this year we've done a nice job uh in regards to thank you Keith um in regards to developing that continuity and making sure everybody's goals were really center around uh student achievement um so on our end uh we will be adopting our district goals this meeting we did adopt our board goals at September's meeting uh which were developed uh during uh a a working period for the board uh which uh we had New Jersey school boards uh work and collaborate with us and I I thought the um conversation and also the results of the work were were quite good um so on our part from a district we were really utilizing certain sources of of information um as I've noted to the board on multiple occasions when I stepped into the district these resources were sitting literally right on the desk in in my office uh you just heard from one of them which was the one of the special services audits we also had a federal audit uh we also utilized our 2023 24 smart goals we also utilized our long range facility plan also the Ruckers report uh and also our our Q act we're able to get some information before the official results uh have been given so uh we utilized all those sources as we developed our uh 2024 25 goals um I do want to note that really one of our priorities uh and I believe the board's priorities was making sure that our goals were data driven uh and I think one of our big pushes this year is to develop more sources of tangible data and also to be real intentional with decision-making that is based upon that data um there has been some inconsistency around data usage in the district for quite some time uh We've made some uh I think some good moves in regards to such platforms as link it um that will have a we can collect really essential data around student achievement on and share on a regular basis U I think another point I want to emphasize as we developed our goals was that we wanted to make sure it's a living document right that it wasn't static that it was very Nimble um and and finally that it was also we're going to be intentional around communication around those goals uh and also the metrics to measure them um by intentionality you're you're going to see myself mention and reference the goals at every board meeting during my superintendent updates uh we are working obviously as we mentioned before on a new website so District goals will play a prominent part on that website uh and uh we also are really focusing in on understanding our role as steuarts uh for not not only the fiscal side of the house but also the academic side of the house and I'm we're hoping these goals reflect that um and as noted uh we want them to be extremely accessible not only to community but also to staff uh part of that work uh will be accessibility on on the website but also constant Communications uh during the year around uh our goals finally I I think one of the main things that we discussed a as a senior leadership team uh was the idea of creating a critical friends network uh amongst school districts and amongst administrators amongst staff uh right now we started that work with our district leaders uh and then we will transition that work uh to the building levels uh for for me uh and I think our SLT if we need to Define what a critical friends network is uh I think it's really providing intentional time um and structures uh to promote adult professional growth and really to look at our work um from 5et 10 feet 20 feet 100 feet and also having third parties look at our work so I think really for the first time in a long time uh School a will have school C looking at the work they're doing uh and and really providing some critical Friends Network support in regards to uh things that are really working you know uh the glows and then also giving suggestions around grows uh so those schools uh meet their goals so I'm excited about that endeavor and moving forward and I think District goals will play a very important uh part in that um I also uh as I've shared with the board and I think that's part of my 100 day plan we really want to work on the idea of performance dashboards uh that that are that change on a regular basis and are updated and I think that'll be part of our new uh website launch so I'm looking forward to that and sharing that uh with this group as well uh so for us as a district we decided really to work on certain codes that that are be friendly as we share our goals out to the public uh we use the color coding goal uh work not started yet planning stages pilot or early implantation full implantation and full implementation and success metrics attained and as we've discussed with the board and also our senior leadership team some of these goals may not be attained at the end of this year may need to carry over into year two and that's something uh we have to look at as we do work uh around meeting these metrics I think our our first goal number one is really our power goal uh which we will prepare our students for College and Career through the design of learning experiences that will prepare them to become the leaders designers problem solvers and innovators so from that major goal we then drop down to our sub goals uh for example 1.2 enhanced preparation and access to algebra one to establish a strong Foundation to for success and Advance high school and math courses from our main goals to our subg goals to our measurable outcomes uh we believe this format will be extremely transparent for not only the board but also uh our public um we'll be updating at every board meeting around where we are with these goals um we also be using uh Google surveys to get feedback from the community and especially our staff around uh the movement and and steps we are taking to make and meet these goals goal number two uh we will nurture responsible fulfilled and successful Global Citizens to developing an awareness of their interconnectedness with the world and learning skills that can help them contribute to change as I noted um and as you just heard Patrick keeno's uh audit presentation you will see things taken right out of that audit and placed in our goals uh to really emphasize uh our work and What needs to be improved uh this year so uh examine current 2.3 examine current Infinity space opportunities for uh uh bip and create more opportunities through expansion uh progress will be measured through focus groups with students Carrie touched on this in her last two presentations um and then as we go to our metrics you will see focus groups will be conducted at the high school and middle school levels regarding Infinity groups data from the focus groups will be analyzed by June we then go to our midyear midyear Focus uh four focus groups will be conducted by January 30th so we're trying to drill down to really specific metrics uh as we move forward goal three uh we will align all operations Strategic Staffing accountability and data driven decision-making resources differentiated and governance policies and procedures with a focus on climate culture to effectively meet the needs of Staff schools and uh community example out of here is uh C32 partner with uh minority serving institutions build strategic Partnerships with historically black colleges and universities uh Hispanic serving institutions and other minority serving institutions to recruit diverse candidates we do have a fiveyear human resources plan that will also be shared uh on our website throughout the year and again if we look at measur outcomes of formal Partnerships with three msis uh and by by mid year uh we'll have at least one formal partnership developed uh through an mou goal four we will authentically engage families and community in supporting schools and students through Community immersion co-creation of solutions recognition of different groups Community Based and Beyond appreciation of historical knowledge and recognition of community efforts um to us uh this is a very important goal because uh there is a need and I think you've seen discussion at the board level uh we've had these discussions with building leaders we've had discussions with staff around really building relational trust again uh throughout the district and we're hoping to do that through an increased transparency and also uh communication uh example 4.1 increased parent involvement in the mass selection process as well as at home strategy support math and achievement at home as measured by participation in information sessions parent seminars and selection process we've held we've so far held multiple workshops and we're also recording those Workshop so we can so parents can revisit on our website we'll be putting out our year-long schedule uh by the end of October so parents will have a good uh chart to see what um professional development they would like to attend 4.1 by the end of the school year at least 50% of grade 5 and a parents will participate in at least one math selection information session or parent seminar either in person or view uh the recording by mid year at least 25% of parents will have participate in at least one Mass selection information session app parent seminar either in person or by viewing uh the recording we stall here Keith last one we had one more that's it thanks you sir um as I noted and you know one point I do want to stress is this is this is a living document uh having done this job for some 28 years um trying to predict what is going to happen in the next hour or within the next day um is is very difficult how however uh on our end and we've spoken about this publicly um we have a lot of work to do uh from a district perspective uh a lot of that work is going to involve uh garnering stakeholder input whether that's Community conversations that we'll have with board members and myself whether that's professional development whether that's surveys um I do want to note that part of Patrick Kino's audit which we posted on the website also has a survey associated with with it for questions and comments uh so on our end we have to do a lot of work uh around amplifying voices of our stakeholders which also includes our students uh to really uh ensure uh that we're continuing to build that trust which is something that I think you're going to hear me repeat multiple times but uh in my 90s some odd days here I think that's a gap that we we really need to address and and can reduce significantly uh by the end of this year and going into 25 26 questions first I just want to say thank you um I think these goals and kind of the work that you described going into them feels reflective of the process that we've all been a part of I know the team has worked really intentionally to incorporate those suggestions the findings corrective action items from all of the ious reports and audits to ensure that we are actually using those things to drive results and so I know we had mentioned this this had come up at the retreat but um not seeing it in this draft as we kind of move towards approaching approval here I do want to reiterate that I do feel very strongly that we should include a column on the scorecard that direct stakeholders to the report um or initiative of each goal or sub goal that it supports from from one of the audits yeah so if it's some if it's derived from the record Equity report if it's derived from the special education audit Federal monitoring um I think that this would help build a share shared understanding of how the sources are being utilized and informing our goals and then it also supports that increased transparency that you're talking about while also helping the board lead with Clarity and our capacity for providing oversight and accountability we can do that this week we'll put it on so and just the piggyback yeah on something Liz just said you know part of this is also leading into our strategic planning process which is really a priority that the board has mentioned um so this year really planning the Strategic plan uh we'll start that work next year as we start meeting with with groups uh to start G garnering input so to me this is just really a toll and a water in regards to really getting deep into strategic planning over for the next three to five years yeah and then I just add one more thing great I also just wanted to take a moment to thank uh thank you superintendent bank and also the senior leadership team because as you read through the goals we have prioritized a number of special education goals within our larger power goals as you probably learned tonight we could probably have built an additional goal just on the work that we have to do there but I actually think while it could have been its own separate goal that integrating it into our overall goal sends a clear message that special education is not other it's not separate but it is an integral part of our Continuum of services and I think this really is reflective of our commitment to inclusion and ensuring that our students with diverse support needs are a meaningful part of this vision and so um I think that deserves to be recognized so thank you yeah as I think I think Liz just noted these are one of a thousand goals that you know we had to narrow down and really figure out what goals we can leverage the most that would have the most impact on students um so looking at whether it was the Rucker's report whether it was our special education audits our long- range facility plan uh a big part of the work was just narrowing down goals uh and figure out which ones we could leverage that would make the really biggest impact towards student achievement and also building that relational trust that we've been speaking about I'll do that this week all right thank you then we'll move on to the business administrators update okay thank you uh just some quick things um I've had the opportunity to visit some of your construction sites so I had took some time out yesterday to visit them with mtic uh with your director of facilities it's always interesting seeing construction especially over my career I've probably done about $110 Million worth of construction so it's always interesting to see how things have changed over the years uh as to the approach um I've been attending your uh weekly meetings with your consultants for your construction so I'm kind of in the loop with where they are on a weekly basis as they update um your director facilities I'm attending those meetings I'm not attending the meetings with the actual contractors I'm leaving that uh for your director of facilities um this evening I handed out a draft uh to the ffnt committee of a request to have a board secretary recap report so that the board at at the meeting you get a recap you already have the full report but something that is more precise and understandable uh for the board to follow through on uh you have starting on Monday the 2324 annual fiscal report is starting uh so that's going to be starting uh I've been attending meetings U although virtually for your federal audit follow-up meetings they have uh some additional items that they've requested I will work with the staff to try and accommodate uh as much as I can to follow up uh with that request uh the and um Mr Bing has uh indicated uh The Architects have scheduled meetings which your building principles to update the long range facility plan uh so those are all scheduled and ready to go uh one thing that was brought to my attention was that uh at the meeting uh the be the business administrator also gives a construction update so I apologize it's pretty lengthy uh so there's I I'll go through it um Seth Boyen School epic management close out items to uh will be addressed with the contractor uh architectural punch list reinspection was performed on October 3rd and 4th it will reissued at the next week with the final steps to close out this project uh tuskin School uh epic management close items it close out items to be addressed with the contractor same thing architectural punch list reinspection was performed on the 3rd and 4th and will be reissued in the next week with the final steps to close out that project Marshall School the boilers are operational however the control wiring work is being finalized uh System Program programming to be completed existing electrical panel work to be completed during next school break and Architectural punch list to be issued montro School the boilers are operational however the control wiring work is being finalized condens pump to be installed the system programming to be completed the punch list to be issued and completing the Privacy room mirror installation uh Columbia High School this one is pretty lengthy uh bwing above ceiling of baitman in room b201 b203 b205 b207 b211 and b213 completed work on the rooms was completed as of 10724 medeia Center New hva systems underway framing sheetrock and spackling all underway uh Media Center electrical work of units is underway B 107 science case work completed nurses area completed common area floor patching and leveling completed paint underway as well as it underway glass partitions completed exterior wood doors installed Tazo work is under the way to be followed by with paneling and systems new guidance completed auxiliary gyms a117 and A113 work is completed roofs slate roof replacement are completed around the school roof coating on the way mechanical curbs loaded loaded installed awing abatement completed a301 a302 a304 a306 science rooms work is on the way d-wing HVAC new science rooms work is underway mechanical systems completed ceilings in progress rooftop units and all other hbac equipment to be loaded and installed on the roof was done already main gy duck work completed uh rtu rtus installed already boilers at DMB were inst were started gas piping to all new equipment was completed preparation worked for existing guidance of batement is underway and inspections are underway as required new ramp area entrance to Media Center completed need to install railing Maplewood Middle School boiler start up completed repair steam leaks installed CEO and gas sensors and motorized louvers installed thermostatic valves at radiators throughout building fire alarm system turned over removing Legacy field device start up of second floor V UVS on hold until vage res resolution cutting grills and stacking first floor VVS wiring on hold connecting piping and installing tats PA IDF rack wiring completed next steps are testing and debug intentive Le scheduled to begin on the 22nd of October continue work on in all in the all gender rest room on the second floor privacy room on the first floor and office 27 7 Auditorium air handling units ducting still underway prepping for Auditorium ement work markout electrical and clearing outspace uh building automation system wiring to field equipment continues uh front end location selected custodial office continue to paint glass gas line serving rooftop equipment roof repairs of wet spot scheduled for weekend coding will follow will be performed simultaneously as temperatures must be 40° fah and Rising dry Wells for condensing condensation completed continue addressing door punch list South Orange Middle School electrical service Bennett set the exterior switchboard on pad Thursday the 3rd of October next step is to run the new conduit second shift South Orange Middle School contract has been awarded to PO Auto Builders equipment submitt are underway on Viewpoint South Orange Village zoning department requires that this project apply for zoning fitment this has been completed and approved the contractor can now apply for the building permit the project is scheduled to be completed for the start of the school year 2025 I received this late this afternoon so I will make sure that it is forwarded to all the board members so that you have it uh for your reference for the future any questions on everything I know I went through that quite quickly so could you go around again I I will if I'll start at the bottom and work the opposite way that thank you okay all right next is the board president's update all right sorry good evening tonight the the district presented two major updates regarding our school district first the administration shared its findings from a special education audit this audit aimed to provide the South Orange Maplewood School District with an impartial assessment of its special education services and related areas the audit covered a review of special education policies and procedures with a focus on compliance issues an examination of child study team records along with surveys from parents teachers and administrators regarding special services it also reviewed the efficiency of power professionals and offers offer recommendations for improving special services in the district some of the findings aligned with those from a federal audit highlighting the urgent need to improve services for our students however it is encouraging to note that some of these issues are already being addressed though the work must continue the school board in collaboration collaboration with Mr Bing and Dr gesumaria fully supports the Department's ongoing efforts to ensure proper oversight the board recently elevated the special committee on special services to a standing committee bringing it to the same level as the committee for policy curriculum and instruction personnel and finance facilities and Technology this decision underscores the board's commitment to ensuring that special education receives the attention it deserves especially when around 20 20% of students are classified the audit is part of a broader initiative that will soon examine the financial aspects of special services including litigation out of District placements and the use of power Professionals in the district additionally we also presented the district goals as discussed in August these goals focused on four key areas that will discuss that that will guide the district's agenda for the year one we have enhancing academic and career preparation two fostering global citizenship and social interactions three aligning District Operations to create an inclusive environment and four engaging stakeholders to ensure Student Success today we introduced sub goals to support these four areas the board and the superintendent collaborated on refining these goals to strengthen them further while District goals are set annually they are part of a long-term strategic plan to build a lasting vision for the school district the board has also committed to its own goals that will provide board members training to better support these District goals we look forward to continuing this important work together as we move forward next we have the board president statement the school board meeting is a business meeting in public and not a meeting with the public often times it may appear to members of our audience the Board of Education takes action with very little com comment and in many cases a unanimous vote before matter is placed on the agenda at a public meeting the superintend the Administration has thoroughly reviewed the matter with the superintendent if the superintendent is satisfied that the matter is ready to be presented to the Board of Education it is then referred to the board to to the appropriate board committee the members of the board committee work with the administration and the superintendent to ensure that members fully understand the matter after the committee discusses the matter it is then shared with the other board members for consideration only then is it placed on the agenda for Border discussion and action at a public meeting now we have our hearing of individuals and delegations thank you for coming in person and dialing in by phone this evening the South orang maplehood Board of Education certainly respects that you've taken the time out of your busy day to address the board at tonight's meeting we value public involvement in our school district and we are eager to hear what you have to say the board does have time limits by policy and it will be enforcing those to enable as many people to speak as possible this evening each individual will be given 3 minutes to speak please do your best to stay within the time afforded to you the first public comment period is usually limited to 1 hour and the second public comment period may be limited to 30 minutes all input shared with the board of education is taken very seriously and will inform future deliberations work by the Board of Education and its committees and our first it will be with Kelly Quirk do I have to press something no okay uh so I'm Kelly Quirk I'm a Maplewood resident I'm a very proud mama of three kids in the school district to is Seth Boyen and one very proud as Seth boy Alum who started their middle school Journey this year at MMS and I want to shout out the IEP team um because my kid would not be able to go to school every day without those services so I really appreciate you guys being willing to do an audit and to do be self-reflective I get that this is a compliance audit but um some of the messaging that came across from the consultant tonight was a little flippant to the parents who heard a lot about how we can save money and what I want to do is my kid to go to school and get an education so I also work in Social Services where we have a long long history of deinstitutionalization that was never met with the services on the low um strategy side right so we take all the restrictive Services away because we think that that's too restrictive I'm not saying that that's not true but then we don't invest on the other side so we don't invest appropriately in training the general education teachers which is what your consultant suggested we don't invest appropriately in um setting up systems that are objectively used to determine who gets Paras and not right we say we're going to do it and we kind of half you know butt it so to speak um and I say that not because no one has bad intentions but that traditionally has happened time and time and time again right and so to sit here and hear someone um talk about wanting to bring out of District students back in which would be great right this is our this is our home my student I don't want my student out of District right but there's a lot of to your point super tending a lot of trust that has been lost and a lot of um feeling that the communication strategies and hasn't worked um and there's a disconnect sometimes and so if we could focus on that before we focus on the cost of Paris supporting kids if we could focus on getting IEP goals that are smart goals I agree with the audit right like you need smart goals we need things that are like actionable and realistic right so if you have a kid who needs extra time my kid needs extra time it's okay to put in there he needs an extra 45 minutes for certain assignments he needs an extra whatever it can be specific um but I caution when we look at this is how do we get the rest of the general education Community up to speed because I've certainly had teachers well-meaning in back to school night tell a whole group of class parents that they are not special education teachers and so I don't necessarily trust that um going forward thanks so much thank you all right that's all for public speaks so next we'll do our committee reports yes there are no um community members online to speak all right okay now we'll move on to committee reports thank you okay the special services committee met on October 8th we began at 6:30 and adjourned at 9:02 myself board member Meyers superintendent Bing and Dr Jess Maria were all in attendance prior to the meeting on October 2nd a meeting reminder and a request for any questions with a link to our internal tracker was sent to the full board and after the meeting on October 10th notes were sent to the full board for review ahead of tonight we started our meeting with Kelly mmer the communications officer of CPAC who uh began with bringing us some insights they shared that they are happy that for the first time in over a year the administration for the special services department has been fully staffed I'm going to take a moment to just share that we do share in that excitement and as a point of clarity for the community we are fully staffed at the administrative level only as there are still vacancies for the school-based education special education roles during this time we discussed several topics a forthcoming letter to introduce those new members of the department and their responsibilities um as well as some improvements to our district website around special services in we also discussed a portion of the district profile that did address the establishment of par professional criteria and the district's commitment to providing adequate support for students based on individualized needs while also prioritizing student Independence after CPAC joined us we turned the conversation to discuss power professionals a bit more the district shared a summary of a meeting that they held with ESS the company who provides our power professionals the meeting was insightful and productive and key takeaways included that ES offers more than par professional support which may be helpful to us and suit our needs we've improved security access so they have granted the district Personnel platform access to track building staff which improves our security and also discussed par professional training that they offer from ESS and then we also offer on our end in terms of Handle With Care and Allergy awareness next we discussed current internal work on par professionals which includes examining and reviewing those assigned via a Section 504 with plans to create a district sop to improve Clarity in this area as well as par professional determination and fading leadership team is currently discussing audit findings with our child study teams developing criteria and then we'll engage parents to monitor the progress and determine fading needs over time we turn the conversation to Transportation the district reports that all IEP required Transportation AIDS have been requested and provided any Aid absences are immediately addressed with the transportation department the SLT is coordinating with the Essex Joiner to prevent and future issues there um as superintendent being mentioned earlier um the Seth Boyen there is a Seth Boyen bus that is um Contin continuing to have some issues but um has received some nice responses from our transportation department this continues to be on their radar um to resolve any outstanding issues personal data was briefly reviewed but um board member eert and myself are collaborating to try and establish a more consistent data consistent data sharing schedule between our committies just based on the way that they are scheduled throughout the month to make sure that the special services committee has access to the most up-to-date Personnel information for our monthly reviews next we uh discussed and reviewed the slide deck that you saw in tonight's presentation and then discussed also an upcoming presentation where superintendent Bing and Miss Jess Maria will present that will kind of complete our special services profile it'll incorporate insights from the federal monitoring as well as ones that you heard about tonight to demonstrate how these elements can come together to form a clear roadmap for the Department's goals and aligning with the districtwide goals and objectives sharing their vision for the future of the department we received updates next on home instruction and pull out replacement services at this point all students who require home instruction should be receiving it in acknowledgement of the issues surrounding the implementation of that special services is focused on developing an sop with an anticipated completion date of January 2025 Solutions have been and continue to be put in place to address the issue of students receiving less P support than is mandated in their IEPs and communication is ongoing um goals and wins we discussed um now that we have district and board goals and those have been finalized or soon to be approved our special services profile has been absorbed by our new leadership team and we plan to align our committee goals and finalize those accordingly so that the things that we're monitoring in committee as was referenced earlier there is kind of a Cascade effect of our district board and then committee goals in terms of how we're providing oversight and monitoring that feels aligned our next meeting will be on November 11th at 6 6:30 I'll open the floor for questions at this time okay thank you the Personnel committee met on Monday October 14th at 3M in attendance were board members dval Wilson B lmani and myself and Mr Idan Mr rant and Mr Bing from the district the public facing meeting minutes are posted on the website um but just a few highlights from our meeting we discussed uh in terms of vacancies uh regarding the business administrator the district interviewed more candidates after unsuccessfully finding a candidate in previous rounds there is one candidate that has emerged to move into the second round as of Friday October 11th there are currently 27 vacancies to be filled 10 within the special education department and 14 leave replacement positions to be filled six within the special education department um now that the committee has reviewed the monthly report I'll be distribut Distributing that to the full board um after this meeting or first thing tomorrow morning we Mr adidin gave an update on the 5-year diversity Workforce plan they are still Target targeting to launch the survey to teaching staff members in November uh before Thanksgiving break so it's it's a little they pushed it back a little bit um but we're still within the Q Q2 timeline so we're still on target um just a quick update the director of guidance role Dr Gilbert unfortunately was not able to attend the meeting but he has been working on a job description for the role that he has reimagined there will be an intentionality around Wellness for both students and staff and while the role will support scheduling um the core scheduling responsib will fall under the principal with support from other staff members so it'll be a team approach that will include more cross training and use of power schedule power Schuler I did ask that more information be provided around the research including other districts that have reimagined this role when the committee reviews the job description at the next meeting and then we talked a lot about confidential Personnel matters um but the rest of the the public basing meetings uh minutes can be found online any questions thank you okay so I will share some high Lev notes from the ESX County and jba meeting um on October 10 board member will Meyer and I attended the meeting there was a feature speaker to discuss best practices with your board attorney hey Casey you're new um and and the East Orange superintendent and board attorney were present to give this presentation so there were a lot of questions about bre best practices for communicating between the lawyer the superintendent and the board um because common practice is for the board president to be the only or main contact to their Council so just some high level advice um that the uh board attorney shared which was you know when members are able to ask questions to the attorney directly it can help serve um it can help board members serve better and more efficiently it can clear up ambiguities um she suggested creating a chain of command and getting board members to vote on this via policy um when it comes to the structure and chain of command with with speaking with your board attorney um uh Retreats is a good time to have these discussions they can be discussed um year-over-year um once a new board forms and you can always modify it uh she had one interesting thing she said in her District the lawyer attends committee meetings um many don't do this but she said that when um lawyers are attending the committee meetings that's where all the action happens if a lawyer isn't in the think tank stage he doesn't he or she doesn't know the issues deeply um so they should be there and there have been times when lawyers may not be as involved and before a meeting things have to get pulled um and so this is just a way to reduce risk for districts and to this person's point one hour of a committee meeting is less than 10 hours of dealing with legal issues although I know our committee meetings last longer than an hour um question came up on social media and she mentioned that that's best to consult with your board attorney directly but it's always been a Hot Topic you know what can you do on social media and there and and what's the balance of what is appropriate or not um one thing that uh she did leave us with was it's hard to be an activist and a board member residents can be activists but the board role is legislator um one good question that came from the meeting was reducing litigation uh and so she shared does your District have a multi-prong approach where you could Implement new policies practices or administrative reviews with the superintendent lawsuits can tell you patterns with the same departments people or issues it also speaks to employee morale um places where people are happy don't have a lot of workers comp and lawsuits so something to also consider um and then lastly there's a new njsba website which may or may not have seen they are very excited about it um and there are multiple volunteer opportunities available on the site if you want to add more things to your to-do list thank you oh and the next meeting is Thursday December 12th and it will be at Newark Vocational High School and the topic is on AI so I will definitely be making that I was not present for the fft meet last fft meeting and uh board member Meer thankfully he' led the meeting so he'll read out the minutes thank you Bor Kahan and I co-led the meeting it was a very communal kind of situation uh so Bo M kellahan and myself uh were at the fft meeting on October 9th along with superintendent Bing uh ba Mr Deandrea uh Mr bonds uh Mr jilio and Mr vales uh Mr B Boney and telis were of course otherwise uh occupied at this dis at that time uh as always go on to the website to look at the full minutes it was an extensive meeting but I'll hit some of the very high level topics we discussed the status of facilities going through uh the uh terrific lengthy plan of uh facilities updates that have happened recently uh as uh were mentioned in the uh the ba update four issues that came up recently there was a sewage leak issue at the Marshall School a sewage leag issue at Maplewood Middle School uh both of which had to be addressed very quickly and uh led to a discussion about how we handle purchases that have to take place on very short notices for an emergency situation uh we also talked about plans for drainage improvements that have been a perennial issue at Seth boen on the lower level we're voting on a a contract for an architect to start a uh plan for addressing those issues tonight and we addressed an issue with the gym floor at Dila Balden which has been buckling and looking at opport opportunities for uh small fixes versus large fixes uh in that setting we discussed the CHS stage and the uh importance of getting that back online as quickly as possible what the reality is uh of that and what we discussed was largely uh echoing and mirroring the uh letter that went out to the community recently so everyone has seen uh that we did discuss the district's ongoing process right now of identifying uh sites for us to use in the spa in the place of the CHS stage until it can be brought back online looking both at Community settings as well as our other uh District sites and acknowledging as part of that that we have a real issue with most of our stages uh Seth boen has very recently been renovated and it's a terrific space but there's only so many things that it can accommodate and it's a different size of course from Colombia uh and we reiterated that as part of uh this current lrfp that's being developed we need to make sure that all those stages are being looked at and brought into the process so we know how much it will cost to fix all of them and then consider is this something that should be presented uh perhaps with other urgent issues uh for consideration of a bond uh so that is ongoing we did some discussion on budget forecasting things that we're seeing on the horizon and we'll certainly talk more about that in the next couple months uh but we identified uh certain areas where addition Focus would be necessary uh and making plans uh for how the budget process is going to work which dovetailed into the presentation that uh the superintendent made of the materials that were sent around to the board uh earlier this month regarding our plan for budget development this year uh starting you know more or less right now and rolling information out to the board as quickly as it possibly can uh in addition to bringing in community members uh and we discussed the process of developing a budget advisory committee that's going to bring in folks from the community with uh budget knowledge and experience but from different stripes with the community to have a uh a discussion of what our priorities are uh and that will be um brought together and developed shortly uh we also discussed uh transportation we now have a full-time coordinator Chris Jordan uh from Essex region who is our Point person for all Transportation issues uh we had a report on the status of our bus issues the majority of which have been resolved from earlier in the year the two main issues uh bus 164 and 167 which we are working on the district is working on dividing into two buses which they had been previously however it does take some time to actually get those bids out have them returned actually have the equipment Etc so those are ongoing uh we discussed the stop finder app the G video fencing segment of which is being rolled out over the next month so you can look at the app and get real-time information about your kids bus we discuss the status of the business office right now of course we have an interim ba uh which has been terrific this was our first meeting with Mr Deandrea uh he is currently giving us 24 hours a week uh and so there is a limitation to how much uh extra capacity they have to get projects done and we don't have an assistant ba uh on yet we're going to have them on soon and we're going to be growing that office's capacity but we are right now still operating uh with very limited uh capacity and there's a lot of great stuff getting done notwithstanding that uh we discussed briefly the question of uh invoices that the district uh pays out that are under the $44,000 bid threshold and how those are uh handled by the district and the discussion largely focused around the need for again nsop developing an actual standardized plan so that every invoice is handled the same way every time there is a purchasing manual that has been distributed based upon a state standard manual uh that once we uh finish the draft and adopting it to our use can be relied on to make sure that we are following the same procedure every time uh which will be um I think a real gain for everyone we looked at three policies for review policy 6220 budget preparation uh the District uh SLT is considering what changes they would uh they believe would be appropriate for our policy to reflect some of the uh new structures and guards we putting on the budget creation process uh we're going to pick that discussion back up at our next fft meeting uh policy 8420 emergency and crisis situations we've sent that back to the policy committee to look at with some local additions with regard to how our emergency uh security drills work and policy 8467 on weapons uh we are adopting the updated Strauss ssme language uh that was sent to policy which is now on the docket for uh first read tonight any questions yes not necessarily a question but actually just a reminder I'm looking at you Aron because we have talked in the past about uh a stien position for like a stage manager and as you talked about all the upgrades that are going to be necessary for all of that we should just keep that on our radar thank you just to follow up on that I mean I strongly support that I mean I would we're spending so much money on this I mean we will be spending so much money on the stages it makes no sense to spend like $5 million and have nobody responsible for it and there is an opportunity for that position to pay for itself as well we've discussed that a couple times so yeah oh there just one quick followup um superintendent I guess this is more for you superintendent thing if that's okay with regard to some of the updates that we're considering in terms of creating um a community advisory and a more participatory budget do you have a sense of like from a timeline perspective when when we can expect presentation and and some of that moving forward yeah uh in the uh budget advisory committee packet I sent the board I outlined a timeline um it's tight but I think we can we can get it in uh so I can present that at the next meeting when yeah one final comment uh we it this is about going back to the stages right the auditoriums that we have we need to fix obviously we are doing the CHS rigging right now we have the CHS lighting coming up next we have the South Orange Middle School stage to be done as well as MMS so it is my hope that we can fix all of these using our current budget as opposed to punting it down the line and putting into a a long range facilities plan that may or may not happen for the next 5 years again that's my hope I'm not saying that is necessarily the the best way or the most efficient way to do it or but using current budget to plan out our Capital fixes or maintenance you know how we want to see it is probably the best way to handle it all right if no other questions oh go ahead um this is probably for administration I think the capital maintenance plan is supposed to get approved um September October so are we who's did just just thank you Kaitlin uh I had a question on the long range facility plan so um just looking at the paperwork at the fifth year is 2425 but if you're taking in taking consideration the pandemic year or you're then bumping that out to 2526 so that's my question for the board I think we had had the understanding that you're required to do one every five years so from 2019 it we go to here I don't know if there was an exception for the pandemic year or not I'll do some res above M pay grade all right if no more questions on fft I'm going to go ahead and um put my policy hat on and my governance hat on on top of that we held our meeting on October 1st uh and in attendance for myself board member members sck Gable and Whit letter as well as superintendent Bing uh Miss Jess Maria and we also were very pleased to have for the beginning of the meeting our student representatives glasman and nessen uh they noted I think this was perhaps the first committee meeting they had gotten to go to and this is a practice that I think the board has not had for a while but we were really pleased to invite them to come to the meeting uh both as sort of testing the waters to see what opportunities there are to include board members student representatives in some committee meeting discussions but also especially for this one because we wanted to focus on uh one of the board goals that we had uh passed at the last meeting specifically uh the consideration of creating a board goal uh sorry consideration of creating a student and family focused committee uh it was really important we thought to make sure that we actually had a representation from our student reps and talking about their experience in working both with our board and with the district uh and they shared a lot of very helpful information with us about their thoughts about how the dynamic is working on the board and information they would like to have and share to be uh Fuller members and also talking about the scope of what areas that we thought the committee could focus on uh in a way that would bring in thoughts from the student body from parents Etc certain are that we thought could be useful would be student transportation suspensions code of conduct HIV placements threat assessment student Mental Health Resources student crew Athletics music and arts family Communications and Outreach school security guidance counseling and of course core instruction so they're going to be long meetings um and it was a a really productive discussion and I look forward to finding new opportunities to uh engage them going forward we have three policies for second read uh that were put forward for tonight uh 5337 for service animals 5350 student suicide prevention and 5610 suspension for first read this evening we have policy 2200 curriculum content uh and policy 5751 sexual harassment of students uh curriculum content was reviewed a few times by the cni committee uh and was approved after determining uh what if any language from our prior version of the policy should remain and so we figured that out 5751 we've been discussing this for a while uh we have a policy right now that has very extensive uh very detailed descriptions of sexual harassment procedures in a way that uh is more or less mirroring the state of the law right now but perhaps not entirely and more to the point we should not be hemming ourselves in by having all of the actual required language in the policy so we are adopting the St ese version that has the broad outlines of the requirement and uh the district will then be adopting regulation 5751 which has all of the most recent requirements um for implementing I believe it's uh Title 9 uh we also discussed uh a number of different carryover pieces from our uh prior budgets uh excuse me from our prior meetings uh including um the uh annual agenda that the board maintains uh and Reliance we think it makes most sense to rely on the very detailed District agenda that is maintained uh with modifications as we need to for additional board items uh as well as uh looking at our best practice recommendations for board meeting um we have the survey that has been out we're expecting the results to come back we're going to review that in our next committee meeting to discuss what things we could do to make sure that our meetings uh are uh most effectively meeting our needs TimeWise content wise Etc uh and that was about it for everything else of course go look at the website any questions not exactly a question it's not a question but um I just wanted to thank you for really making the effort to bring in our student board Representatives because I know that you know several of us have discussed that in the past and um it was great to have their input and um participation in the meeting so I look forward to seeing what comes out of that going forward agree thank apologize uh just to follow up we did discuss at the um committee meeting about the uh board secretary's report being public and you wanted to bring that to the full board's discussion sure going back to the fft meeting there was a a discussion that um I don't know if we want to have in full this evening or or chew it over uh but we were discussing during the meeting the uh practice that our monthly board secretary report and treasures reports are posted for our review uh they are technically public records when they're Oprah we provide them uh many other districts do provide them initially for public purposes um but we currently do not and so you know I think at the same time as we would love to look at having uh our business administrator give a an update overall to uh during the board meeting of here's essentially where a snapshot of where our finances are this month uh whether we want to be actively Distributing those uh which may overlap with the reades on of the website I don't know so we can have any discussion on that or to uh table it for a subsequent meeting I think that's a great idea yeah I think we had yeah I think we had a discussion about this in our agenda setting meeting and we were going to wait until we have those two documents in sync but we wanted to present those documents great and I think we just for public Clarity can you explain the two documents in sync so you can what it is you have your board secretary's report and your treasurer's report you have a confirmation of your treasurer's report that the cash balances that are represented in your board secretary report are are in agreement currently the practice of the district is you're issuing your board secretary's report and then at a subsequent meeting you're approving your treasurer's report you in your meeting you have a a memo saying that this is a draft and it will be approved at a later point in time uh it's not a practice that I've been accustomed to I generally like to present both because one coincides with the other uh so that's part of the goal of trying to work together uh as Mr Bing said bringing certain things that have been different practices that both he and I have experienced to try and bring some of those here and one of them was this evening uh your resolution actually reads it's it's saying a professional service is being awarded and why it's exempt from the practices of having an RFP or anything so uh we are working together to make some of those small changes so that things are more open and more transparent and a better understanding of what's going on so uh we will work together to continue to do that okay so on to the curriculum and instruction committee for October prior to our meeting I sent out a reminder and a link to question tracker just in advance and we met on October 7th at 6:30 p.m. board member dval Wilson and I were in attendance as well at from the board as well as um all of the district members District staff members we started out by reviewing the three District goal categories that um directly tie to cni numbers one two and four and in the spirit of alignment um we discussed using these goals to then drive our committee oversight throughout the school year throughout the year so each month we will focus on two to three relevant sub items based on the district's progress and we'll be sure to cover all of the goals over the course of the year and of course we can have updates on other goals as needed but we'll devote a significant portion of our meetings on two or three of those items we discussed the reimagined guidance position as board member eert um mentioned already and I'll just add a bit more based on our discussion in cni uh around the details of the position we got a look you know we were reminded of the history of uh bringing this to light and last spring Dr Gilbert said there were positions that he would like to bring back after the Riff if possible and two positions have been brought back already and now with the funds received from the state did the district proposes that we bring back this third position but reimagine it um he shared that they had researched how other districts structure this position and they all have it as a district role we discussed the role of the person in this um supervisor of guidance counseling and student well-being for k12 and um how the duties of the previous director of guidance will be absorbed by the lead counselors and this new position and in addition um there will be a mental health component the new supervisor would oversee all of our mental health personnel for example non child study team social workers and counselors and support the mental health of our students and adults um there will be an added focus on supporting marginalized students across schools as well um admin shared that serious mental health challenges students experience require someone with this expertise to support building level admin during crisis and um we talked about how the position will come under access and equity and under the access and Equity department and will provide support for inrs funding will come from part of the $250,000 that Dr Gilbert lobbied for us to receive from the state with the understanding that there must be a focus on access and equity and that next year we would need to absorb this salary into our District budget we moved on to um a few items that are specific to Columbia High School we discussed the revision to the special dance curriculum um the new lead counselors congrats to Marsha Hicks and Danielle money Chavez for stepping in to the lead counselor roles um they have officially started and are leading the department they've met multiple times with senior lead leadership to discuss their needs one of the lead counselors is focused on the programming pieces and interns while the other is focused on supporting academics getting senior transcripts out to colleges Etc they're also working with the IT department to clean up course selection in power school which is already laying the groundwork for next year's scheduling process um we also heard that the district has not received any recent reports of teachers refusing to write College recommendation letters which is excellent news for our seniors regarding the budget most of the cni funds have already been spent down which is typical for curriculum and instruction at this point of the school year uh Dr Gilbert regarding the scheduling consultant Dr Gilbert and Mr Bing will be meeting with that consultant next week I think you said next week Mr Bing yeah to discuss the scheduling work completed we discussed items that are up for Board of approval tonight um there are a couple of Fine Arts curriculum pieces dance one and Dance 2 the policies that board member Meyer referenced um for first and second read and finally a new business we reviewed the question tracker for any outstanding items from the board umed an Arts webinar from njsba that some of us were able to attend or watch um and it was interesting we were actually used as an example in that presentation um random um we talked about the mtss curriculum night coming up on October 24th at Seth Boyen HIV the Hib Paran knite was already held on October 9 was after our meeting um and we discussed the district wins for the month because there are there's a lot of good happening in this district and um it was refreshing to be able to just share that out and to continue that sort of that new tradition at the end of our cni meetings um so some of them were that the first curriculum night on magnetic reading was well received with over a 100 attendees and feed back data will be shared with the committee um and the recording will be on the district website soon the parent seed flyer went out last week and there were already at the time of our meeting 11 uh people signed up for um the sessions and which is Big because they have to commit to a series of Wednesdays board member dval Wilson gave a shout out to Dr Gilbert for uh setting the bar high for being present in the school buildings as Acting Superintendent and to Mr Bing for continuing that um and as an added win I'd like to add the high school back to school night there was a buzz of parents expressing how impressed they were by the teachers counselors Administration throughout the evening um I experienced this as a parent times too at the high school as well and I really just I I thank the high school staff for their passion for their content and their dedication to to our students and our next meeting will be held on November 15th uh November 14th and um any questions anything I missed from my committee colleagues so during the back to school night did you end up going to the clock tower the world famous Clock Tower and seeing how good nice it looks from there yes and the um northern lights were visible that night too okay well if I can just jump I wanted to just augment my report very very briefly by noting that there are three policies that are on for first read that were not noted as such in the minutes because they got to that point after the committee meeting we're also looking at policy 8467 today firearms and weapons which uh was outstanding pending review from Mr valz to make sure that it aligned with our local procedures uh and accommodated uh our need to report to law enforcement when a weapon is found uh as well as policies 3160 and 4160 regarding physical examination uh of our uh teachers and staff which was uh pending uh review between our HR and uh Folks at ASA and SAA making sure that they didn't have any concerns with this policy uh so the feedback came back no changes and so those are also uh on the docket for tonight thanks all right move on to the action portion of our meeting motion 4672 through 4681 like to make a motion to S 4681 uh all right that I am becoming BR dead Mr ters move it did you move it or is someone else's move no just set the SE that's all request yeah no there's no need to second or anything yeah I I apologize I'm it's late and I'm losing track where you're just severing 4681 so that's just a request to sever so there's no second or vote on that okay so so so we're going to do 467 through 4672 through 4680 and then 461 separately yes you got it so I have a motion for 4672 through 4680 yeah Mr Meyers and second look that way and M Gable I apologize VOC call or any discussion first I'd like to uh shout out and point out to 4675 H where we are authorizing insurance coverage for district clubs and parent organizations and in this particular case we're actually including the CHS athletic Hall of Fame and the CHS athletic Hall of Fame committee so that's what traditionally what we do is there are many PTA and clubs that we bring Under the Umbrella of the district insurance and you know and it's not an exact science because there is no comprehensive list and sometimes it gets left out so I'm glad we're pulling these in just wanted to highlight that we're doing that call y real call Board member Callahan yes board member Duval Wilson yes board member eer yes board member Meyer yes board member sack Gable yes board president telis for yes board member vad lamani yes and board member Whit letter yes okay I now have a motion to approve 4681 I like to make a motion to modify the language um and should I just read off what how we're going to modify language so I want to modify language to say be it resolved that the Board of Education approve the following District goals for the 2024 2025 school year as presented and as augmented by the document of sub goals measurable outcomes and midyear targets that has been created by the district it will be noted in the final minutes I got apologize I'm trying to keep track of all the names yes second okay any discussion would you like to explain what we're changing I me I'm happy to we're changing I sent this one earlier uh the version of the resolution 4681 that appears uh on school boards right now uh approves the four top level goals that the administration and uh board together created however it is important for us uh to document the full array of number one incredible work uh that the district and board together have um have done but also recognize that not just these for top level goals which are sort of guiding principles but also the very measurable uh datadriven and aligned subg goals are um a part of the official goal that we are voting on tonight so with this amendment uh this document becomes part of the resolution and part of the board of the district goals all right we guess we go to roll call Bo member Whit letter yes board board member Von lman yes board president elliswood yes board member sacki Gable yes board member Meyer yes board member Gord I'm sorry my he he left the meeting board member eard yes board member Duval Wilson yes and board board member Callahan yes motion passes all right now we move on to our second hearing of individuals and delegations do we have any new signups just don't believe anyone here no I'll just assume no then yes all right now we'll move on to new business the Board of Education or anyone have any new business sorry all right I guess everyone wants to go home the Board of Education will meet in public session on Thursday November 21st 2024 at 6:30 p.m. in the district meeting room at 5:25 Academy Street in mwood New Jersey immediately following the opening of the public session the board will move on to will move to go into a closed session in the superintendent's office at 525 Academy Street in Mood New Jersey as well as using an online video conference platform to discuss Personnel matters with the attorney client privilege legal negotiations and other matters that may arise and require discussion to be announced at a later date immediately following the closed session the Board of Education will meet in public session estimated to be at 7:30 p.m. in the district meeting room at 525 Academy Street in Maplewood New Jersey in person utilizing an online video conference platform which will include hearing of individuals the community can view the meeting by following the steps which will be listed on the agenda if there are members of the community who would like to attend the meeting in person please note that masks and social distancing are optional in accordance with the guidelines receiv received from the local do and CDC action will be taken that like to make a motion to close the meeting all in favor second okay thank you B volani and we'll be closing at 10:48 p.m. thanks