continue on with the agenda the next item is the Pledge of Allegiance if everyone will please stand okay so in special presentations it looks like on March 10th there
will be a present ation a preliminary presentation on the 26 20 2526 budget school year Budget on April 28 uh there will also be the final budget presentation and hearing on June 9th there will be a goals recap of the current year along with the board self- evaluation and goal setting um I'll have some more information regarding that and then
um letter F superintendent comp Dr Forte thank you we went to the uh Junior Honor Society induction at Valley View on January 30th it was a very nice event Mr Kim spoke for a little while and uh it was great to see the kids getting um their due uh acknowledgement the anxious generation we do have 100 people signed up so we have a decent crew we have uh
probably 20ish people re volunteering to be on the panel so I have a call next week with Miss Watkins who's going to help us run this facilitate this and we'll look at the people on there and we'll figure out it's going to be like four or five people on the panel which is on April 22nd and that um we have to figure out you know a good representation good mix of people for that um February 21 mark your calendars February 21 5ifth grade lead graduation
1:45 p.m. Riverview an next again that's February 21 grade five lead graduation 1:45 p.m. in the Riverview Annex gym and I have three important dates for the Ed Foundation if you want to mark your calendars as well on May 17th at 6:30 pm they will be hosting an event at X golf that's May 17 7:30 pm X Golf and movie night will be September 12th at 7
pm at Garder field and the annual outing golf outing at the null Country Club is set for October 16th and that is my report for today thank you Dr Forte assistant superintendent comments Dr Cullis uh coat testing will be February 24th through 26 for second graders and February 27th and 28th for fifth graders
a read Across America the readers for or guest readers March 5th is Lake View and March 7th is riverv viiew I put Lake View twice so if any of you have been invited to uh guest read you probably received a Google form and you can just fill it out and select your day and time in school the new K toi report cards rolled out on Friday I've only actually heard one comment and it was good so I don't know if anybody else has any has heard anything else about the new report cards but it went out pretty smoothly everyone was
able to get in and I haven't heard anything else any difficulties with getting them this concludes assistant superintendent report thank you Dr gois business administrator comments Miss no comments okay thank you Miss Kowski it is 7:34 PM we'll go ahead and open it up for public discussion seeing no one in the chambers and
no one on online we'll go ahead and close public comments at 7:34 and the next item on the agenda is excuse me one second old business no action to be taken uh Mrs adalis can you walk us through that please I absolutely can so at the next meeting myself or someone else we'll uh verify the following op
options for approval uh the board reports for January 2025 the education reports for January 2025 and the minutes for the January 6 2025 and January 27th 2025 meetings great thank you any questions or comments okay Mr Capello uh under new business action to be taken can you walk us through Personnel please uh yes I'd be happy to if there are no objections under uh Personnel I would like to
move items one through five they include uh new hires resignations retirements employee leaves extra pay and salary adjustments the individual items include one resignation um a um couple of talent show directors uh home instruction item uh a um soft assistant softball coach assistant baseball coach a leave replacement teacher uh ALS so under number
two we have um there's a series of leaves of absences a b c and d uh three is the termination of employee 1424 four is uh we are resending motion uh 4 A1C from December 16th and finally number five we're approving uh one substitute can I get a second please I'll second thank you questions or comments
seeing none roll call please Dr Moore yes Mrs selis yes Mr Cass yes Mr Anderson yes Mr Capello yes Mr Kim yes Dr Moore can you walk us through instruction and program please uh sure
I'd like to move the uh following resolutions uh under instruction and program uh for approval under number one workshops and expenses we have a virtual reading Institute through reading and writing project network uh for the literacy Coach position um under item number two there's a Riverview parent uh Matt Keon to present his book The Happy heart uh under item number three we have approval of some
title three uh Consortium purchases for Rockaway burrow second thank you questions comments uh I actually have a question about the happy heart book uh what grades are there is that book targeting I'm not sure okay I can ask
and find out for you great thank you all right uh since there are no other questions roll call please D deore yes Mrs selis yes Mr Cass yes Mr Anderson yes Mr Capello yes Mr Kim yes all right under C there are no actions
to be taken so D Finance Mr Anderson if you will sure under def Finance I'd like to move the the following two resolutions the first one is to resend resolution from December 16 2024 um as noted on the agenda and then item number two is to retroactively approve the following out of District placement per students IEP which is the same student referenced in item number one I'll second thank you questions comments roll call please Dr Moore yes
Mrs aelis yes Mr Cass yes Mr Anderson yes Mr Capello yes Mr Kim yes and E operations Mr Cass please I'm off the hook tonight uh no no action to be taken forgive me I didn't notice that so I I'll will not turn on my pay voucher for tonight okay great yeah there are no actions for E operation so we'll move on with the
agenda new business is no action to be taken uh Mr cell can you fire up your AI and give us a summary of your committee uh uh sure I absolutely can do that um so well first I'll cover at the at the next meeting I or someone else will be moving the items which currently exist under uh number one uh right now there are some uh items for new hires resignations retirements employee leaves uh again we'll be covering these at the next meeting um as far as we did
have our um imp meeting this week uh we covered some uh some M some topics uh one was the kindergarten registration update uh Dr Cullis provided um the number of students that have been enroll registered so far one interesting statistic was that 72% of the families uh are the oldest children in the families so they're first into the district um so that seems Seems like a high number to me um we also talked a little bit about budget uh
obviously this is a a tough budget year so the administration is working on that looking at all the all the things that we may have to be have to do as we go through the budget season um Dr Cullis uh summarized for us the dala program um it's being reduced uh from five weeks to four weeks uh this year due to budget constraints and the price is increasing to $70 a week $280 in total uh we covered some policy including one of note which was the non-resident student
policy changes um the the tuition now has to be County approved and it looks like we're not going to be able to give exceptions as we've done in the past so if we have a family where they're moving out or we would like to let these students stay until the end of the year that's going to be much more difficult um my understanding is also the uh tuition cost would be going up um Dr Forte is going to U make a case to the um this the county executive for keeping
our current I believe Steve it's $4,000 like that's what that's what you would argue to keep our our tuition right at correct okay thank you um there's also some discussion of leadership coaching uh one of our staff is doing that now and Dr Forte would like to uh continue that possibly for uh some of the rest of the leadership team and we also covered some other policies on uh using AI uh in the classrooms and um Dr Cullis is going
to schedule uh tours for um Mr Mrs asterino and myself at Lake View to look at class sizes I believe that's the summary thank you very much any questions or comments okay next item on the agenda is imp uh Dr Moore can you walk us through um the resolution for next meeting as well as anything else uh regarding imp
I guess that was already done so yes um if you could just walk us through the resolutions uh yes uh next meeting either myself or someone else will move for approval item number one under resolutions uh for instruction and program which is the uh field trip list okay all right the next section governance um the uh we'll be voting on a bunch of policies uh during our next meeting for first reading um
there are a few policies missing that was actually discussed during governance committee so I'm going to work with Miss Kowski to get those policies on there a couple of those policies were regarding um just some outdated informations I believe one of the policies had our mors Avenue address uh for our um administrative office so just simple things like that uh is what we went through we also discussed
uh a few other things um the first big news that I want to share with the board is that uh the names Charlene is actually retiring so she'll be retiring in May uh or June so um I have asked her if there's uh one more presentation that she can make before she retires and so that all brought brought up the conversation of maybe getting recertified as a board with uh
School boards So currently our two certifications with school boards have been ex are expired the bo General board certification as well as the Carol e Larson Master board certification are both now expired so uh I'm going to ask um U Miss Peterson to present uh on just updates on board ethics uh this is a presentation that she's doing uh for the botin Board of Education I believe this month so um she has agreed to uh
share that but haven't made it official yet so once we have the date it'll be the one of the board meetings in April I think it'll be the second one U but I'll work with M Kowski to get that on the calendar um we also talked about uh I had a bunch of questions about board Retreats and just for public knowledge board Retreats are not like company Retreats where they take you off somewhere um for a weekend to um maybe um uh do some team building exercises
it's more discussion of certain items uh uh which could be unofficial or it would still be an official meeting but there' be no voting uh that happens during the retreat so I'm going to propose that we actually have our June 9th meeting uh earlier uh have that start at 6: PM uh and I'll have to work with school boards but we'll also have to make that public too so I'll work with Miss Kowski and see if there if that's uh possible so
if there's any board members that uh have a conflict or anything like that please let me know uh I think there were some other things uh Dr Forte brought to us uh brought to our attention that there's some school funding bills that are currently in Trenton and being reviewed or being proposed so we'll bring more information as we get that and there will be a couple of other resolutions that we will be proposing as well um there is one further thing they
there will be a board evaluation tool that School New Jersey school boards created similar to the superintendent evaluation tool so we can evaluate ourselves similarly to how we evaluate uh Dr Forte uh using the school board's uh website so uh that just implemented last that was just turned on last week so I'm going to look to see if we can get that for our June meeting so we we'll have our review or self-evaluation using
that tool so was there anything I missed umre okay uh after this meeting I'll send out the agenda I did forget to send the uh um the minutes for the uh for the committee uh govern minutes commun to the rest of the board but that's a basic summary so any questions okay uh looks like under def Finance uh Mr Anderson is there anything for you to share with the board
sure the um finance committee will meet this Thursday um primary topic will be to uh review the budget um Mrs Kowski and Dr Forte have been working on it as we've mentioned a few times already obviously um I think it's a little bit of a broken record it's always a tough year um as we try to balance uh ensuring we provide the you know same level of benefits obviously and uh and the appropriate um
raises to our staff I mentioned those two items because obviously those are significant drivers of our budget um and health benefits uh particularly this year is going to be a difficult one considering the uh increases uh it feels like it's a roller coaster we get a couple years of of uh decent uh increases and then a couple years of really high increases um so uh appreciate the work that the business office and uh Central Administration have been doing and uh look forward to
having our meeting on Thursday day um I will get th th those minutes out as soon as possible after the meeting and then I'm sure it'll spur some discussion and conversation I'll be available as well as Mrs Kowski I'm sure if there's any questions um and that it'll be a kind of a a working session as we move forward uh on the budget uh as far as the uh next meeting uh myself or someone else will'll move forward with our typical uh bills list and then the only other item we have thus far on the agenda is um always a nice one which is a donation
of $2,500 of Acme gift cards from the Acme Markets foundation and then I'm sure we may have some additional items that are added uh before the next meeting great thank you Mr Anderson um does any board member have questions for Mr Anderson okay uh Mr Cass it looks like there's nothing to review here as well so uh unless you wish to say anything no we're going to be meeting on Thursday so uh but just going back to the last meeting um if you
had a chance to look at that referendum on Lake View expansion from 1999 that was a very good information to uh go back to to help us kind of like he can assess how it was handled back then and what the situation was back then and also soon thereafter when the when that addition was put on the uh school was packed so there was it was full to the brim when they probably did that so
I guess the uh whatever uh studies demographics were were done were not as accurate as they should have been great thank you Mr Cass uh any questions for Mr Cass okay uh next item on the agenda is the good at cause committee reports correspondence discussion items um board meeting highlights as well as uh any comments regarding classroom space considerations I have two things
for the good for the uh highlights if anybody'd like to add anything I have um just a reminder that on March 10th we'll have the budget presentation and the second thing is that Dr CS reported that the new K5 report cars were launched smoothly last month that accurate just an answer on the happy heart it will be for
K through five thank you I think those are good highlights for me unless anyone wants to add more I had a couple of things under good for the cause um tomorrow February 11th at 7 o'clock congresswoman Cheryl is going to be having a town hall and as some of you may have may know she's running for governor so
um I signed up for it I emailed in some questions they said they would take some questions from the floor but um you know there's a lot of uh in the news now a lot of the candidates both Republicans and Democrats are are running so they're these little uh articles on what they St you know what they want to promote if they get elected um so what I'm going to talk about here is not in any of those uh resumés of what they want to do so affordable housing is a big deal
throughout the state and starting to get a lot of Kickback from a lot of uh districts on that as as we all know so um I asked uh the questions I had was you know why the builders remedy um and also exempting urban areas from contributing to the affordable housing and um you know why can't the state have legislation to pay for just affordable housing rather than you bowing down
acres and Acres of uh pristine Woodland to put up these cluster houses um so and the other thing which we've also discussed at the Town Hall meetings and uh mention it here too is that um why do they not have any regulation regulations regarding the environmental impact the sewage impact water and also the schools and all of a sudden you're talking about having to expand a school build new schools is tremendous burden on
the uh taxpayers so and the uh other thing I uh questioned I I don't know if she's going to answer these or not is the defacto segregation lawsuit um and the solution would be why we can't we fix the schools that're not giving their kids a good education so the other thing I I saw the uh the minutes from the U inp
meeting meeting and uh the thing really caught my eye was the tuition approval I guess it's the county of superintendent um so whatever the district's charge now which I would think would be thought out and fair and probably would differ from District to District um then then it has to go to the county for uh approval to uh charge tuition to an outer District student so I don't know if there was any additional detail on that that legislature actually passed that if the school boards Association county level and
state level were involved with that um personally I I just see that as more bureaucratic nonsense you know put putting extra you and it's a non-fun mending because now our superintendent has to take time get approval on it and then you're going to I know we have Steve has a great relationship with our uh our people at the county but if you get somebody that doesn't agree with you you know you're going to have an arm wrestling match over something like that yeah the way um Steve explained it to
us in the committee meeting was this I guess had its Genesis with some uh high school districts in maybe in Bergen County and essics and different places and it had to do with student athletes and basically I think letting student athletes go attend schools tuition free and yeah so there was there were some games being played basically so it sounds like we're kind of paying the price for some of that so I mean so where did the Eda come from the legislature this there
a law now yeah it was actually a bill that was passed that was bipartisan too supposedly I think it's a good move because I've seen plenty of articles on the sports pages in high school where all of a sudden something's going going elsewhere to uh play basketball or football what what whatever the uh the sport the sport is and um you know could have very easily been taken care of by the uh New Jersey Scholastic Sports Authority organization what whatever they're called and uh you know you have
to show your right you come to school you have to show proof of residency so if you're not a denal residence or tent ofly wherever it is you can't go to school there yeah yeah no I mean it it's I think it's an unintended effect and the the effect is basically that it's it's limiting our fle sorry our flexibility um we can't do some of the things that we've done in the past where we've given people uh you know a little bit of Grace um and also it sounds like the the tuition that we would be required to charge would be much
higher than it is now at least that that accurate Steve if they don't approve our tuition then yes but there is a part of the law that allows the board to make decisions for employees that's separate so you can do different things for employees um but yeah it's a bill it's passed it's um requires you to set a tuition rate it's typically your per pupil cost the way we've done it to attract some people we've given a little lower tuition rate and we've brought in a few kids here and there and it
brings a few extra dollars into the district so we're pretty happy with that but I think it does have the Genesis in um some some athletic I I saw some things about Camden County and Essex County specifically so they were letting these kids go to school for free because of their scholarship to college so now they have to be charged that's I think that's the the main reason why they're doing it yeah and we'll see how the uh canman County
and the other places that do it are uh going to come up with a real low low amount of money for tuition I have a couple of uh uh things to bring up for the good of the cause um first and foremost I'm uh really excited to announce that uh some of you may have seen Dr Forte is being awarded uh
a Denville good scout award this April um so mark your calendars April 10th 6 PM it's up at Winnebago Scout Reservation uh which is up in Rockaway not too far away uh just uh this is H this award I can speak because I was on the committee who helped uh uh pick the awardees obviously denville's full of incredible volunteers and individuals that go above and beyond every day and really that's why Dr Forte was selected for um his work above and beyond on to help
students and uh really support them uh outside of just his uh normal and everyday job of being a superintendent uh just the way he's been able to support them uh whether it be uh financially to make sure that they they have their needs met um but also educationally uh going above and beyond for uh particular students and families so um congratulations Dr Forte and look forward to uh seeing you in h April at the uh award thank you Mike uh
secondly I just wanted to announce uh this past weekend the Denville Education Foundation held their sweetheart dance they had two of them um kindergarten through 2 grade and then third through fifth grade both were sold out events I was able to attend them for a little while um great event uh run by uh some incredible volunteers um so I'm glad that those uh events went off well Dr Forte mentioned there's a few other events coming up in particular um they're calling it kind of Spring Fling which is a little bit of
a golf event indoors at ex golf if you guys haven't been there it's an indoor golf facility open recently in Denville over on Route 10 um and also that they're GNA have a DJ and some food and whatnot so not just golf but um nice little uh a fundraiser event for the foundation remember all the funds raised for the foundation go back to our students through teacher grants or District grants um so uh please if you're able to support they they would appreciate it um and then the final thing
I wanted to mention was um I was actually over at Denville Community Church uh this Sunday for an event um and the pastor mentioned Dr fores and the districts I should say uh book study of the anxious generation and the really cool part about it was I was mentioned to Dr Forte before the meeting and he said he actually hadn't directly reached out to her so she had heard about it she spoke about it she told the uh audience that was there about it she said she was reading the book she's about three quarters the way through she mentioned a
couple things that she had read already in the book about it um and kind of almost invited the public to uh to that event so um nice to see how that um event is is you know taking off as Dr Forte said it sounds like we've got over 100 RSVPs so just wanted to make a mention to it since I had just seen it the other day thank you Mike any other board members uh there are uh one or two things
that I have uh as well um I was part of the mors county school boards association meeting and presentation uh one of the updates that they had was that the election petitions are now going to increase to 25 signatures so uh for those who might be looking to uh rerun uh we now need 25 signatures so I'm sure that won't be a
big uh hurdle but uh just wanted to bring that up uh and it was an interesting session uh there was presentations on on boarding and and how some districts uh what districts do for new board members especially when they um are so um they're out of the loop I mean a lot of when when we start the when they start the term in January we're already talking about budgets new budgets and stuff like that so
um this meeting uh this presentation was about how boards shared what they do in terms of uh onboarding new board members so this is something that I'm looking to do uh especially within governance so you might see some uh additional or additions into the document that you can find in the board member shared folder on Google Drive there's sort of like a a Google doc that has a link to all the things that we will need um uh there's documents that we'll need
that's outlined by one of the policies such as um contracts and and bylaws Etc but other things that new board members might need so we also brought back the directory or I think Dr Forte uh and Miss Kowski created the directory of all the board members with their cell phone numbers Etc so that's also in the shared drive and a link to that is on the on that Google doc so um one question I wanted to ask
was with regards to the tuition uh was there a discussion of maybe ever increasing the tuition I Dr Forte explained it very well in terms of why it's low to attract uh but with the increased costs per student as well as the costs for uh special education uh I'm wondering if we can have a conversation or should we start a conversation of maybe increasing that tuition so just a note if any if any of the students who pay tuition have addition
Services that's tuition plus the price of the service thank you so if they have speech or something like that then they pay that cost of that thank you yeah that's thank you for uh thank you for sharing that um so for me that's not something that I realized so and the last question um I had was for Dr Forte you said that there's a bunch already for panel uh the panel on the anxious generation uh is there a board member present as well or is that something that a board member even wants to participate in I I didn't
I reviewed them I didn't see a board member on there but I wouldn't say that a board member couldn't be on there um we're just looking for kind of a repres I think we're gonna have somebody from St Claire's they they've offered it and we have a good partnership with them we'd like you know at least one parent one staff member um so we we're gonna I'm gonna have that call with the person next week come up with some ideas and figure out what we think is the best route but I don't think there's anyon reason why we can't
have a board member on it so if there is a board member that would like to be part of that panel that'd be great so you know and um just reach out to Dr Forte and if uh if there's room for additional panel member then maybe uh maybe we can have someone from the board on there so okay that's it for me any other board members that wish to share anything or okay so moving on to the agenda we will open it up
for public comments at 8:03 p.m. seeing no one in the chambers and no one online we'll go ahead and close public comments at 8:03 p.m. uh will there be a need for an exe uh another executive session after this meeting I can update you on the last thing we talked about in um in the first executive if you like
the Hib case have some information okay so uh yeah then let's go ahead and open it up for uh uh we'll go into executive uh session U at this time um before we motion for executive well we'll let the public know that we will no longer be voting after we adjourn or come out of executive and we'll go straight to adjourning this meeting so um Dr Moore do you want to take us into executive
yeah I'd like to move that uh we convene an executive session in accordance with Section 8 of the open public meetings act the purpose of this closed session will be to discuss negotiations legal security and Personnel issues minutes of this session will be made available to the public when the need for confidentiality no longer exists I'll second thank you any uh all in favor I any Nays extensions we are
an ex at 8:05 p.m.