And the title of this presentation is bringing wellness to your students, staff, and our community. Maria Carrol. Thank you, Mayor Gallagher. Good evening, everyone. As Mayor Gallagher said, I'm Maria Carrol. I'm Superintendent of Schools of the Hanover Park Regional High School
District. To my left is Mr. Kelly, Principal of Whippany Park High School, and to my right is Dr. Allgaier. She is our District Wellness Coordinator, which is a very unique program to our high school our high school district. So, you know, I wanted to start out by talking to you a little bit about our mission as
educators within the Hanover Park Regional High School District. And that when we talk about education, many of us just think about reading, writing, and arithmetic. But what we really truly believe and foster in the Hanover Park Regional High School District is the education of the whole child. Looking at
the whole child from a comprehensive standpoint. Looking at their academics, but then also looking at their social emotional wellness, and how the growth of the academic program directly correlates to the social emotional wellness of a student. So, what we had
done Let me just So, back in the 2020-21 school year, and I'm sure many of you remember what was going on in 2020 and 2021, we started to talk about wellness. And we started to talk about student mental health, but what we wanted to do is we wanted to
change the focus of what mental health was, and we wanted to change the focus by using the concept of wellness. Knowing that wellness was something that was very important to our student population in order for them to learn and grow. If you look at Maslow's hierarchy in the bottom of the triangle
of Maslow's hierarchy, some of the bottom pillars of that hierarchy are safety and security. You need students to feel safe and secure in order for them to reach self-actualization at the pinnacle of that pyramid. So, what we wanted to do is we wanted to put in programs in order to allow our students
to not only feel safe and secure physically, but also feel safe and secure mentally. So, that's where that concept of wellness has come in. And what we have done is we hired actually a District Wellness Coordinator with Dr. Allgaier, which is one of the first uh types of positions we've had in the
state um with regards to this position. And what Dr. Allgaier has done is she's worked with myself, Mr. Kelly, and the rest of the administrative team very closely in order to develop a wellness program. So, over the course of the presentation tonight, you'll hear from Dr. Allgaier and Mr. Kelly to talk about
what wellness is, what our district does um regarding the wellness program, and what impact that wellness program has specifically on our school community. And when we talk about school community, we're not just talking about students. We're talking about students, parents, and the greater community at large, as
Dr. Allgaier would talk about some parent presentations that she hosts on a regular basis, one of which she held even last night um over at Hanover Park. Um and then obviously some wellness strategies and techniques that we use with our students in order for them to be successful both in the classroom and
outside of the classroom as well. Good evening, everyone. So, thank you for the introduction. Thank you for the invitation to be here. I'm very passionate about what I do. I'm privileged to take care of the children in our community, to be one with our peers, our colleagues, our families,
our extended families. And when we think of wellness, it's a very buzzing word right now. What is wellness? Is it yoga? Is it namaste? It could be. I like that part, but it's so much more than that. We're talking about how do we perceive ourself? How do we perceive ourself in
the in the realm of academics? How do we feel in the body we've been given? Do we feel socially connected? Are we isolated? Do we feel secure financially? Talk about Maslow and what is most important. Do we have food on the table, a roof over our head? If not, how are you supposed to feel well in the school
building? And if not, can we help connect you to resources that you might need? When we think about other aspects, we talk about emotional. A lot of our kids, they're so insightful, but some have not been asked, "How are you feeling? Well, in what way? In connection to your
ability? In connection to your identity? In connection to your family relationships? Do you belong somewhere on this campus? Do you feel like you're seen somewhere on this campus? And how to make the connections with them so there is more of a support system in
place outside of the home and with us? We also talk about why is wellness important now more than ever? Oh, I'm going to you got me on my toes here. Now more than ever, and really in the past 5 to 10 years, there has been an
increasing need for support. And why might that be? Why now? Right? Why not 20 years ago, 30 years ago? We're talking about a very complex intersection of not just oh, there was a pandemic and we were locked down and that was very stressful, which believe
it or not, 5 years later, we're still seeing residual impact cuz there's a great sense of isolation and a low access to help. And during the time of a need for help, there was a record time low of providers, but a record high of needs. So, what
were people doing at home by themselves? How were they coping? Were they turning to substance abuse? Was there abuse in the home? Was there feelings of not feeling understood and connected? A lot of that has still have impact today on the adults and the children.
There is a lot of managing pressure. There's a perfectionistic feel that we have for them as students. We have to achieve well, we have to get into this particular school. I have to have a plan. They're 14. Their prefrontal cortex is not done cooked yet. They're not finished.
They're not developed. How are they supposed to know? But they feel, whether it's from social media, from parental expectations, from just a general vibe in their community, I should know. I should know what to do with the rest of my life, the next 40 years. And you ask any one of us, you know, we don't know
in 5 years what we want to do sometimes. So, how can we expect it of them? But they feel the pressure. They're not sure what to do with it. There's a burnout possibility when we are all of our helping fields in this room. When working with families, with teachers, with students, with law
enforcement, with social services, there's compassion fatigue. So, can we talk about that? Can we give light to it? Can we connect with each other? This is hard. This is hard work. Can I understand and get empathetic nod from someone? A side conversation with a colleague and leaders in our building.
How can I get through today? This has been a lot. And we want to provide a dialogue for all of that. There's also an understanding that when the morale of the students and the staff feel better, we do better. When the families feel more supportive, when I can throw a lifeline to a family, here's
a CarePlus phone number, here's MHA. Have you talked about NJ Families in your home yet? Can we discuss if you need nourish? Is there not Is there not enough food in your household? Is there a political unrest and and scarcity and anxiety that's brewing in your home that's bubbling over into the school day? Is there someone I can connect you
to? Can you text 988? All of these different community resources, they develop over time. It's my Is it my fourth year? My fifth year? It feels longer, but the more I reach out and understand who's in our community to connect our kids to and our adults to, the better off they feel
supported, the more secure they feel that there's someone else on the end of the line, and the better they perform in school, and then most importantly, the better they feel about themselves, the more value they have. So, I don't typically use a microphone. I hope that's okay.
I've been given kind of two parameters for tonight. Don't talk too much cuz it takes me 10 minutes just to say hello. And then try to make sure that the volume is too low. Oh, I do have to use the microphone. All right. Well, I warned everybody, so full full disclosure. All right, there we go. So,
uh I also walk around a lot while I talk, so I'm going to move over here if that's okay. Um A couple of things that I I need to give you just my my general impression on this. So, it's my 11th year as high school principal at Whippany Park High School. I started at
Hanover Park, and the other principal at Hanover Park High School and I were pretty much in lockstep. Pretty much everything that we're talking about here is mirrored in both schools. So, it's really, really important for those of you who are curious about Hanover Park, it's the same thing. I once heard a quote long ago that if your students feel safe and secure in
the building, then the test scores will take care of themselves. And I think that that's something that we always tried to do. That was always the goal of our school communities. We're small schools. We're community-based schools. A lot of our students, they come back. They live in town. They send their students or their kids back to our
schools. I have a lot of teachers who went to Hanover Park. I have teachers who went to Whippany Park High School. It's a very, very tight-knit community, and that's one of the things that we really, really enjoy about it. But I would say it started in about 2010, 2011 with the advent of cell phones and access to the internet. You started to
see students feel more and more isolated, and they were still kind of wrapping their head around it. Now we have these students who are fully digital natives. They are immersed in a world that is completely digital, and they have two realities. So, when I have meetings with my students, I have class meetings once a marking period, I meet
with all our students, and I say to them, "You have the reality in which you live with us, the face-to-face reality, the reality with adults, with handshakes, eye contact, smiles, nuance. But then you also have this digital realm in which you live. I'm not a native to that, but you know things before we know things. You see things
brewing before we see things." And what we're constantly trying to do in the school culture that results in wellness that will impact academic performance improving their health outcomes and fostering meaningful relationships supporting social emotional learning bolstering healthy healthy social and
academic habits increasing student engagement and awareness and empowering them. Really boils down to one word if you ask me it's connectivity. Our students are starving for connectivity. And when they go out into the real world and they immerse themselves or they sit down and they'll sit and watch a phone
for hours. They will scroll through TikTok, they'll scroll through Instagram and they will spend a lot of time interfacing with something that's curated and it's really trying to manipulate them. What we try to do is when we bring back into the building we have people
like Dr. Allgaier, we have our SROs and our SLEOs in the building and we have our guidance counselors and we have our teachers and in every faculty meeting and every time I talk to them there are a couple things that I ask them to do. Number one, in order for our kids to connect with us and feel like they're part of us, we
have to get to know them. We need to know their names, we need to know a little bit about them, we need to know what they're dealing with. And then that also has to have a ton of communication between our faculty, our staff, our administration. So on a daily basis we're trying to touch base with the students, we're trying to touch base
with the wellness coordinator, with the guidance counselors, with the teachers. And I have in the Hanover Park High School and in Whippany Park we have an open door policy and we say to the kids, "You don't have to be Batman, you don't have to save somebody else, but if you feel like somebody's struggling, tell an
adult. Tell a coach." Because we tell our coaches, we train our coaches on how to deal with these things. We have meetings at the beginning of the year and we do talk strategy. We talk about winning games which is important, right? But we also talk about if you want a healthy culture of a team,
those students have to feel secure and they have to feel validated and they have to feel seen. And that's one of the things that we're constantly trying to do because 15 years ago it was more about test scores, it was more about showing up. And now like you said it's this intersection of so much information
that quite frankly they can't process it. And what we're really trying to do is just build a community and a sense of belonging and a sense of safety where no matter what's going on in the world, all the noise in the world, all the noise at home, when you walk into the building you feel like you have a connection. It might not be with
me which is probably a good thing in some ways, right? They don't want to talk to me, but it might be with Dr. Allgaier, it might be with their counselor, it might be with their coach, it might be with their teacher. It could be with an aid, it could be with anybody in that building who we understand if they need help they can reach out to and then that
person can reach out to me or somebody else in the district and we can get them help and that's ultimately our goal. But if you have this overarching sense of it's important that your state of mind is in a good place and that you feel comfortable here and comfortable enough to ask for help because you feel
connected then chances are we can really help you. And on a daily basis there are kids who struggle probably more than I've ever seen. You know, I'm a product of the '80s so a lot of this didn't even exist back then, right? But it's a different world, it's a
different reality and we try to make sure that those kids can connect to somebody so that they can feel that they're important and where they are mentally and emotionally and physically quite frankly puts them in a better space. So
thanks to the leadership of Mrs. Carroll we brought on Dr. Allgaier. Um if I could clone her I would have 10 of her in my building every day um because the kids they flock to her and I will tell you this and I'll get into some of the things, but last year was probably the biggest test of me as a principal.
Bar none. I had a student who was almost fatally taken from us. Um it's still hard for me to talk about. And she was in an accident with several other students. As much as I was worried about the student who was in critical condition, I
had five other girls who are on the precipice of leaving and going to college. She got them into the building. She met with them. That was the connectivity and that for me was a big test for us and I think if we can continue to do that where the
kids when they're really dealing with something that's visceral and brutal, if they can feel connected to somebody and I can get them back in the building and they can go to class and they can go to lunch and they can see somebody then I think we're winning. And fortunately that I mean you all know
what I'm talking about, right? Um we had a big day for the young lady and it was a great story. It's a resounding success story. I'll carry it with me forever, but the people behind the scenes who helped those kids were the wellness coordinator, were the counselors, were the teachers and it's
all about connectivity. Okay, so then just with some of the nuts and bolts we infuse a lot of this into our curriculum, right? So we train our teachers, we talk to them about how you talk to kids, when you talk to kids, mandatory reporting, things of that nature. And then we also have a lot of
character education and service learning and I'll get into that a little bit more. That's part of our character education, but in a nutshell it's really about taking what you're learning and putting into action because if you do that the studies will show you and anecdotally I will tell you you have a more empathetic group of students in the
building and if you have more empathetic students in the building you have quite frankly a nicer place to work and a nicer place to go to school. Um we do a ton with our co-curricular programs, we have a lot of clubs, so many clubs and I'll come back to that later as well how that's also going to go back to what I
started with, connectivity. Like if you don't have a club and there's not something here for you what do you want to do? Maybe we can start one. It might fade in 6 years cuz you've moved on, but I got you into the building. You're a wildcat, you're a hornet, you have an identity, you've
been validated, you've been seen. Oh, you're not doing great. Let's talk. And it's kind of the the way you can pull them in and make them feel like they're a part of something bigger than themselves and also feel supported. Um Dr. Allgaier does a ton of programming with our students and our parents and then of course we have crisis
intervention that we use all the time. Um I'm sorry that I made eye contact with Chief Wack in this crisis. But sometimes he gets the call. Um and then we also have a ton of connection to the community resources as well as risk assessment protocols and things like that that are all built in. So if I'm
out of the building for whatever reason my assistant principal, he knows what the steps are to help somebody. We have a lot of protocols in place because ultimately at the end of the day we just want to make sure like I say to them when they're freshmen, when you walk in this door I want to see you in 4 years when you're
wearing the cap and gown and you're walking out. And the only way we can do that is if we have a sense of community and connectivity. We've talked a lot about the overarching umbrella in the program and it as a whole, but one thing that we didn't talk about is how this gets into the classrooms on a daily basis. So some of
the things is that that we have that's very unique to the Hanover Park Regional High School District and as Mr. Kelly said, when I speak about the district I'm speaking about Hanover Park High School and Whippany Park High School, is that we have wellness courses that are integrated into our program. Courses like Dynamics of Health Care, Fundamentals of Health and Wellness and
Scientific Principles of Nutrition, those are actually dual credit courses where students are getting coursework not only through Hanover Park Regional High School District, but they're also getting credit through Rutgers University. So those are dual credit programs that are focused specifically
specifically on health and wellness. Um mindfulness, which is a unique course a semester course elective that we have for our upperclassmen at Hanover Park Regional. Um Dr. Allgaier pushes into that class at times um and that is a very popular elective with our upperclassmen. Public speaking is
something that we initiated or we reinitiated back recently into our curriculum and it's interesting what we're seeing in public speaking is the anxiety that students are having to speak in front of a group. Dr. Allgaier is working with those students to push in to manage that anxiety and allow
students to be flourishing in a public type of speaking environment. So Dr. Allgaier's services are not only on that broader spectrum, but they're getting pushed into the classroom in courses such as this. We have an independent reading initiative in our English language arts departments at both high
schools. The concept of choice is extremely important for our students. Giving the students choice empowers them and allows them to learn and grow in the manner in which they choose. So that independent reading initiative is very important to us in order to allow
students that concept of choice. Obviously I talked about Dr. Allgaier and how she pushes into the the to classes and it's not only the classes that I spoken about. There's a number of classes that she will push into on a regular basis to talk to them about self-advocacy. Our freshman seminar
program she has been in multiple times to talk about how as freshmen you can advocate for yourself to allow for additional student student success. Allow them to make those responsible decision making skills. We know they're adolescents. We know they're going to make mistakes, but the question is going
to be how are you going to learn and grow from those mistakes in order to be successful human beings in the future. Developing that social awareness and relationship skills are pivotal. As Mr. Kelly talked about these students are very used to being on a phone. They do
not speak with each other on a regular basis like you and I would. So what we try to do is we try to incorporate skill development in the classroom such as cooperative learning types of skill sets in order for students to be able to speak with each other both in a
professional academic manner, but also in a relationship building type of manner. Those are skills that you and I might have taken for granted when we were adolescents that are not skills that are inherently developed in the teenagers of today. So all those mindsets that we sometimes
think as as adults, oh, well, this is what we do. That's not what adolescents do on a regular basis, and that's why we have to be very conscious of what we do to allow them to learn and grow in those skill sets, and those soft skills essentially, which are extremely important that we find as high school
educators. Okay. So, I'm going to talk to you just a little bit about our character education initiative, which really was kind of revamped, I want to say around 2010, because we found that it wasn't really working. We had a lot of placards on the walls, right? It would say citizenship, caring, fairness,
respect, and we do an announcement, and we expected the kids to be like, okay. We're going to do it. Um, they're in high school. They don't even read them, and they don't listen to the announcements unless their name is on it. I'm just being totally frank with you. So, we had to re-revisit it, and one of the things that we wanted to do
was we wanted to have an end game, and the end game was really about getting the kids more involved and experiencing something, and then kind of thinking back on it, reflecting, and making it a little more intrinsic. And we knew that we weren't going to move a mountain in a day, but over time it might help. So, we started our character education
initiative in Hanover Park High School and Whippany Park High School, it really the secret to our sauce is something called service learning. So, I'm going to run this back to being a child of the '80s, where when I was in high school, we did community service. I'd go rake leaves, or bring in a can of
soup, and I did my duty, or I'd go to church, and I had to help out in some way, and that was community service. Well, now what we do is we take a class, and we teach them something. And then we take that concept that we teach them, and we ask them, well, how do you want to put this in action?
How can you do something with this? And then the best ideas always come from the kids. So, a while back, pre-COVID, we had something called the gallery walk with a genocide studies class. The kids would study genocides, genocidal atrocities, the causes, the roots, things like that. Initially, when we offered the course, I
didn't think anybody would take it, but it happened to be one of our most popular electives. The kids were like, well, we want to do something where we can educate everybody on what genocide is, what causes, and things like that. And then essentially, what we would do is we build a pop-up museum in the hallways, and every kid in history class would go through a packet,
and they'd learn about genocidal atrocities, the causes, the impacts, the effects, things of that nature. Then we would couple that with a guest speaker by the name of Maud Dam, who survived the Holocaust. She would speak to the students. And then she would walk through it, and then she
would talk to the students as they walked through it with her, and then the kids would write it down on pen and paper, and they'd reflect, and it'd be a really simple question. How did your experience in the gallery walk reflect one of the pillars? Take a moment and write something down. And then that's really where you see the
kids start to process it on an individual basis. And believe it or not, that's service learning. That's taking what you're learning, having the kids create the projects, create the pop-up museum, and have students go through it and reflect. And the kids who went through it and did it, they reflected upon it, and it was
great. But the kids who really learned the most, the kids where you saw the spark, were the ones who created the museum. They're the ones who did the projects, and then at lunch, they're like, man, did you see what I did in the gallery walk? Did you check that out? What do you think about that? And then they're
high school kids, they're going to talk, and then they're going to weave in and out. They're going to weave in to the project and the genocide, and they're going to weave out and talk about Friday night's game, right? Or they're going to weave into it, and they're going to talk about the how my tie doesn't match my shoes, or something like that. They're high school kids. But if you listen to those conversations
in the cafeteria, you can see that it starts to have an impact. And that's essentially what we do. So, then we take those activities, and then we connect them to our pillars of character, and then we try to reinforce that on a daily basis. What do you think you can do? And it's always about choice. What can you choose
to do? Even when we have students who are in our office for bad decisions, why did you choose to do that? What do you think the impact of that is? Cuz the easy thing is to say, all right, you're in trouble, get out of here. But it's much rather have those conversations and get the kids to reflect, and if you're going to do that,
it's much more helpful. But again, they feel connected. Those activities bring connectivity, and then when they start acting on it, and you listen to their ideas, and you let them, like, ah, I want to do uh some sort of bake sale. All right, we'll find the materials, we'll find the
money, you do a bake sale, but what's it for? Why? Well, I learned in my nutrition class that we should make like high protein meals for people who are, you know, indigent, things like that, and you connect it, and they have the bake sale, and then they take that money, and then they give it to the Morris County food shelter. Something of
that effect. And that really, really helps. And that in a nutshell is kind of our character education. And we have a lot of bullet points up here. The service learning, we integrate it, and it's in our curriculum, it's in our goals, it's in our PDPs, things of that nature. And then we also do the heavy hitters, like we do the October
awareness months. We do newsletters, and we try to highlight the students who do it. But if you look at our if you follow us on Instagram, shameless plug, I'm just saying. Hanover Park and Whippany Park both have Instagram accounts. What you'll see is we try to put up there as much as we can, random acts of kindness.
So, I don't want the kid who's, you know, the super athlete or the straight A student all the time. I want the kid who went out of his or her way to help somebody, didn't make much noise about it, didn't say anything, I just did it. And the teachers email me, or call me,
or they come down, and they're like, listen, you know, I always say Johnny, all right? Johnny did a really good job. He did this for another kid. I just want you to know. Cool. I bring him down, I give him a T-shirt. If I have any gift cards to Starbucks left over, I give them to them, and then I take their
picture, and I post it out, and then the parents get a nice surprise. Why are you on social media? Oh, well, I just helped out a student who was having an issue or a really bad day. I helped out a student who had special needs. I had a student who was struggling, or I helped somebody up, I picked something up, I did something that was totally random,
that somebody saw, and the teacher recognized it. Connectivity. Connectivity. Chris. I'm still going. I'm sorry, I'm still going. Um, I'll be very brief. I thought that connectivity was like a really good closing, wasn't it? Come on.
I was like, man. Um, so, I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I a lot of things that we have done just nuts and bolts. We have a ton of clubs. These are just a few. Book club, kids
helping kids, saga, erase, interact. Those are all kind of service clubs. There's a lot of clubs. I have a sports media club. I have a Wall Street club. Over the years, I've had a lot of I had a ultimate frisbee club one year, right? Like, but we've had a lot of clubs where
we try to get the kids involved, and then we also do student focus groups. So, the superintendent a few years few years ago spoke to me and the principal at Hanover Park and said, listen, I want to hear from the kids. This is what I want you to do. I want you to get a panel of six kids. One panel is going to be freshmen, then
another one sophomores, then juniors and seniors, twice a year, different kids. I want to meet with them in the guidance conference room, and she's going to ask them questions. I call the kids down. I say, listen, you're going to have to you're going to have the opportunity to sit down with the superintendent and ask she's going to ask you questions. They all think
they're in trouble. I'm like, no, no, no, no. You're going to get a very candid conversation with the superintendent of schools who's going to ask you essentially, how can we make the schools better? The number of ideas that have come out of that are awesome. But then what happens is
the superintendent gets first-hand knowledge, boots on the ground feedback from the kids, and then what the kids do is they go out. Where were you third period? I was in the focus group. I was with the superintendent, Mr. Kelly. It was awesome. What did they ask you? Oh, they asked me my opinion.
They wanted to know about this. They wanted Did you tell them about the paper towel? Yeah, I told them about that. And then the next thing you know, I'll have four or five kids come up and be like, hey, the next focus group, I'm your guy. I'm your guy. I don't know, I want to be in on it. But what we try to do when we make these focus groups is we try to take
a cross-section of the student body. I want to take kids who are involved in everything, who want to go to Princeton. And then I want to take kids who are not as involved, and don't necessarily know what they want to do. And then I want to take kids who are in vocational tech, and like, no, I'm going to go into HVAC
and make a fortune, and you're going to be calling me in 10 years, Mr. Kelly. I'm like, yes, you're coming to the focus group. So, that I have we have different disparate voices, and that's really how you gain information. But the power of being able to sit down with the superintendent of schools, she takes the time to do this. It builds, again,
connectivity. And the game of life is something where we bring in an outside organization, and the kids go through, they're given scenarios, and they have to try and know where the resources are. Scenario might be, well, you need, you know, you're out of power, you don't have any money, who do you have to talk to? And you go to the various communities, organizations,
they'll come up, they'll set up tables, and you'll go to them with their situation, and they'll help you out. And it's just to kind of introduce them to the resources that are in the community. And then we have wellness, it's infused into our classes like crazy. A lot of our teachers do breathing exercises. They have the kids sometimes do standing
and stretching. Um, do brain break walks, grounding to the senses. And then the public speaking thing is amazing. I have students who are brilliant, brilliant. You put them in front of a crowd, and they and they and they freeze up.
So, that's something that we really need to address, uh, and we're doing that through a public speaking course, and then also through other pieces of the curriculum. And then AP exams. If you're not familiar with advanced placement exams, it's a testing it's a testing rodeo that takes place in
May, where the kids are really, really stressed out. And we do a lot of things with the kids. We'll do a lot of AP study sessions and things like that. And as we get closer and closer to the test, it's not as much about content as it is managing how you're approaching it.
When you start to feel stressed out on the test, what do you do? You do the breathing box. You reflect. What are you drinking while you're taking the test? Are you drinking water? Are you drinking a Monster, right? Things like that. And we try to help the kids so that they can manage
that stress, not just when they're taking the test, but building up to it. Because there's a massive amount of anxiety when these kids are like, well, I really want to do well on these tests because ultimately they could have some implications on college credit or I get into school and things of that nature. They're high stakes and we try to make
them more realistic about what those high stakes really are. You're going to be okay. This test is not who you are. Just approach it the best you can and there's some strategies to do it. Okay, I'm out. All right, so this is my favorite part
to share. This is my office at Whippany Park. Not the traditional looking office. I have a very similar one at Hanover Park and you can see there's some set of ponds, there are some twinkly lights, there's a lotus in the middle. It does not give the vibe of
let's get down to business get a science score of five on the AP exam. Let's make sure we get number one on the team. No, come in. You're welcome. Whoever you are, you are welcome. I run a number of wellness groups. I thought maybe I'd do one or two per school, see how it goes.
I'm running six currently and between the two buildings, we have a big big breath and variety of types of kids that are signing up. It used to be a few with like some good intellectual literature minds that have some insight who want to go a little deeper. Oh, well then they brought a friend. Now there's actually a
jock from one of our teams on there. Now there's this whole group of kids that I brought three friends and now they're all signing up. I want to get into the next one. When's the next one? And I'm thinking, okay, well what do they want to do? What do they want to learn about? The number one thing is actually connection. Do you want to be in there? They want to be seen. Their points want
to be valid. They want to understand that they're not the only ones going through this. We have groups such as the art of assertive communication. Now I'm pretty much 80s, maybe 90s with my childhood and still no phones. Our kids
are afraid to call to make an appointment. If I say call your dentist, they're like, oh my god, are you kidding? Click. Is there a way I can text them? Can I text for the appointment? Please, please, please. You know, can you go to that teacher and ask for help? Would an email be better? No. No, no, we're not.
Please show up. Please do something. But they're nervous, so how are we going to talk about that? What do I need? How can I ask for it? Why are my needs important? Who's going to advocate besides me? No one. You are the number one advocate. The second area, transfer student support. We are lucky that we
have a diverse community. They're coming from all areas of the state, if not the world. We have exchange students, people coming from Ukraine, we people coming from other counties. It is a very different vibe coming from southern Florida rolling into northern New Jersey.
And they're walking through the hallway saying, where are my people? Who do I belong to? More like who do I sit with at lunch? Who do I walk the track with during gym? Are they going to think I'm weird? I don't dress like this. I dress like this. My hair's like this.
They come in nervous, worried. We had four different countries represented in our last transfer group. Not only did we have children that were new to the district, we had children new to the language. I'm talking Chinese and I'm supposed to connect somehow with a with a student from here that's grown up since they
were three in the school district. So a lot of that group was we do have overlap. We can be welcoming. How can we extend our hand to these students? How can we make connections with these students? We have things called under pressure. I just had this this morning. I had six AP
kids. And when I say AP kids, we're talking four APs in their schedule, scheduled for five next year. They are under a lot of pressure and they sometimes get tripped up with irrational belief systems. If I don't get A4 or A5
and get my credit, I will not get into this college. If I don't get into this college, I won't get into this career. If I don't get into this career and before you know it, you're walked all the way down to I am jobless and unhappy and and on a rocking chair by myself until the end of my days. Whoa.
Because we couldn't get a good score in in lit? In AP lit? Where can we Where can we walk it back and try to go back to the basics of how do I deal with distress? Can I tolerate it? Can I accept it's there? Can I manage myself with a strategy and
move forward? They're on yoga mats doing grounded breathing techniques, leaving the room just a little bit later. We have a lot of groups that have to do with the ins and outs of resilience. It's not going to go away all the time, not for us, not for them. How do we deal
with that? There are groups about anxiety, about anger management that I too might feel isolated and depressed and how do I reach out when I can barely feel I can get out of bed? And then there's a lot of things that have to do with academic, vocational. I have some students right now that are
working with DVRS, the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services. They have special needs and way back in the day they might be thought of someone who might be unemployable and that's not the case. There are job coaches, there are resume builders, there's community-based instruction,
they are valuable members of our community. So how can we make them feel that way? How can we prepare them? There's a tiered supportive services much like a pyramid and my pop-ins to every single solitary freshman seminar class is to make my face known and its
services are known. That is universal. Having a speaker come for assemblies about the use and misuse of social media, universal. But then there's the wellness groups where the kids are like, I need this. I want to sign up for this. I'm struggling with my mood. I need to connect with someone. They're
self-identifying. They're a tier two group. And then the tippy top of the pyramid, the top little percentage that I work with are the most psychiatric cases we have in the district that are facing the most adversity. These are kids who may be products of abuse. These are children who have
substance abuse that is running rampant in their homes and they need somewhere to go to talk about it. These are kids who have tempted their lives before, who need a suicide risk assessment and who need resources beyond the school and the family. These are kids who may have to have other agencies, many of you are
here tonight. We work with the arrive program, we work with NJ4S to extend a hand from the outside to pull them up because they can't get up themselves. And those are the kids I see one-on-one. Those are the kids that we sometimes have to send out for psychiatric evaluations. Those are
the kids that are in my nest in this room every single week. And they're the most precious children that need the help the most that are part of our group. Last but not least, we have parent workshops. Just last night I worked with a room full of parents about how do I
not only handle stress and anxiety, how do I handle my stressed out teenager that is now living in my home? Oh my god, I'm scared of them. Okay. Okay, let's walk that back. What are they doing? What's happening? And how can I help them cope without one
either ignoring and not validating it's real, it's real to them. We might be wise enough to know it this will pass or we need the help in like starting that conversation. They're holed up in the room all night. How do I get them out and talking? So a lot of what we do is community
outreach, individual intensive services, structured programs and a lot of connection. So you'll see me associated with graduation readiness or earnest workshop. Yes, they're going to graduate, they're getting their diploma, but do they know how to navigate a campus map by themselves and ask for
help? Do they understand how to reach out to a therapist when they're living in another state away from their family? Do they know what it means to advocate when something not right is happening? They have to speak up for themselves. There's workshops in college planning that the counseling department puts on
every year and there's resources for family. There's so many families that want the help, they just don't know where to start. So we're here to connect them, to make the warm pass off to a human, to someone we recommend, to an agency we've worked with before. Either one.
He's like, keep the microphone. Fine. So what we're seeing is the more we see our children, what I say see them, see them for who they are, how they identify, what they're experiencing, the more they come to us. The more they feel safe. The more they feel like no matter
what happens, no matter what landed me in detention, the principal's office, whatever it might be, they're still going to be loved, they're still going to be welcomed back, we're still going to work it out with them. They're going to feel more engaged. There's something for everyone. There's a ping pong club. You can do anything.
There was a minds over matter organization a little while back where people wanted to learn about therapeutic effect and how to find more accuracy in the community. We want to see the staff engage with our children. I'm invited into public speaking courses so I can just help them
with their jitters. I'm invited into other courses where we're going to do a mindful walk and inhale and exhale and stimulate a vagus nerve to make a calming sensation over our body so we can handle the hard decisions that are in front of us. We're giving tools to everyone. There's
an increase in parent involvement and when there's an increase in involvement, there's an increase in self-worth because now I know you care enough to show up and hear me out and take me seriously. And then there's evidence through our surveys and our focus groups and our
meetings and our student observations that we gather informally. And some of this is, oh my god, they're coming to school. Wow, this kid's been absent this many times and they're actually in their seat engaging. What a phenomenal piece of data. Now, that data is not going to look the
same as an SAT score. And the life that's in the seat because we helped bolster it and make them feel worthy is not going to always show up in a ranking of a school. But what we're going to see is that these kids are getting value in who they are and why it's worth striving for a higher
quality of life and that's when we know we've done a job well done. And all the resources can be found there, but I think more conversationally so when we see it in our children, in our community, in our groups, you see it live in front of you.
Does anyone have any questions? Mike, can I get an appointment for the breathing? Your referral slips can be handed in tonight. We can sign you up. I just want to thank you, Mayor Gallagher, for having us this evening. Oh, I'm sorry, there's a question. Not so much a question, it's a
comment. Very happy to see that you're embedding social emotional learning into the curriculum. You have a I don't know if you're aware of it or not, but you have a study out there, a meta-study, that backs you up. It was
done in 2011 by Loyola University and University of Illinois. It was a study of 214 districts. Uh it covered every demographic. Probably it was 2000 or 275,000
students, K through 12. By embedding the social emotional learning into the curriculum, those districts experienced a 50% drop in disciplinary problems and an 11%
increase in test scores. And I believe a follow-up study a few years later, those test scores were up to about 14%. Mhm. Yeah. Um so I my background I was a fire captain for 26 years. While I was in that job, I was the
contact officer of the critical incidents. When I retired, I became a disciplinarian in a middle school. So I had a lot of work with emotionally challenged uh students. And uh one of the problems
with um Just this, please. Thank you. One of the problems uh with kids being in a constant state of anxiety, it triggers that fight or flight syndrome and it actually affects the architecture of the brain.
The good part is it's not irreversible. And social emotional learning gives these kids the skills they need to deal with the stressors. So now with social emotional learning, if it's done properly, the kids are managing the stressors instead of the
stressors managing the kids. Um uh what else did I notice? Um Yeah, so a uh as you said, um kids are constantly on their phones and everything, you know, like I said when I was a disciplinarian, that was
that was a big issue. But what in doing that, as you well know, they're losing those interpersonal skills, which also affects problem-solving skills. Which as they get older and, you know, parents were I have a 30 31-year-old son
and you always want to try to solve all their problems, but that doesn't do them justice in the long run because you're not always going to be there when they need a problem solved. And if they don't develop those skills at you know, basic levels over the years, they're not going to have
them when they really need them and that's going to become a problem in the long run. Um also removing the stressors, uh the kids being able to deal better with anxiety. The study also showed that it reduced
uh uh physical problems in adults years later. So you are absolutely, you know, you you hit the bull's-eye. Uh it it's you have studies to back you up and the the
districts that are out there doing that, it's it's showing real real benefits, you know, in the in the long run. I I think part of the problem, you know, I noticed when I was a parent, um I'm on the mayor's wellness committee in
Chatham Borough and in some communities, it's like a it's like a competition with the kids. My kid did you know, my kid got higher scores than yours. You know, the kids should be competing with themselves, trying to get the best that they can out of their abilities.
And the more parents, you know, start to start to live through their kids and it's like, you know, well, it's a reflection on how good a parent I am, how good, you know, my child does. That's a lot of pressure to put on a kid and it's not fair.
Uh you know, just you're not going to not get into a Harvard, like she said, if uh you know, if if you're if you're wanting to your club or you played baseball or something like that. There's got to be a balance and I think a lot of parents, you know,
we need to reach the parents and say, "Hey, you know what? It's fine to motivate your kids, but it's not good to drive them. That's not going to that's that's not going to be good for your kid in the long run." Thank you. Thank you.
First of all, I'd like to thank Krista De Giorgio for helping us set this up. Krista, thank you very much, you did an incredible job. I'd like to thank and recognize Deputy Mayor Mahalco, who's back there. Mike, how you doing? And Hanover Township PD, thank you very much for being a big part
of everything. Uh I'd just like to say to our team from Whippany Park, actually Hanover Park Regional, what was really special about tonight to me is a lot of people talk to us about what we should do, not knowing what we actually do and not knowing what you actually do. So how
many times do we go to assemblies at our schools and watch our children, but I haven't seen an opportunity for our families and children to watch you and what you do for them. So the fact that we're recording this tonight, it's going to get a lot of
views. We're going to put a lot of time into the editing and we're going to section it out. So we're also going to work with you on how to title this portion and it's going to be what Hanover Park Regional High School is doing for you. Because many many people don't know what
you do until something goes sideways and then they learn. But I think you do a phenomenal job for whatever that's worth. Thank you. >> Tonight I learned a lot and therefore our families are going to learn a lot and I could speak on behalf of our team. We really appreciate everything you do. And Mr. Kelly, one thing you said is
interesting and I learned this title from Tracy, we learned a long time ago how dangerous being isolated is. But when you take isolation and then you referred to connections three times, I know the connections in your building and I know the connections in Hanover
Park, which is very very is the same. It the atmosphere and the attitude is the same. So connections piggybacks onto isolation, Tracy, and and I think I know how important that is. So that being said, we hope you hang out with us for a little bit. Uh Maria Carroll, you have to, you're on
the dais, so you're not going anywhere yet. But thank you very much, everybody. GREAT JOB. >> MUCH. OKAY, NOW