##VIDEO ID:uY-tbUvdtyY## the New Jersey open public meeting law was enacted to ensure the right of the public to have noce of to attend meetings of public bodies at which any business affecting their interest is discussed or acted upon in accordance with the provisions of the act the mon Township Board of Education proved public notice of this meeting which included the time loation that was posted at the mon Township Municipal Building all M Public Schools the M Public Library the mon Township Board of Education Administrative Office build the district website and AD advertised in the Daily Record and monville in the board's official newspapers on January 28 2024 so another portion of you uh so in your weekly the packet I gave you the District goals and the uh bo event goals that were Ved on and adopted last June into July and then we added all the action plans allet question basis I'll just start talking about it uh we have uh by law we have to U there a summary report for HIV about the self assessment that each building has to do so I'll just start this each year and uh you have a team of people from each building looking at eight different core elements of the HIV and how they're doing these things in their school so by category the first one is going to be HIV programs and coaches or other initiatives so the maximum score is a 15 and uh M High School scor 15 laar 14 the others are 15 Mason gave one point lower this year under 13 so that's area that they want to work on a little bit more uh core element number two is training on HIV policy maximum scor is a nine uh all the schools gave themselves a nine except for Woodmont Valley View and C Hill that was the same as last year Coral three other staff instruction and training programs monville High School themselves a 15 which up one laar went down one to a 13 Cedar Hills a 15 and the other schools were 14 producing themselves at one so each year so this indicates to me that each one is they looking at these things seriously each year seeing it did a better job or they need some more help you know this year core El number four curriculum instruction on H related information and skills each school gave themselves a six which is the same as last year that's the maximum for HIV Personnel maximum is in nine each school gave themselves a nine as the same as last year Cor six School level HIV intitute reporting procedure M high school gave themselves a six which is same as last year RAR reduced by one five all the other schools G themselves maximum six the same number seven was the hi investigative procedure uh 12 is the total so high SCH 12us down 11 and all school 12 and the last HIV reporting maximum six all schol the same as so uh it's good news and like I said seeing the plus and the minuses shows that the RS seriously looking at these things and now identifi work on continue work so especially for everything do a great job looking other scores I that out twice a year about the actual scores where they and you see how overall very very highy abely good teams very good teams yes would they just might feel because sometimes the teams change sometimes so you have some new uh members they might say you know we need to be brushed up on some training and so then they will go to training like so for instance next month there is one being offered by the county so maybe one or two of those people might go to that training and get rushed up on something would you like to take sure so I will be speaking with you this evening about the Elementary schedule specifically the changes to the Elementary schedule that will begin when school begins in just okay so um the first thing is just the agenda so I'll going to give you about the science of breing because that's what really drove us to adopt amplify and then from there we made adjustments to the overall schedule as a a wi period and then also thinking about departmentalization at the fourth and fth grade level so on average it takes a child two to three years to learn to decode English it is the toughest alphabetic writing system in the world um the only one that is comparable is um the Asian languages but they're symbol based they're not alphabet based so basically the science of reading and you might have heard a lot of this uh in recent years refers to all the research that about how reading occurs and how children learn to read and the instructional practices that can assist them to get them to read fluently so at the heart of it uh two researchers in 1986 proposed what we call a simple view of reading and it says when somebody is presented with a passage of the text how do they extract information or meaning from it and according to the simple view you need two things you need need to convert the written word into speech which we call the coding and then you need to understand that speech which is language comprehension so this is basically a graphic that you will see um when we talk about the simple view so if words were if BR words were um or pictures like emojis one for each spoken word children would learn 50,000 different pictures fortunately writing instead tells you that the sounds that each word makes and there are 44 different sounds in English and it doesn't sound like a lot but there is because remember there's only 26 letter in the out um another researcher um Scarboro in 2001 came up with um a synthesis of that simple view so you need language comprehension and then you need word recognition what do the sounds um what sounds do they the letters make and then how does that become words and then there's increasing automaticity and um increasing strategic comprehension as students learn to become skilled readers so the first point is decoding when children first learn to read they already understand a lot of spoken language but words and letters are as strange to them as what you see up there if you can't decode the symbols in a sentence you can't read it even if you know the language in which it's written sounds logical enough um so we start with decoding unfortunately English is complicated so the technical term um for the sounds is the phone names and then you teach them what the um the letters then you teach them what sounds the letters stand for so in English the p a letter can be p as in pen as in photo or silent as in paryl in Spanish the P always sounds the same it only one sound Associated so now let's try this a mystery word begins with a letter e what sound does that word begin with f e anybody else hold there's actually six possibilities f as an N likeon got e as an e that shout I as an i I as an English as an early and a as an eight or eism come so the um the whole point is that in learn English you can't just learn e as an you have to learn all these other things but children in Finland only have 29 sounds that they need to learn right so um on average it takes children in the US two to three years to decode English the toughest alphabetic writing system in the world in Finland where there are no exceptions each letter always for the same sound and children only take a fews to learn to deod learning English is a lot harder and it takes practice and that practice must beate the second point about learning to read is comprehension there were two researchers in Wisconsin who worked with 64 students and basically what they did is they took this 18 by 20 in replica of a baseball field and they put 4 in wooden figures on it and then one by one the students were handed the same story covering an inning of a made up baseball game and asked to re so here's the passage chac swings and hits a slow bouncing ball toward the short stop Hy comes in fields it and throws it to first but too late chernak is on first with a single Johnson stayed on third the next batter is whitcom the Cougar's left fielder the balls return to Claris he gets the sign and winds up and throws a slider that wiom hits between Manfred and Roberts for a hit Delaney comes in and picks up the ball Johnson has scored and chernak is heading for third he comes here comes the throw and chernak is out chernak argues but to no avail so now the question is who did best at correctly reconstructing the story strong readers kids with good knowledge of baseball or it made no difference kids with good knowledge of baseball in fact good readers who didn't know baseball scored 19 scor 19 out of 40 core readers who knew Baseball scor 27 out of 40 so what does that mean that means that kids need to have a background and knowledge in order to get the comprehension part of reading so basically um sorry for the Ty strategies uh to build knowledge need to shift from explicit and systematic teaching to we shifted so at first we always taught kids how to build knowledge through explicit and systematic teaching however over time it became more popular to teach thinking skills and strategies and what happened was over time um kids lost that background knowledge that helps and that over time in um different subjects areas that are common at the elementary level you can see the number of instructional minutes we have so for reading language arts for all elementary levels about 87 minutes of their instructional day but look at science and social studies we're down to 20 minutes or less and it's those subjects that science those social study subjects that is teers about the world around them with that defit we find that students have harder time with thege compreh of so that's why we looking atsy that is AE langage and what that does it does do the explicit systematic instruction along basically students will get to know how toode but then at the same time they'll use text and they'll be taught knowledge about the world around them that's interesting fun and engaging and those two pieces together should build a stronger foundation for that just so you know that instruction guides teachers in explicitly teaching the 150 spellings for the 44 sounds of English so it's amazing so the science of reading has eight principles that are up here um and it also talks about why we want to do that so we want Equity we have students from all different walks of life maybe from all different parts and they don't have the same schema they don't have the same Bas knowledge and therefore by teaching knowledge as part of the English language arts program we can ensure that there's Equity cost um strong background knowledge also lends to better vocabulary so the whole idea of we don't need to teach it anym Google way has found not to be true by teaching and directing and showing kids what is around them we can help them be stronger overall um which leads us to changing our schedule and adopting amplifi um some highlights the surve will continue to be the same however the period L will to 15es there will also be a win what I need now period which will be 25 minutes that all students will have at some point during the day and that can be used for enrichment intervention ESL Rel Services what that little bit of time it doesn't seem like it's much but it's the difference between a child being pulled out of a science or social studies block to get that they need and or staying in and being with their classmates during that time so if we can do this intervention or enrichment work when all kids are getting what they need then they get to stay in class and be with their peers during social study science where historically school districts always kind of took that to get them to do more reading or math physical therapy or you occupational therapy or whatever they need it um certain things will always stay the same like our band orchestra lessons it will continue to be the P program and it will continue to be the same length of time we are also um going to departmentalize fourth grade we've always done it in fifth grade but we're now moving it down to fourth grade and it will be for math science and social studies so they'll be Ma content expert science content expert and social studies content expert and what that will do is that will provide that rich background instruction in conjunction with what the students will get through the Amplified program um I kind of went over what the wi is but this will also be that personalized differentiated instruction that we know is good for children um um with the fourth and fifth grade once again students will be they will be um heterogeneously grouped and the teachers will continue to differentiate um based on students needs will be Noel ability and is ref and but I found this whole discussion and topic about the science of being completely fascinating I'm not sure why but maybe because I like baseball um but you know in my very little experience it seems as so programs about reading come and go like for example my daughter a whole language was a big deal and then when Alex seven years later when he was in kindergarten first grade he was back to clonics so where does this fit in um in terms of whole language and phonics is there any piece of that so when the whole language movement started monville never adopted it fully they always had the phonic program we always had foundations and so we taught phonics [Music] and so on um what this will do amplify will um discontinue our use of guided reading which is Lucy ckins youve probably heard about her um she was through Teachers College at Columbia uh what they found and this really came about during the pandemic when parents were home with their kids and they're trying to help them and the kids were Tau like look at the pictures to try to figure out what the words mean or you know you don't have to sound out every syllable well that's great and all if you have pictures on the page but when the pictures go away and you don't have anything to fall back on like what's that sound how many different e sounds are there kids struggled um so what they found was that this whole idea balance literacy which is the piece and reading piece were in conflict with each other based on the sence of reading research um so this now what it adds back for us is um a bigger concentration on core knowledge when we piloted it what we found was topics that even the teachers thought were a little it like there's top the fifth graders on donot in this program um there's the Renaissance there's geology there's all these different um component chemistry so they're learning through their English and then we can build upon that bying that into their actual science and social studies classes as well and one more question um this has to support the notion that more time parents or grandparents spend reading to their children and providing [Music] experiences um so we are keeping a little bit of phonic in this there's a lot ofic how is and so why was it that we were teaching about the world through our reading befor it sounds like this's emphasis on teaching about the world through learning to read before what's the difference between you know reading before and this form of reading so this program Amplified puts it all together it was it was silent it was reading and then you learned reading strategies like what does the you know textual elements that students saw that could help them but what we and then we were leaving to the science and social studies to the science and social studies classes but then we were kept taking that away part of it is because of accountability and assessments and everything the focus was always on math and English and then um we modeled after what assessments were given to our students and we're finding that um they they they don't know certain things that we grew up KN so now [Music] that's we don't get give up Fox and socks so I okay couple things first of all thank you for a really excellent presentation and I must say I'm very very happy to see the initiatives I think they're going to work very well and just a commentary as I was looking at your presentation and there was an emphasis on what I think was rather unbalanced and unhealthy emphasis towards English all the way up here then massal lower then you get down to the bottom you science social studies and and I think a lot of that probably philosophically is a product of where we've come as a society over the last several decades of have test schools English math and yet a lot of people saying go we value our schools based upon test scores so what happens schools are going English math English math actually tests science is significantly lower social stud is even lower than that because social studies doesn't show up on test anymore then you get down to the ARs practically non-exist and what I'm seeing now is really more of a balance where our students are going to have a better idea not only as to English and math but for the other things that they need in society and I believe it gives them a more well-rounded education as a matter of fact you see that science is up Social Studies is going to be up and you know even specials are going to be up and I guess just a question thing I don't know what if any effect that could have on our test scores I mean could possibly result in being somewhat lower and if it is you know what I'm okay with that because I think we're finding out over the years that test scores are very very poor indicator as the education student is getting even a worse indicator as to the kind of teach is so I really think we're definitely going in the right direction here and I commend the administration um so I know the program is that specifically GE to the program actually goes up to 8th grade and we are adopting the amplifies amplify in sixth grade okay and then I know that we had several classes piloting it and we positive feedb the teachers were could you just talk quickly about the strategy for training the staff and teachers tooll out so the teachers who were in The Pilot did get some initial training from the uh representatives from Amplified um and then we uh gave everybody a six-hour training in um May and June and we made sure that they have all their resources over the summer so that um they to go there is going to be um some additional training for K to2 teachers the first opening days of school and then there'll be another full training um on our October PD date we are also working with our instructional coaches who will be going into the classrooms and working with the teachers or um Team teaching with them and you know it's kind of deck and then we'll also be providing teachers with opportunities to articulate and collaborate with their peers across the district so that they can um feel connected and share best practices and what's working what's not working because they do really need to feel supported the nice thing about um the program is that it's a One-Stop shop so even our new teachers that are coming in don't have to with the seven different programs for our Ela block that we used to have it's all contained within one um comprehensive but one program I think it's great remembera growing up with the color oh my gosh that's that that was the different levels of learning back then um my question is who picks the subjects is it the teacher for each lesson and how how long does a lesson generally take like if you were doing science so so for this program amplify actually has uh about nine units that are the the core knowledge piece of it and then there's a whole different section for the foundational skills which is the phonics portion of it um they have vetted these and they have um you know done this and and they've done it across the nation um and then we are able to pull out some that but each lesson is supposed to be about 90 minutes um so they should be able to complete these within their block but they also have time to rete and um we built in for the schedule so that they do have some downtime um for other things besides just amplify we didn't want to take away teachers autonomy Al together to do some of their pet Stu you know projects that they like so there should be a balance for that so this is my other question it goes with the kindergarteners that entering Learners you know you hear these young parents now um saying that these kids they're teaching them to read at four years old and then you have other Learners that are just playing you know and they enter five and a half or six years of age do your teachers find any difference between the Learners who are reading before coming into kindergarten or the learn or not or do they just end up the same place when they get to second grade I'm just curious because there's a lot of pressure on parents things most thej of them even out you'll always have those students that'll be accelerated for the duration of their career and probably Beyond um they they have a um their Advance at the beginning and then slowly other students will catch up to them amplify starts out and the program starts out really slow for kindergarteners I mean it's basically how a hold a pencil and then it accelerates very quickly because those foundational skills need to be set once those students have those children have them then they can take off and any parent who's ever taught their child how to like shoelaces knows that it's uous until they get it and then it's like they've never not done it and that's how this program thank you very much a very inter I'm okay um let's move on then to committee reports Finance facilities Karen uh no meeting but we will have a meeting on September 17 that so we did meet before this meeting and I want to thank Andrea first of all for being um very informative and comprehensive at our committee meeting as well as your she gave a lot of my report just now but um we talked about the schedule we talked about foreign language um and you know we've been reviewing some the curriculum updates to be approved okay uh policy Joe yes we met on August 6 to review 17 policies and regulations for first okay thank you communication uh Mike's not here Christin Safety and Security um we are working onu a meeting for SE are uh New Jersey school board Karen I just want to make the board aware that um the new JY evaluation review test for we host a virtual hearing on Wednesday August 28 46 together from Educators students and other stakeholders including board members details on register just want to let everyone know the two meetings have been set for the fall winter um October 2nd they both be hyri meetings but October 2nd will'll be at quic high school the topic Mental Health Resources for your school district and December 4th will be at marown high school and the topic is creating an effective board culture okay Joe Mar education Serv we had a meeting last Wednesday just our standard meeting we are looking to possibly super [Music] andess okay back toip all those no for another week and a half okay um now negotiations um can you want to say anything further about negotiations I just had AEF conversation Laura and the association is anticipating they have period they cany the contract um but it looks like we haven't anticipated September 10 to approve the contract and looks like all on same so that was the on 10 and will announce it be a single item meeting contract okay uh so moving on to public participation anyone wishing to address the board on anything on the agenda um there will be another participation session so items on the agenda okay name and [Music] you suggest to um on the parent side of looking to the kids that they looking at my girls who have been doing foundations and the other programs and then now they're going to be switching and then now having ing different one of the things I think in my research about amplify I um was learning that there's not like reading levels in the same way so in the past like the teacher would tell me or first grade second whatever would say like your child's reading on this level I would take that home work with them help them um what kind of like parent guidance is there so you should get something once we start from teachers to kind of help you bridge that Gap um foundations and Amplified program are all based on um oron Camp so it's it's similar Concepts and a similar structure for how they do it but you'll get more and the teachers you know by back to school Mone should be able to support you yes you're not going to have the my child's get to um there is a universal screener that's part of it it's called B eight and that will provide parents and teachers with more information about where get fall and then what we can do with them from that point um so so as far as like me on my like when I stud should I start like me as aent where should I start and being able to like set my kids up for Success just read with them I mean that's basically it and um one of the things that the the reading levels would do is like I said you know use what's on the page and the pictures to help kids determine words um now I would say just have the kids sound out the words and if they know those phone names you know every single and and try to work through the comprehension from there rereading you know a lot of the same strategies apply but now we don't ask them to guess at Roots we actually we ask them to sound them out so that's a support that you can do with um your children and just um you know it takes a lot of deliberate practice like it says and so that's what we just need to Del continue we expect we're we're not sure we're going to see how well it goes and then we'll make that determination throughout the course of the Year usually at the Seven Grade level it kind of switches to a more High School focused where it's uh English literature not so much [Music] reading questions comments U motion on resolution thank you okay any questions on a minut uh section J Administration K facility person a lot of approvals here sure we have one retir we have ter insinger who's been retiring she's been working in our central office for 11 years as a human resources representative she has supported all facets of Human Resources with the utmost professionalism and uh and collaboration and working with the central office and all seven Schools she's been proactive collaborative has attention to detail and most notably and uh the person that's going to miss her the most is Dr shter over there so uh everybody's had when you're coming into the district and when you're leaving the district you all interact with her uh she's an expert in everything that has to do with human resources and she would greatly Miss she has a lot of travel plans ahead of her and we wish her the best in her next uh section M curriculum any questionss and then policy section n any questions on policies first reading none okay ask for roll vote Please Mr Brown yes Mr D yes Dr calino yes m s yes Mr pal yes m yes Dr yes no session uh old business uh General board Comm business anyone have anything to say Karen you're nodding your head I aming my head okay yes yes would you like to say I just wanted to give a shout out to two of our supervisors s Schwarz of and supervisor languages uh both of them the tcj women's Leadership Summit in October a conference by the School of Business and is attended by Business Leaders from all of the Tri Area um I've had I've been lucky to hear drar Dr spiter and Dr Schwarz SE they do a Duo kind of talk fantastic to watch they inject a lot of comedy and very engaging so I them as they get invited to participate in more more conferences and I did want to mention and I'm sure Charlie who had much more experience with Mr card than I did express my condolences to the of mar card he was a principal here for many years anyone who ever knew him the mention of his name okay uh last lastly public participation anyone wishing to say anything about no nothing okay motion CL thank you very much see you all in September