e e e e e e e e e e
e e e e e e e e e I think we're ready to call the um
meeting to order uh with a roll call Mr Donnie here miss Andy M MC here Mr mmud here M Brogan
here the Ridgewood board of education has been meeting an executive session pursuant to njsa 10 Poland 4-12 the minutes of this meeting will be released when the need for confidentiality no longer
exists um I hereby move that the board oops uh uh pursuant to requirements the open public meetings act advanced notice has been given to the Star Ledger the record and the clerk of the village of Ridgewood in addition notices were posted in the office of the board
secretary in all school buildings please join me in a a flag salute agents so welcome uh Dr Schwarz good evening everyone thank you for your patience the board was just tending to some closing out their final business and executive session we appreciate everyone's patience um we
have some really fantastic presentations today that we're looking forward to sharing uh for starters we have some students with us representing our Cambodia club and so I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to them at this time could you please introduce yourselves my name is call oarn um and I
am one of the presidents of Cambodia Club my name is navine suer the other president of the Cambodia Club my name is Mark DUI I'm the Director of Events and school deaon my name is Zoe Cameron and I'm vice president of the Cambodia
Club my name is ma mcer and I'm the director of public relations for the Cambodia Club the Cambodia Royal school project began in 2007 in three Ridgewood New Jersey schools it was conceived as a student driven program to fund construction of a school in a Royal
Cambodian Village and nurture ongoing cross-cultural relationships the concept was brought to the rwood New Jersey school district by two parents and the district approved the project in total the r of Cambodia project has raised over $200,000 to support our schools
abroad these are some photos from past events fundraisers and the camp Cambodia trip hi my name is Audrey hington and I'm a fifth grader at Willard I've been a part of the Cambodia club for 3 years in Cambodia Club I really enjoyed
participating in fundraisers such as Ben and Jerry's scoop night celebrating Cambodian New Year and steel wheel Bingo night these events help us raise money to buy fans projectors and tile floors for the schools the money also helps us pay for medical appointments for the
students I hope to one day travel to Cambodia with Miss parish and Miss Vader but for now I'm excited to be in the Cambodia Club thank you hi my name is EVN OWI I'm in fifth grade at Willard Elementary School I've
been in Cambodia Club since 2022 when I was in third grade I have learned so much about Cambodia and how school is very different from our schools here every year when students and teachers visit the schools they bring sports equipment pencils crayons and more they
also get a chance they also give the students a chance to visit the dentist because the kids there don't have dental care like we do plus toothpaste and toothbrushes for home how we raise money for these are fundraisers some of them are seal wheel Ben and Jerry scoop Knight and winter
wonderland we also sell things like s'more love for Cambodia which were s'mores kits that we made at a meeting I love being in Cambodia club and I hope one day I can go to go to Cambodia with my teachers I'm definitely going to be
in Cambodia Club Middle School it's so much fun thank you hello my name is Elise Russo I'm in fifth grade and I go to Willard Elementary School I've been doing the Cambodia club for 3 years now next year
I'm hopeful that I can go to Cambodia club with Miss Vader and Miss Parish so I can visit the schools that we support and learn a lot more about Cambodia I like Cambodia Club because I
can learn about different countries and cultures plus I like learning all about the famous ancient temples I also like adopting service rats and sharing postcards and learning all about the
kids who go to the schools that we support in Cambodia this is why the Ridgewood Cambodia Club is an amazing part of the Ridgewood education hi my name is Vivian OWI and I'm in fifth grade at Willard Elementary School I've been in Cambodia Club since
the fall of 2022 when I was in third grade once or twice a month month we meet from 3:00 to 3:45 in some meetings we talk about the recent trip to Cambodia learn about Cambodia and teach the kids in Cambodia about American schools a few weeks ago we made a video
of the English alphabet each student had to bring something in to represent the letter they got for example the person who had a could bring in an apple we try to show the Cambodian students what we do here at school some of the things we do to help the schools are replace the
floors with tiles and install fans in the classrooms in the past few years we have been so successful we are going to help two new schools I love being in Cambodia Club because I get to learn about cambodia's culture how school there is very very different from how schools break in the United States thank
you hi my name is Charlie cucan and I'm a fifth grader at Ridge Elementary I've been doing Cambodia club for two years now and I really enjoy it one of cambodia's most well-known symbol is Anor wat another well-known spot is panon pen which is also the capital of
Cambodia both spots are famous for many different things in Cambodia club we have learned that Anor wat is an ancient temple in Cambodia another fun thing to learn about is the African giant pouch rat named Maga who is recently retired
but used to detect landmines overall Cambodia is a great country that I've enjoyed learning about my name is Oliver beer and I'm a fifth grader at rge elementary school I've been in Cambodia Club since fall of 2023 when I was a fourth
grader some things we have gotten in the few past few years are we have um we've gotten dental care for all the students and gotten them dentist appointments we have also started helping two schools because because of two very generous
donors we have also recently gotten an English teacher for the students so they can learn about our language and how to speak it for when we visit overall Cambodia is a great country and we have are we are constantly working to help them have a better
education my name is Olivia Waldo I'm a seventh grader at GW and I've been a part of Cambodia Club since fourth grade I originally joined the club for something fun to do with some friends but after being a part of this for the past 3 to four years I've realized that it's so much more than that it's not
only fun but also a great opportunity to learn about another culture and help those in need two examples come to mind first when I was in sixth grade A Man Named aror Pond came to Willard after school to speak about his childhood during the Cambodian genocide which was the Takeover of an extremely violent
group known as the CH Rouge that lasted from 1975 to 1979 and unfortunately resulted in the deaths of many innocent people I learned so much from his visit and it helped provide context of what it felt like to go through such an ordeal that that context cannot always be
provided by a book another time when I was in fifth grade our club adoped Ed Ronin the rat while we might see a rat as a gross rodent here they play a vital role in Cambodia these rats are trained to help sniff out highly dangerous unexploded landmines we were making a
difference and I hope to continue to participate in Cambodia Cambodia Club in the upcoming years better understand the struggles that others go through and help make a difference thank you my name is Devon strawber and I'm in the sixth grade at GW Middle School I've been a member of Cambodia since I was in the
fourth grade at Ridge I'm here to highlight the Cambodia club's fundraising efforts for the last two years we've partnered with the steel wheel Tavern they donate 20% of the net profits back to the club this fundraiser includes games food live music and socialize it with fellow Cambodia club
members additionally an organization called team meaning the empathy equality entrepreneurship Mission matches our profits so after a fundraiser we double the money that we earn in our first year of having a fundraiser there we had raised $1,200 without team so with team
we raised $2,000 $400 in our second year we raised $1,180 without team and with team we raised $2,360 upcoming in may we have a fundraiser at Biagio and pamis it'd be great if you could try to make it thank you hi my name is Julia stabiner and I'm
a seventh grader at George Washington Middle School and a member of the Cambodia Club I've been in the club for three years and one of my favorite activities was writing post cards to students in Cambodia in the club us students are also able to communicate with our friends in Cambodia besides going on a trip to visit visit them we have written letters and postcards back
and forth between the schools in the postcards we talk about our names interests what grade we're in ETC this way we are able to communicate with the other students like us on the other side of the world and learn about who we are supporting with our project this postcard and photo I'm holding is from fourth grade when I was still in Willer this letter came directly from Cambodia
and is a student in our schools this form of communication between our hundreds of students really helps our club understand the lives and experiences of the people who we are supporting on the other side of the world thank you hello I am Will Harris and I'm an e8th grade at George Washington Middle School the Cambodia Club has been a special part of my
middle school experience my first meetings enriched me with the immense culture Cambodia had I was fortunate enough to learn the history in America and physically see it in Cambodia I learned and saw the dark history that plagued Cambodia and the dictatorship of popot which still impacts the country
today including prison S21 which used to be a school but later turned into a torture Camp I saw the old Temple and World Wonder Anor watt but most importantly I saw our sister school I recall our bus passing through the beautiful rural Villages of Cambodia and finally our sister school when we
arrived and got off the bus I saw the children clapping as we entered and I felt welcomed that day and the following we helped these kids learned English and had a fun field day with them I learned before our trip that the Arts were not in the Cambodian curriculum and I was happy to make them happy I I hope to
continue the Cambodia Club at the high school and and continue educating myself about Cambodia thank you thank you all so very much uh is do we have any followup from our high school students yeah okay but if everyone can please stick around because we really want to take a nice picture with
everybody before we go today okay all right so we're going to start with our recent trip to the schools this uh just happened about a month ago um we left on January 14th um we really nice we got to see as you heard some of the elementary schoolers and middle schoolers say it was really nice that we
got to see our sister schools um we're going to play a quick video um give some context for it real quick uh in Cambodia they don't necessar like the school system is still very new uh and they don't always have necessarily the best resources um to we actually have donated
a um a computer lab and we hired a computer teacher for them to teach them how to use newer Technologies um but when it comes to things like science they don't always necessarily get to do Hands-On experiments that's one of the things that we did with them when we went they seemed to really like it they had a lot of fun as you'll see in the
video in a second yeah so as you can see um when we went we also built Bridges with them we talked about the importance of bridges um and we because one of the things we really like to do is like show them like how to love to learn because it was used to be discouraged um and we just really
tried to encourage them to learn more go to high school graduate high school it's just one of the things that we really try to focus on and I really getting to see it firsthand at least for me was absolutely incredible getting to see them with the smiles on their faces as they learned things that they didn't know before it was really really special
to me um in this next video so obviously as you can see they they loved playing um uh rock paper scissors uh they actually already knew how to play they acted pretty much just like any kids youd have back back here in the states uh they played tag for a
bit uh they were all chasing me it was really really funny they literally the average third fourth fifth grader that you'd see back uh back home like in at Ridge or Willard they were really almost exactly the same it was really quite it was really nice to see um and they were
just really really fun to be around so one of my favorite fundraisers was the steel wheel fundraiser I met so many amazing elementary school kids there and we just all like had so much fun we sold um jewelry played Bingo and learned
so much about the history and we ended up making a lot of money there um some of the profit from the food there was um some of the food that was bought there went to Cambodia and also the jewelry that was bought um that profit
went to Cambodia as well and it was a really amazing time um to share like the love and support we had for Cambodia and it was it was great so orange horn Pond is a speaker who shares a story about living in Cambodia
during the genocide he escaped and moved to the United States with his adopted father and we were so lucky to have him come and speak at our school and we're hoping that he'll come again soon um in October we met with Mr Hull who was a professor at Cornell
University he was born in Cambodia Richard high school students got to ask him questions from his favorite Cambodian dish to how he got to where he is today the students also learned a lot about the history of Cambodia at the team leadership Symposium at Ruckers we w we met with
multiple different schools from around New Jersey and discussed our plans to fundraise money for Rural and poor countries around the world like Cambodia the symposium at Ruckers helps our club get more ideas on how to support these countries the best way we
can so in December uh December 14th the rwood Cambodia project and rwood worlds for lines partnered in creating a winter wonderland experience for every kid in the elementary school program in the district it was an extremely fun um event we raised around
$2,000 um it was a very big turnout so this is kind of an idea that we will be back next year so this past November we created an online fundraiser where we made an ornament using the Cambodian flag over the course of a few days we sold over 50 ornaments surpassing our fundraising
goals which was a great accomplishment for the Cambodia Club One Last quick little bit about the trip um obviously we've done it every just about every year since we found the club in uh 2009 we're going to go again next year hopefully I'd love to go I'm hoping to get um as many people from the
Elementary Middle School clubs as well uh it's a really great way that we get to see the impact of the work that we do I've been in the club for eight years uh since third grade and um I know for me it was really really special just getting to see uh the kids and getting to see the impact that we've
made some future events coming up are the team World Cup of soccer tournament on March 29th and this happens at the super doome and we are representing the country of Cambodia we're playing other high schools who are representing different
countries as well and for fundraising if you donate $5 um people in the country will get a free F mail dignity kit for an entire year you donate $10 yearly supplies for a high school student $15 for weeks of
counseling for victim $20 40 nutritious meals for students and so on um and you can donate using our website and you can watch the live stream using that link for the Cambodia New Year
celebration that's on April 27th which happens at Kate yates's house and this brings together all of the people involved in Cambodia club or people part of the culture and it's just a really nice event um then and Jerry scoop night
happens on May 15th and people participating in the club can take a 30 minute shift and 10% of proceeds go to our schools in Cambodia for the taste of Team celebration that's on May 21st and it
happens at Biagio in pamis and we see how much money we have raised all the high school schools that have clubs a part of team go to the event and it's just a really nice event thank you so much for giving us this opportunity we hope to see you all
at the future events thank you and then for all sorry guys one more thing this is our link to our website where you can donate um on the venos there too thank you so much awesome thank you so much everyone
so first of all I just want to say just real quick just how proud we all are are of you first of all your presentation skills were fantastic it's very clear you all spent a lot of time to to present tonight and thank you for your professionalism and your fantastic speaking but also I just want to commend
all of you for your attention and your enthusiasm for helping others I think sometimes uh Bridgewood is this wonderful wonderful town and it's helpful sometimes to appreciate the things you have by going and helping some folks who don't have as many as many great things so I commend you for your desire to serve and for the kind of
things that you do and I'm sure some our board members might want to say a few things too and I thought that maybe Mary Lou might uh Mrs handy might like to say something CU she she was just on that trip and has been very involved in Cambodia Club my heart was swelling
hearing all of these students talk and naven was there when he was in third grade standing up like you all were and working with these students since the beginning 2009 I've been to Cambodia 15 times and the love and the passion of
the students that I've met at all the elementaries and the middle and the high school we all should be so proud so proud of these students who give of themselves who mean it who throw themselves in and they help in so many different ways and other programs but
they also don't forget others and the best thing is is to see that and was mentioned here that students in other countries are just like us they have the same wants and needs and and want to know what their favorite you know music is and they all love Taylor Swift and
back in the day they loved Justin Bieber so it's just heartwarming and thank you all all of you and the parents for your support and come on to Cambodia with us next year it is quite a trip I I understand after listening to but thank you so much
and thank you for your enthusiasm and and you're giving um I think that we can ask for more from our community when we um really see that our students are engaged in in the world and and are not
just focused always on Rood but I'm focused on the greater world and people who may need our support and you're doing a great job so thank you for that okay thank you and before you all go round of applause of
course yeah and before we all go we really want to get a photo with all of you so please all the students who spoke if they come and yeah if we can if we can maybe stand over wa yeah want you over here by the corner okay see Y come on over here want to get a
photo just the students go ahead and then the board members come in later e e e e e all right everybody thanks so much uh
next we have a few retirees that we're really excited to honor tonight so first of all uh we have we're going to honor from Benjamin Franklin Middle School we are going to honor Maryanne
Gus galenus excuse me maryan galenus and I see we have principal Stacy wisneski with us here sit all right we'll sit very authentic okay good evening
everyone it's both a privilege and a Bittersweet moment to to sit here today as we celebrate the incredible career and well- earned retirement of Maryann galenus MaryAnn's join joined here tonight by her husband and her daughter
so welcome for being here mariann's journey in education began by shaping young minds as a dedicated teacher in fourth and fifth grade in Saddlebrook and in 2011 we were fortunate enough to welcome her to Ridgewood since then she has been
an integral member of the child study team team at bfms as a learning consultant helping countless students families and colleagues navigate the path to success maran's passion for education has always been evident not just in the way she helped students
learn but in how she made them feel valued understood and capable her patience wisdom and commitment to her students have left a lasting impact that will continue continue to be felt long after today
Beyond her professional Excellence Maryann has been the heart of our community in so many ways whether it was her thoughtful advice her warm presents and the hugs she always gave us Maryann used to give us little tokens of her
appreciation and one was a wooden cutout of the word hug we all keep it on our desks and let's be honest her incredible baking she brought a special touch to our school that we will dearly Miss
but while we will miss her immensely we couldn't be happier for the exciting chapter that she's about to embark on maranne is looking forward to spending more time with her husband who's also her high school sweetheart as they embark on their new adventures traveling
together she's deeply committed to her faith and can't wait to dedicate even more time to her volunteer work with her church a true reflection of the kindness and generosity that defines her Maryann from all of us at bfms thank you for
your dedication your warmth and countless ways you enrich our lives We Wish You a retirement filled with health happiness and new experiences and if you ever feel like baking just know we'll always be happy to take some off your hands congratulations Maran enjoy every
moment you certainly earned it I can say a few words I wasn't expecting to say a few words but um it's just been a pleasure to work with maranne last 14 years and um you know Maran would call me into her office she like Greg there's
a mouse in the no problem I got to marry her take care of the mice she took care you take care of the children I'll take care of the mice and she was just so caring and just for the um you know for the for the students the staff always so
considerate and we just needed that kindness and she she always gave it to us and I just wanted to say it's we're going to miss you I'd like to thank the Ridgewood Community for the support I've had over the last so many years since 200 11 I
came in with Carrie Huntington Patricia stab Tony orini um hired me Greg was here from day one as well uh the staff at BF is really like the Disneyland of a school system
um we have a lot of fun and that's when the magic happens because the kids don't realize they're learning because we're having fun and um it's been uh an honor and um I thank thank you very muchus if you can stick around for a
minute we'll we'll we'll do we'll do a picture together we'd love to we'd love if you'd honor us with that thank you so much and next uh representing George Washington Middle School we have with us our principal as well Mr David Bailey and we're going to be honoring aah
Arana okay good evening everybody Senora Ada Arana is set to retire at the end of this school year after 26 years of teaching Spanish for Ridgewood Public Schools Ada came to the United States from Peru at the age of 22
after graduating from ruers she began her teaching career at Patterson Catholic for two years before coming to Ridgewood in 1999 she taught at the elementary school levels uh Somerville Willard and trll until until 2009 when she came to George Washington Middle
School and uh the students and faculty have been better ever since you arrived so just a few words from from your colleagues her snazzy outfits are only tapped by her passion and love for Spanish always enthusiastic positive and supportive of the students we are going
to miss her smiling face upbeat attitude and her great dance moves Ada is truly One of a Kind always has a smile and a signature Ola as she brightens up that each day at ngw she has left her mark on countless students
more than just a great teacher a is the definition of a true friend always there with a kind word great sense of humor and a heart of gold she's always willing to help but what really sets a apart is the way she connects with kids she has a gift for making students feel special
building their confidence and making learning Spanish something they look forward to a may be small in stature but she's a force of nature strong passionate full of life to know a is to be in the presence of a master
teacher recently a shared with me that her goal in the classroom is to not only teach her students the Spanish language but to teach them to feel comfortable taking risks in her she hopes her students see someone that is different from them but the same in the end we are all more
alike than we are different I was able to speak to many of A's students currently at GW and asked them to describe you as a teacher So Hear are their words happy extravagant entertaining silly
energetic patient Senora brightens up the classroom Senora understands me she makes complicated things fit she takes the time to help us understand she cares about me not just as a student but as a
kid I am excited to go to her classroom she is my favorite teacher OT we are so H happy for you and your family OT has three sons Andre his wife Jasmine Samuel his wife Vanessa and Jose Maria out of
plans to travel with her husband coko who I learned is also your high school sweetheart from Peru uh they first hope to go to Italy next year for the Catholic Jubilee she also is going to be a full-time Grandma to her granddaughter Rebecca who's here with us tonight her
middle name is a shares her grandma's name and her next grandchild who will be born in April congratulations Ada to a job well done thank you for leaving GW a better place than you found it and GW will always be your home thank you Mar
good evening everyone um I just wanted to say a couple of words um on behalf of the Spanish team at ridgwood Public Schools um I've known a since I've been the World Language supervisor uh since 2010 so it's it's been 15 years and I
just want to say a has been a stable experienced senior voice in the room all those years um she's gone through a couple of different partners at George Washington Middle School um she's helped train both of those people um she's
brought a vast experience in fact K to5 experience here um in our first rendition of a Spanish program at the elementary school so she was able to uh help the current rendition of Spanish teachers acclimate themselves um and
have an understanding of what our mission and goal are um ultimately she's trained she's in a key position at the middle school where she's training kids for the better part of two two plus years I'm and putting them in a position where they can um succeed at a rigorous
level at the high school in our in our Spanish program which is by far and away our largest language program um here in Ridgewood so on behalf of particularly the students that have gone through the countless hundreds of students who have gone through your program your classroom
and for the Spanish program at large um I wish you much health happiness um with your well-deserved retirement perfect for thank I just want to say much gracias thank you very much for all
these years I did enjoy and it was a pleasure working here and I appreciate you and trusting the education of your of your children and your thank you very much
I I think we'll get some uh photos uh so a if you'd like to come up with your family and have a photo that would be great and then Maryanne if with your husband and you have family too here too
great e e e e e e e oh oh I'm sorry sorry e
e e you know I think um Harrison why don't you go ahead and um I know the other board members will catch up okay yeah sounds good uh well hello uh Happy February good to see you all um I'll try to keep this quick for
you uh though it was fun to have some life in here I think right um so I'll get right to it uh ridgewood's very own star Johnny Jackson uh is having a good couple weeks uh he recently uh is officially cancer-free which is awesome
uh and also uh he just hit 2,000 career points uh so definitely he's doing awesome uh and I think I can speak on behalf of all the students when I say we're all very happy for him uh and proud of everything he's accomplished so uh the RS bands uh successfully had five
students audition for and make the All State band uh the music small ensembles concert happened uh on January 30th in the Little Theater if you can even remember uh January uh the Jazz ensembles concert happened on February 11th also in the Little Theater
um on Thursday the 20th the maroon and white recital uh paired with the rhs artists uh to create a joint event celebrating both live music and visual arts uh so those events happened in the learning Commons and the Art Gallery respectively uh so just a lot of music
stuff there um and then janere recently celebrated its 79th year a couple weeks ago at BF with its Vegas themed performance uh and they raised a record $291,000 and Senior scholarships this year uh and it was it was a great show uh if you got
to go I'm sure you enjoyed it uh so that that's awesome uh the learning Commons is featuring a selection of books in celebration of Black History Month uh for students to to browse and enjoy um the art history students recently visited the Met um a retired FBI special
agent came in to talk to forensics classes about her experiences um in you know recent world events she gave her opinions on some of those uh and she let students check out actual ual uh equipment like retired equipment uh which is pretty cool uh in order to familiarize students with
Shakespearean language and a fun and engaging way English n classes held a Shakespearean insult rap battle where students were paired off to exchange light Shakespeare inspired insults um I did that my freshman year that was kind of fun uh it's just it's just dumb and and stupid but that's some of the best
ways to learn right so um the annual rhs Asian Fest returns this year it's on Friday that's kind of the talk of the high school um it features music dance and other types of performances for students to watch uh in person or on a live stream uh that happens for four classes out of
the six in the day um and there's also a lunch where you buy a ticket and you get to eat lunch um and a lot of the the parents of the students in Asian Fest will actually Supply um like a little little thing that you can just take put
on a plate um for lunch um so I I ran today to secure my ticket because because I got that meal last year and it was fantastic you just get one of everything eat around the eat around the world and it's it's great um rhs recently recognized 12 students for being catalysts of positive human
interactions with maroon Awards uh and the career Pathways and medicine program recently visited the fertility Institute of New Jersey and New York um and courses for next year will be available to students um next week I believe so teachers are finalizing that now um the
applied engineering club recently submitted 12 teams to the NJ steam tank Challenge and 11 to the Thomas Edison pitch contest uh 24 rhs HOSA uh future Healthcare professional members competed in the Northern Regional Conference on Saturday January 18th 2025 uh in several
events uh four students finished uh finished excuse me as finalists and two will move on to States in April um even if we all tired of it the ski club and ski team are uh enjoying the abundance of snow recently uh the ski club makes frequent trips out uh to
ski for those looking not to compete uh and the ski team is obviously competing and they're fairing pretty well uh we have a handful of second place finishes and individual winners on the girl side and a couple of team wins team wins for the varsity women and I believe today they headed to um States it's a slalom
competition um so yeah so they're doing pretty well uh the crew team brought home two bronze medals and 10 top 10 finishes in the 2025 Iron Man Berg classic they also brought home nine medals including five Golds at the winter watt Farm uh the rchs Rapides uh female AC capella group competed at
Ramsey High School at a competition hosting schools from all over the Northeast and the acabellas recently had a competition out in Bayon uh also with schools from all over uh thanks to a grant the green Club purchased and instituted more of the new colorcoded waist bins to reduce uh confusion and
keep rhs green uh the bowling team is seeing success this season with one Junior bowling a score of 777 across three games which included uh an impressive 26 strikes and 30 frames so thought I'd throw bowling in there I feel like people don't talk about it a lot so give it some love uh the girls
who code Club recently went over to GW and introduced over 150 students to coding um the French Club and French National Honor Society are planning a visit to Monclair State's French day in March and lastly the rhs boys swim team recently secured their first sectional
title uh since 2018 against Colombia uh we did head out to States against Westfield and we did get slaughtered but that's okay we got the sectional win that's what we wanted um so yeah that's pretty much all I got for you um hope you had a good month and I will see you in March so thank
you thank you so much Mr Burns and I actually happened to be um uh through through some Fortune I happen to be actually with the girls ski team today because my son also is a ski racer and they actually won the state championship in both solemn and GS today so congratulations to the girl at Alpine
Ski team and thanks for thanks for reporting out on all of our teams and congrats on the section title so good so much good news coming from high school um thank you Harrison uh we'll open now for
um uh comments from the public and um as you come up to comment please just give us your name and also um the municipality you live in so is there anyone here for public
comment I also forgot to mention um if you could keep your comments to to four minutes or less that would be great I will be brief yeah uh uh James Coello Ridgewood resident um good evening everyone uh my comments will be very brief um I know that when
members of the community a lot of times come up here they bring up issues that they're concerned with or perhaps have upset them um I'm going to do something a little bit different which is to say thank you uh and to mention how much I appreciated seeing in the last board meeting the adoption of the board goals
goal one uh which read in part the need to Foster Public participation collaboration open communication with all state holders this year with the specific emphasis on our special education Community uh and really uh appreciated the requests for that report to update the board and the district's
progress on the four priority items uh that were identified in the special education report from December uh which include which I'll I'll paraphrase here a little bit to better align instruction and assessment expand support services mtss and inclusive practices Implement a structured parent communication system and partner with the cpeg and ensure
alignment of goals with the district strategic plan and review the state of special education annually uh I just want to say I think these are incredibly important priorities I was very heartened uh to see that the board has adopted this as their goal and again I thank you for your work and look forward to hearing more about the progress uh on
these priority areas thank you thank you be with me for one second please good evening Colby M Keen east side of Ridgewood Mr Ross so nice to see you again I think we should collaborate on a class together of Shakespearean insults maybe we can get together again it's
been a while been a few years um couple questions I was uh kind of in transit during the superintendent's coffee hour um I had run out of uh Chuck full of nuts so I
had to get to the store so I can enjoy some coffee during that presentation there was some uh talk on um what Dei meant uh or or making a statement there was a caller who had uh wanted some
clarification on that so I just have a couple questions um what does Dei mean to you all uh does each school have a Dei committee and how influential is this Committee in budgeting curriculum development
calendar development policy development and the implementation of each um is Dei a special interest group as a district head coordinator myself um I'm just wondering if you have
have heard any news on why the state has cancelled the webinar series that was scheduled they had about six or seven webinars scheduled this year and they abruptly uh canceled those those presentations so I haven't heard
anything maybe maybe you all have been enlightened um I'm wondering too um with the uh recent Administration organization um there's seems to be consolidation of power and a rejection of some policies so I'm wondering if you
have any theories on that and um I'm also looking for the ssds data presentation uh that was while there was a presentation in October there should have been a presentation again um for
the second half of the Year reporting on on on the data from the first half of the school year so I'm just looking into into that um I'm looking into that because one of the comments or one of the policies to discuss tonight was the the hi policy so I think just before we
we make any discussion we should have a full set of information before we look to revise that that policy um because there are concerns with the uh consolidation of discipline going into that direct hands of the
superintendant um a blending of the state law and a district policy is concerning um you know so I think we should have to have a community discussion on why why discipline is taking a legal angle and not an educational philosophical and
psychological angle um that's all thank you thank you hello my name is Kieran o ziden and I live in Ridgewood and I'm here with green club and members of High School talking about the inclusion of climate
change and freshman your biology though it is in the curriculum we believe that there's more that can be done to talk be taught about it and we think we are here to advocate for it now I'm going let other people if you guys want to take the book with you if some multiple speakers you guys can fill it in while you're talking
it's okay to take the book it's all right it's four minutes per person yeah you you each count as one person I'm Emma doen I am a resident of rdwood and a sophomore at rdwood high school and although this climate change
is included in the CP biology curriculum it wasn't sufficiently addressed in my personal experience I recall it being briefly mentioned in a past Point presentation but it wasn't actually discussed in class or taught in a manner that would incentivize students to engage with the issue environmental science is also not
a mandatory course at Richard high school so this means we must put further emphasis on the topic and climate change education during freshman biology it is especially important to do this early on because this is when students are exploring new fields of study and interest joining green Club my freshman
year is actually what sparked my passion for sustainability and environmental Sciences in general and and I believe it will have a very similar impact on many other students at rid high school if we further emphasize climate change education at ridard high school thank
you I'm Elanor I also live nid and I'm also a sophomore as my peer Emma has discussed students at rhs are not getting the proper education on climate change that we believe that they deserve and although me and my peers we put a lot of emphasis in hard work into making rhs Greener whether that whether that is
through as Harrison Burns mentioned actually the recycling bins being placed around our school and our Meadow and our wildf flower Meadows students don't participate in these events simply because they don't understand why it's so important so they don't care enough to by integrating more climate change
and environmental factors into the curriculum we believe that students will feel more incentivized to participate in these as they will begin to understand the impact that not only climate change can have on them but the impact that they can have on the school as a whole thank you thank you
hello my name is Devon and I'm a freshman at Ridgewood High School and I also live in Ridgewood environmental issues present issues in our day-to-day lives and these issues will only worsen not only is it important to learn about these issues in high school but it is also important to put more emphasis on
these issues at a young age in Middle School by learning at a young age of environmental issues students can enter High School to continue taking classes related to these topics and actually execute projects using their knowledge to improve the environment students will then
understand the responsibility they hold to improve climate change by learning about climate change it will not only improve the environment but it will also improve the well-being of students thank you thank you hi my name is Keen Sullivan I'm
anuka madra I'm ma sh and we are sophomores at rwood high school we also live in rwood the state science curriculum has placed an emphasis on climate change however we have not seen that through our personal experiences the
njsls has placed a focus on climate change but it hasn't been a big priority compared to the other subjects taught in biology the biology course where climate change is taught in is predominantly
taken by freshmen which encourages us students to learn about this crucial issue at an earlier age however the majority of us have learned very little about this issue throughout the approximately 8,000 minutes of class time for school year some teachers
despite the packed curriculum do make an effort to emphasize the climate change education which proves that it is possible to further educate us students on climate change all while using the provided curriculum education on climate change
is crucial because it's all of our futures there are so many issues around rid that are directly impacted by climate change like the droughts and the flooding of the field the only way to come up with an effective solution in the future is to educate our younger
generation about the problem just like how there's a heavy emphasis on the election in history class there should be an even heavier emphasis on climate change in biology thank you thank you hi my name is Jolie Walcott I live
in Ridgewood and I'm a sophomore at rhs my freshman year in biology didn't cover climate change as much as I would have hoped and my classmates and fellow students have agreed we sent out a survey to Ridgewood High School students and over half of them said that they do
not recall learning about climate change as sufficent as sufficiently as they would have hoped in freshman year biology those who claimed that they had learned about it in freshman year biology said that it was a side topic and did not have a specific plan that
followed after thank you good evening my name is Shaina Ramos and I also live in Ridgewood and I'm a sophomore at rwood high school um as my peers have previously mentioned the importance of integrating global warming and climate change into
our curriculum is of great importance and given the amount of time that uh science teachers in the science department have especially considering snow days sick days and just student pacing it's virtually unpredictable and makes it very difficult
to place in a new unit of global warming on top of the already intended material that teachers need to teach especially in time for midterms and final exams where students have to study a bunch of material so instead I propos that instead of adding a new unit into the
curriculum which would take up too much time we weave it into what's already into the curriculum that way students have a broad insight and better perspective for example if we take biology taught in nth grade they teaches about ecology the carbon cycle and you
know many more if we take into account the carbon cycle if teachers just took a small amount of time to talk about how human intervention has caused a negative impact in climate change students are not only learning about what they need to learn in Biology but they're also
gaining a broader Insight onto how their decisions affect you know the world this can go from chemistry to physics and given the opportunity we'd like to provide specifics on how to integrate climate change into the curriculum thank
you everyone I'm Maran Carroll um a student at rwood high school and as a student at Richwood High School I know how important it is to learn about environmental impact and things such as climate change um for my freshman year I happen to have a teacher who was and still is very passionate about these
topics um prior to this I had concerns about the environment but didn't know how serious these problems really were um and currently are but by being educated about these issues I become more aware of how urgent it is to take action and how our daily habits and choices can either contribute to or help mitigate current and ongoing
environmental crisis since then my interest in this topic has increased and I've been looking for ways to make positive impact one of the first things I did with joined the green club and start to get heavily involved some of the things I've done just joining the school year have been to name a few leading a team to secure a grant to
plant trees for the school assisting in the school garden doing trout testing attending green Ridgewood meetings to learn more about issues regarding the environment within the community and more I truly believe that without being educated I would not have been motivated Enough To Try to Make a Difference by educating students at Ridgewood High
School we can make a community of passionate change making students who are willing and educated enough to make a last ing impact let's carry Ridgewood High School's tradition of Excellence forward not only through academics by by but by becoming leaders in sustainability ensuring ensuring that
the Legacy we leave is one of responsibility action and a better future for this planet thank you for your time if you that if you'd like to um stay uh we're going to finish public comment but then often our superintendent has some comments back
okay please good stay um I'm just going to the screen to see if there's any any hands I do see um is it Amy do she have her hand raised Amy yes sorry about that
I didn't see your hand no that's okay am I good to start yeah please okay um Amy mccambridge Ridgewood um again former Marine um studied environmental and biological exposures and I just want to
give a huge shout out to the green Club because this is exactly what we need to hear and what I'm going to be talking about tonight um and you guys just proved my point that you are not getting um educated on on what's Happening and
that you are our future and you are our change makers and I am so proud to just hear you guys speak up I also run my own nonprofit I'd love to meet with you um this is a lot of the issues that we work on with that um Schwarz um I'm going to
talk about the tur fields and for the green Club I think you guys would be super interested in this um Schwarz you claimed during the coffee thing to have done a comprehensive review um about the tur field with a district um physician
and your attorney but let's be clear neither of them are experts in toxicology environmental science or public health The Physician May understand general student health but unless they consulted specialists in chemical exposures or opinion carries no scientific weight and your attorney
their job is to protect a uh Board of Education from lawsuits not to protect the health of our children you referenced a v variety of studies but but what studies are you referring to did you actually reach out to mount siai and Dr Evans and speak to the scientists
that are doing these studies on the dangers of turf fields are you relying on the deeply flawed EPA study that only studied an extremely low amount of athletes for a very short amount of time with their exposure of turf at 1 hour a week because that's not reality our kids
don't play on these fields for an hour a week they live on them every single student is exposed how many hours a week are they on those turf field for wellness I think the biggest betrayal to the parents and the students is that they have not consented to any of this
they have no idea clearly from hearing from the green Club the danger that you are putting them in have you tested the water that you have been polluting for over a decade with your turf fields have you tested the soil yet if not how can you claim that you have done your due
diligence meanwhile the rest of the world is waking up the Netherlands is Banning artificial turf by 20 2030 because of increased cancer risk and a great concern for the Youth a study of 60 Dutch football clubs found that their fields contain arsenic Benzene lead Mercury carbon black and heavy metals
and here we are pretending this isn't a problem and what about Washington state where reown coach Griffin started compiling a list of current and former players who have all developed cancer the list is now uh includes close to 300 players more than half of them who have a form of blood cancer the majority
developed Non-Hodgkins lymph and Hodgkins lymphoma we have seen this drawer before asbestos lead paint tobacco thinks once label safe until the people start getting sick let's talk about the heat artificial heat can get up to 80 degrees hotter than the ambient
air and 50 degrees hotter than asphalt that means on an 85 degree day your safe field could be over 160° kids suffer heat exhaustion and what about the Airborne chemicals released in the Heat leading to the inhalation of voc's and phahs many which are known carcinogens
your St students are breathing this in Daily and you still consider that safe other cities have had the courage to act Boston Bann artificial turf they chose health over convenience why aren't we instead are you off you offer training on Turf safety if it's safe why does it
need special training real grass doesn't come with a warning label and for what what are we selling our kids out for to save on maintenance to keep up with a trend at what cost because if artificial turf turns out to be as dangerous as evidence suggests the ones paying the price will not be the people in this
room making those decisions it will be those kids the students that you have failed to protect this isn't a debate this is common sense we are letting these kids down if there's any doubt any risk any chance that we are poisoning the very students we are supposed to protect the only responsible decision is
to stop and wait until more studies come out what we Risk by moving forward is so much worse we don't get a second chance at this when the studies are finalized and the illnesses up and history proved that this was yet another environmental disaster we should have seen coming will you be the outlier who had the courage
to do what was right by these kids because if not I hope that when the lawsuits come flooding in which they will that they don't go after the turf companies that they go after you all who had the choice to do something about it and chose not to and for the green Club
this is just talking about what we do not know yet about whatd yes um the four minutes is up so could you just um maybe yeah I'll I'll wrap up um environmentally I haven't even touched on the heat Islands what it does um to
our River um to all the species in the river to all the microorganisms so um yeah I would just I I would like to end with that and kudos to the green Club keep going because you're on the right path thank you thanks
Miss o'keef hi good evening Cynthia o'keef can you hear me yes we can great good evening everyone uh also Kudos uh from me to the Green Team um I think it's a
really great initiative to have young minds care about climate change um and start to you know put the wheels in motion start to think about how our actions will affect you know not only our community um but you know our world
our environment um and you know it dovetails really nicely with some of the things that Amy mcbridge said about artificial turf and that I've talked about in the past um I only got involved in finding out about artificial turf and the negative you know Health impacts and
also the negative impacts to our environment because of a project a major project that Ridgewood is pushing to cut down hundreds of trees and put an artificial turf field on a piece of property in Ridgewood and you know so
therefore I became concerned about our children's health and what it's doing to the environment now Amy spoke about many things she's got a really strong background in biochemical um you know studies and you know artificial turf as we've spoken
about before can contribute directly to climate change it's not recyclable it's a pest plastic Laden product that has a huge carbon footprint uh in terms of heat Islands heat retention and the impact on soil health so I think some of
these young minds you know may want to start thinking about you know what we're doing in our own community that will affect the planet um you know it's it would be a great project I think if they're interested they could talk to
Amy or myself um and you know maybe kick something off the ground where we come up with innovative ideas and other ways to you know do organic grass maintenance um and really reduce our carbon footprint and uh impervious surfaces
within our own Community uh that's all I really wanted to say but I really want to give a great shout out to this young group of people who really are passionate and I hope they drive that passion forward um and really think about Ridgewood and the impact um that their great minds uh can have on our
community thank you um that no other comments so that ends a public comment and um Dr schor did you have anything you wanted to respond to sure sure just to acknowledge some folks thank you so much um so for
starters appreciate Mr Coello joining us thank you Mr Coello he's been been an active participant and advocate for special needs community and special needs students grateful them come out it's nice to hear someone come out for a thank you um I also wanted to acknowledge Mr mulini he asked a variety
of questions I'm not sure fact that i' be be able to speak to all of his concerns here but um suffice to say that actually part of our district goals are to audit uh the district we've had de committees at our schools for quite some time now so our goal this year was to audit kind of what they do and
coordinate their efforts and figure out kind of exactly what direction we want them to be in uh given given some of the um uh some of the changes that have been going on at the federal Administration I think that we it's now is a particularly good time to have that goal in place um to answer the question our Dei
committees at our elementary school or at our schools have primarily been involved with things like funding speakers and special events and inclusive events um but that's the process of inventorying all of those things is what we're going through right now um I think there's a question about curriculum or policy our Dei committees
are like parent committees they don't they don't directly engage in policy or curriculum or anything like that um uh don't have any information about can State canceled webinar series um I think there's a comment there about uh code of conduct and HIV practices again and the
and the the or charart changes just to be clear um you know the the codes of conduct are the same as they were at the beginning of the year and have been uh every school has a code of conduct that's to be enforced fairly that's rooted in policy that hasn't changed um and then as far as HIV you know we've had the same uh very comparable policies
we haven't had any major changes to those policies so um but happy to happy to welcome in these conversations where we can engage more of a dialogue at the superintendent coffee um and then you referenc the ssds report we are due for that report the reporting period ended in January 31st and so we'll be we'll be
uh reporting we'll be reporting shortly I believe in March we're scheduled to report that um I'm sorry the reporting period ended in December and it was due to this state January 31st uh to our students uh who joined us representing our Green Team thank you all so much for taking time out of your
day uh I know you all have school tomorrow no doubt many of you have homework and all that it was really nice to have you all here I'm sorry we had a lot planned for tonight so we sorry we had to make you wait so long but you've done you've done a wonderful job expressing uh your concerns and your interest in advocating for sustainability and awareness of climate
change and uh taking care of our of our of our environment um Miss Murphy I think you had something to just to share real real briefly about that sure so I'm not sure if the students know this but we're constantly doing curriculum reviews and I know that
science is going to be reviewed now in the um next couple of years and one of the things that's being considered is adding additional climate change um into the curriculum so that's already uh under consideration by your teachers and by the supervisor of science for the district and the and the curriculum
department so we will pass on the notes of of all the things that you shared today too to uh to um to Miss Taylor our supervisor for Science and certainly your that go to your teachers as well U Mr Ross as director of curc instruction do you anything you want to
say I excuse me I just wanted to join the the chorus of voices commending you for coming out tonight we really appreciate hearing from you I was particularly impressed that you ran a survey uh you know I love that so uh you know thank you for sharing all and we are going to be taking a close look at this so we will be continuing this
conversation with you so thank you and we will not take it personally if you decide to leave after this after this little conversation okay so feel free to hang out you're always welcome here but if you want to get home we understand would it be helpful for uh
for the students to share the survey and results uh with you Mr absolutely yes if you have anything that you'd like to share with me survey or otherwise please feel free to to share that thank you all right great thank
you great and then we had a couple commenters here just with some concerns about uh about about turf fields so I just want to real quick just again clarify um you know we're not talking about adding any Turf in the community right now we're also not talking about their about um we've actually been
pretty candid about some of our concerns around safety with Turf in fact we actually just added some language to our student handbook um particularly regarding hygiene and safer practices around Turf um so again I'm not qualified to have a big debate regarding uh the specifics of all the studies um
at this point in time uh we don't see uh anything Rises to the concern that would cause us to close our existing tur Fields I guess that's really the question should we should we continue using the tur fields that we have um it's pretty clear that we need them for our programs um but we will have to make a decision in the coming years regarding
what we're going to do with them because they are going to be due for some sort of restoration so I think there's more conversations to be had but I just want to be clear know there's not really a com there's not really an action or proposal on the table right now that we're discussing but appreciate everyone's concerns and certainly want
you to be heard here thank you Miss brother sure I just have one comment for the Green Team um I think one of the students did mention that uh one of the passionate teachers uh inspired you so I think if you keep working with that teacher um and join the Green Team of
the Town um as one of your um the other students so join the Green Team uh maybe take AP environmental science because that's where you'll get a lot to get to work a lot and I don't remember the exact name of the book but one of the engineering books for the uh that was
introduced two years ago that revolves around a lot of the topics that are related to climate change so including the floods in Louisiana and other places that how that impacted uh humanity and the life livelihood and how people live
so that the whole engineering class or the that book talks about that and it revolves around that and that was also um the supervisor of the biology and the passionate teacher that you are talking about they they worked on that I think together so so they are working on it
but yes keep bringing these topics here and keep bringing the them at the Green Team meetings and uh I think everybody's intentions are to make it work thank you presentations all right thank you so much uh the first presentation that we have tonight we do have two we are going
to try to make them expedient I want to encourage the team to don't be afraid to be concise um I'm sure our board members are going to have questions for you so please make sure that you do leave some time for questions um but we had a presentation that we've been planning for quite some time here um over at some
point maybe it was over the summer Miss broken I think you I think I think this is all we're gonna blame you for this the duration of time here um no but seriously there was we talk a lot about um our priorities in terms of ensuring that we're providing a highquality education for all of our students one of
the foundational um paradigms that we are shifting to is the idea that having a very solid curriculum and great teachers and high quality instruction is absolutely The Lion Share of what we do
but uh we can't control factors outside of school and uh and factors within individual students that sometimes cause them to find themselves in a place where they are not meeting grade level expectations and and it's not just grade level expectations there are other factors that go in like there could be
other other needs that can be met but for this conversation we're talking particularly about the efforts that we're putting together to ensure that we are AC that we are planning for what the inevitable that some students at certain
times in their their over the their educational experience will not be meeting grade level expectations and the plans that we have in place to respond to that so there are two primary a couple primary things we do the first is that we monitor progress right we do that with really benchmarking systems
and progress monitoring and then we take action to try to help the students right the teachers are primarily involved in the action but the administrators have to be involved in creating the systems whereby we measure progress and monitor progress and then make sure that that information gets in the hands of the
teachers so that they can be respons respons for the student needs so we talk about that quite a bit and we've been talking about a software that we called linkit which is a primary software that we use to help us house our data for students monitor their progress identify Trends and then respond accordingly and
so in response to that inquiry we've been planning this presentation so preemptively I want to commend everybody at the table here right now we have a a team of Supervisors here who have done do a lot of work in link it and put together a nice presentation that should give the board members and the members
of the public a window into what what we get out of linkit how it helps us and why we think it's it's worth the resources that we spend and it's a important part of our progress monitoring all right so that said take it away everybody okay good evening everybody I
know that brevity is the soul of wit if we're doing Shakespeare references so I'm going to try to keep it very witty um so thank you Dr Schwarz um we're talking tonight about progress monitoring as Dr Schwarz mentioned uh and um so just to to to establish a
shared definition of progress monitoring it's tracking student growth identifying learning gaps and informing the timely interventions that we deliver to make sure that our students are achieving so we leverage data to do this the data that we collect from our assessments
informs our instructional decisions while at the same time driving important revisions and changes to our curriculum I want to give uh special credit to miss onmo here for creating this really this really great visual um you
know it it really represents the cyclical nature of this process right we are setting instructional goals for our students we're then delivering targeted instruction in our classrooms we're assessing student progress and then we're analyzing the resulting data and
we're using it in two fold two two ways uh we're using it for those for those students in that classroom but then we're also taking a look at it to try to sus out what's an instructional issue and what could potentially be a curricular issue and if we find that we have a curricular issue we're going to use that information to inform the
necessary revisions to the actual curriculum itself so Dr Schwarz as Dr Schwarz indicated uh progress monitoring is a big term it covers you know everything from benchmarking which is you know the the
kinds of assess ments that are measuring progress toward learning goals screening you know uh you getting early information on student needs your formative assessment which is uh kind of like your your daytoday assessment that's giving you a sense of the process
versus a summative which is that that end product and then of course your big standardized testing and so to to house all of this we have a tool called linkit linkit really does two two things for us it gives us benchmark
assessments and it also houses data and something lincol calls the data Locker so we're going to tell you a little bit more about that in some detail this evening and I'm going to start by Leading with the U
Benchmark the three the three benchmarks uh so we deliver in grades 2 through 10 three benchmark assessments the fall which is also known as form a the winter formative which is Form B and the spring summative form C so you can
see there in the italicized text it gives you a sense of the function of the respective assessments first one is goal setting it's giving us a sense of where the students are when they return to school in the fall midy Year we're giving this really again progress
monitoring test that's giving us much more detailed information about where they are with specific skills and standards and then finally the summative form C really gives us a sense of how they did across the year and it's predictive for the njsla so it gives us
a very good sense of how our students are going to perform going turn it over to membo to give you more detail and some concrete examples as Mr Ross mentioned um the perform student performance on the benchmarks is supposed to correlate with
how they're predicted to perform on the nsla so here's an example of what we would see on our end after students take a benchmark so njsla has five performance bands there's not meeting partially meeting approaching meeting and exceeding what linkit does is it
adds in an additional a sixth performance band called the bubble and students that fall into the bubble fall into that meeting cohort but they're the bottom 10% so these are students who who can p who are currently predicted to
pass the njsla but can just as easily not pass the njsla and just from the data that we have from our linkit form C which was our first one at the middle school that we were able to administer last year was we were able to see a correlation between our bubble students when you align it to how they performed
in nsla and how they performed in the link at form C our bubble students did typically perform at either a 752 a 754 like they just met the expectations or they just fell below the expectations so it is a good indicator of those students
you want to provide some additional support to to push them over the edge to be meeting expectations so here's an example of some data I was able to pull from the linkit form C for sixth grade last year and this is a topic overview so through
this we were able to identify that students were scoring significantly lower in expressions and equations compared to the other major topic units in sixth grade and expressions and equations is actually a major content area for sixth grade so students are
expected to master a lot Master these skills in order to be successful in their seventh grade curriculum so going further into this data and understanding that expressions and equations is an area of focus for us we were able to analyze by skill how
students performed on the linkit form C and if you see this the skills that we performed lower in all fell in between expressions and equations but we were able to identify the specific skills that they were struggling in so rather than having such a broad they're
struggling in expressions and equations we were able to identify that really identifying equivalent expressions what what do our questions look like what do their questions look like what do njsla questions look like to identify how we can improve our curriculum to support
those areas here's an example of the item analysis that teachers and administrators can review so in the item an analysis report it shows every single question that the students were provided the percent of students who answered
that question correctly but then it also adds in the percent of Stu the percent of students who answered each answer option so what's great about this is if you look at question number two 75% of students answered that question
correctly but 19% of them chose a so as a teacher and administrator you want to look at question number to and try to identify what were the common misconceptions or distractions in that question that caused students to choose
option A rather than option C and so what's great about this is Teachers can click on it they can see the question they can see the type of question the language used in the question how the question was presented and that's really important because a lot of times we look at it and we say oh my students mastered
that skill but it just wasn't presented the same way it was presented in class and so our goal is to present this information and questions in a variety of ways so that no matter how it is presented whether it's in sixth grade seventh grade or 10 years from now that
they know how to apply what they're learning to whatever they're presented or we doing our own ass this is the linkit form C so it correlates with how students will perform on the nsla actually questions
that's the question for they're provided from link it but they're ngla style question so they are similar to the types of questions that they will see on I don't think they can from most of these softwares for licensing they cannot copy the same question but they
would give you a similar question we're doing our own testing yeah this link it link test simulation of ngsl about distraction could you just yes so for example a lot of times
especially if you've had students who have taken SAT and ACT there's always a qu there is always an option that is the common mistake that students make when they're solving that type of question every every sat question you always see that one where if they didn't do that last step this is the answer they would
have gotten or if they made the common mistake that most students usually make they're going to get this answer so that's what you want to look at when you're going through these examples and I've even been in classrooms where teachers have pulled up the examples and showed what student 19% of students
shows this question what what mistake do you think they made so it actually creates great questions and communication between the teachers and the students as well so we have licens for linkit up to 10th grade now right so does do they
have simulations for PSS and SATs not in link it I'm not aware of it here's another example of a class diagnostic report that teachers can review and so in this report they can actually go through each of the standards and it will tell you the
percentage how students performed in that specific standards how many questions fell within that standard and then they can click on the standard and it will give you the student information of how they performed in that individual standard so for this a student a teacher might look at this and pull a small
group of the red the students who struggled in this area and do that type one level one type of questioning but then they can also pull the higher-end students the 75% or above that green and give them the type three that highest level higher order thinking to push our
students who are meeting over to exceeding so here's some examples of how we've been able to utilize the linkit data so far with our curriculum and instructions so for an example of what I discussed is expressions and equations we identified that in sixth grade at as an area of focus what we were able to do
this year is because we identified that last year in our Link at form C we moved that unit earlier in the school year and what that allowed us to do is to be able to integrate those skills into future units so after expressions and equations sixth grade moves to ratios and
proportions so while they taught ratios and proportions students were solving ratio solving ratios and proportions using equations their next unit is percents they're going to be able to write and solve equations with percents and which is actually a skill they'll be
they'll be building on for seventh grade so that I make sure I'm understanding everything you're saying that change that you made was a change in instruction not in curriculum correct so am I correct about that we like changing having the equations coming
earlier in the year it was kind of like it was a change in order of instruction yes yeah order of the curriculum yes okay but then but we integrated our the change of instruction would be the integration into our future units right the application I was trying to uh
understand with a real concrete example you know how Brian said in the beginning that you use Link it to determine whether or not you need to make a change in curriculum or a change in instruction and so what you did was both but so I was just trying to make sure I understood what you were teaching us that's all thank you appreciate and I
assume the teachers can all filter by their class to see which students need work right yes so I'm looking at it right now the examples I'm showing are from a district lens but teachers can look at their overall a lot of them teach the same class multiple sections they can look at all of their students
together they can look at it by class um and it is very helpful for them to be able to see this class specifically struggling with this skill or overall my students are struggling with this skill so another example of how we've been able to utilize the link at data
was actually through our geometry first math sequence originally when we met last year and we talked about the state test scores we had talked about waiting for one more year of state test results with our curriculum we had adjusted our curriculum in the um in geometry and to see if we had progress in it we
implemented linkit in January so we were able to administer Link at B and Link at C and both of those assessments were indicating that we were trending in the same we were not going to see the growth that we were hoping for in the geometry so we were able to make that shift to go
back to the traditional model of algebra one geometry Algebra 2 earlier rather than waiting on an additional year to make that change and our nsla results showed similar to what our link it was showing um the data that we collect is extremely useful it helps us Identify
some curricular gaps that may exist and also tell our professional development sessions at conquer maath and within the district it also helps us bring our action teams together meeting the teachers and during the meetings of the teachers we're making sure that we're identifying in current trends making
sure that our resources and our instructional pedagogies how we teach the students are current and and relevant okay so here are we have outlined uh English language opportunities to analyze assessment data
set goals and Target instruction so to begin the the linkit data Locker serves to house our district assessments and we have created customized templates for the K to 5
diagnostic assessments which include Universal screening and On Demand writing vocabulary is a topic and a skill that has been identified as an area to Target instruction across grade levels
the linkit vocabulary items um on which students have scored below meeting um the expectations or the benchmarks were used to design ex explicit strategies to strengthen overall vocabulary
performance uh the link it the link this one okay the link at data um allows us to look at the question and the standard
this is an important point because the njsla will only report the standard Miss for example when we were looking at the data about the questions that we were missing we noticed now it would be an informational text but in the past we
were missing reading History questions but we couldn't see the Ashley can you we couldn't see the question um but what we can see in linkit is the specific information to the
question so if we look at the question they're missing the interpreting graphics questions and if you look here these questions are specific to a timeline
um these questions are specific to a map these questions are specific to a graphic which we wouldn't have that information just from the NJ
njsla so what we can do here is we can reach out to our social studies colleagues and we showed them the skills that we really don't have room for in the English classroom to teach the graphics like this and so the social studies colleagues are introducing these skills and they're teaching these skills
so it does give us the information to collaborate across the curriculum so that we can meet the needs and the skills of the students I know we've talked about teaching to the test versus teaching the skill this is a skill we want them to be able to read a timeline
we want them to be able to read a graph and we want them to be able to read a math and these are important things that if we know um what's being asked that we can also adjust our collaboration and make sure we meet those needs our key
takeaways um so key takeaways um progress monitoring helps keep our curriculum alive okay so link it is our current tool for benchmarking screening and
measuring performance outcomes okay student performance data is measured collected and then uploaded within Linkin then K8 teachers take that information adjust and tell their instruction and their instructional supports for their students okay that
along with other analysis of student performance data from the state of the school's address are taken into consideration as part of our progress monitoring and our next steps to injust adjust our curriculum instruction and our ped pedagogy
thank you very much team nice job thank you for that uh I'm sure we'll have a few questions yeah thank you I appreciate it and I appreciate that it was uh like short and sweet and we tried we tried but that gets the message across I mean I'm very happy to see that we're using the tool because I think that's what
we've been lacking for a long long time and we have it now a few just thoughts or questions and you probably may not have the answers now but just for us to think about for the future kind of first question is are are we just going off
the njsla standards and do we feel that those are good enough or do we want to create our own standards or benchmarks well njsla is more like the the apple and we we put a lot of meat around that core so it it's the interwoven within
our expectations um and then just the second question is how how do we again we may not have this right now but how do we get to the point where we say for example you know are we teaching math in third grade an example uh better worse
or the same than we were five years ago I think that's the golden question right of all education are we getting better and extrapolate right Ela seventh grade sixth grade right all these exactly what we've been doing with the data we take the data we're analyzing Trends over time um and looking at our performance
level levels or performance expectations where the needs might be and making certain we're making incremental growth across and through the years we've had the opportunity the wonderful opportunity to have this element for three years at the grades two through five level so I've really
been able to dig into the data and um actually proactively what we've done two years ago was I renewed some units of study on time and money um and then a year and a half later the standards were updated to include additional work on
time and money for those students and I saw that this year the third grade score on time went up by 10 points so uh it's really been a nice way for us to identify gaps but also kind of I don't know some accolades for teachers that have really worked on the resources and
increased their instructional pedagogy thank you because I think that'll be the golden question right is like are we getting better all of those grades and subject areas over time sure um thank you for the presentation um I
always learned something I listen to you and I made it very clear so I I very much appreciate that um my question is um I understand now how linkit helps with General planning instruction and
curriculum is link it also a tool that a teacher is able to use to support an individual student we talk a lot about the multier system of supports yeah so want to know what the interplay is and it's it's one of the facets we have action meetings that we've been holding
with our teachers so during them I would call up link it and I get on the element and I show the teachers had to dive into data for the test for the question show them print reports for each Administration print out a nice little report on on what how the is the
information on the students and where they're sitting and where they might be striving okay great thank you uh just to to deepen that you know if a student is struggling and we bring that student to the intervention intervention and referral services committee the linked
reports are really invaluable sources of information because every item is tied to a standard so we can say you know these are the areas in which a particular student is struggling you know and now what are the ways that we can attack those areas for growth in you know in individual and small group
instruction thank you so uh thank you for really good and um concrete presentation um it's really good to see that we are uh moving from reports to actions so earlier like we
had pres so to answer to one of the Muhammad's question about whether we are improving so we are not just improving the curriculum we are also improving these presentations right so we are going njsla reports or anal reporting and now we are also we also have what are the actions that came out report so
it's not just limited so it's continuous Improvement as the the very first chart that was shown um and also um this discussion has come up um in rwood a lot about teaching to the test versus teaching to the those standards so my
thought process on that is always that when we are teaching to the standards and when the test scores are higher whether it's njsla or SATs and acts and PSATs that reflects um to the outside so
the people who are still planning to move to some town for Education they those scores reflect uh re's capabilities and then we will have more cohort and more students who are moving to town who are more focused on
academics and we are improving overall so that eventually improves the like our student body so there there are and if those stand the test scores are good those students get to go to better colleges so it's good for their career also so yes soft skills are important
teaching is like overall skill development is important but we can also not discount the test scor so test scores are also important and um lastly um every time we have discussed link hit one of my feedback has been that we have to come up with a way to provide reports
to teach uh parents and a consistent way to provide some sort of reporting to parents so that we still have to work on so yes uh we have a plan for that in the works um so we're going to be we're we're looking at what is the best delivery mechanism so we can make this information digestible to parents but we
we are working on that right now perfect thank you keep in mind that's also a slippery slope right you give a parent access and then it's like my kid is 37% what does that mean or he in yeah so that's why they have to uh they cannot give the same report that is coming to the for the teacher so they need some
some summary that and I think uh Dr schar's opinion on that was that we'd have to do that like we are we are supposed to be doing that so uh but what format that it doesn't become a burden on teachers to respond to more questions
it's a qualitative Su yes I think one of the benefits of what you're doing is having the midyear Benchmark because you you do it in the beginning and you're working towards improving your student standards but then to wait till the end of the year to
see if you were successful is you know there's mystery you're waiting too long this way you're mid year you say oh yeah these kids are doing well we'll do this with them but we still have a few students that need more and I think this
is ideal for a teacher to know exactly who got it now and who's understanding in what way and then to be able to work more selectively with students that are having difficulties and maybe their new skills and other standards that haven't
been met and so I really think that it's very advantageous to from a teacher's perspective to know what to do and then as a predictor for the you know the NJ LSA but I think that's a great having three
times that of of benchmarks yes and and to just circle back to Mr Donnie's point we use linkit Link it has a wonderful ability to break it down into skills which really makes it meaningful for students so we sit down with teachers and and we sit down with them and we go over the skills that a good math student
a good language arts reader and writer has to gain from our curriculum and we FOC on that very much I I I did get a preview of this in curriculum so uh so just two things one is um does this also help to
identify a child who might be struggling in in reading and um maybe coincides with the dyslexia screening and um maybe pinpoint some areas of um
need so it's one of multiple measures and really the key indicator for that is our set of universal screenings and those Universal screenings are housed in the data Locker so that's where a teacher is going to upload all of that information and they can see at a glance how an individual student is doing or an
entire class is doing coupled with the link you know in grades two you know end up uh coupled with that linkit Benchmark information those Universal screening provide really a powerful picture of of of where a student is thank you uh the other is there's no surprise here that
I've always been a little bit skeptical about the state testing and uh but I'm reassured that the skills that we're teaching are skills that that students need and so we're teaching the skills and oh by the way our students will do
better on the state tests that's exactly how we start our meetings with our our teachers um because it you know it you wouldn't want to it's I think with a state test it's one point in time so this allows I
think looking at multiple points in time and where where students U need to go um there is nothing in science though in link it right or is there it it gives it gives time on task on the test and it gives us a little indicator on um what
we've gleaned from that is the longer that the children marinate in the element and longer they take on the on the question in each question the sto the scores do rise a little bit that's some information that we gained from there and I've been sitting with some teams and sharing that with with the
teachers to kind of build stamina for the children as they you know kind of get in the Years up to the fifth grade test right and I would imagine that skill of um looking at um charts and
graphs that would also be helpful in not only in this but you know in your science starts in second grade yeah reading the graphs and the charts in second grade and it goes all the way up to what Susan said correct and we we've already identified that and we're kind
of coming together to bring an inter curricular well thank you so much great thank you yeah great job thanks so much team and uh I just want to just as you you please feel free
to keep packing up but um it's uh it's very encouraging you know sitting transitioning I know when I first came I was talking a lot about a lot about these systems and I just have to commend our whole administrative team and our faculty as well although I work primarily through the administrative
team and just their um not only just their openness to to to Really having this Paradigm Shift towards progress monitoring and uh and and this system of supports but really frankly that they were kind of very much on this path already so my actually when I first got here here over that over that summer I think with the first some of the some of
my first experience with Summer admin team was actually add a link training so so kudos to all of you for kind for really being on this path already so um and and board members I just really appreciate your interest and your engagement the the extent to which all of you are speaking the language of of
uh of of making sure successful so close to everybody we're going to have some overlap goal presentation that will hopefully make the presentation a little more efficient um and I'll go ahead and transition I to that now but folks if you want to head out please feel free but thank you so much for your time I'm thinking there should be a link it for
board members yeah right judge us on our skills in the beginning of the year and then figure out where we are by the end of the year it's fun um but I will also say you know uh we're sitting here talking about linol which is a proprietary product and
but all these systems that that exist and there are other systems like link it um they all have their pros and their cons in their areas where they're really strong and areas where they're they're not they're they could be better lit is uh is is is very granular and it's beneficial in that respect because we
really can get some actionable data but one of the challenges is that and we see this a lot of times with Data Systems I know for many of you who who have experience in uh in in in software often the more powerful a tool is the more complicated the interface can be and training is required for it so so lincol
is definitely the more technical side but what I will say is um in my experience uh and in my research uh one of the most foundational practices that seems to cut anywhere where we where where uh rates of proficiency meaning that like all students can really start
performing on grade level or coming or coming close to all students performing on grade level the common denominator is progress monitoring and then specifically teachers engaging with that with that data and then talking about that data on a regular basis and then being responsive to it and that and the
data has to be kind of actionable you can't just have generalized data like that's where I love the presentation where you know your showing like you might think like oh well you know non-fiction reading like how often you hear well we need to work on we work on we need to work on uh on on non-fiction text and that's just such a broad topic
and they were able to drill down here that on some of the questions about non-fiction text was actually a function of them not being so comfortable working interpreting graphs and charts right which I'm looking at Mrs Miss handy over here fellow social studies teacher right
um that's that that that's been long in the in the domain of social studies and it's been it's such a critical way of being able to process information and it was a great Insight that really makes uh brings social studies teachers more into the conversation where they should be too so uh so I'm gonna go ahead and transition to the district go report um
could someone please pass me the Mr Ross can I ask can I recruit you over there um I'm going to pull the presentation up uh last year around I think we did it around December actually did the district goal update and so I realized that you know I didn't want too much time to go away before we did a uh
before we provided just an update on where we are with the district goals I know we do a lot of talking about the district goals I this is probably a lot of this is familiar but I do think that it's important um at this point in the year as we're going in the budget process this just a great opportunity for us to just check in and talk about
where our progress is again a lot of this should be familiar so we're going to we we'll move quickly what I'm going to do is instead of asking the team members who are in charge of specific areas to do the whole slide what I'll do is I'll do like a quick overview of each are of each goal area and then I'll ask
the team members to just fill in some gaps for me if there's anything you want to particularly highlight and then of course we'll leave it to the board members if you want clarification up for any of those things let us know but I will try to make this uh fairly concise challenge Dr sches
asef I I will I will try not to disappoint fortunately we we've covered a lot of this already just kidding that's sort of a kidding but not kidding sort of thing all right so so real simply put um our goal here is we want to review the district goals make sure that they're
top of mind for everybody we want to provide a status update and then you know this is all this should all sound redundant right we shouldn't be having lots of Divergent uh initiatives so you're going to I think you're going to see that what we're talking about today is going to be reflected in the district goals it's going to be reflected in our
strategic plan it's going to be reflected in our 2526 budget development process it's going to be reflected in this annual state of the schools coming up um we we saw some of it reflected in the special education review that we did in December and then of course as we talk about curriculum and program evaluation you're going to see it
there this is just a key as we said before I like this color coding system you I think you got G you all gave me some feedback that you like this too so uh so blue just means that blue doesn't mean it's done blue just means that we're like basically up and running okay green means it's in processes in like
we're we're we're we're all in it but it's not necessarily in a place where it's sustain aing um initialized means we've gotten the beginnings done uh not yet initialized means we really haven't done anything yet and tabled it means that it's been placed on hold um so I threw the language in here so that we
could post this as a presentation everyone can see it um but I have like a summary of each one for each slide so I'm actually going to skip these slides if you want to go back and read them more clearly you can um so basically District goal one had to do with strategic planning um I did a shorthand version on the left uh under act where
it says activity these are like the activities within the goal so what first was engaged with a consultant we've obviously been working with our our partners with hiya since the summer um they and we're well on our way with the strategic planning process we concluded some detail here to kind of just flesh
it out but we've talked about this several times I talk about this in the state in the uh my my superintendent coffee pretty often as far as the Strategic plan timeline you probably all know that we are on on track to have um our final presentation on April 7th so
at the April 7th board meeting um uh Dr Bill and Stacy Adams will be with us uh with our uh chairs of all of our teams and possibly some of the rest of our teams to present the final uh the final action plans and and roll out the the vision 23 strategic plan um we also had on here to
incorporate various priorities that we had identified that's going on right now in the action plans we're going to integrate uh outcomes in the St in the state of the schools address so when we uh as we as we do our build our analyses for the state of the schools address we'll be taking into consideration these
initiatives and then finally we want to educate families about Vision 2030 there actually is a goal within the the division 2030 strategic plan around engagement do we have somebody here a board member on engagement I think we do Miss Sandy is involved in that so there
will be a whole goal on ongoing Community engagement within that plan um a lot of this stuff is actually already done I think we left it as in process but these are pretty that's pretty darn close to being established lished and then of course April 7th is the uh is the meeting Dr Fenwick has been leading up this goal she's not with us she's not
feeling well so I was not able to oops hold on little too far there so so she's not able to elaborate for me so I would just kick it to um Mrs Murphy or or Mr Ross is there anything that I missed in that quick overview no I would say that um we're
all moving along in our action plans the teams are working well meeting regularly and um we have plans to follow up with hya um for additional guidance and final review shortly in the next week or two um so we're getting to a point where we're ready to start I think uh soon
beginning of March plan the presentation and get ready for that April 7th meeting so we're we're on track great all right so our district goal to was about empowering students with systems of support so this is going to be of tremendous overlap with the
presentation sorry I just cut out there so um so two and three actually both have to do with student support this one was more focused on empowering students and setting them up for success in terms of um making sure that they're properly supported goal three was about making sure they're really academically
supported so here we talk a lot about inclusivity and student well-being uh we identified that we wanted to work with the university partner to evaluate uh the process any processes that we have in place to ensure inclusive School environment um that's actually we're getting our first report this week I
believe right is it tomorrow afternoon yeah tomorrow afternoon all right so excited to what they say um we also we as we referenced before in response to one of our public commenters we wanted to Norm our school Dei committees we actually had our first meeting this last week um had some interesting initial
conversations we're going to be continuing along with the university partnership to take a look at everything we're doing um I know there's been some questions and concerns about uh changes at the federal level and some conversation around specifically concerns about Dei um having worked on both sides worked
with folks on both sides of the aisle for quite some time in my career um I'm very confident that most of the activities that we're talking about if not all of the activities that we're talking about here in Ridgewood um are very very universally appealing in terms of being about celebrating differences
and making sure that everyone feels included and is respected at school we also want to focus on support for staff so that's something we're also looking at the University partnership you know we have of course we do want to have uh a staff um that that uh that that brings together people from all
different backgrounds so that way we can have our students can have exposure to all people from all different walks of life that said we always want to make sure we're hiring the best people for the work here so we want to figure out how we can increase people's interests with uh who are coming from various backgrounds to be a part of our schools
yes Miss Andy are you allowed to say what university you're working with oh yes Unity part oh I'm sorry yeah we partner with Montclair University yeah all right and next we talked about seal Behavior academic supports for students um so we're in the process of inventorying the different supports that
we have and evaluating their efficacy and then child study team practices dovet Tales a lot with what we've been talking about with special education um we had identified last year through our state of the schools address and some conversations with our uh special education parent advisory group that um that there was definitely some friction
that we were feeling a little bit in the CST process that we thought we might be able in terms of Ip meetings and and engagement with child study teams uh that we might be able to smooth out we spoke with both our child study team members as well um that was a big part of the conversation leading up to the special education review that we did so
I think we have some good movement in that direction um we're looking forward to some further conversations as well and then uh additionally we also have in this goal gifted and talented practices um we do know that there is a law that was passed in 2020 requiring certain gifted and talented practices
meaning identifying certain screening and identifying students then providing services in certain contexts um we know that we have more that we need to do in this space so this is also a part of our budget conversation for next year to ensure that we uh we can off we we're offering those Services as we should and
then we also had intramural sports uh this has been an ongoing topic we've been having a variety of conversations around uh how to make sure that our students are engaged we know that u athletics are pretty people tend to be pretty hardcore about their Athletics here in Ridgewood um and but but everybody just loves was participating
also and so because the sports are so competitive sometimes by like high school um you know kids who really are passionate about a sport might not have the opportunity to really actually play on a team so to give them some just extracurricular Ural options seems like a nice thing so we've been looking into that um so Mrs Murphy I believe these
were your goals right so I give a quick overview do you want to fill in any gaps I might have missed sure I'll just um I did get an initial look today at the um audit findings the first look and I'm there's think surprising it's it's kind of where we kind of know that some of
the things that we're working on that are part of the Strategic plan so I think when we get the the full report tomorrow afternoon I think we're actually already starting to do some work there um which is great and I think we'll get some good recommendations and hopefully we'll be able to share that out with with the board soon um and I
think in general we're going to be sharing with the administrative team the collection of the inventory for those additional supports this week and it's really to focus on um what supports we're really offering across like all of the areas that we would look at with um
tiered supports and really get an idea of how to build that in where our capacity um is and where we need to build capacity with staff so that we can build that in um to our professional development plans for next year and make sure we're providing staff with
opportunities to grow or build programs out where we are not supporting students of enough in what whatever area that that we see and hopefully we are but I know that staff can always use additional supports and intramural continues to be a conversation we did
you know we are offering some minimal intramurals at the middle school level specifically at at BF right now um but we're we're gathering information we also want to make sure that we don't detract from unified in the process of expanding intramurals so we want to make
sure we create balance so that we are creating more opportunities for our students that don't want to get um necessarily into competitive sports but also we're continuing to maintain and keep student participation in our
unified program which has grown uh immensely over the last couple of years a quick question which I hope will be helpful to you um have you talked to anybody from the recreation department bu because like for example I just
remember that um you didn't have to play on the soccer team they they have the through Village W boys and girls could be playing soccer at high school age so it's like in neural um and so you wouldn't necessarily want to you know
duplicate that if we don't need to or certainly shared services might be appropriate so I just wanted to give you that heads up and I am the board rep actually on Parks and Rec so I can help with I think about we'll talk some more then but a lot of the wck options stop fast high
school they're very limited even not outside of high school and pre high school so I do think this is a big priority area for us because it's either your kids are signed up for really competitive Sports which are also by the way expensive for a lot of
families for each like sixs it is something I think that imp establish this I I believe it's RSA that offers the program that you're talking about and I'm a soccer coach
with the Maroons and I didn't realize how um viable and how exciting this program is for high school kids and being having two daughters playing soccer there's so many kids that get cut and they do other things and I had no
idea until recently the vibrant program it's Coe so it's fun as well as something to do for soccer for example so I do think I know they have something but I think advertising it more and letting high school children know that
this is an option because I didn't I'm involved and I didn't know so I do think we could you know put Christine Corless on it she'll get it done but you know it's something like that I think it's and I don't don't know if volleyball no your daughter plays volleyball I don't
know if there's any kind of a comparable program with volleyball or softball yeah dang it but the RSA model for soccer might be something that we can we can use the model right so for basketball volleyball you know whatever
it is so I there's a lot of resources do they work with community school or RSA is like second grade all the way up to eighth grade and they do they have a travel component for Middle School in
the younger grades it's within the town it's within the village but high school was the program that I didn't realize how much fun it is and I was trying to encourage my daughter's just to do it because that that whatever happens in high school that that stress isn't there
it's more fun if you love the sport this is a great opportunity and it would be interesting to see what they could do with volleyball and softball basketball of basketball right I don't think they have they used to
have high school basketball um right yeah they did my kids did it yeah us I think we need a like an audit with the with the town like what's what for what ages how people are participating
yeah we're actually we've redrafted the uh joint facilities a joint Fields committee which is really joint facilities and Fields uh policy so we'll be talking about that in the coming months so might be a good time to nail some of that down all right everyone thank you so much that was District goal two District
goal 3 looks a little smaller but it is piffy so uh we have strong academic systems for all and this is the one that's more familiar because of what we've the conversations that we've had so again habits of work if you're don't remember habits of work they were a function of the 2019 to 2024 uh
strategic plan it was something that was a really powerful outcome of that plan and really uh sustained despite a significant amount of turnover in the district administratively and uh right now we're we actually have the it's it's embedded in the teacher evaluation
process particularly with respect to teacher reflection and planning for lessons and lesson observations so it's a conversation Point um and again for the habits at work we're talking particularly about out and see if I can do the four hours so it's reflection responsibility respect
and I can't ever get all four unless I in front of me but the point is is that we're talking about the habits of work that relate to how students what are the beh what are the academic behaviors that pre that that are the prerequisite for students to be successful in school and they're really
they they were developed here but they're really research-based and they're also very common sense resilience I love one too and that's the one that I always forget but the idea it's and and that gets into like the grit the research on grit right but the idea is that students need to be
responsible for their work they need to be they need to be respectful of themselves and others in their learning environment and they need to be resilient when it comes to doing hard things like we can do hard things right and uh and so so it's a it's a really
great uh it's a really great mindset that if you really if we want to see strong academic emphasis in our schools that's the pathway to do it so so we're going to continue that work um we also have common assessments and progress monitoring that's all that we just talked about so you know that that's
well underway we also have program evaluation for Math and Ela um I'm going to let Mr uh Ross get into that a little bit we I'm sure he'll fill us in um we've been talking a lot about one pagers and frequently asked questions as resources for parents so you know we have these giant curriculum resources
online but they're not necessarily always very helpful but if we could create some very digestible very aesthetically pleasing uh concise guides that are one Pages for every course that we have that would be immensely helpful for parents um and frequently asked
questions document I know Mr Donnie you've been an advocate for that um and then instructional alignment again particularly on those transitions grade 5 to six and 8 to N I know we've been doing some good work Mr Ross will share about that and then of course generative AI has been on our minds quite a bit and
so we are uh doing quite a bit of work there so Mr I'll let you flesh out those bones thank you Dr Schwarz um so on the the math and Ela a lot of what you heard here was very representative of the work which entails supervisors meeting with teams of teachers and their principles
and really drilling down into the student performance data and talking about next actionable steps to improve student performance so we're doing that in both math and Ela additionally we're really drilling down in ela taking a look at our curriculum you our K5 or
pre5 uh curriculum committee and we just ran a survey we had 146 responses of our teachers across the district to just get a sense of how teachers are feeling about the curriculum in terms of everything from um resources to pacing
and so we're we're uh we're meeting actually later this week for our team to to dig into that data and talk about next steps with that crew uh and then when it comes to instructional alignment this is just one example when we talk about the transitions I mean we're we're always taking a look at our
instructional alignment but we're paying particular attention given the test data that we've seen over the last couple of years at grades the grade 56 and 89 so we are getting teams of teachers together to um drill down again into that data and to articulate and to be sure that we are meeting the needs of
our kids as they move from level to level so um on the FAQ part um the there are I have two feedback um one is there are a lot of parents who have questions
that they send out to principles or superintendent and I think we can save a lot of our time principal administrators time if those FAQs are available on the district's website so they are not sending out those emails or if they send out those emails and the response is hey
here's the response but by the way this is available answer is available there so that way we are bringing a habit of going to that FAQ site and then whether those answers are consistent Ross all elementary schools so or both middle schools right so there can be a lot of those
repetitive questions that parents are asking and our principles and superintendent are spending time in in responding to those FAQs that how do I do this or how do I do that or is this available or not available so that's one part of the fqs and the second part is I
think we need a a a short interview series from students nth graders at at the end of nth grade what do you think the eighth grade students should have known when they were entering nth grade same thing for
10th graders what the ninth graders should have known before they enter 10th grade same for juniors and same for seniors just um a survey or one question survey or somebody a student going out with the shorts like a 30 second videos
because um at the last coffee one of the parents called in and they mentioned that they did they were not aware of some of the courses or prerequisites in nth grade and I've had that experience with rap Ive provided that feedback earlier so that that's a repetitive feedback unless you have your older
child go through the school system a lot of the parents who are whose first child is going through the system they say oh in 10th Grade we we should have known this in 9th grade or at the end of the e8th grade we should known this at the end of n9th grade so a lot of those prerequisites or how to do the course selections or if you picked a specific
subject then you cannot take the other subjects all of those combinations or even that availability of some sports so all of those things just Fu from students that what you should have known or what would you recommend eighth graders to know before they enter ninth
grade and the this is again Dynamic changing information so if we have these interview series or FAQ series every year I think that will be helpful I think that's a great idea I think that you know as we've seen time and time again when we when we invite our students in to the conversation they give us this incredible you know this
this richly detailed vision of what our schools are actually like and so yes definitely and we've talked about that in our strategic plan as well just you know more focused group involvement and getting a better sense of the pulse of the kids so I think that's a fantastic idea and then also just you know if we zoom out you know these FAQs are just a
part of a body of of family facing Communications that we want to generate so that you know everybody in the community has a clear sense of what are the courses what are the prerequisites what are the core resources what are the expectations of our students and we can deliver them in multiple modalities we can have a program of studies we can
have an FAQ we can even leverage some of the generative AI tools to create podcasts where you know you have two people talking about about courses or a whole series of courses to give parents a better set sense of the option so there are a lot of tools available to us we're definitely going to be exploring them all right great any other questions
around District goal 3 all right District Four is is about finances and Facilities so uh of course we had a goal about the budget projection and presentation so those that presentation is well on its way uh we have a finance committee meeting coming up this week to get into the
details of what what our projections are for this budget process and and of course our our preliminary budget presentation will be on March 24th uh we recently received our facilities assessment uh we met with the finance committee recently and we're uh setting up priorities based on the feedback from
that from that uh output um Master site plans is something that's I've kept on the the um in our district goals for some time although it's a very it's a big lift and it's an ambitious lift the idea of this is to really get to a point where we're not just looking at how to maintain our facilities but to actually think about like ultimately what do we
want our facilities to look like um I think it's an important exercise to do so that way we don't um you know we don't miss opportunities to uh to we don't we don't accidentally close one door because we're just trying to fix a problem with one one system so uh but
we're but that's only at an initialized phase because that's going to flow out of our facilities assessment we also o have been doing work with a new uh security committee and we're having conversations within our budget around some uh how we can continue to make investments with our security um particularly with respect to some
physical improvements um we also uh had an ambitious goal with to to Really audit all of our vendor services so we've initiated rfps for a variety of them uh We've also talked about busing equities we've been looking closely at our busing rot um we have to be thoughtful and
especially in a time where we are not going to be seeing increases in our state revenues we have to maintain make sure that efficiency is a part of every conversation uh we're not planning on any dramatic changes to busing at this time but we are we are looking at it closely um property acquisition has been
it's in process we've had a little bit of a we haven't had much of a response to the RFP that we put out regarding a commercial a commercial realtor record we're going to have to be more proactive with respect to that but we want to have someone who can advise us with respect to the possibility of acquiring any property that might be advantageous for
the district um and then of course Athletic Field evaluation is something that we commissioned to evaluate particularly BF but we are looking at um other District Fields uh specifically with with the definitive focus on the high school Fields Stevens and Stadium
Field um right now one of the primary objectives of this was to figure out if we could turn BF into a usable uh full-size field for multiple Sports uh to be a field for use but also most importantly a backup field God forbid we have another flood and we our fields are
are are Tak get out of commission for a period of time uh Mr Matthews is there anything that you want to flesh out that I from what I shared yeah sure thanks boy so going back to that first slide budget budget projection presentation so last
week we got a uh a letter from the state stating that um we all can expect like a 3% cut in state aid 3% cut in state a is kind of like the the most will will get cut it could come in flat meaning the same as last year or you can get a
additional way but they said plan for 3% cut and state the uh the board presentation has got to be done on or before March 19th March 20th 24th is the date of board meeting but the budget presentation due to the county no in March
20th facilities assessment of threeyear capital plan so we had a special facilities meeting um two weeks ago uh sat down with the uh the architect and went through the full uh heat map of all the different projects that are out there for the next couple years and uh
we came away with a three-year Capital plan um that we're going to put together and also have 2526 capital projects uh in there based on a priority by schools and you'll see that in the 2526 budget so can I just ask a question on that sure because I'm not on facilities is
that presentation going to be shared with the rest of the board at some point I know that we got the so it it was the full document was the full document but but the conversation in the what you're considering putting in the three-year Capital plan will the first time that those of us not on the facilities
committee see that will that be when we sit down with you review the budget or will we have an opportunity to so there is about $65 million in projects on that assessment right and out of the threeyear capital plan we came up with about $1.7 million for year one meaning
2526 and then year two it's about $2 million and year three is like $2.2 million I'm just wondering when we can a full assessment no but but for example that that one two and threee assessment when do when can I see the in
the rest of the board when will we see the information as to how those decisions were made and when they were made like oh okay there there was some reference I was I was unclear there was some there was a report that was sent to in one of the um fii no I I know there
was there was I know that we have the general report and I saw the reference to the three-year Capital plan and I also saw reference to the special facilities meeting but not the minutes from that so I'm just trying to get a full picture not today I might help you
do we do we we have the the last facilities meetings minutes yeah but it's not in there oh the report's not in there no I have the report what I want to know is is of the discussion yeah what I was going to say is there's an update we'll look at the minutes again just to clarify but there's a there's an
updated report that has a color coding heat map sort of thing I don't know if you've seen that one let let's make sure let's make sure that you have that one well we'll do that after the meeting but it's a heat map and the and the and really our conversation just reflected that heat map and we're pretty much I think we're pretty much on on okay
taking it as it was because that conversation didn't make its way to finance because I know we I I just want to know what's going on that's all so we have a we have a meeting on Friday we're gonna go out go through the P Budget on Friday N9 o'clock so so at that meeting I'm going to go through the
capital plan okay for 2526 i' like to go through the threeyear capital plan if you want um because we are going to do a three-year projection for you so at the meeting on Friday you'll have the three-year Capital plan okay okay because facilities hasn't seen it and there were were questions on on the heat
map okay so it's okay yeah hasn't has I think it hasn't been finalized really what it comes down to is we have this is the week where we're really getting down to our brass tax in terms of numbers and uh but I mean but I will say you know the Glenn and ridge projects those are well I know those are
a go yeah I mean I'm interested in not just numbers but priorities how those priorities were come to those types of things which I just think is for discussion at some sure okay I'm I didn't mean to derail you also just on that same uh ve uh at
some point let's get to like a a statement on what we are doing about the flooding situation I know we've been lucky so far um but what is our position on that is it going to be is it is thef going to be the backup for that and we're just going to move to get that ready we have other
options the table like whenever facility closes that out with the Architects just have that clear so that way we are so on this specific goal uh Mark andri I have uh three small inputs one
is um you mentioned that the board presentation has to be done by March 19th but our next meeting is on March 24th so how will what's what are the logistics for that so we'll have to have a special meeting for the plary budget uh presentation on on or before March 19
so when I submitted the budget calendar we those dates were were in here we got the dates from the the county from the state about when when bud has got to be submitted So based on April election November election you all be we we're given a signed dates that the budget had to be to the county by a certain date so
for for November elections type two the deadline is uh March 20 and we have a date for the final budget hearing as well for the for the for the budget adoption which is I think it's um I gotta so we'll be adding adding more we're going to have to evaluate that
because we we we we've been that's deviation from what we've been saying and what we've been planning so we're going to have to follow up on that tomorrow to figure out what we have to do that but but I think Mr Matthew but I thought at least initially Friday is finance will see the initial right so that was my followup question
that when are the next other other board members seeing the so Mr Matthew I believe had said May 7th is is for the final budget adoption that's a final budget adoption but I got be honor before March 20th but
I believe you're planning to meet with the members at ones and twos after Friday yes after Friday yes so that's going to happen after okay so that that's one question the second one is um on the overall finance and Facilities goals um there was one presentation
recently um by Mr Jim shup and he came to one of the board meetings couple of years ago and um Mr Matthews he has always advocated for a purchase requisition justification form um in his district so do you plan to uh introduce
that in rwood well he brought it up at the last meeting it's a purchase requisition form but that is for like every purchase order that's being done right for the year which could be really really cers so I did that in Patterson and for every PO for the whole year it's
really it's really kind of C some things just don't don't move I don't really believe we got to do that right here right now in Ridgewood is there a certain dollar amount above that it should be done it's a it's a straight form is based on anytime you want to requisition to put down the reasons why you want to want to put right right so
but if if you think that okay it's it's it's uh too much work for every purchase but should it be done for a dollar amount like anything above a dollar amount I think when you when you freeze spending then you may want to do something like that okay so or for to do it from like day one for the beginning
part of the year I mean he's giving you tools that you can use he's not saying that you must use that form throughout the entire year so when I used it I I did it when I when I froze spending okay you want to do a purchase after a certain amount of time you use that purchase uh form to justify what you
wanted to buy after after October or November whenever you freeze after certain time okay got it and and the last one is uh something to evaluate and something to maybe talk to the um auditor or the bond attorney can we for
right now or the current capital the way we do the capital projects is we wait till the end of the year that what is our reserves and we or whatever are the um savings then we allocate to different reserves and and we allocate some amount
to capital reserve and that's what we generally use for our next year's Capital project right so once we know the amount then we allocate it and then those capital projects come the following year so there's at least a year and a half lag between when can we
plan the projects so what if we start we allocate say 2% of the budget or 3% of the budget two or $3 million every year that we would do uh every year we'll do a reference in November election or December election or along with November
election so that way there's no separate election so every year we do a $3 million referendum and that way we know we can plan up to that amount of projects uh in advance that there is a proper planning for that it's not a too
big amount so that way it's not overspending so you can pick really really good project because it's still a small amount and by doing that you get 33% from this state so we are still spending the same amount of money but we'll be getting 33% from the state
because if we go through the referendum route right now when we are spending about the same amount we are spending all of that in regen Glenn HVAC projects we are getting the rebate because we are getting those through the um energy upgrades and the rod grants and those
that route right but instead of going the rod Grant route if we go with the referendum route for majority of the project except the the fields majority of the projects we will get 33% or 34% from the state so that way if we can say okay every year we'll do a small
referendum $34 million and 33% or 34% will come from the state that can be a properly planned uh capital capital planning can be more consistent with that and if we have savings we can pay it off quickly or add on to the
project so something something to think about I see the lag that you that you're talking about as far as capital projects like the 2425 budget had these uh the rid and Glenn project in it but based on
what we see for 2526 um these projects can all be done within the 2526 year maybe one item will be pushed into the summer of 2526 because we can't get access to the the elevator during during the school year
so I mean we've already identified the items for 2526 um one item could be a a lead time item but we're you know I think if we we start the process right away we should be to get a lot of this stuff done within 25 26 uh one project we we're
doing a uh specon an RP for that work that work should be done this year in in 25 or GW U when the elevator at GW that's on our list for 2526 that should happen in this calendar year the other elevator is going to probably happen in
the summertime because we can't take it we can't take out of the service during school year because it's so vital to the building but I think I think what s is suggesting is is if we can look at 26 27 right and kind of say hey we think we
might have $3 million of capital like let's do a rough projection right that's my understanding we're gonna have three million of capital dollars we can spend if we can plan and actually go for referendum so that way we get 33% funding from the from the government
then it's a savings to the district that way right but it kind of takes some pre really really pre-planning projections right there's more that goes into it too yeah but if we have a a template for doing that every November
then the same template is being used um that reduces a lot of that planning and um advertising and everything Mark if I could just add one piece to the property acquisition something to think
about so we did go out two times for a commercial rtor and we're gonna we do have a a a commercial company that's going to bid on our proposal uh on Friday so we should have somebody to put on agenda for either March or April fantastic thank
you realtor okay Mr Matthews anything else you want to share from that that's it and just on another note I did just look up the dates on the calendar like we it does seem that there's some sort of an oversight because we are we do have to have that the the hearing done
by the 20th so I think we we have we either we either have to add a meeting so we could add it the the 17th is going to be a little bit of a tighter squeeze we have to add a meeting before uh so then the question is do we want to keep meeting on the 24th and have the have
the hearing vi just an additional meeting I think the budget is big enough to to to Warrant a a short meeting I think um you know based upon just uh this month's meeting and and the amount
we had to pack into it um it seems to me that we could do one on the 17th very focused just on the budget let's keep it crisp and and then um on the 24th we can
go ahead with our our regular so everybody free on St Patrick's Day on same just to note please note students do not have school in St Patrick's Day it's a professional development day for staff right so we have might have some families who are traveling that weekend we're not really quite sure but so we there's uh it does look like we have
some flexibility at least my calendar for the rest for the other days that week is there interest in doing it other days or you want to stay with the Monday i' i' prefer to stay with Monday so but if the budget is going to be ready by this Friday we don't have to wait for 17th we can do the Monday
before well we have work administratively to do in terms of preparing the presentation and like there's there's just there's turnaround work we have to do as well yeah and then there's also if there's if there's implications that Impact Staff like we there's a lot of there's work that we would want to do to make sure that we're
communicating everything well okay but schools the next day yeah yeah yeah I mean they we're all here do it on the Monday and I think you should make us some Sour Dough Bread that maybe dye a little green you know
so that we're we're feeling that it's festive and it's been a while you know I do have some carway seats yeah there's new players that week there's a lot going on in the school district that week uh so I think it's easier if the people are interested keep it on the okay sounds
good she have to advertise that yep oops I all right anything else uh just as final takeaways uh just that um as I said before teams are making progress um all these efforts I'm just reiterating
the first slide really all these efforts are being uh integrated and basically overlapping with the Strategic plan the budget process state of the schools and all that um I anticipate a final District goal report I think last year I gave that report to you all in executive session because it's tied to my my evaluative my evaluation processes but
then we realized as the summer went on that we never really presented that publicly so I then presented the outcomes of last year's District goals as I presented the next year's District goals and like in like September so uh so we'll do is I'm I'm have a note here that uh in June after we do our whole
superintendent evaluation process with the district goals I'll then make a note to report them publicly you did report your the goals at the end of last year I did it at a coffee we didn't do it at a board meeting I I remember all the color
coded no really oh okay and that that concludes our our presentation thank you okay so let us um move on to consent items regular and
routine issues I move a attendance at conferences and I think U maybe there was a uh yeah we have a quick edit regarding the edit on the attendance at conferences so I just like to speak that edit into the record Mr Matthews if you could make a record of this
please so under uh under uh 9A so that's attendance at conferences within the attachment um there is a uh project Adventure um professional development opportunity for Mr Brian Quirk and the
amount should read $1 1,875 so it did read $1,693 it should read 1,875 motion by m Brogan second by Miss Vali okay Mr Donnie yes Miss handy yes m m yes M mm yes M Rogan
yes okay Administration um and there's a second reading of the regul on school security that really has to do with our class three officers being added to our um
policy um I'm move Administration okay motion by Miss Rogan second by Miss call Mr Donnie yes Miss handy M mcau yes M MCM yes M Rogan
yes uh see curriculum instruction just one under there field trips I move the field trips motion by m bran second by Andy Mr Donnie yes Miss handy m m yes M mmud yes
M Brogan yes Human Resources um we are um appointing a director of special program she happens to be here tonight um patiently waiting um and and I just wanted
to um congratulate and wish well and and I hopefully they'll be here retirements for Patricia Hans at the high school and bills wicker who is um working in um with our buildings and the grounds and
I've done so many great uh jobs repairing things and um I can um remember when he did the um language Lab at the high school um we thought we would be spending a lot more and he
really put it together so yeah be great oh okay and there's some edits for the human resources and again I just apologize for the need for these verbals but there are a couple of details that were identified that need to be updated so uh on page six of the agenda that you have it
should be under Human Resources um sure I have the coding right human resources is three um D3 under D3 trying to follow the coding just give
me one second I want to make sure I say it correctly D so Dum resources and three correct um for Miss dolphy uh there is uh a date change so the effective date currently reads
February 3rd It should read February 7 25 Mr Matthew you have that yes I do great and then the third edit is uh within D if or
d1f the substit oh no the the uh this was um looks like some of the pages were stapled incorrectly it is part it's still part it's still part of three excuse me my my my packet was was stapled incorrectly that's U my page five and six are mixed up page
seven D3 Mrs men's uh she was originally listed here at 1.20 full-time equivalency and she should be 1.4 fulltime equivalency
that adjusts her total salary to 154,00 310 thank you got it a motion I'll move uh Human
Resources with those second second Mr call Mr Donnie yes and welcome Miss Pon to the district Miss
Sandy miss m yes welcome Mr mmud yes welcome M bran yes I think you could go home oh oh yeah now now you'll be here more more you'll be in rewood more than
welcome all righty um just going to go through human resources here and finance E I move Finance what your my Mr brokan
second second Mr Paul Mr no I actually um I'm just going to read into the record the donations uh travel home and School Association for 21,37 gift and kind a gift and kind of enrichment programs field trips and
assemblies for the 2425 school year at Travel Elementary School and Ridgewood High School lacrosse $1,941 to be used to pay for a charter bus for the overnight trip to Pak hen
Pennsylvania probably messed up how to say that um are there any questions on finance no okay hearing none uh Mr Donnie yes Miss handy m m yes M mm yes M
Rogan yes can I make a just a quick comment on finance just uh just I want to compliment Mr Matthews and his staff because I'm realizing the very last thing we approved was the correction action corrective action plan for the
2324 school year uh there was a lot of work that went into that a lot of work to make sure that people followed it and um did it really quickly and I just want to thank you for that and acknowledge the work of you and your staff approval of bills um
Mary yes so I reviewed the bills um and am happy to move the bills as stated on the agenda motion Mr second I second second M Broan roll call Mr dony yes M handy m
m yes M mm yes M Brogan yes board member announcements I've got a few so one is just a reminder that this Saturday is super science Saturday starting at 9 o'clock at the high school goes to 1:30 doing the rocket launch at
1:30 so um do come out and see it um we have 60 this probably about 15 more presenters than we normally have 60 adult presenters at um super science Saturday a lot of new uh faces will be
joining us um um as um adult presenters so we're really happy about that and last year we started to work with cpeg about having um the first hour which isn't usually too crowded um from 9: to
10: um being sort of a sensory friendly time um making sure that our presenters knew um that some of our special needs children might be there and um and just uh
to have presentations as they um as they come to your table so um and this year through cpeg and Jamie Davis um who connected with the unified some unified students will be um there at the high
school at nine o'clock to greet um the students as they come and they're familiar with these students so it'll be a nice comfortable atmosphere so we're really happy with how that is um playing out of course any student can come at any time and stay for the day or stay
for a smaller part but we did want to just call that for um our neur diversion children who might um need um more a quieter um more one-on-one um experience so that was fun Asian festival uh that
is March 1st as well at five o'clock so super sign Saturdays out of 4:30 Asian festival starts thank you to their custodians um who um keep everything moving along so um and you
know what's really neat about Asian Fest is that the um very small really it's $5 for adults and high school students um tickets at the door $3 for middle school and elementary schools uh students that
come but all proceeds um are donated to Doctors Without Borders so um really Kudos I think there's 150 um students participating in Asian festival um and and um they'll be featuring
performances and a fashion show from China India Japan Korea in the Philippines so um what um and Ma c c is um the staff uh adviser for that club
and she does really a wonderful job so um and finally tomorrow at um 7 o'clock um the high school HS say is um opening up the doors um um and it really
opened to the community where students will um be presenting about the impact of cell phones the internet and social media on their lives and these are students uh from our tomorrow's teachers class that we'll be presenting so the
community is invited um any parents and to get that discussion really um moving that discussion forward about uh cell phones in our schools the use of cell phones what's a good age for children to
get cell phones all that um I think it will be um a good conversation starter for our community so I would encourage um parents um to to come and and uh listen to the student perspective on
that um so kudos to the HSA for putting that together so I just want to add uh to what M Broan mentioned about the Asian Fest uh which is facilit or coordinated or mentored by Miss MAA kirani um that my daughter
attended that and so it does that they support the doctors without the borders and they uh put on a very good cultural performance but those students also learn a lot of organizational skills and Leadership skills there and she has a full system of uh
like country leaders and then um overall Fan Fest leaders and specific type of dance and different leaders for the dances and they all run that show in a in custem uh so there are different leadership levels and they they usually
graduate to those so it's not just a performance and U supporting the doctors it's also leadership development and organizational skills development so uh Miss K is doing really good job there and the students
board committee reports so we've covered a lot of what's happened in our agenda for the um our board um so I don't know if uh if there's anything to add for finance if there's not we'll just keep
moving okay facilities we talked a little bit about that we still need facilities committee still need some more information about those plans uh we did begin to look at um the U the facilities report um but I think
we need a deeper dive into that I don't know how you're feeling but I'm feeling that we just sort of did a surface on on the facility plan to begin with yeah I agree with that so we're still working on that um
curriculum blanket we heard anything else anything else you want to add for curriculum no the other the only other item I have to is um Mr Mr Ross and team are also working on um
advancing on that Ela curriculum for elementary school and integrating the science curriculum as uh the the reading component or read aloud component so instead of just going out and getting
new text or new curriculum we have the curriculum that we are just adding more more skills or more techniques to uh make it more aligned with the science of reading which was already happening at a lot of the places but they're working to bring uniformity and um more structure
around it is that a correct phas phrasing of that Dr schs more consistency here yeah I would say so I could see Mr Ross is eager to jump on there yeah no I think that's very fair to say I mean we are absolutely striving for consistency of
delivery of our instruction across our elementary schools um we are also taking a look at the research um and we're really going to dive into that survey data because that's really going to give us a good sense of what our teachers are seeing in our students where we want to move our program next um
policy that um the policy committee is going has proposed revised policies under discussion items for tonight and so there are links there to some of the policies that they're recommending and the these are out of straussa
recommendations I think they're all mandated wording yeah so um did you have something else to add for policies not a policy uh communication um just a lot of good development of the website one thing
that uh stud actually testing out there was a company that AI chat that will actually be able to scour the minuts as well so that way when are trying to ask questions chat I should be
able to point so that that's Rel PDFs yeah exctly scam PDFs rather so we can search within the document of a PDF which is more accurate and give feedback to people who were looking for something specific rather than they have to check
every agenda or minutes if we go that route that could be also I think a good solution so so the the technology and chatbot would work when we have the content yeah well we have yeah we'll need the content for
that so first first we need the content available on a publicly available website which the chatbot can crawl and create its content that's we have it right but but most people are not interested you can see the audience right so most most people are not asking those
questions from I'm highly highly shocked that you're saying that yeah so that it's not from this meeting but it's mostly uh the other FAQs and for that first we need the content otherwise if you just put a chatbot AI chatbot it will be just hallucination and it will
be generating answers that it probably should not be generating and the other thing was the with the new with information that she has she's able to um give us feedback on who is following
our Instagram our Facebook and gives us data on is it men is it women with age groups and is giving a lot of information who's curious who wants to follow us and we have she has seen an uptick in people following and engaging
in our social media which has a lot of positives and getting the message out to the community so for the for the communication are you recommending to renew the licenses for um the um there was a software that we bought for
$45,000 something for surveys uh we yeah hot exchange we have only done one survey from that and I don't even see results were followed through or youing that's being reevaluated right now negotia yeah because if you don't
have like if you have budget issues then that should probably be the if you're not using something for 45,000 we should not be paying that money no Christine has a plan and she's working on it quite actively but we have paid for a year and we haven't used it for I know she's negotiating with the company yeah but if
we pay then we should be using it I'm wondering if flood exchange I'm not sure would be useful the question I was going to ask you was about the survey for the special education parents and and whether or not any um work has been started on that because I know people
are anxious to hear about it um come up okay um as we're talking about I'm wondering if thought exchange is just can you which which survey you're talking about the survey that's part of the board goal for the special education parents students and yeah I mean I can
provide a little context in general so thought exchange has been a tool that i' I've leaned on very heavily but but what's in my prior District coming here we did have a couple of uh we did have a couple of exchanges that had some productive value um but being that we
have corus especially uh she's just she's able to uh push out so much information and then be so responsive to people directly um that seems to be uh really it's her efforts seem to satisfy
a lot of what I would was trying to accomplish when I was when I did not have a public information officer and I was a superintendent trying to manage you know all the different opinions from the community with no real time in a community like this um it doesn't seem as though and even based on some of the the feedback that we had from the prior
thought exchange is that the community saw as much value in those as they do like just well well organized surveys so um I still think that there's a time and a place for a thought exchange the problem with the thought exchange is the problem with thought exchange is their pricing model it's just they have this
very high high user rate regardless of how frequently you use it and it seem it seems to me and this is what I've asked Christine to take up with the company and and I'm going to call the I do know the CEO and I'm going to call him if we're going to break part ties and just tell him you know you're missing out an opportunity you could you could change your pricing model and you could let
people get into your product by charging them by exchange you know you could they could have like like especially if you're going do a large scale exchange you know you want to do three exchanges a year I mean and realistically speaking you can't use it that much more than that we did try using it internally um
and and they have a whole other set of services that it provides but we looked at the survey module that they've built and it's a good module but we are already comfortable with the provider that we're using and it it did well for us when we did our state of the school survey so this is one of those things where if it isn't if it isn't broken
don't fix it sort of a situation and that survey service is much much cheaper than thought exchange so if if thought exchange is not willing to come to the table and play ball and be able to like basically price the product according to the amount that we do use it which is pretty minimally which should be much much much lower then we're just going to
we're going to cut ties and work with smaller uh like do more of a more of a besting class on a couple of smaller Niche areas so so Dr Shores one uh what I one IDE I suggested with pristine and maybe just for you when you speak to the CEO is a lot of times these software SAS
companies are reluctant to Discount because they worry that if the price gets out to the put and for the street right other districts and everybody's gonna want that price and so now their revenue will significantly take a hit a solution for that is called like a restricted use license Clause right
where you can put a hey Ridgewood has a special situation right they only use it for this amount so therefore we are giving r a special price this that way that way change the whole thing just give us exception yeah Miss corus just sent me a message and she just said that we they did use it a lot in the
strategic planning processes and and then they are coming to the table with with some reduced pricing offers so we'll see how it goes and and on the special education um survey I thought I thought some preliminary work was getting done yes it
is yep so Dr Fenwick has been doing some work but she's going to be working with Christine coris model the the the system that we use for the state of the schools address developing those surveys so we develop them with our stakeholders but yeah they've been pulling uh model surveys from other from other
organizations and States as a starting point um great uh anything else anybody wants to I just want to mention cpeg um oh yeah just uh uh cpeg had a a good meeting in February where Michelle Lockwood who's been working with the
district on inclusion came and spoke um with the community it was it was very um it was very informative and she had a really robust discussion with the parents that were there so that was helpful um but also cpeg has its initial
Gala on March 13th at 7 o'clock um tickets are still on sale and um get yours today good thank you you know I uh I'll bring this up here um
because I have I've heard some comments and I too have experienced so the way we've organized our um FYI in terms of the minutes and all the links so we link
into you know the minute of a of a committee meeting and then there you know five or six links in the commit we I think we need to look at how we're disseminating the information to um our board the board members for
easier access and use and if you've forgotten what committee you read something in you know you're going through it and you're linking again so there might be a better way to do it I'm not sure what way but give some feedback
on um the the FYI and and how it's using because I'm finding that I'm com I'm having at some time times not all the times have to come out and then go back into to the drive um sometimes the links
aren't open to us and we're asking for permission and it's a weekend and and then it's Monday we get the permission so just need to to take a look and maybe at our next um meeting we can uh sit
down and really talk about some of those issues so that it's it's a just a little bit more it's a little bit easier are you yeah so I think Sheila I think I provided the same feedback uh when um these committee meeting started coming
out so when you we are reading the FYI or a memo at that time those it's very handy to have links so we can click on those links and immediately read through that right but when you want to go back and reference it then you don't know in
which email or which document that link came through so there's no one common folder or one owner so there I I don't have a way to just go to committee minutes drill down to a folder and see all Finance committe minutes or all some one type of documents or a packet right for example our packet used to be a you
have a date folder and you go in that and then all documents are within that folder right so now you have to first find either an email or a document from where it's linked and it's not find things I'm finding it labor intensive
reading to go back and you know mean I try to read everything but I'm going back and forth and back and forth and it's is the Wikipedia model right it's a Wikipedia But but I I mean I feel actually this is way better than what we had before personally yeah so that that
document is yes that is good but those links the original documents should be should be organized they should not be owned by different people and different links so if you're sending a link to request access you don't even know who is going to send you that link back right so sometime like in this meeting I
had three documents where I did not have access and when I clicked request access the approval came from three different people so those are the owners so for anything that is um being provided as part of the preparation of the meeting
that's all operable information that all should be for recordkeeping that all should be at a centralized place not owned by different people who are creators of those so I think I think the solution for that could be that all of these minutes get placed into a a drive holder like committee reports or
whatever in the down by Finance facility whatever and the drive itself could have a default permission that it's default for all board members right so that way that's where it's stored in a library with the default permissioning but then it's linked in FYI just so people knows there right that's how it feels to I
want you need a date yeah of the meeting yeah it could be that could be the subject yeah we have that so we have a folder for every meeting and all the documents are there except some of these linked documents so if you go to Boe folder then there there are dates so for
every meeting there and then Lucy moves them to an archive folder by every week so or meeting date basically for every meeting date you have a folder but not everything related to this meeting in that folder so some documents are linked outsite so that's should come back be
careful because we're getting FYI and additional FYI so then we've we get everything isn't all in one so we're looking at an email that that get sent and then we're so we need to look at how the information is being shared and not
and not have us not have so many different links that bring us here and there right so I know just a thought so can I ask some clarifying questions yeah because because I've been I mean this has been this is like a
it's a it's a it's always a work in progress right so um and and I and I you know without the ability to just sit down together and talk this all through like whatever I want I have to take a lot of Liberties and saying I think this would be better I think this would be better right so a lot of this is just me
just kind of shooting from the hip so I appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation because we think about this all the time so there's a couple issues here the first is what's the most systematic way to get you information and and and it doesn't always come exactly in the same packets right there's like the board meeting which is
nice but then there's just times where like there's things that like honestly I don't really feel comfortable waiting for board meeting I want to keep you more up to date or if I save them all for a board meeting it just becomes then you're going to get ready for the board meeting but I'm also hitting you with all this other information right so so I was trying to go up with some different
systems this last one actually was set up even a little differently where I tried to put all the board stuff in the first chunk and then some of the more General updates afterward so pretend all the links worked and forget like the fact that sometimes come things come in email sometimes things come in packet can I just ask did you like the idea of
getting your board packet with all the board stuff up front and then additional updates afterwards yes I I definitely like that and I definitely like the links in the document so when I'm reading a document then I click on the link but the links don't all work right
but that but beside once so that is very user friendly when you get the information for the first time and you're reading that but now if I had to go back and reference that information so for example I'll give you the example of the special ed um settlement that we
had today right so we had special ed settlement so I received the email on or the packet on Thursday I quickly looked at it um that very high level that is there anything that I need to ask a question before Friday and I did not
find anything uh alarming or for where that needs more information so I thought okay I'll read the details later on so but when I went back and looked at the details so the the settlement was in the drive but the reference letter by Dr Fenwick
was a linked document that's not as part of the packet right so so that for that so I remember that I read the justification or the reference letter by Dr Fenwick but I could not find that in the in the packet so we we have a practice of a a packet folder right that
there's a packet folder for the everything for this meeting so when I'm reviewing the everything about meeting so now I I had to go back and look at some emails and the FYI that where did I see that link that link to Dr fenwick's letter yeah so that letter is part of
today's meeting so it that letter should be part so not the interim updates but everything related to today's meeting should be at one place so so the other yeah yes so so the other challenge is that we're using a Google doc based
system which is which which is which is not designed for what we're trying to accomplish here meaning that meaning that we have well I shouldn't say that it is if they are creating those documents in that folder if any document that there so Dr fanwick for example created this document for this meeting
so she that document was created for board update so that should have been created or stored in that same folder just like all other documents you're GNA end up with a folder with a million documents that's how we had we always had those all yeah always no it was
always FYI and background right so background information so right right background had everything so that's one thing I like my issue is the minutes and the access LS don't work but I know I have to go back
to right but you have to go back to FYI but if which FYI for what dates committee minutes you have to correlate that right I I I will say I had all of you're saying in the
background information was part of the we have two separate I so I I I will continue I'm taking this all into account I we will continue to try to adjust you know Lucy's been doing
this for a while so she's been she's tweaked this system a variety of ways it is my opinion that a Google Docs is too flexible of a system with too many hands and too many shared folders and it makes it very hard to coordinate everybody
sharing exactly the right way there are all these shared folders We have to build everything and then we have to move it to your folder that you can see but we have to be able to build it before we move it but then once we move it and now you can see it if we add to it now you feel like we've just added
stuff to it there is software I don't like board dos don't worry I know you don't like board dos I don't either no it's not there's but there's a software program that we brought in you know from my prior district for this exact purpose and it really resol significantly resolved these issues that's fine and I
don't just I I want to add to that because it's not that I don't like boards I don't like the underlying technology that they are using that technology was deprecated by IBM 15 years ago and sold to some company and it's in maintenance mode so if we purchase a bardog and if they are using
Lotus nodes a lot of today's software programmers don't even haven't heard the name of lotus noes so any other technology any newo technology I'm fine there's there's there's a there's I don't even know I don't even know what the state of this particular software was that we were using at the time but there's a it's designed for
public bodies like municipalities and school districts and it and it basically it it creates every item effectively becomes a module right it's it's in its own independent module you put your resolution into it and you attach whatever supporting documents you need
and we can work in that module continuously we can even move things from one meeting to another without doing duplicative work and every time something is inut input it's encoded as confidential or non-confidential which means that we have the public will also get links to things that are
non-confidential and then when it's time to produce a packet we just push a button and you get all of your links and everything directly embedded in the actual agenda itself so you can just go through the agenda and every link you need is actually attached to every single one of the items so that way you
don't have to go back and forth and back and forth plus it exists as a PDF on Amazon web server so we have all of their protections and encryptions there's a t of stuff that's not not on the agenda so th so things that pertain directly to an item we know
you just you would just embed it confidentially and then and then then you as board then then there's two features you can print for the public which eliminates everything confidential and then you print for the board members where you get all the things that are confidential and Dr Schwarz there was a few months
ago there was an update to the Oprah legislation by the state where they restricted a lot of the type of opa request but then they mandated some of the types of documents that should be made public proactively and I think they funded technology for that a state based
website I think or some technology so there were funds allocated to make it proactively available like Village Hall so for Village meetings they have a a public folder uh transparency folder so everything that is all the um contracts
and everything that is being discussed those resolutions are available in the transparency folder yeah from a technical perspective I mean everything that we vote on that doesn't have confidential information theoretically should be made available to any asking member of the public as a public body that's what the transparency folder is about we no one asks here so we don't
necessarily do that we have we could do it electronically right but my point our position in my last District was we had we had similar District here there was a lot of concerns about what was going on and we just felt like rather than seem like we're trying to gatekeep just if it's available for the public embed it
and provide it to everybody and it was well received it worked smoothly it's also really helpful for our workflow because once they build the resolution and they attach the attachment they can just continue to move on and behind the scenes there's a lot of work human work and I say that not because it's not just
people's time but also humans are humans have error right whereas a system well there'll still be error in inputting to some extent but it's significantly reduced by a system like that so I I would recommend that that uh that you that you would allow me to bring in a vendor to do a presentation for all of
you so you can kind of see what the product looks like um or if you want me to just move forward I could do that no I think we ought to take a look at it I think we ought to identify some of the issues that we're having with our current system yeah maybe and then in terms of communication just in gend another thing is in terms of
communication something else that we can do which it's your preference is that when instead of me providing you like inum updates via email I can provide you we can create a shared document with running updates that are all in one
place so then I could notify you hey I've provide I've placed some updates in the in the email or I can say you know here's the text that I added but then if you ever just want to go back and see like a running list of the updates I've sent you they can all be in one linear document well that might be more helpful
because it's it when we get all separate emails with different information uh with updated information um and they're not wondering where you start not was it the email was it in the FYI it's it sits
out here and La La Land so yeah um let's talk a little bit more about that and see about your um seeing if what that vendor looks like because I don't think this is a system that is a a as effective as you'd
like it to be I I I I am not I'm not saying that the system is effective yeah but I just want to uh add after all the discussion that there have been improvements in last few weeks or a couple of meetings uh so what we the packet for this meeting was better than
two meetings before well continu continuous Improvement I appreciate your patience too with the um just with the links that's just uh these are things you have to work out I think the system for the Committees I mean has really fixed that I mean we were all complaining months ago that nobody knows
what the other committees are doing now that's all clear we don't have that many questions in the in the public meetings so so Mohammed the problem changed right so earlier the problem was we don't have minutes now the problem is we have minutes but they they can be can they be
more accessible right so they problem yeah if if we use the software solution that I'm familiar with we would just embed the minutes as part of like where we have our minutes reports we would just embed the actual minutes there so again instead of having to go back and
forth and back and forth back and forth if you just went linearly down your agenda but you'd hit everything my my concern and worry being in Tech forever feels like forever is that the click of a button in human error clicking something that's
confidential versus something that should be shared with everyone and that errors and mistakes because so many things of what we do have to confidential and just being cautious and what we do find that there is a clear a
big Fe do you want to make this shared with everybody just to avoid any mistakes because that could be devastating yeah so that and that uh that would be that feature of being able to add something confidential is restricted to very few users so we would
make sure that really basically you know my my assistant and I would be The Gatekeepers of that and making sure that that's being used correctly but but I also wonder about the S like does that become easily easily searchable later well the modules piece
in the moment but then if you want to go back and yeah because because when you because when you hit the uh print when you hit the um generate packet button it gives you the agenda with all the links and then it also has all the links PDF behind it so when I hit generate board
member packet or generate public packet when I hit gener public packet it's like a depending on the meeting it could be like a 500 page document because it's the agenda with the links but then all of the printed PDFs are behind it so then we just post that in all of our documents and all of our and all of our
uh agenda is up say wants to find policies but say wants to find the facilities meeting back in like September of 2023 where he remers we discussed something well we would still have a separate folder where we keep all those you have access to them all
folder each folders I I just wonder I think there might be some tweaks in Google that could fix our issues like maybe if a folder again well just for the next meeting we're gonna we're going to tweak I I I I I I went over this I this idea
of having like the oh well if the one folder is sharable to everybody then you just drop it in there and then we know you know you got it we had this conversation I'm I'm not remembering exactly why that doesn't fit the workflow right now or what the constraint is for the team I'll we I'll we'll go look at it again with Lucy but
um but maybe this is something too for us to talk about with as President and Vice President just sit down with Lucy and like let's let's uh let's brainstorm together here how how we can there might be have to be some concessions about about uh about how things look or how things are presented but honestly it
looks pretty labor intensive on our end so in trying to meet your expectations better it might actually clean things up on our end so before we go spending money on software why don't we try that but I do remember 20 25 years ago looking at board agendas there were
Pages upon pages of PDFs because they didn't have the ability digit and everything if you was always yeah and a binder usually right the packet was so huge huge used to have a big packet binder delivered to you
right every meeting yeah I know used to print them and put them in the school buildings as a way of being transparent because they did not have the internet capabilities that we have now and I said oh my gosh as a person wanting to watch
them okay we're gonna just go on to discussion items the policy regulations these are mandated standard standard updates um didn't look like anything that was like really is there any one
that you feel needs to be no not really there was a concern raised you know about the policy 5512 for you know HIV and just to clarify um that was mandated and it really had to do with making sure that there's cooperation to
the extent that a there's a police involvement with a with an HIV complaint that that we you know the school districts required to cooperate again it's not something that's discretionary we are required to adopt it for the state so um I know there was a question
about that from someone so I just wanted to clarify that's what this particular HIV policy is is uh addressing I do that I good so today's the introduction and next meeting will be the first reading there'll be yes there'll be the
first reading next next meeting um acceptance of minutes January 6 regular public meeting seems so long um I move uh acceptance of the January 6 regular public
meeting all in favor all right okay other business so the only yeah sorry the only uh question I have is um if if there was any update on the ice hockey and
athletic allocations uh that reporting research yeah we did we did get a we had an initial analysis we gave some feedback we did get another round of analysis we're in the process of looking at that do we have I think we have a meeting schedule don't we Yeah March 4th
we're meeting yeah next week thank you okay uh comments from the public we have no public here we've we've we've outlasted the public here I don't know if there's any so
um there no public comment I move um to adjourn the meeting I have a second yes all in favor would you like to stay later for any reason no okay um so we'll be back uh on the
17th of March for a discussion preliminary budget right preliminary pardon me yes the preliminary budget to to go to the it gets voted on to go to to be
presented to the county right