##VIDEO ID:RZdKRh1lFM8## correspondence this evening okay then moving right along Dr J do you have any comments I would we have a scintillating audit presentation tonight um so I'll keep my comments brief set you up there Chris so we have high expectations um actually I would just like to speak about the Murray Hill Chinese School New Year celebration that a number of us attended this past weekend um the past couple of years I've brought my son Quinn who gets so spoiled because they always have a goodie bag of stuff for him there and he really enjoys the Dragon Dance uh but it was a really really nice event and they they have been a part of our school Community for a lot of years I mean since I've been here for 12 years and probably I mean I know way longer than that and they are very supportive of the school um one of our students was actually one of the MC's for the event so it was it was a really nice event thank you to the board members who were able to attend um we really appreciate their support every year but that's all I have all right I will pass and uh turn it over to Mr sty uh Mr President I will also pass since we have the audit to discuss great uh we have Sophie we're fortunate to have our student reps again this evening Sophie lamb and Juliana Santos would you guys like to tell us what's going on okay so this month's student achievements are as follows congratul ulations to coach crutz and the fbaa team on their recent success at the regional competition this year we had 14 students placed in the 1 through n spots in the future Business Leaders of America Regional competition congratulations to coach flann and the math team as of January 2nd 2025 they are ranked second in the county and 11th in the State coach flanny will be stepping aside for the next three meets handing the Reigns over to coach cardi coach cardi is a legendary figure in Math League circles with a long and successful history of leading teams to Victory and a true Mentor who has built a strong foundation for future coaches and teams to succeed good luck in the following weeks Michelle Peta social justice class is working with our car's program students in a pure Outreach doing activities and getting to know each other one activity was a selfie project in which they went around and took selfies with different teachers and staff members they printed the pictures and hung them on a bulletin board in the south cafet herea on Saturday December 7th 22 students from the instrumental music program as well as six students from the coral music program auditioned to be part of the Central Jersey music educators Association region to honors ensembles auditioning for one of these ensembles is an amazing feat in itself as the competition is incredibly Fierce students from all over Central Jersey work for months to practice audition materials for a chance to receive a spot in one of the ensembles of our 22 instrumental music students 12 successfully auditioned into one of the ensembles those students are Aaron Lennox Alex Chi Alexander Glassner Nico Mitchel ludus Zachary Rubin yeli Hogan Alpha Zoo Jessica zakaras Christopher sper Emily Wang pearly zo and Caitlyn Sun of the six Coral students three receive spots those students are Bianca reddish kylo Wang and Francesca gulas it is also worth noting that Aaron Lennox and Christopher SP came in first place on their respective instruments congratulations to all the students who auditioned we are all so proud of you thank you for representing watang Hills with your musical talent and hard work a Nick McKellen a sophomore danced four roles in the New Jersey ballet's Nutcracker with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra December 20th through 26th at the Mayo Pac in Morristown this was an amazing performance opportunity for this festive holiday season now moving on to our school events The English Department hosted our School's First poetry out loud competition on Thursday January 16th at 700 p.m. in the Performing Arts Center a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation poetry out loud is a national Arts education program that encourages the study of great poetry by offering a dynamic recitation competition to high schools across the country the winner of the whrhs finals will go on to complete compete in the New Jersey Region 4 competition at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown on February 10th now moving on to our sports update with a busy winter athletic season underway here are some highlights boys varsity basketball won the summit holiday championship by defeating Milbourne and Summit in the championship game the boys wrestling team is the 2025 Somerset County Champions they also placed fifth of 71 teams at the nationally recognized Sam CI Invitational as well as placing second for the public school sector the girls fencing epe team placed first in the county tournament the boys fencing team took first place in the epe team at sato's fencing tournament with 55 teams competing the Warriors finished today strong coming in sixth overall the girls swim team placed third in the Somerset County championships with matd gett placing first in the 200 meter and 100 breath breath stroke and Maya uku Rebecca Clemente matd gett and Vivian U took first place in the 200 medley relay and that is all for our student announcements Dr J has a special invitation this evening so thank you to Mrs obber for reminding me um You Might Recall last year we had talked about including you in our board picture this year so I sent you a Google invite tonight uh it's going to be at our Fe before our February 18th board meeting we tell the board members to get here around 6:15 if you guys get here by about 20 to seven so we can take the group photo I know then you have to hang out while we have closed session but we would love for you to be a part of the picture so um you got a Google invite but I just want to let you know thank you Mr thank you uh uh next up is the annual comprehensive financial report the audit uh Tim would you like to introduce our speaker this evening yes uh from uh our audit firm we have Mr Chris Vincy who was actually here on site doing most of the uh partnering work or I guess Manager work or however you uh uh manager or partner manager okay so he does most of the uh he oversees most of the work that's done here um but he's here to discuss the annual comprehensive financial report um and some of the items that it's relevant to the board and to the public Mr Vincy um so presenting the 2324 annual audit uh for the year end of June 3 24 um hopefully this doesn't come as a surprise it was another another clean audit for Tim and and the business office um they do a great job no audit recommendations um so no items that would require corrective action plan um the audit had an unmodified opinion on the financial statements an unmodified opinion on the internal control over financial reporting and an unmodified opinion on the Federal and State financial assistance an unmod ified opinion is the cleanest audit opinion you can get it's an absolute must um so um now that there's no audit recommendations I'm just going to run through the components of fund balance so the district began the year in capital reserve with 9,754 306 and they ended the year with 5,788 15 so was a decrease of about just under $4 million which may sound alarming but this was planned and budgeted and is is actually going to be a great thing going forward that you're able to use what was in your capital reserve to pay off the temporary capital note for the 2022 referendum um so while the financial results may not look great for this year I think you're absolutely going to see the benefits going forward so this is this is a very good thing um maintenance Reserve started the year with a million 049 884 and ended the year with a million 15329 so it went up about 103,000 uh the maintenance Reserve is about half of the what it can be uh at its maximum allowable um the main difference between capital reserve and maintenance Reserve capital reserve adds useful life to a project maintenance Reserve brings an asset back to its regular working condition um so just for example if you were going to replace the entire roof on the building you would use capital reserve that adds life to the building if you're replacing or repairing just a small portion of the roof you would use maintenance Reserve just as a comparison uh tuition Reserve remain steady 100,000 at the end of June 30th of 23 as well as 100,000 um June 30th of 24 this is primarily for the green book Greenbrook tuition adjustments the certified tuition rates from the state come out is almost like a a year DeLay So these this 100,000 in each of the past two two school years is used in each to the subsequent Year's budgets excess Surplus uh which is an item of Revenue that has to be used in the 2526 budget so for the June 30th of 24 excess Surplus is $489,000 21 this was down from the previous year of 622 756 um this is a good decrease excess Surplus is not really an item of fund balance that you want to rely on provides a little bit of tax payer relief but also helps balance the budget um in the following school year so that $489,000 221 has to be used as an item of Revenue in the 2526 um budget unemployment that remained the same as the previous year $264,700 is more cost effective you play you pay the unemployment claims as they come in from the Department of Labor rather than regularly making the same contribution to the state uh for encumbrances these are open purchase orders at year end by now they've all been liquidated uh these were funds that were earmarked for purchases that were input into the financial accounting software but the goods and services were not received until after year end uh there was 280,000 that was used as an item to balance the 2425 budget um that's known as designated for the subsequent Year's budget and then finally the last item for fund balance is unassigned fund balance so the state has a 2% calculation the that's so this unassigned fund balance is the 2% expenditures which is just over $95,000 plus the unbudgeted portion of extraordinary Aid and non-public Transportation Aid um so all in all fund balance went down 4, 8838 but again this was planned and it was budgeted and I think rather than having to pay a Serial Bond principal payment over the next several years if the district had to issue long-term debt the fact that you were able to pay off this Capital note in in one year is is great great so the district is in very sound very stable um condition anyone have any questions any questions I'm good no I well actually um thank you and I the Applause is not really NE but my staff does all the work I'm I was going to say I was there I'm there for looks but I'm not it's clearly not the case but you're there good but but because my wife would still be laughing she was watching but um they they're phenomenal they my group is so professional in what they do and how they go about their day-to-day stuff I like I was telling Brenda the other day this is the best group I've had I've had good groups this group is the best I've had um they just do phenomenal work and I Chris is with you know he audits them but it's so when they ask for things they he doesn't even have to ask twice they'll have everything there for him because they're so profession need more audits like this it's very uncommon to have an audit with no recommendations and it's been I don't know how many years in a row so big thank you yeah it's all that thank you okay well thank you very much certainly appreciate it have a good night have a good night uh we will move into committee reports in a second uh there were committee assignments I'm although I presented it to the board a couple people have reached out to me with some changes they might want so I may tweak them a little bit but all in all I so everyone knows and I think I spoke to most of you I try to give people opportunities to be on other committees that they haven't been on before I tried to get people leadership U positions chair positions uh you know my view has historically been we are you know there's 10 of us we all have an equal say and equal vote and that the committee is an opportunity for to flush out some specifics or go into greater detail about certain items but no just so the public is aware we can't make any decisions no action can be taken in the Committees and any action taken has to be done at the board level so they may certainly present things to us but you know the people who are not on say looking at the education the five people who are not on that that doesn't mean that we necessarily know that much less than the five people are on the committee and that you know we all work hand in hand they just happen to be the ones who are um in it a little deeper more more in the weeds let's just say uh so with that said again if anyone else has any tweaks that they're looking for um let me know uh in this year the only other addition I did make a an ad hoc finance committee um I think we alluded to the fact even though we had a great audit um that this year may be uh particularly difficult budgeting year uh Tim has uh again the four years that I've been on the board in the presentations with finance that there's always significant issues and significant concerns and uh whether it's Health Care special ed or just Rising inflationary costs and stuff like that and doing our best to stay within the uh governmental cap and I just felt it was important although Finance has always been covered well since I'm on the board under the operations that it was worthwhile to have a special committee that only focused on that uh for the next certainly for the next four months okay with that said uh the education committee and uh although I recommend that Lisa should be the new chair uh that didn't take I'm reporting in Bob ABS talking about education yeah yeah because we had all the former committees moving forward right so right there what I'm saying is there had been committee uh committees meetings in the last couple weeks before we before I made some changes so yes so Bob had I think been the chairman of the education Bob obviously is not here this evening so Susan you're going to give the report I'm just reporting because Bob is absent tonight thank you Susan so the education committee met on January 15 at 3:45 um we started by uh with an update on program of studies Mr Sabina reviewed the program of studies revision for the 25 26 school year there will be four new course offerings Foundation of Creative Design biomed science a neuroscience H and criminal justice a public speaking course was also discussed but will be postponed for further review and discussion Mr Sabino discussed the foundation of Creative Design course which would be offered in the new Design Lab additionally uh Mr Sabino went on to discuss planned revisions for existing courses which are included in the outline and the Ed education committee folder we discussed a potential revision to the instrumental music sequence but will not be moving forward with that change and we'll have future discussion about options an updated summary of the uh program of studies revisions has been included in the education committee folder and also included with the Blue Notes Mr saino also mentioned the change in course drop notation to W meaning withdrawal instead of WF which is is withdraw fail or WP withdraw pass if a student withdraws from a course after the deadline uh 8th grade parents night Mr laera explained that the notice went out to the sending District's 8th grade parents to notify them of the upcoming 8th grade parent night which will be held on January 30th at 7M in the Performing Art Center the evening will give them a chance to get familiarized with the ninth grade experience students will come back in April to get information on club and sports offerings eth grade articulation eth grade articul sorry eth grade articulation took place on January 15th the science departments for seventh and eth grades from the sending districts sent representatives to the high school articulation went well and was well received uh Dr jitt mentioned that the cell phone and AI policies uh will be upcoming topics for the next Ed committee meeting meeting adjourned 437 does any uh Ed committee members want have anything else to add um any questions I just think it's great that we provide additional education opportunities different types of classes and stuff like that certainly when I was a kid it was your five solid it was a math English History and you just didn't have these diverse opportunities and it's just great that we we continue we've done it and we just continue to do it of course you can thank you so um the the in the foundations of Creative Design right am I getting we we worked a lot on the titles uh for our new design course for the Design Lab we are looking obviously at a sequence of courses because we're looking to introduce a whole new design program so we have we're going to have two options for the foundations courses one of them is our current intro to engineering design course um but we wanted an option that was for students who may not be um the engineering focused and want more of a um design course that is uh you know more entrepreneurial Humanities Focus because there's a lot that goes into design in terms of who you're designing for we actually had a whole discussion at the dinner table last night of who decided how long the prongs on a fork should be it was and so then of course I started talking about our design courses and our Design Lab um so I I want to encourage um students you know right now they're they're really open to all grade levels we're looking to build a design course so ideally it would be nth or 10th graders taking the foundations courses that can then take the future courses but we're trying to get the courses off the ground so um Sophie and jul Juliana tell all your friends um to sign up for these courses but you know it's hard the the difficult thing when you first start running a course is we need to try and get the word out and advertise it which we are doing with the eighth grade counselors with our counselors once the courses start running and students are in there and talking about it then other students want to sign up for those courses um so we're looking to get these off the ground next year and you know our hope is that we have so many people sign up that we have to actually um figure out how we're going to um to you know weed to to narrow it down so that we can fit the courses in the classroom um but it we finally H do have our robotic students in there correct Miss C there are they in there now working the robotics classes did they move in I'm asking you because you were the former science supervisor but I'm not on the spot I don't know they've been doing a lot of organizing in there oh thank you thank you Mr R so they've been in there um it is just it's such a cool space I'm so excited about it and about the programming that it's not just like we created a new space for our existing courses we're actually designing a new program for that space um so I you know I think that's actually going to be a really really cool opportunity um and you'll hear more about it over the coming years because each year we're going to be introducing the next level of courses for that program so anyway thank you for indulging me sure uh do we have any Katherine is in charge chairman of personnel is there a report this we did okay operations chair but Carol the operations committee met on January 15th at 9:00 a.m. attending were Michael bernberg Bill marich Heather tror Elizabeth JEA Tim sty Auditors Gary and Chris Vincy and myself the mess's Vincy gave a review of the 20 2324 audit stating that the audit was excellent and provided a com and provided a comparison of the Surplus and reserves from the 2023 to 2024 years they noted that the Surplus balance this is going to be a little redundant but um I wrote it before we heard what Mr Vincy had to say they noted that the plus balance was down as planned due to the pay down of debt from the referendum project Gary Vincy reviewed the balance of capital reserves and noted that while a reserve is lower um is at the is at the lower end of the limit for comparison to other Regional systems it is within the guidelines Mr Vincy reviewed the audit synopsis which is composed of three items which are the balance sheet statement of revenues and expenses and Order recommendations once again our district did not receive any audit recommendations he noted that our debt will be significantly down in the years's 2028 29 year and that if we are contemplating any referendum he recommends we think to the future of those years it's nice to have Auditors that give us a little heads up uh Michael asked about the formula for determining the maximum Reserve balance Mr Vincy Vincy explained that it is tied to the long range facility plan uh looking forward the 2526 budget Mr Sky discussed the increase in the cost of health benefits the additional cost in outof District placements coupled with the decreasing reimbursement from the state Tim gave us a construction update noting that all the new areas are now occupied the new chillers are in place but not yet hooked up there is a change uh order on ton T night's agenda for the chillers and pack lighting projects uh Tim noted that our Architects were scheduled to be at Watchung Hills the following week to work on a punch list of the items to be uh resolved on the maintenance projects the drawings for the new sack office are almost complete and he was reviewing with the Architects and engineer proposed plans for drainage upgrades behind the bleachers he further reviewed the two addendum items on the agenda for paining to long range facilities and hpack upgrades in the administration area uh the meeting was adjourned at 1012 thank you do we have any questions you can direct them to [Music] Tim okay excellent uh so this is the first opportunity for public comment the first public comment period will be limited to agenda items for this meeting only the second public comment period will be open to any topic all comments are limited to 5 minutes uh if you have a comment please uh state your name and where you're from does anyone have any comment for the first round okay seeing none I close the first round of public comment and again there'll be an opportunity for second round of public comment uh do we have any items for board discussion anyone to have any board discuss discussion items okay any discussion of addend we don't have any addendum items tonight do we okay any discussion with respect to those items okay let's move into action items uh Mr President I'd like to move items A1 through A3 and A9 through a17 any discussion with respect to those items see none roll call please Mr Gall yes Mr Mayor Che yes Miss obber yes Mr Potter yes rasa yes Cur yes Mr Burber yes motion carry um Mr President I'd like to move items A4 through A8 any discussion with regard to A4 through A8 seeing none roll call Mr St Mr Gall yes Mr Mayor yes Miss obber yes rasa yes chur yes and Mr Burber yes car Mr President I'd like to move items C1 through c112 second any discussion with respect to those items no but I wanted to congratulate all of the people who are moving up on the salary guide because of Advanced degrees thought it was exciting to see we have a PhD another one another one yes it's very good news they for students as well um any additional discussion roll call please Mr Gall yes Mar yes Uber yes otter yes rasa yes chour yes and Mr Burber yes motion carry Mr President I'd like to move items D1 through D13 no D15 15 second any discussion with regard to D1 through D15 I see none can I get a roll call on that Mr sty Mr Gall yes mayor Che yes Miss hober yes rter Yesa Cur yes and Mr bber yes motion to carry okay that was quick second opportunity for public comment again this is comment on anything you want please come on up state your name and where you're from do we have anyone okay see none we will close the second opportunity for public may have to start doing some controvers controversial action so we get some comments be careful what you wish for right they give it a month don't we don't okay do we have any other business to discuss this evening anyone want to bring up anything else okay then I will entertain a motion to aurn I have a second second all those in favor I