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MINUTES OF THE PATERSON BOARD OF EDUCATION REGULAR MEETING January 20, 2010 – 7:55 p.m. John F. Kennedy High School Presiding: Comm. Errol Kerr, President Present: Dr. Donnie W. Evans, State District Superintendent Mark Tabenkin, Esq., General Counsel Comm. Theodore Best Comm. Waheedah Muhammad Comm. Eddie Gonzalez Comm. Pedro Rodriguez *Comm. Jonathan Hodges Comm. Willa Mae Taylor, Vice President Comm. Danilo Inoa Absent: Comm. Wendy Guzman The Salute to the Flag was led by Comm. Kerr. Comm. Best read the Open Public Meetings Act: The New Jersey Open Public Meetings Act was enacted to insure the right of the public to have advance notice of, and to attend the meetings of the Paterson Public School District, as well as other public bodies at which any business affecting the interest of the public is discussed or acted upon. In accordance with the provisions of this law, the Paterson Public School District has caused notice of this meeting: Regular Meeting January 20, 2010 at 7:00 p.m. John F. Kennedy High School 61-127 Preakness Avenue Paterson, New Jersey to be published by having the date, time and place posted in the office of the City Clerk of the City of Paterson, at the entrance of the Paterson Public School offices, and by sending notice of the meeting to the Arab Voice, El Diario, the Italian Voice, the North Jersey Herald News, and the Record. Comm. Kerr: If you are here and you have your cell phones on, we are asking you to please turn them off because they do interfere with the recording apparatus. So if you need to use them, you go outside of the precinct of this auditorium and you may use them. But while you are inside here, we are asking you kindly to turn them off. Page 1 01/20/10 REPORT OF STATE DISTRICT SUPERINTENDENT Dr. Evans: I have three or four items I'd like to briefly share with you. First of all, I'd like to provide for you – and I think you have copies for each Board member, Cheryl – a working draft of revised weather emergency procedures that we recently distributed among our principals and other staff. These particular procedures will replace any preexisting procedures that we have. As we have moved through the winter, the possibility of a weather event that may result in a delayed opening in particular has prompted us to include that as an option in this particular array of procedures. I understand the district has not exercised that option much. In fact, I think there has probably only been one occasion in the recent past that the district has used it and the response that I've gotten from individuals who were in the district at that time was that we needed to be clearer on the processes, procedures, and expectations, and we think we've done that. But we've also made major revisions to procedures as it relates to school closings, or cancelations, and early release. We also have included in this particular document a section that addresses shelter-in-place procedures. We may find ourselves in circumstances where a particular weather event comes so quickly and is so devastating that we may want to hold our students and faculty in schools rather than allowing them out into whatever weather may be under way, because it may be more dangerous for them to go outside. So shelter-in-place procedures are necessary then for principals to follow to maintain youngsters and faculty in the schools until it‟s safe to go outside. We provide this to you for the purpose of getting your feedback. I'm asking that you will take the opportunity to review them in the coming days and get to Ms. Berrios suggestions or comments you want to make regarding them by Friday of next week. I believe that is January 29. At that point we are seeking to put them in final form. We are also seeking input from a number of stakeholders. Indeed, included in the introduction and overview section on page four you will see a list of stakeholders from whom we are requesting input and you will see the School Board is the first on that list. You will see other individuals that we want to read this and give us feedback so we can be as through and represent that feedback in any revisions that we make. So again, we ask that you review it, give Ms. Berrios a call, send her an email or a memo, or in whatever form you choose to communicate, to advise her of any recommendations for revisions to this document that you'd like to make. Secondly, on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr.‟s birthday, on January 18, I had the privilege of participating in an activity sponsored by the Paterson Youth Council and NJCDC. I was extremely pleased. It was very well done. In fact, so well done some of our students were recognized to the point that I want to bring them to you in the next Board meeting to recognize our students and the two Board Commissioners that were involved in that activity, Comm. Gonzalez and Comm. Best. But I want to personally commend them. To see first our Commissioners in a leadership role and sponsoring such an event, but then having our students also to assume leadership roles and be the recipients of awards was doubly pleasing. So, on the next Board agenda I do want to formally recognize members of the School Board and the students in our schools who were a part of this process. Again, I commend you all for a job well done. Third, we had some discussion in the workshop last week about alternative schools and you voted and I took some action as a result. One of the comments I made was regarding Eastside High School and where we were with it. I have some additional comments that I want to offer after reflecting on last week‟s discussion and my action to add additional perspective. But I've asked Principal Moody to come and provide for you a very brief update with regards to where we are with Eastside High School. *Comm. Hodges enters the meeting at 8:00 p.m. Page 2 01/20/10 Mr. Zatiti Moody: Good evening Dr. Evans, distinguished members of the Board, and our community at large. This evening I was asked to update you guys on some of the changes that have taken place at Eastside High School. I'm extremely ecstatic that as a staff and as a school we have been able to rejuvenate and reinvigorate many of our staff members by simply setting a standard and holding firm to our belief that the classroom is our most sacred place in our schools. We have a team of behavior experts, along with our administrative team, at Eastside High School who have partnered with Dr. Evans, Dr. Fulmore, Eileen Shafer, Captain Smith, and many other central office administration members to introduce a highly intense, no-nonsense approach towards educational excellence. Our team has been amazing. We have some members of our staff here tonight who can testify to a team buying into a process to take over our schools and establish some type of order, and a process where we believe in a concept of demanding excellence as opposed to demanding obedience. You will hear me say this on many occasions that we have a team approach where no one person can take credit for the early success and for the things that we have accomplished early on this past week at Eastside High School. With this in mind, we also need to understand that no one person can take the blame for some of the negative activities that occur in pockets still at Eastside High School and out of Eastside High School. We do believe that we take ownership of our students, their behaviors, and their actions, even outside of the school because we have to teach them a culture of getting along, going to school, and respecting one another. So with this said, we worked collectively as a staff. We met collectively as a staff. We met with the student body individually on grade levels to make them aware of some of the things that we were bringing forth. We vigorously attacked some of the behaviors that were not conducive to the educational environment, such as students walking the halls aimlessly, students being very disrespectful to themselves, to the staff members, and just to the whole academic environment as a whole. We attacked these behaviors. We are clear to say we attack behaviors. We don't attack children or young people. We try to encourage them and teach them. We use problems as an opportunity to teach different ways of understanding one another and coming to school for the right reasons. With this said, what we did simply is we created an in-school suspension program where we cleared the hallways. Any student that was late to class or late to school had to go into an in-school suspension program where we gave them some intense behavior modification and allowed the remainder of the school to focus on what's important, the education in the classroom, like I said, our most treasured environment. Many of our teachers and staff members, and the students, believe it or not, bought into this process. They were looking for some firm direction and guidance. Our students don't mind how firm we are.

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