MINUTES OF THE PATERSON BOARD OF EDUCATION REGULAR MEETING August 10, 2005 – 7:00 p.m. John F. Kennedy High School Presiding: Comm. Chauncey I. Brown, III, MBM, President Present: Dr. Michael Glascoe, State District Superintendent Mr. Agostino Rottino, Interim Assistant Superintendent of Operations Ms. Monica Peck, General Counsel Comm. Joseph Atallo Comm. Andre Sayegh Comm. Jonathan Hodges Comm. Lawrence Spagnola Comm. Alonzo Moody Comm. Willa Mae Taylor Comm. Juan Santiago Comm. Daniel Vergara The Salute to the Flag was led by Comm. Brown. Comm. Vergara 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 August 10, 2005 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 Al-Zaman, El Diario, the Italian Voice, the New Jersey Forum, the North Jersey Herald & News, and The Record. Comm. Brown: Before we continue, I would like to have everyone please turn off their cell phones or put them on vibrate. In addition, I would like to have a moment of silence for some family members of individuals that have passed away in our community - the Quince family, the Rafferty family, the Malzone family, and the Chinchay family. I would like to welcome our new Superintendent, Dr. Michael Glascoe, to his first Regular Board Meeting and I am going to turn the floor over to him. Page 1 8/10/05 REPORT OF STATE DISTRICT SUPERINTENDENT Dr. Glascoe: Thank you, Comm. Brown. It pleases me to provide an update of some issues that I have been involved with since starting on July 18th and the first one certainly is dealing with facilities. As most of you know, the SCC has recommended six projects to get underway as early as September. Those projects include two new schools, Marshall Street and the International High School. We have two major renovations at Schools 24 and 25. This certainly is far, far below what we expected and what is certainly needed construction in our school district. Our greater community is certainly working hard behind the scenes and even in front of the scenes to confront these issues under the law to make sure that we get the numbers of projects that we deserve in our school district. Our facilities are woefully inadequate, as all of you know, and we will continue to do all we can to improve them. It does not, by the way, stop us inside our schools and outside our schools to do the very best we can in providing a great education for our students and we will continue to do that. I do want to share with you my early plans to have a School Board retreat. I had intended to do this in June, even before I officially had taken over, because it is important that the Superintendent and the School Board come together as a team to make some decisions and develop guidelines on how we conduct business, how we interact, our expectations, and even a vision of what we would want to see for the school district. I attempted to schedule a School Board retreat last week, but we had a number of our School Board members who had obligations and certainly could not get out of those obligations. At one point, and I do want to be up front with the community, Comm. Brown and I were anxious, so to speak, to get this process underway because in the next two and a half weeks or so school will start and we want to be a fully functioning team when that happens. So initially we were going to try to go with not all of the School Board members there. But in discussions with Comm. Brown, we decided to postpone that until a later date and we certainly want to make sure that we have all of our School Board members involved so that we can develop a high functioning team to serve the community and the students of Paterson. I want to let everyone know that we have a major leadership conference that is going to take place in Princeton on August 25th and 26th. Comm. Brown is going to join us to bring introductions to all of our principals, assistant principals and central office staff members. This will be an opportunity and a time for me to present what my staff has called the State of the School District address. I will cover items such as leadership, school improvement planning, taking a hard look at where we are as far as achievement is concerned, and looking at what we need to do to be more accountable to our stakeholders, and then to talk about how we should be restructuring our school district to get all of this done. We also have the new teacher orientation session on August 29th and 30th. This is for me a very exciting function and activity because we will have what I hope will be the best and the brightest of young people who have decided to take on the most glorious profession of all – teaching. I will glorify that with these young adults. Maybe some of them may be a little more mature than young, so I apologize if that is the case. But we really want to try to kick off the school year in grand fashion and welcome teachers and provide them with a great beginning to their careers in Paterson. It goes without saying that if there is a great beginning for teachers, they tend to stay. They don’t burn out within a year or two and try some other vocation. Again, that new teacher orientation is going to be August 29th and 30th, and I believe it’s at School No. 1. We also have an opportunity for me to address all of our staff members in the school district and we are trying to make plans for that, either via video or we may even have a face-to-face meeting. So we are still working on that and we are looking at September 1st. I have three issues regarding the opening of school. Bear with me and I will try not to ramble through this. I have a vision for Paterson Public Schools for the first day of school. I want you, our students, and anyone else who will have the opportunity to visit our schools that first day and first week to see teaching and Page 2 8/10/05 learning to begin immediately. What are the challenges to do that? The first challenge is staffing – to staff our buildings. At this late date in the year, and I will take that responsibility because I am starting late, we still have some principals vacancies to fill and we still have a number of teacher vacancies to fill. But we want all of those things done by the first day of school. So human resources and all of our staff members are working very hard to make sure that that happens. I understand that student registrations and scheduling can be a challenge for our school district. I really and truly don’t want to see groups of students and parents lining our hallways to register on the first day of school. We are working on a project of activities to do early registrations and to get the word out to families that they need to register now and not the first day of school. Within the next seven to ten days there will be some major communications going to each and every household in our school district imploring parents to make sure that their children are properly registered and scheduled for their classes, and also to talk to their neighbors, friends and relatives who may be having some difficulty in registering their children in school. So we don’t want to see that happen the first day of school. It will be a tremendous message to our students and to you, our community, if teaching and learning started the very first day of school without interruption. The other major challenge, of course, is facilities. Our facilities staff is very busy in trying to get our schools up and running for the first day of school. Broken windows, misplaced furniture, and the like we are scrambling to try to make sure that those things are taken care of. A few mishaps along the way, such as school flooding at one of our schools when the water fountain malfunctions, we are working very hard to take care of that. So it is those three challenges that keep me awake at night as far as the first day of school is concerned, but we will do all we can to make that happen. I have been extremely busy and involved in trying to reach out to as many organizations and communities as possible. Many of you have heard me talk about a 90-day plan, so to speak, or what my initiatives are early on.