January 27, 2025 Board of Education Meeting Summary

Board of Education public meetings continue to be controversial and also are providing more and more insight into major school issues. The major topics of interest include new student standardized testing scores, the state of the West Amwell School and potential sale, and changes in senior administrative personnel.

The latest Board of Education Meeting was held last night at the High School. This article will provide a summary of what occurred, and we will be providing in-depth articles on a number of spotlight issues. The formal agenda is available at this link.

2025 saw a welcome change in format for the meetings. In the past, the Board President would run through the agenda items generally without discussion. This year, each Committee Chair proffers a verbal report on their committee and their most recent committee meetings, discussion is asked for, and then a vote is entered into. The new format adds more transparency into what is happening for the public to follow, and lowers barriers to Board members to engage in discussion before voting on issues.

This meeting also saw a surge in attendance. A large number of members of the South Hunterdon teacher's union were in attendance in response to the ongoing volatility of buildings and classrooms in the district and the future of the PreK program.

Meeting Opening

This meeting saw the swearing in of Martha Dennis as a new Board member from Lambertville. Martha has served in the BOE in the past as well. The union teachers in attendance applauded loudly at her swearing in.

Correspondence

While we are happy to see increased transparency from the Board, there is still much work to be done in that area. Correspondence is one such area. In the past, correspondence was acknowledged in detail, the writer(s) were named and their correspondence either read into the record or at least summarized. The Board has moved away from this and only states whether or not any correspondence was received, and no other details. It is unclear if such correspondence is even read by the Board members.

As mentioned in an earlier article, correspondence this month includes a complaint from former Board member Dr. Hengst. While Board President Gallagher acknowledged that "correspondence had been received", he failed to indicate that they had in fact received a formal complaint, and that it was from a former board member regarding alleged problems with the Gifted and Talented program.

Approval of Minutes

Minutes for the December 10, 2024 special meeting and December 16, 2024 regular meeting were presented for approval, along with a resolution to approve executive minutes from November 25, 2024. It should be noted the executive minutes only record the broadest possible topics to be discussed and no details.

We will be covering the special December 10th meeting separately to talk about the PreK discussion that took place then.

Reports

The Reports section includes a regular monthly Superintendent Update and any other special reports. This month also included the i-Ready Winter test results for the K-8 students presented by the Director of Curriculum Jane-Ellen Lennon.

Superintendent Update

The Superintendent Update for the month is available here. The updates vary from month to month and the topic and extent of the update is entirely at the discretion of the Superintendent.

This month was relatively light, with the following topics:

• PreK classroom Options. Facing pushback from the Board of Education and the public on the PreK classroom options discussed in December, the Superintendent provided yet another option: splitting PreK between LPS and the Jesus School (e.g. St. John's). The parish already responded to the cost of hosting all 5 PreK classrooms there for an eye-watering $291,000. The Superintendent is waiting to hear back what they will charge to host only 2 classrooms and some conference space.

• West Amwell School. With both the public and increasing number of Board members agitating for the West Amwell School to be sold, the Superintendent has restarted those conversations. Complicating matters is the fact that NJDEP has discovered water contamination issues at WAS several months ago. We will have an in-depth article on this issue soon. The broker who evaluated a WAS sale in 2021 will re-evaluate the property. The new evaluation will also include the vacant house that is part of the property, which was not included in the 2021 evaluation.

• Administration Changes. The Superintendent is shaking up his senior staff for the 2025/26 school year. Instructional coach positions are being eliminated, some current Principals will be making lateral movements into new positions, and 1 or more potential new hires will be coming in.

Mid Year Student Data Update

Our new-ish Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment, Jane-Ellen Lennon, gave a presentation on the results of round two of K-8 testing using a software service called i-Ready. The i-Ready software is used to evaluate student progress against grade level and suggest remedial courses of action.

We covered the presentation itself prior to Ms. Lennon's speaking at the BOE meeting here. We were hoping that Ms. Lennon's talk would clarify several points regarding the test methodology and results, but unfortunately her remarks seemed to have muddied the waters even further. Ms. Lennon chose to spin the data as a "growth story" for the students, ignoring the extremely troubling trends in the data of students accumulating more and more learning deficits as they journey from grade to grade, ending up with a sea of red in the highest grade levels.

Perhaps even more troubling, her explanation of the results does not match our research into how i-Ready works and is meant to be administered and interpreted, and she made several questionable claims about the testing methodology and how to interpret the results. We will have an article on this issue to explore this topic in-depth.

It should be noted that there was no applause at the end of Ms. Lennon's presentation and commentary.

Public Comment Period #1

Following the reports we come to the first of two comment periods. These are periods where the public may speak to the Board on any matter they choose.

Unlike many other school and municipal venues, South Hunterdon has chosen to make this process highly restrictive. Audience members are first berated en masse at the top of each Public Comment period opening, with the Board President warning speakers repeatedly that the district has strict rules on speaking, and speakers may only speak once and for a maximum of 3 minutes.

There is a 3 minute clock shown at the start of each speaker's time period begins.

For this meeting, there was only one public comment, this was from the local teacher's union. The speech can be summarized as the union being wary and concerned about all of the changes happening in district buildings, asking the district to address the chaos and uncertainty it has subjected the teaching community to, and expressing distress at the possibility of teaching positions being eliminated as a result. The union leader stressed that they are strongly motivated and willing to work with the district to come up with the best solutions for PreK and the K-12 student population.

The large number of union teachers in attendance applauded vigorously at her conclusion.

Buildings, Grounds, Transportation, Finance, and Safety Committee Report & Vote

The meeting then transitioned into the new format of Committee heads reporting on their sections, and then voting on relevant line items from the agenda. First up was BGTFS chair Keyes.

Chairman Keyes highlighted the decision to join the Bergen County ESC Cooperative. The BC Coop is another purchasing cooperative that the district has joined, in addition to several others. This is a no-cost membership that gives South Hunterdon access to more bidding and purchasing options for goods and services.

Board President Gallagher spoke briefly at the yearly audit results in item J (resolution to approve 2024 AMR, ACFR, and CAP). We reviewed these results earlier in the week. President Gallagher chose to minimize the audit findings, indicating that failing portions of an audit was "common" and attempted to demonstrate that the indicated infractions were minor and inconsequential. We imagine most if not all audit firms would likely disagree with those characterizations. What seemed clear was that President Gallagher seems to view accounting and finance as a 'best effort' endeavor, and not something to be concerned about performing in an exacating manner.

The agenda items were all approved unanimously (agenda items 5A-5M). It should be noted there are critical reports in these agenda items that were not discussed. 5A contains the Bills list, the list of all bills that were paid since the last regular public meeting; 5B includes Monthly Financial Reports, including account balances and transfers; 5D contains new contracts the board is entering into. There are also items approving moving funds out of the NJARM investment account (item 5I) and resolutions to approve major capital payments (5L, authorizing payments for the LPS roof and 5M, authorizing payment for ongoing Middle School construction). We will go into these in-depth in another article.

Personnel Committee

Next up was the Personnel Committee, which generally tracks resignations, firing, hiring and similar matters involving personnel. President Gallagher noted the resignation of Thomas Bill, a long time employee and counselor at the High School.

Curriculum and Technology Committee

No material was presented on this topic.

Policy Committee

The only item for consideration this month was minor tweaking to the Attendance policy. The policy files under consideration are available here.

School and Community Committee

This committee focuses on the individual schools and the relationship of the district to the community. A Draft calendar for the 2025/26 school year was presented. Meeting minutes also indicate that the S&C Committee is considering analysis of current communication tools and their efficacy, and to find ways to celebrate academic achievement more than is done currently.

Routine Information Items

This section reports on "Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying (HIB)" report, drills, and enrollment statistics. No HIB incidents were reported, and enrollment ticked up slightly in a few grades.

Public Comment Period #2

The second comment period enjoyed two speakers.

First, an LAEF representative talked through several LAEF initiatives.

Second, Andrea Little spoke. Andrea is a regular fixture and speaks at most recent Board meetings. She opened stating "congratulations on the shift of the new committee leads....I thought it was refreshing" to see the resulting conversations.

She went onto note that enrollment is down 6% year over year, that the Choice student count is locked at 97, and that Choice students now make up a full 12% of the student population.

Ms. Little asked the Board to reconsider choice at the elementary school, if we eliminate it Choice at K-4 classrooms it will fix space issues.

She mentioned an alternate approach that also could be successful, specifically that the district should consider a "shift up" strategy, shifting the top grades at LPS up to the new MS, and let the 8th grade stay at the High School.

There was no reaction or acknowledgement from the Board or Superintendent.

All in All - the public Board meeting format has improved from prior years, the new Board members have blown a bit of fresh air into the institution, and there is cause for hope for more improvements. But it is clear that the "old guard" board members will continue to attempt to thwart transparency attempts, and that Superintendent Suozzo is becoming increasingly isolated not just from his own Board, but from community stakeholders and leaders.