As per Public Officers Law, Article 7, § 103-a (Videoconferencing by public bodies) although Board members Traci Frey and Rebecca Peters are not present in-person for this meeting, they are attending via videoconference from locations posted on the public meeting notice/agenda and open to the public; they are therefore considered to be in attendance for purposes of quorum and are permitted to vote. 

As total Board membership currently totals 6 Trustees, quorum is 4 members.

QUORUM IS MET FOR THIS MEETING.

The Board returned to OPEN PUBLIC SESSION at 8:02 PM.

M. Harmon-Vaught stated that due to the extended timing of tonight's meeting caused by the lengthy closed Executive Session, we'll proceed with a few agenda items, and hold some items for our next meeting so that tonight's meeting doesn't run too long.

A. Wolkowitz, acting a Chair ProTem, opened the nominations for Board of Trustees Officers as follows:

Officer Positions

• Board Chair/Co-Chairs: A. Wolkowitz nominated M. Harmon-Vaught and T. Frey for Board Co-Chairs. 2nd by R. Peters. There were no other nominations for this position. VOTE: 4 Yes; 0 No; 0 Abstentions. M. HARMON-VAUGHT & TRACI FREY ARE ELECTED AS BOARD CO-CHAIRS.
• Board Secretary: M. Harmon-Vaught nominated N. DeStefano for Board Secretary. 2nd by T. Frey. There were no other nominations for this position. VOTE: 4 Yes; 0 No; 0 Abstentions. NICOLE DESTEFANO IS ELECTED AS BOARD SECRETARY.
• Board Treasurer: M. Harmon-Vaught nominated R. Peters for Board Treasurer. 2nd by A. Wolkowitz. There were no other nominations for this position. VOTE: 4 Yes; 0 No; 0 Abstentions. R. PETERS IS ELECTED AS BOARD TREASURER.

M. Harmon-Vaught stated that because we don't have a lot of time, we don't want to go too far into tonight's agenda, and Board Secretary N. DeStefano is absent tonight, so we will postpone to a future meeting the following agenda items:

Special Areas of Focus & Unfinished Business discussion of:

• The CEO & Bridge Prep School’s Goals in the areas of External Community Involvement & Fiscal Management
• The Board Business Calendar & Meeting Calendar SY 2025-2026

We will also postpone Reports & Updates by: 

• CEO 
• Academic Committee 
• Finance Committee 
• Board Development & Governance Committee 
• Family Association Representative
• Board Co-Chairs Wrap‑Up with Review of Action Items & Future Topics 

We can now move forward to the new business item, an iReady contract with Curriculum Associates.

T. Castanza gave the following CEO update:

• STUDENT ENROLLMENT: We just had a Board Strategy Session, but we are well into the school year at this point. Our student enrollment is starting to level out a bit, so we now have about 260 students, significantly above where we projected to be at this time, which was around 245 students. That's well above what we budgeted for (232 students). We will keep monitoring enrollment until October 31st or November 1st which is usually when the numbers start to level out a bit. We are thankful to our recruitment team for doing good work and for pushing some families forward that were on the fence. We continue to get enrollment demand and we do have some seats available. There are no seats available in the grades where we have applications. But we have seats available in 2nd grade. We currently have only 1 section of 2nd grade, and enrolling more of those students would push the class size to be just too high. Right now, 2nd grade is probably about as high as it can go for only 1 section. The only path forward for us to accept more 2nd grade students would be if we add a 2nd section of 2nd grade. Second grade would be approximately 27 students split into 2 sections of around 13 or 14 students which would be one of our smaller sections. There's some additional considerations that we need to look into, particularly the ability to hire enough quality teachers. Classroom space is another consideration, but that is something we could probably work through. Our team has done very well with over the past couple of years, so he's not concerned about that as much as making sure that we have 2 high-quality 2nd grade teachers. We're going to monitor this over the next couple of weeks, but overall, we're feeling really good about student enrollment. The higher student numbers will drastically change our budget, as I shared at the Finance Committee meeting. And this is one of the years that I was the most nervous about enrollment. And this is the year that he's most proud of where we are at this point with enrollment, which was a worry of this summer.
• TEACHER RECRUITMENT: We spent a lot of time this summer planning new ways, engaging new partners, thinking about different strategies and branding. Now we're going to shift the same level of energy to teacher recruitment and teacher hiring, because that'll be our next worthy endeavor. We're doing something we haven't done before for teacher hiring. We have a new partnership with Kokua, a company that connects candidates to jobs as student teachers in K-12 schools. They will send us substitute teachers when we need them. Right now, we have a teacher vacancy that we're working to fill. We have a teacher in the classroom right now, but we've been using the sub in the interim, and the subs that came to us from Kokua are really quality teachers. We have 1 really high-quality sub that we are going to explore an employment contract with. Kokua charges a finder's fee for any candidate that we hire, but high-quality teaching candidates who are looking for a full-time job will be great for us. Not just for our staff, but also as an alternate pipeline for potential teachers as they come in. The finder's fee is a percentage of the hire's total salary.
• CALENDAR OF EVENTS: We are still working on getting the Board a calendar of events, as a month-by-month calendar. The school team was gracious enough to provide him with a very detailed overview, so he will put some of those events and dates on a calendar that the Board might be interested in.

At this point of the meeting, a FIRE ALARM sounded in the building and the Board of Trustees were instructed to evacuate the school. Therefore, this meeting was adjourned.