R. Kerr welcomed the attendees and thanked everyone for their efforts on behalf of our students; she wishes everyone a restful week off to enjoy and refresh. 

With mixed emotions, we thank L. Timoney for her service, everyone knows what she's meant to this board; as a valuable and efficient Secretary to the Board, she was always there helping us to become a professional board; she is a founder of our school and for the record, we want to thank her; the board members agreed. She then gave the floor to L. Timoney.

L. Timoney thanked the board and said that it's been wonderful; she has some challenges in her personal life and needs to take a step back and has resigned her position as Board Secretary effective February 9th; she will continue to be a board member and will serve on committees; she offered to help out in any way she can with the transfer of this position to the new Secretary, who will take her place on the Executive Committee.

R. Kerr opened up the process for election of a new Board Secretary for the remainder of the term being vacated by L. Timoney.

R. Kerr asked for any nominations for the position of Secretary to the Board of Trustees.

L. Gyimesi nominated M. Harmon-Vaught for the position; this was 2nd by G. Winn. 

R. Kerr asked M. Harmon-Vaught if he accepts the nomination and he responded that he is honored to accept. 

R. Kerr asked if there were any other nominations; there were none. 

A vote was then called to elect M. Harmon-Vaught to the position of Secretary to the Board of Trustees.

R. Kerr stated that an Executive Committee update would be redundant since each committee chair will report tonight on their committees and recap what was discussed at the last Executive Committee Meeting on 02/08/22; therefore we should move on to those reports.

The next Executive Committee Meeting will be on March 8th at 7:45 AM.

G. Winn welcomed M. Harmon-Vaught to his new position and thanked L. Timoney for her service; he then gave the following report of the Finance Committee Meeting held on 02/14/22: the committee was given an update by E.D. on the budget; E.D. met with Josh of BoostEd, our financial management vendor; they plan to deliver a 1st draft of the budget to our committee on March 9th; they will focus first on staff-related expenses and head-counting, then move onto non-staff related expenses, such as curriculum and programming. If you look at the financials for January, you will see a $98,000 variance tied to pupil revenue; which is due to a variance in pupil head-count which should not persist. We are also looking at risk management and cost of insurance; the partner we use is Gallagher and most of the risk has to do with our data protection; we will talk about this further in March or April when we will look at pricing of coverage. Fundraising is being done at the school.

R. Illuzzi was invited to speak about school fundraising since she gave a fundraising update at the last committee meeting: In January, we raised $2,040; February we will be getting funds from our Amazon Smile partnership, but the amount is still unknown; in March we will hold the Barnes & Noble fundraising event; we have been asking for donations for our school's vending machines; and we have set up our Facebook tools to reach out to our community.

The next Finance Committee Meeting will be March 14th at 4:30 PM.

L. Gyimesi gave the following update from the Board Development and Governance Meeting held on 02/03/22: We continue to work on our structured development plan for the board; we are revising our trustee job description; we will start posting on some websites; if anyone wants to recommend someone to serve on our board, please let me know. We are also still awaiting the board evaluation results from 4 board members; we will be meeting again in early March and would like to discuss the results of the evaluations; Pasek Consulting would like to meet with our board again remotely sometime in March to discuss what we can expect from the charter renewal process; at this point we are about 18 months away from our renewal. We will set up a date for that meeting in the next few weeks. A question was raised on whether that meeting with Pasek Consulting could be considered a regular board meeting and it was determined that as long as the public is invited and the board has quorum for the meeting, it can be considered to be a regular board meeting.

The next Board Development and Governance Meeting will be on March 3rd at 8:00 AM.

L. Timoney said that we are waiting to hear back from Board on Track regarding the Executive Director's Evaluation that they are creating for us. We should be hearing from them within a few weeks.

M. Harmon-Vaught said that he will follow up with them.

R. Kerr gave the following report on the Academic Committee Meeting held on 02/09/22:

E.D. is on vacation, and DTL C. Volpe has been giving us academic updates in his absence; we covered a lot of content at our last committee meeting; she then gave the floor to C. Volpe:

C. Volpe then reviewed the F&P data for literacy fluency and comprehension from the Dashboard; she compared the beginning of the year (BOY) data to the middle of the year (MOY) data; the percentage of students that experienced growth from BOY to MOY: 1st grade - 43%; 2nd grade - 31%; 3rd grade - 63%; 4th grade - 68%; she then reviewed the OG data for each grade; there is a disconnect in agreement between the F&P data and the OG data; moving forward we will make sure all teachers are trained in administering assessments; we have created a data assessment team; we will identify and prioritize OG skill pattern assessments for consistency; we are creating scheduling for next year to align F&P to OG; we are starting after-school Session 2 in February with smaller groups and we will group students by their skill level, not their grade; we will also set up groups for ELA & Math as well. NYS ELA exams will be on March 29th & 30th; Math exams will be on April 26th & 27th.  We are preparing students for these tests and making sure that students who need accommodations will have them. We have been provided an additional OT and counselor to provide in-person IEP services to students. 

R. Kerr and E.D. met with David Frank, Executive Director of NYSED Charter School Office to discuss what has recently been in the news about DoE plans to open the first public school for dyslexic students since we already exist in that category and we seem to have been overlooked by the Mayor and Schools Chancellor; D. Frank was very supportive of the path we are continuing in working with the community. The District 31 Superintendent and Deputy Superintendent met with us to find a middle school solution for our 5th graders; this has not be established in any borough, so we are forming a task force with District 31 to create a model solution for this.

The next Academic Committee Meeting will be March 9th at 9:15 AM.

In the absence of T. Castanza, F. Ebanks gave the following Executive Director update:

• We launched our “Show the Love” initiative, celebrating our success in different ways. NY1 came to visit our school last week and wrote an article on our "Show the Love" campaign, the S.I. Advance newspaper will be visiting us for a similar feature on February 14th. 
• We are starting Community Calls when members of our Leadership Team and Student Support Team will check in with a family of our school; 
• We participated in a successful Dine Out for Bridge Prep event sponsored by our Family Association; 
• We celebrated World Read Aloud Day by providing all students in the school with a copy of this year’s school-wide book, Aaron Slater, Illustrator by Andrea Beaty; 
• We launched the Bucket Filler Challenge, where classes are using Carol McCloud’s book "Have You Filled a Bucket Today? A Guide to Daily Happiness for Kids" to help students understand how rewarding it is to express kindness, appreciation and love by "filling buckets." Each class chooses a bucket filler of the month who will be celebrated across the school; 
• We are marking our 100th Day of School on February 11th, we celebrate the amazing growth of our students and dedication of our staff. This year’s event will feature many “Fun-dred
  Days” activities for students
• Our Love of Literacy event in partnership with Barnes and Noble will be held on March 5th
• We have been working on revising our Discipline/Code of Conduct Policy to be legally compliant and a copy of the final draft of the policy has been shared with the members of the board; it will need to be voted on at next month's board meeting; all board members are invited to make suggestions on the policy via email to the E.D. before the March board meeting;
• Our school's updated website is now live and has many new features including our monthly newsletter, The Bolt, along with the Bridge Builder Spotlight of 3 members of our school community; also a donations feature allowing people to make direct donations to our school online;
• We are applying for city funding from our NYC Councilmembers for a Literacy Lab for our students; 
• Admissions update: at this time we have 67 applications for 49 available seats; we are sending letters to the local elementary schools inviting admission applications; we are sending out a direct mailing the week of February 21st; we will launch a virtual information session on our website; we will post a printed advertisement in S.I. Parent Magazine in mid-March; our admissions lottery will be on April 6th at 5 PM.

A. Volpe gave the following Parent Association update:

There will be an ice skating event in February; we will sell flowers in April and hold a fun event in May; there will be a 4th grade parent meeting on March 10th.

A. Volpe said that she reached out to the DoE office of Family and Community Engagement (FACE) and spoke to Dr. Melendez - asking why charter school parents can't participate in a city-wide parent council; having conversations with DoE about the necessity of allowing parents of charter schools to join such a council; our charter schools are impacted by DoE schools, but not ruled by them, and we believe charter school parents should have a voice.