♪ - From NJ PBS studios, this is NJ spotlight news with Brianna Vanozzi.

- Hello, and thanks for joining us tonight.

I'm Joanna Gaggis, Brianna Vanozzi is off.

Coming up, how new technology is helping to identify victims of the September 11th attacks 25 years later.

Plus, Rutgers oceanographers tell us about their research on how warming waters are impacting marine life.

But first, it's back to school week for most students in the state.

New Jersey Department of Education Commissioner Lily Lox joins us to talk cell phones and other technology in the classroom and how the state's school funding formula may finally be reworked.

Funding for NJ Spotlight News provided by RWJBarnabas Health.

Learn more at RWJBH.org.

It's back to school week for many districts across the state.

And as students settle into their classrooms, many schools are also learning how to adapt to new guidelines regarding cell phones in the classroom.

And when it comes to school funding, a new nonpartisan steering committee has been established to reform the formula that calculates how much districts receive.

Many critics call the formula outdated, complicated, and unfair.

Heading up that steering committee is the commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Education, Lily Lox, who joins us to talk all things education as part of our Under the Dome series.

Commissioner Lox, great to have you on the show.

Thanks so much for coming on.

We know many students in the state are going back to school this week, and there's so much to talk about in education, but I want to start with the cell phone ban that former Governor Phil Murphy signed into law in January that really takes effect now at the start of this school year.

What will the new rules be?

Thank you so much for having me.

The bell to bell cell phone guidance this year is I think a really exciting development for making sure that our students have an opportunity to focus and build relationships and really be present in their learning.

So this guidance, which the department has put out, we've put out some additional FAQs from talking to districts, really focuses on helping school districts with what local parameters they need to set to make sure that work for them.

But the real important part here is addressing students' mental health and screen time issues.

And so we're looking forward to that implementation that many of our school districts started last year, but we'll begin in earnest this year.

- Okay, you said bell to bell, and I know that was part of the language in the law.

Do districts have, because this is guidance, right?

Do districts have some leeway, any leeway, in how they implement those technology bans?

- We've put out some really important guidance that we developed from talking to different school districts and to families around what some of those exceptions might be when a student has a particular need for a device or what some of the other instances might look like.

So we really encourage school districts to take a look at that guidance.

And then for parents, it's really important that they communicate directly with their school district to understand the details of their local policy and how to reach their student if they need to.

- I have middle schoolers, they tell me that it is a constant battle to get the phones put away, even when they are banned.

Do you recommend, is there guidance for consequences that districts should take if students are not complying?

This is something where districts really have their systems in place and again looking at the guidance and thinking about how they move forward is something that you know is a conversation they need to have with families and boards.

But hopefully and with your own middle schoolers you're seeing this as well, hopefully it starts to get easier and certainly with this being statewide policy and being something that students will also get used to during the school day it gets easier as we go.

I want to look more broadly at the conversation around technology in the classroom outside of cell phones.

When we look at the use of Chromebooks, some programs like iReady have come under criticism for not actually having data that shows that they're improving reading and I don't want to single out just that program.

Is the state reevaluating the way, when, and how technology, Chromebooks, programs like iReady, as one example, are being used in the classroom?

Absolutely.

This is a really important topic, and Governor Sherrill has been leading on kids' online safety and mental health.

And in general, we know that screens have many important uses in the classroom, and many of them serve an instructional purpose.

And that's really important, and that's what we want technology to do.

But having those conversations and being really clear about where does technology really support student learning and where does it not is a key priority as we move forward.

And we wanna make that as easy as possible for districts who are navigating a variety of different tools and resources and trying to figure out how do they really make sure that kids learn most effectively.

- Okay, so to drill down on that, is there going to be any guidance recommending a scaling back of use of Chromebooks in the classroom?

I think right now it's too early to say the exact guidance, but I would again note that the use of Chromebooks, for example, varies really widely right now already by class, and there's really significant differences again in screen time by age.

So this is where I think that Kids Online Safety Research Institute will be really important as we really drill down into that research about what's developmentally appropriate and how do we further student learning while continuing to support their mental health.

Yeah, when we talk about supporting student learning, I know that there's a new literacy screening that rolled out that's evaluating literacy for students, kindergarten through third grade.

What did you find through that new screening process?

So I'm a former middle school reading teacher who had students reading way before, reading way below grade level, and I'm very, very passionate about literacy screening and the difference it can make for students.

So last year was the first year that this screener was in place, and really what it is, is it's a tool that gives educators much more precise information about where students need support in their reading.

And it's grounded in evidence, and it really helps target those skills so that students don't fall behind.

In addition to that, it also gives that information to parents.

So parents have really clear information about how their student is doing on key foundational skills with literacy.

This year we're very excited that we'll be collecting that data three times a year and this is data that is designed to again be useful to local schools and communities and drive specific support for individual students based on what they need help with in their reading.

So it's really a great practice to continue to make sure that we're really precise in getting kids what they need and making sure that all of our kids learn to read on grade level, which we know is so important for their future in our education system and beyond in New Jersey.

We know that home rule has been a conversational point for a lot of school districts.

Many families want a school district that reflects, you know, the communities that they're within.

There are more than 600 school districts in the state, but when we talk about literacy, you know, basics, there was a big push a few years ago to implement phonics as the model for teaching literacy.

Has that been uniformly rolled out across the state and are there guidance or are there mandates to ensure that it's phonics instruction for all districts?

So we just quickly take the opportunity to talk even more about the science of reading since I always love to do so.

So phonics is an important part of science reading of reading but it's not the entirety of it.

So when we think about the research on how kids learn to read there's really two parts of the something called the simple view of reading and on one side it's this ability to decode and understand words and phonics is included in that part of the equation and on the other side it's building knowledge and vocabulary and these two things really work like a mathematical equation.

A student may be a fluent decoder, but if they're not building background knowledge and vocabulary, they still won't necessarily understand the text that they're reading.

So these evidence-based practices, including phonics, are something that many school districts in New Jersey are doing an incredible job with already.

And we are working with school districts across the state to provide supports based on where they are and continuing to share best practices from those school districts that have already brought those different evidence-based practices together to get more students reading on grade level.

All right, I know that there is a steering committee right now that is reviewing the very controversial school funding formula.

It's come under a lot of criticism.

Who is going to be a steering committee and I guess my big question is how will recommendations be incorporated into potential changes?

Great question.

Our steering committee is online and I'll let folks be able to see that on our website for the actual details.

But I want to note that the steering committee is just a really small part of the school funding outreach.

As you mentioned, I've heard loud and clear since I've started that the school funding formula needs a close examination and it needs to be updated.

And part of what we're hearing about school funding is part of what Governor Sherrill has also been clear on on affordability.

It's not just the funding formula, it's also the rising costs that are stressing the system.

So we're planning to look at all of this and the steering committee is a particular group that will come together to look at the recommendations that we're getting across the state.

So right now on our website, we've also started a learning series to make sure that people have access to information about how school funding works.

We've put out an opportunity for folks to sign up for a newsletter where they can get additional information.

But more importantly, that newsletter will start to feature opportunities around the state for educators, parents, taxpayers, anyone to be a part of the conversation, which will again come back to that overall decision making.

So we look forward to having a million readers.

Please.

I want to just ask you very quickly, do you expect that with any changes we're going to see an overhaul or do you expect small adjustments?

Just a few seconds left.

I'll say I expect a both and.

I think we need to see some adjustments now, but we need to look at the whole system and absolutely as you'll see in some of that, we expect large change.

Okay.

And we will bring you back on to talk about that as it becomes more clear.

Lily Lox, Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Education.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for having me.

Under the Dome is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

Twenty five years after 9/11, the painstaking work to identify those killed at the World Trade Center continues.

A woman was recently identified through a forensic technique used in the 9/11 effort for the first time, offering new hope to families still waiting for answers.

Mark Desire leads the World Trade Center DNA Identification Team at New York City's Office of Chief Medical Examiner, and he joins us now.

Mark, thank you so much for taking some time to be with us today.

It's really hard to believe that it's been 25 years.

Take us back to that day and why you were first called to the scene.

I was a member of New York City's crime scene reconstruction team.

This is a unit that does advanced forensics at certain homicide investigations.

So typically, we don't go to crime scenes until the fires are out, bad guys are caught, booby traps are disarmed, but this was all hands on deck.

We got activated and we went.

From that day, things didn't go, I guess, as planned.

Your work and your mission changed.

Can you talk about the work that you started doing since then and how you've been working to help identify those who were killed?

We made a promise 25 years ago to identify every single one of those 2,753 homicide victims and return them to their families.

And that commitment is as great today as it was in 2001.

But we've had to evolve.

We had to advance the science, push forensics into the future to make those identifications, because everything present at Ground Zero destroyed human tissue, destroyed DNA, making our job impossible.

I should mention you were injured that day.

You were there when the second tower fell.

And I just want to acknowledge your work and the danger that you put yourself in that day.

But talk to me about the forensic investigative genealogy, excuse me, genetic genealogy work that you're doing and how that field itself has evolved in 25 years to impact the work that you're doing to keep that promise.

Yeah, it's been an excellent technique for us to use in our everyday cases, as well as recently, we started using it with World Trade Center.

And it's another tool that we have in our in our toolbox.

Whatever it takes, whatever method that is needed, we're either going to develop it in New York City, or we're going to find a way to bring it here to use it.

And genealogy allows us now to take that next step, to be able to have that methods and techniques to help us locate families and who this victim is.

In layman's terms, how?

What is the process?

What are you doing?

How are you able to identify those who were killed that day?

It's multiple.

We've evolved all of the science.

We're the largest crime lab of its kind in North America.

We use the most advanced techniques in the world, but it wasn't enough.

We had to find a way.

We knew those things like ground zero, the fire, the water to put out the fire, the jet fuel, the diesel fuel, the sunlight, the mold and bacteria, chemicals in the buildings, chemicals that were already in the ground, all of those things destroy DNA, making it impossible for some of the remains to be able to generate a DNA profile.

So every time we can't make an identification, I push the team, can't make an ID today, why not?

Go back, try it again, find a better technique, do something different, evolve, be able to do things that no one else can do.

So these new techniques, there's several of them.

Every year we make advancements.

We go back to the remains that we previously been unable to identify.

We make identifications every month.

We've made probably 20 identifications just this past August, but the public doesn't hear about it because these are previously identified.

These are victims where there might be hundreds of remains recovered.

There are almost 22,000 pieces of those victims, of those 2,753 victims.

So there was a lot of work, do a lot of fragmentation.

But the techniques are to, how do we get DNA from samples that are so badly burned or so badly degraded?

The genealogy comes into play recently when we have complete DNA profiles and we don't have a reference sample to compare it to.

So part of our job is to have the samples from the families.

There were 17,000 reference samples collected from World Trade Center victims, toothbrushes and razors.

And we didn't have an item that they touched.

We would take a sample from a family member.

But there, unfortunately, were some victims that didn't have any family, or the family hadn't come forward.

Over 80 countries were represented in that victim pool.

So that job to collect the reference samples was equally as challenging as getting DNA from the bone.

And that's where the forensic genealogy comes in to help take that DNA where we have a full profile.

I could probably make 47 identifications today if we were able to have a DNA sample from all the families back then in 2001.

We know that about 40% of those who were killed that day remain unidentified.

How many samples are you still working to identify as of right now?

Thousands.

We have upwards of 4,000 that we keep going back to and if we can't get DNA with this, the most latest technology, we'll bring in, we'll apply more advanced techniques and we'll try again.

Some of these recent identifications, we've tried 10, 15 times over the years, and we're finally able to push the science and be able to return that loved one to their family.

Yeah, for so many families who are mourning the loss of a loved one, they have no place to bury their loved one or a place to go to grieve.

How can families who may not have identified the remains of their loved ones connect with you?

How can they find out if perhaps, you know, you are working with one of their family members?

Please, that is the importance of the media.

You're going to let your audience know that we're still working on this.

Most people, like you're still, why haven't you finished this Mark?

We have, we just keep going back and making identifications where it was impossible the year before.

So if you have a family member, and what we're seeing today is a lot of the children of those adults that died, mom and dad died in the towers, and now they were in diapers in 2001.

Now they wanna know why haven't my parents been found?

Reach out, please contact us.

We can go over what samples we have.

We can explain the identification process, how we're able to make IDs.

We work a lot.

This is a very unique investigation.

This is unlike anything we've ever done.

I actually pushed my scientists to meet with the families, explain the process, and see the importance because the families still want us to keep going and return their loved ones.

Yeah, I know this work is ongoing for you, but I can see it's clear that you're committed to the work and committed to getting answers for these families.

Mark Desire, Assistant Director of Forensic Biology in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City.

Thank you so much for the work you're doing.

Thank you for continuing.

Thank you for getting the word out for us.

We really appreciate it.

Right now, a pair of Rutgers University oceanographers are leading a 25-day expedition in the tropical North Atlantic.

What they're chasing is a process called salt finger mixing and whether it can keep nutrients flowing to ocean life as the planet and ocean water warms.

What they find could matter for the whole food chain.

I recently spoke with the researchers Joe Gredon and Cordae Seldin from their research ship.

What are you studying right now?

Yeah, so we're out here studying how life in this environment grows.

The ocean covers about 70% of Earth's surface and it plays a really important role in regulating global climate.

One of the ways that it plays an important role in climate is through what we call the biological carbon pump, through the action of small organisms that live in the ocean.

So phytoplankton, small photosynthetic microbes make up the base of the food chain out here.

They play an important role in climate change, or excuse me, in climate by taking up carbon from the atmosphere.

That carbon can then either move up the food web or be exported into the deep sea where it can grow.

So our expedition today is looking, we're looking at how phytoplankton grow and how the physical mixing processes in this particular environment, which are also being impacted by climate change, affect that growth.

- Okay, so in that mixing process, right, it's something called salt finger mixing.

Joe, can you help us understand what that is and how you're exploring that, how you're studying that on this 25 day expedition?

- Sure, yeah.

So we have a really awesome interdisciplinary team out here.

My team leads the kind of physics side of things.

So we study the ocean mixing and salt finger mixing is this, you know, really weird term, but it's a kind of simple idea.

I use two analogies to describe this.

You put milk in your coffee and you stir that around.

That's called turbulent mixing.

But if you put a teabag in hot water, that tea slowly diffuses out.

And so that's called diffusive mixing.

And so salt finger mixing is way more on the side of that lower energy diffusive mixing.

That's actually really, really hard to measure.

But when you add it all up in the oceans across the world, it can have a really big impact on a variety of things.

Okay, help us understand why that mixing process happens to begin with and why it matters.

Sure, yeah, so I use that analogy of the teabag, but in the ocean where we are right now, it's a really unique location.

So we have really warm, salty waters that are on top of colder and fresher waters.

And so if you can imagine a little blob, a little finger of really warm and salty water goes down into that colder, fresher water, it will actually diffuse the heat out way, way, way faster than it diffuses salt out.

And so it's getting colder, but it's still salty.

And so that means it's heavy and it sinks.

And the same thing happens with the colder, fresher water going up.

And so that's why they call it salt finger mixing.

It's kind of these interleaving layers in the ocean that really, really enhance the mixing that happens in like the interior of the ocean, we call it, at depth that you wouldn't normally find without these kind of unique conditions.

- So Cordae, you mentioned warming of the ocean.

We know that small changes in the ocean can have massive changes for our planet overall.

Why does this matter and how do the changing ocean patterns impact salt finger mixing?

It's one of the ways in which nutrients can be moved from the deep sea, where they build up, into the sunlit upper ocean.

So phytoplankton, the plants of the ocean, just like plants in your garden, they need different things to grow.

They need water, they need light, and they need nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus that you might add to your garden to enhance growth.

So in the ocean, there's plenty of light, there's plenty of water, but there's not much nutrients.

Now, nutrients can build up in the deep water.

So when salt finger mixing occurs, nutrients can be transported into the upper ocean, where there's light and where phytoplankton can grow and consequently be consumed by larger organisms.

I imagine this has a trickle-up effect, I imagine, on marine life, yes?

Yes, absolutely.

If the base of the food web is doing well, then there's more food for everybody else to eat going on up.

How are you studying this?

Because I've read that you have some machinery that's as delicate as a potato chip.

How are you studying it?

- Yeah, so we're using a lot of different instrumentation.

The potato chip reference that you just made, I'll start with that one because it's a really important part of our research effort here.

We have two different instruments that do this, but they have these really, really sensitive probes that are on the front of this sort of torpedo looking tube.

And they measure kind of the energy in the ocean, the mixing.

And we drop them in the water, they fall down sometimes as deep as, here's one that you're probably seeing right now.

They fall down to sometimes as deep as a thousand meters.

So, you know, 3,000 feet, and they'll measure the energy that's in the ocean, the mixing.

And then because we're on this huge ship that we can put all different types of instrumentation into collect water samples.

And so that's where Corday's team takes over.

And the physics side, you know, we wait till we get those measurements back and then the rest of the team goes and starts on their work.

Yeah.

And you two are on a ship right now.

We should tell our audience just lost a little bit of audio there, but we're going to keep going.

Corday, just a minute left.

What are you hoping comes out of this study?

- We're hoping to understand how important salt finger mixing is in delivering nutrients into the upper ocean.

So as the climate warms, we tend to think that there will be a greater, the warming of the surface layer will create a greater barrier preventing more nutrients from coming up through turbulent diffusion, right?

That stirring that Joe mentioned in his analogy.

We're curious to find out whether or not this diffusive mixing mechanism could offset that.

All right, good stuff.

Joe Grodon, Corday Seldin, oceanographers with Rookers University.

Keep it up.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That's gonna do it for us.

I'm Joanna Gaggis for the entire team here at NJ Spotlight News.

Thanks for being with us.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow.

♪ NJM Insurance Group.

Serving the insurance needs of residents and businesses for more than 100 years.

♪ Is that... Wow!

[laughter] ♪ It's gonna be okay.

♪