 I'm Chris Riley, one of the school board members from here, and Roy is in the school now. We're going to twins in the third grade, and then we have a three-year-old in the preschool. So I'm going to cover the first two slides, and then Andrew Jones is going to take over on the rest of it. So I'm going to put the wall. Let's start with, like, introduction to the whole crew. OK. So, yeah. I'm meeting you all. I appreciate that. I did. And, Tammy Benoine, I just take notes and give them to Lisa. Rodney Rangel, school board director, Bethel. Lisa McCrory, school board director and clerk for, and I live in Bethel. Andrew Bowen, elementary principal, and Bethel, and Bethel resident. Jess Ryan, school board director, and Roy Elton. Andrew Jones, school board director, vice chair for Roy Elton. We're missing own Radley tonight. I think he's got a previous personal thing he's doing. I'm Bruce Labs, superintendent. I'm Tara Weatherill. I'm the business manager for the SU. I have Riva Craft and high school principal. And I'm David Wallace, elementary principal here in South Portland. So I guess there's a couple of different things that go into the development of our budget from last school year. So FY19 is not the current year, but last year we did have a $350,247 deficit. So that was a combination of several different factors. One was there was a $105,000 shortfall on the revenue side on tuition, so a few less students than what we had budgeted for in terms of tuition students. Another issue is our HRAs, the health, what's it? What's it called? Health and personal arrangements. Yeah, health and personal arrangements. Wasn't budgeted properly, so it was a $50,000 shortfall on that. Our SU office that was over $104,000 that we were responsible for as part of our school district and our contribution to the SU. The spend and special education funding was also $100,000 shortfall that was our portion to cover. We also had some office understaffing. So like here, I think it was here in the front office, we were understaffed in terms of what was budgeted for position. So it was a $50,000 shortfall on that. And for grounds and maintenance, we had new contracts for voting and snow plowing. And so there was other maintenance issues over the year that went to $50,000 over what was budgeted. And then merger facilities were also an additional $50,000 on that. Yeah, some of that was like the middle school shop or maker space, but they wound up developing that more than had been budgeted for. And so that's not necessarily stuff that was directly related to merger, but more added things that happened. That happened before we realized that there was a deficit. This will make sure I understand. These are over and under relative to budget after out in the private year. Is that right? Yeah, 19. 19, so a year ago. So if there's a maintenance increase, it's not that the maintenance necessarily went up by any sort of amount, it's just that we were off the budget by that. Right, right. OK, thank you. But the maintenance contract did go up significantly. So that's why we went up by $300,000, but you only budgeted for $200,000, increase of $250,000. What are the main responses of what was budgeted? This is just how we were off the budget. Right. Thank you. So in our current budget year, this physical year, FY20, we, in response to those budget differences, we've, the principals and the staff at the Bethel and at Wellington campuses have worked on learning, spending on any non-essential items to help try to bridge some of those gaps between what was in last year's budget versus this year. So trying to absorb as much of that difference this year as we could so that it doesn't get passed along into future budgets. So for our current budget process for going into FY20, so what is going to be coming up for both coming into the budget process was to keep the rates equal or keep the equalized rates level. So our goal was to try to have our spending be the same for the coming year as it was in the current year. So in the original first draft of the budget, it did end up going up by 7% due to different contractual matters in terms of staff raises and health care spending increases. So from there, we worked on trying to address that 7% and bring it down to a lower value by decreasing any non-staff spending and then cleaning up the budget. And that brought us down to a 3% increase. So some of this included reducing staffing by 2.7 FTE, which included trimming some of the elementary staff to the better-managed student levels. So at each campus, we're going down one elementary school position. And so that helps to better manage what the student levels were before CLA increases. When we looked at the budget, there were additional cuts that we could make to get us all the way down. So what we're proposing isn't actually all the way down to the same as this current year's budgeted amounts. We considered earlier cuts, but we thought that they were going to have too much of a negative impact on the students. So things that were considered were, we could have potentially eliminated French classes from the high school and only offered Spanish in face in the classes. Didn't really want to do that. It would have put us as, I think, the only high school in the area that was only offering one foreign language if we don't offer French in addition to offering Spanish, so something we didn't want to do. There was also going to be a cut potentially of one social studies class from the high school. So that's not just, well, not a section of a class, but actually one specific topic, a specialized course from social studies. So that was, again, something we didn't really want to do. And we also were looking at, we could cut family and consumer science from the program potentially just based on potential enrollments. And then the other one was outdoor education coordinator position at the high school was another position that we could have cut. But at the time, we don't want to, I guess right now, the goal is to try to offer it for freshmen and try to build it up. Currently, there's not a lot of interest among the upper classmen and students for it. So the goal is to try to offer it to the ninth graders, I believe, right? What we wound up with, so to talk about how spending changed between last year and this year, going into the budget, we were budgeting staff raises of 3%, we haven't finished negotiations or anything, but that's kind of a ballpark figure for just what we're looking at. And we're looking at pretty steep health insurance increases of 12% this year. We also had our SPED assessment is up $138,000, which is 13%. A lot of the reasons, and the SU assessment is up 7.5%, so the SU budget and SPED budget face the same health insurance increases of staff raises and stuff that the rest of the budget does, so that's part of the reason those are up. Another part is that with our changing student populations throughout this SU, our percentage is up a little bit this year, so that's another part of the reason that's up a little bit. But with those four things, that was a lot of money that was kind of added, so Chris talked about how we, the administration went through the non-discretionary parts of the budget, or the non-staffed parts of the budget, we tried to trim as much as we could. Some of the places that were decreased were field trips and equipment and books and supplies, so we tried to get that down as close as we could for this year, either delay spending for future years or just working on alternative funding sources like field trips might be done through fundraising instead of through the school budget. So decreased as much as we could without impacting things too much. Looking at the budget itself, there's a lot of categories that things are slightly different because we have to rebalance things or try to rebalance things to better reflect what actual spending was like. This is the first year going into the budget where we actually have a full year of spending from FY19 that we can use to check how well things were budgeted in previous years. So then going into the merger in addition to combining the two districts books, we were also using a new chart of accounts and so there were some places where the spending was happening in this category but we budgeted in this category so things have been shifting around a bit. So if you're looking at the budget and things, there's one category that's down and might be that the spending was happening in a different spot so it might not be happening in the taxpayer and we're just going to rebalance it. And yeah, so in addition to the non-staff spending we also reduced all of our staff by two to try and better match recommended class sizes and there was also a half of a custodial position in Bethel, that was the result of our time and point two position work with basic learning. And that was, we had a full-time staff that were one and we had a point eight so that's exactly that. So anyway, the net result for the spending was that we run from 1,018,000 to 12,098,000. On the revenue side, we did have more tuition students this year than we had our first year in FY19 so we increased the tuition revenue that we were protecting for this year to reflect that. And part of that was that we had a larger freshman class than we did the upperclassmen classes so if you look at our tuition numbers it's heavily, we have more freshmen and it kind of drops off as you get older. So we're kind of hoping that that trend is going to continue and we'll have stronger incoming classes as people are able to see what our school system offers that the market is going to implement. And so our tuition revenue is at $150,000 but that's offset some of my federal funds increased by $60,000 and we had a balance carry over last year which with our deficit we're not adding any money into the budget this year so that's offset some of the revenue. Revenue was up a little bit but not so much. The final piece of what goes into for people spending, enrollment, our equalized people were essentially flat this year and it's down very slightly but essentially flat. But one of the things to look at is that if you look at our average daily membership which the equalized pupils is based on two-year average daily membership. This shows how our two towns working together really can help. Royalton's average daily membership was down 10% this year which would have been a big impact on if Royalton was still trying to go in alone. But Bethels was up 8% so in the end we wanted that being pretty level as far as equalized pupils. That just shows how in previous years Bethels, ADMs, the downing in Royalton since it's been helming out with Bethels. Our two towns working together. All right, so to look at how this actually translates to a tax rate, to calculate taxes you take your current people spending which is your spending minus your revenue divided by your total pupils and then you take that and divide it out by the state yield and take away the mergers and so on and then you get the final rate to take that rate and then divide it by the common level. Praise Royalton for those steps now. So overall our spending was up 2.4%. Our revenue is down about 5.2% so our net spending is about 2% and our people are more percent. Equalized pupils stayed the same so our per pupil spending is about 2.1%. But the state yield which is how the state translates per pupil spending into a tax rate is 2.2% and so that means our rate actually our preliminary rate actually is staying level and the way that that works is as the tax base of the state increases, property values go up and new properties are built. So as the tax base of the state increases they have to, going with the same tax rate would bring in more money for them the following year than the previous year so they use the state yield to adjust it so that in order to bring in the same amount of money they can set the rate a little bit lower. And so if we are spending increases at the same rate the yield does then our tax rate does increase. So in this case we're keeping preliminary rate level but because we're still in the period where we're receiving merger incentives and those are slowly days away, the merger incentive is 2 cents less this year and that's why the equalized rate is up 2 cents for 1.1%. And then to look at the final rates in each town this is based on taking the equalized rate and dividing out the CLA which is the factor that is based on how our praised values compared to actual land sales so that the state is taxing it based on the closer of the real value of your house close to the praised value. The battle CLA is down 7.10 to the percent and so the final increase in the battle tax rate is 1.9%. Royalton's CLA was down as well but because Royalton's equalized rate last year was capped at the 5% increase it wasn't the same as the battle had so it was capped at 1.603 last year and it's not gonna be capped this year so Royalton's rate is going up would go up 4%. Last year we're gonna have different equalized rates between Bethel and Royalton so from now on they're gonna be the same which makes things easier for the management perspective. So that's kind of how all the tax rate and everything is gonna work out. I guess does anybody have any questions about that side of things? So I can clear my head, the average daily membership is the average average student in school in an average daily. In October. Oh, in October, oh yes. And then the equalized pupils is the number over two years. Well so they take the number over two years but then take into account that they don't give you as many equalized pupils for a preschooler as a regular student they give you more for a high schooler and they give you more if you have based on your poverty levels and English as a second language so it's a complicated point of view. So it's time based on what resource needs will be? Right. Resource needs and then the two years. And then average. Yeah. It's complicated point of view. Rich. Someone in the state, how does that sound? When they, when you say this is the last year that the rate, tax rates are different for the world and that, how do they decide, how do you, the people that made the decision, how does that mean? So when we first merged, when you first merged, your tax rates can only change by 5% each year. Your equalized tax rate can only change by 5%. So Royal Tents was capped at a lower rate because we started at a lower rate, the metals was up there. So, you know, we went up 5% and they came down 5% and then they came down another, basically Royal Tents have been capped at a lower rate because we've been doing 5% increases but it's not gonna be capped anymore. So we're gonna be at the same level from now on. It's just the way that math broke down until now. That makes sense. Well, it doesn't mean that I'm not a mathematician. Sure. We'd say that before we merged, that it would be equal to three years, right? Well, that's what we have to make sure we estimate it. Yeah, that's for the statement. The equalized it out over those years to sort of make it like an on ramping for all the involved groups so that there wasn't a sudden change in different towns, tax rates from prior to merger to after merger to where it was, there was sort of an on ramping so similar to what happens in other times when there's like, I guess, like when we've had some different contractual changes or when the SU merged, there was some on ramping and merging of different contracts among the employees and stuff to get everybody on one contract. So it was the same sort of thing here where rather than just changing us all immediately, there was a three year phase in period which was how they did that 5% staging. You see all the issues moving in here, right? Yes. See all the issues moving in here. Our equalized rates would be the same. So I have a couple of questions, but one, your presentation was mostly geared to some budget assumptions and how it impacts the budgets and how that impacts the tax rates. Okay. So do you want to have, I have some questions about the budgets unrelated to tax rates. Sure. So one of them was unrelated tax rates. There was an assumption last year about tuition revenue and we over budgeted by 150K of tuition revenue as well. Yep. And this year. That was for FY19. Okay. Now we're forecasting an increase in tuition revenue. So. By 150K. So last year or when we first budgeted, I think it was $640,000 and we got basically $500,000. And so when we went into FY20, it's the last year when we were doing our budget, we set the tuition rate or tuition, expected tuition at $500,000. Okay. So we decreased it that last year. This year we have so far received somewhere around $600,000. Do you want me to give the same answer I gave last night? Yeah, go ahead. Where I'm going. Different one. Basically what is your confidence? Yep. What is your confidence in tuition, whatever tuition revenue you're forecasting and what is being done to aggressively market the school to bring in tuition revenue? That part I can't answer. I'll leave it up to the administrators. But I can tell you the mentality behind the budget number for the tuition revenue. We took this year's ninth through 11th graders with the expectation that they're going to stay at the school because they're here now. And that was 33 students. And we multiplied that by the FY21 announced tuition rate. Because that was set by the board in January and that was a higher amount. So that was the base of it. And then we added a projection of five new freshmen coming in. So that's where we got the number. So we were very conservative as far as what we projected for new students, like cap the nine through 11 students that are currently here. We're more aggressive in marketing. That's the principle. So the board charged me, the high school principal, last year with coming up with a plan to do that. And so this year we'll execute the plan as we did last year, which is framed around an open house for all students that we potentially could serve. What we do is identify all the possible eighth graders that we can identify and send out invitations to those families. To an open house, put an ad in the Randolph-Herald, publicize the event through Facebook, social media, those other things. And we did a pretty good job with that last year. It was a pretty successful event. The majority of students were already in the middle school and most of them were coming to learn about the school. But of the students who weren't within the district, we had a relatively high rate of recruitment from them. So another number of anecdotal examples where parents and students were kinda on the fence and not sure what they wanted to do. And after that open house experience left, yeah, this is what I wanna do. So we felt pretty good about that. The reality is that the size of the eighth grade in Chelsea is not that big. So the pool of students that we're recruiting from is limited in its potential in terms of total gains that we could make. But we have seen students come into the district kinda continually throughout the year. We just had a new student last week and a new student the week before. So we feel good that people are feeling a sense of confidence in what's being offered at the high school where my sense when I started 18 months ago was there was a lot of like we don't know if this merger is gonna be good or not. There was a lot of questioning of that. Maybe some people stayed away the first year cause they wanted to see how it panned out before they jumped in the water. Yeah, the first year too that FY19, the shortfall, when we came up with that number we didn't really have many tuition students and it was sort of with the new merge union school it was sort of a best guess as to what the number was gonna be with Chelsea's high school closing and with Rochester's high school closing and so our initial estimate was off. But now with a couple of years of data and knowing what grade each of those incoming tuition students are in we can do better estimates of what we're gonna have the following year in terms of tuition students as terrorists that with how we're estimating incoming freshmen. Just one follow-up on the same topic. Do you guys, in addition to having open houses do you also like guidance whatever to go to these other locations and promote? Yeah, so we've been to school fairs this year to be a presence, we have a little slide show we take on the road with us to say these are the great things that are happening. So we would have gone to one in Chelsea last fall around Thanksgiving. Which is kind of one of the more important ones since those students can all easily choose to come here. And then one other follow-up to you. In addition to promoting the goodness of this particular school do you also do a competitive analysis against our closest rivals? You know, to see how we think against them academically and other ways. We haven't done a formal competitive analysis. We do keep track of things such as the strength of our instrument lessons and our music program and things that we offer that some of the other schools just can't offer. Yeah, I think the board has, when we're talking about cuts, the board's made a commitment to sustaining programs that exist here. So I think that can be powerful, like if you've had a one-page flyer and you go to these other locations, like not just Chelsea, but if you go to Sharon and if you go to Woodstock and you go around the circle where I'm ran off, and you don't have one-page flyers and you ran off to Woodstock, here's us. Yeah, we don't have to just go to Chelsea. Let's run the search. Just like an idea. Strut our stuff, man. We got some good stuff here. We can have a flyer amongst the things that are listed or some of the unique programs. Like I think we're the only school in the area that offers introductory guitar lessons. We even have gone to elementary schools to try to get kids into middle school. Anybody that would make a deal with that. I'm gonna add that to my TDS. Thanks, I have a broader question. I've heard tonight you guys had to make tough decisions about programming and not affecting students with language or music or whatever. And I was at a meeting a couple of months ago and Lori was concerned about curriculum scheduling and because of financial constraints and so on. The whole reason for the merger. And I was, you guys are all aware, I was very involved in pushing for consolidation five, six long, many, many years ago. And really thinking about the benefits and others people sitting around here had strong concerns about consolidation. And I won't say who they are. People sitting here know who they are. And the argument in favor of it was we can not only help the taxpayers with cost efficiencies through a larger critical mass, but also provide enhanced educational opportunities. We can have it both ways. And was that too polyannish? Are we now struggling with finances and talking about cutting back on programming? Was that too many rosy eyes in terms of the benefits of consolidation? I know it's hard, but we shouldn't, I still believe we should be able to have efficient economics. Some of the, I think at least one of them is one of the costs that's out of our, sort of out of our control is the health care costs increase. I don't think that was predicted. That wasn't the point yet. Yeah. That wasn't predicted. And so we've had a couple of years in a row now of double digit increases in health care. So it's sort of, it was, I think it was a 10%? So I think it would happen now they can be even worse. Yeah. I believe so. Just if I could address it coming from the other five towns in this SU developing budgets with them, they're all up against the cap. It's all, it's, you know, trying to expand things and offer opportunities for kids at a cost with some of these other things like was just said that are hard to control. And I think this board, we anguished with trying not to take away opportunities. You know, we, we did what we were told to do and that is to take it down to a zero increase. And then that was going to, that was going to affect programming and the board really didn't want to do that. And I applaud them for that because we had told the towns that we were going to try to be very, very cost effective this year and conservative this year on the taxpayers. But, you know, that's basically the reality of now what two years out after we've merged, healthcare is still going nuts. We're going to be, you know, settling a teacher and a support staff contract. And we don't know where that's going right now, but that's a factor that you can never predict two years ago. So there's just obstacles and I guess I can't say anything else. One thing that was shared last night because there were a lot of similar questions was just highlighting the fact that, you know, before the merger, there were less opportunities. And with the merger, both schools had an opportunity to provide more, you know, more electives, more opportunities to have access to those electives. And talking about certain students in the high school level grades that had options to go to early college or to leave the district and take advantage of either RTCC or VOTEC or go to take an early college. And I can think of at least three seniors right now that could have gone to early college this year, but because of the camaraderie and the success of the merger and the opportunities of class selections, they chose to stay. And so those are three students that stayed within the district because of a number of factors. And that's a, to me, that's a sign that we're really doing the right thing. Now, you know, for fiscal year 19, the numbers were a little lower, but as we've all, you know, are surmising it's because people, some people were like, I wanna see what's gonna happen first. You know, there were some people that just opted out and some kids are coming back in now that we're demonstrating what we have to offer. I think last year when we had, you know, in the extracurricular, the drama, the athletics, I mean, the music, there's so many things that are continuing to succeed. And for last year with sports to have both the softball team and the baseball team it becomes state champions in the district in the division three was for the first year of a merger was amazing. And I have two high school students and they really blended in well with from Bethel to South Royalton. And I would say some of the best friends live in South Royalton right now. I, you know, they're always out doing something with this new gaggle of friends. So I, as a parent, I'm really happy with what I've seen. And as a board when we were talking about like, okay, we're going to get to a zero level budget. We were going to have to cut positions and classes and the things that we might have had to take out were things that we had added as a result of the merger that we really just didn't want to take any languages out. We didn't want, you know, so we chose that we, as a board, we felt like it's better to, to increase by 2% to make sure that those opportunities are still there for the students because it wasn't going to be good. It wouldn't hit, our conscience wouldn't have been able to take in that hit. It'll be up to the voters to decide. I can't speak for the community. I can only speak for myself. I guess I'll speak for my wife if we can't be here tonight, but we're taxpayers. We don't like to see taxes go up. But please don't shortchange the students. Thank you. You're looking at programming. Find ways to save money and cut money that doesn't affect programming. And as we were creating this budget, we really looked line by line at everything. We put a lot of time into it with everybody, just looking at what was budgeted last year and how much was actually spent and then knowing where we could trim. And some of those line items were a little bit higher than what they needed to be because there were certain costs that came in with just the cost of the merger. And then we realized, okay, well that extra money was there because of merger costs which are no longer necessary. So we were really able to trim a lot of areas that hadn't really been seen the first round of the budget process. So I think we did a really good job cleaning and we're constantly tracking things now in case we have to continue doing some trimming without taking away from the students, for sure. The deficit comes into play a lot here too, the current deficit. Without it, you'd be holding the line and we'd be in a better shape. So I think maybe when you present to the greater town, you may want to really highlight the fact that that deficit is maybe related and maybe it's not related to the merger. I mean, you had two different budgets that were brought in but it's the turnover of the business director, business administrators. The four or five turnover is that. It was very unfortunate that the impact is what really is the root cause of your deficit and that's independent of the merger. So, but there are commonalities of the two different, bringing two different ledgers together. That's got to make it even more difficult. But I think if you may want to highlight that that is independent, I guess, of the merger and not because of it. The turnover. The turnover of the business. The last turnover has had a real financial cost. It wasn't just. Yeah, that's I mean, it's clear. And, but it's independent, it's merger. And you may want to highlight that for mace areas. So you've mentioned healthcare costs as a challenge because they're really outside of the school board's control. What about administrative costs due to state or state and federal requirements? They've always been there. Are they getting worse? I mean, what percentage of the school expenses are due to administrative burdens just to administer what the state requires? And I'll fold in the SU, not just the school, but the SU because you're paying for the SU. How much of our burden is due to administrative state? There's a tremendous push from Montpelier to move a lot of the local, the traditional local control issues to the SU. That got raised faster, Lord. No, I'm talking about things like busing and special education. And now we're hearing food service that basically they want it in a centralized situation as opposed to what the districts did. And that's not of our making. We're, that's of their making. And I know every place I go, people are railing about that because they believe that it's outside of their realm that they have no control over it all of a sudden. See, again, I'm a great believer if you centralized, you should be able to lower costs but it appears that when we do centralized, the costs go up, they don't get lower. So I'm bleary about that. Well, I mean, the factors we've talked about, the health insurance and salaries and things like that are always going to be in play. We, it's staggering to me how much healthcare has accelerated over the last, but it's the generation that are retiring, I guess. What's the SU supervisory head count compared to the, as a part of the overall school head count? I think all the faculty and all the schools and the SU, what's the SU administrative? Are you talking about the supervisory and the central office? Yeah, the central office to run all the schools. There's a list of all the staff and the reports. Is it three percent? Is it 10 percent? I think we have 15 people in the central office that run one program or another. But five of them are paid 100% by grants. There's a million dollars in grants that come into the SU, a million, a little over a million. Actually, Cynthia, is it one million, 100,000? A million six, I think. But the other, just as somebody who runs one set of programs, the paperwork to do the grants is twice as much as it used to be. And the grants are less than they used to be. And every time we turn around, it's the fast, the food has to be, you have so much documentation that it's absolutely ridiculous. And that, I think, is taking up our administrative time. And then within the schools, what's the faculty head count as a percentage of the total head count? Is it three quarters? 60%? 90%? Because when the rubber hits the road for programming, it's the faculty that moves you forward. How big is the faculty in the whole, like do you want to include janitorial and food service and all that stuff, or secretaries and faculty first administration? Well, it's not all head counts the same way. It's professional head count. All the head, I mean all the personnel are listed on pages 678 in this report. But we don't have the metrics, we've got this in these calculations. All right, one of the cuts that has been made with this proposed budget is taking away one elementary teacher in both schools to bring the student numbers per classroom to more like 17 students per classroom where some of them were getting to be less than 10 students were the teacher. And those changes, as the administrator said last night, probably would have happened anyway just to make sure that there was the right student to teach a ratio that was a little more responsible. I'm just assuming you guys have scrubbed through all those numbers. There's no more fat, right? We're trimming a lot as much as we can. A little way here at the elementary school here, the diversity of the birth rate. I mean, they're either lived there or they don't live there. Well, and sometimes a family of three or four kids come into town or sometimes they move out and all of a sudden that puts quite a pit on a small, small school. Right, it's a big percentage, isn't it? Mm-hmm. One follow-up question on ESU is, are we still working the lion's share of the assessment? Are we not still, are we still equal? You're paying 41%. 41%, but are we still equally proportioned from a representation at ESU board level? Are we the same number as First Branch and Shrappard and Sharon? It's, yeah. Right, it's... Is that ever gonna change? There is a process in motion. I don't know what the status is. I missed the second half of your representation versus assessment, so we're 41% assessed, but we're equally represented out here. We're given a lot of money and we don't have a proper share of that. We did try changing that kind of immediately after the merger. I think it'd be worth trying again because that was before Tumbridge and Chelsea were fully through their merger and Sharon and Rochester and Stockbridge, so we might bring it up again. So as a follow-up, just how do you, whoever's on the ESU board from this board, how do you feel your representation, do you feel it's okay and fair or do you feel it's not a big advantage? I think we do a very good job at it. We have better attendance than any other district. We always, we have three members on the ESU board and we usually show up with four or five of us at the meeting. We have two actors. Even though the two actors can't vote, they can still voice their views. So it's, we're always, and even like the executive board which is just the chairman goes through, Andrew and I, while we've all gone through the executive boards as members of the public to represent that. Let's do it. So we overrun them. I mean, we, we talk about it. Do you ever come across a conflict though where like a strafford is looking for an allocation that doesn't benefit districters? Hasn't it been an issue? It hasn't been an issue yet. Okay, thank you. But we're fairly noisy at the board meetings. So how on that, there's one thing that I've never properly understood and I always think that during the actual meeting and I just want to go home and vote, and vote and go home in that order. I still, despite my best efforts, not amount of person, not wrap my head around. Okay. There's an X amount of money in our budget that goes to special education. It's distributed through the ESU. Did we end up with a deficit? How, because it's sort of the impression I had in my head was we just threw a certain amount of money into a big pot in the ESU and then special education was sort of evenly distributed from there because that way no one district would end up holding all the, having to pay out all the special education. So like, you know, almost like an insurance kind of thing. So they, you know, the ESU would handle special education funds. So we had South Wales Elementary, we had three kids and money would come out there for those three kids. I think that was wrong because otherwise I don't see how we end up holding the bag for $150,000 or whatever the quantity is. Don't quote me. For a deficit specifically in special education. And so now I'm just sort of like, but how does this work again? Can someone break it down to very small parts? And I think the overall deficit was like 200. Okay, so there's like a far portion of that. Yeah, that's your portion. So that's our 40%. Yeah. So the special education budget, and I hope I can say this and Deb won't scold me tomorrow if I explain it, right? She's not here, she's not over here. Right. I'm sorry. So the special education budget is established by prior year expenditures. We clearly can't project if new students need evaluations, if they need an outside of the district placement. We have no control over those transportation costs based on whatever their plan ends up being, where they need to have an out of district placement. Those are things that you only can do your best projections on. So when the year actually starts and the expenditures start happening, that's when the special education budget can go awry. Same thing happened in special education that happened in each of the member districts and also happened in the central office. All of the special education parent professionals and teachers are all employees of the supervisor union under special education. So they had the same increase in benefits and they receive the same benefits that everybody else does that's on the master agreement or on the support staff agreement. So when the HRA went into place, that exact same impact happened on special education just like it did for the districts and just like it did for the central office staff. So those are some of the factors as to what happened in FY19. This year we tried, why the increase was a little bit higher than what it has been historically is because we really did budget based on the service plan that special education is required to submit to the state of Vermont. And in the past that number's been reduced after the submission's been done to try and keep it. And then that's where we end up having a deficit in the end. So this year's budget was based on the service plan that was submitted by special education to the agency. Is that from a year ago? Yes. Yeah, from a year ago's expenditures. We tend to run in the years with the AOE for one to two years at a time when we're building these. So I hope I explained to the guys. It's important that you know. You know, you have an assumption in your head and then something cracks that assumption you have a lot of, I don't know. It's important that you know too that a lot of people look at the special ed budget and they say, oh, we can't deal with that. That's just what it is. And we've got to pay it and we don't have any control over it. When five years ago, when we started looking at this, we had 57 kids out of district. Now those out of district costs can range for the new school in, I think that's in Malpillier, $123,000 a year for a student or down to East Valley Academy which is a little over 30,000 and I'm not including transportation. So we took an average of all the placements that we had and averaged them out when we were trying to figure out starting the restorative program. And that average of all the placements that we put out was about 76,000. We've put 27 kids through that restorative program since 2015. 41% of those kids have gone back to class without AIDS which is a huge savings. And I can quote you that some of the numbers from the study that we did for South Royalton, it saved $266,385. For Bethel, it's 380,550. And I can go, I mean that's a half a million dollars with two of them combined. Because it's coming from the state, the money coming from the state, that's not something that people know about or think about or can produce those numbers. But we were being questioned by the boards about why we have this program and what good is it doing? We've tried to make people understand that Act 173 is coming probably next year. And we've been told by the secretary of education to grow your own programs because we're not gonna have the money, we're gonna get a block grant and you have to live with that money. They're not gonna be funded from out pillar anymore than that. And so they said, you guys need to form your own programs because you're not gonna have the money to send to the new school or these other places. And so what Tara told you is part of the issue, we can't predict how many kids will be tested at thousands of dollars a pop every year. We can't know who's gonna move into the district and what kind of needs they're gonna have or family situations for kids in our district that cause them to go in a different direction. We now have, we had 52 kids out of the district five years ago and we have 27 now. And so it's been cut in half. And all of that is saving a tremendous amount of money but it's hard to see. It's hard to visualize. Well, especially since the kids were out of district we're literally not this, you know, it's just this drain that we don't really, obviously can't talk about John Smith who's in and out of the district. Right. This cost him a hundred thousand dollars. It's just this little line of budget that he can have sent out from the city. Thank you. Tara, I have a question for you. When I'm looking at the budget, I think I got it down to where I use, I like to use the FY19 actuals against the proposed FY21 proposed. Is that the best way to do a comparison? When I'm trying to say like what we actually spent last versus what is in the next four going budget. Is that it? Is that an accurate way to do my comparison? It's more, I mean what we budgeted, yes we can do that. But when we built the budget we actually look at, we look at that as a factor but we also look at this year and then make projections based on what we budgeted for this year, what we're trending for this year. And that's the FY20 approved. 20 approved, yeah. Because we don't have the actuals obviously because we're only halfway through the year. But yes, we can look at that. But to bear in mind that there are expenditures in FY19 that as addressed by Andrew and I believe Chris's presentation, there, several of them were one time expenditures and may not be reflective in following years. Thank you. And FY19 actuals, are they the combined ledgers? There is no more combining ledgers as of FY19 because that was the budget. I was wondering about the improprieties that led to the deficit based off the different business managers prior to you. The FY19 actuals, are they confident numbers after your audit and whatnot? Are they children of previous business directors? That makes any sense. The numbers that are used in this spreadsheet are a combination derived from draft budgets that we've received plus what's also in our system. So where we knew that there was changes made in the draft budgets, those were adjusted. To the base of my question is the accounting of where monies are spent. Food service is a great example where initially you guys thought there was $100,000 or so deficit in food service and you realized, oh no, actually 80 of it, I'm making this up, 80 of it was accounted for, it was just put over there, not here. So when I look at it, how are you? I am more confident in the FY19 adjusted column here than what I was three months ago. Okay, thank you, that's exactly it. More confident. I would say that categorized things, there are some places where the spending isn't necessarily in the same category that one budget or will be budgeted. You can see just on that regular ed instruction, teacher salary, we changed around where some of that teacher salary was budgeted. We didn't actually increase that, first line by $1 million, $200,000. I think it's important that you understand too that I know that the turnover of the business managers is getting blamed for a lot of what happened, but that's not the whole story. The money was spent, and it wasn't all the fault of the fact that we had Marilyn Frederick here who was an experienced 30 year business manager who was here during some of those changeovers, and I'm not happy about what happened, but Tara's been here now, she'll have a year's anniversary in two weeks, and it's taken time to sort all this out, and time from our auditors, I really feel pretty confident in where we are now with all of that, but there's a critical shortage in business managers in the state and probably all over the country. We flew a lady in from Arkansas to interview, we were beating the bushes trying to find good people, and you either have to buy one, steal one from some place, or you have to make one, and we don't have enough money to steal one, because they're all being paid very, very well, probably more than we can do, but we've really, Marilyn has stayed with Tara to work on all those little questions that need to be answered. She's worked with the Vass Boat Group, and I'm pretty confident that, and she also has a great work ethic, and that's probably a very skill, she's very smart, but it's also, she's got a really good work ethic, and that's the kind of elements or attributes, I guess you would say, that somebody has to have in order to be able to do this job because it's, and we beefed up the office, I guess we stole Rose, you know, I mean, and that's just been a great difference, we now have two accountants, which is, you know, when we appraise this whole thing, and really took a long look at it, what do we really need? We ended up letting go of about four people, and then really kind of started over, and really built something, and I really feel pretty confident about what we have now. That's what I'm looking for, you know, is the confidence building, and I see it, I see it in the last six months or so, especially, and I'm not saying solely that the turnover in business managers was the sole reason for the deficit, but just by having them having to turn over, you're just having less consistency in eyes on that budget, and that's where it ran astray, so. Well there were some people that I got, I don't want to go in on a lot of detail, but there were some things that didn't pan out the way I was led to believe they might, if you know what I mean, we're on camera, so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, but I will say that, you know, we've learned a lot from what happened, and I really think that we're in a much better place now, and we will be for the future, and I'm proud of that. It was really hard during the time that we had to go through this. Did I read somewhere that the current deficit is like a three or four, what are your opinions, like incrementally to get it back, or is it? I think we have three years. Three years. Three years. Okay, thank you. We're hoping that through some frugality this year, we won't have to do that, and everything will be good. I know that. I know that with principals, and I sat in about a day long meeting trying to figure out what we could do without, and we came up with about a quarter of a million dollars worth of things that we could hold the line with, and I don't hear anybody complaining. I mean, they may have complaints, but I haven't heard them. Hey, a quick comment, and then two questions. The quick comment for the television camera there is you mentioned Rose, and I'll put on my select board hat. The Royalton Select Board really blew it by letting Rose get too much involved in all of the politics of the town, and away from her strength as a finance manager, and I think she's gonna be a huge asset for the schools in being able to focus on that job and not get involved in all the other stuff that distracted from her real strength, so I think that's a real great asset. We could see it in the first week she was there. For everybody, so just to go on record for that. Did I hear you say we flew a candidate from Arkansas in here? Yeah. At our expense. A little bit of our expense, it wasn't completely our expense. Okay, and then my second question is the FY19 Actuals, so these are not yet audited, but these are actuals that you have confidence in, is that right? These are through last July. We went up to draft five of our FY19 fiscal audit with additional changes being made. This is closing the books on the year that ended last July. So I would hope that these numbers. They're getting closer to where they need to be. I mean, we're six, how many months past the close of the books? We should close books faster than that. I know it's hard, but we should close books a lot faster than that. They're one of the biggest challenges and why I believe Andrew I think touched on it earlier. When in addition to the mergers happening, we also changed software systems and we also changed chart of accounts. So during that, yeah, so there was a lot and during that transition, stuff wasn't lining up, accounts may not have been transferred over. So as you're working through the year, trying to keep the day-to-day operations and then you had the business managers leave and you had short staffed in the business office, really trying to make sure that all of that closure to make sure the software transfers happened, everything, all the accounts transferred over, that really got bogged down in the process. So that's what's taken. So they were extenuating, sir, absolutely. What is the board's expectation in a regular year without extenuating circumstances? What should be, what's the board's expectation for how long it takes to close the books after the year ends? Is it 30 days, 90 days, six months? How long did it take to close the books out? We'd initially put a deadline of, I think it was like, October 31st. October 31st, so like one quarter. Yeah, okay. And the other challenge that you have in the state of Vermont is there are very few auditing firms who will audit school districts. And then my last related question is, so Chris was asking about the FY19 Actuals. For the FY20 current year approved budget, does somewhere on the back of an envelope, are you tracking expenses to date and doing an estimate on where you're going to end this year? We do track our expenditures. The board and the administration gets a expenditure report from the business office every month. They also have access to the software system. So there is a full year project where you think you're gonna end up? I will do budget projections during the month of March. That's when I do what you can expect to end at the end of this year. I have to get through budget season and then through town meeting and then I can work on projections. It would be helpful for citizens evaluating budgets to see the Actuals for the prior year but to also see this year's approved budget and a current best projection on where we think we're gonna end this year to compare for what you're asking for next year's budget. So you're gonna ask the people in March for the current budget. It would be nice to see a projected where we think we're gonna end this July. Then not this year, but in future years. I'd really like to see that. That's just a good practice. That's a different venue here. But do you have any idea whether your carbon footprint has increased or decreased in consolidation? And I say that only as a sense that a bigger question is, what is education? What are we educating our youth for to be better consumers or are we really want them to find a place in life that they're content with? And I'm saying that about carbon because if the predictions are right about raising water, I mean, global warming, we're in for some pretty drastic times. And you look at our busing system right now is a pretty extreme. I mean, the big buses that are going up delivering to kids in a certain place on the back road to Randolph there, it's amazing that we're able to do that. I mean, to me, I think overall our carbon footprint is hopefully going down. If anything, from the food service side, I would say that Willie's done a lot to bring the footprint down because there's a lot less pre-process packaged food that's coming into the schools. It's a lot of onsite products by the kitchen staff. So I think 80% of the food that's consumed by the students is produced in-house by Willie and his staff. So there's a lot of less trucking and things that go on with that. To your point about busing, I mean, I think we've got the same sort of general bus routes, but now we've added the cross bus that goes from here to Bethel to take the middle schoolers over and to bring the high schoolers back over here. I think unfortunately for where we live at, currently with the technology that's out there for like electrified buses, like Burlington's got a few electric school buses, but it works better there because they're in a flatter terrain. Whereas here, the going up and down the hills that snaps a lot of the power from the buses. So I think as new technology comes forward, hopefully Butler Bus Service or whoever we contract with in the future would be keeping up with that, but I think we're doing the best we can. And the ridership on the buses, yeah, buses use a lot of fuel, but every kid that's on a bus is one less kid that's in an extra car that's on the street. So hopefully it's cutting down on some of the car transportation that families might have. So I was asking another board too, to look in to try to recommend to Butler to get in on this electric buses. It's all, that's all the Volkswagen money that's funding that, the payoff from the. I think the money they got on the pilot. It's a free food that the government issues, the big department of defense issues is you charge, they charge for the freezing of it, the storage of it. And in some cases, the storage is more costly than the going out and buying the food locally. Fireman to plate to what is that one? Fireman to wait there, something program. Obviously used to from the school. We've never had that in our school system, but wouldn't that be a great thing? I think Willie buys as much of his product locally as he can. He's not, I don't think he's here anymore, but he would be able to speak to it more. I can testify that he's had potatoes from South Royalton. And I think the other factor is Willie's amazingness. I suspect there's a lot of those are pleased at this point. I know there's less food waste in the preparation because I spoke to a very nice lady who works in the kitchen, but he's married to her. And she's talked before about one thing gets broken down and another thing gets, the same way you or I might take care of leftovers, it'll be, there's a giant thing of carrots or something like that and it's used for three recipes, rather than used for one recipe. Like the safe and efficient use of as much of food that they buy as possible is really laudable and the fact that it tastes better means less of a throwaway. I also think we can look at some of our programs that I always say this wrong. I call it the eco program. I hope that that's what it is. Okay, because eco echo, you know the echo program in Burlington, but the kids are going outside. They're learning about growing a garden. They're having opportunities to take care of apple trees. They're learning about recycling. I mean, if you look behind you, there's a great example of some education that students get every day, every time they walk up to the garbage can. So I think those small pieces of our curriculum which we're able to push is gonna help with that carbon footprint with, as Chris said, the busing unless we choose not to bus students, I don't think that we're gonna come up with an efficient way just based on our geography. But we need to look at the whole impact of the school. And I think the kids getting out, working with apple trees, working to produce maple syrup, all of those direct, look at all what we can do with our environment and how we can interact with it is gonna help them become responsible adults later on. Yeah, just an observation too. I mean, climate change is tough and I think local climate awareness theater is important and local agriculture is important. But we can't do anything here to stop China from building 1,000 new coal plants a day and burning coal by crazy. So it's a huge global problem that well-intended issues here are gonna just make up that spirit of a difference. The best thing we can do for our children is to teach them to be independent, resourceful, able to cope in changing circumstances, flexible. That's the education they need to deal in the, for the next 20, 50 years. Final questions? Jones, last year you said, give me one more year. Give us one more year. What do you say now? Well, I mean, I think we are showing some progress with tuition revenue. Like, we did get a very strong freshman class and if we continue to get incoming classes like that, that'll make a big difference for the budget. Certainly doing our best. Peter, believe me, he pushed us hard. He pushed us hard. Yeah. Well, thanks for your effort, too. So I guess the last thing, just to, we do have a couple of school board members up for re-election. One of them will be me and I managed to miss getting my position in on time. So if anybody would like to write me in for the three-year position, I'd appreciate that, Sandra Jones. I believe Jess is running for the one-year, there's a position on Shannon, Cornelius. More Cornelius. More Cornelius had moved to Bepple. So she resigned her position and Jess is filling in her position for the end of this year and then there'll be a one-year position on the ballot to fill that spot. She's running against Bob Gray on the ballot, so I don't know if you want to say anything. Thanks. No, this has actually been very eye-opening to step fully onto the school board. Most of you might have seen me during the merger talks as I was part of that group when this started. When I saw the budget forecast and some of the deficits and Shannon had decided to step down, I thought that was a good time to step back in. I had, as you were saying, seen a lot of potential in the merging of the schools and I had hoped that it would go a little bit easier, a little bit less rocking and that we could see building some programs and saving a little bit of money too. Unfortunately, that's not come to fruition yet, but I do feel like we're getting there. I think we've made a lot of progress in the elementary school. I have seen with my children the ECO program being able to take some foreign languages, having a more diverse base of extracurricular activities and hoping that that can continue in the future and hope to stay on the board for at least another year to see how that turns out and if we can keep this forward momentum going, because like I said, it was something that I very much believed in when we merged. And then I'm gonna be, my name's Lisa McCrory and I'm running for a three year position as a Beville resident. My term is up this year, so I'm just running for the next, to see my term, to continue it for another three years. I don't think I have a, I don't have anybody else that I'm running against from IC. Is there any, did anyone file for the three year position or does it run it open? So it's an opening for Roylton for the three years, so yeah. Right. I'll just be right here. Yeah. Thank you all so much. Ladies, gentlemen, I think you have a great job tonight.