 Welcome everyone. Welcome to Dr. Holmes and members of the school committee. Sure. Len Cardin. I am now the chair of the budget committee. You're saying I want to be chair of the school committee. All vice chair of the school committee. Here. Welcome to you all. Let me just recap where we've been and how we've gotten there. As you all know or should know, we're facing a big deficit in FY26 that will increase every year after that. And that is without any new steps. But there are new spends being talked about. The school department, school committee is intended. Particularly have a desire to. Increase spending to advance their strategic plan, which we'll care about today. And the town manager has also asked for money. For a less big of an ask. It's so money for roads. To put money aside. For our crash. Like the increase. And no money for OPEB. I appreciate that. I think I shouldn't be a town manager was willing to drop and asked to add an art box. Position to our payroll next year. Appreciate that. May also appreciate it. He was at least addressing some of my concerns about. But here we are. We're going to have a meeting. Where the select board as far as I know, and I haven't heard otherwise is planning to meet me on the. June to take a vote to put it on. Put the ballot. Put the override on the ballot. Have you heard anything other than that? So. We will be meeting as a finance committee on the seventh to talk about. The overnight and without position will be. The meeting. And I think we will. I think a lot of you are. Already come to a decision about whether you want to support or post an override, but I think a lot of you are still. Want to hear more about it. And. That's why I've asked the school. Committee and spring to meet here. To talk about. Their strategic plan and intensive costs associated with it. And I think it's important to make sure that. That we have, I don't think this is the best. Form tonight to try to convince each other. It's to get information. They are here. Graciously here to answer our questions so that we can. And get more information. And I don't want to turn this into a debate. So. And we can have a more fulsome discussion on. So here's your opportunity. And with that, I will turn it over. To you. Chris, could you grant the slide around the other side of you. We can all slide down this way. Oh, that's much better. Grant one. I don't have any extra. So thank you. I also am joined by Michael Mason, who's our assistant superintendent of finance operations to help with any specifics that are related to some of the financing strategic plan. Sorry. I think everyone knows from anyway. Your reputation. I think that's a good question. Thank you. Thank you. We're so I'll be presenting this, but I want to emphasize that this is a plan that was developed by the community. And is the school committee's strategic plan. It's not my plan. I led the process that led to it. And we're going to talk about some of what the plan demands. If we were to be successful at it. The ask that is associated with it, the sort of bottom line is in. We're going to talk about some of the things that we're going to do. We're going to talk about some of the things that we're going to do in this presentation for each of the priority areas. And that is a changed bottom line from where we initially projected the plan as well. So as you mentioned, Mr. Fuller has brought some of the initial. Ask for the town side down a little bit and made some concessions. So we have gone through and said, what can we spend less on? What can we adjust here and there? We're going to talk about some of the things that we're going to do in this presentation, which we'll talk about in a moment. So a little bit of an overview of how the plan was developed. We worked on this from April through December of 2022. So most of last year, it went through a period of public comment and final revision in March, 2023. It was going through sort of final revisions in January and February of this school of this year. It was created and drafted by Arlington public schools, and it's the last time we have had to do a review of the community-based planning. We're going to do a review of the specific priorities last spring. And then this fall, a smaller group of about 25 community members to actually do the drafting. What do we want the schools to do? What do we want the initiatives, the focused initiatives to be. And I'm going to walk through the specific focused initiatives that we're looking at and what we're going to need to do to resource those initiatives. As I move through the presentation today, there is a five year budget impact outlook included wherever budget planning for the next five years. The budget planning for year one of this plan is next school year. So we've already built a budget with the assumptions of this plan in mind because this was taking shape as we were developing the budget for next year. So I can speak to how particularly in year one, some of the commitments we've made in the FY24 budget are reflected of the priorities and plan. So it began with the development of a vision and mission statement. This is the horizon we're headed towards. That's the vision. They have the road that gets us there. That's our mission. We've really focused or the community really focused on some keywords that were important to what we wanted to do in the schools. Primarily that we wanted to create a community that was equitable, where our learners felt a sense of belonging because we know that if they feel like they belong when they're at school, they're going to experience growth and learning and achievement and they're gonna be happy in that environment. They're gonna experience joy and they're gonna wanna become lifelong learners and civically engaged and continue to contribute to their communities. So that vision and the associated mission to really look at the whole child and create innovative opportunities for all students guided the work of the plan. When we had to make a decision, we went back to this. What was in the vision statement? Does this initiative get us there or does this one? And then we use that as a guidepost. So there are four strategic priorities and I'm actually gonna walk through each one. I'm gonna start with the first one, equity and excellence and talk about the three initiatives under that one and then there are three initiatives under each of the four. So there are 12 initiatives in total. Each initiative is an attempt to be as focused as possible about what exactly we're gonna do over the next five years. It contains a timeline. If you look at the strategic plan about how we plan on mapping out the action steps of those five years and then we also map the money onto each of those five years to try to anticipate what costs would be. We know that will change because we know we're gonna have to make adjustments. We already have had to in fiscal 24 and say, well, we can't quite afford to do that here but we have grant money, so we'll put it there. So we've already made a couple of those adjustments in your one. So priority one is focused on equity and excellence. It's focused on learning. This is the teaching and learning priority area and it has three initiatives under it. The first one is instructional vision and coherence. We've heard from our community that we need more consistency across classrooms and practice in content. We know that we need to adjust our literacy programming. For example, so we're adopting a new literacy curriculum for next school year that is aligned with the science of reading that ensures that students are learning phonics, that they're building comprehension and vocabulary and that's been a major focus of our work this year and will be beginning to be launched next year. We want to develop curricula and teaching practice that is aligned with this concept of deeper learning. It's a set of principles. It's a framework for thinking about engaging students interdisciplinary and project-based work because we know that today's workforce and today's work world is really focused on having workers who are able to manage projects with collaborative teams and those are skills that students will need to build. Initiative 1.2 is focused on student belonging and adult support. We want to really understand how our students are experiencing school. We have a lot of equity gaps. When we look at our data and there are outcomes in the strategic plan that we're going to close the gaps associated with students' experiences with school. We've identified focal groups for the strategic plan and they are our students who come from low-income families, our students who identify as BIPOC as Black, Indigenous, people of color. Our students who are LGBTQIA+, who are gender expansive. Our students who have IEPs and our students who are English learners. Those five focal groups we're monitoring the achievement gaps of and so in order to do that we need to understand where their experience falls short because their experience impacts their academics. So that second initiative is about really deeply understanding what their experience is and making sure we're building the capacity of those experts we have in the system to address those experiential gaps because that has impact on the academic gaps and we have plenty of evidence to show that that's true. Our third initiative initiative under priority one is surrounding multi-tiered systems of support. What that means is intervention. When a student struggles, what happens? When a student struggles, we need to put them in front of an expert who can help them catch up without depriving them of access to grade level instruction because if you deprive them of access to grade two instruction, say they're reading at a first grade level, then they will never read at a second grade level. You have to accelerate them towards that second grade level. You need experts who can do that, who can basically teach them faster than the curriculum allows for them to learn and provide them with that support. Have systems like that, you want them to be well communicated, well assessed. You need to make sure that you have assessments that will catch those issues and that you have people who can address them fast because otherwise all you're gonna do is exacerbate an achievement gap which I just talked about for initiatives one and two. So these are all very connected to improving teaching and learning for our students. The dollars for priority one are focused in each of those areas. So the way you look at this table is that initiative one, that instructional dividend coherence is the first slide, initiative two is the second, initiative three is the third. The first column funded in FY24 budget reallocated is basically us taking dollars that were planned for FY24 and trying to move them so that they will address this initiative. So reallocated basically means that we have taken into account what was already going to be funded and we've tried to shift things around in order to allocate dollars for that initiative. In year one, additional funding. So this is the additional funding that will be needed. We will continue to reallocate. So if you look at the strategic plan, we have a sort of a back document to that that has what we're gonna reallocate in that year and what we're going to need additional spending in order to effectively do in that year. We're only showing you the additional funding here but we've accounted for reallocation in every single year of the strategic plan with the assumption that we're gonna need to recalibrate the resources we already have in order to do this. What that means to reallocation for us is maybe we don't need this position, maybe we need that one. Maybe we can shuffle the resources we've used to purchase curriculum here. We can purchase curriculum over here instead because it's more aligned with the plan. So reallocation is part of this plan but you're only seeing additional funding with the exception of FY24. So additional funding year one would be what we needed additional for the planning for FY24 in order to do that plan. So I'm gonna talk through these quickly but that's how to read these tables and there's one for each priority area. So for instructional vision and coherence, the needs for additional funding over the next several years would be to get us to full-time librarians at every single school, to include digital learning teachers in the staffing of a fully resourced media center because then you can do integrated learning where you're incorporating technology, project-based approaches and information literacy into lessons and you have a fully staffed library. Increasing our curriculum materials budget to accommodate the expansion of our ELA curriculum and the revamp of our ELA curriculum as well as some of the assessments required to do some of the tier one work or like core instructional work. In 1.2, it's staffing to increase our capacity and diversity, equity, belonging and inclusion. We are an organization with 1,000 staff and 6,000 kids that requires a lot of professional development. And so we need to build the capacity for our professional development in order to do that and need specialists and experts in that area to deliver a lot of that professional development. You'll notice that that's year one additional funding but that's actually in a grant right now. So right now it's not actually built into the base, we had to move it into a grant because we didn't have the funds for it in year one. Multi-tiered systems of support, the funding for that is around interventionist, special educators, EL educators, those people who help when a student's not going to be able to access the grade level curriculum and is going to need additional support to accelerate or additional support to learn the language or additional support to get accommodations so that they can access grade level content and we can close that achievement gap. So that's priority one, we have three more. Authority two is focused on valuing all staff. This is about making sure that all of our staff have everything they need to give our kids everything they need. So the first initiative is on pathway teaching programs. These are programs that have become very popular and expanded a lot in recent years in neighboring districts. They are, their goal is to make sure that the staff that we have who wanna become teachers we're supporting to become teachers. Often those staff are, staff who are paid at our lowest rates. There are paraprofessionals, they might be tutors in our title one programs. They're interested in becoming teachers and so we want to help them out with licensure courses, with coursework that will inspire them to become teachers. Our most diverse staff exist in those roles and so by improving their ability to make it into the teaching profession we also improve our ability to diversify our workforce and to improve retention within our workforce. We wanna develop a couple of partnerships with nearby universities to help them attain licensure and become teachers. Reimagining professional development is focused on sort of revamping our approach to professional development. Expanding choices and teachers investment, we've gotten a lot of feedback that our teachers have told us our professional development doesn't feel cohesive, doesn't feel aligned to a common direction and so we're trying to improve upon that and then one point or 2.3 is the one that really carries the weight of the override number. Competitive compensation is a real challenge for us in APS. We want to both refine and track our strategies for recruitment and retention and continue establishing and sustaining competitive compensation for all of our staff members. Mr. Cardin is gonna speak to that a little bit. When I'm done, he's done some analysis on neighboring communities and updated the analysis that we're constantly doing on neighboring communities but I can tell you we're in the hiring season right now and it's exceptionally challenging for us to maintain our hold on competitive candidates for us to convince folks that they definitely wanna come to Arlington. Competitive compensation is a major part of this plan. So we're trying to get back to a specific task. That was impressive. So the bulk you'll see of the dollars in this one are not on those pathway teaching programs or reimagining professional learning, though those do carry some additional funding requirements for things like stipends for our leadership teams and for people who need to deliver some professional development but really it's around negotiations. So the bulk of that 3.6 for this initiative to this priorities right here in competitive compensation. It's a slow go at negotiating higher salaries and year two additional funding and year three is where we will be negotiating the teacher's contract. I do wanna point out that negotiating the teacher's contract and providing for competitive compensation also gets us flexibility with the teachers because we can negotiate for language for certain adjustments. This past round of negotiations we expanded the school day by 10 minutes that might not seem like a big deal but it makes a really big difference when it comes to instructional time. So when we can provide competitive compensation that's not just us giving money for our bargaining units is also us negotiating for things that will allow the rest of this plan to actually happen. All these pieces are tied together. So if we want flexibility in the schedule if we want additional time for professional development for teachers if we need to get some concessions around time spent or around additional compensation for teachers then we need to be able to pay for those additions to the contract. Priority three is focused on finance and operations. Initiative 3.1 really on modern spaces and operations we have schools that have been redone over the past couple of decades or have been completely rebuilt we're about to open a new high school. And so our schools don't need rebuilt right away we do need to take a look at the Odyssey over the next several years but there are aspects of them like furniture was purchased maybe two decades ago and might need to be refreshed in order to have flexible seating in classrooms or the ability to implement curriculum like the one we're about to adopt. So we want to make adjustments to the technology that's available in our classrooms and the infrastructure surrounding the classroom that the fixture furniture and equipment that we have because a lot of it is significantly updated we need to be able to refresh the floors we need to be able to paint the walls because those have a pretty significant impact on the learning environment for students. So those are things that are included in 3.1. 3.2 is focused on meals this one is the kids initiative the students when we talk to them about how we can improve school we'll talk to you a lot about lunch and they will talk to you a lot about choices at lunch and so they and they have a lot of really great ideas and actually run a lot of the sort of sustainable composting programs sustainability composting programs and recycle programs in the schools and so we want to expand the capacity of that we want to take a look at our spaces in the lunchroom and make sure that they are sustainable we want to take a look at our and develop evaluation criteria for lunches and we also want to expand access to breakfast programming they have a lot of kids who come to school having not had breakfast we have expanded breakfast programming significantly in the past two years and we want to continue to do that because it also offers an option for parents to drop their kids off a little bit earlier to school and we're hearing from an increasingly dual working household community that they need options when it comes to drop off time and they need access to expanded care for their families. And then 3.3 is focused on asset management and using better data to make sure that when we do purchase new fixtures when we do purchase new technology that we have a strong handle on where it is this is coming at least in part out of the pandemic in flux of technology because we needed to expand it so rapidly and making sure that we are being efficient with our purchasing of technology and that we know where all of those assets are and we know we can improve in that area so that's something that we're looking to improve upon the dollars for this initiative come primarily from 3.1 as you can imagine things like technology refreshing and furniture refreshing and fixture refreshes are pretty significant costs and so that priority 3.1 is where the majority of those dollars are for 3.2 we're looking at we're refreshing eating spaces and cafeterias we have, we live in a community where students used to go home to eat lunch and then come back and so our cafeterias are fairly small our infrastructure for making meals in those cafeterias is somewhat limited and so that's one of the things we're looking at in healthy meals for all as well and then the asset management piece that this is not a significant cost and it's not significant in the out years of leader. All right, finally, priority four is focused on community and family engagement and strong two-way partnerships with families so the first is I've mentioned this already access to the foreign after school services we have a lot of families in Arlington who really need additional access to the foreign after school care services we would like to expand the opportunities extracurricularly for this because we know that will have an impact on belonging when students are connected to activities outside school they're connected to school they're connected to the people at school and they're going to achieve the higher levels so we wanna take a look at our extracurricular programming our needs-based programming can we provide tutoring to help with intervention because we don't have as much time in the school day can we expand our access to after school tutoring as an intervention to students as a way of also providing additional care time and learning time so those are things we're looking at in 4.1 in 4.2 we are opening a welcome center this was built into the high school project it will open next year we're going to need to staff it in order to have it the goal of a welcome center is to create centralized registration space for families so that it's not so that it's cohesive and families know where to go they know where to find information we need to develop opportunities for families to learn about their children's education and that and build community and opportunities for dialogue and that's part of what the welcome center's charge will be as well so it's not just about centralized registration it's also about parent education offering workshops for families around topics of interest and building our ability to have sort of two-way relationships with families and not just blast stuff out to our community and to our families and then initiative 4.3 is also focused on communication and partnership making sure our websites are consistent on the district platform and our user-friendly and that we have the capacity to sustain that we did a refresh of the website but we're still trying to make sure that that content is user-friendly and easy to access and that a screen reader can read it for example and that it's easy to translate and that takes time, that takes capacity that takes human beings to do so we are in the process of improving that we also want to expand our coordination of parent groups we have digs at every school we have PTOs at every school coordinating the efforts of those groups so that we're working towards foreign vision can be challenging so the welcome center will be tasked with doing some of that as well. The majority of funds for the welcome center are focused in that welcome center and registration and making sure that it is appropriately staffed and that we have communications right now currently we do not have a communications department we have someone whose job it is to do communications and all of our grant management and title one management so that's a strain because we don't have the capacity to improve on communications in a way that we've heard the community say they would like us to so despite a lot of effort on the part of the folks who are there we really are looking forward to having the capacity and the welcome center to improve our communication strategies and outreach to families and so with that that was a lot of information I will hand it off to Mr. Hart. Thank you so first thank you all for coming back I know after town meeting gets out it's like yeah we're out of here thank you for coming back to listen to us and to meet next week. So I want to talk about salaries that's 3.3 million of the ask more almost half of the total ask into the first three years which is the part that will be covered by the override plan it's more than half of the amount so it's a significant point so where we are with salaries so in 2021 the town did it it's every three years or so it does it hire the consultant to do a salary study of the town manager 12 communities so the town manager 12 communities are not necessarily the ones we're competing with some of them are but actually some of them are not like Lexington is not in town manager 12 at Cambridge is not Acton box borough is not those are all communities that staff have left for so nevertheless that's that's what we we agreed to a long time ago as our set of comparisons so the town manager 12 study did show that our teaching assistants are paid well below the average and most of our teachers were about 5% below the average so as part of our last five year plan is part of the last override we did get additional money and we did put some of that money towards salaries so we did update our study in FY 23 just this year to see where we were and we made a little bit of progress but except for the bachelor entry level where we were pretty competitive except for that very very entry level bachelor position where 2% to 10% to 7% sorry it's a little bit town manager 12 average these differences impact negotiations that Dr. Holman talked about hiring outcomes and retention and the recently negotiated increases in area towns are exceeding 2% so 2% is usually our benchmark that's what's built into our budget that's built into all of our planning when we go over 2% we have to either cut positions or seek additional funding from what is in our formula so what we're seeing on the next slide is we didn't go to 3% this year and 2.75% next year FY 25 is still to be negotiated but these area towns particularly the ones where there were walkouts or strikes are seeing higher equally or higher increases so I just wanted to show those Avril Maldon and Bernadette and not even town manager 12 but they're the ones that experienced strikes recently and with teaching assistance there's not as much data but 30,000 is sort of the figure that's been bandied around that's what the unions are seeking as the entry-level salary for teaching assistance and for our lower-level teaching assistance we're really way far below that so we definitely have some catching up to do there That's it. I think we're ready for questions. Okay, I'll start with a few questions of my own. First, so you've tweaked this and last year they asked can you talk about what you've shifted around what you've eliminated what you've changed? So to begin with the salary ask change so the salary ask change is probably the most significant one we started with a bit of analysis around what we thought would be competitive what Mr. Carter just said is very true we're very frequently losing candidates or losing current staff members to neighboring communities to Cambridge, Luxington so we took a look at the Town Manager 12 and where we were on the average and we started by saying we'd love to get to 65% this ask is getting us to 60% we had us getting at 65% quicker which in the out years ends up costing more because you jumped faster and then you have to pay more the following year so we spread it out a little bit instead of saying we're gonna get there in the one first year negotiations we get up to 65% we said we're gonna get to 60% and we're gonna take a couple of years to do it so that reduced the ask by a couple million but the important thing to note on that though is that, so that would be FY 27 and by that time other towns are gonna be increasing as well so we probably will never reach the 60% percentile that we're aiming for but that's what that's what that's that's how we budgeted it No, thank you some of the other places where we did some shuffling particularly in priority three the assumptions around the cost of some of the refreshes has gone down significantly so if at this rate like if we were to budget about 150,000 a year over a couple of years we would be able to refresh all of the schools maybe in about a decade and we have schools that have furniture and fixtures that like I said are about two decades old so we'd start there and then we would determine based on the work of the initial year which is creating an instructional environment and technology plan we would create a cycle like every year we're gonna do these two schools the next year we're gonna do these two schools the next year we're gonna do these two schools and we're gonna prioritize whatever that school needs right now maybe this school needs desks and walls painted maybe this school needs new flooring and some other major item that's gonna improve the educational environment we have also had conversations about the role of some of those improvements in capital planning and I think that's a conversation that we need to continue to have with capital planning and we wanna make sure we're planning for improvements that are also somewhat expectable and expendable so there are some things we do like purchasing devices that used to be a capital expense still are capital expense but the last many, many, many years those devices don't last very long anymore Chromebook last few years and we're constantly purchasing Chromebooks because they are cheaper and because that they're also being used by little children so they break and they also get updated much faster now than they used to 10 years ago so those are some of the considerations around that top line but we've adjusted that number down pretty significantly from the initial projection and like I said, we've moved some things into grants this year that if we want to maintain in the operating budget we're going to have to find efficiencies in order to fund so this $140,000 is not actually additional funding per the ask in the strategic plan it is dollars we found somewhere else in our remaining COVID grant funds that we're going to have to move into the base budget by shuffling other things out or by making some decisions about what we're not going to keep or continue Those are two examples Thank you and you've referenced that what you're hoping to achieve is in return for increasing compensation is getting the teachers to give on other issues and can you talk more about that and how important that is where that works itself into this plan in a tangible way? I can try and I need to warn you I'm going to be vague about this because it's negotiations there are things that are core to our success of this plan that I think are worth keeping in mind as we think about things like contracts primary among them are that there are a lot of big learning lifts for adults changes in mindset about how we do our work if you're going to close achievement gaps that requires time that requires a lot of dedicated professional learning that requires often coaching and those are things that can impact terms and contracts there are things in teachers that are impacted by the teacher contract so schedules for example are pretty heavily impacted by the teacher contract the teacher contract stipulates the working day contracts stipulate time spent in professional development they can also stipulate things like amount of prep time that a teacher has during a day which actually impacts the instructional block so if this is an example this is not a statement of what we would go into negotiations but this is a good example if the new literacy curriculum that we're looking into has an assumption that you're going to teach literacy for two one-hour blocks for a third, fourth and fifth grade our blocks are 40 minutes long our blocks impact our staffing model so if you have blocks that are 40 minutes long and you have specialists that teach for one block a day that pulls the kids out of that block so the teacher can have a prep and you staff up to that specialist requirement level because of how long the block is that block is defined in part by the teacher contract saying that teachers get a 40 minute prep so if you want to adjust any of that if you want to have flexibility in any of those areas you have to have conversations about what's in a contract and you have to help people come along with the idea of making really pretty significant changes to their working day and to the way they're thinking about what's required of them during their working day you have to build a lot of trust we're really proud of the relationship we have with our teachers union and our bargain units in APS and we've done a lot to build trust between ourselves and our bargaining units and so you have to have a lot of really good faith bargaining going on and MTA, the state teacher association has not been helpful in those efforts because they are encouraging strikes and unfortunately from the data you just saw that Mr. Cardin shared the results of those strikes are encouraging to bargaining units in the state we would really like to avoid that because we know to make these kinds of changes and adjustments that are a challenge to convince people to do that we're gonna need those trusting relationships and we're gonna need compensation for it but those are a couple of examples of things that would probably be areas of adjustment to take that. Other things that are in contracts are things like stipends are things like payments for specific things that teachers might need to do that would go over and above their time. So those are flexibilities you can get when you provide compensation because at the end of the day people want it in their base they want those payments in their base they don't necessarily want a one-time payment. So my last question before I open up to other people is at the end of year five how many additional headcounts was the headcount change at the end of year five that you were sitting here today that you anticipate? We did not sit and count headcount in factoring in these dollars. Yeah so part of this is it's a five-year plan and the implementation teams haven't even been formed yet so they're going, I don't know if you wanna talk about the implementation but she'll talk about that in a minute but as the detailed plans are developed there's gonna be we need this stuff here we need that stuff here. So we did make some assumptions and use some salary assumptions to build the plan but I think we're reluctant to share them because they're so indefinite. But I think we're talking about a couple dozen positions in that range. So I'll talk about the sort of implementation piece. I also wanna add in order to do some of the things in this plan so for example to get the director of communications and family engagement into this year's budget we restructured two or three other positions. We eliminated one to create two for example. So we anticipate doing as much of that as we can because we also know that you don't wanna just add on stuff that you're doing without taking stuff away. If you do that you're not improving the capacity of the system you're making it worse because you're just layering stuff on. So we took the grants position I talked about that was grants communications title one all these things and we split it into two positions and we eliminated it. So that gives us resources to pour into this new position and this sort of restructured position. So I would answer by saying we plan to do a lot of that so that we can minimize the number of additional FTEs that we're talking about here. Enrollment is part of this answer too. Enrollment is increasing at the secondary level. It's not increasing. It's gonna start leveling off at the elementary level. It's looking to be either even or slightly higher next year at the elementary level. So at the elementary level what we're doing primarily is building out the capacity of each school to have the right core of instructional people available to the kids. A librarian, a digital learning teacher an appropriate amount of interventionists and that's based on how many kids need it an appropriate amount of special educators based on the instructional model and the kids who need it. At the secondary level, we're still mitigating for increased enrollments because the buffer that bubble group is headed into secondary now. So we're needing to add teachers at the high school teachers at OMS this year in order to make sure that the class sizes in our art classes for example aren't 40 and just to bring that down. So enrollments make that a little less predictable over the next several years but where we're stable, we're looking to reallocate where possible and continue to build on the promises of the previous override and the expectations around what a core experience for our kids would be. The working groups, we have strategic plan working groups that are about to get started. A lot of those working groups task for the first year is to dig deep into this like MTSS for example and say what do we need in terms of an intervention model what do we not have? What's the ratio supposed to be of math intervention as to kids who need math intervention? What's the model we want to use for co-teaching because we have co-teaching at some of our schools but we don't have a really clearly articulated model for that and what that team decides it should impact spending decisions over the next several years but that team doesn't exist yet because this plan just got approved. So when Mr. Cardin says we have teams that aren't in existence yet to do the work to help us make the decisions that's like we're still in the process of getting the implementation of this put together. All right, questions. Carolyn, John, and Annie. I wanna start on the last one. Can you explain the difference between a TA and an SSP? And the next part of that question is how many of them have an undergraduate degree? Like what percentage? Okay, that last question is gonna be hard to answer with specificity now but we can go look into it and get it back to you. The, a TA, okay, I'll start with actually what an SSP is, a specialized support personnel repair professional SSP is often somebody who works in one of our substantially separate programs who works directly with students with special needs and is tied to special education. That's what an SSP is. A TA is often sort of teaching assistant at the general education level. For example, our kindergarten TAs are TAs. We have one in every classroom to assist the kindergarten teacher. We have TAs in other places where we've used we've needed additional help to help with like a class size that's particularly large. We have building substitutes who are TAs. So that's having somebody in the building who when you have a teacher out you have someone who the kids know who you can place in that classroom who knows the routines of the school. So you're not always using a daily sub. We have building subs at every school but we don't have nearly as many as we often need for coverage. The, there's no plans to expand that at the moment but those are also the TA sorts of positions. Of the full-time people in the TA role what generally, what percentage do you think have a bachelor's degree? Any guesses? I don't want to guess on this. I'm looking at Michael. 20%? I'm, this is a guess. Yeah, I'm not going to hold you to it. Yes, I probably say 30 to 50%. Okay, so 30 to 50% have a bachelor's. So the bachelor's get, come in at a higher salary than the non-bachelor's. They do, that's a newer agreement that we will bring them in at a higher step on the contract than folks who don't. Okay. One of my concerns when I look at this is you've already told us that your TAs are your largest group of people of color and or lower income. And the amount of money you're spending on them is minuscule compared to what you're spending everywhere else. And you're telling us that they only make, they're lucky if they make 60% of the average. So my question is for these new roles, particularly the roles that are not classroom teachers, what percentage are they of at their salary? Because many of them are professionals. They have a bachelor's or master's degree and they're making decent money. And what I'd love to see is new hires not come in at anything above 60% of the average. It'll be harder for you to hire them. But this is crazy that we have this much money at the top end and this little money at the bottom end. It's the same for the amount of money that you're spending on pathway to becoming a teacher. That is minuscule compared to everything else. And I find that really offensive. Now this is my soapbox for every lower paying job in town and everyone else here has been here a while knows it. But it's here it is another example where we're spending the least amount of money on the people who reclaim we want working as teachers in our school system. So what I will point out on this is that in FY23, 24 and 25, we bargained the highest increase rate for that group for that TA group because of exactly what you just said. And we're developing the path. So try to decide where to start. We're just helping the pathway programs in part because of what you just said because we know that it is cost prohibitive often for people who come into this system to try to attain a bachelor's degree that would be required in order for them to become a teacher. And we know that a lot of them would love to pursue that given the flexibility to do so and the financial support to do so. So that is why the pathway program is there. Also we would love to have, I would love to have, I will speak for myself, everyone at this level because I don't particularly love that we have folks who work with some students who are paid at one level and folks who work with other students who are paid at another level. I think that that exacerbates tendencies to label students. And so for us to have competitive salaries, we need to have everybody at that SSP level at the very least. And it would cease to communicate precisely what you're communicating about how we value our most diverse cohort of staff members. And the other thing is for those of us who started work right out of undergrad, what was your salary when you started? 30 years ago, I was making more than any of these numbers. Now granted, I graduated with a professional degree as a professor of therapists. So that put me a teeny bit above my peers. But look at these numbers compared to what you made when you graduated college. And they're ridiculous. Anything else, Carol? No. Hi, John. Thank you, Madam Chair. So I have like kind of a high level question and just a couple of kind of lower, more specific questions. And so the first one, you know, part of my ignorance, but I'm looking at the long-range plan. And it looks like the school food budget according to the long-range plan is the latest available that I could find. Current, you know, FY24, it's at $88 million. And then out to FY28, it goes up to $105 million. So that's a $17 million increase. So what I'm not sure of, but maybe you can just explain is this additional $6 million on top of that $17 million? Or is it baked into that $17 million? How does this work? I don't know which version you're looking at. If it's the one that I tell meeting. That is, did not include the $6.79 million. So it would be, okay. So it's just basically a $23 million, assuming it's day of March 23rd, I assume it's close to the final one. So we're looking at a $17 plus six, $23 million increase for the schools over the next five years. Correct. Okay, thank you. So I guess getting a little bit more specific, you know, these programs, they sound great. And you know, the further you guys, if you guys say that they're great programs, but I assume they are great programs. As Christine said, I think the last time you guys were here, that, you know, we're all very proud of the all the public schools. You could put me at the top of that list. I have two kids in the schools and there's no school system in the country out rather than yet with the quality, the diversity of the culture, everything. So yeah, very proud of the school. I think the schools are excellent. However, you know, if these programs are so great, it's going to be another $6 million. My question is, is the only place we can find the $6 million in the taxpayers pocket? Because we're going to go to the taxpayers and say, guys, you have to come up with another $6 million to fund these excellent programs. Okay, they are great. I'm assuming, you know, I have no reason to consider otherwise. Is there other places where you could find the $6 million within the school budget? Specifically, you know, you look back, since COVID, there's been an increase of 80 FTEs in the school program, 80 full-time employees. So right there, that's, you know, $68 million a year in costs. That's pretty much the override right there. Those 80 million, excuse me, those 80 FTEs. You know, is every single one of them essential? Because that's kind of what the override's coming down to. And, you know, I don't know, I can't certainly dive into all the details. You know, just what I could learn from kind of picking through the budget and actually just kind of checked it again today to make sure I still have the latest and greatest. A couple of things jump out of me looking at the FY24 budget. Some of the increases that have been incurred since COVID hit. And, you know, we don't have to get into the specifics. I'm just giving some examples. And then if you guys say, and I'm just going to ask you, you know, is this money essential? And should we be using this money for these new programs instead of going to the tax rates for new money? So I'm just going to give a few examples and then I'll, you know, hand it back to you guys. So the student data assessment is up by 300 grand. That's 187% increase. Human resources is up by 291 grand. That's 117% increase. The business office is up by 283,000. That's a 58% increase. Team chairs up by a million dollars. That's a 171% increase. Inclusion support is up by 414,000. That's a 42% increase. Those numbers I just said totaled a $2.8 million increase since COVID hit. That's a 56% increase from what it was when COVID hit. So, you know, can we get some of the money from those expenditures or do we really have to go to the tax periods for these new programs? That's my question. Yeah, so I mean, part of the, some of your specific questions are due to some of our quirks in budgeting, which we're working on to correct. In the position control, for example, there are positions, those are authorized positions, even where it says actual, those are still authorized positions, but they may not have been ones that were filled. So we're working to correct that, but unfortunately some of that data that you're citing, particularly for specific categories, like human resources, it may be positions that were parked in there and not moved to the correct school. Other things that happened because of the short staff in the budget office that makes those specific analysis complicated and hard to answer. It's a different category. But as a more general answer, yes, we have increased positions, I checked today, I think it's 50 teaching positions since 2020 to 2024. You're saying 50? 50 teaching positions, 50, yes. That includes not just classroom teachers, but special ed teachers, reading teachers, anybody who's to the member of our sure union. Almost all of those have been discussed in our prior budgets. So for example, at the elementary level, we have this program where we built in an additional common planning time for our teachers. So every week, the fifth grade teachers can all meet together, every week the fourth grade teachers meet together. In order to cover that period, we had to increase our staffing for music teachers, gym teachers, et cetera, specialists to cover that time. So that was six positions that went to the elementary schools, even though we didn't have an increase in our class sections. Our class sections are the same. So across the district, we've added people where we needed, we thought we needed them. Our last five-year plan included $2.8 million in increases. Some of that did go to salaries, but most of that went to positions. So all of those were positions where we carefully looked at what we needed and added where we could. And in addition to the enrollment increases at the high school and middle school, we had to add actual class sections. We did add class section at the middle school and the high school to address enrollment increases. Yeah, so thank you. Great explanation. So what a couple of members jumped out on me, one is you said so 50 new teachers. So I mean, basic subtraction needs me to think that there's 30 new administrative positions because I see about 80 new FTEs. So 50 plus 30 is 80. Yeah, so I believe there's, again, just looking at some of the numbers that are hard to confirm. There are about 10 that are in support staff like facilities, IT, cafeteria, things like that. There are additional, there's probably 10 to 15 there and the other 10 to 15. There are in, I wouldn't say administrators, but there's like coaches that we've added. So for example, there's, each school now has a reading coach. We used to have to share our reading coaches across schools, things like that. Yep. So I guess my final question is, as you mentioned, I mean, the unions can be very aggressive. We see, you know, Wooburn and I know Wellesley's having a lot of problems. The towns you mentioned there having a lot of problems. I would think that it's very much in the town's interest to keep the head count tight because there's gonna be some increases. No question whether it's three, four, five, two, I'm not sure, but you know, whatever that increases, wouldn't you want it to apply to a tighter head count? So I mean, I think that's what we're asking for the more money so that we can do both quite frankly. All right? So we have these needs that we feel are crucial to our teaching plan to building a better school district, right? And we also have these demands from the unions that we're doing. We want to do both, right? If, you know, people have asked, well, the long range plan includes some assumptions about chapter 78, I think it's gonna come in much higher than we've estimated. We have the plan includes very conservative estimates for state aid. If it comes in lower, then we'll be happy to take another look at, you know, if the override passes and the chapter 70 comes in lower what's in the long range plan, then me personally, I can't speak for everybody else, but we'll be happy to look at tightening the budget as needed and not filling some of these positions. But if chapter 70 comes in more and our runway is extended, you know, then yeah, these are positions we need and we really think we need to add them. I mean, so the chapter 70 money going out, I mean, I personally would think if these, some of these positions are, you know, maybe we take them, maybe we don't take them. I would think the chapter 70 money goes up, the override goes down. I wouldn't say, hey, the chapter 70 money comes in, hire people that we may need. I would say cancel the override. Yeah, I mean, we won't know that until next January. So, you know, where this was discussed at long range planning, it'll affect the next override because people talk about what the next override is gonna be after three years. If chapter 70 comes in higher, which we hope, then we'll get four years for five years before we add another override. Got it. Okay, well, thank you very much. Okay. And even Grant and Al and Charlie. So I have about two questions. One is sort of a big picture of the question, which is you have a strategic plan, you have these four initiatives or four priorities with a bunch of initiatives under them. How would you categorize the spending that you're doing that isn't inside of those initiatives or do you see everything is inside those initiatives? Do you know what I'm saying? Like when you're making choices about classroom staffing and so on and so forth, is there something other than the strategic plan that you're looking at? Professional standards, contract requirements? I mean, certainly. So one of the things I'll say to leaders often is that we only have so many rule books. And that is to give everyone the flexibility to make suggestions and recommendations. Those rule books are our contract. We have to follow that. Our policy manuals, we have to follow those. So we have to make decisions that are in alignment with those agreements that already exist. But beyond that, this is the guidepost. This is what our community, this is what parents, this is what kids, this is what teachers have told us they need. So if there's a new ask, if there's an adjustment that has to happen, if we're saying this or this, then the decision should come from what's aligned with the plan. So you've talked about this, you used the word budget and efficiencies. So what you're saying is that you're looking at contract requirements, the sort of basic kids to the teacher ratio or the classroom, so on and so forth, you're setting the budget, you're looking at these initiatives and you're saying, is everything that we have flexibility about pointing towards one of these initiatives or not, and you're choosing your initiatives, your efficiencies out of that pool of spending. Yes. So presumably you could create sort of a sub ledger of the five-year plan and kind of showed all that. Not as complicated as your whole budget, which is complicated and I know dumb three different ways and stuff like that and so forth, but something that said baseline, baseline, baseline, initiative, initiative, initiative and showed how that money was being distributed every given year. And presumably also have outcome measures you're gonna use against that, like for example, how you're doing in your subgroups, closing the gaps, ways to measure that. And your sense of belonging. Yeah, we have surveys that we use for some of that. We're working on getting better at using qualitative data to measure that because surveys can only go so far. But yeah, we have measures disaggregated by those focal groups. We've said, this is what the gap is now. This is what we want it to be in five years it better be much smaller. And those outcome measures where we do something that closes the gap, we should do more of that. And so we're gonna use success to tell us what the next step is and what the resource would be that would be needed and then recalibrate how we're spending to expand whatever that success is based on that outcome. And outcomes not outputs. Outcomes not outputs. Outputs are things that you do and produce. Just checking we're using the same outcomes. Okay, so how many of these TA and SSP positions are full time as in 35 hours a week? There's 30 hours a week. Yeah, there's 30 hours a week. So for most, the vast majority, 35, 35. We don't have a lot of part-time TAs. But if you're looking for like a full-time equivalent of what we've currently budgeted. Like I work 30 hours a week and I'm a 0.8. So for the parent professionals is at 199.1 FTDs. But each one, if you compare them, they only work 30 to 35 hours a week, right? Correct, yeah. So some work 30, some work 35, we don't have the breakdown of how many work. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.75 to 0.1 or 1.0. If you consider 35 hours, 1.0, yeah. It is in the professional world. It's in the world I live in. Yeah. I'm in the 60. Well, I think a full-work week is 35 hours a week. That's worth their lunch, right? Yeah, so it's a seven-hour day with a paid lunch. Yeah. So they're positions range from six and a half hours to seven hours, depending on what location you're at. Okay, so six and a half hours, call it 0.8, right? If it's a six and a half hour day. So 0.8, there's an MIT study that says that in order for a person to live independently and like not in their parents' house in the Boston MSA, you gotta make $48,000 a year. So these guys at 0.8 are not making 0.8 and $48,000 a year, and that's baseline, so. That's assuming a two-month and a 60-day job. I don't know if it's possible. Yeah. Okay. But I guess what I'm saying is it seems to me like we're on the edge here, and yeah. So this increase seems like totally reasonable and not an overshoot of a goal to get people compensated so that we can retain staff who are otherwise going to go, I gotta move on, because I gotta get a job. I got a job, not a real job, but a job that pays me something that allows me to live independently or contribute as much as my spouse, to my family or whatever. Okay. Do you have another question? No, I'll save on my handphone for when we're away. Thank you, Madam Chair. Talk to us about the negotiating and they and this. Can you help me and maybe the rest of us better understand the negotiating process and the players? Like is the teacher, it's hard to envision, is a teacher sitting there and it's a bunch of bargaining unit peoples over there too, and then there's you guys on the other side, yeah, so again, we just negotiated last year, the two contracts. All seven actually. All seven, I only did two of them, but I did the two teacher ones. So now it's on Zoom, but in the past used to be in person like this, the teachers bring between four or five, four to seven, I would say members of their negotiating team. On our side, it's our lawyer, typically, we don't always have the lawyer, but typically our outside lawyer, Dr. Hohman, our HR director, Mr. Mason, myself, and sometimes a principal or somebody else, if there's an issue that's being negotiated that's at the building level. And so those are sort of the two teams. So two school committee members, yeah. And because officially it's a contract between the school committee and the union. So we directly negotiate. Sometimes we've done interest-based bargaining, which is where I've not done this personally. I think you did interest-based bargaining, where you start in advance with outlining. You do some training beforehand, talking about methods and talking and trying to identify what each side's interests are and then you kind of try and put it across. But the thing is at the bottom, at the end of all of this, it comes down to money. And so we've always been stuck with a much smaller pot of money. So we can't get much, we do the best we can to address interest, but we can't necessarily make that much progress on the things we want because we have nothing to give in return. In the more traditional way, it's just, these are the things we want, these are the things union wants, basically a list of demands on each side. We go through it, we talk about them, we explain why we want things, they want certain things, they explain why they want certain things. We bargain, we counter propose, this occurs over multiple meetings, we split up where we can talk on each side, talk amongst ourselves, breakouts. And this goes on for probably five to 10 sessions, depending on the level of issues there are. Fortunately, over the past few years, we've built a very collaborative relationship with our union. It had in the past, probably 10 years ago is very different. But through the prior superintendent and Dr. Holman, it's a much more collaborative relationship, she meets with the union head every week. So a lot of sort of the noise you have in other districts about dissatisfaction or disagreement or uncomfortableness on the part of the union members is already addressed when we go into negotiations. So we're not already at odds over personalities or bigger conflict. It's more about what we want you to give 10 more minutes a day and they say, well, that's gonna cost you a million dollars, things like that. So when you say they, so this comes across to me a little bit like... Oh, I forgot, I forgot. They bring a negotiator from the math teachers association with them. Who is the, so who is the... The union. The union. Oh, I see. The union leadership, the union appoints a negotiating team. It's usually the union president, union vice presidents, and there's a couple of their building representatives. What's the name of the union? The Allington Education Association. These are all teachers in our schools, right? They're all teachers who teach our kids. No, all I'm saying is just want to know the name of the union. And so the MTA is also involved with this too. So it sort of sounds a little bit like a courtroom thing where the people don't say anything, the attorney's do. So the teacher doesn't have any, the teachers are saying they're listening to... No, no, they think it's more effective if they present and it's often more, it's more effective if the teacher presents the requirements. So the negotiator is often there to say, well, Wellesley gave 12 weeks of parental leave. All these other towns gave 12 weeks of parental leaves. Why can't Arlington give 12 weeks of parental leave? Where the teachers are more like we feel dishonored and why can't our male members get the same amount of parental leave. They're sharing the more personal stories. Again, trying to make an impact on us because we're negotiating. We want to be reasonable. We want to reach an agreement. We want to figure out what can we give to reach an agreement? It's a negotiation. It's like any other business negotiation except it's a little bit more unusual because it's such a large group of people. Oh, indeed, indeed. And also the contract is actually with the names on the contract or... The Arlington School Committee in here. The Arlington School Committee and the Arlington Education Association. For teachers in Paris. Now we have other bargaining units. We bargain with the bus drivers. We bargain with the cafeteria administrators, which would be the Arlington Administrators Association AAA. And it's all the same paradigm, but they're not MTA affiliated in their story. No, I was... Yeah. Thank you, Paul. I'm just asking you more about the teachers and their... But it's complicated. We've got about eight units we negotiate with and the town looks at what we're doing too. So oftentimes the townside employees will be looking at our negotiations and comparing us to what the cops are doing with the firefighters. Yeah, sure, sure. But it is a team process, okay? So the teacher has involvement, but the negotiator would probably prefer that the teacher doesn't say anything. No, no, no, no, no. It ends up being... You know you've been there? Yeah, of course it happens. It ends up being a big room just like this. And we sit and talk pretty much just like we're doing here. Wow. And someone will say something and then someone will throw me in. And this is for every single teacher. No, no, the union represents them, right? So there's 500 teachers... There's 500 teachers in the union. Not all of them are active, but they're all members. They're all officially members of the union. They elect a leadership team. And the leadership team is the one to negotiate with us. So they're representatives, not all 500 teachers, but they're representatives. So let's say the teacher gets a great job performance review. Yes. What happens? I mean, because the union... The contract, under the contract, there's no performance bonuses. There's no merit bonuses. None of that is part of the contract. Thank you. Thank you. I did have a question. One more question about the cafeteria thing. I just was confused about this. I don't... I went to school a long time ago. I didn't go home for lunch. The cafeterias, it sounded like I'm paraphrasing. It sounded like the cafeterias weren't built for all the students to eat there. Is that kind of the correct paraphrase? I think it's more... Yeah, I mean, some of the schools that are really old that were only renovated and not rebuilt, like the Hardy, the cafeteria is small and it was small originally because of that. At some of the newer schools, like the Thompson, it's a brand new school with a cafeteria. But then we added on to it and we didn't make the cafeteria bigger. So it's a variety of those. It's a combination of those issues. Maybe if you build that they'd come type of thing, it was bigger they'd actually eat there or something. No, I mean, it's partly because they're so small. I can only do one grade at a time. So lunches start at like 10, 30 at some schools sometimes earlier because each grade goes at a time. They only get 20 minutes because each grade can only one grade go at a time. So... Thank you. I was totally unaware of that. Thank you. Well, I got a bunch of questions. So first one, behavioral models in Wolburn and then you've got the percentages going out. Were those the percentages settled after the strike? Yes. A couple of questions that I'd like to get information I don't have to answer now, but if you could by next week, in evaluating or comparing us to the 12 other communities, at least in the past, we've found that even though salaries are less, the health insurance benefits were better. And so what I'd like, I assume that when the manager did his 12 study, he compared health insurance, which obviously is a major factor with the other 12 towns. So I'd like to get that if I could. And the second thing is when in your new job as chair, the full-time equivalent after five years, that could be a big deal. Every new employee could cost 10, 15, $20,000 in health insurance. If they're not in the teacher's pension union, they're gonna be in our pension system. So just to get a better idea how much this will cost the townside in the health insurance and pensions, if you could get that information, I would really appreciate it. My basic question and my basic fear is down the road, you've all seen the five-year plans, there's big gaps, there's big deficits. And while the last one override included some new programs, generally we've done the overrides to prevent reductions in services. Now, and the fear is that if we use up all our chips in this three years, four years down the line when we need big money to prevent cuts, it might not happen. My question for you is in this last year, and I don't have the specific page in front of me, but through about $1.1 to $1.3 million in reductions in adjustments. And another 1.5, something like that, monies that were left over, in other words, you've got the $4.5 million of new money. So you were able to cobble together $2.8 million for new programs. $2.8 million, we cover priority one, priority three and priority four, almost total. In addition to that, your school enrollment is gonna start tailing off. We're an anomaly, everybody else's, well, everybody outside of 128 or 495 is going down. Can't you fit this program slower over a longer period of time using the funds that are already in the five-year plan? And we're increasing the school budget by 5.3% this year is projected over four to 5% increases going forward. Could that be an alternative plan rather than going to the taxpayers for another $7 million? So this is more of a political question, so I will start by answering it. Well, it's a financial question. Yeah, you can have certain things you want. Can you spread them out over a longer period of time? Well, certainly, yeah. Certainly, any additions can be spread over a longer period of time. They can be reduced, they can be prioritized. We already did prioritize them. We already did reduce them. Of course, they could be, but they're gonna have a slower impact, right? So we built a strategic plan that tries to get stuff done in five years. If the funding is slowed down, it won't happen over five years. It'll take seven years or eight years to get there or maybe we'll never get there. The long range plan already adjusts for enrollment. There's a $400,000 decrease in FY28 because our enrollment is projected to go down. So if you're saying, I mean, we are, so to some extent we're already using that money, that savings is going back to the taxpayers but we still need more money in that year, right? So if you're saying, let's not give that money back and use that instead, I mean, that's kind of already built into the plan and we're just subtracting it one place and adding it in another place. So just to add on to what Lynn said, I think part of the reason that we're pushing to try and get this going now is also because our students are still suffering from the effects of COVID and the disrupted education that they had during that time and they will continue to over the next couple of years. We're doing our best to bring them up but and that's part of why we've added like the coaches and things like that along the way but we need to continue these efforts and put them in place now. Another thing is the negotiation, being able to hire teachers and retain teachers, that's a problem now, we can push it off but that means we just keep the problem and we have continued problems either in changing our, we won't be able to achieve any of the negotiating goals that we mentioned before because we won't have any compensation to basically pay for them and we won't be able to increase salaries to be able to attract or retain staff. So it, yes, it's possible to reduce or to retain the one other thing I'd say about the enrollment is one thing to keep in mind is that although our enrollment will be going down if the state house continues as they have in the past or chapter 70 is going to hit a point, hit a peak and it's gonna stay there with, well, and maybe go up a little bit with whole harmless than the, just the regulations. So even though our costs are going down or chapter 70 is gonna be coming in at the same rate and that happened in the year that we experienced a great decrease in our enrollment a couple of years ago and chapter 70 just stuck. So we actually brought in kind of more money per student than we normally do. So that took a lot of time. I have the same question as you did about the efficiencies too because this is something that Dr. Holman and Mr. Mason have been very diligent about for both the FY23 and the FY24 budget bringing to budget subcommittee this like a list of efficiencies. And boy, did we sit there saying, this is great. We're gonna be able to take this and then turn it into the things that we actually really wanna do. And I asked them, I said, because the first year it was very exciting and they came back with another number that we were able to reallocate. And then I said, gosh, but are you gonna keep being able to pull these buddies out of a hat? Are you gonna keep finding this level of efficiency? You agree or can we hope for that? And the answer is really no. At some point you found the efficiencies in your staffing models that you're going to find. And I think they've been very aggressive at doing that both into FY23 and into FY24, but at some point there's only so many more efficiencies you can eke out. All right, but you still have about a million five if I remember correctly, within the current plan of money that you could use for new programs. And if that compensation is a priority, use it for that. And so, thank you. As we increase salaries, we also decrease the amount of the budget that is able to be spent on programming. We want a higher percentage of our budget. Because competitive compensation is a huge priority I want a bigger percentage of our budget to maintain our salaries. And what that means is that programming is what's left of that budget. We have staff, we have stuff. The stuff is the programming. Our ability to fund that programming is compromised if a larger percentage is used on salaries. And in the out years, the salaries are what cost us and take up a bigger bolus of what is remaining in our budget to do any additions or expansions to program, which is why you see both represented in this number. Thank you. Charlie. Thank you, Madam Chair. I have three questions. Let me start with a somewhat rhetorical and it's a little bit reflective of what now and John asked in different ways. But fundamentally, in the five year plan before the ask, school budget is growing at 5% a year. Maybe a little bit less, maybe a little more. 3.5% for the general education and 6.5% for special ed. And whether or not those at the right splits comes out to 4.5% a year. The numbers up there for your salary increases are two to 2.5%. I don't understand why there has to be a big ask for salary increases when the growth, the budget is 75% salaries. And so why if we're growing at that rate, do we need to have a big ask for salary increases because you've got margins built into the growth of the budget? So I've asked this question myself also and it's the step in lane changes, right? So because our staff is, about half of our staff is at the top step, half is not. So that's a lot of people who are still moving on a step each year. Each step is about 3%, I think. So overall, the step in lane changes cost about additional 2%. So our salary increases mandated by the contract if it was a 2% overall raise, it would be 2% plus 2%. So 4% overall, right? So this year with a 3% raise, our salary increases without any change in FDE goes up by 5% per salary cost. So then we're talking about raising salaries beyond that? It may, so it may require a 3.5% raise. It may require a 3% raise. It may require a 4% raise to boost people up and then back to 2%, not sure, but yes. So a 5%, 6% total cost of salaries is what we're looking at. So I mean, and I have to finally comment is where I come from, if you're against that sort of a wall, you have to decrease the number of people. I mean, that's sort of basic economics. So a second question has to do with the driving forces behind the request for salary increases. When the, and by the way, I shouldn't preface my comment. I wanna congratulate you on the presentation of the strategic plan. I think it was very succinct and very clear and appreciate the effort that went into it. In the prior presentation of the school department to the finance committee, Dr. Holman was talking about turnover and made reference to a certain cohort of younger teachers who eventually are gonna leave the district regardless of what happens. In other words, they get married, they have children there, family there, the wife or the husband is working somewhere else and they're gonna leave because they've taken this job more or less at an entry level job. And they're moving because they wanna live in a bigger house with more acreage or something like that. And they're gonna move further away and then try to get a job in the Sudbury school district, for example. So are we trying to fight an inevitable tide here with this concept of our proposed increases because those changes are gonna happen anyway? I think you're asking a retention question. We have had some more turnover than necessarily expected in somewhat recent years of teachers who live outside of Arlington because they would love to live in Arlington. They would love to live closer to Arlington but they can't because they can't afford to live in Arlington. And so they live further out and they commute in and so our retention struggles because they choose to take a job somewhere else. I would argue that, yes, we are to some extent trying to fight that a little bit by making it more feasible, more possible if not to live in Arlington, for them to live in a nearby community. What happens when they're interested in living in a nearby community often is that we'll have a different kind of retention problem because they live in a nearby community, they have to pay to live in that nearby community. And so they will take a job at a higher paying neighboring community in order to sustain that. So we have kind of two parallel retention problems where we lose people to neighboring communities who live close in and we lose people to further away communities who live further away because that's where they can afford to live. Thank you. So on the subject of retention, like Lynn, I've done some closing about the town manager 12 data as well. And the DESC publishes database of retention for superintendents, principals, and teachers across all the districts. So I looked at the town manager 12 group and I computed, I think it was, oh, it says here, 2017 to 2021. So which is the latest, 2021 is the latest data that they had in the database. So Arlington's retention rate was the second highest right behind Needham, it was 89.4%. Needham was 90.3%. And the average salary in Needham was $94,000 and the average salary in Arlington was $77,000. This is, I don't know, this is from the state. I mean, they, what's recorded, I don't know what goes into all of that. Interestingly, the town with the lowest retention rate was Brookline and they went to town with the highest salary, $99,000. And when I did some graphing here, I found that the correlation between salary and retention rate was somewhere around 0.25 or 0.3, which is not a very strong correlation. I hesitate to say that because Kierce is the statistical expert around here. She'll jump all over me, but this is just a layman's approach. So I'm troubled to hear discussion of the retention as a reason for jumping at these higher increases. Yeah, so do we go first? Do we go first? And then we start first. So did you look at that data? No, I didn't. I could speak to some of it. I did look at that data also. I didn't look at town at age of 12, but I chose random communities. So that is driven large, not largely, but a big factor in that data is the higher ones, right? Because we've added so much staff, our retirement level is much lower than other communities that haven't added staff. So the percentage of our staff that is retiring is extremely low compared to other communities. And that affects, that's why you're retaining them because they're not ready to retire yet. So if there was a measure that adjusted for retirements, if it included retention without retirements factored in, then we could have a look as to whether, you know, we are really losing people at our higher rate or not. We only have anecdotal evidence, right? We have anecdotal evidence that people tell us when they're leaving that they've taken this other job in Lexington because they're paid higher, or they've taken another job in Acton-Boxborough because they've paid higher and was closer to their house, right? And we only have anecdotal evidence. And our rationale for this is not solely on retention, but it's also about building the pride of our teaching staff, maintaining good relationships and getting contract negotiations, getting things in contract negotiations that we need. It's also recruitment. But you don't know anything, excuse me, Dr. Bowman, but you don't know anything about the retirement pattern in the other 12 towns. So that's entirely a supposition on your point. Well, we do know that we've hired a lot more than the other towns because of our enrollment increase. We've hired a lot more teachers. We're all 50 positions that we just talked about. That also affects why our teacher salary average is low because on the state data, we've talked about this before, our cohort is younger. Kirsten, did you have anything to add? I was just, yeah, he just stole my thing, just that I have. Well, actually I have something that I wrote up where I can take the same, I mean, I think I'll just send, Christine, I'll send it to you. It talks about how the average teacher salary is really affected by the mix and depending on how you do mixes, it can tell you totally different things. So I'll send it, you can decide if it's worth forwarding to the rest. Thank you. Can I add too that, this is a really great question, Mr. Posca, thank you. There is an effort because as Mr. Cardin said, we have semantic total evidence so I'm gonna give you two in just a second. But also for us to improve and refine our tracking practices and our data practices around recruitment and retention so that we can have a really clear picture of what these trends are because right now the trends we know of are in exit interviews and in what candidates tell us when they don't take a job. So two examples on that second front. We are currently in the process of doing a lot of hiring for next year to fill vacancies. I am in the middle of a hiring search where I am very likely about to lose a candidate for a really important position in the role to Cambridge. I absolutely cannot compete with the contract that they are about to be offered. I'm recruiting on relationships and good faith which is really probably not gonna work, but I'm hopeful. And in another situation, we had a teaching position for special education. These were just today. Teaching for special education, we tell our educators, our hiring managers to please try if you hire somebody in with a lot of experience at the top step, top lane to then go hire somebody who's like not a lot of experience gonna come in towards the bottom of the pay scale to help us balance the ins and outs because that's how we budget. We had two candidates, one towards the top of the pay scale, one that had a little bit less experience but had an offer from a neighboring community that was going to provide a hiring bonus and a higher salary. And so I was asked, will you green light this hire? It was in special education. One of the areas where we so badly need high quality candidates and they're so hard to find. And so yeah, I green lighted it. But now we're gonna have to budget for some efficiencies and other hires and other places because that happened. And those two just happened in the last couple of days. So it's recruitment or retention but it's also happening in recruitment. And we want to more granularly track what's happening in recruitment because that's harder data to capture. It doesn't get captured in actuals that get reported to the state. But we see it happen during the search process which impacts the quality of candidates that we actually end up hiring which has an impact on student learning and impact on student experience. Well, I have to say I congratulate you on your green light management decision. That's the right thing to do. And secondly, it doesn't matter what raises you give you can't compete with Cambridge. You know, the school committee members there get $25,000 or $50,000 a year. I'm surprised our school committee members don't want to move to Cambridge and get themselves like that. So yeah, that's something that we just have to live with. My third question really goes back to the prior override ads in 2019. I think it was in 2008 and 2019. And a big rationale for that increase that incremental amount that the school department requested was to close the achievement gap. I'd like to know what the school department has done to measure the efficiency of the spending that we undertook then, you know, what steps were taken, how was it spent and was it successful or to what degree was it successful? And are we gonna have a way of measuring this current ask against some sort of hard metrics? But let's deal with the last one first. Yes, you're on me. We can start. Are you gonna start? Well, I was just gonna say, I think this stuff all basically got run over by the truck that was coming from the truck. And that has muddyed the waters so much that we don't exactly have a way of teaching out what happened. I mean, what would it tell, we just... What we did, we must have hired people, right? They must have hired staff, we spent that money. So do we have to spend the money again? So yeah, so I mean, the investments we made will also help towards the focal groups that she's talking about. So we have added more interventionists, we have added more special educators, we have added more EL teachers and we're beginning to see some... It's hard again to tease that out of the COVID impact. But those investments will help pay off, but whether we can't say we've delivered yet and next year if we see improvement, can we say that was for the old investment or the new investments are combined? I don't know. But we will be tracking it more granularly going forward, particularly we're adding a data manager that will help us with that. Do you want that? And do you think, we never asked you to evaluate the impact of the investments because again, they're mostly overshadowed by the tsunami that was COVID. So this year's budget FY23 is the first... It's like the first budget that I built and implemented the one we're in now. It cat in mind what we thought we were gonna come through in the strategic plan because we had a sense of what was coming. I'm eager to see next year's accountability numbers. We don't have closing gaps right now. What you wanna see in a closing gap is you wanna see not stable enrollment for the non-focal group, but improving enrollment or enrollment achievement. It's time. I'm tired. And you wanna see for the focal group. So let's say this is students who do not have IEPs. This is students who do have IEPs. Right now we're like this. You wanna see this, right? This group's accelerating faster. This group is also improving. All kids are improving. We have the mechanisms now. Those graphs that I just described they're in the strategic plan if you go and look at it. And you can see where we're at with that. You can see where COVID is. You can see where it hits and where the gap increases because we knew COVID was only going to exacerbate equity issues. Access to stable housing, food, like the impacts of that are still being felt by our students and families. We are very hopeful to start seeing those bottom lines turn a corner as we get outcomes from next school year. As a result of changes we made in this, the implementation of this year's budget and the implementation of a couple of adjustments to programming including a 10 minute addition to the school day, which was hours of time added to the school day. And chronic absenteeism is worse than it's ever been after the pandemic. Mental health issues with kids are worse than they've ever been after the pandemic. We've added social workers, counseling support and additional resources because there aren't enough counselors and social workers in the world right now. And we know that those will continue to have an impact on academic achievement, but we are monitoring that very granularly now and there was not previously a mechanism for monitoring that very closely. I mean, there are the data reports that we get but they're not very visually easy to parse. And we want educators to be able to monitor this themselves so that they can make a small change and notice whether or not it did what they expected it to which is what our school improvement plans do. That's something that we pay a lot of close attention to now so that we know if a school was successful and can hold accountable the people at a school for whether or not they've improved outcomes relative for a focal group or a group of focal groups. So those are some of the adjustments in practice that we're doing so that we can have a really small scale sense of whether or not we're doing exactly what you're talking about which is having an impact on outcomes not just doing a bunch of stuff. Have you examined what was done before? Who was hired and why? Well, the last one million was in your FY23 budget. So out of that 2.8 million, it was delayed. The last one million is this year being put into effect this year. Is that the question? Well, my question is of the 2.8 million that was major portion of that program was to close the achievement gap. And I'm just wondering what did we do to close the achievement gap and how does that fit into the envelope of this plan? That's really the question. One thing I can, these folks might know more about what was done. I did a lot of assessing of what was done when I came on board. And a lot of the things that were promised in the override three years ago have been implemented. We've done an expansion of coaching. That expansion of coaching support of librarians, we've expanded librarians significantly over the last couple of years, which were all part of the previous long range plan. The impact of coaching support in particular as an example could only be finally felt this school year because this was a normal school year, sort of. It was closer to normal than we've had. The investment that Mr. Carton talked about earlier where we added specialists to add in planning, collaborative planning time for teachers, that got completely blown up by the pandemic year. That didn't happen, those planning blocks. Those additional staff were used to cover and supervise classrooms. So that year, that investment had no impact on student achievement because the resultant implementation of programming didn't happen. The year after that was my first year. You were very taken over by COVID that year as well. That was the year that Omicron hit and Delta hit. We had those mechanisms in place, but we were trying to restart them for much of that year. So yes, I've gone back and looked quite a lot at a lot of the adjustments that were made shortly before I came on, the adjustments that were made as a result of the last override. And there are adjustments that will have an impact on student achievement, and that we're gonna hopefully start to see very soon as we emerge from the pandemic. Thank you. Thank you very much. Dave? Yes, if I could. I wanna go back to Grant's question about the negotiations. Can you tell me how many people are in a room when you start negotiations? Total? Approximately. It depends on the unit. It depends on the unit, but with a major teacher unit. Yeah, about 12, between 10 and 15. Do you find that cumbersome? I mean, that's a lot of people who negotiate a contract. So usually, I mean, usually the union president is the chief spokesperson, and then they will delegate specific people to speak on specific issues. So for example, in the last agreement, we're negotiating an issue about the preschool. So somebody from the negotiating team who taught at the preschool presented that issue. So the people that speak the most are our lawyer and their negotiator, and second would be the superintendent and the union head, and the rest of us don't talk very much. As some people know, I was, I sued on the school court for a year. And to turn that to that time, the head of the teachers union was never involved in negotiations. They would select a negotiating team, right, usually about four people. 99% of the time, it was secondary teachers. Never elementary teachers at all. But as far as negotiating the team, yes, they had a representative from the MTA one. There were no lawyers in the room. We each had lawyers on call. And basically the negotiating team was made up of the superintendent, one member of the school committee, and having the business officer on call if we needed, and the four plus the MTA, and that's how we negotiated contracts. Having a room full of people when it gets down to the new degree of that negotiating, it's two people, one side, the other side agree. And I've seen that done both on the school side and when I negotiated contracts as representing the police officers, you're at the town. By the way, that year, we negotiated an 8% period. Thank you. You didn't have to ask for which side of the he was on. Sorry. A negotiating tactic that's been shared in all those communities where you saw strike next to them and that is growing and has happened in Belmont and has happened in other neighboring communities, that the MTA is sharing with their union leads is, if you think 12 is a big group, is to have silent observers, sometimes not so silent observers, present at negotiations, and it's an intimidation tactic. So what will happen is their administrative side will be on one side, the union side will sit on the other side of the table or whatever, and they will line the room with folks to non-verbally respond to just about everything that happens on the other side. Now, our union does not believe in these tactics and we're very grateful for that, but what's happening in negotiating rooms across the state now and I imagine across the country is that they're full of people, not from the administration side often, usually from the teacher's union in the form of these sort of silent observers. So it's all, it's just tactics that they're using now. I'm glad I was on the screen coming in yesterday. All right, Jennifer. Well, just one statement that the MTA, current MTA leadership is certainly not helpful. But I wanted to ask you a question about the implementation teams. So exactly, who are they, where are they, are they at a school level? Do they consist of people who are originally on a strategic plan? Are they new people? What kind of authority do they have? That kind of stuff. And I know this is a future. Yeah, I'll try to be succinct about how we're designing this. This is like in design right now. So we're going to have working groups for combinations of initiatives because 12 working groups is just, it's a lot. So we've put strategically in priorities two, three and four specifically, some of them together because they're aligned with one another. And there will be a total of eight working groups. Those eight work, priority one, all three have their own one because priority one is the center of the plan. And so those working groups will be led by members of the administration who not by members of the central office administration but by leaders who are interested in more leadership. So it's at least in part sort of a shared leadership retention and growth strategy. So every administrator in the system has to opt into a working group. And then the working group will take a look and say who else needs to be at this table? So for example, for meals, the leader of our food services program needs to be at the table. A kid might need to be at the table. So they're the ones who eat these meals. For things like the Welcome Center, we wanna make sure that we have families at that table. For the learning experience for students, we're gonna need some students at that table. We're gonna need teachers at that table. So the working groups will start with every administrator in the system which is about 40-ish people, 40 to 50 people will opt into a working group. They will go deep in learning about what they need to learn to implement and actually trying implementation right out of the gate. Like, let's go try something. Let's see how it works. We know our outcome for this year is this. We need to get to there. Let's do little tests. And then once we find something that's working, let's grow it. Let's build a recommendation plan to grow it. And then we have mechanisms, sort of engines that are already running that the AEF has funded over the past couple of years like the school improvement plans and the ILTs. That's what's something we have funded. We have instructional leadership teams at each school. These are cross rule teams and that's your dissemination mechanism. So once a working group says, this is what works in multi-tiered systems of support, we've tested it here with a pilot. We had this outcome. They go to the school's ILTs and say, figure out what this looks like at your school and go and implement it at your school. So that's what takes the sort of big work of the plan down into the classrooms. Do they come up with metrics as well to what counts as success or do they, is that coming from somewhere else? In the plan are metrics that say, if this initiative is this strand, no, it's successful, here's the metric. Now, they're gonna find other metrics. They're gonna say, this data is inadequate to tell us what this impact is, but the plan has a five year goal and one year increments that they're expected to hit. And if we don't hit that, then we need to adjust what the working group is up to. That working group's overseen by members of the central office team. So, and then just to comment, one of the things that I've always been really impressed by the Antimoga schools is that there's very much pilot to grant that there really is a kind of testing out of new proposals before they get implemented. And so that brings me to the question. I'm wondering how much of the new strategic plan is based on things that was tested earlier that are seen successful, we can have money for. A lot of them probably will be based in that. So like successes or challenges in co-teaching are going to inform what the MTSS group talks about. Successes or challenges in pushing intervention, in placing students in a particular way. So place them where you sort of concentrate the support or do you place them where you spread everybody out. Testing, we've tested ideas about that but we haven't always linked it to outcomes. So the goal of the working group is to take some of the stuff we've done or things we think will work and either test the things we've done against the outcomes that we think should be a result of that or try something new and test the outcome as a result of that action step. But we have examples of places where gaps are closing. For example, as a result of some of the changes we've made in early literacy. So we should do what we did in those schools where those gaps closed at all the schools. And that's what the working groups will suggest and then it will implement through the attitudes. Topra. Thank you Madam Chair, some numbers questions. So how many kids get breakfast? I can't tell you an exact number. We only have at most of this. So I'm gonna talk elementary schools. Most of the elementary schools we only have a small handful of kids who access breakfast. However, we tried out some before school care programming at the schools this past year, particularly at Pierce and at Thompson. The breakfast numbers at those two schools more than tripled as a result of that programming. And so what we're gonna try for future years is being more consistent about both the marketing and availability of that care program and time at all of the schools. So that we're opening at 730 for breakfast and families if they want to drop off I need to wear between 730 and eight know that their kid will go to breakfast and have that for supervision. So we're, it's growing particularly at Thompson and Pierce and we're hoping that that can happen at all the schools. And what about after school? I don't know that's been. That's always, that's been a challenge. Sure it's a plan. We have increased access to it over the past two years. We need to look at the program that we run in the schools to ascertain why that program is not enrolling students at the same rate as some of our vendor partners are enrolling people. Whether that's because of pay rates being different for the staff. So them struggling more with recruitment that's part of the assessment that needs to happen as a result of the priority for initiative around aftercare. So while we're increasing it, we're not meeting the demand. There's a significant gap between the demand and the enrollment. So how much can you accommodate right now just to terms of it? Around a hundred in the programs we run we're around 130 to a hundred. You just reported on this. Do you have any advice? Yeah, it was, it rained between a hundred and two hundred and forty at each site. Where we run the programs and some of our vendor run programs they're able to accommodate a hundred up to a hundred and seventy. So we know that the schools can hold between a hundred and sixty, a hundred and seventy kids at the end of the school day. We need to be able to staff that many kids and space we can figure out. So now the project 50% of the students and this is just the elementary. Yes, and the demand and wait list grows every year. So we're seeing, we're only seeing those, the demand increase and the capacity is trying to keep up but it's not been able to keep up. And the afterschool is elementary. Yes. Yeah, that's all elementary. We have some programming at Gibbs as well but it's not as high demand. And then I think I heard this right. So the number of TAs and SPPs is 199. That's a bunch of FTEs. Okay. We've actually, we're able to fill this year is about a hundred and sixty eight. But that would be 20% of the full staff. And then the whole question of increases in the lanes and out of lanes. So if 50% are in the lanes or in the steps then 50% are not. They're more senior. They've aged out of that. They've gotten all the training they're going to get. I hope they haven't gotten all the training. They're not going to get hours yet. They're not going to get hours yet. They can't go any further. They can't go any further. That's my problem. Obviously they should be getting more training. So inflation is more than 3% right now. So half of your staff is going to be looking at that in terms of what these contracts. All right. Thank you. Any more questions? Annie, just a couple more. So how are we doing on elementary question sites? Are we moving in contact in all questions? Are we on average? So our goal is to stay between 20 and 25. The class average, I do report for the school committee every time we meet that shows where we're at with averages. Then when we hit about mid-year, I start to project the next year's sections. And we make little adjustments based on the class average sizes. We budgeted for even class sections for next year at the elementary level. And they're even at the moment. So that leveling off that we're seeing is working pretty well with reasonable costs. I just calculated this today because as I said in response to John's question, the elementary sections have not changed. But our elementary enrollment because of COVID went down. So from 2020, our average class size at the elementary level went down from 21.9 to 20.2. There are some classes that are much larger. There are a couple that are 25. I don't think we have any over 25 at the moment. No averages over 25. 25 is still the contractual limit. There's no contractual limit. There's a suggestion, but it's not a. So I want to follow up on Al's question about the stretching out of the plan and so on and so forth. But I want to ask it from a different perspective. So let's say we put this question in from the voters and they turn us down. And I don't mean the whole override, but let's say we have split question or we ask it into layers and the school asks are treated separately or whatever and you get turned down. Then you have to do that stretching program. So obviously you thought about it and you probably have a plan for what your priorities are. So my question is, what do we know about the kids who are on the losing end of the achievement gaps now about how they do post-secondary? Do we have any tracking of that data? And we know what happens to those students. We have data on that, but I have not analyzed reasons. So I would want to go dig into that before I try to answer. I would love to know what we know about that because my concern with the idea of stretching is that's great for our budget and it's great for the taxpayers, but it's not so good for the kids on the losing end of the gaps. So is there in your mind a way to prioritize the gap closing regardless of the success or failure of an increase in the school budget? Basically, can we close these gaps without an increase in the school budget? Well, when I take what would we have to give up, can we do it in order to do that? Without, let's just assume we can't make the teachers, we can't give you the bonus of money for the salaries because we either don't ask them or we have to take a second bite or whatever. Unless we didn't get that, but we still have those gaps to close. Are the two that tightly linked that you can't do it without or? I think so, yes. I think they're that tightly linked that we can't do it without. The strategy that I believe would be most prudent in the event that we didn't have the dollars to do the programming and staffing adjustments would be to focus on the impact of competitive compensation on our teaching force and our ability to have flexibility in our contract terms and appropriate time for teachers to have professional development. So, and our ability to recruit a diverse workforce. There's a reason most of the dollars are in that particular bucket. So the strategy would be to really take a deep look at what it would take for us to continue increasing the percent of the budget we spend on salaries to continue improving the quality and diversity of our staffing while allowing a lot of the other things that we simply can't fund to not happen. So would that include things like increase in class sizes or reducing offerings at the secondary level or? Yeah, so it would definitely equate to increase class sizes, reduced offerings at the secondary level because the quality of the teacher in front of the kid is this primary thing that matters for closing achievement gaps and for students achievement. So if what it takes for us to be able to do that to put high quality educators in front of teachers and require of them what we want and need to require of them in order for kids to get the outcomes that they need is to reduce the programming, reduce the availability of interventions in order to get the best teacher in front of the kid on day one, then that's what you prioritize. Okay, so I have one more question. It's short and totally irrelevant, but have you thought about taking your slideshow on the road and taking it into students in the classrooms? You think it's a super example of how you have to think about this kind of thing and this kind of changemaking that I think we still have some eighth graders who would really love that. I got to talk to some eighth graders the other day about a really cool question they had for their civics project that got into some systems thinking conversation. It was a lot of fun. And we have talked to the kids about what these values mean in schools and they've given us some really good advice and we've captured that on video. So that's gonna be a learning tool for our administrators when we enter into next year. It's gonna be a material that we're going to share publicly about what this plan means for our kids and to our kids in terms of what they need to see in their schools and what it would look like for us as adults to do a better job for them. Great. Okay. So I have one more question. So as you pointed out some of the things not for the big dollar amounts are things that would normally be funded or could be funded in a capital plan. Are we offering an assumption that we are going to the capital plan committee with sort of a very similar set of acts as we've always done so that any addition it doesn't make sense to go there. And knowing that the capital plan is very, very constrained. More constrained than people would have liked. Is that sort of the assumption that sort of whatever we've done in the past sort of continue. School committee is very invested in that administration bringing our asks to the capital plan. Yeah, it's really important. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're not increasing it because it's all, it's going into here. Right, okay. Any other questions from any commenters? So I think there are a couple of things that people have asked for and Chrissy is that you're going to get something. You can get that information in the next few days, that would be great. And before you break up, do you have anything else, Dr. Holman, Mr. Mason, school committee members, anything you want to add? Say at the floor if you want. Thank you very much for your time. Yeah, great question. Thank you. Thank you so much. We know it's hard coming and sitting in here again. Mr. Mason and I are more than happy to dig in if there are, you know, have you looked at this? Like what, to the extent we have the capacity to do a little bit of data crunching around numbers that you're looking at, but help me contextualize it. We're more than happy to do that. Thank you very much. Thank you for that. Thank you for your presentation and answering all our questions very personally. And we may disagree on budgets, but I don't think anyone doubts that our kids are in good hands with you all. So thank you for all the work you've done. We appreciate it. I'll make one comment. Sure. That was the group of kids that came in and made a presentation to this committee. I'm offended, I'm offended, I'm offended. You should be proud. Very proud of them. Yeah. Very proud of them. Very, very proud of them. So, we will meet those, see what the select board does, and we'll both continue to support and not feel appropriate. See, everyone? Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Second. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.