 Yep. Thanks everyone. Opening the March 6 meeting of the Montpelier Board of School Directors have a busy night. Is everyone not sure? Yes, it's on our agenda. Give them time, Tina. Give them time. I just said hello. Yeah, so we have a busy agenda. As folks know, we are going to have to revisit our budget. We also are going to have to reorganize. I also want to congratulate if that is the right word. Tim Duggan for joining the board and Mia Moore and Jake Feldman for re-election and Kristen Gettler and Scott. Ellen Scott-Lewin for re-election as well. And Kristen who's just coming in who also was re-elected the board. Thank you for stepping up again and serving. I also want to give a shout out to Tim favorite who ran and we really appreciate people stepping up to serve and Tim favorite might be the winner from last night. But now if we are all quite happy to be here but we do have some tough work ahead of us. We do this being the meeting of a newly formed board. We are going to reorganize that is on our agenda after public comment and the consent agenda. In terms of reorganization, I would be happy to serve as chair again. I've talked to Mia about it. Given that turnover is good, this will probably be both my last term. I have two more years in my term and I'll probably step down after chair after this year. For next year for people who might want to think about a leadership position, obviously Mia would be fantastic but I don't think she's 100% there. It's a year away but start thinking about it but that's kind of where my thought is. It will be 10 years on the board and my seventh year as chair and with the exception of superintendents who should serve much longer than seven years in their role. Seven years is a pretty good run in a leadership position. I think what we're going to do is just because of the budget and also because we have at least one new member, I think I will just give a quick rundown of the committees and what they do and push off actual selection until we have a little more time because we're not going to be doing committee work in the next week and a half. I think we have the luxury of waiting to reform those and that can take some time. I think we want to be thoughtful about it and also I think probably Tim does not have much of an idea right now of where he wants to serve. I do not want to speak for Jill but I know she sent out a message that after very heroically serving as chair of the tech center board she is looking for some relief from that role. Am I correct in saying that you'd be happy to be replaced entirely? I would or if failing that I'd be happy to be the MRPS representative but I've already let everyone on the career center or no, I will not be chair at least so. So if anyone is interested in that, I don't think we have to point tonight or no. I think the 12th, I think we should. So we'll have to do that as well. We are going to have two public comments tonight. I'm adding a second, we're adding a second public comment to the agenda. Just because of the budget vote we're going to have the initial public comment. Then Libby is going to discuss some options for another for a second budget which we have to do quickly. She's going to explain the timeline which is fast and John Odom, thank you for coming. The city clerk is going to help us make sure that we get all of that right. So we'll have a second public comment after that presentation. Yes, and then we will also I think almost certainly have to have a special meeting. I doubt we will make a decision on a second budget tonight. We'll probably have a special meeting sometime in the next seven to 10 days to decide on a budget and put it forward, but I'm hoping that we can at least give Libby some pretty strong guidance about what that second budget should look like by the end of the evening. So with that, why don't we do the first public comment? Again, you will have a second opportunity to have public comment after we have the budget discussion. So if there's anyone who wishes to go up first in this public comment, please do. Could I see if your hands are in the room because I just want us one, two, three, and then could people online do the raise hand function? If you plan to speak, I'm just trying to get a sense of how many people and I don't love to put time limits on, but if we've got a ton, so it's only one. So not going to do any sort of clock thing, but if people could try to keep their comments reasonably short a minute or two, that would be appreciated. And so why don't we start with the room? Whoever wants to come up first, again, please introduce yourself for the audience both in the room and at home. And then, yeah, we're obviously very interested in hearing your thoughts. So whoever wants to come up first, please do. I'm Tina Muncie and I live in Montpelier, and I know your superintendent will have a proposal for you to consider tonight and for the next budget to be voted on. And perhaps she will have cut a position, perhaps she will have cut a program or reorganized it, perhaps she will advise to put off some facility improvement or something that needs to be made. But I'd like to say I've been watching you and listening to you. And I think there's a percentage of the board that now thinks that it would be best fiscally and educationally to bring the students from Roxbury into Montpelier to be educated. And if that's really true, then I'm wondering why you would have the taxpayers spend $1.5 million or whatever it turns out to be to have for a year to have that decision just sort of put off for a year. So I wish, I know you've in the process of establishing a committee to talk about it, but that committee could meet with your superintendent for the next five months and decide the how and the best way to have the students come in. So I'd like to ask you to consider, when you're considering the next budget, consider that as one of the options you might take instead of putting it off, do it next year. So I thank you for even considering it in your considerations. And as always, I thank you for the time you give our children and the careful thought. Thank you. Anyone else? Let's talk to the other hands. All right. Tim favorite from Montpelier. I just wanted to take this public opportunity to congratulate Tim and Jake and me and Scott and Kristen. Yeah, I wish you the best of luck, and this is not going to be an easy road ahead, at least in the short term. Yeah, in terms of the budget, I would, you know, it was clear that it was defeated by a lot of anger and fear and a good chunk of misinformation. And I would just urge you not to overreact to that. There are things you can do like closing Roxbury Villa School that's been mentioned many times, but that is an irreversible decision that has a really huge impact on a lot of people. So I would urge you to find something maybe you can put off facilities or, you know, I don't know, something that could be reversed for a year before we rush to a decision that that is just going to wreck a lot of folks. That's it. Thank you. I'm not going to, John Guifre from Roxbury. I won't go into all I've advocated twice online for making sure that we don't make any rash decisions on this. And unfortunately I'm here to try to set the record straight. A lot of misinformation has been tossed out. I'd call them red herrings. None of it has necessarily been false, but providing false equivalencies without the full knowledge of what went on there is wrong. And you guys need to know it because by my count, there's only four people in this room right now that were here for the merger committee work. Jim's in a position where he can't say much on this. Tina has obviously advocated for this Nancy in the back. I will have to tell you Tina has put out these red herrings. Her posting today is what brought me in here. I didn't intend on being here. I was at soccer practice and I've left to come here and make sure that at this critical time you guys know the full story as to what happened during that merger committee because she was quoted three meetings ago I believe saying we never promised to keep kids there. That's not factually inaccurate. We all read the merger documents I'm sure. It was guaranteed there for four years. After that just like any other school building, you can't guarantee anything indefinitely into the future. Who knows what's going to happen with Main Street Middle School. We can't say in some merger document that we're always going to have kids there. What was very clear during all of our conversations was that closing our school was off the table. And if any of the people in the room wanted to disagree with me, have at it. But that would be false because as a community of Roxbury, we need that building occupied. That is the heart of our community. And however she wants to portray it as well you never know and we're just providing information. She's not providing the full picture. And the full picture is that school was supposed to have kids in it in some capacity indefinitely into the future. And that was the gist of it. We weren't interested in anything else. And I'll say this because no one else in this room can say it. Let's be honest with this. Both communities used each other to help each other out during that merger. I was a vocal proponent against Act 46. I spoke up in the Joint Education Committee against it. I thought it was a terrible idea. It didn't go far enough. It didn't do enough to save the money and create all the hassle. However, once it was passed, it was passed and we got down to work and we'd got something done. And it was one of the most successful mergers that has had some of the fewest hiccups. However, Montpelier benefited from Roxbury joining because they didn't have to join with anyone else. It's made them safe. So everyone in the Montpelier community, you need to understand that. That's likely one of the reasons that they chose to talk to us. And for Roxbury, it was great for us. We benefited from the partnership with Montpelier, the people in our town that support the school are most aligned with the city of Montpelier and the way they support their school. I think this is the first time in a decade that either of our budgets didn't pass. We've traditionally been very supportive in both communities of our school budgets. And so, yes, we used each other to gain benefits. Montpelier was able to protect itself from having to merge with a bigger entity. And Roxbury protected it for himself from being this orphan because our district fell apart. We were in Northfield in Roxbury and it fell apart. We weren't allowed to stay that way. So I'm just here to remind people of the history here because the history is quickly vanishing into the past. And it's important that everyone who's making decisions knows the full history and not just one side of it. And I've kept my mouth shut until I saw that posting today. Because to pose this as let's just come in and talk and save your taxes is the false equivalency. You guys are not going to be able to take $6 million out of your budget. It's just not going to happen. Something's going to change and it's either going to destroy this school district or the law will change. So starting to make cuts like this that this gentleman behind me pointed out are irreversible because we have one person presenting some sort of argument saying, well, you know, never really promised this and we can do that. What I'm asking you guys to do is just keep the big picture in mind and figure out a way where we can honor the commitment that these two communities brought together seven years, six years ago, whatever. I can't remember the actual number because that's important. Honoring the commitments and knowing what those commitments were. There was no talk that, yeah, you know, whatever. It doesn't work out Roxbury. You can get on the bus. You guys are going to be in the very, very, and I've supported you guys and I continue to support you. I'm not, this is nothing to do with you. You have an unbelievably hard task to do here, unbelievably. And it's not fair to you. Now we'll keep reminding you guys and everyone else in the city and both towns. This was brought on by legislature and you guys are in the unenviable position of deciding whether you want to put a kindergartner on a bus for 35 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour depending upon the route because we want to try to quickly save a million and a half dollars if that's actually the number because what do we do next year? Are you going to cut two million out of your budget next year and then another two million? What's this building going to look like? What's the whole district going to look like? I don't know those answers. I'm here just to set the record straight and provide you that context because I think it's really important because you have some amazingly hard decisions to do right now and I don't envy you and I do thank you again for all the work that you do. Thanks. Hi Peter Stirling, from up here I have two kids in the school district. First, thank you all for serving on the school board. I know it's a lot of time and it's a lot of work and it's important work. We have a great school, a lot of us live here in large part because we love our school and we want to see it continue to flourish and continue to be the great school that it is. I'd encourage you. The budget went down and that's obviously very disappointing. I know you all worked really hard on it but as you move forward to consider a new budget remember we have a great staff, we have a great school, a lot of parents, a lot of people in this community like their school, even people without kids in the school see the value of it so please do your best to mitigate those cuts and just in reference to what the person preceding me said, I was on the school board when we did the merger. I wasn't on the committee but I was on the board and I don't ever remember promising that school would never be closed. We had a lot of conversations about keeping it open. We had a lot of conversations that I recall about the eventuality. If the school was to close could it be reused in some way to benefit the district but there was I don't ever recall a conversation where we promised to keep that school open in perpetuity. That's just my recollection so I want to share that and again thank you for all the work you're going to do to help this school continue to be great. That raised my hand initially but I appreciate you allowing me to speak. So I'm David Beatty. I'm a taxpayer in Montpelier. I've seen in the paper listed pressures. Thanks so those are things that you should have been thinking about these past few years as budgets increased and a few years ago I tangentially I remember there was a pressure to consolidate and I think that's what the first person talked about the second person talked about that you under pressure to consolidate or be consolidated. So the law came up you had to react to it you chose Roxbury. So another law came up now that's really exacerbated the cost whether that goes through or not I don't know but I think you've had some time now I'd like to hear what have you thought about up till this time when the law changed again where it became more of a financial picture an impact that that voters reacted negatively to so the budget was voted against. So as you go through these deliberations I'd love to hear you know what things you've been doing right along with those mentioned costs in the paper they were adding pressures and I don't think that reassessment is actually a cost it's a redistribution of your costs but I'd like to hear you know what you've done so far thinking about well what if well what if over these years thank you. Anyone else in the room? Yeah online looks like we had at least one raised hand two let's start with Catherine. Hi everybody can you hear me? Yes okay my name is Catherine Dunley I have been a Montpelier resident since 2015 I have two children currently attending MRPS and one who graduated in 2022. I also work at Montpelier High School as the student attendance specialist and I'm co-chair of the AFSCME union which represents support staff tech staff and custodial staff. More than half of our bargaining unit live in Montpelier but all are part of the MRPS community. We want to continue to be part of that community but these budgetary woes have some contemplating a change in employment. Please when you are making these tough decisions ahead of you keep in mind that there are people behind each of the FTEs you consider roofing. There are important relationships with students caregivers and staff at stake don't sacrifice the backbone of your schools before looking at all the other options and I just want to take this opportunity that I wanted to a few weeks back to give a shout out in the name of solidarity to Alison Wehring a teacher who put in the effort and built an important relationship with my oldest son when he was in her science class at Montpelier High School. Thank you Alison for all that you do every day to connect with students and inspire them to be in this world and make it a better place. Thank you everybody. And Hannah Bryant. Hi there my name is Hannah Bryant. I live in East Roxbury and I have one child at Main Street Middle School and another child at the Roxbury Village School. My background is in community planning so that is my lens today and I just really want to speak to the board but also want to speak to those who are advocating to close the Roxbury Village School. Like others have said before me this is an irreversible decision but I think it's bigger than just what happens with that building. I encourage people to think about the dwindling student population and how that increases the cost per student and what it will look like if Roxbury Village School is closed and there's no opportunity for elementary school students to attend a local school and every student has to ride the bus. My student gets on the bus at 6 30 in the morning to get to Montpelier every morning so for my eight-year-old to get on the bus at 6 30 a bus that is not at our house so we leave home at about 6 10 a.m. that's a huge impact and so I think it's pretty safe to say that families who have any other option will not choose to live in Roxbury and that may really exacerbate our dwindling student population in perpetuity. So I totally understand that we're all freaking out about property tax increases but I do think that this is a short-sighted move to close the school and that maybe we could explore amendments at the state level or other budgetary options but I think that the long-term ramifications of closing Roxbury and making this a really undesirable community for any family to move to are going to have a lot more impacts on the Montpelier taxpayers in the long-term than this one tax increase that we're proposing in the next five years so please consider other options and for the Montpelier folks you know I really hope that you can consider Roxbury as a partner and not an adversary it does feel like you know we're being seen as a ball and chain as opposed to an opportunity there are just a lot of developable land there's a lot of housing in Roxbury there's a lot of opportunity to bring new families to the community that would benefit all of us so think about that opportunity and how we can all kind of uplift one another as we move forward thanks so much a couple more who Dave Bellini if I'm sorry for most pronounce that can you hear me now yes oh hi my name is Dave Bellini and I've lived in Montpelier most of my life and went to the school system and I'm trying to turn on my camera but I don't know how to do it you won't be able to sir just we can hear you that yeah okay well my background is in human services 42 years with the state of Vermont and I understand good times and bad budgetary times believe me and I understand cuts and good days and good years and it's never an easy thing but I'd like to ask you all to put yourself in the place of maybe a senior citizen maybe some younger homeowners and what 20 percent increase means to them they're the ones that are going to have to make really tough decisions for some people it's a choice of food or medication for other people it's I can't afford the increase because I can't pay my property taxes for others it's I'm not going to be able to keep my kids in the daycare I want so it's not just tough times for the school system and I've supported the budget most of the years but I had a vote against it this time because 20 percent it's just not acceptable it's difficult for me to remain in my home and some people have it worse than me so it's not just difficult on the school system it's difficult on the people that live in Montpelier and probably Roxbury it's it's not an easy time so I just wanted you to consider that thank you very much great thank you Dave Parker Parker Ray can you hear me yeah sounds like it's James yes hi this is James Ray on Parker's computer Parker's here with me I just wanted to speak to remind the community and I should start with I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs about what I'm about to say but I think I know enough to say this that to remind the community that the situation that we've been put in I think from my understanding has more to do with directives and decisions made at the state house and the governor's office than it does to do with any actions taken right or wrongly by the school board in other words that the school board over the years has been put in positions to react to decisions passed down to them by the state house and the governor's office and so I think as people task this the school board to make their decisions to please understand that they are reacting not in the reactionary they're they're responding in a responsible way to decisions that they are none of us really have much control over and speaking control over it I guess the second part of my statement is a plea to any legislators out there who might be listening to this who might read the transcripts of this or to who any of you might be talking to to please think through decisions a little thoroughly again I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs of this but it very much feels like especially in this last round that the act that's led to this most recent budget crunch that massive decisions were made before they really had a sense of how those decisions would play out in communities across this state and my understanding also is massive decisions that were forced on school boards with ridiculously and I think irresponsibly short timelines to react putting putting communities like ours in situations where we have to make these tough decisions and again I think an un irresponsibly short timeline not irresponsible on our school board irresponsible on the legislator and the governor's office that is putting these communities in these situations to make like it feels like pendulum swings are forced on us by the state level and I just my plea is to the governor and the state house to just slow down put thought into these things before before these decisions are passed on to the communities and the school boards to respond because as I hope they can see right now I think the report I heard was that 30 percent of the school board school districts 30 districts in this state did not say yes to their school budget this year and I think that's a reflection that they've all been put in situations that are untenable by the state house so please I think tomorrow to our community I would beg folks to remember who you know where this is all coming from and I would beg the state house and the governor's office to please pay attention to this do what you can to rectify the situation now and please please please take a more patient thoughtful approach going forward thank you all very much thank you James uh the Hannah and Jane pinkess and I think if anyone else wants to speak please raise your hand now because I think otherwise I'd like to get to discussion and and say for their comment for the second comment period um Hannah hi my name is Hannah Zayjack I'm a Roxbury resident and I have one kid in rvs and one in main street middle school um I'm actually the wife of a former board member that went through the merger process um it was an interesting time but I can say wholeheartedly that it's been a very positive thing for us and our family I've seen wonderful things happen at rvs um and my kid loves main street it's been a very positive experience and I've been lucky enough to help coach with some of the um track and cross country teams and meet some of the kids and it's just been a super positive experience um but my one thing I'd like to I guess point out is if we could continue with having a thoughtful discussion and forming the committee to talk about closing the Roxbury school rather than a knee jerk reaction I think it would be a much better thing than um trying to force something really quickly um and leaving the kids at the center of the discussion if this is better for the kids great um you know we'll talk about that and figure out what we need to do but it you know we gotta keep leave the kids at the center of the discussion as well um that's it great thank you Hannah and then uh Jane Ficus hi I'm Jane Ficus I've lived in Roxbury for over 50 years it's a community that's changed over these years it's growing it's beginning to really thrive and trust out roots and branches where people are starting to work together it's so important also that that our children in our school have the chance to be connected to people to the kids in Roxbury it's so important that the heart of our town stays alive and that I you know heartily support with Hannah just said that if we can look for creative ways in in transparent ways to get our act together to choose alternative ways of dealing with with the expense of of keeping Roxbury open I think we should look for them and and not just sit back and cut conversation off I think that would leave really bad and and negative feelings and I think we could I urge you urge you to try and find ways to keep the two communities together the two schools together and and with all my heart I hope you can do that and I encourage you to do that and thank you great thank you Jane I appreciate it um thank you everyone again we'll have a second public comment period after a budget discussion next item is the consent agenda just for folks at home and for dwell I'm going to take a wild guess that Tim knows what a consent agenda is but in case you don't the consent agenda is essentially items that are pretty routine like you know approval of minutes previous minutes and our warrant for payroll etc that don't require discussion we put them together the board reviews them quickly or deeply beforehand and if there's anything someone wants to discuss we pull it off the consent agenda and separately discuss it but it's it's a it's basically a way for us to get a lot of business done quickly without unnecessary discussion if we don't need it do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda I move we approve the consent agenda do I have a second a discussion I just I just quickly wanted to say Libby thank you for putting together those slides with the statewide data to make them easy for people to find and read do we have them on our district website yet yeah it's really helpful to be able to have it at our fingertips so we don't have to go digging around on the website ourselves so thanks for putting together that slide for those who don't know what I'm talking about Libby linked to it in her superintendent's report so you can find it there in the board documents and I hope we get it up on our website because it's information we should all have so thanks for doing that all those in favor hi any opposed okay great um so now reorganization this is where we choose our chair vice chair parliamentarian uh cb cc representative and I don't think we're going to committee membership tonight um I will just explain largely for kind of tim's edification but also for folks at home who are watching and anyone who needs a reminder uh we have um it's like eight committees now uh that uh that we all serve on uh most board members serve on two I think there are a couple who who serve on on three uh the committees do work that they bring to the board but isn't it it's it's it's uh a smaller group where we can delve into uh specific aspects of uh our work um we have I will not talk about the future of Roxbury's village school committee we can save that and wrap that up and do a bunch of discussion but we did form a committee to look at that uh but our standing committees are uh policy uh we are a board that um that follows policy those policies need updating and sometimes we need to change or add new policies uh that committee deals with those issues first uh does drafts brings it up to the board for approval um it's it's a great place for lawyers to serve um because some of it's some of it's technical our negotiations committee is uh as it would indicate it's it's the committee that does negotiation with our three unions and uh then brings uh things to the board for approval from those those unions the negotiations committee can be very quiet and it can be very intense depending on where we are in negotiations with with our various unions uh the finance committee uh basically meets I think four times a year uh to get a deep dive into our finances just because a lot of the the finance and and Medusia of our budgets are pretty technical uh we tend not to have a lot of board time for it so what we've done is we've established a committee that meets with our business manager and the superintendent quarterly when the reports come out to do a deeper dive and essentially that committee if they find things that they feel needs the board's full attention we'll bring that to the full attention it's a way of having the board have knowledge of that without taking up the time to educate all of us and and some of us um are more more of an accountant mindset than others so um so we tend to try to put people who have those strengths on that committee our facilities and energy uh is where we do a lot of the work in terms of of our maintenance on buildings it's where our our climate work has taken place uh they oftentimes meet with our facilities director Andrew LaRosa uh and again you know help help bring issues around you know building improvements building maintenance um our our uh net zero policy um the superintendent evaluation committee uh works on one of our main tasks uh which is really kind of our three main tasks are approving the budget overviewing the superintendent and then being commuted to the azons um the superintendent evaluation committee make sure that we have a process for a meaningful and thorough evaluation of our superintendent uh to make sure that that she is uh both doing the job she'd be doing and also getting the resources and support from the board that she needs uh our equity committee um advances our DEI policy and make sure that all of the the work that we're doing is properly considering uh equity um equity and that um you know it also works with a lot of students because equity is a obviously a huge issue for a lot of our students um and uh you know some of those you know some of that work the work goes everywhere uh and then we have our net zero ad hoc committee um which is not a standing committee but has been assigned to really delve into our net zero policies and try to put some some meat on that as we move forward uh so those are the eight committees six standing yeah i just wanted to add on the equity committee that we have met a few times recently and um there has been talked a little bit at the board level of committee creating another committee for communication and we have um as a as a current committee now this could change if other people came on to the committee or whatever but as a current committee we've said we would be willing to take on the work of establishing communication protocols and you know sort of our general philosophy so that we wouldn't have to create a whole nother committee to do that because it feels very in line um with being an equitable board and being an equitable district is opening up access and transparency to the board so i just wanted to put that out there as if anybody was interested that would also be work that the equity committee would be doing this year yeah excellent now that is a great um great addition and yeah we have had talk about communications committee because as uh folks on the board know and and uh uh tim for uh kind of your education and putting together our our kind of district goals communication and improving communication is is one of the the high ones um so uh with that um let's let's choose our uh our officers and i think we can put off committees until um either probably till our next official meeting because i think we'll probably deal with our budget at a special meeting um again i would be happy to serve as as chair for another year um so i would definitely entertain be nominated again if someone else wants to step up and do it i'm i'm not going to wrestle you for it uh but i i would it's been an honor to serve and i i certainly would be happy to continue to do in that role so i will entertain a nomination for chair so it's a nomination not a motion it's it's it's a motion okay i think you nominate i move that we nominate jim murphy as our chairperson second any discussion all those in favor i well thank you very much i really appreciate the the the trust and um the yeah the honor to serve for another other year uh vice chair uh mea more has been a fantastic vice chair uh i'm sure she will continue to be one if she's so so desires but um i will open it up for nominations and um i think mea would be a great suggestion is mea does mea think mea is a great speaker okay i'm not i'm not seeing her run or shake her head uh do i have a nomination for vice chair i'll move to nominate mea more to continue to be vice chair for our board second second all those in favor i i great you didn't even ask for discussion um thanks everyone thank you thank you since anna does most of the minute taking the secretaries are pretty light left light enough that i forgot to be current secretary is i think it might be red um would you would you be interested in serving again maybe don't don't uh anyone else is don't don't contain your enthusiasm does anyone do would anyone else be interested in serving as secretary and what is that role in tail i think officially it's like the no-taker but okay but so yes and you say thank you anna christin yes just slide it left yeah slide it left sure yeah it sounds pretty uh low low pro okay yeah i believe the only time right was put into action was when anna had gay birth to twins so she's not planning on doing that in time so she's promised me i'd like a guarantee and i think sometimes when we're in executive session the clerk has to make sure we capture that who made the motions oh yes sounds like i can i'm capable of that too yeah um i'm going to nominate christine gutler as clerk uh secretary of the board uh do i have a second no second uh any discussion i was a favor i right congratulations christine and then i believe that jill is our parliamentarian um obviously she just knew what the secretary does yes um and and i was going to i i don't know if you got it but vsba sent like a a one-page laminated robber's rule yes cheat yes i remember to bring this uh since you've had some time to familiarize yourself with that do you want to continue on i'm happy to continue to be a mediocre parliamentarian for you all unless someone else is interested um do i have a motion to nominate a parliamentarian i'll make a motion that jill continues to be a mediocre parliamentarian thanks to me i have that reflected in the minutes it's better than uh second second second all right any discussion all is in favor hi hi and then finally the cvcc representative representative as i spoke on jill's behalf but she nodded uh and jill currently doing that she is willing to continue um but i get the strong sentiment that uh she would not be crushed if someone can i give like the twitter version of what it yeah yes okay so um a few years ago the center vermont career center became an independent technical center district it was it's it's still physically attached to spalding high school in barry and it serves the 18 towns of central vermont so um i was the montpellier rocksbury representative um the governance committee that worked with a consultant to actually literally sort of how do you become your own independent career center district um and so then after that um voters agreed to do that and so i was the montpellier rocksbury representative so the board for the center vermont career center is made up of board members from each of those six sending supervisory unions and then six um appointed members of the public so there's a member of the public that's appointed and there's a board representative from each board so it's very equitable as far as mr ps twinfield cabot very harwood the whole game um washington central so um they meet once a month and then similar to this board there are subcommittees um and what i ended up you know it was our first year ever and nobody was uh ready to do chair and i said i would do it for one year only when nobody else wanted to take that on um and i stayed on for another year as chair um that is a lot more work than being a representative on the board and of course with all the subcommittees there's other work involved so realistically i probably took it a little too far but it is a time commitment um but it's also a really exciting time to actually be on the career center they are not only have they formed an independent district but they're actively working on building a brand new career center somewhere else in center vermont um so they really need someone who has the time and attention to like participate in that and i just feel like as much as i would love to and my heart is really with them i don't literally have that time um so i wanted to just genuinely open that up if anybody was interested in being on the center vermont career center board as the mrps representative it is an exciting time for them for that the the tech district and it is such an incredible resource for um this for this area and obviously the tech centers that are serve other areas in the state are also incredible resources as a learning opportunity for kids who's who for whom like quote unquote regular school just isn't the right fit and and also kids who are thinking a little bit further ahead about what their career path is going to be even while they're sophomores and juniors in high school is just an awesome awesome resource that we have and it would be a cool way to support um to support that resource would be being part of that um that board and as we said last year yes jim mentioned most board members serve on we serve on at least two committees we um said it makes sense that that role counts as a committee you you it wouldn't have to be the case that you would serve on two of the committees of this board and also be that if you wanted to be the representative from our board to that board because of that time commitment yeah thank you and it is it's really exciting it's a really fantastic place about half the students actually don't get in it's a competitive process to apply um and there's way more demand from students than there is literally space in that building um and it means that we're having to turn away basically all kinds of fantastic free resources from the community and from the industries because they want to support it and frankly a lot of these students graduate from there with very well-paying jobs waiting for them um so it's really cool to like go to the open house and it's just absolutely pulsing with students who have found their thing um so you can probably tell I really do care about it a lot and it's been great to be on it and that's why because I do care I wanted to see if there were other people who had a little more capacity the perfect storm was when I was negotiations for both both boards um really hard um anyone interested uh I heard from a little bird that there might be a had a bit of interest online so um if you all can hear me hopefully you can't hear me um I was on our TCC board um sorry to disturb um back in Randolph and would consider it can't be the chair for sure um and I don't have it's really quickly are they all um in person can vary or are they on things no we have hybrid just like this meeting and honestly because of the disparate places folks travel the majority of board members like Cabot Harwood they're they're always participating remotely I usually go in person because I live in Montpelier and it's not that far um but yeah it's hybrid similar to this I think Jill would give it to you willingly Scott oh I'm so glad thank you and I will be a huge supporter and help her however I can I move that we nominate Scott Lewens to be the Montpelier Roxbury school district representative on the center for Mont career center for second yeah any discussion all is a favor hi hi well yeah thank you Scott and thank you Joe and thank you Joe I know you've worked a ton of work over the last few years um yeah yes um no thank you both and thanks thanks everyone um for uh being willing to to serve and we will um we will get to committees later and if anyone has question about committees uh you know feel free to email me over the next couple weeks uh and now I was thinking around you weren't here for the I do have one comment I want to see that's yes yes sort of so yeah I totally agree that that the community assignment is not the highest priority although I am curious to hear I think there's enough there's certainly an argument for at least setting up the future Roxbury school committee as soon as possible it's a big conversation and a big decision and one that I think is happening informally um and it would be nice to get that um formed sooner or later so yeah I understand that the need to focus on the budget but that's also something that I think is is you know equally important and right so yeah just wondering what others think of them that one particular and they're getting that um some sort of our yeah I I agree Scott I mean my thought is I think Roxbury is going to be a part of our budget conversation and how that committee looks and what it's eventual charge might be may be informed by how our budget conversation goes um that's that's kind of my thoughts which is one of the reasons I I held it I'm okay circling back to it later tonight perhaps after we've seen some of the options that um Libby Hazen has had a bit of a conversation but we do have a charge and we have a committee composition and we have a deadline so um not that those things can't change of course but um we have initiated the committee and I I definitely hear what Scott is saying is that it's got a big job to do as as we've charged it so far and um I wouldn't want to delay getting the work of that committee off the ground unnecessarily and if we waited until say the March 20th meeting then that's a whole other two weeks that we aren't getting say letters of interest from the community for people who want to participate at that level yeah I think that's all fair I think we can circle back to it later tonight um so now we're going to jump into the budget discussion uh just a few comments uh you know we have had a lot of budget success this is new territory for us um I mean I I think that we put out a reasonable and responsible budget uh I think we put a lot of work into it and and did a very good job and I think we we made some some tough cuts um I understand why the community reacted the way I did uh the the tax implications are are high um I know that that people feel that and I believe some some people you know have made comments of that both in writing and otherwise uh and I know that other prices are high too you know groceries are high people are having to make tough decisions uh I also know that we have you know income sensitized property taxes but even with that it raises for everyone and even the people who can fully pay that are oftentimes the people who have the biggest commitments they've got you know um they're oftentimes paying the full amount because they're in their peak working years but when you're peak working years you've got college to save for you've got a million kid activities that suck up money you've got you know you just your expenses are often at at the highest that they're at so I understand why people feel very squeezed by that budget and I also realize that a lot of the forces that led to what's a drastic change I mean we've never had numbers like this um are out of our control and are this really the yeah the result of some state policy changes and some other changes in terms of uh you know federal money going away that that had kind of floated us for a few years um declining enrollment uh etc um that said there was a message I think sent to us that um we have more work to do and that uh we need to go back to the voters with a budget that at least does something for costs um I know that that my goal is to do that in a way that protects as much of our educational programming and what's best for kids as possible because if we do not have strong good schools uh with that are adequately funded uh that provide programming and opportunities for kids that kids need uh it's corrosive to our communities uh if we are going to bring keep and bring families here uh one of the first things they look at are the schools and what opportunities their kids have um so we cannot uh we cannot corrode our schools uh in the choices that we make uh yet um I think we do have to be cognizant of of the cost so we've got a very difficult task ahead um and I'm gonna turn over to Libby who's gonna walk us through I think some of the administration stuff and then we'll open up the board but I just want to acknowledge both the the need to really strongly support our schools but also I think the the very legitimate um angst and anxiety about what this is going to do to people's budgets and and the hard choices that people are going to have to make at home um you know with with tax increases like this so this job doesn't get any easier ever that we got through the unprecedented times but we're still well within the unprecedented time um right now so I am just providing the board with some potential scenarios there is nothing written in stone whatsoever this is ultimately um how much of a tax increase we want to go back out to the voters is ultimately a board's decision not an administrative team's decision um so that is that's primarily the decision you have to make and you don't necessarily have to make that tonight either so this is information gathering it's giving an idea to the board and the community of just how much we'd have to cut and what those potential cuts could look like if um to get to certain tax rates that's that's the purpose of this right now um it is incredibly hard to talk through this we had an administrative meeting this afternoon and I look back and Jason who's here for some moral support I know my high school principal um and it was a tough meeting so I know that right so we have a timeline for a revote and John Odom has kindly come tonight after I've talked to him a few times on the phone over the last couple weeks and today um but so there are two things that the board needs to work with the statute as well as our contracts um so what's in statute after a revote or for a revote is that a public notice has to be provided um the public notice is the warning just as you warn school board meetings and that kind of thing um and a vote can be had seven days after the public notice has been provided to the community a public informational meeting must occur at least five days following the public notice um and if it's rejected again this process can start over now John has had put it so professional and nice to me and he said yeah that statute doesn't really work out with reality um and so I we have we're working with our partners over in the town clerk's office as well as our administrative team and our community and the school board so there's lots of people in that um conversation um and John clarified with me today around like what does what does that kind of turnaround look like and there's pressures on both his office as well as our MRPS contract so I'll I'll do the contracts first and then I'll give John the opportunity to I don't want to put you on the spot John but give John the opportunity to speak though about the pressures from the clerk side of things um in our AFSCME contract um just as Catherine spoke of earlier our AFSCMEs are custodians or tech people are administrative assistants there's the there is a notification of reduction in fourths by March 15th for AFSCME there is nothing in there for a second vote or a failed vote or anything it's just the vote in the MREA contract as I spoke about before the notice of a riff or a reduction of force must be given out at by March 31st for a failed first vote um so that's the kind of timeline John and I were talking about today and then I also wanted to point out that all administrative contracts um have to be renewed by contract by February 15th so our admin team have already gotten their contracts as is written in their legally binding contract and statute the principal position if they've been in their position for two years need to have their contract renewed by February 1st that's part of statute so um those administrative contracts have been given out and have been signed by the administrative team at this point that's state law the 15th first the first for principles for the principal position and that that's a state law yeah um what is it can you explain what who the administrative group is yeah so anybody with an administrative license so including myself so myself the principals the assistant principals director curriculum director of special education for student services as we call it here um director of social emotional learning uh director of flexible pathways and as well as people who do not have that administrator certificate like our business manager director of facilities um Anna my my executive assistant Heather the director of human or coordinator of human resources that's part of their contract as well because their contract kind of mirrors an administrator's contract so those what I'm hearing you say is those contracts have all been signed yes there's no rift we could make at those levels because those contracts have been signed there would be legal yeah ramifications potentially from that I just wanted to put a fine point on that yeah that's very helpful but central office staff would fall in one of the would fall in the MREA group no they're the administrative ones like the give me an example of what central office staff you know like we learned early on central office staff went from 15 to 26 additional 11 people who had been S or funds but are now normal payroll and their their administrative contracts no we didn't hire I don't think those are our central office those are central office staff yeah okay so they're under one of the different yeah they're MREA okay um okay so as John pointed out to me earlier the law for a revote is not exactly friendly to a town's clerk's office Jen do you want to step up to this mic here so everybody can hear you at home could I ask you a question quickly yeah so when those reduction enforced notices there's specific notices that go out to specific people by those timelines it's not a general statement that there will be a reduction in five positions is that correct the information that I provide to Joe our union leader is uh that it's the position with the licensure category okay so three teachers and two assistants or whatever uh it would be the licensure category so it'd be a you know since we already have decided on a k6 ref because of enrollment it would be um reducing enforced one can the k6 license it's not person specific at that point no okay no because then it goes to seniority okay John you're on for the realities of the town clerk's office first of all I will assume that the clerk's office role in this would be myself and my deputy just basically putting on the election um since you've got your own infrastructure for doing all the warnings and everything like that so I wouldn't have to think about that which is great because I think about this thing um yeah and Libby brought it up and she mentioned the date and the outside date being the 28th for an election and I hope we keep it as outside as we can I don't think I don't think I said anything I think I was sort of stupefied by it um the quick answer if you asked me if we could pull off an election and if somebody made me give you a quick answer I would say no um now if you were to look at me like I was Scotty and you were Captain Kirk and you told me well how are you going to do it anyway just kind of what I did um I would say you would have to look a couple ways because one of the the the problem there's a few challenges in there the biggest one is legally everybody who got an absentee ballot for this last election needs to be sent one for this one so we got a robust early vote it was about 800 people so that means 800 early ballots would have to go out so there have to be time for people to receive them there's no it's not set in statute I mean theoretically you're not breaking the law if they don't receive their ballot until the day before the election but that's going to create problems for you in a lot of ways and you know possibly could set you up for legal action I don't even know it's uncharted territory so given the realities of how we do elections here we you know I've always used the auditorium in city hall we have for a very long time always used tabulators and had those programs and have ballots professionally printed and have tabulator run elections if we need something by the 28th there's none of that would could be true uh lost nation theater has the auditorium tied up so we'd have to find another location and the obvious location would be here which is going to maybe make some people feel a little oaky about another revote on the school budget at the school but it would have to be there really wouldn't be a way around it I could talk to a local church but I think another public building is probably the way to go it also could not be a tabulator election there's just not time they would need two weeks to turn that around and that wouldn't even necessarily include the printing time so we'd be talking a hand count election something I've never done before but it's the first time for everything so that's that's what you're looking at if you want that kind of time frame this things aren't usually turned around this quickly for example Barry is doing their vote on their second bite at the apple in mid-May and presumably under this under the same type of pressure as you all but that's far more typical is to push that out quite a ways if you did push it out farther we could have the auditorium unfortunately no earlier than the last Tuesday in April so that's pretty far out too but if you really want to try to keep it under that 28th time frame then that's what it would have to look like really is a hand count here what I want to say to the board is we don't have to do that the ramification of of not knowing a past budget by May is twofold one our entire MREA staff would get rift notices if we missed that March 31st deadline because you you'd need it's going to sound awful but you'd need the freedom with a budget right um so they would receive rift div dines only or rift notice only because it's of that language in the contract not for any other reason um and then there's the second potential ramification is that if the budget goes down for a second time um and we need the same lead time to get a third vote up and running um that would push you into FY 25 and when we move into FY 25 that's when the we can only work off of 87 percent of our FY 24 budget is available to us so there's financial ramifications for that pushback kick a couple questions um can we mail everyone a ballot um whether they requested one or not is that what you're saying i'll register voters i'll register voters um i don't see why not that would be your all's choice as to how to run your how you wanted to proceed with that and i'd just be again i'm making some inferences here but i'd just be the person putting it into putting into effect because i think there was money for that and each existing that filled the past only if you only if you pushed back the budget on the budget the decision we made not to do on february 7th so that would be a dramatic change in the scale of the election too and i would push back a little harder on the idea of spreading it out stretching it out a little so we could use those tabulators was it earliest we can get a tabulator um well i was trying to talk to see if to folks today to see if there was some way you could have it by the 28th they could program it for me and have it all turned around by in two weeks they said after that i could probably have the printed and that would be tabulators would be ready to go um then i'd have to have the ballots printed probably about another week so we're talking about three weeks and then we have to mail them to the 800 people so that stretches that out a little farther so we're probably talking about mid april yeah so we did it in mid april and separate notices we could do that and then we would at least reduce our risk of having what i'm sorry yeah because you could have a you could have a separate quote i didn't hear the end of your sentence i said if we if we say say we gave an extra two weeks two or three weeks went into mid april sent the rip notices which i know hopefully we can explain it well so we reduce our burn because i'm sure that's not then we could have a little more time to make john's life easier and and have a tabulated election and make sure that you know ballots get out and word gets out and reduce the risk that if it fails the second time that we have i mean 80 87 percent of our existing budget is bad uh and not a place we want to go we would be able we'd use our fund balance to help yeah we would have to it's still not be great right and and it would and it would and eat our fund balance yes yes but it's just 87 percent until you have until you have it right of the current budget not of the planned budget right yeah and you're right it would only be until we get i mean like given the the increases that are due our current budget would mean a lot of people couldn't go to work it depends on when paychecks start because not everybody's on a on a 26 paycheck cycle um so it depends yeah it also would depend on what we decided not to pay i mean it doesn't have to be salaries that we choose not to pay it could be maintenance for a couple months deferred maintenance and things yeah yeah no exactly but it was it is tricky it it puts in uh whether we're talking about the rift notices or not or the second failed budget which i really hope doesn't happen um it introduces a lot of instability into our highly functional system and puts a lot of stress on my amazing educators world i mean it means operating on eight million dollars less than the budget just like that for some period of time yep is there anything you else else you wanted to share with us i don't think so i mean i think you've got the picture of it there and obviously after you all have made a decision we'll talk right away and put whatever it takes into motion absolutely the first moment possible so you know is roxbury facing challenges for sitting up there and if you talk to the clerk i haven't i haven't talked to camry in any kind of depth um so i i but the process would be the same for roxbury i mean it's it's going to be similar um she's she is not as isn't sweating in as much as i am she basically said you're the bigger town you're going to have a harder time with it so i'll back you up um so she's not as um wild eyed and frantic about it as i am so okay so we're assuming that they can be pulled up here can be pulled up yeah uh scott and the jill you're the quick question for john um you mentioned that the hand count and i can assume what the downsides um and upsides are but i'd love for you to just share what you perceive as downsides and upsides to a hand count over well i think the biggest downside i think it's about context i think it's about where we are it's just not something that people are used to and it's not the way we think of running elections in montpellier and i think um i just think anything that looks different and feels different might create some potential friction is all i think there probably be potential friction from having in a different place since all of our elections for centuries have been in the same place um i i think that's that's the big difference really i mean i'm going to say something you're not supposed to say and the tabular tabulator counts are more accurate time and time again it's been shown so there's that but we're talking very tiny negligible degrees here um i mean the biggest concern for me personally is that i've never done one before although it does not sound like it completely unfun but yeah we you know we pull off whatever you need and would it be like a one question ballot yeah yeah i mean the way i would do it if it was a hand count you're a lot cheaper because i'm going to have to charge you all for this too is just to have printed out pieces of paper cut them in half you know take them to a nice printer nice little color thing with the one question i'll send them to a mail center mail them all out to the 800 people have a big big ballot box container there and we dump it out on the table divide it into stacks of 50 get about 16 20 people divide into twos and just go through it and tally them up and an hour and a half two hours later we have the result so cute you know fun but different sounds very homey it's very homey it's but but i would not over i would not underestimate i think the impact i ran this by a few people and they were all like they they thought it was a bad idea because they thought people would react badly to it because it's different some sense that the school was trying to get some kind of special treatment of the way things were being counted or having it done at the school was somehow not you know above board or something what's that but that's the i mean that's the only real differences is um what are people going to expect other than just the again the level of how frantic will i be to get it going i'm i'm always in favor of less frantic oh yeah all i was going to ask is it sounds like maybe realistically mid april or may and that we make sure it doesn't happen during april break a lot of people might not be here you could have the on april 29 we could have the auditorium that'd be the only time but i was that pushes it out kind of late that that's her work i thought it was the week after the break oh whoops that's the point i had to see earlier so you could have the auditorium well it's that tuesday's the 20th it was a tuesday the 30th is the tuesday okay that's the we'd be back that's the tuesday after break okay i thought the break was the week before city budget but city halls so um yeah oh yeah yeah school budget out of school is that what you're saying yeah well it's it's yeah it's coming across for a month yeah yeah i mean i get public works to throw all my crap in a truck and we don't have anything completely yeah neutral location i just wanted to get i'm just trying to wrap my head around everything you told us and that i think what i hear you saying and so i definitely want you to correct me if i'm hearing incorrectly i'll try i'm really tired i believe it i really appreciate you being here um is that it we could hold an an election or the vote on march 28th but what that would require is hand counting and printed ballots and having it here at the school that's right and you would be the the tension you would you might feel the pushback the other pushback you might get would be the lack of time to turn around those ballots that were mailed out to those 800 people okay so that's that's the other one that's what we're looking at if we wanted to try and adhere to the contract that the um that is in our current the agreement that we've yeah contract language thank you okay i just wanted to make sure i understood that and that these other dates we've been talking about give you the time for tabulators and a little more breathing room a little more breathing mailing yeah okay thank you there's a second vote need a specific date or can it be like vote by the state so you know people could get ballots in the mail and then return them to city hall by a certain date well i mean the the buy date would be the whatever the date the election was was picked i mean yeah if i'm not sure i understand the question well if you do an absentee ballot you can put it in the drop-off box thoroughly like if you're going to be away or something is that right we'd open up the drop box for sure is that what you're asking me yeah yeah fully mail and drop election oh you're still talking about there's no in-person voting minimal in-person voting well i mean the biggest um that's more of a logistical challenge and it's certainly more of a financial commitment um but if you all wanted to talk about it i mean we could do that is it like a dollar each for eight thousand six thousand oh yeah i'm not prepared to uh if i've gotten through to the mailing center today i might been able to tell you but i wasn't able to reach anybody today um unfortunately i have a town's calling them do you have any idea what the um percentages the difference between in-person voting and mail if it was a mail in like do you have any sense of the return on those you know it's interesting because i did some studies on this one time um if you're talking uh uh if you mail them all out to folks the the deviation between high turnout and low turnout elections levels out near that higher end it doesn't really increase the turnout of high turnout elections but it brings a lot of lower turnout elections up more towards that level so um you know it's hard to guess what the turnout of this would be if you had a pretty strong turnout um yesterday but obviously a second vote is going to be a fraction of that and you know what fraction who knows but probably uh if you did it if you sent out all mail in you would bump it right back up to that level i would guess maybe even a little higher that'd be a lot tougher call for a uh hand count one though definitely that would be a tabulator election and it would take uh yeah no we could we could do it be a big job for a big mail house though two more things i just said that the police station would be available for voting as well okay that's that might deter John forgive me were you clerk the last time we need to go to a second vote on the button oh this is all new for me okay great so we're the same anybody i don't remember i don't remember it and i don't remember what the timeline was okay went with when they just looked it up i think it was April 15th okay yeah that's great okay yes carol dawg's welcomed me to this world today it's impossible to thank god so just say yes or no without the without the text and then get that in the worst and print a sheet when you get it in two hours and you get the you mean to sort of get it started with everything we could have an hour the printed sheet only used to say school budget yes or no as opposed to having the specifics of whatever you decide could the tabulator print your people start that process well the it'll have however the the question is warned so it'll need that language you're okay with that she's easy one of her fidgets i have more i have more stress balls in my office if you go need one i've got buckets of them in there i'm sure it's helping you pay attention yeah yeah just just yeah just for the audience i know but it's not we'll have public comment later it's this is not not open forum so sorry for let's try that down initially but i i know i know people have questions but well the quick answer is if you make it over four will be here till till april 15th uh jill so in order to actually even try to do this for the 28th we need to send out so we would need to make a decision like next week yes yes it just it feels not possible i feel like april 15th sounds reasonable or like i said after we get back from break i i don't i mean we would have to make a very important decision in a week and then hot off the presses get things mailed have a hand count so find volunteers to hand count which will take time i know it's today's the sixth i agree it seems to rush to me i think we need to have a good but budget discussion yeah i would be more comfortable with the things as well um so april 15th as far as logistics go would mean we don't have um lost nation the auditorium right but we would have tabulators we should have tabulators yeah again this is all assuming that you all don't take too long to make that decision to go forward with it right yeah we should talk about what the what deadline we would have to set for ourselves in order to meet april 15th so so when would we have to get more language too oh let's see i'm gonna just thumbnail this because i was going through a lot of this in my mind earlier today and each time i went through it i came up with a different answer um we need about if you get three weeks out we're getting them printed to have the tabulators here i'm getting them mailed um then maybe a couple weeks on to that for people to receive the mail and to actually send it back to me if they choose but that's about five weeks there five five weeks would be the week of the 15th well there you go so five weeks if you move very quickly on this in this next week i think yeah i think that works i think think of it in terms of bumping it another week maybe okay let that let that be a rolling five week here i think five weeks and there's mailing ballot i think five weeks there won't there's a little bit of a margin for error in there too when something goes wrong because often there is um not much but but i feel i feel a lot better about five weeks so even if we wanted equal 15th it sounds like we need to make a decision next next week let's say we could do how do you feel about four weeks i mean because because i think we could have i mean i think we could do the budget in two meetings and so yeah if we did it yeah we could have an emergency meeting next week and then a regular meeting on the 20th the private language by the 21st and then say we have for the 21st of March of March should be so you might want to think more about that 30th date then where we could have the auditorium April 30th yeah April 30th so which we could do because then because the the 22nd through the 26th it's our April break yeah so people would be back from break would be the 30th has the advantage of being something everyone will recognize is this is this is a month earlier election and i have a weird desire to have it on a Tuesday because elections some of you know people are used to that um what just came up recently where somebody complained about something that wasn't on a Tuesday um i i have heard of complaints on that i i like the idea of having it on the weekend i was going to say could we have it on a weekend too is that a possibility that's i'll have to check with them um it might have to be that sunday honestly if it's the end of a vacation the end of a vacation yeah so we have to follow it again what do people feel just we don't have to tell what do people feel about the 30th i think the 30th makes a lot of sense yes yeah yeah okay let's yeah we're not i mean but if we get okay i was just wondering it's curious yeah friend yeah well the first thing i can do tomorrow is lock that in if that's the date you all want to go i would need to get final confirmation from from lost nation but they are communicated with them again today so but i still want to lock them in rock solid and let you all know first thing in the morning if that's the way you want it to go just i just say that because i believe in jinxes yep i i think we've got um do we need to take about i just haven't been through the 30th i'm not trying to tempt fate but then just also understand if there was to be a second but we'd be looking at another five weeks out from that well five weeks out from a budget decision from a budget so not five weeks out from April 30th so it would be well because the vote would happen on April 30th right by pushing that we would have right okay and then we'd have to go back and we have to do all this again okay thank you and when this is and then we have to handle it right so we could we could probably sneak in that second not tempting faith just maybe you can have it on the last day of school last day for who for seniors or for others i know that seniors are leaving the 14th whether the school's done or not it's so horrible um okay but um so and we've gotten at least Tammy's backing like figure it out for Montpelier and she'll she'll figure it out and she said that she she could probably do what what i needed to do so we would double check with her you know we would then presume that the vote on the school budget would take place on April 30th as well in Roxbury yeah okay and there should be plenty of time for her to say i'm the crazy one she's much more even keel and you would have to do there because Roxbury also votes at the school in the gym so yep but i did talk to Tammy today too and she said that you all have been talking and she's aware and she's got her wheels turning yep she's she's a good one she knows what she's doing better than i do so i'm going to thank you for coming tonight thanks this is very helpful yeah very helpful thanks john thank you john all right so we're going to ignore the next slide okay i think that's one other question do we know if that contract language existed 10 years ago i guess i'm just i don't know if we had done that yeah the same thing joe has heard this whole conversation and he and i will chat tomorrow what we want to do okay i don't remember the previous vote for the last time being that quick but i've also it was a while yeah yep okay yeah so i just want to remind the board that this um these are just possibilities um based on uh conversations that our administrative team had a long time ago based on conversations we've had today um there are some things you won't see in here you won't see many facilities pieces in here one of the ironies of last night's vote was that the voters did pass the capital plan for the 270 000 dollar addition for the capital plan that was passed and so there's a question that i'm not positive the answer to is does the board have to abide by that vote or not um so that previously for my plan b was part of plan b it is not part of the capital right for next year it is now not part of my plan b because of that vote last night i'm i don't even know who i asked to get clarity on that but i'm still thinking about it um so there are things that you won't see in here that you might say hey why would you consider this i want to remind the board that the vote happened last night and it's today so i worked on this today and hadn't didn't have a whole lot of time to really think a whole lot of things through um so a lot of well why didn't you think of this won't be you're gonna get in because it was today um so one possible scenario is that we could cut 700 000 dollars in spending and increase the fund balance contribution by another 575 000 that would make our total fund balance contribution over a million dollars for this budget we would decrease spending by taking 40 000 from school budget lines which essentially is a level fund from f y 24's budget so it essentially would say to our school principals um and central office administrators that you're level funding your budget however you want to do that um we would eliminate the three permanent substitute positions from the mob kill your schools the permanent substitute position was not filled in roxbury this year and that was part of the elimination from the first round so it would be eliminating all of the permanent substitute positions from mob kill your schools and i i also just want to say that that there is no way to not hurt in this in this scenario in these scenarios because um our permanent substitutes have brought a whole lot of um normalcy for our teaching staff in particular when we have people out um we uh we could do 2.5 f t e from marissa which is our instructional assistant unit we could do three f t e from m re a the faculty um what those positions are we have a few different ways that the administrative team was thinking about it today and we did not make we were not able to come to consensus around what that is so we still have some more talking to do around that eliminate the roxbury late bus and eliminate main street middle school mob kill your busing um in addition to the cuts that were already made from the first time around so in doing all of these pieces right here the potential tax rate increase assuming that the dollar yield is at nine thousand seven hundred seventy five dollars is still an 18 percent increase in mob kill your and it's a seven point four percent increase in roxbury i will be completely honest with you based on the um what happened last night i don't think an 18 percent increase in mob kill your will pass it's that's just my opinion i could be completely not really wrong but that's a whole lot of the cutting to do and you're not getting a whole lot out of it for a tax increase a completely different scenario um is that we would cut one point four million dollars in spending and increase the fund balance contribution by bringing our roxbury students to union elementary school so that's the breakdown of where that saving where that one point four million dollars in spending comes from um if we were to do a scenario like this then the potential tax increase assuming the dollar yield is at nine thousand seven hundred seventy five dollars the tax increase at Montpelier would be eleven point six nine percent and at roxbury would be one point six three percent a different scenario is that we could do both of those things if we did both of those things then that's a two point one million dollar cut in spending our contribution from the fund balance of five hundred seventy five k and that gets us sorry to an eight point two one percent increase in Montpelier and a negative one point five three decrease in roxbury if we were to do both of those slides so essentially take the stuff out of it take the bullets out of it we have to cut our general budget by nearly three million dollars to get below ten percent increase in taxes um i don't know how to do that if we don't bring roxbury students to union and i'll just be perfectly honest about that that's a significant cut in our budget um from an educational standpoint in terms of what you feel would be in the best interests of the kids in the classroom what you feel would have the least impact on your programming and your ability to give kids the education that they want which of those three slides do you feel has the less direct impact on kids and the educational services you and your administration want to provide can you speak up a little bit sure he asked which is which has the least impact on the educational services that we can provide um the three scenarios of the three scenarios i can say that um the first scenario with the basically those cuts are essentially with the exception of the roxbury late bus all come from Montpelier schools um with the with the first scenario alone systematically that has this tremendous impact on our system because the people who do those jobs already are important to our systems um and one of the major conversations that we had earlier was how do you break up those particularly the mrea positions because some mrea positions may not influence a significant number of students on a daily basis because their caseloads are very small because of the supports they're giving students however um there are oftentimes our students who need the most support um and so then when you flip it and we said okay so which positions may not be working with students with the most needs then you're going into fine arts and music essentially um which is not something anybody wants to do either so there's no good scenario there for um programming and what we want to offer for kids and when you look at bringing roxbury to union elementary school am i confident that the kids at roxbury would have an excellent education at union elementary school absolutely i would send my own kids to union elementary school and pretty much any classroom there because they're wonderful um and the experience is wonderful at union elementary school and i can hear the roxbury community i understand that that that is the the center of their community i think that there's part of that challenge in debate is that there's a logic to it there it's logical to bring roxbury students to union as a class saver and and that it doesn't have an educational impact necessarily on the kids from roxbury if we're talking educational impact um and there's an emotional argument that logic loses to emotion pretty much every time so um that's a that's a really tricky scenario however i am quite positive that my colleagues at union elementary school would provide a wonderful education um just as we've heard tonight from roxbury families that mainstream middle school provides a wonderful education to students from roxbury as well i think it was the summer maybe before i was on the board or it might have been the summer before um that there was a staffing issue at roxbury where there was like a last minute attempt to hire somebody for some grade last year last summer actually it's happened every year pretty much but last summer resource i feel like you know with roxbury in a tenuous situation if that would happen again it might be even harder to fill it we are we are predicting that just alone just with this conversation alone with this whole budget season alone roxbury will be in a tenuous situation with staffing again so that you know and in that thing that i'm describing that i wasn't here for um was was bringing the union uh bringing the roxbury students to union considered as a backup if that position couldn't be filled our grades three four because that was the position that couldn't be filled that it can mean it could be an eventuality anyway do you have any what's going on i do want to stress that um the way our contract way a union contract is and i know most people know this but sometimes it's hard when emotions emotions start running high the way our union contract is is run is that there's a seniority list that we have and there is no roxbury versus montpelier on that some seniority risk it's an mrps seniority list and so um what we look at is licensure area and where people were hired within that licensure area so if the board decided to close roxbury village school it wouldn't be like the roxbury village school teachers no longer have a job at mrps it's based on seniority and so most of them would be um most of the classroom teachers would be folded into the openings that are already happening at union so the the riffs that would happen would be the newest teachers by um area and it regardless of what school it's just the youngest that are not necessarily youngest but the newest teachers and because of resignations and other riffs we've already planned there would be no like there would be a place for everybody and those would be lateral notes in terms of the yeah position yeah as of right now living can you really quickly can you repeat what you just said because maybe i misunderstood it and i think it's an important one yeah so because we're under a union contract um there is no employee here who's a roxbury village school employee or a union elementary school employee or a mainstream middle school employee it's based on their licensure category and everybody is placed in a licensure category and then you're basically ordered in terms of your date of hire um and so if there are riffs that with no resignation so we we're not filling you know if there's a resignation and uh riff then the person who's ripped moves into that resignation that position you know we just don't hire for that position they just have rights to it already um i like to think of it as the union owns those positions and licensure areas so um people would just move slide over into um union elementary school if there are case six educated educator for instance um openings that are already there i have two questions well and really quickly i thought i heard you just say that given the the current known resignations that no current teachers would would be rift only positions that don't won't have a person in the next year no not no no teacher positions classroom teachers because part-time employees are are placed on their salaries are on the seniority scale based on their part-time equivalency and roxbury has a lot of part-time employees for specials for instance uh and and most of those people are on the lower end of the seniority category okay thank you i remember my two questions um one is um so when when riffs are made is there any consideration of competence yeah okay that's a little scary and um and then um go ahead because i need to remember my second question confused about slide six um are the the bullets under like the supply salary and benefits are those cuts related to like would that like go with busing students to us or like yeah they would okay yeah so if you add those numbers up they come to around 1.4 million dollars and so those are positions of of like employees at rvs positions because we wouldn't the supplies would already be in unions like they move into union so we wouldn't have those those budget lines anymore um so uh it'd be supplies salaries and benefits that's about what it equals to um to piggyback on that so are there costs associated with sending rvs students to us i see that these are the things like these costs you know would no longer be line items but in terms of transportation or special education are there any costs that you can name or have explored that are associated with sending students no because we already send the bus we already have a middle school and high school bus so the kids would jump on that bus and there's there's a quick capacity on that bus those buses hold 75 kids okay yeah so they would jump on that bus um and we'd have a full bus now instead of a quarter full bus k through 12 one bus yeah um so they so we already have the transportation faked in i would suggest the board if the board were to go with a decision like this that we'd keep the late bus except the late bus primary responsibility would be to pick up kids from part two and union and bring them back to roxbury so it would be like a six o'clock there would be no like six thirty seven thirty late bus you know it'd be five thirty six o'clock for the to prioritize kids who go to part two and i think currently the east roxbury like the first pickup is at six thirty in the morning so we would be talking about kindergarten potentially age students getting on a bus at six thirty in the morning and traveling for an hour hour and ten minutes to get to uvs i don't know how stacy who's our bus coordinator yeah would change the routes right and anyway i mean there could potentially i i don't know because i don't do this part this is like the most convoluted job in the world yeah but um there could be if people drop kids off at roxbury village school so that they could leave later you know and have one common pickup you know or at a safe space yeah for kids that might be an option they choose but i don't want anybody put me on that because it's not my decision to make but it but stacy and her team would would be working with that i think i'm also thinking about wellness readiness to learn and the prospect of a five-year-old being on a bus for an hour and ten minutes feels impossible um in terms of that student's ability to come into a classroom but i know that these are details and this is but i'm just the detail and it's also something that's very common in vermont an hour and ten minutes i think we heard an average of 45 minutes from tina last time this is tina's sort of you know uh robe research and i recall it thank you um but that's not uncommon uh i will say um my child is not five and i recognize that yeah to go the four miles from his high school to my house is an hour and 45 minutes i get it the way that yeah exactly exactly well yeah i would be interested in learning about possibilities to minimize bus time including spending more money on more transportation options um an hour and ten minutes even though it may not be unusual for vermont i think it's too long for a five-year-old so another bus a van some logistical changes even if they do cost money to minimize that and it seems like the number coming through is about four it seems like they're gonna be identified for next year we have three three i mean four lined up right now but it's only i mean it seems like for three people you can identify who they are and try to make their situation so i don't want kids waiting outside for a bus in the dark i think i'm gonna just put a time out because this is not the conversation we need to have right now because you're not making the decision right now right you're looking at what like what the board you what really the board should be thinking about right now is what's the tax increase you think you can pass and how are you gonna get there um not necessarily busing kids so i just to echo what jaynie said back at the beginning and i was sort of preparing for tonight and this is not an isolated conversation that we're having here in mrps that 29 out of the 93 school budgets that were voted on yesterday failed so that's about 30 of all school budgets so while this is incredibly painful and this is our problem to solve it also reflects a statewide message and challenge to our lawmakers about how our education funding works and i think that this sort of 30 of budgets being i remember in 2014 when a whole lot went down after act 46 and apparently that was only 14 percent of budgets were voted down and this is 30 percent of budgets so i'm hoping our lawmakers are listening and i i know they're aware of the challenges because i spent a lot of time over there but um that this system is not tenable for vermoners anymore and that school boards across the state are having to have this exact same conversation um i also read and i think it was vt digger that health insurance alone makes up 42 million dollars of that increase and so um again this is just to put in context about how little control the school boards have over the spending and frankly the property tax system right i was in florida last week in a small high school in central florida and they had every possible everything for their students i went to a softball game and they have all kinds of things and the reason is there are places that in the rest of the country that if you have the means you can do all kinds of boosters and all kinds of things you can do to bring money into your school but vermont has made a commitment that we're all responsible for educating all of our students and i say that because i think what i saw is that even if we did these like drastic decimating cuts for our district both in staffing and in buildings we still will have an eight percent increase for Montpelier voters so even with like really just ripping ripping this whole district to shreds we're going to have an eight percent increase and that's um a little heartbreaking it's a lot heartbreaking um so i just i i just wanted to kind of provide that bigger context because i know we wrestled with some of our budget decisions in the last several months and it was really tough to see that oh even if we made some pretty substantial changes the tax rate implication was still not that great so um you know i think the legislature really needs to readdress this i know they're well aware of the problem i know we need more housing we need people who can actually afford to come here and live here and share in the property tax burden but a lot of the um a lot of the financial pressures that are on us and 29 other districts plus the six or eight however didn't even vote because they postpone their vote um is out of our control um so i just hope that our voters understand that even if we rip things to shred there will be an eight percent increase in our taxes and that is not something we can we don't have that much control of it that's you know we shouldn't and no one should be surprised by it i mean that was the full intent of act 127 Montpelier and in the minds of legislature has been getting a benefit for since act 60 by the people's being mis-weighted they corrected it and they wanted to do it all in one year and so i'm i'm just frankly shocked that everyone is so surprised by what's going on because it's all engineered yeah i think one of the challenges it's off topic too is that even districts that act 127 supported because they got more weights benefited failed yesterday and so why why is that happening frankly northeast failed yesterday like they were one of the biggest beneficiaries of it so it's there's there's questions to be had there that speaks to what's happening you know yeah and i'm yeah i think all that's really valid and important to keep in mind i also think that there are things that the board could do there's there's a big difference in people's budgets in people's ability to pay for piano lessons to buy groceries to do things they need to do between a 24 percent increase and a 12 percent increase and there's a very substantial difference between a 24 percent increase and an eight percent increase and i think we need to deliver i think we need to keep pushing the legislature really for i think some major changes in how we fund education i think the fact that a lot of these factors are out of our control does not excuse us from making tough decisions of things that are in our control that i think can make a real difference in the cash flow with people's houses and i think from what i'm hearing we have some decisions that might be very tough that may may help people out and may not have big long-term educational impacts and things that we can work out of work with tough as they may be they're there i had one more i'm sorry i didn't think this earlier is there any way to know what our budget would look like next year i remember emma was trying to say this you're killing me because you know there there is if we just if one of the speakers earlier is like if we just have to keep doing this every year we have to make some we have to make some big decisions and try to be as strategic as we can because i don't think the legislature is going to save the day with the yield and i don't think act 127 is going to change the third time maybe it will so i think one of the changes one of the significant contributors to the f y 25 increases because the the board quite rightly negotiated a much higher salary increase for our teachers and our instructional assistance that was well deserved and that's part of our part was part of one of our pressures and we will be going into negotiations again with both of those units and i think we have to get creative with our partners in those units around how do we how do we create high quality contracts that may not necessarily have the monetary increase that they got in the last contract negotiation that was a big part of the pressure that we're facing right now i thought of my second question and that is in terms of absorbing students from roxbury space and teachers and support staff like do we need the entire staff from roxbury to make that happen and is there room at union for more classrooms are analyzed our class size policy and the numbers that we have currently at union and at roxbury and yes we can because those we can fit the kids in union and still have a little the slide six it says the busing to ues it says the increase the fund balance contribution by 575,000 that's in addition to what was the original fund balance contribution 475,000 and we have 1.6 million in the fund balance after the 4.75 4,475 so that's still that still leaves another 400,000 it actually is about a million because the 1.6 is is is considering that we are already going to use 475 the four sorry yeah so yeah so there's a million dollars in our fund balance and originally the response to using that was we need to save it for our cliff when the 5 cap goes away the 5 cap has gone away now why are we not using that i mean and and and because what's happening is a kick in the teeth to roxbury when that's available and this is a partnership it's going to continue to be a partnership unless some really dramatic changes happen it's going to be tough to have a successful partnership when you've been kicked in the teeth it's not enough i know but so we'd have about i think i think if i remember correctly it was like 800,000 dollars because you have a policy that says you have to have a certain amount in there and so i believe that was about 800,000 left there's other legislation that's pressuring the schools so we've put this would put about a million in from the fund balance in which was way more than we expected and another 800,000 dollars would eliminate any use of that fund balance going forward it wouldn't decrease the tax rate considerably it would decrease it but not considerably if we just use that what should i say we just use that and we also have other legislation around PCBs that has not been paused this building was built at the time when PCBs were used in the caulking we are expecting it to have PCBs in it what was the what is the cost of building a new school in burlington it's like 26 28 million it has to go to bond if it if there's a high PCB level one million dollars is not going to do it not going to do anything that's not true my understanding is that u32 it depends on the level the way that the burlington high school was constructed it was particularly toxic and unusually toxic like u32 has some pcbs it's going to be a pretty modest modification that you know they're not going to have to rebuild that building did the state pause the pcb testing uh they're talking about the house that is trying to get it through but then they've put some money aside that money's already spent by north country and or will be spent by north country and the other buildings that found pcbs and i think for out of burrows and furlington yeah i'm understanding like pcbs does not be able to tear around your building furlington was a unique case you have to do remediation but most buildings were not built the way the burrowing high school was built and and we will have to pay for it yeah and we'll have to go ahead and i think it's more like 60 million for known by republic no like that has the legislature said that this is pcb remediation this is school responsibility yes and no uh so they put aside some funds for the um for remediation mitigation that's going to be used up by the people who have already been found over the limits that the legislator set legislation set they have no other fund for that nor are they thinking about it so they're trying as jake said the house ed committee is trying to put legislation forward to pause the testing um indefinitely until there's a funding source for it that can be found um it's my understanding the senate education committee is not interested in taking that up but i could be proven wrong and until we do have signed legislation we're going to have to assume that that i we can cross our fingers the day i got the letter from msms and us but we had no pcbs in there i did a little poop and holler and i would do the same thing here um but until we know for sure that they're pausing that legislation we have to be mindful of it because of when this building was built and i forgot that you went yeah i know it's like in a year or something when is our testing coming spring okay this year i believe this year yeah oh i thought it wasn't i thought it was a year later and you're told me or whatever they say important yeah and you're told me maybe it's roxbury that's in the spring but we're not concerned about roxbury because of when i was built so it's 2025 what fiscal year will we expect possible mediation but largely it's going to need we'll have to it probably wouldn't be something certainly correct me if i'm wrong liby that we would include in a budget in the way that it's like a budget line item it's more like it's we should make sure to have our savings account pretty full in order to use that kind of money and or capital plan money i guess it just depends on how much it would cost yeah we've got money accessible and that's not to say or scare anybody and the board could say don't worry we'll worry about that bridge when we cross it sure that's your prerogative to do um but it's a reality that we have on our plates that my colleagues who are going through it right now can tell you it's not fun and it's not inexpensive yeah yeah i'll just say my own opinion is it doesn't make sense to me to just go ahead and use all of our savings this year to drive to drive down tax increases without reopening our budget and actually looking at what could we continue to take out of it that we didn't originally consider and i know we're not making that decision tonight and we've given ourselves um a couple more weeks to make that decision so i fully understand liby why things like you know facilities or other like transportation stuff isn't in the presentation you have for us tonight and i guess what i'm requesting is if there are other options that you could continue to consider that would be included on what you have for slide five um things like i'm looking at the um presentation you gave to us on november 29th where you had those three pie charts and transportation was a very significant amount of idea number three for example and facilities was a fairly significant amount i can't remember if that slice of the pie included not in not contributing to the capital plan or if it was actually from the facilities line item but my recollection is we after that meeting when we had new information from the state we reduced the amount that we were going to cut from facilities so i would i i would appreciate seeing a few other options um the next time we meet so there is no more transportation there we learned when roxbury's afternoon bus couldn't run or but morning bus couldn't run rather the amount of people who rely on that because they don't have automobiles that's so that's off the table okay um i union elementary school busing has been around forever the board wants me to find out how much that is i can i would recommend against it yeah so that is the transportation that's available to the board i think in my opinion you can tell me to do something else um the the capital fund was a need if that is that if you saw a major number of facilities that would be the capital fund okay um that was like four thousand years ago in my brain so i'm not remembering exactly and it's it's not a dollar amount here on this slide yeah if it was a big piece of a pie chart then that included the capital plan we can certainly look at deferring maintenance we we absolutely could do that i would recommend thinking hard and long about that but we could i did not have a chance to go into andrew's budget today or have a conversation with andrew today around his facilities piece i don't think we will put it this way the amount of money we're looking at in order to get a lower tax increase is pretty significant and yeah i could probably get andrew to find you know maybe up to a hundred thousand dollars or something but it's it's not going to replace full bullets right yep and i think you rightly talked about we don't want elementary kids walking down for lynn street or from town hill road down to the elementary school i think that's just not realistic well and there are elementary there are kids in my career who live on a who ride the bus for almost an hour because that's how far they live yeah i'm good to clarify questions can you just maybe i spaced out and missed this part probably did can you clarify why in both these plans were increasing with unbalanced contribution so i don't have so we don't have to cut as much so that the 575 when talking with christina um was the who apologizes she's not here today she's on vacation um the 575 was what she and i both felt okay-ish putting towards more so we had to cut less um the other thing i want to point out about the fund balance that i didn't say earlier was that this is the last time that we've you've rather encumbered money for a budget so for the past four or so oh christ as long as i've been superintendent i feel like there's been a four hundred thousand dollar allotment encumbered from the fund balance that was supposed to go as a revenue source in each year's budget that this is f y 25 was the last year the board had encumbered any month money so there is no more encumbrance going forward from the fund balance yeah and if we use all the fund balance that's money that we have to find next budget cycle and i don't understand the encumbrance part so the board can and when the money goes into the fund balance we're just like our savings account you know money we don't spend at the end of the year and it grew significantly through covid quite honestly um we got a lot of federal support and we didn't use as much you know we didn't have a substitute teacher for a year and a half for instance um so the fund balance grew considerably um and the board can what's called encumber that money for a reason and when you when the board votes to encumber it that means that that money is essentially taken out of that savings account and put as a hold um until you spend it for that reason right yeah that's true yeah yeah yeah kind of sure so for the past several years i've been super this is my six year superintendent my six budget season season we have had um a planned encumbrance of four hundred thousand dollars and our fund balance each year so the board has said we're going to put four hundred thousand dollars towards our next year's budget as a revenue source to bring down the the education spending um sometimes the board has used the four hundred thousand and sometimes you haven't had to because other because in that year we didn't spend all the money you know that we planned on spending um so sometimes we continue to put money back into the fund balance because we didn't we didn't use that money whether it was we didn't put a position or whatever so the board had planned that you they planned it ahead of time right so they had it planned through fy 25 the budget year fy 25 which is what we're trying to revote on now um for four hundred thousand dollars there is no more encumbered money so for the fund for the budget revenue source so moving forward you'd have to encumber it again um with this kind of contribution which is about a million dollars you'd have probably about eight hundred thousand dollars left to put me on that exact amount but i believe it's about eight hundred thousand dollars left so if you encumbered another four hundred thousand for fy 26 and you're cutting that in half of the usable money so i'm i'm not sure if i'm putting words in red's mouth or if i actually heard red um uh allude to this um but is it not true that over the last five or six budget periods um our district benefited from rocksbury being a part of it and thus contributed to the increase in fund balance accumulated over the last five or six years i can't answer that scott because i don't the fund balance isn't like how it's how the money goes into the fund balance isn't different isn't differentiated by school now so i couldn't yeah i understand i understand that but you met you made the point that that covet contributed and it was the same time period right and so i just i think it's important to recognize that the the things that contributed to our budget including covet and including the benefit that we got because of the merger with rocksbury like should should all be mentioned not just some of i'm not yeah i'm not sure that's totally totally accurate i mean i i think both districts in some ways benefited from the merger i think that's that's true i mean both districts got a you know a discounted tax rate for four years that's probably yeah i don't think that that counted into the fund balance because when we planned our budgets we planned with that you know that that that revenue that that was part of our revenue calculations and our tax calculation i mean our fund balance is largely because you know frankly we we had some windfalls and we did some over budgeting i mean the the fund balance happens when they say you plan for a teacher and you plan for a hundred thousand and then they come in and they opt for or you you know you hire someone who's more junior than you anticipated and then they don't have a family so they don't take the family plan yeah and then you you know you're the hundred thousand dollars that you budget you get 35 back um we were just lucky for several years yeah i yeah thank you jim for that explanation again and i still think that we over budgeted as a result of that fact that our tax rates were were less impacted because of the merger no no i just don't think it's as direct i don't think it's as direct as that it's not like we were saying oh we have a six cent tax discount so therefore we're going to put more money into the budget we made that we we created the budget that we needed at the time and then if we didn't actually end up hiring for a certain teaching position um then we could save that money or like jim said if somebody didn't choose the more expensive health plan we could save that money so i just don't think it's as direct of a connection as that i i guess i disagree i mean we've we've been talking about positions that we budgeted in roxbury that have not been filled so that money that was budgeted was not going to pay for staffing in roxbury so it was going into our fund balance so i agree that it's not a like direct um you know impact but but i think it's naive to say that that it is not due to that at all i to be clear though there that's only been one position this past school year so it's been the point with the only position that hasn't been filled in roxbury in the past six years that i've been here is point five purity k for f y 24 which is not a one point five million dollar position right well and maybe this is a detail that's not as important but that tax discount ended in f y 23 right yeah it was i think four years after i have my 23 it was small i mean it started large and by it went it it was gradually decreasing anyway it's over it's over it has ended it has ended then for a couple years and you know it hasn't been significant since 2020 and i also i mean i wanted i i do want to give a little bit of the the history with because i was on the committee i mean all we agreed to was to keep the school open for four years and if you look at the agreement there was a very distinct reason that the board can close it because if you look at other merger agreements like for instance wash central the towns have approval and i think it was very much contemplated at the time that it was a small school with a difficult to sustain model i think there was hope that it would continue i think there was a lot of knowledge that it was a difficult school to sustain and the reason that the the power was vested with the board and not the towns is because we knew it would be a difficult thing for roxbury to close obviously and and that was pretty evident at the time and that's why the agreement was structured the way that it was structured and i know that's a tough thing to say and i'm seeing nods from nancy and tina who are also in the room uh that is why we structured it that way right and both towns agreed to it yeah no i mean it's it's out of the box decision and um you know i think from what i'm told and based on the experience of families that are in all three schools including rbs not ues um yet um is that they're having really good experiences and when compared to surrounding districts they're happy with the experiences that they're having um a rushed process is certainly not anyone's desire um no it's not it's it's not and we added a lot of positions with esser funds that we folded into our budget and those are what replaces the rbs line i don't necessarily because we had budget cuts to go with those those positions as we moved please be completely from our besser into local budget we had decreases to match it for almost every position except for one maybe two and that was not just this year right right that's been happening across the last three years because we knew our besser was going away so we've been doing that um consistently and those positions add to this experience that people are happy to be happy that and probably that surrounding districts don't have yeah no those positions have enabled us to really give i think the social and emotional support and academic support yeah i just feel compelled to mention right now obviously this is very loaded and it's very emotional and as we we kind of use language like unsustainable and things like that i just want to say that the experience that students and teachers i believe are having at rbs right now are really positive and there's a lot of really wonderful things happening there right now and a lot of community building and a lot of connecting and many kids feel that rbs is their home away from home and 80 percent i don't know of rbs kids arrive at 738 o'clock and they leave at five o'clock because we are largely a working class community where families need to tap into the afterschool care program that we have i just feel compelled i know teachers are probably listening or are going to listen later and i want them to know that they are deeply loved and appreciated and they are doing an excellent job um so i just want to make sure that we're also careful with our language because we're talking about current work that people are doing every day and we are dropping our kids off to kids to people who love them care for them root for them every single day and it is so meaningful to us i have a head cold and i'm emotional so pardon but um i just want to make sure that we're also acknowledging that i'm not saying you know but the when we say things like unsustainable it can just feel like a dig and and maybe that's factual i just feel compelled i want to send the word out to those folks and to our families to make sure they know and that all of you know that that is the current lived experience in roxbury of the school no and i i i didn't mean to undermine any of that i and i i know there's fantastic work doing and i know uh and great gains underway which i think we'll see i know shannon miller is doing a great job i know the staff is doing a great job i think you can have people doing great work and giving a great experience in a model that is is hard to maintain absolutely i just want to make sure too for the public knowledge because i think sometimes there is some derogatory language used toward roxbury i want to make sure that from my direct experience that i am living on a day-to-day basis i just want to make sure that that record is very clear and what the experience is at that school right now it's from a mathematical perspective um you know it looks like roxbury village costs a lot more per student but act 127 acknowledged that sparsely populated areas and small schools we don't get it i know i know that we don't we don't receive it we all understand it but you know if if roxbury was analyzed on its own then the cost per pupil would be comparable i don't i haven't figured out but it'd be probably comparable to what we spend a union but because the demographics are all blended together it doesn't work out and and that's that's a flaw in the law it is and that doesn't go unrecognized in roxbury it's a really tough one to swallow that we are bringing up particular demographic particular statistics that we do not maybe rvs doesn't directly read the benefits for it's not to say that those benefits couldn't be folded in and they couldn't be um realized uh you know in a uds setting however that is a really and i think it's a really unique um fallout of 127 because i don't think we saw a lot of mergers with like such tale of two city demographics that came together you know i mean i think that's out there but this is really unique in that we were only two communities the the demographics were quite disparate and um and it's it's an unintended yet again consequence of 127 so i just want to go back to the bigger picture and what the defense what our administration has proposed here that my shoulders we did get a very clear message yesterday um i i assumed that the city budget would also struggle the city budget did not struggle the school budget was thoroughly rejected so i do feel like we spent the last months trying to find some machination and i'm as guilty of it as i'm more guilty of it than anyone about complaining about the legislature but the reality is that this board has a very acutely painful problem right now and if we don't do something substantial we're either gonna kick the can down the road and have to do that again next year and the year after and the year after or our budget is going to get voted down again and we're going to be decimated and back here so i don't i think and i this pains me as someone who was a big proponent of the track and our students experiences and i'm a popular property taxpayer too i get it and the director of property taxes say i really get it it's not fun um but i i do feel like we were given um a pretty strong message for better or worse um in the budget not passing i do think i hope that a lot of that was also directed at as part of this 30 percent of school by just being voted down as a message to lawmakers but meanwhile we have to do two three weeks to come up with something that we think has a chance of passing i'm not even sure if 18 percent still being an increase um would would pass um our monthly voters i don't know so i just want to get back to like big picture we have like not a lot of time i do want to honor that um i i given that we have a longer time frame with our talk with john than i thought uh there will be other opportunities to come out of the budget i think what we're going to do tonight is to hold on to is to give hopefully maybe some direction for what to present i think what we probably want to see i'm assuming we're gonna want a meeting sometime next week um and then our meet on the 20th will probably make a decision uh so the our timeline is not as as uh as it's not quite as compressed as we originally thought so with that i do want to honor the the public comment i would like to say if you think you can hold off till next time hold off the next time if you can keep your comments brief keep your comments brief um but i do want to honor that and if if you can it's nine o'clock i think you can hold your your thoughts till later um you probably won't get a ton of complaints but we certainly want to hear hear your voice but we we have more time to hear your voice than we thought we did uh so with that i jim and then why do we want to give the direction we want to see when we wanted to after public comment that's fine i think it might be good to just get a flavor of the public comment first and then tell the other people's feel because it seems like we've already kind of made our minds and people might feel they have a little less influence um morgan and jim and getting your name on us ben ben joe uh anyone else online just tim senate tim senate and because it is late i'm going to open it up for two more minutes if you don't get in two more minutes i'm not going to keep adding because i want to know the amount so i can give times so three we have three people online anyone else online please raise your hand and get the cue anyone else in the room i counted about five if you could i'm not going to time you if you could try to keep your remarks to about a minute that would be hugely appreciated um so whoever wants to go first in the room please i'm susette ballard and um i'm a lot pillar resident and um have some experience in education sorry i looked through you go ahead stand right here i just wanted to suggest to you that as you face all of these um decisions and how complicated it is and i really do understand how complicated it is that your communication um you you started to talk about a communication piece being in one of the your committees that that be right next to every single decision that you make how are you going to communicate that to the public you know the fact that you can you know take a million dollars off and you're getting only down to 18 percent you know what what is what is one percent how much money do you have to cut from your budget to get one percent three million is going to only get you to eight so you know what are all the things that you really need to help the community understand and the whole traditional part about all that stuff that's not in your control and um the legislature's fumbling but it's not a time to blame but it is a time to let people know what is really going on and i think also the board has and jim you alluded to this earlier that you do have a responsibility to advocate for this community at the legislative level and whether that becomes a piece of your commute committee structure going forward in this particular time is something to consider but i do think you have that that responsibility so i got see at the next meeting uh whoever wants to step up next please do hi everyone joe carol president of the montpellier oxbury educators association i'll be quick i'll respect that boundary jim uh the first thing is the notice of riffing everyone i just can't stress enough would be a really it would be really hard to be a teacher while that happened and i think that would throw the system into terminal and i know livi was implying that so i'm not trying to impugn what she said i'm just merely underscoring that that would be really hard for all the teachers during the hiring season i'm sure it would drive many of them to school spring and once you're on school spring the openings that are there just you would see turnover and i don't think we want to be contemplating that this year i wanted to provide more context about the raises while they were generous relative to previous years and we appreciate the board's cooperation to that end we're still 14th out of 20 schools in washington county for our base salary and 12th out of 20 for our max salary and given the cost of living in the healthcare increases many teachers just didn't see significant raises those two things the latter of which are outside your control and just providing context that even though relative to previous years they were generous we're still trying to claw our way up that ladder regarding riffs and evaluations and competence i hear what you said lin and that's true strictly speaking it's only on seniority but there are mechanisms for teachers to be evaluated deemed incompetent and then either sent on an improvement cycle or not renewed i know statutory requirements make admin cuts not possible for all the admin and livi you and i've talked about that but it doesn't feel great that even though there are some admin that are subject to being rift as it were uh that's off the table this year especially as we contemplate more teachers and more other educators being rift i i think that's worth the board's attention in future years i'm not deprecating the work that the administrators do in any way shape or form but they cost a lot more than teachers and in order to bear these cuts equitably i think we should all be considering that down the road and last but not least um the budget failed 55 to 45 i wonder if a smaller cut not going down to say 10 percent i wonder if a smaller cut would sway some of the middle or the road voters that's a guess i have no evidence for that but i wonder how many could truly be swayed with just a smaller cut not as catastrophic a cut as going down to 10 percent thank you i spoke fast i'm sorry one of the honor of the boundary so my name is uh ben pinkis of a graduate of rocksbury village school and um one minute i took about a half hour's worth of notes here so i'll try to be concise and do 60 seconds um just a couple things this this morning i spoke to two teachers at rvs and um just checked in and apologized for what happened with the montpelier uh school budget getting voted down and they said they loved the school they gave great feedback on the principal um on the gains academic gains made since covet and i mentioned that one um really cruel voice hard hearted voice in montpelier was like oh well you know just so you know um she said to me most likely september comes around and the teachers won't be there and i mentioned that to these two teachers and they were pretty upset they looked at each other and say we want to be there they will love the school and um and i want to say that the school the heart of the school is the children i shouldn't be testifying the children should be testifying the teachers too um and talking about what it means to go to our roxbury village school i went to roxbury village school when it's a two room school house and i think i mentioned this before but it's worth mentioning that the small rural school is something it's a something about the small rural school the heart of the heart of an american tradition that's that's dying and with the death of the american school i took a whole bunch of notes on this often dies infrastructure social services community center dies with it property values plunge and so i don't you guys are doing a really really hard job thank you um so i guess i'm not really testifying or speaking before you all but i want to speak to the city of this city of montpelier and the people in montpelier just say um we are we have a wonderful thriving community i could if i had time i could tell you all the the um nonprofits that are working in town and working with vermont council and rural development hopefully for community visits project working with usda rural ag aid um to get low income folk access to things like furnaces um roxbury roots we're working with um um making food for the food shelf and community dinners there's a roxbury crafters group that we we live in a tremendously vital community that will be devastated economically emotionally aspirations will be leveled if the school closes so i'm pleading maybe not to you i've seen the writing you know i'm not a i'm not a utopian i don't have a utopian fantasy i saw the writing on the wall but i just want to say maybe to the residents of roxbury of of montpelier um please please help us keep this school open for one more year we need more time there has not been enough time the language has been dreadful of peace people in montpelier describing uh roxbury village school as this somehow subsidized as if we we don't pay taxes um and i just want to say and as you mentioned jake about the terrible irony of here act 127 which was supposed to address equity and this is this this is a this a school that needs certainly a lot of health and services is is being really hurt by it so i'm kind of appealing to the the voters of montpelier to say hey you know if you believe in a progressive vision for rural development and growth and sustainability please find a compromise in this budget um at least for this next year thank you hi everyone um morgan loyte ues teacher parent um and taxpayer in montpelier um am i right that the roxbury community voted to pass the budget that's correct i just want to start by thanking the voters in roxbury for um supporting their schools and their school budget um sorry also i really just want to urge we've talked about it here and the the message to the voters of so many school budgets being voted down i really want to urge everyone here to take action all of the thoughts that we have about the problem lying with the legislature and with the funding at the state level are are very supported here in this room but unless we take action to make our voices heard and contact our legislators and contact the governor who won't be listening anyway but i i really just want to urge everyone listening online and everyone in the room to take some action today to urge our legislators to fix funding for school education or for schooling in vermont um i also want to urge the board not to make a decision to close roxbury village on short notice the last time that you met you made a decision to form a committee to investigate i really believe that this irreversible decision deserves um deserves a process and a timeline that's respectful of the students in that school and of the staff in the community who has supported that school and now ours as well um i shared joe's concern about riffs and i think that's unavoidable at this point but i believe that that uncertainty um will not only make showing up for work difficult but i really believe that we will lose the high quality staff because when everyone gets a rift notice you start to feel like your position is not so certain there's probably some good communication for our administrators to do around that to try to reduce the impact of this budget situation finally i just want to end by asking you know in that slides that will be shared there are so many things i don't know what the dollar amount is that we could save but there are so many creative ways to save money that i'm not seeing in these slides and so i want the board to ask questions about things like increasing class size at the elementary level that's what i know best multi-h classrooms um what when i started in montpelier roxbury schools montpelier public schools um ues was a k5 school with declining enrollment do we have space to make ues k5 again and hold six through 12 at montpelier high school could we look at closing the middle school as opposed to roxbury village school do we have the capacity to house our students in another way what opportunities does our district have to generate income whether that's through tuition students or international students renting spaces these are questions that i would like the board to ask um before we look at cutting positions closing schools and reducing services for kids in our community thank you anyone else in the room i'll give another shot i'd like to thank you by the way for your comments because i think there are a lot of things that could be explored before you take the drastic action to close the school there's been i don't know how many times i've heard it that all the roxbury kids could get just as good or a better education experience at ues than they can in rvs well that's just not true um i don't think the ues kids take forest walks and have science in the forest or um you know go ice skating on their own ice skating pond you know i don't think they do those things and but roxbury kids do you know we have a new park right across the street from the school where they'll be able to have classes in the in the gazebo or or doing things that you know that you don't have access to here so we have an excellent program in roxbury and you're not going to save i've said this a hundred times you're not going to save the money you think you're going to save because at least 500 000 of what you attribute to roxbury is not going to go away that money is going to just be reabsorbed and you're still going to pay it it's liby salary it's her staff salary her her salary for for roxbury not her salary but her staff is uh oh what is it four hundred and forty five thousand dollars for the little three room school roxbury four hundred and forty five thousand dollars for your office in addition to that is operation maintenance services that's for mowing the lawn i guess and you know cleaning the building seventy seven thousand dollars you're going to get rid of those guys no they're going to come back and go to work here the the guy that mows the lawn comes out from montpellier mows the lawn comes back he's not going to go away those costs are going to be ongoing you're not going to save 1.5 million like people in montpellier want to throw around it just isn't going to happen in addition to that you know if you close ues nobody would even know it it's not a back street nobody even looks at it you know unless you live next door it could fall down you wouldn't even you know nobody in montpellier would care really certainly i wouldn't if i was driving through town you would never see it but in roxbury what are we going to do with that building it was built as a school building it was paid for when we joined with you guys we took on a portion of your debt and we've been paying a portion of that debt for the last five eight years or however it's been are we going to get any money back are you going to buy us out of this contract or are you just going to oh well we'll give you the building back for a dollar you know it's just not going to work you need to give us time to work out what we can do and how we can maintain that building because the cost of the cost of educating a kid in roxbury according to liby's slide 20 which jim says is meaningless you did say that the other night monday you said these numbers are meaningless it says but this number for roxbury is five thousand dollars more per kid than ues now that's probably just bussing you know what's five thousand dollars per kid and you know and our our numbers are going up your numbers are going down you know so you need to think long and hard about what you're actually saying and and people in long pillion need to think long and hard about what they say and how derogatory they are towards the town of roxbury you know we got forced into this merger we didn't have a choice we thought we were getting a good deal but if i can guarantee you the townspeople who voted on it never knew that we were going to get that you the decision to close it was going to be made by this board nobody in town knew that except for those people who were negotiated it was not widely known thank you ah yes we have three people on two people online um tim and melissa tim hi there can you hear me yeah um thank you all this is a really important meeting and very long um but i appreciate it uh this is tim synnet the father of two boys in ues and ms ms and i'm up with your resident um if we're setting the record straight as john wefrey wanted to do earlier this evening i would like to point out that the closure of roxbury village school was certainly discussed during the merger committee work uh meaning that meaning that closing rvs was not at all off the table they have a much larger longer comment so that i'll be emailing you all plus john and liby um but i just wanted to point to one quote from the minutes of february 6 2017 uh roxbury montelio school consolidation study committee of which john glee fray was chairperson in those minutes it says chairperson glee fray said that he is not interested in seeing rvs closed and that the distance from montelio would help keep the the building open because no one wants to bus young children large distances whereas if roxbury emerged with northfield it might be considered acceptable to bus young children to northfield i was going to read that again but i think i'll just let that sink in for a second um so chairperson glee fray himself discussed the possibility of a roxbury village school closure and i would argue that his calculation in that comment was both risky and more importantly manipulative thank you all for your time tonight and much appreciation for the week ahead thank you chairperson i would i would like to remind the public to please keep comments as impersonal as possible and then based on the facts uh i i i no i appreciate that i just i just i'm not sure i'm not sure it's helpful to say things like i think it's great to point out that comment and then it was okay i let me let me just say one last thing which is i think that john should apologize to tina munsey thank you yeah no john did the same thing and i think the reminders should go to john i and i i know it's it's it's there are other community members who who've said things this is hard i think we should trust that the intentions of everyone are are are are good and above board uh no sorry to call you out tim it's just i i don't know that's fine yeah i think it's good to point out that that it was discussed and john probably knew it at the time whether he was being manipulative or not i think is something that that hopefully and i think this for everyone i i think if we can avoid those characterizations i think we all have a better discussion um because there's a lot of misinformation out there so so um melissa yeah i know and thank you tim and i didn't mean to call you out i i apologize for that but i just wanted to use that opportunity to point out that if we can for everyone if we can keep keep it from being personal i think we'll all be better off uh melissa yes can you hear me yes all right thank you um i appreciate the comments that i heard from christin as well as some others uh tonight i think the busing situation as it was somewhat brushed off of the logistics and put on to the bus company i think uh needs to be at the forefront um i do not agree with kids kindergartners getting on the bus at 6 30 in the morning i also recognize i'm an aot person 32 miles of our town is back roads 10 miles of our road is pavement that bus never leaves pavement let that sink in 32 miles of people drive their kids to meet that bus multiple miles very few kids get to walk home and most of our kids don't use the bus because their parents already have to put them in the car to drive them to the bus stop so why not leave a little later and just drive them to school those same students will not be able to be dropped off at their houses at the end of the normal school day they will their parents would have to meet them at the end of the road because over 50% of our bus stops are road intersections they are not houses i know this is the case obviously in my appeal year but i watch i follow one of those buses every day when i pick up from main street and those students walk through two or three houses down to their house that is not the case with roxbury students that is why we have a robust after school program because those kids cannot go home and given the competitive nature of part two and other options and my appeal year for after school care it is my opinion you cannot absorb those kids into those programs with the timeline we are giving and those students then will have nowhere to go after school because we rely very heavily on the after school program in roxbury it's hard enough with middle school and high school students who also cannot walk home because they're walking seven or eight miles some of them that is just ridiculous and we already have to find options for those students to be picked up by other individuals or try to find activities after school that align with the bus that is provided you're now going to double that logistical nightmare for families when you add elementary school students into that thank you thank you um we have one more uh jacklyn sorry if i'm just pronouncing your name i'm looking at a zoom it's fine hi everyone jacklyn frazier i am also a roxbury school graduate i went to u32 high school and i have been abroad for the last 10 years and i moved back to roxbury i was not expecting to have my children be in a local school here but i've been incredibly thrilled with the results of them having attended the school i have a seven year old and a fourth grader who'll be heading into mom piliar next year i'm i'm exhausted i don't know how else to say it other than i am just exhausted with the back and forth just like i'm sure all of you are i'm a single parent i want to know what's happening next year so i make decisions that will allow me to take care of my children because as melissa just said i don't know what to do with them after school if i'm if i have to be responsible for them knowing we had already gotten a grant for after school programs next year knowing that i have to be there for my seven-year-old kid who by the way good luck to the bus driver who's going to have him on her bus her bus for an hour and a half i wish her the best of luck on that i do wonder what the plan is for other young children to be on that bus because they're going to need a lot of support um so i i'm just you know i want this to be wrapped up and as efficient a manner as it can be so that we can try to make the plans necessary to to deal with this major upheaval in our lives and as a graduate of roxbury of course i mean i can speak to all of my colleagues in roxbury school who've gone on to do amazing things we all came from a very tiny school but it was that um niche and that really special unique element of having it been such a small school that allowed us to spread our wings so broadly so thank you for your time thank you um i think that was the final uh hope to comment thank you thank you everyone um so in terms of our next steps my suggestion i'm happy to um have it amended is that we give libya some parameters of i think a slightly more formal budget presentation um i think we probably want multiple options my initial option is that you build on the three that you presented tonight and go into a little more depth and kind of put it kind of a little you know in the form that you put the original budget presentations in so we can really see it um and i know that you have christina back uh which i think will be helpful because i know she's just wrapping up her vacation so that would be my suggestion i don't know if people have other suggestions or more specific things you want to see i mean i think one one question that might be good for me to see is the came up is um your confidence level of of a transition if we do send you kids to us having things like part two will there will there be space okay um like having some answers to you know the house on that um i don't know if i'd have to be able to do that in a week yeah i mean like some of it like would we have space for you know take the transportation question can we get them there can we can we house them after school and not all the particulars but are there any big obstacles that you see yeah gotta stand up and scott go ahead scott yeah uh liby i know you had like less than 24 hours to put that presentation together and i really appreciate um for the next one um if you could be consistent in the scenarios the way that you describe so i think if i remember correctly in the first scenario you had things like fte's and then the second one you had a broken down by spending category um and so it's hard to compare sort of apples to apples that way um so as best as you can be consistent across the options would be my um request um and i also again know that you're you know working more than over time on this so i appreciate it yeah um i was just saying and thinking as you were asking for those other details that to me feels like the work we would be asking the committee to do to look into transportation after school options so i'm not sure we'd want to include those in the budget conversation i i think i mean the reason i have it is because if if we do opt to send ues students starting in fall i i think liby knows enough to know that like hey there's no way we can get that or like yeah we yeah as you know it's kind of the answer to chris chris and throw their question yes we have an existing bus we have room out of us i mean like the part two question like if there's a if there's gonna be an after school care problem do we know that immediately i mean i think the committee knows that i'm not sure we can get the committee to answer those questions if we have to pass a budget in three weeks i mean and if there's a major hurdle i would say that if i knew of a major hurdle right now i wouldn't be presenting it as an option to the board okay i guess i'm just thinking jim i we have heard from people who have deep concerns about the tax implications of a budget that was the size that we proposed and even maybe a little bit smaller we've also heard from people who have deep concerns about the life implications of making a decision that is irreversible to close a school within one month's time and i think that one of the things that has gotten challenging about these conversations is that we start to go down different tangents like should we put kindergartners on a bus when what we're really trying to do is figure out what the budget looks like and i understand that those are interrelated but we have also heard from members of both communities telling us take your time on a big decision like that and so i think it's more valuable for us as a board to look at the budget scenarios regarding the numbers that they represent and not the details of like what would it take to make it work if we were to close roxbury village school so i would rather that we but i think it's important that we have some knowledge about what those numbers mean and and i mean we can't make them in a vacuum we can't i mean we could just say liby find 1.5 million that you want and we'll pass it except that liby just told us if she if she saw a major hurdle to it she wouldn't have put it forward yes and good information to have yeah absolutely and so i think it's more our role to look at the numbers in the big picture and as liby said at the beginning of the budget conversation decide as a board what we think a renewed budget going back to our voters and another effort could pass and maybe there are board members who think a budget that looks more like 700 000 cuts really would pass maybe there are board members who say no way i think we got to go to 1.5 million maybe there are board members here we haven't discussed it and we're not going to tonight who say actually it should probably be 2.2 million that third scenario is looking pretty good to me because i'm really concerned about tax increases and i don't think it's worth us to get into the details of how would it work i think that is putting the card for the horse and i'm not i'm not finished and i think that there it's just my two cents as far as whether or not it makes sense to have that big decision happen within a month is that it would be really valuable to go through a full process which we have already begun and have that kind and ask the committee to dive into those questions and not do at the board level because this is what we have established and when when we look back on big decisions that we have had to make as a board i've only been here three and a half years but we've had some pretty big ones the times that we have taken our time like with school safety and really run a process we have been able to make to do the due diligence that it takes to make the best decision for our community and when we haven't run a real process we find ourselves with the decisions not fully embraced by the community and this is a decision that has way higher stakes than any of the other ones that we have considered before and feels valuable for both of our communities to do that due diligence and i don't think having the conversation about whether or not we can put kindergartners on the bus next week is the right time to have that conversation so i i think we just need to be looking at budget scenarios but how can we look at budget scenarios without knowing the implications of those budget scenarios because all of the things she put have different implications there are all all these decisions are going to be rushed you have the slide five that wasn't closing rocks break that's going to have implications it's going to have a different set of implications and those implications we're going to have to live with them closing rocks break is going to have implications it is going to have a different set of implications in slide five and we're going to have to live with them we have to make a rushed decision either way and we have to have some education on what the implications of those various decisions are it's not just about a number there's there are impacts behind those numbers and how we cut and where we cut and the choices we make are going to have lastly all of these all these decisions are potentially irreversible so i think we have to have some awareness of where the potholes are with all of these and and that's why i do want to point out that the thing you were asking about as far as awareness goes only pertained to closing rocks break village school just now when you were saying can you give us some scenarios of what it would look like to transition that's what i mean by when by putting the cart before the horse yes but we got some questions about that and some legitimate questions like you know like after school care is a big deal i you know i would love to hear more about the implications of getting rid of the ms ms bus as well so um yeah time is time it's late um and i know we talked about circling back to the committee and then mea you just brought it up and and margan brought it up before i think i think we need to make some decisions about the committee and let the committee do its work i know our time is short um i i don't know if it's possible i i heard joe's comment and just the idea of rift notices going out to all of the teachers is just just destroys me to my core can we not like perhaps work with the union to reopen that clause of the contract such that we can not send rift notices until maybe the end of april or you know like we're talking about trying to be flexible and the importance of of the process and yet i think it's just it's a little disingenuous to be into entering into the conversation about closing uh the roxbury village school after we just developed a process through which we all agreed we would go through before making a decision um so so i i do think we need to act um the committee as quickly as possible and do whatever we can to hold off on um on making a decision until we have the information that we need and again i don't know if it's possible i don't know what the implications are or even if it's possible to reopen the contract but but have those conversations and and then decide at this point we already know that we're gonna have we're past the march 30th deadline so so maybe we can hold off on sending rift notices to all our teachers um and give us some time to get into the end of april perhaps and let the committee meet for a month and go through the process and get the community input that we we said we all wanted yeah would um maybe i do appreciate the budget scenarios you put forward but i think one of the inadvertent sort of ways that that got teed up was it's sort of you know you had the cut Montpelier slide and then you had the cut ropster slide and it kind of i think teed up a bit of a combativeness between the two ideas and i think i wonder if we can have more of an a la carte options list kind of in the vein that scott suggested with numbers that were consistent across so we had a framing of you know fte's or this that whatever you can find but in a way that was we could understand it as compared to other options and just see a list of areas and sort of what the impact of that would be you know bullet or two right now seeing it as a package sort of package one versus package two doesn't doesn't quite feel right to me and i think while i understand that to realize the savings for you know if you're if you're trying to grab one point five million dollars at once there's a scenario where a lot of these have to come together i get that i think i'd rather look at a list that was um that we could understand and maybe have then have the discussion amongst the board to say okay well we think that this might be an area this might be an area we might end up in the place where it's you know if there is there is will to grab the one point five million dollar chunk but i i i really don't feel like and i recognize you know me has been here for three and a half years i've been here about three and a half hours so i don't have a lot of the background to understand and it may be obvious to everyone here but i can't based on what i've seen tonight make reasonable decisions and so i wonder if a more a la carte presentation would be helpful and if you have a timeline where we have specific questions what would that be so that we can kind of feel ready for the next conversation can't do that uh the challenge is that to get two numbers that i believe we need to get to to pass a budget you're talking about a significant number of fte so what you would see is 15 fte from mre mre yet i can't i can't do that from well you did that three in your slide yeah so it would be a bigger number right so then where would the the next logical question that i know these school board members will ask me is where is where they come from that position i guess i would i would ask that sort of we have the chance to do the math on that and say if we can just figure out well what is your sort of you know fte cost and then what's you know how many do you think like it's i'm not advocating that this is sort of an fte based approach in any way shape or form i just want to see a list because right now i just see a couple of sort of all or nothing scenarios that i'm not sure i guess i want to think a bit more whether there's different options between those it does feel like it can be broken down into a la carte pieces that feels like a single concept right and slide seems a little like roxbury some variation again because it could be like fight you couldn't could be roxbury roxbury is a truck yeah no i get i totally get that certain decisions might have to be carry and if we see a consequence but right now for example you know presumably there might be something small at roxbury in the same way that there are some at mom peeler that i just want to see that out because right now unless what the message is is that we really only have choice a or choice b and we can't consider putting that package i think it's really important for us all to remember in this conversation that there are roxbury students at msms and mhs as well and they would also be negatively impacted by any cuts to staff um and then two um i think if there was some hidden mattress with money in it we would have found it by now i you know we just we spent so much time and i just i have so much respect for liby in our leadership team which very clearly has spent so much time on this like i don't think we're going to find another answer i think we've been told that we have to make something a pretty serious decision in a pretty short period of time because we answer to the taxpayers and i don't i don't know if slicing this differently or showing and i i agree it would be great to have like more but and but there's only 24 hours in the day but i mean that's just the reality is we have to find a way to get a budget that will actually pass in mhs and i don't know how many different ways we can slice it because we are still one district we are not mhs Roxbury we are Montpelier Roxbury and the students are all together at msms and mhs and those teaching cuts would directly impact students in both towns in all four buildings so it's not an either or either way we're going to have to make a really hard decision that's going to hurt our entire district and but we don't have a choice between how the funding works and what the voters are able and willing to pay you're going to i just think we're i don't think there's some hidden way around this i guess it's interesting right curious what the situation where if there is in fact a grant funded after school program at rbs if there's a combination of rbs students what that might look like with rbs students at us and then doing the after school program at rbs because a lot of what we're losing is community and that and that vitality and i'm not saying that that's going to be a choice that the board would make but i'm really i personally would would really like to see what that might look like as an option because um that would that might it's you know it wouldn't it wouldn't be as cost saving i understand but if there's a big grant that's kind of already in the works i don't you know for the after school program there's no known use for the building other than our kids um i would really like to see that as a temporary a possibility put in for the after school program we have not heard whether i think it was due today so we haven't heard whether or maybe friday haven't heard whether we got it or not but we did put in for it i mean it would be money that we would be i don't know what you know like if we did get it then it's already there so as a scenario i'm curious what that might look like i would be sitting there as i'm not going to cost because i back two is 90 a week and i part two yeah and i that's more than a 20 increase in in my income it's also a subsidized program so yeah well it's not going to help it's got yeah just another you know thought about creativity um you know i know before cobit there was lengthy conversations around um like a language immersion program i know a lot of montpellier residents that would gladly put their kids on a bus for 45 minutes to roxbury to be able to be in a language immersion program and i i i remember the conversation distinctly about not talking about closing roxbury village school but about educating our our roxbury residents the k through four roxbury residents at ues and so and so yeah i just i those are the kinds of things that i think the committee could could get into and again why i think it's so important to have those conversations and and not just rush the decision at the board level um yeah so again like we've talked about different ways to be creative and and i want to want to see those um those scenarios play out so that we're not just closing a school but perhaps reinvigorating the community i don't want to i don't want this comment to sound like i'm against roxbury village school in any way shape or form it's one of my four babies so i don't want anybody to take it as that um however this board is in a position where you need to cut costs like we need to get the tax rate down and so that is that quite honestly to sound heartless a little bit is your main task right now yeah is that we have to get the tax rate down and that means we have to cut costs uh it's getting late so i saying something stupid um but you know i i originally was for the deliberate approach of forming the committee and taking a year um but what happened between then and now is our budget was defeated um so it's a it's a different landscape and as you said we do have to cut costs um and what's occurring to me is that this feels ultra rushed and it's pretty awful um but what would be even worse is if roxbury roxbury village school starts up in august and there aren't enough staff and at that point it has to the decision has to be made that would be a hundred times worse than this and that's my fear um so that is where i am at so um i was going to propose i do realize that it's late i think we have identified that the committee would be useless useful see it's late i'm saying something stupid useful no matter what yes and so i think it would be worthwhile to name to nominate the or i forget exactly to committees do we nominate maybe i'll just use it to nominate the people on this board who will serve on the roxbury village school future committee whatever it's time to call it and we can get started on staffing that up with the community members as well by putting the notices out if you know if you're interested send us the letters of interest and the board can decide by the march 20th meeting who's going to be on that committee and at that point if there is some sort of decision that is somewhat final for roxbury village school which i truly hope there is not by march 20th um then the committee can have a different task ahead of it than we originally intended but it is my hope that that committee will follow through on the deliberate process that we set forth and i would like to get either way i would like to get that committee going sooner rather than later yeah i i agree that the the committee has purpose regardless whether it's whether it's a how or and i don't think we have to take too long tonight to put the board members on the committee yeah we can do that i first let's see if let me have some clarity so i think what we want is kind of a a version of what you put together tonight um i need to know what how much you want to i need to know what i'm going for the dollar figure or like a tax rate increase that the board would be comfortable for me to get around now the tax rate could change because as my friend jake will tell us that dollar yield's not set yeah so like a range of what you think the voters will vote yes on is really what we need just for the roxbury voters did so i i also so i'm kind of looking to our our montpelier folks and you are more attuned to your community members and what they are asking of us so i would ask you all where do you think montpelier folks want to land i i there's no crystal ball but even if it's a range yeah it's hard to say because without the range i don't know what i'm doing i mean i can present something to you and it's going to work for some of you and it's not going to work for other people and it's not going to be enough for it's going to be too much or so i need i need something to go on here um you know with regards to the yield um it's going to go up i don't know how much but um you know i have a company yield cheer that the two of us do every morning together um you know so many budgets were defeated around the state and as those are revised that actually increases the yield for everybody um so you know i i guess i'm asking like can we just assume a higher yield and plug it in well you and i were talking about that and i'm kind of going with that 10 000 number yeah let's use that is that realistic yes yeah is it low is it what seems like could it be higher could it be 11 maybe 12 if they put a new revenue source into the ed fund it would go higher but that's sounding maybe not so likely so so 10 sounds consider realistic realistic yeah yeah i mean i think it yeah um i can you that's what jake and i've already talked about is is assuming it's going to be around 10 000 and that helps it does i mean i think if we could bring the rate into the mid to low teens that would be i think that would show a really solid effort to it would still be much higher than we've seen in past years but i think that would show a really solid effort to bring it down 24 is that 10 or less i was thinking 10 or less i think mid teens i don't know it's still low teens i mean 10 or less is getting yeah i know that's how much 255 is the third scenario yeah it could be very low teens like 11 so maybe really quickly what was the second scenario the second scenario was a cut of 1.5 million dollars yeah and what was the projected tax indication was about 12 yeah percent increase sorry yep right side um the second the second slide was 1.975 million oh that's right and it was a tax increase in Montpelier with a $9,775 yield at 11.69 percent thank you we were we were it was supposed to be 24 percent like a couple weeks ago yeah yeah i think that's what ultimately that's the order yep with the lower yield and we're still in a place where $500,000 is a somewhat somewhat equivalent to three cents in Montpelier should be still still around that so a one million dollar cut without rocks per unit million dollars with rock you know one point whatever it is you know this i don't know that this slide number six can just go away but maybe there's a high number with this is an option and i don't know is there a way to find a million dollars just as an option not as a just to put it out there so that we can so why don't we just do around the room what people sense are of where we need to get Montpelier's tax rate this is because Roxbury actually starts going to negative with some of the bigger cuts it sounds Kristen well well i mean i'm not going to say you know an 11 percent tax increase for Roxbury is very real for some folks so i mean i'm not saying some Roxbury folks could also appreciate you know a decrease um you know it did pass it passed by 34 votes so it's not like you know 55 percent of the voters voted yes 45 voted no so it was not a landslide right so um so i mean as as far as Roxbury goes you know an additional decrease of one to two percent i mean as as you know take a look at but you know it did pass so and there's a lot of you know there's a lot of things motivating Roxbury for that budget to pass well i also want to point out that if we do send rvs students to ues even though the tax implications of Roxbury may go down the no votes may go up i said even though the the tax implications of Roxbury may go down there's a chance that the no votes may go up right what's your sense i i would like to see a scenario without rvs students going to ues i would like to see a scenario where the building is utilized for after school and i would like to see a third scenario that cuts a million dollars just i don't know yeah i mean because can you get to 1.5 without rvs i'm sorry are we talking about substantive ideas for reducing or are we talking about kind of like number palatable a validable tax increase that that that voters are like okay like what's what's the number that that voters 1.4 gets mobiliar down to 11.69 1.4 and spending plus that's $575 plus all right so it's like two million that's two million gets you down to 11.69 yeah i don't know if i can say anything that makes any sense at this point i'm sorry it's okay i think you know given that we were at 24 percent if we could now if we could make it 12 percent ish that would be meaningful um and you know that's that's right that's what i think the the conversations that i was having leading up to the vote and the emails that we were getting and the posts that i was reading on front porch forum i did not see very many numbers mentioned what i saw were principles and there were a lot of people who made the case that voting no would mean that we would have to revisit the the the conversation of merger with u32 or or closing roxbury and so i get the impression from from all of those bits of information that it's it's not necessarily the the percent figure so much as the decisions that we make and so if we decide to not saying that i'm supporting this but if we decide to educate the k4 roxbury students at ues and that only results in a 16 percent or that results in a 16 percent um tax increase i i think we'll get a lot of people that will support that budget because we closed the we decided to close the school now i'm again not suggesting that we should do that but i i guess that's evidence for me that it's not so much the the percent value so much as it's it's what those specific um decisions that we make um represent so i don't know that helped at all um but but i think it's a very observation yeah which is why i think us throwing out percentages tonight is just a guess i think it's just a guess i think i know that's what you're asking for libya i'm sorry yeah so realities we have to get a printer to print what we're asking for in three weeks so it's not ideal but i think we that's what happened when our budget got voted down now this is how we have to do it i mean i i think the important thing is that we we show that we are making hard choices and being responsible to the very real financial concerns of this community um and i think that's the point is to adapt that i think that's what i heard is it's yeah it's time to to make some some tough choices and to acknowledge that we're not playing with monopoly money if you want a number i think i think if we can get in the 10 to 12 percent range i think that's pretty safe and i think that i i don't think we can do that without making the type of choices that people are asking us to make would you say went already i did um i so what got voted down yesterday was like 23 24 percent so i'm sort of with jake and the 12 percent 12 to 14 i think it would show a very real response to that and it's a very real amount of money um but i'm really concerned by going below 10 or to 8 because looking at what 8 percent increase still increase gets us is a really um really ripped apart district and i don't i don't want this situation to make us do something so drastic because once we do something we can't undo it so if we're losing educators and we're closing buildings and everything like that um and it still leads to a tax increase and that feels futile so i feel like 10 to 12 to 14 at the most the private palatable when you said 10 or less um yeah i'm i'm closer to the 10 um and possibly because i'm the oldest person on the board and probably the only person on the board who's on a fixed income and so i hear from people like that and um you know it's a reality in my failure my failure is becoming a very unaffordable place to live for many people and the school tax is a huge part of that so um i think and and you know that compounds every year it's not like we're going to increase decrease our budget a whole lot next year it's going to be added on to what we already add on this year and so every year it just becomes this heavier and heavier burden for people so i think we really have to think about that and my my failure has a pretty high population of people who are over 65 yeah i think i really agree with what scott said um i think it's for sort of what what we're seeing is doing then a certain number i want to be really cautious about overreacting to this if if you know this board thought um that the budget passed uh that the budget recommended was responsible i want to make sure that we're not overreacting and and taking too much from this vote in a way that's going to make irreparable change um so you know while i certainly want to be low 20 i don't i i don't want to i don't think that's ultimately the message that is going to get through i think we you know so one thing i've been thinking with um discussion about where to educate kids from robsbury is is um it seems like there's not been direction on that question and all of a sudden we're going from not really engaging with that question to you know thinking about answering it within a couple weeks and that that's a little concerning to me the speed there um i'm really concerned about that pace um and i heard i watched the the discussion about establishing the committee that i i don't think that sort of endless discussion about you know what to do on the matter is appropriate either but i i think that i'm really uncomfortable with making a decision of that consequence in this short period of time and i wonder if there's some ability to signal we heard from a few people that you know even the year is really important and i want to think on that more about whether or not there's a way to signal a direction maybe focusing more on the how as opposed to the weather and um really understanding what the um what our position is with our existing fund balance how that can be utilized because i do see the potential for a bridge if there is a substantial cost saving and there's a direction clearly articulated by this board where that could be utilized in the short term and you know if there is general consensus that it change might be in order um there may be savings in the subsequent years so it's not to create any kind of shock i think i'd like to explore that issue a little bit more but i don't have like a specific number give me a chat see what i can bring to you i i'm hearing i'm hearing in the fuzziness something around 12 yeah that's whatever with the what's matter um i think we can name two members of the to the committee now um we're all slightly zombie like uh or heading to that direction um i'll just open it up for our discussion guys i think we do we say two or four i think that's four two from up yeah so that's we're done i'll wrap that we're done on the roxbury side that that's that's easy uh assuming you guys want to leave can i still in pumped um uh who from the bumper i i was on the merger committee i would be happy to step up again um i mean i i i want to do it the acknowledgement that i have put some language out there that we need to think seriously in this budget cycle about whether or not we send students to ues and perhaps before the committee has a chance to decide that so um i i if if that makes me seem prejudiced i i just want that out there i i um because i know others have have maybe not stated um but i would be willing scott i think i've probably shared privately with about half the folks um on the board that i'd be more than happy to represent mom hillier and lin did i hear you say you're yeah i'd be interested and you know i i do empathize with the situation in roxbury i don't i don't want it to be a shock and i also realize that we have to figure this out and so i would like it to be um an honest process right that kind of values everybody involved you know and i have very much of that vote too i mean i when i was part of the merger committee i mean i i was really i've always been impressed with that school and impressed with that town and uh i ideally would would love to keep that school open i think closing is is the worst possible option we have except perhaps for all the rest um and i i've just i'm very cognizant of that so i'm happy to have it be scott and lin i have it to be some combination of whoever but it seems like one of the three of us and i will let the board make a decision about that but we have our roxbury folks chosen um i'm i'm happy to have it be scott or me and lin or me and scott or okay well i'm just gonna make a nomination um i nominate jim and lin um i do appreciate scott your willingness to step forward i think there's the perspective of that you have the historical perspective jim of having been worked on having worked on the merger um and and lin i think your perspective as as you've said maybe the only person on the board on a fixed income um do those two combinations i think are very helpful perspectives to have in the conversation but i do appreciate you offering scott but that's my nomination so or my motion any discussion or objections i i'm not sure that yeah jim i appreciate you the historic perspective but times are very different now and the context is very different now um and you've been pretty vocal um over the last couple of weeks about your perspective um and yeah and so that that would be my concern um so i want to voice it and i think it's i think it's a valid concern if the rest of the board is is simply a concern i'm happy to step aside i am i mean i mean it when i say you know i i would like that school to survive i am just being very realistic about what our budget situation is and what our choices are and i think my the fact that i've i've been involved with that school for for four or five years is is is part of of that perspective i think um from reading the post on front porch forum we do have some constituents who have that perspective of um wanting to see things move along um i think it's a quick turn around myself but i realize we're we're in a bad spot here and we really need to talk about it and figure it out yeah and i'm gonna i don't have a and i think some of the front porch forum perspectives and some others are very unfair i mean you know and wrong yes uh you know roxbury is not subsidized by paul failure the i don't think there's any objection there from a educational perspective to go into us i think it's it's concerns about their community and the centerpiece of their community and you know it's that's a it's a very important part of that town and we have very hard choices to buy jim thank you for for bringing that up about front porch forum and and i i should have started by saying i also would feel comfortable with a combination of uh glenn and scott or jim and lin or scott and jim i think those are the three possible combinations so i apologize for not for not starting with that comment yes um should should we move this to a vote or do people want to amend or change it i just think the last thing i'd like to add to the discussion part is that i think it's really important that anybody who joins the committee i think it's impossible to have zero percent bias coming into this we all have an experience and so i think we should just take that off the table as a possibility but i think that there needs to be a commitment to anybody who is going to serve on this committee whether it be a board member or a community member that they are going to lead with curiosity and really good hard questions and not coming into this process with a foregone conclusion or decision and so i just i want to make i want to get that out there and it has been challenging at times jim i will say that it sometimes does feel like there is a um an opinion that you hold about what is best for the roxbury school and i could say if you're going to serve on this committee that you put that aside and that you be and yes the perspective is is super meaningful and helpful and historical i mean it's very that is very very real and i appreciate that and i also want to make sure that whomever i am serving on this committee with is going to come to this work um with a commitment to to put the bias aside as much as humanly possible knowing it can't completely go away so i just want to have that i just want to remind people too we have this conversation at the last meeting which is the committee does not decide the board decides what happens i mean our job as i see it is to figure out the process for this happening in the least painless and most beneficial way to everybody right well it's but it's not i just want the committee is not for the purpose of my reason to make a recommendation is what we last discussed on the future of the roxbury village school it's not a transition planning committee it's a committee that's really the purpose is is to deliberate the future of the building and where roxbury elementary age students are best educated so is that correct yeah okay should i move to vote all those in favor of me as nomination or motion motion okay oh hi hi sorry um me as nomination with i nominated jim and lin to serve on the roxbury village school committee all right and are we doing a different vote for a different configuration nope no just that just a configuration um i can vote yes or no yes you're allowed to you were sworn in so you can vote oh yeah you couldn't stay yes um and there will be no other configuration that we're voting on if it goes oh i think we have formally dominated your point we heard it if we if we don't vote in favor of what my motion was then we could try a different configuration but it's also i think we did that last meeting so right now it's just jim and lin serving as the montpelier representatives on the roxbury village school committee i'm going to say all those in favor i did say all those oh i don't do hey guys i said i guys i got three or four eyes jake jake is is wondering what his choices are uh and i'm not sure red or christin have spoken up yet so they may be okay guys okay one one two three four so we've got oh okay eight of 16 votes um i think i think it counts one vote we count us two oh right that's what you did eight got it got it thank you so your vote would carry so we need we need one more vote and and i if if another configuration makes sense awkward uh but um can i vote pass you know that that's staying awful for yay okay wait if you got this morning okay you can't vote but i love you so much do you want do you want me on the committee or not i mean i'm gonna be honest i think i could be a fair broker i'd be i wanted to start this conversation four or five years ago because i wanted to find a path to save roxbury i i've said what i've said because i think we're at a really hard place i would be very honest i think of all the cuts out there it has the least impact and i think the path to save roxbury for long term is very narrow and i would hate to see us take a hatchet to things that are going to have a longer term in fact that's why i'm saying what i'm saying and it's not because i don't love the school it's not because i don't love the community it's because we're in a shitty spot and i i think of the choices we have it does the least long term problem and if we do send students to us i hope we i think we can come together and do it the way that is that that takes care of the hard problems and makes it as as wonderful as it can be and i think it's a wonderful school and i think the roxbury students have great experiences at msms and mhs and i think they can have great experiences at us too and i think we can do as much as we can to heal the community and i've just it's been very difficult for me but trying to steer through a mob billiard community that clearly has big concerns about what we're asking them to pay it is one of the paths that i see is is one of the most pliable to getting to a yes vote and dealing with the crisis that and that's that's why i've been pushing us hard to seriously think about a very hard thing and making the case in a way that might sound a little advocating but i feel we need to grapple with this now and i think if we do something different we have to have a really good explanation to the voters why we're making the choices we're making because it's it's it's the the the case we made coming to the voters yesterday didn't sell so really quickly as the associate parliamentarian and the non-voting member i think by my math you've already the the the motion passed because um my votes i don't count so it's it's eight out of 14 so okay and i want to go to bed and i want to go to bed that says yes okay um i woke up at four o'clock in car to henna so okay so we have one of four o'clock yeah we've got yeah yeah uh we did chance any any no votes and if if you want to vote no i i i will totally respect that i don't i don't know if you guys voted yet you can abstain or vote now but you said i oh then we're there i mean i will vote i because i i want to i support and i just want to make a commitment to one another to do this work you know authentically with curiosity and with as much objectivity as we can and that is that yes yes and i appreciate that yeah uh motion i think we're at a motion to adjourn we do we do oh do we table them till next week well let me ask a question does did anyone have any objections to policy monitoring no no do i have a motion to approve the policy monitoring reports which i'm sure listed on the sheet so moved yep got it second any discussions all is in favor aye any opposed great um looks like we will schedule a meeting for next week does the 13th make the most sense probably we have negotiations but i don't know if you'll be allowed and it's 415 to 615 okay um why don't we just do it on on that Wednesday or do we want to do it maybe on the tuesday or thursday because we've gotten people have not been happy with us overlapping with the city council can people do it tuesday yes we go to sit on tuesday just 536 30 no at 630 is the high school right right starts at 630 i've got so many rooms in this building Nathan okay is it there there's a track there's a meet the coaches yep i've got a huge auditorium for those 85 tractors that can go right in there or a gym well let's do it Wednesday the the city council passed their budget and hopefully they've they've got happier things to talk about um yeah 13th it's just just keep it on Wednesday um it's supposed to go to share of the plan you are that's your tuesday let's do it tuesday we can't go on an airplane on wednesday at 630 so it's tuesday tuesday tuesday tuesday is fine yeah airplanes and sharers are okay this is late notice people were probably planning around having regular board meetings scheduled not special board meetings scheduled uh 630 okay Nathan you're in the gym uh motion to adjourn some of them thank thank you everyone i know this is very hard and we're we're doing a really good job thank you