 So it's called order the meeting of the Montelio-Roxbury Board of School Director is 41 for sort of a public comment, nearing none. We can go to Consent Agenda. Do I have a motion to approve the Consent Agenda? Any discussion? All in favor? Be opposed. I'm assuming we didn't drag open... I honestly wrote them an email to ask if they needed a ride up here and never heard a response from them. So I know there's lots of things going on right now in student lives and sort of in terms of College acceptance and all that kind of stuff and probably other pressures on them at the moment, but I did not hear back from them. We will give them an excused absence. Let me just plug this in. And I know also Mike was off today, so you're gonna fill in for Mike on language immersion, so why don't we... We'll do the best actually. So there's my lovely family. That's not what you all need to see right now though. My husband doesn't usually look like that, I promise. I think we might as well go through this. Oh, there's a... If you mirror it right there. I'm sure there's room for you. So you're working in action. Thank you, Benjamin. Okay. So these are Mike's slides, so I do not want to take any credit or think that I am any kind of expert in this. He is much better versed at presenting around the language immersion program, having more experience than I. But like Jim said, he is having some things going on right now and it wasn't at work. So we're taking it on for him. So if there is additional questions, then I'll have Heather write them down and we'll get the answers to you and I'll do the best I can tonight. But this is very quick. So just looking at why immersion in your board packet, you also got a white paper before I start on this. That was written by Jen Bozegern, who's a current superintendent in Orange. And she wrote that as the director of curriculum for Chittenden East when she was there. So Mike had taken over for her, so therefore took over the foreign language immersion program and getting it in place. But Jen, this is a reasonable start, so I want to make sure that she gets credit for writing that white paper. So this is all in that paper. If you had a chance to look at it, it's pretty researchy and I understand that. Why immersion bilingualism is so very important as is bi-literacy. As a former international school teacher myself with tons of bilingualism in that environment, as well as a teacher from an inner-city school that had a whole lot of Spanish and English, I can attest to the importance of bilingualism. And it's one of, I think, a knock on American education that we don't have more of it, quite honestly. So that piece, there's also bi-literacy, which is huge. Academic achievement, as you saw in the white paper and in some of the other research, there is a proven, there's plenty of evidence around increased achievement with students who are bilingual over time. Social cultural competence, global competitiveness and communication. All of these things are quite important and important to this board and important to our community as well. And bilingualism can help that immersion. So the purpose of the study that we're proposing in this particular budget would do this work. It's working with a certain company who does this, as Mike mentioned in the last board meeting. And it has the seven pillars that it stands on. So throughout the study, it helps the committee go through, whoever studied it with you, go through each one of those seven pillars. It also has rubrics that are attached to each one of those pillars so that we know where we are and what the next step will always be. So it helps us really dive deep into the necessary thinking that needs to happen in order to put a program such as this in place. They're experts, they've done it in plenty of places. And they have evidence to see how they're doing and talk to the people on staff. So around that, we have Jericho Elementary right now, who's in year two, Richmond Elementary. We'll be starting at a very similar time we were, we are, because they're starting a new one. So we have some local places, but we also have some places in Massachusetts that we could rely on, which is not very far, far haul from here. Things that we don't know about is we have no idea what language, because that's a committee decision. We have no idea about the location, we have two elementary schools, which one would it make the most sense of? The committee would have to really dive into that. The staff thing, we haven't talked in depth about that. We just don't know the answers to that. The study would help us find the answers to those kind of things. I'm going to send you these quick slides afterwards, only for these links right here. It has the link to the white paper, but also the foreign language brief, which was written by John Elbergini, who's the superintendent over at CESU and Mike. And the reason why I like it, you don't have it, you do have your materials now. Take a look at that, because I thought that I had not seen that before. I looked through the board packet. Mike hadn't shown that to me before. So looking at those questions were very similar questions to ones that the board raised last month, or last board meeting, and you have three separate school systems who are in the thick of it answering those questions. And they were asked very specifically by John and Mike. They're not just general questions. So I thought that was great, and you can see what CESU is doing right now. But that's really what Mike had planned, and then he was going to talk about his experience in bringing about the program. But I can't speak to that. All I can speak about is from a parent who lives in Jericho, whose kid couldn't participate because she's too old. So I can only tell you what the feel of it is at Jericho, and it's not separate from any of the other classes, and that it's part of the school. And when I go listen to concerts, the kids sing in Spanish. And it's just the way it is, and everybody else claps along. So that's my only experience with it. I can't really answer anything more. Go ahead, Steve. This is a question to take back, maybe, but I read the part about the Bible for an IEP student. So that's a challenge right out of the gate for any of these programs. And there's a mention here about self-selection out by families. And others are saying, look, we just don't help. And the others are like, well, we offer it, but it's shaky. So I think that that's a piece of the bigger question about just general equality of access. And if our overall district goal is moving towards equity and inclusion and making sure that the kids who are struggling at home aren't somehow on the edges of our educational system, how do we do immersion and include? Yeah, and I can speak to a little bit of that just because I've had these conversations with Mike in the sense of there's significant evidence that if a child has a special need that's language-based, there's a lot of evidence that says this is not the best place for them to be. And Chittman East was very honest about that with families when they were talking about immersion with kids with special needs that are language-based. So not all special needs are language-based. That's important to understand. So that's just a snippet for that one little piece. As far as services and things, I don't know how they're handling it right now. I just have no idea about that. And then you made me think of another one, too. What was the second part of that? I don't know. I mean, I'm a huge fan. But what I'm concerned about is that we create sort of like a privileged thing versus everyone else. I know what I was going to say to that. Can I just answer that real quick? Another thing that I know Chittman East has done is that when they have the lottery and people apply to the lottery, they hold slots for students who are free-reduced. So the lottery is less than that to try to address the equitability in kids who may be on the fringe in other places. And the self-selection out, you still have to kind of encourage some in, you know, or whatever, right? So they had procedures in place. This particular group helps you think through all of those things that we may not think of as, you know. I was interested in the white paper about the have-than-have-not part, that the culture they spoke about needed to work on the fact that these kids are segregated or separated. And that was an interesting thing to think about. And it was interesting to hear you say from a mom of a student who doesn't know how to get it. Because she's old, not because she's reading it. She's too old. But it's an interesting thing to talk about. And the other thing that I didn't see in the seven, but it's probably in there somewhere, is I wish this group would also talk about evaluation. Oh. It is in there. It is in there. Yeah. This is a longer brief. So what this group does, and that piece is as part of it, teaching you how to assess and evaluate the program. Another thing I really dug into this today, I skimmed it before, but I really dug into it that I think the board, I noted to myself that I think the board really wants to know is a piece of this, is a considerable focus on sociocultural competency and equity piece in terms of sociocultural awareness and that kind of thing. That's a significant part of their push in the immersion process. So in a way that I know that the community of molecular values. So that's just something that stood out to me as I was digging into this today. So Mike will absolutely come back and talk to you guys. He just couldn't tonight. So if you have more questions or want to know in depth more about the ESU's experience, he's definitely a better voice to say that than I am. Jim, you were going to say something? Sorry. I've got a question there. I think the comment is just, you know, keep in mind that the study is going to really show us how to get there and how to answer I think a lot of these questions. I guess I have two questions. One, how much for the group doing the study kind of looked to the board and others for input about the type of questions we want answered? And second, which is a question you can totally punt on if you want to, what is the language-based versus non-language-based learning disability? So, let me address that. Like a language-based disability could be a specific learning disability in reading, for instance. It could be a speech and language piece for kids coming in with significant articulation challenges. I'm not sure if presenting content in a different language and asking them to learn a different language might be the best route for that child. It may be. It's just, we would have to question that. We would have to really take a hard look at that. So those would be two examples of a potential language disability. Your first question, I would imagine that there would be a member of the board on the study committee. I would encourage members to be on the study committee if not to. So that would probably be your liaison to the information. Can you clarify about the committee's role? You said something about they would make the decision, not the administration or something like that? They would be the people who would be really digging into the questions and deciding what's going to happen next. So I like to have a decision-making matrix. We use it at our league meetings when we need to and hard decisions need to be made to be clear. Some decisions, I would imagine, that would probably not be a clear statement. Some decisions may just be a board of administrative decisions. And we'd make that clear. It may come down to location. That could be a really tricky conversation to have. And so we might say, and I'm not positive on this, but we might say, in deciding location, we're going to see here pros and cons of both buildings. And the committee is going to inform the administration and the administration will make the final decision based on everything that we've heard. So there could be some decision-making matrix in there, but the committee would be responsible for really digging into some hard conversations that would have to be had. Isn't it likely that the committee digs into it and makes a recommendation to the administration and the board, and then that decision goes there to somebody? To the administration. Go ahead, Andrew. So in terms of this committee makeup, are we thinking that it would involve maybe at least one board member, maybe a foreign language teacher or two in our district, some community members who are invested, interested in this or might have expertise in this? Is that what we're thinking? How would this... There's specific language in here as to who the steering committee is. Yes, to all of those things. And also EL teacher, a general education teacher, principal, thinking a little bit outside that as well. But there is recommendations in here. Like they guide you through that program. Process is how to best select people. Because you want some naysayers. In this particular process as well, you want some people who are going to be like, hmm, the devil's advocate, if you will. Sure. Well, I have a question that Andrew brought up last time, and that this looks great. It looks like a good plan. How would we choose them in preference to somebody else who might do this? I'm going to go with what Mike said last time, that when CESU researched that, there were two people, two companies to go with. And when I was talking to Mike later about that, he said there are two companies, and the second one is a spin-off of this one. So it's really people who have gone off the reservation to earn their own money in their independent consultancies, from what he understands. We can do more research to see if there's more. There's nothing stopping us from doing that. And I would say that my colleagues probably at Chittenden East probably did a considerable amount of research in that already, but we can certainly do more research. There's nothing holding us back from that. To add to that, can you just send out an RFI and notify these different companies? Yeah, that's probably how we do it. How we do it, yeah. That wouldn't be too important to you guys, would it? No. I think we should. Thanks for pushing this forward. Yeah, seriously. Thank you. Yeah, that was exciting. It's a great group. I understand I'm not young enough to participate. Come visit Steve. Come be a reader in there and read them. And again, I apologize for Mike that he's not here. He truly wanted to be. Could it be tonight and for my inadequacy of taking his big shoes? Thank you. Thank you. Well, Jim's the chair here. Jim's the agenda man. Yes. I think that's it for the superintendent report. Yeah, so I can take any questions from the superintendent report. Originally when Jim and I had planned out meetings, our year-long meetings in advance, this meeting was supposed to be a deep dive into the entry plan and what I found, but we didn't think about that it's also budget season and that's just way too much for a board agenda. So when Jim and I were talking about the Superport for this week, we thought we'd just kind of hit on something, so I'm happy to answer any questions that you have from what's there. Again, we're going to bring the entry plan back, but this is just a quick recap. I think some of your three meetings were great. I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what it means to have a system and structure in place for improvement? I mean, as someone who's not in that, doesn't live in that world of education, even just an example. I'll give you a good example. Yeah, I'll give you a good example. So in my former district as the curriculum director, when I took over right as the problem for had come, the unpacking had been done, and I came into the spot where we needed to write a curriculum off of the new standards document. And so we had to think about how do you do that? What's the best way? What's the most efficient way? How do you get the smartest minds in the room? How do you train people who are going to stay and be able to continue this work? All of those things come up in my head, right? I had, in each of my elementary schools, coaches in reading and writing. So I made the executive decision that those people would be the ones writing curriculum because they're the ones who run PLCs back in the district. They're the ones who really control professional learning. They're the ones who do data analysis at the La Zoo. They were the best people for the job. I had a structure in place where I met with them, monthly, and they were able to be pulled from classroom or from their schools like the day before a holiday or day before a vacation because they don't see a lot of kids on that day, right? So because I had those people and we set up that structure that they would be doing the work and they would be the ones who have the means to go back to their buildings and teach the teachers the curriculum and work through challenges and bring back revisions for me as a curriculum director so we can work through it together. That process, while hard, was seamless. The teachers responded to it. They were the most knowledgeable people about the curriculum and our teachers were able to work off of it. You know, we get to plan units off of it and make common assessments. That same work didn't happen at the same time in Montpelier-Roxbury and so when Mike has the director of curriculum taking over, we have no structure in place to get that work done and it should have been done four or five years ago. So right now, we're having to decide who do you include? Who do you have do it? Do you use staff meeting time to do it? It's going to take forever. That's like 45 minutes every once in a while that principals don't need it. Do you pull teachers from classrooms to do it so that it influences the kids and as a subclass? Do you pay teachers after school to do it in which case how do you decide which teachers to do it with? So we have so many questions. We don't know if that work isn't able to be done quickly and efficiently yet because there's no structure or system to do that kind of work in place and there's a few other instances that that kind of forward thinking hasn't happened. I'll give you another example too. I was talking in Libertations the other night and they were asking about the SEL coordinator and they said, well, we have APs just train them. And I said, okay, so Steve's my AP, he leaves. APs want to be principals, right? They're not APs for long except for Jen at the high school. She wants to be an AP forever and she's very good at it. So when Matt Roy leaves at the middle school, which you will and he should because he's going to be a principal sometime we got to retrain whoever comes in. There's no system in place. It's dependent on a person. Right? And so with the social emotional coordinator that person can come in and take an audit of what our strengths are what our weaknesses are, where the passing needs to be built at the teaching level, at the administrative level and start putting in systems in place. So when a person new comes in the staff can say, welcome, this is how we do it. This is what works for us. Here's our evidence for it and we currently don't have that. It's very person dependent. And I'll add to that one of the things when I worked at the State Department that happened, I'd go to school and they'd say we've all been trained in X and I'd say, oh really? And when did you do that training? And they'd say, well three years ago everybody in the building was trained Really? So tell me how many people are here that were here three years ago? Oh man you know three compared and that this kind of a system takes care of that your training from the beginning so everybody gets trained right along and everybody has the same background Yeah, and you can develop expertise in a different way That's what I'm kind of thinking about there That's really helpful Any other questions about things I've highlighted that I'm really thinking about? I'm loving the data collection They know because they've heard me for years so I'm so glad that we're going to work on it I like the geek out on data it's really hard to do that right now I also just think I'm really impressed that we're able to talk about our weaknesses in writing and I think that we all need to be able to do that and then it doesn't mean anyone is rendering a verdict on anything it just means we're continuing to work and I think that the more we can call out our own areas that we can help and we need to work on I think it's going to be more transparent for the community and we're all going to be on the same soapbox in terms of the way we talk to people it's like yeah, these are things we haven't done as well as we want to and we're going to work on these rather than no, we're good which is what happens when you don't point out areas you need to grow in so thank you for doing that Your number of two statements that I use a lot is when you know more you do better and the second one that I had in my office actually up on the dry erase that people try to erase but I don't let them is that data is information not condemnation so we just need to really think about that we can get better at what we do but I mean just doing the lack of data collection like I'm like yeah, that's cool we can fix that that's a fixable problem it's not like a lack of intelligence and actually collecting the data will tell you what you're doing really great at not doing so great at and then you'll know how to fix it but also on data and I've had conversations with Andrew and Libby about this and you know, we've had some requests you know, in the budget process Andrew asked for kind of long term budget data Michelle's asked for some data I think about what's going on in the classrooms you or Ryan asked for data about class size numbers what we thought we'd do is some of those would kind of like come during busy times and a lot of that data is not there or not collected necessarily in the way that we want so what I thought would be a useful conversation to have after the budget process is over is kind of what sort of data would be useful for the board on a kind of an ongoing basis then have just an odd discussion with the administration about is that data that's available and maybe a deep dive on some things where we might feel data might be useful and the administration said well either that data is not going to tell you much or it's going to tell you something different that you think it's going to and then kind of make a decision as a board about the type of data we'd like and then give the administration time to put that together and put it before we wanted to so we are kind of getting that data on a regular basis we're not having questions on one day like could you at Wednesday's meeting tell me about all the teachers and what schools they went to and how many kids are in their classes and how many people are named John and so there's some expectations about what's out there and I think reasonable time for the administration to get it together so the budget each year we have a certain set of trends that make sense and you know a year in advance about what sort of budget data trends the board's expecting and it's clear does that make sense to folks? it does and as a matter of fact since I think the bottom line is we would like to know how the students are doing it would be interesting when we begin that conversation for Libby to tell us what it is she thinks we are up to tell us how the students are doing in addition to that that's where I can thrive in but I'm not like I don't thrive in budget but I'm expecting what kind of questions you may have around budget so I think it is definitely helpful to think it's a little board hat too because I've never been a board member I don't have that hat the student data I'll definitely be sharing that for you once we collect it in the way that works I think what I have in discussion is good because there are questions a community asks of us that might require data that you might not find super useful or necessary actually what I was thinking though was she might have a set of data that would answer whatever that big question is without the data that they are specifically asking it's just something we haven't had before this is an exciting time to start thinking about collecting data because it's our first year as a new district so if we start collecting data right now we have the whole history this is the history three or four times that's exciting to collect data you need to hang out I'm changing the leadership he's really slow excellent so any more questions for Libby so next up is a budget presentation the main purpose of doing the full budget presentation twice is to give Roxbury residents a chance to ask questions I'm guessing Ben has some familiarity with the budget already there's a water barrier resident may not so I guess a question for the board do you want Grant to go through the full shebang again because they're already on tape for folks who want to this is not a live recording actually good question I'm not sure if it's working live right now but they're working it's supposed to be live but we have so my question we're recording this one we'll do the last one so my question is do we want to go through the whole shebang again or do we want Grant to just maybe do the overview slides and then tell us about things that are different changes changes from last time to this time and also changes from the last year to this year big points of change now not that you're not translating in wonderful in your presentation but that works fine for me you may have to be patient because I've got about 50 notes on every slide because I was expecting to go through the whole thing so I may be hunting and pecking Humber is easiest for you anybody need hard copies they are different from the last time they're not different from what I sent or what Heather sent out so you're good I can use the hard copies to follow along we did send it out on money because we were waiting to see if the state was going to give us a new number and I am glad to give out as many as we can because that means I don't want to care anymore we're just going to grab a drink of water but I'll take one more alright so I will try to just make sure I hit some of the highlights and changes on the outline so speaking of changes there's now a section for changes from the December 5th presentation I would ask as we go through this if you can also think about the public forum on January 2nd and if you have any ideas on how you might want to make adjustments to this presentation for the January 2nd public forum if you can think about that and take some notes down and make some adjustments nothing has changed on this context slide I will change I have foreign language on your hard copies I've changed it to world language being more appropriate I'm sure we'll get into the busing discussion and the use of fund balances something that will pop up later as well so the changes in future slides you're going to see highlighted in blue I tried to highlight in blue things that had changed things that are in yellow the dollar yield in non-residential rate we have it's still kind of an unknown to some extent because it has to be set by law but those numbers are probably as good as it's going to get until after town meeting day some of the other changes I had on one employee I had an error fixed that that cost $8,000 we took another snapshot of all health coverages and of course they all went in the wrong direction financially people going from two persons to family I think I had one not the wrong direction financially I mean it's a great thing but not in this moment tech center tuition went up about $6,000 we were talking about central Vermont tech center they gave me a new tuition rate which when I factored that in raised our expenses considerably that may come back down again because we don't have our six semester average which that's how you end up figuring out how much you have to spend it's based on the average number of kids over a three year period times the tuition rate they did say while I was there we have and our six semester average is right at 10 right now and the good thing is because it's over six semesters if you have a big jump in one year you don't have to pay for it it gets spread out so right now I've assumed we're going to have 11 as a six semester average which hopefully that's safe for revenues we got a new number for the small schools grant the VAOE has told me that the small schools grant will be the amount everybody received two years ago and so I got that number and it's about $3,000 less than the amount before I also heard that by statute that goes on the phrases in perpetuity so we're always going to get that small schools grant that's another benefit of voluntarily merging because those who didn't voluntarily merge will not continue to get the small schools grant what's the total amount on the small schools grant what's the total amount on the small schools grant what is it? $70 that's fine it's in that range though but $70,000 I'm actually going to give you the exact number because it's not hard to find it is $73,722 and it will be the same to that 2016 number forever or whatever it won't be inflated so $74,000 special education in total the number is about $36,000 less so when you condemn me for always being conservative there you go optimistic and see what it got me transportation aid we won't get a better number I don't think until town meeting day so I should probably stop saying that it's an unknown bump it up by a couple thousand dollars because we're getting about $90,000 this year and I figure we'll probably at least get a couple thousand more so I increased that by $200 you approve the announced tuition rates which are $100 more for elementary $200 more for secondary so that means $600 in revenues something to think about if I forget to bring it up later is for tuition revenue I've assumed that the kids that we have paying tuition are going to stay but that we're not getting any more that might be an assumption that we should change maybe I should assume that we're going to have one more or two more kids because we usually get some transition we're going to have some 12th graders leave we typically have some come in I didn't bank on any but that could be something we could tweak so you didn't bank up replacing the graduates with new if we had two 11th graders I figured we'd have two 12th graders but if we had one 12th grader I assumed they would graduate and didn't assume we would get another 9th grader coming in which we don't and on the expense side how did you do the tuition out money tuition out so really I assume you're talking about Roxbury 9th through 12th for that I assume that all the kids I'm paying tuition for right now I'm going to have to pay tuition for next year and anybody that moves in basically and that's a great place to be because I've been a business manager at school choice and that was the one thing that always would bite you because people would move in you didn't know well now if they move in they don't get school choice they're going to come to our schools so I don't have to worry about that that's very clear although is it possible it is that if they came here for a year they could still choose tuition under grandfather no once they're in they're in are you sure not that they would let's say somebody came early we had one or two or three that could have tuition and did not yeah and I would say that it might be a legal question but if you had somebody that voluntarily came to their high school this year they could have had school choice and they wanted to go to Northfield next year I think my position would be no because it's to continue at the school that you've chosen that's the policy reason right but I'm not sure it's the law anyway we can figure that out why does it want you it's not going to happen because everybody loves it that's it once you're here my feet is struck at red tell your friends alright you've seen how pessimistic you were being now they're all going to go back no not that bad so tax factors the unknowns Aprilized pupil count is still a big one and I have been I think conservative on what I've been using and I hope it goes up I am just very concerned about Aprilized pupil count because the AOE has a new system where they collected census data and I'm just not sure how it's going to look like it's not out they are starting to release some numbers like drafty draft numbers I would hope in time for the public forum that we might have a number I do think that it's going to continue to change during January because of just the nature of the data that they're seeing dollar yield non-residential rate we've got that as good as it's going to get CLA last year we had it on the 15th the year before we had it on the 23rd I haven't seen it but I just it's got to be anything yeah unfortunately I heard I initially heard it was going to be closer to 91% now I hear it's going to likely be a little less than 90% so I was using 90% maybe 89 just to give you kind of a reference point for equalized pupils I'm going to jot this down if we have an increase of about 7 pupils it's about 1 cent on the tax rate for CLA a change of about 1% on CLA is probably 2 cents on the tax rate about so 14 pupils equal to 271% of the CLA yeah CLA is important yeah very important so we'll see how those things go the other one I know is going to come out fairly soon as the career center six semester average that impacts your revenues and your expenditures expenditures more so the revenue is the state pays part of the tech tuition on behalf of us and so we get a revenue for a little less than half of the total tuition amount on the expenditure side you show the full tuition so there's a little bit about 16,000 per student CLA is probably closer to 17 Central Vermont was closer to 16 but now it's probably closer to 16 and a half I think they've really jumped up so anyway we'll move on so like I said blue and I didn't get everything that was technically the total budget changed because the general budget changed non-tax revenues changed because of special education equalized pupils is yellow because it's still an estimate you can see I dropped it about six kids and we have more kids so I would hope that the number goes up not down but I'm being conservative because I learned my lesson I didn't change anything really on here I may have changed a few call-out boxes the thing for everybody to remember here is the caption is right this is just Montpelier High School Main Street Middle School and Union Elementary K-4 Roxbury kids are not included on here because it would mess up our class size analysis but 5th through 12th grade students do get factored in as they transition into the middle school and high school and we talked about this if it's colored yellow it means we're getting real close to max class size if it's red it means we're over so according to this we'd be looking at adding classroom teacher probably in the 420 we're going to be very close next year but 22 looks like the year we'll see how the enrollment projections continue to trend and this since we didn't have Roxbury this just completes the picture for K-4 staffing the only thing I changed here is I took out some of the words on the human resources coordinator because we decided to go ahead and show a separate slide and it's a little wordy and I'm not going to go through everything but I will tell you that it's not a complete list this is just like a few things that popped out as we were talking about this position I will admit I am a huge advocate for this I will say that we're getting the job done but it's among five different people and I'm one of those five and I will tell you that if we had made a different choice for HRA vendors we'd be done we would be done there's just no other way around it and I think I've mentioned that there's a statewide uniform chart of accounts coming out that we're having to have in place by July 1 a new HR finance system that we're going to be supposedly ready to go on July 1 those are going to create a lot of transition work for two of the people two of the five people that do some HR work um and whenever we do this there's going to be an opportunity hopefully to do some automation for time sheets leave tracking I need somebody to kind of run point on trying to get those things up and running we just don't have the capacity for those of you that have been around for a while this office used to have two and a half people and that half person just didn't work it's very hard to make that a very effective or efficient job so we just went with two people I do think there is a strong need there strong need there and I'm sure Becky would HR and finance are two areas where it's not getting less complicated it just gets more and more convoluted for us another thing is with the merger this year we got to do two of everything tax documents that we send out W-2's 1099's and all these things we have to do two sets for everybody because they were M-V-S and now they're M-R-S-D so it's an area where there's a lot of liability if something falls through the cracks I would say we haven't let any fall through the cracks but I would say there's a risk that we certainly could Tina I'm looking at job descriptions for all positions and I can't imagine you had any time to get to many of those we've got a lot of them to do we've got one for you all righty well let me ask you something Tina did you have job descriptions at all the schools where you worked um do all the teachers need job descriptions it's not a case of all the teachers need job descriptions but I don't know that we have a job description for any position I mean do we have a job description for him? Probably not do we have a job description for a coordinator of special ed or the you know we just didn't have any job descriptions so for the big categories what I'm wondering though is the job description thing I've asked in teachers at other schools like you have job descriptions and I haven't heard from any of them but they have job descriptions I would say that without a job description it's hard to evaluate that too I agree with you completely we also employ more people than just teachers so that would be good for you so I would assume that there's a general when I was a principal and that's what I used to evaluate teaching it's not like the second grade teacher has a different job description same thing for custodians there's a job description for custodians a job description could be out there for IAs or teachers it might be broken down by different types of teaching but it's really all the other positions that you should have certainly administrative and I've gone to like my old district at Essex Westford they have them all posted I mean there are dozens and dozens of job descriptions for school personnel they're out there and we literally have one right now which makes it kind of difficult for supervision evaluation I don't want to sound like I'm not a proponent of having job descriptions because I certainly am I was just curious to know that the world doesn't do supervision evaluation well and so you don't notice you don't have them in some cases until somebody tries to evaluate somebody and there's nothing to evaluate them against which is what just happened this year an administrator was told you can't evaluate me I don't have a job description which I'm surprised hasn't happened in the world because without a job description you really can't the employee can say hello long while I don't know I did not know I had this expectation and this and to kind of get to what you were at because of the fact that it may not be critical each and every day that's why this is one thing that didn't get done and hasn't been done but it would be good to have it and if we had a position like this I'm sure we would start so this HR coordinator position is scheduled for a higher on July 1 if the budget gets approved would we consider higher in 2 months early and take me out of some one time money I'm just there's a lot to maybe July 1 not a lot of new things are beginning but it sounded like there were well I know so what I'm wondering is if you get somebody for not a lot of money out of a budget to start 2 months early you've got a wonderful time to get it ranked up get some things in place maybe help get some of that stuff in place for July 1 I don't know but I'm saying it's not you don't mean after the budget has been passed so you know the community will approve but that's a long distance still you've still got time to do the higher and if you try to push that for a May 1 a big load off your shoulders for not a lot of money just the timing nothing else I would say once the budget when the budget gets passed I would say it would be great to be able to put it out and see if we get some great candidates I would definitely come back to the Board and ask if it would be okay to hire a month or two early it really depends on the strength of candidates there might be good candidates they can't do it until then right that's true but I was saying this position may not fall on a typical academic calendar higher maybe it does it depends on the candidates but that's a great idea Steve it's just I see it every day where you get somebody who comes in and it's not intuitive to know where to go I mean if they come in because they need to do fingerprinting and background checks if they come in to sign up and get their health done it's Joanne's if they are interested in a contract for IA that's spooky and then it's just daily crises I don't mean like evaluation crises I mean more like just where does this fall in our policy and health is the big one where we get daily things where hey I got this bill I don't know if I should pay it or not and you have to kind of go through with them and that's a bill to you at that point but I can tell you a very definitive story from one of the first couple months I walked into the business office and there was an employee in tears sitting next to Jo who's trying to talk her through in a public space through healthcare that her husband was you know like that's not Jo's job Jo is a fabulous person and wonderful person with Fable that's not her job in the public space to work with an employee who's obviously upset about trying to figure out the healthcare system it's just it's not good for employees and there's privacy issues too yeah all of the healthcare not HR in general should always have a closed door yep and we're semi private because the business office is just the three of us but there's a lot of traffic that comes from there but this is not an HR department it's the business office and I can tell you like in my old Essex Westford yeah the budget was three times higher but they had an actual HR department with the director system director administrator administrative assistant I mean there were three or four people so hopefully I would probably take this is an example of something I probably would take out for the public forum and then just put another bullet or two back on that previous slide because I don't think we need to go into this level of detail this was more for you thinking about this slide though you might have it not there but say it printed so that somebody who says really an HR person love what they do you're gonna get that I think so I will probably put a lot of slides in back up so we can get to them I've gotten that from people who are super supportive of our schools they're like really an HR coordinator or the administration they better justify that I feel like you guys have heard half an hour the other day and Jim heard quite a bit about this I feel like it is very justified but it's something that I think you're right because it's not what is this going to do for my kids but it is eventually I mean if we can't take care of our employees they're not going to take care of our kids I have 10 employees and I want to be in charge for them I can't comprehend how you do this it might be that it's not this slide but a slide that ties this to how it actually does allow the district to better serve its employees and their board students you know a couple of bullets we could maybe put our heads together but I mean that's really what we're trying to get at we need to serve our employees better by giving them access to this we need to have time available other people do other things this is ultimately about the district accomplishing its objectives of educating students I think that a good example to kind of throw out there is we all know that there's going to be statewide health negotiations next year when that comes down we could be looking at redoing everything we just did for HRAs and if we have to do that we need to make sure somebody is taking care of the employees because if you have teachers in you know our office that are upset and crying over the bills that they're getting hit with they're certainly not going to have their head in the game to try to do the best for teaching our kids so that is kind of one of the real examples of something that could happen starting next year and I also I think we might not want to get too cute about this too and just kind of say to people here bring that up say this is a 200 plus person employee organization then can you think of another 200 plus employee organization that shouldn't have an HR director and I think you know does your business have an HR director and I think most people would be like who do I go to when I have questions about my health so I think just having some frank conversations that in addition to educating people this is a place that employs people and has extensive employees and a pretty extensive budget and I can't imagine how business managers survive in districts who didn't choose our health care I hear about them all the time for labor contracts one anecdotal experience I was even thinking about after talking to Libby the other night was the idea of harassment, diversity training that's something that state employees receive and it's extremely helpful hearing from our two student representatives it sounds like that type of training might also be helpful in our schools as well listen HR it's your turn okay and I think a lot of this is going to go pretty quick because I'm just going to highlight the changes I think that for the informational session and if you remember last year we did this too we only started looking at expenses one way instead of two ways so I think we'll probably cut the ones by category and just go by programs which means this special ed, general ed co-curricular so we'll take a snapshot looking at things this way and on this slide once again I tried to hit and blue things that had changed which most of that has to do with the salaries and health benefits that I talked about where I had the tweaks and things those hit under the categories of general ed special ed and buildings and grounds those were the people that I was talking about having to make adjustments for salaries and health the other one that's highlighted is career center tuition I mentioned that I had a higher tuition rate that I had to plug in so those are kind of the big numbers that had changed on the expense side I think in total it was about $49,000 at the exact total and most of that was health benefits and new snapshot so I will skip by category which is salaries, benefits, tuition in revenues and we have a very colorful chart the line items in blue have changed education spending is going to change anytime any other number changes because it balances your expenses and revenues small schools grant I mentioned is about $3,000 lower special ed intensive is about $60,000 lower than I was using and they're basing that on 56% reimbursement of eligible costs and I was using a higher percentage of that kind of didn't mean the block grant is about $24,000 higher than I had before the extraordinary and triple E which is essential early education those were off only by about $1,000 they were very close tuition at $600 waterfall of money based on the announced tuition that would be the area where if I assume that we're going to have more than two elementary and two secondary students coming back and maybe at least one new high school student that would be another $16,000 so that would be something to think about should we be more realistic there and assume we're going to get one more tuition in yellow tech on behalf will change based on six semester average and that's really about half of the tuition bill that you get transportation aid I think I'm going to stop highlighting it because I don't think we're going to get a better number but the balance forward is the fund balance revenue that we're going to use and remember the whole idea behind this was we thought we were going to drop our one time expenses in projects from FY19 to FY20 by like $250,000 and we only dropped it by about $168,000 so to meet the goal that we set we said well we'll use $87,000 for the fund balance which basically is like dropping your expenses by another $87,000 so that allowed us to hit the target it's something I highlighted because it's your decision and it's something we should think about because in FY21 if we look a year ahead of tax rates if we drop our project costs down by $87,000 and then take away this fund balance it's not going to help the tax rate at all in FY21 because you're dropping both and if we drop it now it's a near term hit it would be a challenge for our tax rate this year but next year when we drop our expenses and we've been to mess with revenues we're really dropping expenses and we were dropping our and would help us drop the tax rate and absorb some of that $2 tax merger incentive that we have to kind of soak up so it's something we're thinking about and it may not be something we decide way away maybe we wait until we get we wait until we get equal as and if those things are favorable and drop our tax rate some more maybe we say you know what that's a good number to hit for tax rate purposes let's adjust this so that we don't have to worry about that I would take it out now and put it back in if we have prices that's the other thing because if we go to the public forum with the tax rate of whatever increase and then we take this out and it's a 7th and increase that's a harder thing for the public to have to absorb but if you all are okay with it especially if we get a CLA number that's okay and if we get equal as pupils that is favorable I can start dropping that down some and then I can maybe be a little on the optimistic side of dropping it down because we can always put it back in so I will drop it down it'll be somewhat lower than this anywhere from zero to this but with your permission we'll reduce it somewhat unless we kick that problem can down the road the better I have one question I'm in agreement with Steve in terms of our anticipated unreserved fund balance the last time the finance committee met we were anticipating it was going to be around $30,000 on the year do you have any sense of that change in the next year do you think that might bump back up a little bit it actually bumped up considerably at the end of this last year because we ended up with a good size surplus and the number now I can say based on our final audit which I just got is it's $30,000 less so it's $870 for our fund balances and I can tell you now I'll tell you later too but what happened was we got a land water conservation grant that $150,000 for the playground we actually got $30,000 of that and I basically kind of double counted that so that needed to be taken out of the fund balance so instead of 900 it's about $870 which is a good fund balance and I think right now we're looking pretty good for 19 to finish on target or maybe a little bit of a surplus and I think it's great right now to have that money available because as we're getting ready to put out RFPs for that bond the prices just are scaring me with what we're hearing are happening out there with construction RFPs so it's nice to know that we have a little bit of flexibility there to be able to put back something if we have to we never know what's going to happen in construction and in a few cases we may try to move some money around during 2019 like I know we're going to come in under budget for tuition for 9 through 12 because my first semester builds in there's a lot less kids than we anticipated because they moved for the ground attack center so I know I'm going to have a good amount of money there if you look the van is out there right now that I drove the kids down after school today we went ahead and bought that van because I had some money left in merger and I knew I was going to have some excess so I had talked at the beginning of the budget process about a one-time expense for a van we already did those are some things that if we see that we can afford it we'll do it I'll bring it up as part of the quarterly reports to say this is what we're looking at doing but it helps everything that we do will help us to be able to deliver a bond project that is at least as close as possible right the capital plan one of the things I was looking forward to being able to explain if we had Roxbury people here was yes we understand Roxbury is not on this list but there's a reason why the reason why is because the roof is in great shape here the heat plant is in great shape here there isn't any kind of major capital project that we see in the near term for Roxbury that's why it's not on here I will also say that if you've been to the kitchen you'll notice that we did a lot of work in the kitchen this year we're going to do some work on doors the card readers still this year there's still money that we're spending this year in this school and next year we put $62,500 in project costs for Roxbury in the general budget not in the capital so like the bathroom around the corner there's two bathrooms there and both could use some work so either we might do a big project in one bathroom or do a little bit in both bathrooms to make those better we're going to do some work in the town hall so it's not that we're ignoring Roxbury it's just there's not a big capital thing that we see although something could pop up and we can certainly adjust anything beyond FY20 FY20 we said last year we were going to do bathrooms FY21 and on we always have the time to make adjustments there I don't think there's big expectations that we have to do any of these things for sure that this is a good snapshot of at least what we're seeing out there the one big thing that's on this list is window replacements that we do have to tackle at some point and there's a lot of it I don't think Roxbury folks would be too surprised Ryan can attest this things that Roxbury came to my pillar with was like the buildings that will be part of the new district the building has no deferred buildings and whereas well you should know right now before we get married that we got a ton of deferred buildings and then we're going to have a big bond and they're like okay well so I mean it was very interesting that dynamic was like one district comes in with everything ready to go the other one with a mess frankly on the buildings in the beginning and I will say the one thing that wasn't the kitchen was a bit of a mess and they were starting to plan for that and they did put an initial investment into that right as we were transition but we put a significant amount of money on top of that and I think what's cool too is if something does come up all of a sudden the septic fails or whatever it's like they're part of a larger base now so that that can be absorbed out of budget crisis which is a good thing about that we can get wed and another good thing is from Roxbury's perspective is the tax rate calculation I love this slide because it gives you the mathematical operation so you can actually do the calculations and know how it works it is a little over only a business major so it's great I appreciate it the reason why I say Roxbury is happy about this or should be very happy about this is their tax rate went down this year it's going to go down next year I guarantee it's going to go down the next year just because of the merger and it would actually go down a lot more but it can't go down by more than 5% by statute so I will say if somebody from Roxbury was here looking at this I would tell them the one thing you should take away from this is if I add a million dollars to the budget it's not going to change your tax rate if I cut a million dollars it's not going to change your tax rate I mean that 1.654 equalized rate is as low as it can go and I would literally have to put millions of dollars in the budget to make it go up that's just if you live in Roxbury just for the Roxbury tax rate did Roxbury just redo its grant list is that why you had 100% must have been the past few years it's been at least three years ago it's been a little long it may change this next time we're trying to figure out how the realtors are saying that Roxbury real estate is hard I hear lots of families with kids are moving in and that's a good and bad thing it's great for the community but it will be bad for the tax rate because that means your CLA is going to drop like a rock every additional student doesn't make up for that you've got to get 14 of them so the big things on this slide are what's highlighted in yellow just chomping at the bit to get equalized pupils I'm chomping at the bit to get CLA I'm hoping that we're close in CLA and I'm hoping that I'm way under equalized pupils and things get much better I'm not sure that we're going to have the equalized pupil count by June 22 I hope we do if it's a good number if the CLA is close and the equalized pupils goes up it's going to make me feel a lot better about taking out their fund balance so you're projecting a actual decline in the equalized pupils or you're putting in as a placement I just made it a round number and I didn't want to go up so I went up by all stretches of my imagination it should go up it really should but there's this weird thing on equalized pupils they look at your two they take your average daily membership over two years and then they have all this weighting like a high school kid is worth more than an elementary school kid preschool kids only worth 0.46 but if you have kids that have well needs they get weighted heavier if you have kids free and reduced high then it gets weighted heavier and then what happens is you have a total number statewide it's a lot more than the number of kids you actually have in the state and then what the AOE does is it says what do I have to multiply this by to get it to drop down here and they multiply everybody's equalized pupil by that equalizing ratio and that's a scary thing because I don't know whether that's 93 or something but I cannot do the math there's no way because I don't know what the equalizing ratio is Brad James does he does all the math and in fairness to him I can't really complain about him not giving us an equalized pupil count because there are schools that don't have their data in yet because the statewide launch to no data system is very challenging for you to feed your data into it and it has to be exactly precise the way it gets in and it changes this year without any technical support as to how to do it so that's why I'm not sure when we're going to get that and what it's going to look like but I'm really hopeful that I'm very pessimistic about it hopefully pessimistic she reminds me which the school year the Roxbury Montlator have the same pre-CLA actually how many is it 5 it wasn't 5 is it 3 years after the merger that the rates go together probably equalized it was probably about the time the merger incentive expired but it's a 5% decrease so that absolute number is getting smaller as their number goes down so your tax it's not a straight line right it would be getting there a lot quicker if there wasn't that 5% because you can see the equalized is the number you need to look at because everybody's CLA is different so if you look at the equalized Montpeliers almost $1.50 that $1.65 would be considerably lower it would be the same as Montpeliers I was just trying to remember which fiscal year they would be but also it's not going to work that way because the Montpelier rate will keep going up so they're going to meet the middle and mathematically when that will happen is whenever the merger incentive goes away because the math will tell you that the equalized rate will be identical when there is no incentive and there is no limit on the decrease so whenever that 6 goes to 4 to 2 and then hits 0 then there's only going to this chart will only have one cell right here and so by definition in 5 years they will be identical except for the CLA I'm not going to talk too much about this because it could change I mean Roxbury's number should be pretty close except the CLA is going to impact so for Montpelier you've got Pupilcon and CLA that are going to impact this for Roxbury you really just have the CLA and I did add on here at the bottom it is something to remind people that in Roxbury for example these impacts are a worst case scenario this is for families that pay 100% of their taxes education taxes based on property value 2 thirds of the people don't 2 thirds of the people get an income sensitivity so it will be even less than this for most people all board members need to have that because that's something that we're going to master every single conversation 2 thirds of the people are going to see this much increase non-residential I changed the tax rate based on the commissioner's recommendation but the other thing to remember here is this is not impacted by school budgets at all the outlook so we'll spend a little bit of time on these next two slides and then we'll be done so the big thing is that 2 cent rate decrease every year means if we're going to try to keep tax rates level we would have to cut about 250 to 275,000 dollars in expenses the enrollment in staffing since they're both going up and the enrollment is going up more than staffing probably the spending for people should be pretty level it's not a big impact that means your tax that's pretty much tax neutral because both are going up the expenditures that we know we're going to cut about 40,000 dollars in grandfathering in the next year 80 and then 80 and then it's done and wasn't that working about that 2 cents when we talked about the mergers that 2 cents goes away also what we're paying into it yeah the thing that's interesting is because we're seeing that huge drop in FY20 there's less of a drop now in the other years so it's not that nice it's a slope of like 100,000 a year it was like 200,000 and now 40,000,000 so far if you're doing keeping track so far to absorb the 250 to 270 all we have is 40,000 we could decrease these one time facility costs for 87,000 but if we also have that fund balance and get rid of that that's tax neutral if we don't have the fund balance and we get to cut 87,000 for 87,000 towards the 250 transportation aid is going to increase probably only about 20,000 in FY21 but then 48,000 in FY22 because of adding the main street bus bond expenditures are pretty level we don't have to worry about absorbing a big one like we did this year because of the first year bond principle but construction bond costs are going to go down and the beamers bond for retirement actually is structured so it goes up in the way of the year so they're pretty much level so the outlook is we have a lot of money to have to cut if we're going to keep the taxes neutral and we have maybe half of that if we take away the fund balance this year maybe a little more than half of that we're probably right about a half of that budget summary can I skip a slide the budget summary that'll change whenever I get new data but the discussion points is the other big one so I beat the first two bullets to death we talked pretty considerably about the third bullet so really what I'm looking for is if you have any other thoughts or if you have any other thoughts about the public forum presentation last year we had more a few education centric slides, overview type of slides that we had thrown in there as well things that aren't in my alley so we could look at maybe adding a few slides that are like that I will take out some slides especially the ones that are like by by cost category and put those in back up the HR one and put it in back up I'd open it up to you as far as with your bike I would say a couple of things I think we should have a general slide about the merchant like maybe more a review slide and a grant slide I'm sure so just overall how's it going how's it going? how's the finances going? the operations well and I think and I think the finances so what's happening that by the way we didn't have to pay for it kind of thing I think people were worried that the merger would cost a lot of money and I like having the like what do we do slides that are like we have four buildings we have this many employees we have this many families do you guys agree like I think just to ground people in what we do well remember we talked about the big challenges for the year we're going to be the mergers equity and one other thing I don't know what it was what was it? it might have been so the question is how does the budget react to those three priorities and that was something I think we did really well last year was how the budget kind of relate back and if there was any way to do a cover sheet you know the merger here's what we did here's what's ahead here's the budget impact I know I don't want you to dig up create new research on this but there needs to be educational context as you were saying some educational slides I agree with that too but I also just like the what we do context what we do as a school district when people show up and they're interested in learning about the budget to ground them and this is how big our organization is this is where we want to be this is the scale of what we do I love people say to me what are the grades at Roxbury? when did our kids come? so that idea of okay Roxbury consists of these grades then they come to Montpere it sounds like we've said it 5 million times but I tell that to the left and that's sort of how did the merger work you know what actually happened oh Roxbury now is day 4 yeah and just think about it as your presentation I would call it a little time now there was there was kind of a deep dive into a bunch of very kind of factual information on just what the schools looked like yeah I think that could be a quick overview we've just got four schools we've got four buildings, they have this many kids four employees exactly and then maybe a little more kind of vision and what drives the budget and how's the merger going just a here's where we are everybody always asks me how are the kids getting here is that okay? because it was a question during the merger of transportation well maybe instead of trying to get it I think all that quick overview is good I'm wondering though how do we tie why this budget what is it that why this budget is the budget it is and what are you trying to do this year in the schools what are you trying to do next year in the schools and why this budget how does that do that? yeah I think that's a direct connection of correlation just as I kind of play it out just without having much thought to it but it's that question alone is a direct correlation to the two staffing pieces that we put in and aligns with the systems and structures that I was talking about in the suit report that those positions are meant to build capacity in terms of systems and structures and what we're able to do that's dry I know it is dry and I think maybe that's what you say is like this is my first year full year and what I'm trying to do is get everything organized get everything that's practices professionalism build a good culture you know and say that which is not a lie that's exactly what I'm trying to say but that's good maybe we'll feel good about that we got a strong leader to understand systems and those three things that you put in the report for this board meeting are those things that I think people want to know oh we have a new superintendent by the way she noticed that we need these things yeah and maybe part of that is we had a big year last year with the merger it's been a huge year we had these two big things that was the other thing was to execute the bond properly and so we've gone through that so great now we're wrestled back to the ground but now we got to start looking at systems and culture and not try to be too ambitious in the coming year other than finish the things we started and get some professionals of it and some system in place so we're going to take a breather you're not going to see a new anything in this budget other than what you would hope we would be doing right and I think that's a positive statement you're not seeing new initiatives that are going to be terribly sexy this year it's really good well there is one right it's just the beginning of the beginning it's just starting I think even that fits into an approach of look I'm responsive to the community I'm just responsive to the community but looking at systems and looking at how do we achieve educational ends looking at what we have, looking at culture and we're not it's not a program it's a study to see how can we implement a program even that is not going to be a new initiative this year it's starting to get ready for out there so if you can say that in a way that makes people feel like that's exactly what this whole district means this year is that so the other thing that might come up so how are we doing with that one how's the construction there's a playground here it's going to come up where are we on track are we spending more than we thought we would are we all those questions that transportation and Roxbury will definitely be three things possibly snow days not only budget related so many questions oh I know the Superport was last week I knew it they'll last five years everywhere there's a certain number of people who are convinced we're going to have more snow days because of the merger and unfortunately it's snow before Christmas it's coming true it's a cruel joke I had to do two snow days before December so one thing that I think might be nice of Grant would be to have basics of a school budget in Vermont kind of like to explain like how the tax factors fit into what happens to the budget because if I came in not knowing anything about how it works in Vermont I would think your budget that you're making is the budget but then there's all the state things that affect what actually happens and well I guess what happens to the tax rate so some sort of I don't know where necessarily but like something about like the breakdown of what happens so we set the budget and then this is what happens to get the tax rate and I know like the slides at the end do sort of address that but not like in an overview sense do you know what that makes sense so you're looking for something earlier that basically just talks about the education fund and how that works yeah that I'll be glad to have you explain that before like people are sort of like all in the details BPR has spent like ten years trying to educate from others what if it was more of a I like that maybe it was more like as we build a budget in Montpelier we have to remember that there are these five things that happen to us they come from the outside that are going to ultimately turn our dollars into a tax rate and we don't get to control those and we don't even know what they are yet and then here they are yeah and I think there's still a lot of people out there that think that you get money based on the number of kids that you have that hasn't been like that for years so maybe there is something I could put together that's at least like the basics the very basics of how it works you don't have to reinvent the wheel either there are a couple of really good resources the BSBA put together a cartoon thing from the ed fund last year I watched it like 15 times before I interviewed for you but that's something that you guys didn't know was a quick link to send people if they asked like here try out this cartoon I just think it would be awesome if I could put a link to a cartoon and a budget free we could totally show that instead of you talking right now see how warm it is it's a totally crazy idea to what you will but I just had this thought that you could take the slide at the end but just last year as the first slide if you started with this and kind of briefly explain how this year's budget where all these numbers we already know the back could sort of frame a little bit for like this is this year these are these numbers that we didn't actually know you know I mean like this is where we're starting okay now we're going to go through what's happening and then kind of end that's a dead standard under it it's hard or maybe nice round numbers something right we need one of those honors to bill thanks for that totally they're actually like public assets it's too creative it's outdated now but yeah it's very similar to that it was like eight years ago well I will think of something I can put together obviously it's hard to think about doing it in a less than like five slides but I think it's something that we should try to build on to just one slide if I can do it and if somebody comes across something that oh this is perfect then send it to me otherwise I'll just start looking around and come up with something on my own and see how it will be I think you can just a quick overview like these things are really complicated we don't control these but here's just kind of here's what we don't control what you can do is you can have a handout that has the details you can give the really quick brief kind of how it works but if you want more information on the table is and that may be something you could get off of some of our research I can put a slide together the cartoon any other thoughts I think it's okay if it's dry people don't comment they're not budget people yeah we don't have 100 people that show up in this in case you're noticed well I think just I think the point is to communicate what we're doing in life not to make it sexier than it is but if that's true then I think we have to leave but what are we trying to get done exactly what are we doing in life and then here's the budget for it I do think what Steve's getting at though I've brought this up at numerous meetings before slight digression here which is without a real vision statement where we've been involved in the community to really iron out what do we want from our schools I think we're going to continue to have trouble with this with this type of communication I think our approach this time is great I disagree I think we could have a vision session till we're blue in the face and I don't think it would make this better okay, research is quite good you're our goals as a district if we have like three to five goals as a district this is how this budget is helping us meet them we don't really have we're working on that and I think that's what we say is if it was three years ago we set these as our goals we all know that this is where this district's heading and this is what we want to achieve here's what we're doing this year we don't have that so this year you all know we're a brand new district you all know we don't have any goals yet so in lieu of that we're going to get a really solid institution we're going to build a really solid institution I know we're going to build a really solid institution that can build on that and that we're going to finish this disruption and we can three goals she gave us today we can I'm going to say the royalty because it's me right so we have a new district a new superintendent who's leading a leadership team relatively new we need some learning we appreciate the community giving us that kind of time as we build the structures we need to in order to move more efficiently in all kids learning and that we will get there it's on my shoulders so that's what we're going to go with it's not your shoulders it's our shoulders to get those goals in place and to know exactly what we need to do and you guys to say either yay or nay to those goals and so it's been a challenge for going on 13 years for me to try to build a budget that really links to action plans and links to this and links to that because the fact of the matter is 70 some odd percent of your budget is salaries and benefits for the people that you've got so the majority of our money is going to be for doing just the everyday stuff and we're always going to be able to call out a few things but it's never going to seem very significant in terms of the total percentage of budget like hey we're going to do this $22,000 world language immersion which is 1% of the budget because you just never can get that big chunk and say well 20% of the budget is for this goal 70% of it is just to have the people come back but what percentage of my tax increase is for maintenance versus an issue and as a taxpayer if I see my tax are going up 100 bucks I think going up 100 bucks because you guys are doing a bunch of new stuff are they going up 100 bucks because you're just trying to pay the bills and I think the answer this year is mostly we're just paying some bills and that's why the tax increase is small and you're not seeing a lot of huge new initiatives out of this although we're adding a person and we're adding busting and we can talk about why we felt that was more we should say that isn't it at this point accurate to say that most of the tax increases because of the CLA more than I mean you could say well equalized pupils right now is causing a little bit of a problem but CLA yeah CLA is probably good portion four cents of the six so yeah it's complicated for a problem it's all within that range of there's not a lot you can do and that's explaining the CLA well here it's better it's two cents is because we lost two cents of tax and then four cents CLA yeah I mean there's other places where we gained because the yield went up ups and downs but it's okay I mean I think the message is this is not a year for a new merger for a new bond for a new anything other than yeah it's a good thing because you're paying the most on your bond this year and we knew that so we're not doing other big things yeah I think that's a little charred people might be relieved it's like we got new administration new district and huge the biggest bond in history okay let's take a breather right and it's still the same take a breather don't underestimate how people will be about busing and a meaningful step forward and a new superintendent those two things have been I've been hearing about those since I've been on the public that's true and the playground so those are pretty sexy things yeah maybe what I should do is that slide that shows by category all the increases and decreases that's about first maybe what I should have is more have that more as a here's this slide that goes into all the real details if you want to look at it later but in front of that maybe I should just talk about budget increase is X and here are the big pieces size 12 font instead of size 4 font so I could look at trying to do that kind of prime for that page and now when he's 21 after you do it I think you've done a great job yeah, no it's fantastic appreciate it this is your third year and all three have been fantastic they really have been even though the slides are endless I love all the information not that much alright, what do we do next that was the I'm just going to assume that our board discussion on budget we skipped a republic comment I think we're done 32nd thing about my trip to the career center sure I think we were as were the legislators to go to the open house which I did go to and what was interesting to me is that besides visiting all the places at the end they gave this little presentation which explained that very high school wants more of the space the career center is in so the career center has to go somewhere else the career center wants to go somewhere else well I'm getting to that so the career center's vision is that they'll build a new school and it will be a whole high school 9 through 12 so students that attend the career center will enter in 9th grade and go 4 years there they won't come to another high school that was interesting for me to hear I did say, okay we've been gaining population the rest of Vermont is losing population acquiring that population from those high schools that are losing that and I was saying to Grant they had the great answer which was it's not losing we're not taking we're discussing the entire educational career of all of these children which is of course true but I just thought you know that's what they're thinking about now imagine how much talk about budget it would cost just to build a whole new high school and then think about how much it would cost to build a tech school we don't have any like they're proposing in Vermont, they have them in Connecticut Massachusetts and they as far as I can figure out they don't understand how they would get the money they thought perhaps the state would give them this is a publicly funded competitive high school with other overlapping districts I mean it creates a real problem for public education public public funding of education their answer of course would be if you're looking at the whole education of the students wouldn't you want well that's your argument for school choice in general is just student focused not community focused that's not a systems approach no it's not sorry you have to consider the not just the welfare of the students who choose to attend there but the welfare of every student it's a tough one I've been keeping Jim in the sorry Steve I've been keeping Jim relatively in the loop when I get new information about this particular thing I don't think I'd be speaking at a turn if I said there's a little rogue behavior going on well and the mere fact that that's what I was saying about building a new building in a whole new school costs a lot of money and there's and I don't want you all to think that that is coming from the board of directors school board directors from Barry for colleagues of boardmanship what's the governing body of that school so I said on kind of a commission that is from every sending district and the principal their penny and that governs it the very board technically is there they're they're under a very contract but decisions like that would be made by Barry not decisions of that nature it couldn't be made simply by Barry unless Barry was funding it totally because because in essence that is a share exactly that's a shared entity even though it falls under the jurisdiction of the very board of directors so they would need to do something that scale they would need to get the well they would need to get each districts to approve the new agreement or whatever where does their funding come from from different schools? can I pull this back just a bit this is not an item and we're getting I think beyond an update we can have it as an agenda and especially if it moves forward but I think if we get if this is something we need to react to and it may at some point be I think it's too early to react to it just why I kind of wanted to go from update to yeah all is in favor I'm just going to run out the door to try to