 We're going to call our meeting to order just to try to respect everybody's time and people that have joined us online and have joined us in person. Welcome to our Washington Central Annual Meeting. Hope you can hear me OK. All right. I'm going to try to do my best to project my voice and sort of look at both the screen and the people here. I'd like to start by acknowledging that we are fortunate in Washington Central to have really caring staff, really caring community members that are here. And by staff, I mean everybody from our bus drivers to our administrators, our teachers. We're really fortunate to have a community that really cares about the future of our kids. So as we get started in this conversation of our budget this evening, I want us all to think about the consequences of today into tomorrow. What we do here tonight matters. How we show up here matters. Given the challenges that we have faced and overcome, and I know a lot of you guys know this because I've been part of that over the years, I believe we are capable of overcoming any obstacles not only for this current budget season, but for the future of making our district a sustainable school district. I wanted to remind us that it takes all of us. Let us model for our younger generation, stability, kindness, be curious, listen for understanding, and greatness, like they say, is usually what we do for others, not what we do for ourselves. So I want to read a little quote about why we care about public education, why we care about what we do here as a school board and as our administrators. In every interaction, we must remind people that public schools were created to make our democracy a reality. For centuries, they have been indispensable in creating the most free, creative, and powerful country on the planet. And they remain the principal mechanisms through which this nation makes good on its fundamental promise of liberty, justice, and opportunity for all. Every path to individual community and national success runs through those wide open doors in each of our community schools. And we can't do it alone. We need you. So I'm excited for all of us to be joined here together and for the opportunity that we have to have a conversation with you. I know this has been a challenging time, but let's get started. Welcome, Joshua. So we're going to get started right with the, we're going to have a brief presentation, but let's move right to the next. Could you say what your name and role is? Oh, sorry. My name is Floor Diaz-Mitz. I'm the chair of the board. And I guess let's go around and introduce ourselves. I'm Megan Roy. I'm the superintendent. I'm Suzanne Gain, the business administrator for the district. Ursula Stanley, board member from Middlesex. Amelia Contrata, board member from East Montpelier. Zach Sullivan, board member from East Montpelier. I'm Daniel Keeney, I'm a board member from Calis. I'm Micaela McClare, board member from Worcester. And I'm Prismic Bay's board member from Middlesex. Josh has said it's sadly a board member from Middlesex. We also have a few board members online. I might just call on them when I see them. Yeah. So, Kari. I'm the board body's chair from Calis. Natasha. Hello, Natasha Eckhart from Worcester. And Diane. Hi, Diane Nichols-Cleming, board member from Birdland. Great. I think that's all of us. So, Mark, can we? Oh, you've got the slides. So we wanted to do a quick overview of how we got started. Started. Started. Started. Started. Started. Started. Started. Started. Started. Started. Started. Started. Sorry. I got it. There you go. OK. So we've been working really hard as a board to try to do round-ear budgeting. This is when we've been talking about this. This is when we started the budget development timeline here of 2018. I'm not going to read through the whole timeline, but this is where we are. Right now, we adopted a budget on January 17 that we had to really quickly change in February. But today, March 4 is our annual meeting. And March 5, as you know, is our voting day. We move to the next slide. The agenda for tonight is just to give what has happened in Vermont that makes this year challenging. We'll cover a little bit of that, the vision on core values, and what do our schools need in order to support our students. And then we're going to talk briefly at the end on the configuration study that the finance committee, the expanded finance committee, has been working on. And how can we configure our schools to achieve our vision of sustainability? And we are also, of course, going to go over what is the cost to provide this to our students. I know that some of you had joined us for some of this work, but not everybody came to the meeting. So we will leave room for questions at the end. We're going to try to make this presentation as brief as possible, but we want you to all have the same information before we get started. OK, next. The context realities for this year's budget, as you know, is the sunset of the ESSER funds. What are the ESSER funds? Those were the federal grants that we received during the pandemic. They all sunset in September of 2024. So that is the big context in our reality for this year. The rising cost of labor, health care, and construction cost changes in the Vermont education funding. And recently, it connects funding to enrollment. And our enrollment, and we'll look at some graphs later, is definitely declining. Act 173, which has decreased the special education funding, it's made it more flexible, but it has decreased some of the funding. And Act 127, the long-term weighted average daily membership, has changed how instead of equalized pupils, we now have a long-term weighted average of daily membership. The budget realities. We can debate whether there were unforeseen implications or not, but the reality is that the entire state discovered enormous tax rate implications in the middle of this budgeting season. The cost drivers that we just talked about not impacted just us, but impacted everybody in the state. The transition mechanism that originally Act 127 had was a cap of 5%. So to say, we were at 9.87, but we were capped at 5%. So that was the reality that we were budgeting with. Once the cap went away, we were in a different reality. So not just that, but the impacted property yield resulted in significant increases in property taxes. Our CLA at our district, the common level of appraiser, our houses, there's not enough housing in our state, not just in our Washington Central area. Our houses are selling higher, but we haven't kept up. We are due for a re-appraisal. So that's another factor. The General Assembly in its attempt to address all of this created at the last minute at 8.50, which removed the cap. But basically, they had to do it because there was no other option, because we were going to jump into you. We were going to just don't want to get too much into why 8.50, because it's not something that we can control, but it happened. But I think it would help if we give them a little context you might jump in in, Megan. Yeah, I think what we're trying to point out is, unlike most budget years, there were changes made to our projections very, very late in the game. And that is different than normal. You build your budget based on assumptions that were given on December 1, typically. And that's what this board did and adopted the budget that assumed those. The state needed to react. The General Assembly felt it needed to react to widespread increases. This was their solution. And it changed our conversation after the budget had been adopted. And that's really the highlights. Later, if people have questions about 8.50 and what it means and some of the mechanics, happy to get to those, the most important piece is that last bullet, though. We do not benefit from any sort of incentive or protection in the new law, because we gained, in long term, weighted average daily pupils. So we benefited from Act 127. And therefore, we are not eligible for any sort of property tax protections. That's what I would have you keep in mind. Do you want to hold questions? If we can hold questions, if that's OK? Yeah, we'll hold questions to the end. And we'll have a space for questions and comments. Let's do the next slide. And we promise to be quick. This just because I know a lot of you guys are familiar with this. But the total enrollment for our district, I'm not going to read through the entire graph. But if we stay in the current enrollment, you can see that the entire district is 1428 students right now. So from year 2022 to now, or even from last year, we're losing students. If we go to the next slide, it gives you the same picture with a different model. But you can see what we're projecting for year 26. Again, it's 1326. I keep changing that number. It's 1320. It's 1420. 1320. And I keep saying 1326. But you can see that our district, our enrollment is declining. And we've been seeing this as a trend over the years. So this is not news to most community members. Then we're going to get now into the why. Why is why we do what we do as a school board here? And what is the story we tell with our budget? So all year, we have been working on our core beliefs. We have been engaging with the community members in what is it that the community cares. And why do we exist? We're keeping our same mission. But we came then come up with input from community members, from staff, from students. We came up. We developed these five core beliefs, humanity and justice, community and belonging, well-being, transparent, and responsible leadership, which is the governance you're here, community engagement and relationships, and rigorous curriculum and instruction. And so with this, we're in the middle of the strategic planning process. And well, actually, we're at the end of the strategic planning process. So we're starting to create action steps. And through this deep community involvement for almost a year, like I was saying, we have identified the core beliefs that we just talked about. And that defines what we are committed as a community, not just what the school board is committed or where the students are committed. It's what we are committed and what we want to support with this budget. What we have been using over the past two years is these three pillars to also frame our budget. So if we bring the core beliefs into grain size, we have focused on academic achievement, safe and healthy schools, and humanity and justice. What does academic achievement mean? And I know that MLLS is just another term that we put there, but it's multi-layer system of support. So how do we make sure that we give first instruction? What is that? First instruction is that we make sure that our teachers, everyday teacher in the classroom can meet 80% of the student needs. And from that, it's a layer two where they can do interventions, et cetera. We're not going to get into that. So that is, we have seen results on that. So we want to make sure that this budget supports that. And safe and healthy schools, the social and emotional learning, and district safety is something that we know our kids need. The mental health needs are huge right now, and this is a very, we're committed to that to make sure that we're meeting our students and that we are keeping up with professional development and the staffing resources that we need in order to support these three pillars. And then with humanity and justice, we've been working on equity. Thanks to Megan, we have a way to monitor a little bit better now, our equity indicators, and our humanity and justice coalition has been doing a lot of work to make sure that our kids feel like they belong and that they're ready to learn when they go through our doors and they feel like they belong in our schools. This last slide that I'm going to take is our engagement timeline. What are our priorities, right? What does AOE requires? What Act 173 that we keep talking about in this special education? The board wanted to focus on the achievement gap. We created a goal for that. And as we talked just a brief minute ago, we identified those three pillars, which is not just us that use it, but staff use this. The staff and the community, you can see the timeline there. I don't need to read it to you, but we were engaging meaningful input from a community. And with that, my last slide is really the budget parameters. This is something that we started back in September. Like I was saying, we were committed for year-round budgeting. And what we said was we further development of multi-layer system of supports, support accelerated growth for our students from historically marginalized identities. And what really means is like supporting those students that we know that have been struggling for a long time. Supporting our three pillars, academic achievement, safe and healthy schools, humanity and justice, and support investment in school security. And why school security is not just because we believe it's important, but also because there was legislation that passed, legislation that passed that made, we needed to commit money to that. We also wanted to, we're considering configuration changes that realize this program quality improvements. And remain under the Act 127 for Pupils spending threshold to avoid a tax rate review. At that point, it was a 10% that all went away. So this parameter doesn't even count anymore. Frame a budget decision around education quality standards and equitable distribution of resources. This is what we do to provide guidance for our administrators, right? We don't get into allocating money, we as a board set guidelines for them to allocate how they're gonna meet, not just meet the student needs, but also provide opportunities for our students. And with that, I'm gonna pass it on to Megan. Perfect, thank you floor. So again, our job as a leadership team is to take all of the input and the conversation from the board and this direction that the board has given us and bring them a budget that we believe will support our mission, vision, the work of the schools within this context. And I just would highlight the reason that net impact under the October inflation rate was removed is because that was direction given to us in September until we realized exactly how much costs were inflated. And to bring our net impact under that would have required significant reductions. So the administration takes these three areas that the board asked us these lenses. We grounded our conversation in education quality in the distribution of resources are all of our schools receiving the resources they need to serve the share of students they have and also take into account student need. So when we began this work, we knew that we would have to be proposing reductions that that was very clear in this budget process. We were not going to be able to bring in a budget with increased spending. So in order to approach that as a leadership team we wanted to prioritize our ability to achieve our vision within our current configuration. We are configured the way we are and we will be at least for the coming budget year and we took that as understanding that context. We needed to make sure our staffing was consistent with education quality standards. That is both the board's direction and also state law. And then we wanted to make sure that we allowed individual schools to make recommendations based on their current instructional needs. And that began by saying we know we have revenue loss through the loss of grant funding and that we have to respond to enrollment changes. So all of our schools have served fewer students and lost funds, but we wanted each school to be able to propose what they believed was necessary. And so the next several slides, in a second I'm gonna turn it over to Suzanne around the numbers, but we wanna talk with folks about what the changes are in this budget. And again, those of you that have been with us through this process have seen this, but some of you have not. This is a summary slide that just talks about the changes across the district. I'm gonna go through some slides that show you exactly where those are. You will see there are increases to this budget. There are positions that we believe were necessary to meet the needs of our students. And we knew that in order to achieve those, we would need to offset those ads. So I'm not gonna spend much time on that summary slide. The next several slides, we'll just talk about what those changes to the budget are. This first slide, in fact the first two, these are changes that we would make regardless of whether or not they realized savings. And that is because the enrollment in pre-K and kindergarten between Worcester and Middlesex is so small that it does not allow for quality class sizes. So we knew we needed to merge those two programs. So for pre-K, we are merging a single program. It is going to be housed at Rumney for next year. This allows us to provide more consistent sessions and have before and after care for pre-K students. So again, this we would have done regardless, but we will be able to realize a partial reduction in support staff for that change. Same with kindergarten, the projected enrollment is seven and six respectively. So together, even together, that is a pretty small kindergarten size, but 13 is good instructional size, seven and six are not. This will be housed at Doty for the coming school year. And this does realize a reduction of a classroom teacher. Across the next two slides, they're just gonna summarize the decreases. In Berlin, there's an enrollment-related reduction of a classroom teacher, a reduction of a school counselor, an ESSER-funded school counselor, and an addition of a board-certified behavior analyst. That's what BCBA stands for, and that is someone to provide support to the social-emotional learning system. Part of that is funded through ProjectServe, which is grant money associated with the flooding in July because Berlin was particularly impacted. At Eastmont-Pillier, there's a reduction related to enrollment of a classroom teacher. In Callis, their reductions are also largely ESSER reductions. So these are positions that were funded through the ESSER grant. And I should say, as I'm looking at this slide, the board did make a decision at the end of the budget season to maintain full-time nursing and counseling. And so the reductions that you see in Callis and Doty, we did not update that slide. In Rumney, the reduction is in the area of paraeducators and also a school-wide behavior professional that was, again, a grant-related reduction because of a loss of funding. And at U32, there's a reduction of an ESSER-funded school counselor and an add of an SAP counselor, that student assistance program, someone who can work with the student body on substance use and prevention, and that is partially funded through a grant. U32 is also reducing in the area of paraeducators. So that's a lot of information, but again, this is just summarizing what the changes are in the budget. Actually, let me go back a slide. This does represent significant reductions in this proposed budget. This is a chart that has a lot of information in it, but this is just to let folks know that even with the reductions that we have made, we are still well within Vermont's education quality standards, which is something we're both required to do and we believe is the right thing. And so we think it's just important to make sure people know that, yes, we are reducing staff and we are still well within our ed quality standard. And I think this is where I turn it to Suzanne. So over the course of this, we've had this slide in here for some definitions and we won't go over it a whole lot. It's really in here for reference on the long-term weighted average daily membership, the common level of appraisal and the property yield. You'll see that a combined increase in expenditures of 12.5%, a decrease in revenues of 3.15%, resulted in a net ed spending of increase of 16.14%. The long-term weighted average daily membership or LTWADM provided by the AOE is an increase of 8.8% from 2184.51 to 2376.88. And the local spending per pupil is a 6.7% increase over FY24 from 14.5, 10 to 15.488 using the long-term weighted average daily membership numbers. And I would just jump in because it's important for people to realize we did not gain students. We continue to lose students. What has changed is how those students are weighted, which is part of how Vermont funds education. So I just wanna make sure that's clear. And in order to calculate tax rates, they recalculated this year's membership or last year's membership to compare our current spending. So that can feel confusing because a few slides ago, we showed a slide that said we have about 1,400 students and that is what we have in chairs in school. This is a different thing. So the equalized homestead tax rate is the rate that a district would have for resident homes if all properties were assessed at fair market value. The equalized tax rate is divided by the common level of appraisal or the CLA to develop the individual town tax rate. All five of our towns in the district saw a drop in their CLA which ranged between 6.37% in Worcester and 13.67% in Berlin. The CLA decreases mean tax rate increases in each of those towns. So here we have estimated equalized homestead tax rate. For this budget it was calculated using the property yield from February 8th, which was provided by the AOE as a potential $9,769. We have seen this number vacillate extremely throughout this process, but that's where we landed on February 8th. This results in an equalized tax rate of 1.5855. This number is divided by the CLA and results in the estimated property taxes for each town. Illustrated by this table. This slide illustrates the estimated tax increase that homestead property owners would see in each town based on homes valued at $100,000, $200,000, and $300,000 using the equalized tax rate of 1.5855. So we know the state's final property yield will likely change before the legislative session is over. Throughout this budget development process, we've encouraged the board to focus on what they can control, which is the net expense budget. We provide this information to the board to help connect the tax rate projections to the budget that needs to be warned or that was warned for town meeting day. Okay, so I'm gonna finish us off and then we'll have time for questions by sharing a little bit of the board's conversation around configuration because as we shared earlier, this budget is built based on running six schools the way that we do currently run them. And that is partially why the costs look like they do. This is not a new conversation for this board. In fact, this is not a new conversation for this district and long preceded both Suzanne and I and several members of the team. But this year, we wanted to kind of walk us back the last two years. So we knew that if before we were gonna have a conversation about how we should be structured, we needed to know what it is our schools are trying to achieve. And if we didn't ground this conversation and what do we want for students, then we're just sort of moving chess pieces. We're not talking about what is it we want for kids. So last year focused on the strategic planning process, which Floor talked about at the beginning. And that is not quite finalized and adopted, but we're coming pretty close to the end of that process. What we do have is our vision and core beliefs, which is sort of the most important piece to be able to ground this conversation in. In August, the board decided to do this work by charging the finance committee with studying it and presenting recommendations to the board. They also made sure the finance committee had representation from all of our towns. There's a few bullets in here that just talks about what we did. If folks are interested, all of this information is on our website under the board committee section. They looked at enrollment data and focused on what some options might be. The full board received, at first, we were operating off this idea that we would have options presented in December, that we would spend January on engaging the community and aiming for a June decision. What I would say is that that timeline revised a little bit because the, rightfully, the finance committee wants the full board to engage in this conversation and have a deeper discussion about how we then engage the community. There will be a full presentation of configuration simulations on April 3rd. But again, another way of looking at it is in order to know how we should be configured, we need to ground that in our core beliefs. We need to study different ways to organize ourselves and we need to deeply engage our community and the board is committed to this process. This, we thought, was important to remind people of. We are not at this meeting presenting configuration options. That is something the full board has not had an opportunity to look at. But we want the community to know that this is part of the conversation because it is related to budget. But one of the things that we have come to in the study of this is the goal of our structure is to have high quality enriching instruction for all students. And sometimes the structure that we, in some ways, a structure that we have now limits the ability to do that. So this is a conversation about what's best for students in our communities, not just a cost containment conversation. So we know, based on the board and finance committee, that we want class sizes that meet education quality standards and are sufficient to provide rich instruction. Meaning they need to be big enough to provide rich instruction. We don't meet that in all of our schools. We know we want full-time nursing and counseling in our buildings. We know we wanna maintain or expand enrichment opportunities. We have inconsistency in our district now because some of our schools are too small to offer some of the opportunities that other schools in the district have. We also know from a workforce standpoint that we wanna limit or eliminate shared positions across schools or really small FTE. And that's because we have great teachers and great staff and we wanna keep them. And it's hard to do that when over time you shave that off. The board also heard quite a bit about the concept of a middle-level program for grades six through eight instead of seven, eight, which is who currently attends middle school here at U32. Because again, that will achieve a quality middle school experience. So they did ask us to prioritize that model and model several options that include fewer than five elementary schools. So again, that is just so that the community and those listening understand that this is an ongoing part of the board's work. So we can stand that slide for a minute. So part of the reason we're not sharing that, like Megan said, is because the board as a whole hasn't had a chance to look at it. But also because the main purpose of the configuration study committee right now is to be able to come early on to the community and get engaged the community meaningfully. Because we know if we don't engage you meaningfully, we won't have, we won't earn your trust, you won't support the change. And then the change won't be able to be a reality for our communities, right? Especially if it involves closing a school, right? And we have articles of agreement. So that is one of the reasons we couldn't make that just happen really quickly. We are committed to deep community engagement to make sure that this system change it would be there for years to come and benefit all of our students. So with that, the last slide is just also to remind you to pick up your ballots for the career center. You don't please vote tomorrow. And also to, don't forget if you voted absentee the career center ballots were not mailed to you unless you requested a ballot. So don't forget to vote in career center. The budget for the career, the amount of money that it's shown there for the career center is already in our budget. So it is not like you're adding more money if you're voting for the career center separately. It's just now it's a separate career district but it's already embedded in our tuition. Are you saying there's a separate vote ballot that we're supposed to be voting on now? Yes. That didn't happen in the mail. It doesn't come in the, yes, yeah. And that was the same last year. This is the second year of the career center and the reason for that is because we would need the 18 towns to agree to mail. Right now for us, we get six towns to agree and we go around for six towns to agree to mail the ballots. We will need to get the 18 towns that make the six sending districts to agree to mail the ballots. And it's a bit challenging. So with that, we would open it up to questions but I wanna say we're gonna wanna have people online raise their hands. Nope. Oh, sorry. Put it on the chat. Sorry, I forgot about that. We talked about this this morning because we wanna make sure that we open it for questions separately from comments, right? So if you have a question put it on the chat, Megan is gonna help me monitor the chat and we will alternate between the people in the room with people online and then after that, once questions have been answered, we will take comments from both the online people joining us online and people joining us here and we'll do the best that we can. So please, let's get started. Are there any questions from here? I have a question. Yeah, and then identify yourself for us. Yeah, and this is more of a figure overall general question versus specific. We presented on the timeline that you guys start the budget in October and start finding that we've got crisis happening to try to do this budget. Is there any, we knew the numbers were going well years ago. We knew that COVID money was just gonna be isolated. Is there any free budget process to say hey guys, I know we started the budget in October, but does nobody look at that crisis mode until it becomes a crisis like back when hey, we're gonna have a problem in three or four years and numbers are gonna go low. Is that happening or is everything just like October first crisis mode, we don't have the money, now what do we do? Decision I made is like okay, we find this with COVID, are we gonna be able to continue it? Do we want to fund this? That's my biggest thing because we've known the numbers are going down. Is there any pre-thought like hey, three years from now? Yeah, so we're in crisis mode. And I'm not gonna attempt to answer all the questions myself because we have other board members here that can also jump in. But what I would say to that, Jen, is that we are looking further ahead. Part of the reason of moving into year round budgeting is not being a firefighter and every time there's that fire, then we react. Now, the whole point of why we're talking about strategic planning, why we're talking about the configuration of studies is to create a system. We were being moving slowly since past act 46, right? We've been moving slowly as communities into creating a system, not a system of one school system instead of several schools. So it just, it takes time. But two years ago, we presented, we need to buy in both from the community and from, we are a diverse board, right? We have diverse opinions. We have, and that's what makes it not just fun but what represents our communities. There's a diversity of thought among our board members and we need to get more community engagement. We were getting community engagement. What has been happening so far is the feedback that we have been getting and what you see here on the board. And I don't mean that as an excuse either. So we are planning ahead. Is there things that we could have done sooner? I don't, you know, I think we've been acting responsibly. Well, I think my question was, is there a committee or a pool of people that really step back and look at the what ifs and three or four years so that we don't get to crisis mode or did, you know what I mean? Because also I feel like we're in crisis mode. So is there, what you're telling me about what you're saying is there hasn't been that committee or foresight that you are now working towards to try to make it now that we're, it's been a long, we knew it was going to be an issue but we just haven't been able to get off the ground in order to figure out how to address the financial situation before it becomes a crisis mode at this point. You're working on that, but that didn't happen five years ago or six years ago when we knew the numbers were going down, no one knew that. We've been working on it as a board and as a community but I'll let other board members speak to these because it's not like we have, there's been a finance committee working on the long-term plan. Flora, I can just jump in structurally. I think the board is the entity who has to answer the question of why they choose to take the actions they choose. But structurally, yes, these, we have known for I would say between six and 10 years that our enrollment has declined and have had conversations. So yes, there is a finance committee, the finance committee interacts with the board, they look at these numbers, there is an ability to project year to year. I would say it would have been difficult to project exactly the perfect storm that happened this year, that is a little bit different. But in terms of the big picture pieces, yes, there are structures to do that and the board makes the decision that they make based on the input they receive from the community. And so that's, again, my job is to create the structures. I don't know if board members would have anything to add to that. Orza? I was gonna say, we've talked about the numbers through several budgeting cycles. I don't know if any of you were here last year or the year before when we did talk about our declining enrollment. So it is a subject that the board has been discussing. But we also know that the physical configuration of our district can make the cuts that we need to make difficult. And that is a big change that takes time and needs a lot of community input and a lot of community engagement from us to you and you to us, so that we can make meaningful change that benefits our students and it just, it takes time. So it sounds like you guys are just focusing on that one solution is gonna be X and that's what you guys are driving for versus stepping back, like where else can we, like maneuver stuff and cut things or whatever. So we're not in such a tight thing that you're looking at mining or anything. I didn't speak to that one. So what the administration has said to the board at least in the two years that I've been here is further cuts in our current configuration would impact student programming. So yes, there is a deep look at all of the different functional areas and how we could get by. But at the end of the day right now, we operate six schools, five elementary schools and a middle high school and in order to do that effectively and not further sacrifice. Instruction, what we have shared with the board is this is what it costs to run our current configuration which is why the board is engaged in that configuration work. And I think it's important to note this is one of the things that the, the specific piece of guidance on the configuration was to look at, you know, how do we operate with fewer than five elementary schools? And so I think that's the, that's the piece that's been going on for a couple of years. That's the real, that sort of is, you know, we're gonna have your really, it's an unfortunate, the time is unfortunate, but we're gonna have sort of really concrete proposals you know, to look at, you know, in the next couple of months. But in the next few years until that's done, we're gonna have hits of 25% increase of taxes and stuff that we're just gonna have to hit until we figure out how to make this thing run a lot a little bit. It's definitely this year's extraordinary, Jane. Do we were not expecting it to be, to be this? Yeah, we knew that it was gonna be bad. We knew that a fiscal cliff was coming. We were working towards that. We could have never predicted the perfect storm of all of this. And I also want us to acknowledge that, like we said, there's other factors that we have absolutely no control over. But I wanna give also space for people online. Do you have a question there that we can, I don't control the common level of appraisal and that has a significant impact on what the overall tax rate, the tax impact. I think it's the tax that you control the common level appraisal. So if that was kept more up to date, we wouldn't be seeing the spike that we have now. But we'd have a spike. I mean, to be, I mean, what if it's 60, 65% of our overall cost? 880. Personnel is 80% of our cost. So you close the building, but unless you're losing personnel at the same time, you're not really changing much in terms of the financial dynamics. So we have a choice here as a community is really where do we wanna go with our educational program. And education is just more expensive now than it was years ago. I have to say even 10 years ago because technology is constantly changing. It's always being updated. And it's just, it's hard. And it's just very hard to give the product a type of quality education that our community expects if not demands and also be fiscally frugal because they don't meet really well. I mean, we do really try. I will tell you that because we're all community members here and, you know, but we have an exemption because our taxes won't go up this year. I'm just kidding. We don't have the same funding problems that you guys can use them. So there's a question online. Why did you consider the federal funding that was given during COVID permanent and budgeted as though it was coming from year to year versus just temporary and not added to the budget? I can just start process wise. I can tell you that most school districts in Vermont did use ESER funding to support staff and that makes it a really difficult conversation to reduce. I would also say that administration looked closely at of those positions, which did they believe were necessary to maintain and which did they believe were not necessary to maintain. And in some cases did not maintain them. Some of those reductions that you saw in the presentation were reductions of ESER positions. In fact, the bulk of our reductions, our commensurate did not quite hit. That is true. At total amount we received but they did come from the reduction of ESER funds. The board did make a decision in January to preserve a couple of the positions because of their commitment to having full-time nurses and counselors at our smallest schools. So that's that question. We can go back to the public here. Edie, were you gonna? Any other questions? You had a question before, Edie? I don't need to ask them. Nobody else? Go ahead. Are you still asking questions? Questions, questions, questions, okay. There's one more question that I was gonna type in the chat because it's how many students currently attend U32 and that number is 708. So someone just asked a really specific question. Okay, there's no more questions. I'm just gonna check here because I think that somebody did a direct message. Just wanna make sure that is, see. I think it's a comment. Oh, no, it's a quite, I don't know. This is from Alan Gilbert and Lila Richardson. I was surprised to see on this year's budget article that there was no longer a per pupil spending amount given. So I dug into the data that has been provided and discovered there is a per pupil amount but what is that call has changed? We just talked about that. And the new amount is more than 8,000 lower than the current spending per pupil amount. What happened? The per pupil spending amount was a useful number that accurately reflected how much school taxes would be that system has now been eliminated. I worry that it is going to make it even harder for people to understand the school budget. Yeah, I guess I would just echo. I think that's more of a comment than a question. And I think what I would say is that yes, because of the changes made to the funding system, the decisions that the board makes around what we spend here have become further disconnected from the taxes they actually pay. Chris talked about common level of appraisal is one reason but how we count students is part of that. And so I'm not, again, I don't, there's not a question there, it's a comment but I would just acknowledge. The other thing just really functionally, there was a law in Vermont that was repealed last year. It was actually repealed just before we, Pat, we warned our budget last year that used to require that per pupil number to be included on the warning and that law no longer, that was taken past the law to take that requirement away which is why it's not on the warning. And part of the reason they did that is because it is confusing. It's a different number because of the weighted pupil and then the number of just what have our expenses increased year to year. So just kind of acknowledging that. Let me see. So you can go ahead, do you have a question? This is a simple question. Do I understand correctly that we have benefited from the weighted pupil? Yes, yes. We have benefited. Yes. Yes, we have benefited. And do we, separate question, do we know how, our, let me start again, our CLA's have, are disgraceful right now in all of the towns. I thought there was a lot that you couldn't go below 75% or something like that anyway. But do we know what percent of these total increases that range from 20, from 15 to 20, 60% per town? How much of that is due to the CLA? So can we take that out of the equation and see how much is due to simply spending? No, we can. 16% of the increases, thank you. Yeah, we can work a little bit of that, but also the total amount they yield, how they set the yield also affects the tax rate. So once the, which is, they just give, so it's estimated, the best estimate we have right now is February, February 8th. And I think the other thing we're just mentioning is that there is not affordable housing, and I know that this is a stretch, but there's not enough affordable housing and housing in the state as a whole, which also makes it really impossible for the appraisals to stay. Well, because we're selling houses really expensive. So she's working on that number, well, and now. Well, where does that, is that number attracted by, I'm looking at, there's two of this, the local educational spending. Does that represent, and that's up 16%? So that's the, the ed spending number that, so the net after the revenues is increasing that much. I think what your original question was, before the CLA, how much is the tax rate increasing? So that equalized tax rate is going up 6.06% before the CLA application. So depending on which town you're in, like Berlin, it's a 19% impact from the CLA. The CLA, the CLA. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So how do you get the towns to start doing appraisals? So the law does require that they do an appraisal once they hit at or below 80%. The problem is that there's a real lack of appraisers in the state, so it's not a real simple thing for the towns to go out and say, do this. And some of them looked at it, I think Berlin even looked at it when they were above 100%. They thought about redoing it, but they were like, we don't need to until we're at 80, and then all of a sudden it plummets two years later. So engaging in appraiser in that timely fashion actually takes a couple of years. So a lot of them are under pressure. Yes, the issue will be going on for a couple of years before any of your appraisals are done. Whether or not you will see that kind of decrease. The CLA is representative of sales from two years ago. So next year we'll be based on this year's. So if your sales continue to drop, that CLA will continue to drop. So there's another question online. So I'll just alternate. This one I think is quick. And the question is, is there any reason to delay a vote on the budget in case the legislature makes a different decision? But the board, you made this decision last week? Two weeks? So I don't know if you want to speak to why you made the decision not to re-vote. Yeah, so basically we looked at a table of pros and cons as a board and three of the major reasons we decided not to move the vote was to not have more confusion that we already had. The redoing the budget at this point wouldn't allow us to have a system to reduce that. It takes, we want to make just like what we're doing with the configuration committee and what we were doing with the strategic plan. If we're going to reduce, that's not just reduced for reducing, right? We don't want to affect how kids, the only place that we can reduce is staff. So what do we say? We've been looking at this. Did you get that number of the 87%? I'm going to throw that right now if you have it. So for example, if the budget, should I wait? I think you should wait because we've got several other questions. But so those were two of the reasons. The other reason was that the tax in that was not that much different. We did a post on Frontport Forum of this and so that you could compare the one that we approved in January 17th with the one that we approved right now in February 17th to 21st. I'm forgetting my dates right now. But there was not a huge difference in between the two. So it didn't make, we would have to make an astronomical cut in order to make significant difference in the tax rate, which the only way to do that is by reducing staff. And so the fourth reason would be that we were also worried about creating chaos and instability on the mental health of our own employees. And as there are same community members, right? We're all made of the same community members that teach here that so do we, we have to have contracts out in April 15th. So there's a lot of pieces in place. And if the vote failed, it would give us more time in a weird way to be able to put a vote faster. If we decided to delay, we still needed to warn the budget at 30 days, which meant that we needed to have everything ready by March 14th in order to vote the last day on April 15th. So it was just not realistic to have this last minute throw it to you and then make a change that is not a system change that is not really thought through. So that's why, okay, board members can add to that. I just want to add one technical piece there, because I think there's one statement there that is probably really confusing, which is that with the change in the law and the loss of the 5% cap, the tax rate didn't change that much. And the reason for that is that the cap apply, that things go in a certain order and the cap applied before the CLA was applied. And so because so much of the increase is coming from the CLA, we actually didn't see a really big change from losing that. That's true. Okay, any other questions? This gentleman's been waiting to make a comment for a long time. So before we move to comments though, Chris, we have to make sure everyone's got all the information they have and then the comment is sort of like to round it out. And there are definitely more questions on this then. So that's kind of why we're going back and forth. Okay, can we stick to the questions? Yeah, so Chris, yes, my neighbor, okay. Are there other questions on this end? Questions on this end. Okay, there was one more here. No, there's two more. There's several more. At least two. So one of the questions is just in general about income sensitivity. And so I will start this. Suzanne can refine it and others can jump in. But in general, what I would just say in an overarching way is this coming year's income, so income sensitivity is based on the previous year. So even those who pay taxes based on income sensitivity will still feel this increase because of the timing of it. And that's a really important thing. It's not a full protection this year. And then the rest of the question is, is there a way folks can get a sense of what their actual tax bill will be after that adjustment before we vote on the budget? And unfortunately, that is not something. That's the challenge of budgeting in Vermont's education funding system is that disconnect and timing, because essentially the tax rate is dependent on what happens on budget vote day. And that is when people get a better sense. Yes, we give you projections and we do the best that we can. And in fact, that's part of why some of the budget materials were later than normal because we knew that property yield was so volatile that we held onto it for as long as we could. So that is an imperfect answer, but that is the answer to that question. The next one is a comment. And yeah, so Diane, board member, just talked about sharing resources for income sensitivity. We certainly could post that on our website and social media afterwards. That may be it for questions. That's a comment. Go ahead, comment. Go ahead. Do you want to introduce yourself for the, I know you, but. Which of the words is the most clear? So I have to say from where I'm standing, a lot of this discussion in terms of financial sustainability, I think has very little credibility. I mean, we've known that the number of students is going down for years. And in the years since this unified union district was formed, as far as I can tell, the board has not made any significant changes to address the increasing costs on fewer pupils, not just poor pupil spending going up, but total spending going up with fewer and fewer pupils. And I know you make a big deal about the $700,000 that you took out of the budget this time. Well, $700,000 out of 44 million is one and a half percent. Meanwhile, spending is going up 16%. You shouldn't be too proud of that, okay? That's just tinkering at the edges. So your actual commitment to making the district financially sustainable to me is questionable. You're asking for us to pay 25% more in taxes than what are you offering in return? You're offering more talk, okay? You've been having this conversation about sustainability, financial sustainability, for years. Okay? The kicker here is that a year from now, this 25% increase is going to be the new baseline. It's going to be the new normal. And your additional costs are going to be built on top of that. We're going to be paying that 25% forever, okay? And like I say, I am really doubtful that you're going to take this seriously until people start projecting the budgets. I mean, I think that's the only thing that's going to actually cause anything to change. So that's my comment. Thank you, Richard. I'll read one from the screen. I don't have hands raised yet. You can comment, I just, yeah. Board can respond. Sorry, I didn't need to jump in. I just wanted to jump into both of you. I hear you're impatient with this process. And I guess I would encourage a little bit more patience. I mean, the consolidation happened less than 10 years ago. And that was a tough thing for the towns to agree upon and there was a lot of fear related to consolidation and what that might mean for the individual schools within our district. So I think I was not on the board at the time, but I think wisely no rash decisions were made in the beginning. And then we were hit with a pandemic which threw us into crisis mode for multiple years. And in the wake of that pandemic, a mental health pandemic and I totally, I'm not making, maybe I am making excuses, I guess, but it's, we are taking these solid steps with the reconfiguration committee and the strategic planning and we are trying now to really thoughtfully look long term within the district. I just think it's been an extraordinary journey in the past eight years or so. So I guess I would ask for some patience. And I know that we are working and projecting ahead to the future as best we can. Anybody else? I would also just like to thank you for your comments and I would encourage folks who share this opinion to show up more to the meetings. It's helpful for the board to hear a diversity of opinion during the initial stages of the budget process. So thank you. Okay, sorry for jumping the gun. I'm gonna read one and then go back if that's okay. Yeah. Comment, I'm just gonna read it directly and there's more than one so I'll keep bouncing. But if you consider budgeting based on our housing appraisal and feel that the appraisal hasn't kept up with the current rate of market value, you must realize that the people owning those homes, houses may not be able to buy them at their current appraised value. Yet we are taxed as though our income would allow us to afford this house. The reality of increasing our taxes creates a situation where the owners of the house cannot afford the new taxes and new individuals who make enough to buy the higher valued house move in. If you're trying to support our community, it will work against keeping people in their homes. I am considering moving with a $1,100 increase in my taxes, you'll slowly lose the community around you that you say you value. Thank you. Charlie. More comments from Desai, at Eddie. I think when we formed this union, was it 10 years ago? Five. I think it was, yeah. It was 2019. You're probably just looking stuff. Yeah, yeah. I think we knew where the difficulties were gonna be and we recognized that there were benefits that consolidation, both for financial, I never personally never thought that we would save money but I thought that it would be educationally better for our kids to be able to have a consolidated district and have the restructuring opportunities that I think you're considering now. So I would just, I absolutely understand the difficulty of your position. Your, our small schools, our communities. I've lived here for a long, most of my long life and I am very acutely aware of how central our schools are to our communities. But I think when we did the consolidation, we decided that our kids' educations are important. You mentioned that, was it the Doty School that the combination of the pre-K and K has gotten to the point where you must consolidate and that's what's coming. So despite the, I mean, not despite but the point of looking at the financial and the 80% of our costs are staff, not buildings. But the buildings allow you to decrease the staff, decreasing the buildings allows you to decrease the staff. So we know that's what's gotta happen. And I'm getting a little long wind in here but my message is simply you gotta get at this quickly because it has been the five years and you haven't even time. People have to get used to thinking that my school that I love and has been here for 200 years is gonna be different. It's either not gonna exist, or you're gonna get someplace better for them or it'll exist in a different confirmation. But time is of the essence now. I don't know whether you could have been at any quicker or not but it's inevitable and you've always known that. And I think we are in crisis mode now and I don't know what's gonna happen with the vote but I think it may push things but don't tarry, you have a terribly difficult job. And what I would hate to see is for our communities to lose the trust that we've always had in you. And I have not lost the trust but I wanna say get to it. Get to it because the home decisions have to be made and they are hard, they're terribly hard. Thank you. Go ahead. This is just a procedural comment but I've been struggling to try to hear specifically with your same floor, if your voice is soft enough that I'm having trouble and I don't know if it would be good to have a microphone in the future. Yes, absolutely. We often have one and I apologize. We should have thought about it tonight. Didn't think about it. But yeah, thanks Tom. I have one other brief comment on the screen as long as the board. Yeah, go ahead. But you have my response. Yeah, I have a comment, yeah. From Ann and Larry Gilbert, you guys have a tough job. Thanks for doing all you do. Thank you. I wanted to know, Edie's is coming about the value of our small schools in our small towns. Each one in my view sort of sets community center as a melding for the community because we moved to town. We met most of the middle sex folks through Rumley School and this configuration will probably result in a school being closed. I mean, I don't see a way around that really and when that happens, that's a hardship for the town because people don't want to necessarily have their student bust to another community even if it's Rumley six miles away or it's Calis or East Montevideo which is longer away but they don't want to have their kids bust anywhere. So and the social center that we talked about is eliminated. It's not, it can be revived maybe in other ways but it's not as certain as social center as having your kids at school where there'll be other kids and you'll meet other parents through school meetings there and that is a lot to bear for a town and it's a very difficult thing that we're going to be doing and I bet no towns are volunteering to have their school closed and none and the configuration could close any number of schools but I think we'll do the best we can to minimize the harm and do it to ensure our students even though we personally disagree with that is but ultimately I think that will be the focus but the community having a vibrant community is also expressed with students that live there because they're continuing to live in that town so those are the pressures. So I think that kind of concludes the comments and the questions so I, if there were any, Mr. Duane. Thanks. This is just a procedure. Can you introduce yourself? Can you introduce yourself because I know you but I don't know everybody else. Mr. Duane from East Montpelier this is just a procedural question. Yes. From a governance walk. I noticed signing in on this sign up sheet and I noticed on many of the materials in preparation for this meeting this is being called an annual meeting. This is not the annual meeting. The annual meeting is tomorrow from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. This is the required informational public hearing prior to a vote by Australian ballot. So this is not the district's annual meeting. That's tomorrow at each polling place from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. except the Berlin which is 10 o'clock. This is a public informational hearing. So I would suggest we not use the term annual meeting to describe this gathering. Thanks. I do have one more. It's an act 46. There's it. There's one more question. One more comment. You had one more thing. I just wanted to comment on Chris and my thoughts comment just now. Part of the restructuring of the initial governance restructuring and now as you get and just go to the restructuring I hope we will all, we all will consider how to create a new community which is a five town community. And part of that may be having an annual meeting or at least a big, like we used to have years ago a big pre-town or pre-school meeting where people really came and debated. So we have to have new ways as we're losing some of the main groups, our schools as a community center. I mean physically they can still use that way but we have to find ways as a five town community to build community and just to rave about our kids to be proud of our kids. And that's much easier said than done but I think it will be a worthwhile effort and it's an effort that has to be done. I absolutely agree, Edie. I think as a board we've been talking a lot about having a larger sense of community, right? That it just all our kids I think there's a complete understanding now on this board that all our kids are our kids. And now creating that larger sense of community, right? Like, you know, Wooster is our community regardless if they're picking on McKenna right now. Like regardless if there is a school there that is an elementary school or is there, you know, if that building is used differently Wooster community still is part of, you know this is their school. This is, our family is the five towns and as board members we're committed to that but I agree that we have to have that larger sense of community. There's one more, go ahead Amelie. As we're saying prior to the reconfiguration study we did an exercise as a board with a great schools partnership facilitator and part of that brainstorming exercise was to consider how we might repurpose the buildings as community centers and to help kind of solidify that cohesiveness of community in those local areas. I really appreciate your comment and your input, Edie. Thank you. I wish you well, you're very difficult to answer but I think you're up to it. Just do it, get to it. So we have one more online comment and I'm sorry. So the comments from Becca Mendel. I think it's useful to remember that we are talking about the kids who live in our communities and that investing in them saves taxpayer money down the road. I believe that nationally every dollar invested in public education saves $7 down the road so this investment is prudent. Most of us pay our education taxes based on income but the highest income earners don't. Their high income makes it so they pay based on their property values so low and middle income taxpayers end up paying a heavier burden than the wealthiest among us. We are working with an imperfect system and we need to fix the reality that the wealthiest among us pay a smaller portion of their income to support our schools than those of us in the middle or working class. Once we do that, the cost of funding education for our kids will be more fairly distributed. Right now, before we get that fixed, this is indeed a challenge but it's not the kids who should suffer for the fact that we haven't fixed our system. Go ahead. Introduce yourself for it. Oh yeah, I'm Ligarity from Worcester. We've known for years and years, as you guys said, that the population was going down here and I think it's really easy to get frustrated that something wasn't done more proactively as a result of that but when I hear that the consolidation happened, is it really just five years ago? Yeah. And then COVID hit which I don't know if you guys remember back at the beginning of COVID but nobody knew what the heck was going on let alone school personnel. I think that and then you get into the mental health ramifications of that and then you get into the fiscal crisis that we're in now. I mean, we have been in crisis mode for a while but I don't think it's because anybody sort of dropped the ball early on. I think it's just the way that it's been and I would just like to say that I think that you have done a really good job educationally and personally over those crises, keeping the best interest of the kids and your school personnel in mind. And here we are and hopefully we can go forward and you can have a lot of input but I just wanted to say that I think it's easy to kind of forget about COVID and the impacts and want to move on. I see that in a lot of facets of life but I think it's important to just remember that there are reasons why things are the way they are right now and not only because people aren't doing their share. Thank you. Any more? Okay. With that we conclude our meeting tonight. Thank you very much for coming to everyone. Yeah, thank you. Feel free to make those questions and get to know your four members. Thank you.