 Good evening. This is Libby Bonesteel and thank you for joining us for the Montpelier Rocksbury Public Schools informational hearing on February 28, 2022. It looks as if we have one pen in the audience so you have our prime time to ask any questions as we go through our slides tonight because we have a limited audience and we have also done this presentation in previous board meetings through December and January. It's a very similar presentation some numbers have changed just because the state has changed some numbers on us. So, if you'd like a more detailed explanation about certain things then we certainly we certainly can go back and watch those presentations or ask any questions. As we are now I'm going to start us off again I'm Libby I'm the superintendent of schools, talking about our theory of growth and some parts of this budget that match and support our theory of growth. And then I'm going to hand it over to Grant Geisler who will be going through the actual budget expenditure page, talking about revenues and in our education tax and that kind of more detailed piece with the financials. So I will get us started we will move fast through some of these slides. I can get us moving there we go. Because most of these are on our website already. And we've gone through it in previous presentations. So, just thinking about the enrollment projections where we are right now. Our enrollment looks pretty good. For the most part our decrease will be happening over the next few years at Union Elementary School. You this tracks to our birth date, birth data so it could be off, it could be right on we're not sure. There may be a piece of a little bit of a covert effect in our US data, because kindergarten is not a mandatory grade level for students. Some people may have kept their, their kindergarten kiddo home this year we're not real positive about what that is or could look like, as far as kindergarten numbers this year, and last year. So, we're just tracking to birth data that of course could change over time because you have five years to change that from when a child is born to when they enter kindergarten, but it does look like there's a, there's a pretty big decrease happening at Union Elementary just looking at it briefly from the time I started the superintendent here it's 100 students left less at Union Elementary than when I started four years ago. The mainstream middle school looks to be keeping about where it is with a slight decrease over the next few years. We have an increase happening at the high school very large increase it's a, it's done the direct opposite from Union Elementary School since I started as superintendent we've added about 100 students. So that's that we knew that was going to happen based on our enrollments going through the kindergarten through eighth grade range, and that will bubble out in the next couple years that will hit a capacity capacity max in the next couple years and then start to decrease very slowly at the school. But that is where we're seeing the biggest change. And at Roxbury Elementary School, our enrollment seems to be very similar to what it is, our class sizes are getting very small at Union Elementary School because of that decrease in enrollment and that does have some sort of impact on our budget. Again, those are Roxbury numbers which looked to be very similar across years. Grant, did you want to talk about the enrollment projection from this slide or I kind of just spoke to it really. Yeah, I just think the top line is overall enrollment, and you can see that probably last year is where we had our high water mark, and so we are going to probably slide it down a little bit. As you mentioned, in the near term UES is going down, the high school is still going up, but overall we're pretty much leveling out or dropping slightly. So we'd like to spend a minute talking about the MRPS theory of growth, otherwise known as the four pillars. It's our theory that once we have these four pieces put in place and really functioning at a high level, then our learners will have limitless futures. We'll be able to create that for them. We're not there yet, and that's really important to state at the outset that these four pieces are incredibly hard to master and become proficient at, but we're working incredibly hard and diligently on designing systems that truly work for students to ensure all learners reach their highest level of capacity. So those four, those four theories are built on these pillars collective responsibility and collaborative practices, essentially is saying that teaching isn't a really complicated endeavor and learning is even more complex and that we can't do that single-handedly. No one teacher knows everything we need to know about students and learning in order to engage students to their highest capacity, so we need to do it together. We'll see this in action in professional learning communities across our district where, for instance, our first grade team will do their planning together. They will have the same curriculum they're working off of. They'll be using common formative assessments so they can see how students are doing comparatively across the grade level and they can also learn from each other. So if one teacher's students really knocked it out of the park on an assessment, another teacher can say, hey, how did you teach that in order to get your kids learning at that level? And they can have that conversation really build capacity internally. So we're working very much on collective responsibility. It's not one person's responsibility to increase student learning, it's all of our responsibility. And then the next pillar is formalized essential learning. We've actually made quite huge strides in the area of math and literacy and science around our formalized essential learning. And our essential learning is the piece that kids have to know, not the nice to know. This is what when we get this rolling, we will guarantee all students will be proficient in. And so there's a lot there. There's a lot that we have to get rid of because we're not saying that students will be proficient in everything. We're saying that we are going to promise and guarantee that students are proficient in these essential learnings. Then the timely system to enrich, intervene and remediate. This is actually where we're putting a lot of financial dollars in for the coming year. Because we have a lot of building to do in this area in terms of human resources to ensure that we have enough human resources in this area to truly work with students, particularly those who are more challenged at learning our essential, our skills. And so that idea of intervening, remediate, we want to make sure that our system is matching what our students need and that we have the human capacity in order to do it. Then high quality instruction in every classroom. It's our goal that every one of our staff knows what high quality instruction looks like we have a common vision for that and we have strategies to, to build off of to ensure that every student receives high quality instruction we don't want to leave anything up to chance. So we think about these theories of growth and where you'll see this in our budget. The under the pillar timely system to enrich intervene and remediate we are putting a lot of budgetary dollars in this area. Our community liaison was actually hired this past year using federal dollars that's being moved into the local budget. And our community liaison primarily responsibility is for the students were really struggling to get to school, because we can't do anything with a student who's not here. So their caseload is relatively small, but incredibly intense and they work very closely with families and supporting families and trying to eliminate the barriers of getting those students to school. In addition, you'll see an additional board certified behavior analyst otherwise known as a BCBA, we have one currently on staff and we're looking to hire another. One of the things that we have recognized this year coming back from last year's pandemic years that's many of our students are struggling with how to how to behave how to act in a community. And so looking at increasing our capacity to really understand those behaviors and how we can make plans to adjust and teach skills so that kids can be more successful in the classroom. And with their peers. We have a need to increase our English language teacher FTE we are lucky enough to be welcoming several families from Afghanistan and our English language needs have increased significantly over this past year. So we're increasing our English language services. Several academic interventionists added to this budget and increasing guidance and a guidance counselor at us. In order to help with students with mental health needs at Union Elementary School. And then we're looking at alternative programming for students who have significant mental health needs. And those two new teacher positions one would be an SMS and one would be at us. We have high quality instruction in every classroom. We're looking to increase our world language at the high school. We have students who have a significant increase interest in world languages at the high school and we want to make sure that we can serve that interest. So we're looking to increase our fine arts opportunities at the high school. We're also looking to increase or actually strategizing focus more of district wide professional development and several and several areas mainly around literacy restorative practices and math. And for a more detailed look about that staffing and where the funding sources are come from you can flip through the next few slides. But we really went through most of that. We're looking at Essar for instance and just see some of these buzzwords in here. Essar is government or federal funding dollars that are coming from the government. As a result of COVID-19 when you're looking at the local budget that is really what our voters are voting on is the local budget. And now I introduce you Grant Geisler our business manager and this is his last go around with this so if we had a huge crowd here I'd have them stand and give you a round of applause. Which yeah you can come right on over here. Okay, good evening everybody. We're probably going to continue with this kind of an expedited version of the presentation so as far as expenses are concerned this first slide is just a quick overview. I'm going to talk about the just the general budget adding in some money for a capital plan, then that gives you your total budget minus non tax revenues, which are things like state grants federal grants. For example, the COVID money that that Libby just mentioned, whenever you subtract out those non tax revenues you get your education spending. You get by the number of pupils and you get your spending for pupil which is a key tax factor. The next several slides are going to track to that total budget of $27.2 million. So this just gives you an idea of by program how we spend our money, most of it obviously is the biggest piece of the pie is general education, the second biggest piece of the pie is special education. There's some money in there for paying for career center tuition. And most of these other categories are pretty much self explanatory. When you see buildings and grounds at the top left corner that includes things like utilities. It includes the capital fund as well. Those two slides just give you the breakout by program and then the comments show in detail what kind of is driving the increases or decreases, and I'm not going to read everything to you but a lot of this would be described because it relates to staffing. And for example in general education that increased about 4.4%. A lot of that is because of ESSA funded positions, the board certified behavior analysts, the two interventionists, and one of the thrive teachers, the English language learner increase the fine arts increase the world language increase, we've talked about all those things. In general ed we also had some savings though we had a reduction of a couple of positions. We had a reduction in the amount that we need to pay for grandparented tuition at Roxbury. And we had a decrease in pre K tuition which is good news and bad news. The good news is it's less money in the budget, but the bad news is it's less kids which we're hoping doesn't mean it's going to be less kids moving forward we're hoping this is a temporary that some folks have decided because of COVID, not to send their kids out for pre K and that we will recover from that. But like general education you can look at the other programs, and you can see the comments there that describe the increases and decreases. I'm not going to go through all these career center tuition looks like a huge increase percentage wise but not dollar wise. We have some more kids that are attending career centers and that is based on a six semester or three year averaged for admission. Another one where there's a big percentage but the dollar amount isn't huge. Student support is a very large percentage and is a pretty big number but that's because of some staffing that we've done. Staff support pretty big increase percentage wise a lot of that is hardware. If you if you're thinking about one to one computing those devices are only good for about four years. And so you have to continue every year to buy new devices for every kindergarten or every fifth grader every ninth grader. So we're, we believe that this budget will get us to the point where we can sustain without major increases each year. The next slide is the second page of program expenses. Looking at this there's no huge numbers on this one. Not even percentages I guess safety is a pretty big percentage but it's just $7,000 it's just realigning some, some funds from maybe what we might have captured is building in the grounds which now is showing under safety because it's a lot of these are safety annual safety inspections and repairs so we wanted to put it in the right place. Probably good enough for now if there's questions at the end we can circle back the revenues. Whenever I talked about local or non tax revenues, non tax revenues are every single thing on this list except for those first two lines, education spending grant and the tech on behalf grant. Those are tax revenues. Everything else is a non tax revenue. So that'll be bringing up non tax revenues later and this just gives you kind of an idea of what some of those non tax revenues are. One thing to point out is our special ed block grant and intensive revenues. Those are now going to just be block grant there's not two separate revenues. It's a change in the model for special ed reimbursement. We lost a little bit of funding there due to what's referred to as act 173. But we think we're going to be okay, especially at extraordinary revenues is based on extraordinary costs and that's based on our requirements so that might go up and if so our expenses would go up as well. Just some other acronyms on here that that might throw you off idea be is individuals with disabilities education assistance I believe is what it refers to but basically it's federal special ed reimbursement CFP has consolidated federal program that's title one and title to money. ESSER that Libby mentioned before is elementary and secondary school emergency relief is part of the COVID response. So we are proposing the use of about 336,000 are overall ESSER three allotment was, I believe over $2 million so we didn't presume that we knew every answer as far as how we were going to use ESSER three money. So this is really still a bit open for discussion and for community feedback. IEP Medicaid and EPSDT those are both Medicaid sourced revenues tuition is for students who are paying or families or districts that are sending their kids to our schools that those numbers are not going up much we hope they will rebound after COVID kind of plays out. So once carry forward that is related to the fact that we have a healthy surplus, and we want to use some of those funds to manage and keep our tax rate relatively level. I'll move on once again we can come back to these. I mentioned the ESSER public engagement and and the plan. This is a website that you can look at for our public plan. And I briefly talked about the capital plan. So back in 19 we started with a capital plan. It is a separate article that you're going to see on the ballot. It is already included in our tax rate calculations though so it's not an additional whenever I show you the tax rates. This is built in. We are shifting now that basically our capital plan in the future is going to for several years is is going to be just for window replacements at Union Elementary and Main Street Middle School. That is a huge project. And so we will collect money for several years and we will replace windows when it makes sense when when there's an economy of scale. We may do for for example a fourth of the windows one year and then wait for a while do another fourth. It depends on on what we can plan out. We still have two projects though separate from those windows that are in the capital plan. The Union Auditorium renovation which we've had some money set aside for a few years. And at Main Street a sustainability lab renovation which we're trying to right now sell in on what we want that sustainability lab learning space to look like. In FY 23 we have $260,000 in a capital fund which once again that money if it's not used in one year rolls over whereas our general fund money does not. So this is an opportunity to fund larger projects and save money over a period of time and hopefully avoid the requirement to perhaps bond for for one of these projects. These next two slides just show some pictures of the projects that are in the capital plan. And now we're going to get into the tax rates. I'm not going to go through the terminology but I do refer to different terms on this next slide and it might be worthwhile for you to be able to go back to this slide to be able to understand what those terms mean. So this is that there for your reference. So here's the tax rate calculation and the mathematical symbols are on here and everything just to go through it. So we start with our general budget of almost 27 million. We add in our capital plan which I just talked about. So two things then equal our total budget or our total expense budget. We then subtract out those non tax revenues and part of the reason for an increase in that area is those ESSER funds that we refer to. That gives you your education spending, which is a factor used in tax rate calculations. So what I mean by that is your general budget really doesn't impact your your tax rates. What impacts your tax rates is your education spending. So if you have a large budget but you have a big increase in non tax revenues, your education spending could actually go down. When you have your education spending you divide that by your number of pupils. In this case, our pupil count went down slightly. The impact from a tax rate perspective perspective is is about a penny and a half negative impact to the tax rate. What that gives you is your spending per pupil. So you divide by the property dollar yield which is a statewide factor and it's highlighted because it's not an official number because it has to be set by law. But you can see it's a huge increase from last year. This is the highest increase in property dollar yield that I've seen since they went to this model for calculating taxes. You can see that it's a 21 to 25 cent favorable impact to the tax rate. So this is what allowed us to be able to make room in our budget for some of the really cool things that we're planning to do without impacting the tax rate. So when you divide the property dollar yield you get your equalized residential tax rate and you can see there the equalized residential tax rate then is decreased by a merger incentive when we had the merger incentive but we no longer have it. We had an eight cent incentive that dropped by two cents every year and in FY 23 there is no incentive. That loss of a two cent incentive is about 2.3 cents on the tax rate. Then what we have is what we call the adjusted equalized tax rate and you can see in 21 there were two separate equalized tax rates one from Montpelier one for Roxbury. But now they are the same. The reason for that was there was a limit on how quickly Roxbury's tax rate could decrease. But now there is one equalized residential rate and you can see we're going from 1.498 down to just 1.394 so a drop of like 10 cents in the tax rate before you factor in the common level of appraisal. In that common level of appraisal this year is 80.76 from Montpelier 94.09 for Roxbury. That has a very large impact as far as the tax rate is concerned you can see that box shows it's a negative impact of seven and a half cents from Montpelier 11.8 cents for Roxbury. So if it weren't for that large increase in the dollar yield this drop in CLA would be painful. And then you have just your bottom line residential tax rate with CLA factored in. You can see in Montpelier it's 1.727 that's a drop of about 4.8 cents from FY 22. And in Roxbury it's 1.482 which is an increase of 1.6 cents. And then just looking at the impact for every $100,000 in Montpelier the tax your tax rate would drop or you're not your tax rate but your extra tax bill would drop by $48 in Roxbury forever 100,000. Your tax bill would go up $16 perhaps less of an impact if you receive income sensitivity which about two thirds of the folks do. This just shows the trend of tax rates from before the merger till now or until FY 23. You can see without the impact of CLA which we have no control over Montpelier's tax rate is down about 13 and a half cents from before the merger. And in Roxbury even when you factor in the impact of CLA it's still 23 cents lower than before the merger. So slides just to show the outlook in the summary outlook reappraisals are occurring in both Montpelier and Roxbury. When that occurs those CLA those CLA percentages will go up which has a favorable tax impact tax rate impact. Equalize pupil count. There is a new waiting study that's being done there's going to be a change in waiting. Change will probably decrease our count. For example, right now the factor for poverty is 1.13 it could be 2% or it could be 200% or more next year which it would increase our account but it would increase others even more. So the net result might be that our pupil count might drop a bit. So that would be a negative impact to the tax rate. We already talked about enrollment. We can throw in staffing as well. Our enrollment is pretty stable starting to drop. MHS is still climbing for the next few years. UES is decreasing for the next few years. We have and will continue to look at opportunities to shift resources or to sustain some of these federally funded positions that we've added that we think are more permanent in nature. Lastly, the merger incentive I mentioned FY23 is the last year that we have to absorb a drop in that incentive. We're at zero for FY23 so we no longer have to worry about that decreasing each year. And then just to summarize the availability of these federal funds and that high dollar yield allowed us to add resources without significantly raising tax rates. Which means that some of these percentages that you see like a 4.5 increase in the total budget of 4% increase in ed spending and 5% increase in spending for pupil. Those percentages are a little higher than we're used to but because of those other factors, you can see the tax rates in Montpelier are actually dropping and in Roxbury it's an increase but it's a very small increase of 1.1% increase. And I believe that's all I have so I will turn it back over to Libby and if there are questions we will try to answer. Okay, we have Chris Chris you have any questions for us. I was not going to do a video. It's like red nose. Right Williams is here also. I know I just was I just went in and I don't have any questions and I hope you didn't have to do that whole presentation. No, you are a number. However, we had to do this presentation regardless of whether you just kept us honest. That's all. So if there aren't any questions great red has heard this presentation what six times now so if you have questions read I'm happy to answer but other than that I think we'll be all set and right I'll see you in a little bit. Yeah, I do have one question. I was just looking at like the answer funds and some of the, you know, the added supports for behavioral and social emotional stuff all that is really important. I just want I see it. I know that Roxbury is very small but I wonder if any of that that it functions essentially as a resource to the small Roxbury community, particularly the BCBA position. There it does kind of crossover. That's that's I kind of assume but I wasn't sure. Yeah, the BCBA positions are our district positions. So anytime you see district that means that services all four schools. Okay, and our BCBA certainly services a couple students out in Roxbury right now needs just the kids that need it most. Yeah, however that affects this whole school system. Yep. Okay. Yeah so in all the social emotional health and you know Nick Connor also our community liaison also is a district wide position and certainly works with families out in Roxbury as well. Yeah, I've talked to him. Yeah, that's what I thought but good to just be sure and you know the way that things. I often wonder how the professional learning groups function and how this things going remotely works for the staff that's in Roxbury and yeah it's actually a benefit. If I were queen, I, and I can't do this because of bus schedules, the days of the day the school day is different in Roxbury than it is at Montpelier, and it's, and it's based on bus needs, busing needs, which sometimes I wish we could have the similar school in Union Elementary School and Roxbury Village School so then, and plus because the FTEs are different and things like that. Yeah, but ideally we'd have the same schedule so that professional learning communities could be one virtually right so the one to teacher at Roxbury would be one with first grade and second grade team, virtually, when they, it's just not possible to do that with the school schedule, but for all the professional learning opportunities, then Roxbury and us like as if it's an elementary school opportunity, they're together, either virtually or in person depending on how the learning is happening. We also ensure. We haven't done it this year but in past years that let's say Christian Cordemont is the person who does our math professional learning and Christian will do days out in Roxbury and days at Union. So the Union teachers travel to Roxbury and the Roxbury teachers travel to Union. Yeah, nice. Yeah, I think that the all the remote capabilities that we've come up with in the last couple years. I think I've provided a lot of access in a lot of ways. It certainly makes things a little easier and that we're just, we always had the access to it we just never did it. Exchange behavior so it's helped. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, thank you. No problem. I'll see you in a bit. Bye bye. Recording stopped.