 Hello and welcome everybody to Town Meeting TV's coverage of Town Meeting Day 2024. This program is part of a series of forums we are bringing you in advance of Town Meeting Day on Tuesday, March 5th. Town Meeting TV hosts forums with all candidates and covers questions you'll see on your ballot, introducing you to community decision makers and connecting you with issues that shape your community. You can find all our forums at cctv.org slash 2024 or on our Town Meeting TV YouTube channel where auto-generated captions are available. On tonight's program, we will hear about Winooski School District's proposed fiscal year 25 school budget. And if you are tuning in live, we welcome your questions. Please call in at 802-862-3966. And if you call in, we'll prioritize your questions. Just please make sure to state your name and where you're calling from. Alright, thank you all for joining us. Before we jump into the presentation, I'll have you each introduce yourself and your position. Sure. Thank you, Emily. Good evening everyone. Like Emily mentioned, we are here to share the proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year 24-25 for our district. My name is Kamal Dahal, a board member of Winooski School District and a member of finance committee. Today I'm here joined by Nicole Mays, a fellow board member and a fellow finance committee member and our amazing superintendent Wilmer Chavaria. We all appreciate CCTV really for giving us this chance to update the public on our school budget for the next year and allowing our residents to make informed decisions before they vote. With that being said, I just have to add one more thing. The newsletter for this month had gone out and I had made an error mentioning the voting date as March 7th. The actual voting date is March 5th. So again, the actual voting date is March 6th. I do not want any voters to get confused and go to the polls on the wrong date. And we'll have some more slides with all that information at the end to bring it back. So before we delve into our presentation and budget numbers, let's familiarize with some of the key terms that will be used throughout the presentation. So the first one is the district budget. The district budget encompasses the total funds allocated for running this school, covering all the costs, regardless of the source of that fund, be it a public taxes, donations, or other government coming from other governmental agencies. Second, we have the education spending, also often called as ed spending and so forth. This usually refers to the significant subset of the district budget that the residents is obligated to cover. And now considering the roles of the board on this process, we have various other responsibilities. But one of the crucial role for the board is to adopt the district's budget and present it to the voters. So today we are here for that specific reason and to fulfill that responsibility. On the other side, the role of the residents is to go out and vote for the budget regardless of how they vote. Voting is still part of their responsibility. So lastly, each budget cycle commences in December where board members meet. And from December the board members meet more frequently discussing in and out and details about the budget details. And then finally you prove it and the presentation sessions kicks in. And all of this leads to this whole process ends when the voters go out and vote on March 5th. So this is a slide that is all over the place. We put this end of statement on our monthly budget meeting agenda. It's on the website as well. It's there because it's very important. So this slides emphasize our end of statements which serves as a district's commitment to the Winiski school community. The end of statements place a pivotal role in guiding the work of the board. So while it's visible here on your monitor, I think it's beneficial for the public to hear it out loud as well. So I'm just going to read it. So all the students will graduate from Winiski school district college and career ready at the cost supported by the majority of the Winiski community. Winiski school district students will lead healthy productive and successful lives and engage with their local and global community. So that's our end statement. Let's move on to the next slide. So on this slide you see our strategy strategic statements. And it's important to note that this is strategic strategies should align with our end statement. So for the upcoming fiscal year, the district aims to there are three things listed here. Continuously enhance curriculum instructional design assessment and support systems to benefit all learners. Commit to providing an equitable and anti-racist learning environment for all our students. Collaboratively support student staff and families by being a proactive nurturing space that values growth, wellness and personal empowerment. Let's move on to the other slide. So this slide provides a snapshot of our district's students demographic distribution. Winiski our town stands out as one of the most diverse places in the state. And our students demographic composition that you see here mirrors that diversity within the community. So consequently, you know, many of our challenges and opportunities we encounter are distinct and are tailored to this unique context of diversity. So this is very interesting for me. I came here from Nepal where we didn't have this structure. So I wanted this slide to be on this presentation. So this is our organizational chart. You know, as mentioned earlier, our town boosts a diverse population. Many of whom, including myself, have grown up in various different parts of the world and may not have familiarity with the school systems in America. Some residents, even if they are born and raised here, may find the complexity of this hierarchy. Nonetheless, our residents are a stakeholder and they sit on the top here, as you can see, residents of the Winiski. And they elect the board of trustees, Nicole and I, and three other members. This board members body, this group adopts school policies. We served as a framework for our superintendent, Mr. Chavari, to manage and operate the school on a day-to-day basis. And of course, the school happens because of all the hard work that goes in from our superintendent, principal, teacher, staff and everybody who directly or indirectly reports to the superintendent. So this graph shows our students' assessment scores in comparison with the state average. As you can see, in different grades, we do not have math, for example, for grade 11. And I think in grade... Not all grades have the science assessment and not all grades have the English and math assessment. Thank you, Nicole. Let's move on. So this slide shows the outcome stemming from our youth risk assessment survey. A comparison is shown here and it reveals the most significant diversity. Disparity, not diversity, disparity between our district's high school survey percentage and state's average high school or survey percentage. The most substantial distinctions, as you can see here, are observed in the obesity rates and participation in physical activities for 60 minutes in contracts to the state's average. So continuing to the survey results here for middle schoolers, as you can observe here as well, the disparity exists for the physical activities in contrast to the overall Vermont average. And this chart shows that we have a decreasing revenue since fiscal year 2022-23. And the major factor that's listed here as well is the decrease in the special education census block grant and also the... What's the full form for SRD now? Emergency secondary school or something... Recovery Act, it's COVID money. I just want to make sure the voters understand when we throw the words like SR. Yeah, it is a COVID money coming from the federal government that we no longer get and we'll discuss, you know, what happened because of that in later slides. But as you can see, we have a decrease in our revenue. Elementary and secondary school emergency relief funds. Thank you. That's why we're happy to talk. Wait a second. All right. So this also continues the same thing of, you know, decreasing the special education revenue while the cost for special education is going up. And the line shows the increase and decrease. So the gap is widening, you know, since 2021-22 fiscal year to the next fiscal year. That was the year they moved to a block grant as opposed to a reimbursement formula. Winnowski was disadvantaged under that new formula. So this is a lot of information on this slide. It's also one of the important slide on this presentation because it gives a numerical value on our budget. So this is the meat and potato of this presentation, if you will. So this illustrates our local budget. As you can see, it's $31,970,907. And let me start off from the other side of the screen. What does the budget allows before we go to the other side? So the budget facilitates us to expand our pre-case services. We'll be incorporating two new classrooms and that will ensure the accessibility of pre-case facility to all four years, qualified four years old in Winnowski. Additionally, a significant initiative involves observing essential SR-funded positions. The one that where we saw that the revenue were decreasing, we're observing that into our local budget. Likewise, we're also addressing various budgetary demands such as the cost of insurance that has gone up and the other negotiated, already negotiated salaries for our staff members. And we're also committed to honoring our agreements that we already had previously. So all of these elements are factored into the budget. And this is the part that gets a little tricky, but the home state tax rate that you see is an estimate based on the information we have, assuming the CLA or common level of appraisal percent is to be 101%. And Nicole can probably add in more context and information into this to clear by this slide. So it's just important to know that this tax rate is contingent upon CLA staying at 101%. So Nicole, go ahead. And we're going to dig into these numbers in some additional slides as well. But I think the big headline is that this is a really unique budget year for Winooski. And there's a lot of uncertainties. And so the board really did the best that we could with the information that we had. So we assumed the forecasted yield, which is a component of the formula released by the state in December, that that's the number that we've been using. That's all subject to change. There's some really critical investments that the district is moving forward with, thanks to some opportunities that were created for the district through the legislature a couple of years ago. So, but before we get into that, I think it's important to, so the total budget is 31, just under 32 million. This slide just shows how those investments are broken out by object or sort of the what? So salaries, benefits, contracted services. And you can see that roughly 70% of the budget is made up of salary and benefits for our employees. Won't be a surprise to folks who have come and visited our new facility. We renovated the entire, the old existing campus and built new wings within the last five years. And so we're beginning to pay debt service on that investment. So that's now consumed almost 10% of the operating budget and the other areas are somewhat are more modest in comparison. Looking at the information a different way, you can see the breakdown on sort of the purpose of some of these investments. So just over half of the funds are dedicated to classroom instruction, whether that is in the general ed classroom or the special ed classroom. 18% I want to just clarify that's not administration. Alone it's administration and support services. So we have a lot of, in terms of the goal of having healthy and productive lives, we have a lot of supports that we put in place from a wellness, from a health clinic to support our students. And so those expenses are captured there, sort of non-classroom based expenses. I'll move on to the next slide. So this provides folks with a comparison of the proposed budget to the current year's budget. And you can see again why this is such a unique year for Winooski. So it would be extremely unusual for a board to present a 26% increase in a printing budget. However, we have a lot more capacity in the budget, which I'll explain in a little bit, to absorb those positions that had been funded through ESSER to expand pre-K classrooms. We built the classrooms, we didn't have teachers, we didn't have funds in place to support actually staffing those programs and opening the doors to all four-year-olds in the city. So it's very exciting that this budget realizes a lot of investments that have been sort of long delayed because of concerns around affordability in the community. One reason we have this extra capacity is because the legislature changed the way we count pupils. In the funding formula. I'll get to that again. But you can see the number of pupils that the district is serving for the purposes of the funding formula has increased by 141%. That has the result of reducing our spending per pupil by 42%, which has an impact of lowering the homestead tax rate. That doesn't necessarily translate into lower tax bills, which we'll get into. We want to clarify that. But this budget, with a 26% spending increase, is anticipated to reduce the homestead tax rate to $1.41. And that, again, as Kamal said, assumes that the CLA, which was at 69 last year, is 101 this year. And the reason that's the case is because we're in a reassessment year. So Winooski's homes have not been reassessed since 2007. And so they are being re-appraised this year. And so we expect the CLA will be 101. Again, get into a little bit more of that later. So I spoke a little bit when we go back here and see the 141% increase in our weighted pupils. That is due to a law known as Act 127 that was passed two years ago. The legislation was designed to increase educational equity by ensuring financial resources are available to local school districts for educating students living in poverty and English language learners. As Kamal showed in some of our demographic data, Winooski serves a high proportion of students living in poverty and English language learners. So the way that the legislation directs additional resources to school districts is by weighting students or counting students based on needs. So that's when we went from 900 to 2167. That was really a reflection of the educational needs of our students. Go to the next slide. So here's how all these pieces kind of come together to estimating a tax rate. And this is a mathematical formula, and I want to thank Superintendent Chaviria for his, I think, great slide that is a lot clearer in terms of the different pieces. But Kamal referenced education spending earlier. So it's not the total budget, but that's the budget that we need to seek funding from the state's Education Fund to support our budget. That amount this year for FY25 is just over $29 million. In the formula, that gets divided by our weighted long-term membership. So that's the average membership of our students, the number of students, weighted according to their need. That figure then gets divided by the yield. That number is set by the legislature. And so districts across the state are given an estimate in December of what that number might be. And that estimate is based on projected education spending, projected budget increases around the state. Again, that letter comes out in December. Boards get to work in December, and so things change often. And so we all use the December one figure knowing that it could change and subject to modification by the legislature. Because at the end of the day, the legislature needs to set the yield at an amount that it will generate enough revenue to pay for all the budgets that pass in March. So once you get to that equation divided by the yield, that result is divided by the CLA. Which is a methodology that's used or a calculation that's used to ensure that every city or town is contributing their fair share to the Ed fund by looking at the differential between fair market value and assessed value on the grand list. Because Winooski is going through an appraisal, the assumption is our assessed values will be pretty close to fair market value. So the closer you are to 100, the better it is. Once your CLA starts to go down, your tax rate goes up. So we're projecting an actual homestead tax rate of $1.41 for FY 25. This chart really shows you the difference between the prior way of counting pupils and post Act 127. And the impact that that has had on Winooski's education spending per pupil. Again, we're counting students differently, so it's not an apples to apples comparison. But for the purposes of calculating tax rates, it is an important part of the calculation. And you can see the impact that that is projected to have on the homestead tax rate. Which is both a combination of the lower education spending per pupil, but also the fact that the CLA is going back to 101. Not having assessed values since 2007 meant we were pretty far off 100. So our tax rate was a lot higher to compensate for the fact that we had really sort of aged house. Our grand list was not up to date. So here is a really fun one. But because normally in a normal year, not a reappraisal year, we would be able to calculate the tax rate and we could tell people what percentage increase that would be. Because we can't predict house by house in Winooski what the new assessed value will be, we can't say with blanket certainty it's going to be an x% increase in your tax bill. We know that the tax rate is going to go down. We don't know what will happen to the tax bill. Because the value of folks property will be changing. And so Superintendent Chavirip put together this chart that is I think a helpful guide for folks who have a sense of what their house, their assessed property value may be once the appraisals are complete this spring. So if for example your house site and the average property value I believe in Winooski is $225,000. So we'll use that as an example. So if your house site is valued at or your homestead is valued at $225,000. In order to see a tax rate increase you would need to, your new homestead value would need to be $350,000. And I did do a little, that's a 55% increase in the homestead value. So this is our way of saying you're going to have to do a little bit of work this year in order to predict what might happen to your tax bill. We did work on our end to both make sure we were using the extra tax capacity because of the new way of counting students to make critical investments and meet the laws intent. And we know the reality is folks home values are going to go up and it's likely they may see some increase in their taxes but we can't predict exactly what that'll be. We always want to remind folks that Vermont does have a provisional law that allows folks to receive a property tax credit. So if your household, if your adjusted household income is less than $128,000 you may be eligible for a reduction on your property taxes. But that doesn't happen automatically. You have to file form HS 122 or schedule HI 144 with your income tax return for your Vermont taxes. Eligibility is based on your household income, your home value, and the school tax rate and gets applied to next year's bill. So if you file it with this year's taxes the credit will be applied to next year's property tax bill. Residents with household income of less than $90,000 will see a credit calculated based solely on income. And that is a little bit easier for us to predict with this chart. You can see it's about a wash. You'll see the higher your income you may see a slight reduction in the tax bill. But we are not projecting an increase for those who pay based on income. Which is pretty incredible when you think about a 26% increase in the budget. Absolutely. This slide is just a reminder that on the ballot you will see two votes and that's because folks vote separately for the federal budget. This really just authorizes the board to accept federal funds on behalf of the district. And we're estimating that that amount will be just shy of $2.7 million. And those funds go to support our Title I programs, our English language learner programs through Title III, Medicaid, and a lot of other really important programs that we offer to support students. We're hoping folks vote yes because it does not impact your tax rate in any way to accept federal funds. So here are just some more caveats to add to the caveats we've tried to sprinkle throughout the presentation. The citywide reappraisal will mean new property values for all city properties. And we are not in the business of estimating what that impact will be. We have invited the reappraisal company to come to the school board meeting on February 15th to answer questions. So if folks are curious about that process and what the reappraisal appraisers are seeing, welcome to tune in or attend in person. Again, the tax rate information we presented here is estimated based on current information that we have from the state and are subject to revision by the legislature. And we estimated actually on the low end for the CLA, the Department of Taxes recommended, I think, between 100 and 110. It says 101 there, but it's 110. We went with 101 just to be on the safe side. We won't be notified of a final number. But again, the higher the CLA goes up, the lower the tax rate. So we're feeling good about estimating on the lower end. And again, because this is a statewide funding system, if folks have questions or want to contact our representatives, they're pretty accessible and easy to get in touch with. And Nicole and I will be doing a series of this presentation in person and probably over June. We'll plan it out, but we'll be doing more than just this presentation. So we would welcome any questions in the meantime. If any of the folks watching this have any questions about our presentation or our budget, we're always available. Our emails are listed here. And the Winiski School Flyers will be mailed to all homes. Or you can download it online on the URL listed here as well. The annual report is also available at this school city hall library. Or you can go online on that URL and get that as well. The upcoming events calendar listed here is we've got the budget presentation date of February 19th at O'Brien Community Center at 5 p.m. We've also got an annual meeting at the Winiski School South at 6 p.m. on March 4th, 2024. That is the day before the voting date of March 5th and not 7th. I wanted to say this every time. March 5th at Winiski Senior Center, it's the same place where you go and vote for any other election. It's a standard 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. You can get an early ballot. Yeah, if you have not registered to vote yet, we urge you to do so. And please, please go out and vote. Well, thank you all so much for coming and presenting this really important information to Winiski residents and voters. We're just about out of time here, but I want to make sure if there's anything that any of you would like to reiterate or if Superintendent Chavarria, if you want to let anybody know about anything, now's your time to do that. I just want to thank you. I just wanted to reiterate that this is a very strange budget year for two big reasons. We're in the middle of a citywide reappraisal, and also it's the first year of implementation of a very important law Act 127. And if you have heard the news, there's a lot going on right now around the implementation of the law. And that is why maybe some of the answers are not quite straightforward, but we're doing what we can to give you as much information as is available to us. And the second thing I wanted to say is it was the first time the board did this presentation, and you did a great job. And I appreciate that. So thank you. Thank you, Wilmer. For this opportunity to stay here. Great. Thank you. Thank you all. And thank you so much for tuning in to Towne Medine TV's ongoing coverage of local elections, local candidates, local budgets, and local ballot items. You can find this and many more forums at cctv.org slash 2024 or on our Towne Medine TV YouTube channel. Make sure to mark your calendars and tune in to our live election results show after you cast your ballot on March 5th. And like it's already been mentioned, contact your local clerk to find out how to obtain a ballot and to register to vote. And another reminder, in Vermont, you can register to vote on the same day as election day. So make sure you get out there and vote. And thank you so much for tuning in and watching and sharing Towne Medine TV. Have a great night. Awesome. Wonderful job.