 that we have our regular board meeting after this. I'd like to get started. Thank you for joining our virtual informational meeting for our fiscal year 22 budget. The flow of the evening will work pretty similar to our in-person meetings that we've had about the budget. So first we'll call the meeting to order, we'll adjust the agenda if we need to. Then there'll be a brief presentation that goes into details about the budget and the most recent school year. And finally, we'll have time for public comment and all of your questions at that point in time. And I'll ask now, but remind you then if you're phoning in to share who you are before you ask your question just for the sake of the minutes. So I'd like to call the meeting to order at 5.01 PM. Are there any adjustments that need to be made to this informational meeting agenda? Okay, moving on, we'll go right into our presentation, which fortunately we have Ray Blue here to share for us. All right, so I think I'll get us started, right? So just I guess introduce myself first to people. I'm Chris Riley. I'm a school board member from South Royalton. I've got twins that are in the fourth grade. But they're attending the virtual learning academy this year, so the VLA. And then we have a soon to be five-year-old who will be in kindergarten next year. So next year we'll have three kids in the school system. So- Chris, I hate to interrupt, but I am wondering, I'm sorry, I jumped right over introductions and I'm wondering if we should introduce ourselves. Sure. Okay, so I'm Lisa Floyd. I am on the White River Unified District Board from Bethel and I chair the board. Andrew Jones, I'm the vice chair of the board from Royalton. I'm Bob Gray, I represent the board from Royalton. I'm Lisa McCrory. I represent the board from Bethel. I'm also the clerk for the board and I have a son that's still in the 11th grader and two students that have graduated in the past few years. And I don't know if Rodney's joined us yet, but we have one other board member from Bethel, Rodney-Rainfield. Do administrators want to take this opportunity to introduce yourselves as well before we get started? Sure, I'll jump in. I'm Andrew Bowen, I'm the elementary principal. If we're also sharing our kids, I have a seventh grader and a two-year-old that will eventually join us. And I'm Reed McCracken. I'm the principal in South Royalton in the high school. Oh, I'm Bradley, principal in the middle school. I'm Jamie Canary, superintendent of the schools. I'm Tara Weatherow and I'm the business manager for the supervisory union. All right, we have more district level administrators here with us this evening as well, but I feel like we should move into our presentation. So I'll turn things back over to Chris. Thank you. All right, so tonight we're having an informational meeting. There will be another informational meeting via the same method Google Meet on March 1st at 6 p.m. Voting will be via Australian ballot this year. So a little bit different than past years and the voting will be on Tuesday, March 2nd, beginning at 8 a.m. and ending at 7 p.m. And that will be occurring at both schools. So if you're a Royalton voter, come to the South Royalton campus and if you're a Bethel voter, go to the Bethel campus to vote. If you're requesting an absentee ballot from the clerk, please try to make sure you do so by February 24th. If you want it to be mailed to you, you can. If you're willing to go pick it up, you can go, you can request it by 5 p.m. the day before, up to 5 p.m. the day before the voting. And then it has to be returned, if you're going to return it in person by 7 p.m. on the election day. But when you do request it, make sure that you're requesting a school ballot in addition to the regular voting ballot. You got to make sure that you specify that you want both ballots. So now I think the administrators are going to take over the next few slides. Yeah, I'll just jump in. Thanks everyone for coming tonight. It's good to see a turnout. And we're also doing this again on March 1st at 6 p.m. So if you don't have enough, we'll want to remind your friends and family and relatives about joining another informational meeting that will happen on March 1st. I joined the organization officially on July 1st and we got right to work. And later in the slides, you'll see some information in regards to just the fiscal outlook and the impact that the WRVSU budget has had your local district, and specifically around the deficits that we've been trying to address. I'm pleased to let you know that currently right now we're projecting a slight surplus at WRVSU and Central Office and Special Ed and in my offices, the fiscal offices. And so that's good news. And so we won't be looking to hopefully have to charge back districts. Any additional monies other than what you budgeted. And hopefully that will help offset some of your general fund deficit. So we restructured the central office for 2122. Part of that was we restructured the way that we were doing curriculum and instruction and in grants. And so what we did is we restructured in a way that we took three admin positions and merged them into one. We will be hopefully hiring that candidate for that position called the chief academic officer who will report to me and be directly below me in the organization next week at our full board meeting. So we were able to encourage some pretty significant financial savings by doing business that way and then we're gonna be able to use those savings to decrease our budget, but also the idea was to take federal funds and utilize them at the local level. And you'll see in the revenue side of the budget tonight that we were able to increase some of the revenue received from their federal funds to decrease the need for you to collect revenue from the local tax base. We've been focusing on fiscal responsibility but through the lens of a proactive approach to student support and intervention. So we've been able to decrease expenditures in regards to what we've been seeing in regards to the special education. Special education is up slightly. You'll see in your budget informational mailer but it's less than 1%. And we were able to do that because we're focusing on early intervention and intervention through the lens of a multi-tiered system of supports that ensures we're providing intervention with fidelity. Another focus for us is next year is we look to build and expand our most intensive social-emotional intervention which you knew formerly as the restorative classrooms that we had grades K through eight, we're looking to expand those into the high school. And so we do believe that over time we're gonna incur some savings in regards to not having to support our students throughout a district placements but to be able to keep our students here within the SU and in district at rut. We've also been focused on how do we best invest in our teachers and our programs. And so what I mean by that is we're really focusing on a strategic plan of professional development for teachers so that they're feeling one, the investment in them. So we're hoping to really retain our teachers but also we're looking at providing them tools to best meet the needs of our students and so that they can differentiate, fill academic gaps and hopefully we can decrease stress on teachers because they're feeling like they have the content area knowledge needed to best support our students. And so we're launching into a pretty significant investment in teachers around PD over the next three years and we're leveraging our federal grants to do so. And so again, instead of supporting a few personnel we're looking to expand that money in those resources across the SU to invest in our teachers. And then finally, I think COVID-19 provided us an opportunity as challenging as it has been to really become one system and learn from each other. And so I'm proud to say that our principals meet weekly to just as a think tank on Thursday mornings at 11, we were able to launch the start of the school year with the same elementary schedule across the SU for the first time. And I think there's been a lot of strength in bringing our principals together to work as a collaborative team. Different principals from across the SU are starting to take on leadership roles that expand past their principalship. For example, principal Bradley is really assisting me in the work that we're doing around equity and anti-racism across the supervisory union. So that's just one example. And so we're trying to key into our administrators' strengths and expertise to best serve all of our schools. And so those are some of the changes that have occurred at the SU office as we move into 21-22. Next slide, Rhett. So as the red principals we have taken on these three goals for the school year and if you've been to any of our board meetings this is really what we report out on every month is points specific to these goals. So this year we've been working with one less principal but through that we have been working on developing personalized and flexible pathways for student learning, providing a robust multi-tiered system of support for students and improving our community outreach and partnerships which maybe has been a little more challenging this year given the pandemic. But these are some goals we plan on keeping and report out on monthly at our board meetings. Next slide, I think. And this is our new shared leadership model focuses on developing a continuous improvement plan that's robust and data-driven school-wide. This picture, if you can't read that is some high school students in the community based learning program who are doing some work improving the gazebo on the Green and South Royalton. Next slide. Another feature of our work this year is an increased use of data for driving decisions. We use the Star 360 assessment for literacy, Ripper reading and math three times a year and meet twice a month in data teams to work on collecting data and analyzing the data and planning interventions. Do you want to go back up, Chris or whoever's driving? So just one of our greatest celebrations, these are just a few celebrations that we've pulled out of the data as we've been meeting and analyzing and this most recent data set that we got was the one we've sort of been waiting for to see how much growth we could have since the beginning of the school year. So despite our COVID complications we're really excited to report that red elementary students have maintained reading levels between December, 2019 and January, 2021 which we think is great given the learning challenges we've experienced. And we just celebrated 95 days of learning without having to take a break for COVID and as you know, we did recently have to do that. We're also really happy that we're working on looking at mathematics intervention and changing our mindset that that's essential and that we see mathematics as an area that needs and deserves our focus. We're not happy with the scores we have and we are going after that full steam ahead. And at the high school we are really excited that our 10th grade math scores improved by 10% over last year. The next slide. So outdoor learning is something that we know is good for you to begin with but then come pandemic it's even better and safe. We've had a lot of fun outside but we've had a lot of learning and it's been throughout the school system and we're really proud of what's coming out of that and we are growing that into the high school as well. One of the areas that's been heavily impacted by the pandemic have been our co-curricular activities. For example, all of last spring seasons were canceled which included our planned performance of School of Rock as our musical. We were able to get in a modified fall season that were shorter, players wore masks had to stay physically distanced on the sidelines and as far apart in practice as possible. And we were able to get in a fall drama production. It was shortened, abbreviated, it was done outside and we performed it and videotaped it so it could be seen by a larger audience just as it started to get cold in November and we had to stop the outdoor practices. We haven't started our winter competitions yet but athletes have started practicing and we hope that the first games will start the beginning next week on Monday. And finally we have a newspaper club that's just published its second newspaper digitally for this year. Pretty excited about that as well. Next slide. Another big feature that has been a longstanding piece of our program is flexible pathways in the form of community-based learning. It's hard for employers to accept as many students in and out of their buildings this year as they have in the past. So that's been a big change but we do have some students who are doing apprenticeships out in the community pretty extensively, which is great and we're excited about that. Hope that that can open up even more next year. Part of our pivot with the pandemic is that students are doing a lot more interaction with employers through Zoom calls and videos. They've been making videos of some interviews they've done with employers and learning career skills of what employers look for virtually. And our hope in this budget as you'll see a little bit later is to expand the number of service learning opportunities and pathways that we're able to facilitate for students across grades nine through 12. There's some wonderful pictures from the last year. You might see, oh, we've got two students without masks that makes me cringe when I first saw it they're brothers so they're within each other's bubbles. Otherwise we shouldn't be seeing students without masks anywhere. Andra? We just wanted to say that we really feel like we are bringing forward a really responsible budget and we wanna thank you for your support through things this whole year, especially this year given the whole pandemic challenges and just thank you for listening and thank you for being here tonight and being present. Thank you. So I just wanted to share as we transition into the budget portion of the meeting and I appreciate that presentation by the principals and maybe on the things that have happened at school that have been so exciting this year that one of the things in terms of board leadership that we've done a little bit differently are the creation of committees to look at things a little more specifically. So we have a finance committee, a facilities committee and those are groups of people from the board, the schools, administration who meet to do a deeper dive into the numbers and then report back to the board and make recommendations if necessary. So that's been an important part of the budget development and the planning in terms of the deficit and how to handle those things as we move forward. So I just wanted to share that as we get a little bit more into our financial situation. So if we can move to the next slide we'll launch into that piece of things. So our current financial position as many of you may know is that there's been a general funds deficit for the last couple of years and I really appreciate the work that's been done at the SU level and at the building level throughout the district to really get a handle on where we were at with our finances to understand where those deficits were occurring and how they've heard and to make a plan that I feel pretty confident in to move forward. There are questions that we've been working to resolve for a couple of years and I feel like we get reliable, dependable answers these days. So I really do appreciate that. At this point in time, through the financial responsibility, the fiscal responsibility that we've been talking about on behalf of all members of the White River Unified District community, we've gotten to a place where we have a deficit that started off as $350,000, $247,000, I mean, 350,247 dollars, but we've had some surpluses and those surpluses when they can be applied to the deficits actually help us reduce the deficit. So little by little, it's being chipped away at. And in FY20, the supervisory union ran a deficit of around $370,000 and that will be assessed to member districts. So again, that drove our individual deficit back up. The White River Unified District portion is $150,000, roughly, and when all of that is totaled together, we get to a little less than $370,000 worth of deficit. But right now we're also projecting a surplus for this year through the efforts of the staff, and that brings our deficit down to $195,344. So we're working on this proactively and I think that we'll talk a little bit more about that in the next slide. Okay, so we have that amount that's our current projected deficit and districts can only carry that level of sort of negative numbers or deficit for three years. We're in two years of that deficit. So we knew that we needed a more detailed plan to move forward. We also felt like this wasn't necessarily a year to raise taxes in order to satisfy the deficit. We did discuss that at length with differing opinions on the board, but ultimately we came around to the decision that we'll address in the next budget year. The idea being that we're going to be as fiscally responsible as possible, the SU will be as fiscally responsible as possible, and we will make that deficit as small as possible and bring forward budgets with focused on student needs and what we need to do to adequately educate our children, but at the same time, thinking about how we can be creative and meet those needs while at the same time, being incredibly conservative with spending. Next year, we plan to either incorporate it directly into the budget. So there would be a three cent increase for one year or ask for a bond to spread it over three years, that it being whatever we ultimately end up with after these surpluses are applied to the deficit. Next slide, please. And so that brings us to our spending changes. And I think that's a slide that I'm passing back to Chris. Is that correct? Yeah, I think so. All right, thank you. So some decreases in spending and some changes in priority for this year or for the coming year, we didn't replace one full-time equivalent position in music. We also didn't replace one of our principals, so Principal Wells when he left, we didn't replace his position. And then there were also three full-time equivalent positions worth of support staff. And then we looked at a reconfiguration of scheduling and roles and responsibilities to help find efficiencies in areas like driver's education, foreign language, and then also in health. In terms of reinvestment, there was one FTA for a pathways coordinator and then also one full-time position for coordinator of student services and an increase in the outdoor and experiential education, continuing what we saw this year. So overall, we're looking at a net spending decrease going from 12,098,000 to 12,026,000 and a few hundred dollars on each. As Superintendent Canary mentioned, there's some different revenue changes as well. So comparing the current year 2021 to what we're budgeting for next year, 21-22, for interest income, we're projecting a lower amount of interest income, so 22,500 dollars less. Also projecting a smaller amount of tuition intake, so we're reducing that down and projecting 28,206 dollars less on tuition income. For other areas, the next few, tuition for preschool, for miscellaneous rentals and student activities, we're not projecting any changes. For Act 60, transportation, we are projecting an increase in revenue of 2,567 dollars, but on vocational transportation, we are projecting a decrease in that, so we're projecting it to go down by 18,061 dollars. No changes in adult learning or driver education reimbursement, but as, again, Superintendent mentioned, looking to use grants from the SU to help on the revenue side, we're projecting an increase in grant revenue for the coming year and an increase of 89,100 dollars. So in terms of overall local revenue between decreases and increases, we're seeing an overall growth in revenue of 22,900 dollars. At the state level, though, we're expecting a decrease in educational spending of 74,188 dollars, and then for tech center reimbursement, we're expecting 20,732 dollars less there. So between local revenue and state level, overall, we're projecting an overall decrease in revenue of 72,019 dollars. So our overall actual ADM is down by 50 students, but the state is compensating for that in their calculations due to enrollment declines due to COVID. So for the coming year, the state will use last year's ADM if this year's ADM is lower. Overall, our equalized pupils are down by 0.7%. So in here, we see the overall trend over the last, six years going out into FY22. So starting in FY16, small decrease versus last year, but in general, a little bit of leveling out versus what we saw for a recent peak in FY18. All right, so I'm gonna take over and talk about how this all translates into the tax rate. So just to go over that calculation real quick, the first step is to calculate the per people spending, which is just taking our net spending and dividing that by the equalized pupils. And then you translate that into the equivalent rate, equalized rate by dividing that by the state yield, which we'll get into a little bit later. And then we're still in the merger period. So a little bit comes off of the, due to the merger incentive when calculating our equalized rate. And then we get our final rate by taking that equalized rate and dividing it by the common level of crazy. And we'll go through each of those steps now. So just to summarize what we talked about before, spending is down about $70,000 and revenues up by $20,000, a little more than. So net spending is down about $100,000 or 0.8%. Our equalized pupils are down a little bit at 0.7%. So per pupil spending is essentially flat. It's slightly down. Administration worked really hard to keep spending in check this year and managed to show a decrease in per pupil spending, which we're very appreciative of. So the state yield is the factor that's used to convert between per pupil spending and the tax rate, the equalized tax rate. So you can basically think of it as the amount of spending that is equivalent to $1 worth of tax. And it's pretty complicated how they come up with it. And I'm not entirely sure everything that goes into it, but they need to basically have enough funding and the ed fund in order to pay all of the state education funding. And two thirds of the education funding comes from property taxes. The other third is from the sales tax, sales and use tax and meals tax and lottery funds and some other revenue sources. And so there's a lot of factors that go into calculating the yield that aren't known when budgets are approved. So they need to know how much total spending there's going to be, but you don't know that until all the budgets are approved. And so there's always a tax letter that they send out in December that they give an estimate of what the yield's going to be. And this year when they were sending that out, they really didn't, because of all the complications of COVID, they had a lot of uncertainty about what state revenues would be, the alternate sources of funding for the ed fund. And also, I think this was before the second relief act had passed and the one that's currently going through Congress. So when they sent out that initial estimate, it was down by 230. So instead of, it was 10998 last year and it decreased to 10763. And when the yield goes down, that means taxes go up. So that was pretty not great news, but in January, the House Ways and Means Committee had taken a look at what they would propose for a yield and passed through a bill which had set the yield at 11,385. I think that a lot of the alternative revenue sources were a lot stronger than were expected. And so they're expecting the financial position to be a lot stronger than it was when they initially released the estimate. So depending on which yield you, but that still needs to be passed by the full House and go through the full legislature. So that's not a final, not either, but it just reflects their optimism about the state of the finances compared to where it was in December. But depending on which yield you use to calculate the tax rate, you wind up with a 10 cents swing, almost 10 cents swing, depending on if you use the one that passed through the Ways and Means Committee or the December projected yield. So as kind of a middle ground, we just kept the yield for our projections at the same level that it was last year. And hopefully it'll wind up being a higher yield, which would decrease taxes in the end, but we didn't want to use a yield that was overly optimistic and then have taxes be higher than what we were projecting. So just keep that in mind as we go through these calculations. All right, so using last year's yield because our per-people spending was basically the same and the yield we're estimating it to be the same. Our preliminary rate is very close to what it was last year. The merger incentive has been slowly phasing out since we merged it started at eight cents and is now down to two cents. So each year it decreases two cents. And this is last year that we're going to be receiving any. But that means that our equalized rate did go up two cents just because the incentive is phasing out. So that was a preliminary equalized rate change was 1.1% increase, not two cents increase. And that brings us to the common level of appraisal. Now, this is the factor the state uses to adjust appraised values, the rates that are assessed for each town to something closer to market property values. They look at what properties are selling for and compare it to what the town has assessed them at and adjust the rate that they charge each town just so that if you have two towns that have assessed values that are different, they'd be sending different amounts to the state ad funds. So it's kind of a way of trying to capture a better market rate and prevent anybody from disparities from arising just because of different appraisal levels. So this has been going down, it went down in both towns pretty significantly. So it went down about 3% in Bethel and 5% in Royalton. And so that caused a pretty significant increase in the tax rate due to the CLA. And if we go to the next side, we can see that the CLA has been decreasing steadily over time. Once the level gets low enough, the towns will do a reappraisal and this will probably go back up. And that will decrease our rate at that point. But we can see since, if you look since FY16 when things have been decreasing, like 22 cents of the tax increases since education tax increase in Royalton is basically just because of the CLA going down and the 15 cents in Bethel is attributable to the CLA decrease. So just looking at how each of those factors impact our tax rate. The net spending changes was about a little more than a penny off the taxes but the equalized pupils out of that back end. So those two kind of cancel each other out. The setup phase out was adding two cents. The yield could either add three cents if we use the December tax rate or take away five cents. It's the Ways and Means Committee. So that one is still pretty up in the air and just keep that in mind when looking at the overall rate changes that they vary depending on what the legislature winds up doing. The common level of appraisal in Bethel added almost four cents and in Royalton added a little more than seven cents to the tax rate. So that final projected rate change was a little more than five cents in Bethel and a little less, more than nine cents in Royalton. So that's how it all works out for the taxes. I think at this point. Thank you. Now, I think that's it for the presentation. Is there anything else that either board members or administrators would like to share before we move into public comment and questions? I'll just jump in real quickly, Lisa. I just wanna say that I'm really proud of the work that the administration and the boards done on this budget. They were able to bring forward a budget that decreased expenditures but didn't take away any programs. We had to make some adjustments in staffing around how the best staff programming, but there wasn't an elimination of a program. So what do I mean by that? We didn't eliminate music from the school. We didn't eliminate foreign language from the school. And what we invested in was ensuring that students were best supported at the primary grades so that they have the skill sets they need to pursue whatever pathways they wanna pursue at the secondary level. While also making certainly kept in place the high level of AP courses we're able to offer students at the high school while also ensuring that there's additional hands-on learning experiences for students at middle and high. And so that I'm really proud of the work that we were able to do to do that and bring that forward to the board. And I just wanted to make sure that we were able to highlight that because it was one slide. I think it's really important for folks to know I do think that this sets us up for some really bright things into the future and sustainability in regards to us actually seeing our equalized per pupil spending drop slightly. So I think that's all really positive news. Thank you. People who wish to ask a question if you are in the grid may either choose to use the raise hand icon on the lower right hand of your screen to raise your hand or if you are calling in you can press star six to unmute. And I will call on people in the order in which they either raise their hand or unmute. Hopefully I'll get the order correct. And also once we've discussed for a few minutes I'll prioritize people who haven't shared or asked a question yet just to make sure we hear from as many voices as possible. Thank you. No questions from community members or public who joined us this evening. Hi. Hi. This is Joe Lavaster from the Herald. My phone ID might say James Martino. My first question is not exactly about your presentation but I'm wondering if you will be able to tell me at the end of this meeting how many public of the public came to this meeting by way of remote both phone and Google Meet. Is that something you will know? Yeah, so that's a little bit challenging Joe and other people can jump in and share. So like you, we have many people right now who've called into this meeting and so that just gives us the 1802 and then last two numbers of their phone number. So it's my assumption that those people are community members who called in. Right, we do have about 15 right now that have joined us. And in the past couple of years the informational meetings have not been particularly well attended. We've had typically somewhere between the high teens and low like 40s or high 30s at times but it has been a challenge to get people to our informational meetings. So I actually feel like this was a reasonable turnout given the change and modality for the type of meeting. It's not easy to shift from being in person to having these sorts of meetings online I think. Thank you. Yeah, I don't feel like that's as good an answer as you might have wanted, but I appreciate the question. How do I unmute now? I think you push star six again. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. I think it's also worth noting as Bridget Taylor said that some people are sharing devices so we could estimate that there could be more than 15 people on the call right now. Thank you. Yeah, I think that's important to think about too. And this meeting is being recorded so we could be able to share this with people to watch after the fact. Absolutely. Right, other questions? Bridget Taylor, please ask your thing. Let's see how quickly I can hit unmute. This may not be a question with an answer but I've asked questions without answers before. Why stop now? I know Super antenna can already specifically talked about music. How are we looking at? Obviously we don't know exactly scaling back up in the future because obviously we've, I'm not going to say we've necessarily even saved money because I feel like we've shuffled the money around into different buckets depending on whatever crisis was hitting in any specific time. But like I'm not sure we feel confident that three music teachers will be adequate when we are back to full rehearsal schedules and rehearsing in groups and concerts and all these things we miss so much. And I know I'm just using music as an example because that's a quick and easy one. And you said the word and my ears picked up. But just in general, how are we looking at? Obviously, like I said, this may not be a question with a good answer because the future is still somewhat uncertain. Are the vaccinations all going to be in order for fall? Probably. But the kind of scaling back up of in-person activities and the scaling down of all the remote stuff that we've been doing. How do we have a feel for potentially how that will affect expenses or is it we're all just doing the best we can? So the principles can jump in Bridget. I mean, I will say that as an admin team, one of the things that we looked at was, how do we ensure that we're still providing the same access and opportunities for our students but by doing it with free full-time teachers? And so the structure we're looking at is a middle and high school choral teacher, a middle high school instrumental teacher and an elementary music teacher. And we're looking at offering the same level of access at the elementary level that we did prior with four. And then also at the middle and high school and the principles, they can correct me if I'm wrong and if I misspeak, but I think they feel confident that we can do that. We're also looking at there's an upstart project coming out of Hanover to offer additional enrichment for our students in all different areas of music education. And is it Trey? Did I get this right guys? Trey Fisk is the upstart and he's a graduate of Sharon Elementary and then Sharon Academy and has come home and we budgeted to provide virtual lessons with musicians over the world really for our students in addition to the lessons that we also offer in person. And so that all is part of this budget even though it's three FTE, we did expand our opportunity to provide additional programming for students through his upstart. And I'm blanking on what it's called. Do you remember what it's called Owen? Be Sharp. Thank you, Be Sharp. Be Sharp. And we have some folks already piloting it across the SU. We could put the link in the chat. I'll do that. Thank you, Owen. And thank you, Jamie. Thank you. Are there any other questions? I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Rodney Rainville and Bob Gray who will be leaving our board this year. I appreciate having the opportunity to work with both of them and having them share their experiences with us as a board and their insight as we work through the budget process and all of the things that board members go through. No one was able to turn in their, no one was able to turn in their petition for candidacy on time or did turn that in on time. We do have one person who has launched a write-in campaign from Bethel with us this evening. And I wanted to give her an opportunity to share a little bit about her candidacy so that people might consider writing her in as the Bethel board member to replace Rodney Rainville who had just wrapped up his term. So yeah, hi. My name is Shannon Moral Cornelius, which is unfortunate given that I'm asking people to write that whole long name in. But I'm running for the Bethel, I believe on the ballot it says the school director position. That's a school board member. And my family, we lived in South Royalton. I grew up in South Royalton and we had moved back and I joined the board when the merger happened and was on the board for almost just about two years. And then we bought our home and we were trying very hard to stay in district and we achieved that, but we now live in Bethel. So I had to step off of the board because I crossed town lines, but I am now running for Rodney's position. He did a great job and I'm so grateful that I got to serve with him. But I'm hoping to step into that position. So I have put that up on Facebook if you're on Facebook. So if anyone has any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. That's usually the easiest way to find me. Thank you, Shannon. Other questions for the board, the administration. Otherwise, we can wrap up our informational meeting and then the regular board meeting. We'll start at six. We have one more question from Tracy Gardner. Thank you. Hi, Tracy, you're muted. I'm sorry. I'm still muted. Thank you. So my question, how would the board like to have conversations with the faculty? Like I have a couple of questions, but I'm not sure that now is the appropriate time and place because I'm a faculty member. So my question is, how do you feel, how does the board feel about having questions now or is there another time that's more appropriate that's not in a public session? Just clarification questions. Yeah, I think in general having questions come to us through administration is helpful, but if there's a need for a forum, we can do that. We could schedule a time for board members and faculty members to meet. Other thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I would appreciate that if, we go through kind of a chain of commands. So there's questions, you go to your principal, Tracy. And then if there's further questions about the budget, I'm more than welcome to sit down with teachers and review the budget. And if those questions still aren't answered, certainly come to the board. Okay, so you don't want them now then, it sounds like. That's fine. That's fine. Okay. I just hope there is an opportunity for us to communicate. Thanks. Thank you. I mean, if faculty is meeting with the board and the board has a forum, then it's a public meeting. So, you know, if it's a question as a member of the public then you would ask it here. If it's something through your teacher role then go talk to the principals and Jamie and then. And I think, I mean, it's not related to board business, but before COVID we did have a couple informal sessions with board members and faculty in non quorum settings. I think one time like Lisa and I came to the Royalton campus and those were like, you know, hello and get to know people and talk and do things like that. And, you know, I think that was something we looked to continue, but then COVID came. So, you know, we look forward to attending that, you know, those things again in the future. I know I enjoyed coming to like the end of the year lunch that the faculty in South Royalton had a couple years ago and as a board representative and, you know, wishing well to people who were retiring and getting to, you know, congratulate people on years of service and stuff. So, you know, we always look forward to those types of interactions, but like Jamie said, for board specific questions about board business, it should come up to the administration. That's really nice and important when you're coming to events like that. We could also do something virtually. I mean, I know COVID's making it hard, but that's an option too. That is true. Thank you. We have additional questions from the public. All right. So the link to this meeting, the recording will be on Orca media. I'm seeing that it will be shared probably on our Facebook as well. Also, Ray has put the link to the regular meeting which begins at 6 p.m. in the comments. So feel free to click on that if you want to attend our meeting at 6 p.m. this evening. Lisa, we did, in the mailing we had the agenda of going over the individual ballot questions. So should we do that real quick? I'm guessing there won't be a lot of discussion about it. Yeah, I think since we got seven minutes, go ahead and do it. Could the ballot be shared just as a visual as we walk through it? I mean, projected, not shared. I know it's been shared. It's in the booklet. Yeah. It's because it does look a little bit different. We could just read to that in the book. Yeah, Ray, it's in your email. Is it in here? Yep, go up a little more. Yeah, there, perfect. Scroll down, keep going just a little bit. Yeah, there you go. Right there, perfect. Yeah, so these things are things that we would commonly see on our annual meeting agenda, like fixing the salaries of the school board members, the district treasurer, those things. However, because they happen from the floor sometimes, it just seems a little different than it normally would. Did you wanna add anything, Andrew, as we talk through this? No, I didn't. I just, no, we had this posted as the agenda, so I just... Right, yep. So we should do it if it's posted. Absolutely. Right, so this is the warning. We'll go through the regular revenue anticipation note, which just gives our towns the opportunity to have a line of credit that they can draw against, should taxes not come in on the schedule or when they need to pay the bills related to the regular operations that we go through. And then finally, the actual budget, which we did present a little more thoroughly than it's outlined right here. Any other questions about the warning or how to have access to vote this year? We talked about it a little bit at the beginning, but if people have questions about that while we're here, it might be helpful. To answer any questions that people have about access to voting. It looks like Louise is raising her hand. Oh, thank you, Louise. Lisa, so for Pam to be treasurer, we have to write her in, is that correct? Jamie, is that correct? Or will her name be on the ballot? Sarah, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that it will falter her. Is that accurate based on her role within the district? Is that what we discussed with her and Dina? Yes, it can default, but her name is on the ballot. Oh, okay, good. All right. She's on the ballot for both the school district and school district treasurer. Her name is on there and then a write-in option. Okay, because the write-ins are something new for people and with our doing Australian ballot, it's gonna be kind of weird for a lot of us. Yeah, that will be a change. Also in order for someone like Shannon to be the candidate that moves forward as one of our school board members, she needs at least 30 votes. So at least 30 people need to vote her in in addition to having a majority of the write-in votes. So it is important if people support her candidacy to write her in. Good, thank you. Thank you for that question. Anyone else have a question? I would entertain a motion to adjourn this meeting. Make a motion to adjourn. I'll second. All right, thank you. And I'll see you in a couple of minutes.