 If you want to go ahead and introduce the board, I'll introduce themselves. I'm Lisa Floyd, I'm the chair of the White River Union District Board. I'm Anna Jones, I'm the vice chair of board. How are we doing? We're on Debra Hill, school board member. Garlick, school board member. School board member and clerk. Bruce Leib, superintendent. Tara Leather, director of special education. And we'll start by standing and doing the Pledge of Allegiance. Consisting of the towns of Bethel and Royalton are hereby noted and warned to meet at the Bethel campus of the White River Valley Unified District in Bethel, Vermont on March 2nd, 2020 at 6 o'clock PM to consider and act upon the following articles, one through nine, and to discuss the article to be voted upon by Australian ballot, Article 10 only. To be acted on this evening, March 2nd, 2020. And I'll turn this first article over to Lisa. Yes, immediately. And serve a one qualification of a successor. Combinations are now in order for the nomination for Allison Fulcher. Are there any other nominations? I think it's four weeks. OK, since we've only one, we don't need a second apparently. I did Allison Fulcher as our moderator for one more year. OK, article two. To elect a school district clerk who shall assume office July 1st, 2020 and serve a one year term for until the election and qualification of a successor. Nominations are now in order for school district clerk. I'd like to nominate Pam Brown. Seeing none, nominations are now for the following year signified by raising your card. Also signified by raising your card. Brown has been elected as our school district clerk. Article three. To elect a school district treasurer who shall assume office July 1st, 2020 and serve a one year term or until the election and qualification of a successor. Nominations are now in order for the select school district treasurer. Are there any nominations? I'd like to nominate Pam Brown. OK, we have a nomination for Pam Brown. Are there any other nominations for school district treasurer? Seeing none, nominations are closed. We can vote. All those in favor of electing Pam Brown to serve as school district treasurer for the following year, please do so by signifying by raising your card. Those opposed? It looks like Pam Brown has been voted in as our school district treasurer. Article four. To fix the salaries of the school district officers for the 2020-2021 school year, do I have a motion? OK, Bushroud Powers. I do need to identify the person making the motion. So Bushroud Powers moved. Do I have a second? Rick Benson has seconded the motion. So the motion that's been made and seconded is to fix the salaries of the school district officers for the 2020-2021 school year. All those in favor, please show by raising your card. Those opposed? It looks like the motion is going to carry, and the motion does carry. Article five. To hear and act upon the reports of the school district directors and officers, do I have a motion? OK, it's been moved in your name, sir. Steve Hall has moved. Is there a second? Second in your name, sir. Chris Mayby has seconded. So we have a motion and a second. To hear and act upon the reports of the school district directors and officers. Is there any discussion? So we have a brief presentation to share with you first about some of the things that have happened in our schools in the past year, which will be presented by Principal David Wells, although all the principals collaborated in creating this presentation. And then we'll take the presentation back to share about the budget and the process to this point. Good evening again, everyone. The four principals and I want to take a moment to share with you some of the things that we've done in our schools on both campuses over the past year. And I'll go ahead and do that right now. We really think of ourselves, even though, as you know, there's a Bethel campus in the South Carolina campus as one school. And we do a lot of initiatives together as one school. And our school-wide initiatives, we implemented multi-tiered systems of supports for our students. And we hired two coordinators. For that, they better support our students. We implemented a new literacy program in grades K through 5. We realized that more and more of our students come to us with backgrounds where they've experienced traumas of many different types. And we've engaged with a trainer to have teachers, all of the teachers from both campuses learn to know how they can better support students who have experienced trauma. Of course, safety is a paramount concern for us. And in the August, actually, the very beginning of the year, we used a new training that is used across the state of Vermont and is recommended by all the authorities of Vermont. It's called the Alice Training. It's a new adaptive way to deal with crises of intruders into the school and be more proactive about it. Another highlight, we have our eco, which is environmental education outdoors. And that program is expanding. It started on the Bethel campus, came over to the South Royal from campus last year in the elementary grades. It's built into the middle school. And then in the budget that you'll see, it's proposed to start with the high school as well to have our students learn and benefit from the natural environment that we're in. I want to talk a little bit more about initiatives in the elementary schools. A really huge improvement and big program for us has been to adopt and to train on a new reading program for grades K through 5. And this aligns our practices on both campuses and within the whole supervisor union, but with us on both campuses. All of our teachers have received training. Many of them have taken courses in this, sponsored by the supervisor union. Every single classroom has new materials. And these new programs were paid for a lion's share from Medicaid funding that the district and supervisor union had. And then Bethel and South Royal, and we went further and secured a $50,000 grant to make sure that we had as much of the materials as possible to grade 5. And we're already starting to see the fruits of our labors. We're seeing now that our kindergarten students now are performing better now than many of them were performing at last June. And across the supervisor union, our students have seen a 16% growth in their reading ability. We've expanded our rural language instruction. So now that it is on both campuses, so students in grades K through 5 have rural language instruction where they're learning Spanish. And we're expanding preschool programs. Again, on both campuses, so that four-year-olds have full day options and expanded options for three-year-old children. And our plans going forth in the future is to have further expansions of our preschool program because there are so many children in need. And we want to get them off to a good start. The middle school has spent a lot of time having teachers work together to do things as a team, to integrate their learning and their teaching. And they're using a learning block. And they really want the students to be reflective at this middle school age as to what it needs to be a learner. How do they learn and what are their goals? And one of the ways to pull all the middle school students together has been a book study group where all of the students are reading the benefits of being an octopus. And they're going to work with that author as well. At the high school, we're working on improving our programs and improving our offerings for students. One example is that we're going forward with strong AP classes. And we added a pre-AP English class. The high school faculty has been doing a lot of work through all of his trainings and a lot of his time together to work on personalized learning and individual pathways to college and career. Up in the students take more charge of their learning and have more of a direction. Our community based learning program continues to be strong where students have personalized learning plans. They're going on job shadowing this spring for all ninth graders, but all throughout the year we have students job shadowing all over the area. And last but not least, we're going to attain the Division of Forest Health Fall and Baseball Championships as a newly merged team. Wildcats hit it out of the park for a season. Continuing on the co-curriculars, our music enrollment is strong and growing. We've added a Janice Band, and we have the prep band shown here. The School of Rock Musical is coming to our stage so the musicals are returning to the White River Valley School. And it will be performed the first weekend in April. The middle school performed their first year of production. We've added sports like bass, fishing, and indoor training, and they're very popular. And then we have our traditional events like our cancer awareness day that are still strong and grow community. We've also been paying attention to the buildings and working with the school board. We were able to put a new roof on the majority of the South Royalton building. We're being systematic and completing asbestos removal in the South Royalton cafeteria and in two classrooms. Things that never needed to be done, but things like pipes in the ceiling that really should have been out of there is the installation taken out. We've expanded our restorative classroom in the middle school to have more space for the restorative program. Back in South Royalton, we replaced three of our hot water heating tanks because one of them had failed and all of them were aging, so we made the decision to think forward and replace them. And we installed a new stage curtain and rigging for the high school stage. So we think it's going to be a community for their support and for taking time to hear our report this evening. So again, I'm Chris Riley, I'm a school board member. I know it presents a few of those slides and how we could build the budget to where we are and then also Andrew Jones is going to come up after me and speak more to our proposed budget for this current coming year. So the first slide we have here is on the FY19 audit. So this is from last year's school year, so from the 2018-2019 school year. So the audit that was done has shown a deficit of $350,000 and there was some of the reasons for this deficit that we've been down in the audit is there was a shortfall in the actual tuition revenue that we got in terms of what we had projected for tuition students coming to the school and what was the number of students that actually retreated to our school. So that was a shortfall of $105,000 versus what we had budgeted. There was also issues with the HRA budgeting, so for our health insurance savings accounts or reimbursement accounts. So it wasn't budgeted to the proper levels or funded to the proper levels and so there was a budget shortfall of $50,000 versus what was budgeted. So there was also at the SU level because of things like health insurance and the HRA issues that we saw at the local level, the SU saw the same sort of issues as well and again, we pay our portion of the SU's budget and because of the budget differences between what was spent and what was actually budgeted, there was a $104,000 that we had to contribute in to the SU to help cover their budget difference. For special education, it was the same type of issue, so there was a $100,000 difference versus what was budgeted that we had to contribute to help cover our portion of that difference. At the school level, at the South Royalton campus, when we were building the budget, we had originally planned on one less position in the front office of the school and then as the school year was going on, we found that that was an understaffing issue that came about and so we had to refill that position and we hadn't budgeted for it. So there was $50,000 of overage in terms of what was spent versus what was budgeted. This year, we also had to go out for new maintenance and grounds contracts and those actually came back higher than what we had expected in terms of the cost for grounds maintenance and snow plowing. So there was again a $50,000 difference versus what was budgeted. And then there was some additional merger facilities work that was not, that was again another $50,000 of difference. So for a total, again, of $350,000 in deficit versus what we had budgeted for. So in response to what the budget or the audit was showing for the current school year, so the FY19-20 school year, we have been limiting spending on campus for any non-essential spending requests that they come up and we're trying to absorb as much of that deficit this current year as we can without it having any real impact on the students. So it's not to say that there's a spending freeze, but as there are budget requests that come through, the administration is looking at those requests and improving the ones that are deemed to be necessary. And then for the current budget year too, while this last year there was a deficit on the student tuition, this current year, for the current year we're physically in, we're actually projecting that we're going to have, that we have more tuition students than what we had actually budgeted for our current year. So on next year's budget, you should see actually a surplus from that is what our expectation is. So given the deficit that the auditing found and coming into our budget process for this year, our goal as we had stated last year was to keep an equalized tax rate level and to keep our equalized tax rate level. And so when we were going through the budget on the first draft of the budget for our FY20 budget that we're proposing, when we took into account all of the contracted staff raises, health insurance increases, and then also, well, the health insurance increases that were projected, those alone brought or increased our budget by 7%. In response to that, we did look, we did go through and we decreased all of our non-staff spending. We also cleaned up the budget and that left us then once we removed anything that was deemed to be over budgeted, that left us a 3% increase versus last year's budget. And so we've also, along with that we've looked at reducing our staffing by 2.7 full-time equivalents. So trimming the elementary staff in both locations, both the sites, Royalton and Bethel, to match our student levels more appropriately in terms of appropriate class sizes for student teacher ratios. And to get to an even rate before the incentive, before any incentives, any incentive decrease and then before the CLA is applied. So there are further cuts that we considered that would bring us down to completely level funding for last year to this year. But we felt that those terms, those cuts would have too much of a negative impact on our students and that wasn't the result that we wanna see, we wanna bring forward a program for our students in schools that gives them the education that they deserve and we don't want to take away the things that as Principal Wells presented in the slide, some of the new things and additional things that we've been offering to the students. So we just put it in good conscious, bring that forward, not to say that we can if we need to, but this is the, we wanted to bring forward the budget that we've already done, so. All right, I'm Andy Jones. I'm gonna be going over what all this results in as far as the tax rates and actual numbers. So going briefly through the actual spending changes that we looked at that went into this budget, the, we budgeted staff raises about 3% of these still need to be negotiated, so the final number might be that and it might be a little different, but that's all part of what we are expecting as far as what the staff's salary increases are gonna be. Health insurance costs were up 12% this year, which was an major thing that we had to deal with and that's something everybody across the state is dealing with. Our SPED assessment is up $138,000, which was partially due to just, you know what I'm saying, health insurance increases and also increased needs, but also we have a higher student population relative to the rest of the SE so our percentage that we pay was up a little bit, so that increased at that added to the assessment a little bit and our SU assessment is up 7.5%. This was the first year that we had actual spending numbers from the, from since the merger, so a lot of the accounts kind of got rebalanced because there was a new chart of accounts that was also adopted at the same time when we did the merger, so some things were being budgeted in categories by being spent in other categories, so part of the budget process this year is going through and making sure that what we're budgeting for is actually matching the categories and the levels that they're being spent at, so some, if you look at the budgets that were sent out, there's some categories where things go down, but it's not a real cut, it's just because they were transferred to other categories or something like that. So in addition to that, there were some places where we did decreased spending, things like field trips, equipment, books and supplies, we tried to limit the non-staff spending as much as we could to try and keep the staffing levels as strong as we could, but we did reduce elementary staff by two closer matches because it wasn't recommended class sizes and then there was the 0.7 which came off from basically nutrition. So the end result was spending was up about $280,000 from 11.8 million to 12.1. For revenue changes, our projected tuition revenue was up $150,000, so last year we just took the level that we got in for FY19 and used that for our tuition revenue and we did get a stronger freshman class than we had in FY19, so in FY20, we're going to be exceeding the amount that we budgeted for the amount of tuition we're getting in, so we're basically just continuing that on. So the amount of tuition revenue we got was just taking the current students that we got for tuition revenue, tuition students, and projecting them forward a year older and then adding in five new freshmen. And for comparison, we have 15 new freshmen this year, so this should be, even with the increased level, this should be a conservative projection plan which we should be able to bring in. But the increase in tuition revenue, projected tuition revenue was offset a little bit by federal funds being decreased by $60,000. And in the previous budget, we had a balance carryover from the previous surplus of $55,000. We no longer have any surplus to carry in, so that's out of this budget. So the revenue is up about $50,000 this year. The final thing that goes into per-people spending is how many pupils you have, and so the graph on the left shows equalized pupils. And those basically held steady, so we didn't gain many or we just had a very slight decrease in equalized pupils. The equalized pupil is calculated from a two-year average of the average daily membership, and just looking at that, it shows one way that being a combined school helps both of our towns out. So last year, Bethel had had a decrease in enrollment, while Royalton helped keep the numbers up. With an increase this year, Royalton was down 10%, whereas Bethel was up 8%, so it wound up cancelling out pretty much. Whereas each individual town, individual town trying to deal with a 10% decrease in enrollment would be pretty difficult. So having the combined of the two towns working together helps even these things out. To go into how this all calculates out into a tax rate, we'll first go over the per-people spending, which is the spending minus the revenue divided by the equalized pupils, and then see how we calculate the equalized rate, which is taking that per-people spending and divided by the state of yield factor and subtracting the merger incentive, and then we get a final rate by dividing out the common number with appraisal, and we'll go over all those things in a little more detail. So yeah, our spending was up 2.4% and our revenue was up about 5%, so our net spending was up 2%. Our equalized pupils stayed the same, so our per-people spending is up 2%. But looking at that, compared to the state yield, the way the yield works is as the tax base for the state of the law increases, the same tax rate will bring in more revenue for the state, so they're able to change the rate that they need to assess to the towns to reflect what they'll need to bring in to pay the statewide education spending. And this yield is projected to increase by 2.2% to reflect that, so the fact that our per-people spending is increasing at the same rate as the yield means that our preliminary rate is actually down very, very slightly, so it's basically keeping a preliminary rate even. We're still receiving a merger incentive for having merged, and that is going, started at 8 cents, was 6 cents last year, it's down to 4 cents this year. So our final equalized rate is up the 2 cents that the incentive decreased. Was had. So that's up 1%, that's our equalized tax rate. So the final rate calculation for each town is taking that equalized rate and dividing by the CLA for each town, the common level of appraisal. And that value is based on how the assessed values in each town compare to actual sale values. And so that'll vary as house prices vary. So both towns have a small decrease in the CLA, which leads to the final tax increase being slightly higher. The Royalton rate is up more than that though, because last year, the Royalton equalized rate had been pinned at capped at 1.6, compared to 1.3 for Vethel. This year it's not capped anymore, so the Royalton rate is going to be increasing more. Going forward, the two towns equalized rates are gonna be the same, so we won't have any discrepancy between the equalized rates. And in the future years, this will be the final, or last year was the final one, where they were different. So the only difference going forward will be the common level of appraisal values in each town. So that's how it all works out to tax rates. So Lisa's gonna talk a little bit about what we're working on in this long course. But first, I think Chris is gonna share a little bit about preschool and aftercare options. So as Principal Wells mentioned in his slides earlier too, this year we're offering full day preschool for four-year-olds at both the campuses of Vethel and Royalton, and then part of what we're looking at, potentially operating for next year, where there's a survey out to families right now, is to offer potentially some preschool programming for children this summer, if there's interest for families. And then also next year, again expanding full day to students, offering that again, and then also looking at the potential of also even offering aftercare for the preschool program. So students would come to school till three o'clock, and the older kids right now, they have one plan of program, but for children that are in the preschool, there isn't any afterschool care for them. So parents or caregivers have to come and pick them up and then transport them to wherever they need to go to next, whereas potentially we could offer, if there's enough interest and support for it, offer an afterschool program that would be, the families would pay a fee that would cover the cost of adding it and potentially generate some small revenue for the school, but offer a consistent one location to offer preschool programming and afterschool care and reduce on that transportation and just disruption to the day for the students and for families and caregivers. Yeah, and so if there are any families out there with preschool-aged children, if you haven't seen it, there is an email that has gone out with a link to a survey, and I believe the request is to have people reply to that survey by March 13th. So if you could please respond to that, whether it's something to feel like you're going to utilize or not utilize, but we need the information and the survey data to help us understand if this is something that we should continue to pursue and if there is that interest from families to take advantage of something like that. That survey is also available on Facebook or you could contact our schools if you'd like to be emailed a link directly and you haven't already received one. We also are at a place where we're having supervisory union leadership transition. So we appreciate Bruce Labs and Deb Matthews for the work that they've done with us over the last few years, but both of them will be wrapping up their tenure with us at the end of this year. So thank you for the work you've done for us so far. And we've been going through a collaborative and a deliberative process to look at hiring a new superintendent and a new director of special education. I believe that there are finalists for each category. I've been on the committee that's looking at hiring new superintendents. We went through a process of screening 13 candidates. Only three really rose to the top, one of whom withdrew her candidacy before we could even interview her and after interviewing the two other finalists, we put forward the only finalist we thought would be a really good fit for our community. So you will have an opportunity to meet that candidate Thursday, 6 p.m. here in this building and we hope as many people will come out as possible. There will be opportunities using either an app or paper feedback form to give feedback and your thoughts on the candidate. And our finalist, which you may have read in the newspaper is South Royalton native, Jamie Canarney, who's currently a principal in Williamstown and has been going through a leadership program to be ready to be a superintendent when he found a spot that he thought would be a good fit for him. So please come out on Thursday and have an opportunity to meet our finalists and that also we want to really make sure that as this leadership transition occurs, we're staying focused on our literacy initiative. We've invested an awful lot in that, both in terms of grant money, buying books, getting resources into our schools so that students have access to high quality reading materials and also our teachers have put an awful lot of time into learning how to help students read in different ways to really reach all the learners in their classrooms. So I think that we want to make sure that those efforts continue and as this leadership transition occurs, don't sort of fall by the wayside and I feel really grateful that we have strong principals who can help us remember that we're engaged in that work and teachers too who can continue to carry that forward even though we're having some transition at the supervisory union level. Additionally, we are really grateful tonight is actually Tara Weatherwell's one year anniversary with our supervisory union or maybe it's tomorrow. Yes, yes. Yesterday. Yesterday, sorry, bad with anniversaries. But we have a business manager who's been with us for a full year and she has been learning at a remarkable rate in order to take better care of us and help us manage things fiscally in a better way moving forward. So I'm very grateful for that. So thank you all for coming out tonight. I'm gonna turn things back over to Allison Fultner. Yes, we will now open up the floor to any questions. Just please come use the microphone and identify yourself. Please part from Royalton. When we went and went through that series of expenditures, what is Sped? I'm guessing it's special ed, but no, I mean you just throw out these. That's right, it's special. Acronisms and it's kind of difficult and that's a heck of a lot of money for that one. And what time on Thursday? 6 p.m. is the community forum on Thursday. Thank you. And Sped is in the special education. My name is Tim Brenner from Bethel. Thank you for the presentation. I just have one question to clarify. I think it's pretty simple. Early on in the discussion of the deficit, it said that the total deficit was 350,000, but some just quick summary of the numbers on slide. It looked like it was closer to 500,000, so the discrepancy there, is there some explanation of this in mind? So we started out with a surplus at the beginning of the year. So that surplus, this period, and then we had the resulting deficit. There's a remaining deficit, too. Thanks. Louise Ferris-Burt, Bethel. According to my calculation, your actual Sped is around 645,000 over the budget. So you take away the 350,000, we're still almost 300,000 over. Some of that was because there was a built-in deficit when you bring in surplus money from previous years. You said it so that the amount that you're spending is less than the amount that you bring in, so that you run a deficit to get rid of that surplus. So there was, I believe, $160,000 worth of surplus funds used in the deficit, or in the FY19 budget, which means that even if things had gone exactly according to the plan, we would have had a deficit of 100, we would have spent $160,000 more than we brought in, or budgeted before. Does that make sense? No, really. Because it doesn't show what is being built in. Is it a line argument here somewhere? No, it's just, if you look at the budget that was passed that includes a balance carry order on the revenue side, but that doesn't show up in the... Well, we only got 2020 and the budget. It didn't give us going back some of the revenue far enough back. So I would say that we really should have the same revenue columns that we have for expenditures. Then maybe that might make a little more sense. Sure. But you only have budget columns. So that it doesn't jive. And my next comment is that last year there was an increase of almost 211,000 over the preceding budget. And this year it's 270. And Bethel was told that our costs were gonna go down when this became a supervisor union, a unified district. It hasn't grown down, it keeps going up and up and up. I want the kids to be educated. I've been in education. But why does the combined keep going up and up? Seems to me that there's something not corporate here. Well, Russell Bethel, thank you for all the hard work you put in making this budget. What it is, I have some concerns. Primarily, a lot of the discussion that I heard tonight was talking about the difficulty in managing cost overruns controlling the budget. And I know from experience, there's a lot of pressure from the community to force these budgets down. You started out this year with a presumption that you were gonna create an even flat funding budget which I would offer is irresponsible. I think that I know that education is a results-based enterprise. It's not like pumping fuel into something and getting so many miles out of it. You have to have a program that raises our children to the level that we want to have them. And for the school, board, and supervisor union to continually cast low-budgets that are continually overspent is unrealistic and it creates a lack of confidence in the community. If every single year we come back and we're told about over expenditures, it's not, in my mind, directly related to mismanagement. It's also related to unrealistic expectations from the community and the board's willingness to go along with that. So I'm willing to support this budget the way it is, but I think moving forward, the community needs to have a more realistic understanding of the cost of education and the value of the cost of the education. And I'd like to see this board start to stand up for the administrators and for the students and to provide real arguments to support the costs that we need to make. Thank you. Is there any more discussion on this article? This is not actually an article we're gonna vote on, but we can continue to have discussion. I'm Stuart Ketchum from South Routen. And it's clear that we did put a lot of work into this presentation enough so that I couldn't understand a lot of it. Sorry. I have been a small business owner for 45 years in Tyler, New Tide. And as I know, if I could try to simplify this and look at it generally, you have revenues and you have expenses. It appears that most of your revenues are fairly fixed if you keep the same personnel. Fixed in the sense that you don't have, you don't have control over it, although they go up. I'm sorry, revenues, I'm talking about expenses. And expenses being fixed or going up because they're not in your control. You talked about students, new students coming in to the high school from seven schools and that there's an improvement this year, but I don't know about what's gonna happen in the next fiscal year and the month after that. I didn't hear anything said about trying to recruit new freshmen into the school. Did I miss something? We didn't include that in this particular presentation, but there have been a lot of efforts at every high school recruitment fair in the area. Our administrative team and our student services or guidance counselors have attended. We've placed some ads, we've reached out and we're doing exciting field trips to have elementary or middle level students from outlying communities join our field trips to get them engaged with our students. And I think our principals could speak more to this, to we have been working hard to recruit students from those communities. Well, I'm glad that you haven't been working hard and I don't know if this is possible, but colleges have fairs and they invite prospective new students. And I don't know if the school could do that, if the high school could do that and maybe even have select students who have some training to walk those prospective students to a school day. I do think that there may be some optimism coming with some staffing changes and administrative changes. So I'm hoping that we can continue to recruit more freshmen to South Royalton because the sending schools do have a lot of choices and many of those students are not in that space. Is there any more discussion? Okay, seeing none, we'll move on to article six. Shall the voters authorize the school board to borrow money by issuance of notes, not in excess of anticipated revenue for the fiscal year July 1, 2020 through June 30th, 2021. Do I have a motion? And your name, sir? Joshua Powers. Joshua Powers has moved. Article six, is there a second? Charlie Baskham? Okay, it's been moved in second and the voters shall authorize the school board to borrow money by issuance of notes, not in excess of anticipated revenue for the fiscal year July 1, 2020 through June 30th, 2021. Is there any discussion? Steve Hall from South Royalton. I just have a question. What does this mean? Do you want to respond to it, Tara? Is this one on? Okay. So this would be the tax anticipation note that we go out to get each year, which provides financial support for the district until tax revenue comes in to pay the bills. Okay. Thank you. You didn't hear that? Okay. Can you repeat that, please? The question was, what exactly is this article? What is the purpose of this article? And the answer was? It is the tax anticipation note that we get each year, which provides financial support to the district to pay their bills until tax revenue is received from each of the towns and the education spending fund. Is there any further discussion? So we'll go ahead and vote. All those in favor of authorizing the school board to borrow money by issuance of notes, not in excess of anticipated revenue for the fiscal year July 1, 2020 through June 30th, 2021, please do so by raising your cards. Those opposed? It appears that the ayes have it and the motion carries. Article 7. Shall the voters of the school district approve the school board to expend $12,988,119, which is the amount the school board has determined to be necessary for the ensuing fiscal year? It is estimated that this proposed budget, if approved, will result in education spending of $18,474, $400,74 per equalized pupil. This projected spending for equalized pupil is 2.13% higher than spending for the current year. Do I have a motion? And your name, please? From Royalton. From Royalton? Yes. From Royalton has moved the article? Is there a second? Okay, Steve Hall from Royalton has seconded and the motion on the floor is Shall the voters of the school district approve the school board to expend $12,998,119, which is the amount the school board has determined to be necessary for the ensuing fiscal year? It is estimated that this proposed budget, if approved, will result in education spending of $18,474 per equalized pupil. This proposed budget, if approved, will result in education spending of $18,474 per equalized pupil. This projected spending for equalized pupil is 2.13% higher than spending for the current year. Is there any discussion? Yeah, I would ask anybody up there might have the figures. How does this relate or match up with spending otherwise for other students, populations in the state and whatever the time spent? Does anybody know? I don't have a specific number in terms of per pupil costs. I do know that healthcare this year has had a significant impact and that some communities are facing 13% increases like Essex and the Burlington area because of fixed costs going in. So I don't know if anyone else could speak to that, but we've really worked hard to keep our spending in line and retain programming that we think makes our schools a good place for our students and attractive to students from other communities. So is there anyone down the line who has comparisons to other communities and per pupil costs? Okay. All right, Tara's looking up what's in our district. Statewide spending was expected to raise about 6% so we could come in and see if we can get under that. I'll make a comment. Okay. They're not able to hear stuff. Can we turn the volume? The statewide projection was that school spending would increase 6%. So we came in under the state projection for school spending increase this year. I just wanted to add that I'm also a parent and I have two kids that are currently in the high school. And personally, I've been really happy with the quality of education that our kids have been getting. And since the merger, they've had a lot more opportunity than they would not have had if the merger had not happened. One of our kids would have gone on to early college this year and would not have been an enrolled senior if the schools had not merged because he wouldn't have had opportunities because of the merger because of the AP classes and other opportunities and because of the friendships that he's made. He decided to stay and be an enrolled student this year as a senior, which to me is a win-win. He made the decision and I know that there's other students that have been in the same situation that have made the same decisions. So I'm personally seeing a real positive movement and some real amazing things happening with our students. So I'm encouraged and it was my husband who came up and he made some really good points where we should be shooting for what we want instead of trying to show you that we can cut corners and make sure that it doesn't cost any more, we should be focusing on what our students need. We want a more healthy, robust community and I think we're doing that. Katera, you have answers. In response to the earlier question. I just pulled some of the numbers within our supervisory union to give some perspective. The threshold that the state set for us that if you go over results in the penalty is $18,756. Within our supervisory union the depending if budgets go through or not it ranges anywhere from $17,184 to $20,486 and that district is specifically a pure tuition only district so they aren't subject to the threshold penalty. Is there any further discussion? Seeing none we can go ahead and vote. If you vote yay you are voting to support and have the school fear passing the budget. If you vote nay then you are telling the school board that you are not authorizing this budget. And so the motion that we are now voting on is will the other voters approving the school district's school board to expend $12,098,119 which is the amount the school board has determined to be necessary for the ensuing fiscal year. All those in favor of passing the budget please do so by raising your cards. Those opposed? The motion does appear to carry and the motion does carry. Article 8 to transact any other business which may legally come before this meeting. So I'd just like to say thank you to everyone we did put forward a budget that we believed is in the best interest of our students. I wanted to take an opportunity at this time because as I look around everyone who will be on the Australian ballot tomorrow is in the room running for positions for our board seats so please don't forget to vote tomorrow by Australian ballot through school board directors but I'm wondering at this time if the people who are on the ballot would like to say a few words about their candidacy. So yeah, that's fine. So if we go ahead to article 10 it's there's three positions the first is from Royalton director for one year term is that candidate here. Two of us. There are two candidates running for that. Okay. Would either of you like to speak? Or at least introduce yourself. Okay. Or give me a name. I can start. So I'm Jess Ryan. I'm a 98 graduate of South Royalton High School. Some of you might have seen me with the merger committee, the secondary committee. This merger is something that I very much began to believe in during that process and after one of the Royalton representatives left our town and moved to Bethel and the word of the deficit got out. Being both a taxpayer and a parent in the community I decided to go ahead and volunteer to step on to the school board. Since then I have seen the hard work and dedication that this board puts forward both in the budget realm and looking at how we educate our children. I have two elementary school students in this community. One has benefited greatly from the world languages and from the eco program and I very much want to see them succeed in the future which is why I am hoping to stay on this board. And who's opposing Bob Gray? Bob Gray? I'm Bob Gray. I grew up in New Syria. I've been an administrator in Farrakah in the Rochester back in the south world I guess I mentioned Rochester. I have a vast experience in education. I have a lot of knowledge I'd like to use to make or improve the school as much as I could. I also have a lot of budgetary experience and I'd like to utilize that to keep costs and I think it's important for the communities, our communities to survive and be healthy along with having a healthy education system but also we need to make sure our communities are financially healthy. So it's my goal. Thank you. Is there anything else you want to say for that position? Okay, so then Roylton, do you have one director for a three-year term on how many candidates are there? One. I'm Andrew Jones and I'm running for that position as a write-in so if anybody's voting tomorrow you can write my name into the three-year Roylton position. I've been on the board for the last two years and I've been working hard to deal with this budget and all this other initiatives that we were mentioning that continue to work on. So I appreciate your votes. Thanks. And the final is in Bethel, director for a three-year term. I'm not sure how many. Just Lisa McCrory, I don't think I have anybody running for the position as well. I think I'm the only one on the ballot at this point but I'm running for another three-year seats. I've been on the board for the last two years and prior to that I was on the transition committee and as Jess said through that process we became really convinced that it was going to be a good thing for our communities. So I hope you vote for me. All right. Just wanted you to know that we spent the day as an administrative team talking about the coronavirus and if you are a parent here you will either be seeing a memo you'll either be seeing it or running it or you'll see it tomorrow. I think we're going to take this very seriously and I just wanted you to know if any of you want to see that memo we have copies so I'll put them out for people who want to take one. Thank you. Any other business to discuss under Article 8? Okay, then we'll move on to Article 9 and do I have a motion to adjourn the meeting until 8 a.m. March 3, 2020 when voting by Australian ballot shall commence? Who will please? Denise Gilmette. Denise Gilmette moved this article to adjourn. We'll have a second. Steve Hall will second with it. So there's a motion to adjourn. All those in favor please show by raising your card. See you tomorrow.