 Welcome to ongoing election coverage by town meeting television. This is one of many presentations we are bringing to you in advance of local elections and town meeting on the first Tuesday of March, March 2nd, 2021. Town meeting TV election presentations and forums introduce you to local decision makers and connect you with the issues shaping your community. The topic tonight is South Burlington School Board budget presentation. And I'm Christina Bell, I'll be your host. Joining us tonight is David Young, superintendent. Hi, David. Thank you for joining us. Bridget Burkhart, school board chair. Hi, Bridget. Hi. And Brian Minier, school board member. Yes. Hello, Christina. Thank you. Hi. With that, I'll just say we're eager to hear your presentation and you can get started. Okay, great. Thank you. I will just share my screen. Okay. So welcome to the South Burlington School Board budget presentation for fiscal year 22. As we start out, I just want to remind everyone that as we develop budgets, the budgets are meant to provide the necessary resources so that we can provide for students coursework, resources and supports that they need to meet the district ends. And the district ends were developed through a community wide process several years ago. And there are many detailed ends underneath these big headlines, but the big headlines for the end are that we hope our students as they exit South Burlington High School have a disposition for lifelong learning that they are academically proficient, that they are on a journey of personal development and they are mindful of that and are focused on finding opportunities that will help them develop personally and that they have developed good citizenship skills that they have demonstrated them and that they know how to be good citizens as they go out into the world. In order to meet these ends, the students have to demonstrate proficiency across a wide range of academic subjects. And they also have to develop transferable skills that will help them with their next chosen steps such as college, career, vocational training or military service. This year's budget and we'll get into the details of it of course, we are asking the public to consider a 5.88% increase in our expense budget. This is $3,090,832 more than we were projected to spend in fiscal year 21. The net educational spending so the amount that we will ask for from the education fund and therefore from the property tax payers of South Burlington is $1.496 million this year in addition to what we asked for last year, I'm sorry. So this is a budget summary that will be in our budget book and it sort of outlines in more detail the revenues that we are expecting and our expenses that we are expecting. So for FY 22, as I said before, we are expecting a $1.496 million increase in what we're asking from the state ed fund. Other local revenues are called local revenues by the state. What they are are made up of grant funding, funding from sources other than the ed fund and directly from property tax payers. And so those offset the total expense budget of $55,623,080 that we are asking voters to approve this year. I won't go line by line through all the details of the expense budget. The major categories of increase this year as in most years are salaries and wages. We do have contracts settled with our support staff union and our teachers union for next year. And so those are in this budget health insurance, which is now negotiated at the state level is increasing 10.57% on top of last year's increase, which was about 15 or 16%. And so those are some of the major contributors to increased expenses. Purchase professional services, we've had some questions about as community members have asked us about the budget or come to our budget presentations. Purchase professional services include a whole lot of different services, particularly for students you have special needs and those kinds of things. Many of those are funded by grant funds and we're not exactly sure what those expenses will be, but we know that there's grant funding in the revenue line and there have to be offsetting expenses in this line. So that category is going up fairly significantly from last year based on what we know should be coming in terms of grant funding and other sources of funds. As many people will recall in fiscal year 21, we had to try three times before we passed a budget. We had asked for a fairly significant increase along with a bond to rebuild the high school and middle school last year and voters rejected the first budgets as well as the bond. We came back in May and asked for a reduced budget. That was rejected as well. So finally in August, we passed a budget that increased expenses by 1.52% and in order to get to that level of expense increase, we had to cut a lot of programming. We had to cut a decent amount of operational things that we either were already doing or that we had hoped to add. So this budget adds some of those things back. We could not add all of them back this year and get to a level that we thought the community would support. So some of the things that we are adding back that were cut last year is that we only did one school bus last year. Typically we replaced at least two school buses a year. So we're replacing a bus. We are adding more computers this year. There is a certain line item for computers every year. We tried to cut that back as much as we could last year. There's HR software that we delayed buying last year because of the budget cuts. Last year one of our two transportation staff retired and we did not replace her. And we have basically had other staff helping support the one person who is still in our transportation office. And we really do need, we need the capacity of those people who have been supporting transportation back on other tasks. And so it really is important to add back another transportation router. We also reduced an HR staff member last year in the budget cuts and given many changes in healthcare given the pandemic and many people taking leaves and having health challenges, we really need the HR employment coordinator back. That's been a bit of a challenge to live without. And then we are adding a partial FTE at the high school to focus on financial literacy and business education. We had hoped originally to add a full person back, but we decided that partial FTE was the right way to go this year. And then GECS is one of our three elementary schools, Gertrude Chamberlain School. And we have increasing student enrollment which I'll get into in more detail in a bit. So we are asking to add a classroom teacher and at Ripmar Cut Central School, one of our other elementary schools, we are in the same situation where we have some class sizes that we're getting a little bigger than we'd like to see. So we're asking to add another classroom teacher at Ripmar Cut. And then last year in the budget cuts, non-union support staff for the most part received no wage increases. And so we are working on a market study to make sure that those support staff are appropriately compensated. And so there is some money in this proposed budget to add some of those increases. So as I mentioned before, enrollment is one of the factors that is driving the increase in the budget. Enrollment has been increasing for the last several years. Last year there was, just before the pandemic, a very noticeable uptick. We had some affordable housing open in South Burlington, which brought a lot of new students into our system. This trend is expected to continue based on new housing that is in development in South Burlington and the turnover of existing housing. So new families moving in with school-aged children and sort of buying houses from folks who may not have children who are moving out of the community or downsizing within the community. This is putting pressure on our elementary schools and our high school in particular in terms of class sizes and in terms of space. And we'll talk a little bit more about equalized pupils because there's a little bit of an interesting phenomenon in this budget that we're proposing tonight where equalized pupils, which is a state-provided number, actually they provided an initial take on that number that had equalized pupils, which is a weighted number going down, even though our seated students is expected to go up. So every couple of years we have been updating demographic projections study with Jerome McKibbin and his firm. And so this was recently updated, and this is just sort of a history of where overall enrollment in the district has been. The vertical line sort of separates history from projections. So there's a little bit of a dip this year in fiscal 21 versus what we were expecting when we originally proposed the budget, as well as a little bit of a dip from last year's enrollment because of the pandemic. So there are some students who have left the district. We don't know how many of those will come back. The projections here though do come from this demographic study, and that was updated just this year. So we are expecting to add over a hundred students over the next five years and another hundred after that before we start to level out. So at our elementary schools, these are sort of projected numbers for next year versus where we are this year. So at Rick Marcott, I focused on K through five as well. I should say we do have pre-K now at Rick Marcott Orchard and Gertrude E. Chamberlain. Those numbers are fairly steady. So I focused mostly on K through five in this presentation. And those numbers are fairly steady at about 25 students. We don't have a lot of room in our preschool programs beyond that. And so we work with outside partners to manage the rest of the preschool needs in our community. So K through five at Rick Marcott, this year we're at 374 students. We are expecting to add about 21 to get to 395 next year. At Orchard, we're at 392 this year, and we are expecting to be over 400 next year with an addition of 13 students. And the same for Gertrude Chamberlain, we're expecting to add 13 students, which would put us at 271 students. And not for this presentation, but for future presentations, it should be noted that we are really sort of up against the guardrails that we set for ourselves several years ago when we started focusing on elementary school capacity. And at Rick Marcott and Orchard in particular, we are pretty close to the capacity of those buildings and our ability to add additional classrooms and staff at those buildings. Bridget, I just wanted to, I just wanted to, you know, kind of saddle on to what you said. I think important for people to know they heard you say our pre-K program makes somewhere in that 25, 27 students. So you heard Bridget speak about, you know, we're up against kind of capacity. So when you add kind of that 25 to 27 additional students onto the number there, either the 395 or the 405, you can see we're in the target numbers well into the 400s, certainly up at two schools. And that's considered, you know, one of the largest elementary schools in the state. So thanks. Yes, thank you. Thank you, David, for that. And then we are often asked as we're preparing our budgets, what our student to teacher ratios look like. So I provided those there and I provided them broken out between K through three and four through five as well because we have a policy policy G six, which is on our district website, where we try to keep those student teacher ratios, those classroom sizes within a certain band. And so for K to three, we try to keep those between 16 to 18 students per classroom with a maximum 20. And at the four to five grades four through five, it's somewhere between 16 to 20 with an absolute maximum of 25. And we look at that sort of on a district wide basis. But we do look inside the schools at each of the different grade levels. And just so that the slide didn't have too much data on it, I didn't put classroom number of classrooms for each of the grades at each of the schools for each of the years. It got to be a little bit much with all of that information on it. But at Rick Marcott and at Gertrude Chamberlain, we were just sort of on the cusp in a couple of grades of having classrooms bigger than we would have liked. So talking 20 to 23 students in a classroom at some of those upper grades. And we really felt we needed to ask the community to add another teacher at each of those schools. Orchard, as I said, is also having an overall capacity issue, but it's a little bit more evenly distributed across the grades. So we're focusing our ask this year on Rick Marcott and Chamberlain. At the middle school, there's actually a projected decrease for next year. That is partly because there are fewer grades at the middle school. So the middle school is a little bit more impacted when a large class moves into the high school and out of the middle school. If that class isn't replaced by a very big sixth grade, you can get a decline in a given year. The high school is expecting to pick up 14 students next year. So overall, the district is expecting in K through 12 to pick up 44 students next year. This is a brief staffing summary. So we are asking the community for 4.7 new full time equivalents. So that includes those two elementary teachers, a point three business education teacher, point four in terms of partial FTEs at Rick Marcott for guidance to make sure that we have two full time guidance counselors there to support students. And then the two operational staff that I mentioned before, the human resource coordinator and the transportation dispatch router. So that will increase the number from this year, but it is actually a decrease. And we would be at 484. It would actually be a decrease from where we were in fiscal 2020. We were at 496 full time equivalents across the district, and we would be at 484. I should say this year we are actually right now operating with 473.56 because we have not filled all of the positions that were actually in our budget. So our budget for this fiscal year was 480 teachers and staff, and we have not filled all of those positions this year, in part because it's hard to find people this year, given the pandemic and in part because there are certain activities that are just different than expected because of the pandemic. So that's where we are on staffing. I also quickly just put together students to teacher ratios. We get asked about these a decent amount from the community. So I did want to share those students per core teacher has held fairly steady in our district. And what I mean by core teachers are at the high school and middle school level. Those are English language, arts, math, science and social studies. All the other teachers are performing arts, integrated arts, PE, all these other things that really go to round out the student experience and are a very important part of our curriculum. So our students were total teachers has been holding steady around somewhere between the nine and 10 range. So we're expecting about 9.43 next year. If you then include all support staff, and this includes everyone, including custodians, including all non licensed support staff. So all the folks that are para educators, all of our library staff, all of our nutrition staff, that ratio is about 5.15 next year. And that's fairly consistent with where we've been in recent years. So projected tax impacts. When we talk about tax impact for our budgets every year, we have to remind voters that they're not voting on a tax rate. It's not really possible to do that in Vermont, given where the timing of town meeting day is versus where the legislative session is. So there are some numbers, which we'll go into more detail about, that the state provides that move around even after town meeting day. So the best we can do is take the estimated numbers that the state has given us and apply them to the expense budget that we think we need to support our students next year and estimate the tax impact of our budget. So this year, our proposed budget, as I said, is fifty five million six hundred twenty three thousand and eighty dollars. We subtract out those local revenues that we talked about, the grant funding and other sources of funding. And that nets out to what we are asking for from the Ed fund. So that's forty three point one seven four a million dollars. That then gets divided by equalized pupils. Equalized pupils is a weighted number where the state takes into account how many students are secondary students as opposed to elementary school students, how many are English language learners, how many receive free and reduced lunch, which is sort of an indicator potentially of poverty. And it gives different weights to those different types of students. So this doesn't reflect seated students. It reflects that weighted number that the state provides to us based on average daily membership or attendance that we provide to them. It's a two year rolling average. So it doesn't always capture additional students that have come into the system all in one year. It has to over a couple of years. It will build those students into our number. This year was a little bit odd because we definitely saw an increase in students last year. But the state initial equalized pupil number that the state gave us was actually a decrease. My understanding is that there is a new equalized pupil number coming. We don't have that in hand yet. So we couldn't change this presentation. But that number is expected to be higher. So a higher number of equalized pupils would reduce your education spending for equalized per equalized pupil. So given the number that we have now, the best we can do in the presentation is twenty five hundred sixty one point nine students, which would give us an ad spending for equalized pupil is sixteen thousand eight hundred fifty two dollars and forty four cents. That is an increase of four point three one percent. And the reason I sort of circled that number on the presentation is that is what voters will see on the ballot. The ballot has already had to be worn. So even though we know that we're probably going to have a different equalized pupil number, this is what will be seen on the ballot. Voters will see the overall expense budget. They will see the education spending for equalized pupil number that's here and then the four point three one percent increase, and that's what they'll be asked to vote on. Then the number below that the property tax yield is another number that is provided by the state. And this is set by the yield bill, which the legislature passes every year. And often that moves around even all the way into May or June, depending on how long the state budget takes to get passed. We've already seen a draft that was passed out of the House Ways and Means Committee just today, I believe, David, is that correct? Or was it correct? Yeah. And this number, this 10,763, was the initial guidance they gave us several weeks ago, the number that we saw today could be as high as 11,385. And again, here, if you're dividing by a higher number, that significantly reduces the estimated tax rate. But we didn't want to put that number directly into the presentation because that is likely to still move around as it moves through the full House and the Senate, and everyone has to agree on it. So we are fairly confident, though, given where the state of the Ed fund is that that yield number will be higher than what we had in our estimated tax rate right now. That is because there has been a higher level of sales tax on internet sales. And so the Education Fund looks a lot better than folks thought it was going to look just a few months ago. So they're actually projecting almost a surplus of about 18 or 19 million for FY 21, which is much higher than the big deficit they were projecting previously. So once you divide your equalized education, spending for equalized people by your property tax yield, that gives you a homestead tax rate to be prorated. And that for us would be 1.5658, which is an increase of 6.59 percent versus last year. Last year, however, our common level of appraisal, which we'll talk about in a minute, was 89.92 percent. This year, the city of South Burlington is going through a reappraisal of all of our properties, both homestead and non homestead. And in a year where you are reappraising, the assumption is that those property values are going to go up. So the state provides the CLA each year. Last year, they provided us that 89.92 percent. They measure that. This year, they told us that we should be using a 100 percent CLA, which basically in layperson's terms means that the value of our properties should be at the same value as the market. So sometimes properties don't get appraised for a long time. They might not be at market value. The state told us to go ahead and use a 100 percent number. So that brings us to an estimated homestead property tax rate of 1.5658, which would be a decrease in the property tax rate from last year of 4.15 percent. The estimated non homestead tax rate is provided by the state and then divided by your CLA. The estimated non homestead tax rate provided a couple weeks ago was 1.73 or $1.73. Again, that is likely to change based on what we saw today from Montpelier. So that negative 5.95 percent change in the tax rate may be an even bigger decrease based on what Montpelier finally decides. So yeah, it looks like we have about five, six, four minutes. Yes. So thank you so much, though. This is yeah, we will move through this pretty quickly, because a lot of the stuff is stuff that I spoke to you on other slides. There is more detail here for folks who do want to pause and have a look at it if they're looking through the video in the future. But this just talks a little bit more about net ed spending, as I discussed before. And again, equalized pupils, which is, as I mentioned, will likely actually go up. But this is what we have. This is our best estimate from the states to date. We just walked through this as well. So I won't go through this again. So this is just what our best estimate is right now of the direction of the homestead tax rate. So it's likely that many people will see the value of their property go up with the reappraisal, but the rate that it will be taxed that should go down this year significantly. It potentially with the yield bill, if the yield bill really does come out to where it's where it's out right now and it gets approved, it could be as much as a decrease of 10 percent in the homestead tax rate. And the states that non homestead tax rate, we talked about, this just gives us a little bit of history of the tax rate in South Burlington. And so if this this minus 4.15 percent comes to be our five year average in the direction of our tax rates will be a negative 0.54 percent in South Burlington. We've had several years where the expense budget has increased, but because the number of equalized pupils is going up and because the yield number was going up, the actual tax rate went down or it didn't go up as much as our expense budget over the past year. If this year's is approved, our 10 year average will be 1.38 percent. This slide just compares where we are in terms of our statewide growth and educational spending versus ours versus the statewide. So we're proposing a 3.59 percent increase in total education, spending statewide is 3.79 percent. And then spending for people, as I mentioned before, 4.31 percent for us versus a 3.75 percent for the rest of the state. Again, ours is likely to go down as our equalized pupil count goes up. And we spoke about this already, so I will move along. Again, this is just a very detailed explanation of the CLA, which I described before. In Vermont, a significant number of homeowners, more than half, pay not just based on their property tax value, but also based on their income. So if you have income below a certain threshold and your property values are within a certain band, you receive a property tax credit that offsets what your total property tax bill is. Initially, they also set a separate yield for income sensitized taxpayers. They initially set that yield in such a way that income sensitized taxpayers would actually have seen an increase of 5.97 percent in their taxes. We are now hearing from Montpelier that they are likely to keep that yield very similar to where it was. So those taxes should be reasonably flat as a percentage of income. I won't go through this one. This just sort of outlines where we are versus other districts in terms of our spending for people. So overall, the budget impact is expected to decrease our homestead property tax rates between 4.15 percent and 10 percent somewhere in there. We're just waiting to hear final numbers from the state. It maintains our programming from FY 21. It adds 4.7 FTEs, as I described before, and it covers increased health care costs due to the statewide award and provides wage increases in line with inflation. This year, we're also proposing a 2.5 million dollar facilities bond. The bulk of that would be to replace the roof at the middle school, and then it would be to do some other long term improvements to our buildings. For taxpayers who are interested, they can go and have a look at this presentation. And this is sort of the debt service schedule, the expected debt service schedule. They're projecting an interest rate of 2.01 percent if we approve this bond. The impact of the bond is that it allows critical maintenance at all five schools. It spreads the cost of capital improvements over their expected life of about 20 years, which allows the district time to develop a long term facilities strategy. So some of these things are really critical by doing them now. It buys us a little bit of time to think about capacity and think about what we need to do for our buildings over the long term. It adds about thirty two thousand dollars to this year's budget. Next year's budget would see about one hundred and sixty three thousand in debt service and then debt service would decline over time until those bonds are paid off and the final payment would be an FY 42. So the four articles that will be on our ballot, our article one, there will be two school directors up for reelection, one for a three year term and one for a two year term. I shouldn't say reelection. Two of our board members are retiring from the board after many years of great service. So there are two open seats. Article two is just our budget numbers, as I described before. Article three will be that bond of two point five million dollars. And article four is an article that would allow us to assign any surplus from fiscal year twenty one to support any non reimbursed covid related expenses. And normally what happens is any surplus would have to be audited first and it would not be usable until two years forward. This would allow us if voters allow us only to use surplus and only to use it for covid related expenses that we weren't reimbursed by the federal government. So that brings us right to the end. So just reminding everyone to vote on March 2nd from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Or look for your ballot in the mail because all of us in South Burlington should be receiving ballots in the mail if your voter registration is up to date. So thank you very much. I'm sorry, I didn't leave a lot of time at the end for questions. But I do appreciate the time. Thank you for that. And David, did you have anything to add? No, I think that's awesome. As we know that we have school board meetings scheduled. So folks that have had a chance to see this, they certainly can go to our website. They can email any board member or myself. We'll work to get you answers. You can attend our school board meetings virtually by zoom. Those are all published. So we would welcome any feedback and questions that you may have leading up to the March 2nd vote. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you, Bridget, for the presentation. Thank you so much. It was very thorough and that's what everybody needs to know, right? Exactly. And thank you as well for your participation. Thank you to the viewers for tuning in to town meeting TV ongoing coverage for local community candidates, budgets and ballot items. You can find this and more presentations and forums at www.ch17.tv. That's www.ch.7. Oh, no, no, not there. www.ch17.tv. Don't forget to vote on or before Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021. Early voting by mail is available by contacting your town clerk's office. Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thank you for watching. Thank you.