 Chair of the Board of CVSD, I'm Jean Jensen, I'm the Chief Operations Officer for Champlain Valley School District. Okay so they've prepared a presentation on the budget that you guys are free to get into. Well I'm gonna I guess get us started off just kind of remind everybody who see Champlain Valley School. It's a lot easier to say CVSD. Who we are? We represent Williston, Hinesburg, Shelburne, St. George and Charlotte, five towns, six schools, and there are 12 board members who sit on the CVSD board. We have about 3,800 kids, about two-thirds of those are in K-8, a third are in 9 through 12, and we have about 415 teachers that we have in the district. The piece of one of the biggest focuses of the board is our mission, and that's really easy to say. It's harder to make sure that all your work that you do aligns towards our mission, but our goal at the end of our K-12 experience for our kids is to develop citizens who learn, think, contribute, live, and pursue excellence, and this really does drive everything we do and it has a huge role in how we develop the budget. One of the goals of the board is to really involve every piece of the CVSD community, whether it's teachers, staff, community members, they all provide us input as we put together the board and we really wanted to thank everyone for all of the work. It is not an easy process to go through. And just a special shout out to Rick DeWiler, who was our community budget buddy who came to all of our budget meetings and really provided some invaluable help as we crafted the budget. So enrollment in our school, Lynn already said that we have about 3,500 students. Pretty much we have stable enrollment. I mean the slide shows that there's a little bit of a decline, but that's not the whole story. The decline there is in actual numbers when we look at equalized pupils, which is the way that we are funded in Vermont. Our equalized pupil numbers have gone up in the last two or three years each year. So I think it's also a line of factor of how we forecast our pupil count for next year fairly conservatively. It's pretty easy to say the first graders are going to become second graders, fifth graders are going to become sixth graders. It gets a little trickier because we also say the eighth graders are going to go to the high school as ninth graders and we tend to pick up kids at that juncture. There are kids who choose to come to CVU who went to other schools. We also have school choice. And also the kindergarten numbers don't, we have a difficult time forecasting kindergarten, incoming kindergartners. So we're a little conservative on that. It's just a way of, we like to budget, to not put ourselves at too much risk in our budgeting process so we're conservative. So a lot of years we've forecasted to be going down a percent or two and it just ends up being relatively flat. All right. And I think the next slide, if you want to move ahead, Jane, the next slide shows what that looks like in each town. And one of the real advantages of the merger is that if we have more kids at a particular grade level, there is an opportunity for parents to choose to send their kids to another district. So it's all part of one district. We do have a, you know, a bit of school choice requests made for a number of different reasons. But so when we look at that whole big number, it doesn't really tell the story about what's happening at each town and actually at each grade level. And we monitor that a lot. As Jane said, that's really one of the key parts of the work that we do during the budgeting process, both for in terms of, you know, the revenue that we're going to get, but also to determine, like, class size and that kind of thing. And there are the averages. So I just was talking about class size. So we adhere to the education quality standards. And that says that in K through 2, our class sizes on the average should be under 20. And at 3 through 8 should be under 25. We go through a whole process starting in, you know, late September, October with the principals in each of the buildings to roll up the numbers at all the all the grades except for kindergarten and ninth grade and see what that's looking like. And it's based on that that we determine how many teachers we need in each school. And so we know very early if we're going to be moving things around. So for example, this year, we know that we need an additional two teachers in one of our schools. We also know that we have a couple schools that we can reduce a teacher. So. And one thing we didn't have on here is we just this is really just talking about the K8s. And of course, we have quality standards at the high school, but they get much more complicated to keep track of. And so the quality standards at the high school are more about how many students a teacher is responsible for across the entire what could be five, six, seven, sections, five, five or six sections. And so we do look at all those numbers. It's just hard to put on a chart. So the board gets that information. And as we go through the regular ed budget, we are well aware of the high school, all of those intricacies and the implication is the same. So the board says, gee, you know, I think that there are too many sex too many over 25 sections in this particular content area that then results in over. We need to add a position there. So it's all connected to, you know, what's the learning opportunity for kids that we want to create? And how many teachers does that take? I'd say Lynn, I don't agree. But I would say that's probably where the board spent most of its energy this year around was on equitable class sizes, equitable, not just between our towns or between our grades, but between math and at the high school math. And we had we had teachers in math in social studies because of the class sizes we're just getting too big. So one of the big benefits of being a consolidated district, this is our second year, that we've been afforded is a relatively stable enrollment. And so it allows us to look at our budget over a five year kind of like project out five years where we see what we're going to where we're going to be. And it allows the board to set two types of goals. We have the qualitative goals, which basically says to the administration, we need to meet or exceed the educational quality standards. We need to make sure that we're achieving our mission and our vision. We want to make sure that our key initiatives like proficiency based learning and our personalized learning and proficiency based learning are we continue with those, we want to make sure that we get the community input, all of those qualitative goals we give to the administration. But being consolidated also allows us to say we have a quantitative goal, and we don't want you to exceed this year was 2.6%. And it's not just a number that we pull out of thin air. It's based on the CPI and the New England Economic Plan, which is more of a educational. What is the CPI? The consumer price index. So we kind of balance those two kind of looking at that that is what we feel is a good indicator of what the community could support because it's based on actual indicators. It's not just a pie in the sky number. So those were our goals that we that we presented this year. And for the next four years looking out, we kind of know and the administration knows, well, no one really knows what the economy is going to do, but kind of generally have an idea of where the budget is going to grow or shrink. I think it's important to say that the board says to the administration, here is what we hope you can come in on. Go do that work and come back and let us know whether you're able to do that and realize the qualitative goals that she talked about. So fortunately, in the last two years, we've been able to do that. We think it's an important piece to like have in mind that it's possible that some year we would come and say, we can come in at 2.6%, but we can't do A, B and C that we know is connected to the board's mission and the values that the board has articulated. Budget work happens here around. I'm the one who has to put this slide in there. I think it's really easy for people to imagine that the crunch that happens between November and March, whatever the date is, or for the board end of January when on some date certain all the numbers need to get in, is the only time that we talk about this stuff. And in fact, we're always talking about what does year-round budgeting look like? And maybe we're not doing the number crunching, but even before our next year's budget is passed, when I'm meeting with principles, individual principles in my monthly go-around, just this last month, I can't tell you how many times I wrote year-round budgeting because they're already thinking about beyond next year and their two-year plans for, okay, well, we have these resources this year, but if we were to, and I think that the board does that too, we'll have a full-day workday in at the end of May that the board will say, here are our goals. Are these still our goals? Do we need to tweak one? Do we need to change it, whatever? That becomes my work plan. And then that plays into all the work that I do with the principles. So I think it's important for the public to realize that it's not like we seclude ourselves for a couple months, do all of this number crunching and say, please give us this money. And then after that, we tuck that away and we go along our merry business. It really is all connected. And so when you're doing that planning, you're planning for more than just one year out. Yeah, sometimes they're way, way out. We don't know if we'll get there. It could be we're going to take like a different path once we get like halfway down the road or even sooner. But yeah, I think people are always imagining what could be. And I think it allows for a more thoughtful solution to a question. So the board could be in a meeting at the end of November and say, I heard about this great program at another school. How come we're not doing it? We should do it. And instead of just saying, okay, well, give me 24 hours to go find some numbers to add to the budget, we have a thoughtful time to say, that's an intriguing idea. We haven't given that enough thought. Let's put that on the agenda for the spring to have a really thoughtful discussion about it and see what the plan would look like. And then we'll include it in the next year's budget. And if it's something that's obviously great idea or something that we think is really important, then sometimes we'll get a little ahead of it and we'll say, let's put a placeholder in the budget and do the work to refine it in the spring. But it allows for less reactive and more proactive planning. And from the board sense, it allows the administration to bring us the data that proves or disproves why or why not these changes need to be made as opposed to just a reaction. Oh, that sounds like a great idea. Into the numbers. Such a simple slide and it really represents so much work. We started the budget in October, but again, it's year-round budgeting. But this is a budget that represents a lot of work and meets all of our goals. Not only does it meet our goals, it exceeds the kind of standards that the tax commissioner put out in his letter in December. So our overall budget is up 2.7 percent. It was predicted in December that statewide the school budgets would increase by over 3.3 percent. So we're coming in below that. And then the big piece, the piece that drives the tax rate in our towns is the cost per equalized people, which is a 2 percent increase over last year, which is well below the 4.1 percent that the tax commissioner asked us to come in at. So not only are we presenting a budget that meets our qualitative and quantitative goals, we're exceeding the recommendations put out by the tax commissioner and I think supports a really strong education. I think it's my turn so we get the pages far more numbers on the next couple of slides. So some of the major, so it's a $2 million increase about 1.4 that or 1.3, 1.4 is in salary and benefits. We do have contractual obligations with our over 1,000 employees. We have 415 teachers, we have over 1,000 employees. So that's the biggest driver of that. We have some increases in the special needs kids. We always want to make sure that we're treating those kids with what they need to succeed and that can change year to year depending on the population that comes to us. But our special ed budget, at least for one more year, is built bottoms up. Our special ed directors get together and do a thorough job of really figuring out what our kids in our system are going to need. And that's what we put into the budget. So this year that's up a bit. Operations maintenance, that's the care of all of our six buildings and fuel costs and that everything else is about $300,000. The last line you see down there, consolidation savings, we've been tracking the money that we've saved since we became a consolidated district. And some of those are very easy to explain like we only need to have one financial audit instead of seven. So that certainly saved some money. We've had the opportunity in some of our centralized services like maintenance and operations where we're now sharing resources across multiple schools instead of each school having to have its own electrician. So it's that kind of thing. So there's some real hard things you can grab on to. Then there's also just the, I'd say, the thoughtful discipline of having all the money in one place to make decisions that are, it's very transparent and very open and the staffing cost that someone retires and is replaced by a new teacher. We know exactly what that number is and we can show it to the board and the board can decide, well, let's give that back to taxpayers or let's, you know, reinvest that somewhere else. We're before with multiple school systems, you know, one teacher retires the principal may decide, oh, I've been really wanting to do this program and they just reinvest it. Now it's not that that was ever wrong, but now by having it all in one place you can really make some real strong priority decisions. That's a really good idea, but this other three things are in line ahead of it or this is the right time to take that savings. Or for example, in the last two years, last year and in the current budget, we have a position held out anticipating that our kindergarten numbers might be higher in one school or another, because we really don't know what those numbers are. In the past, each of the districts would have held out that money and then you've got that money and so, of course, there are always a million things that you can do to make it better. Every one of us sitting here can think of all of those things, but now we have one and now we're monitoring that every time I meet with the principals now. I know that, I'm asking what do the kindergarten registrations look like now so that we start thinking about that? Will we even need to use that money? And what happens if that money isn't used, if you don't? Well, it's the point that Gene was making before. Then there's a decision that the board makes about, are we going to apply it next year as fund balance to bring down the tax rate? So this is a little complicated. This is sort of the explanation of how we get between all of our numbers to a tax rate. You can see the top line there is the budget number you've just seen. The way the state funding formula works, that would be the 78 million is what we are actually intending to spend and we subtract local revenues and a part of that are state revenues that come to us such as special ed reimbursements, so it's 12 million dollars. You subtract that and it's what they call net ed spending. Lynn was talking about our equalized pupil count. You saw on the other slide that we had 3815, 3815 students that magically turns into 4143 when you do the equalized pupil count. That is a state calculation that's given to us and it essentially, the equalized pupil count essentially what it does is it accounts for children in poverty or children who are English language learners and it's a way of making sure that communities that have students with those kind of needs have the resources they need to address those needs. So the number magically changes and then you can take your net ed spending divided by that number and that's how you get to the 16,071. Then there's a state yield number that comes out of it from the tax commissioner in December and it's essentially at a very simplistic view and I think all three of us have tried to untangle this but the easiest way to explain it is the tax commissioner is estimating because this is an estimate what if the property tax rate was $1 how much could you afford to spend on each student in the state and that's the 1066. Our number at 16,000 is 151% of that yield which makes our tax rate $1.51. There are a lot of things that go into funding education in the state, sales tax, people pay on income tax, second home rates are different and then homestead property rate it's a very complicated system but simplistically the one that we tended to zero in on is this homestead property tax rate which is what if you own the house the rate that you'll pay. So we start with the $1.51 because when we consolidated the state was offering and they hate it when you call an incentive it's a transition tax of transition benefit but essentially it's an incentive it started at we had a 10 cents off the tax rate the first year 8 cents this year next year it'll be 6 cents so that means we get to subtract 6 cents from the tax rate so we're at $1.45 tax rate which is actually down a penny year to year and and it seems kind of backwards because actually the yield the tax rates won't be finalized until after all of the budgets are approved because the legislature needs to know how much it needs to raise in taxes to fund all of the budgets which you don't know until the budgets are passed so this is our but this is the way it's always been this is our best guess at what your taxes will be based on the information that we have right now right we're sort of made of a habit of making sure we stick to the tax commissioner's letter trying to rather than trying to assume we know about it ourselves right I would just point out on that slide that that spending per equalized pupil is pretty much right at the middle in the state right it's very close yeah it's very close so I said pre-cLA that's common level of appraisal that's the state's calculation it does in order to make sure that that the property a statewide property tax is fair between the towns and that we're all assessing our our properties at a fair market value so there's different if that's different by every town and that's a little complicated for our towns because we would all love if we could just go to all of our taxpayers and say it's a dollar forty five but because towns still appraise at different times in different ways they the state looks at each town separately and compares how close are your appraised values to your market values they come up with the calculation and that changes and now you see that everybody's got a slightly different tax rate I just want to point out that the will the tax well so the tax rates are very small here's the the column there on the end the change for a hundred thousand dollar house so you can see it's three dollars in one of our towns so essentially flat Williston's got the biggest increase and the town of Williston has told me that they are challenging their CLA adjustment with the state so they're hoping that number will come down okay it's the the state has to look at a lot of property sales and some towns like Williston that have a lot of commercial properties you can have a big sale that's just an outlier and it throws all the numbers off and but the states has been in the past very responsive to our towns who have opted to to challenge that number so they're hopefully they're gonna come down a little bit and I then we can say across the board that almost everybody is essentially the same tax rate across the board so these are the do you want to take these when we do these are essentially the three stars and overly over the complicated warnings that will be actually on the ballot and it's this is all um this article is all based in statute and they put they actually put the language and you just plug in your numbers and basically it's just asking voters to approve our budget um and letting people know what our per equalized people cost is and the increase or decrease in that cost from last year we had talked to you were asking what do you have what happens if you have that extra money well if we can't use that money it's not our money it's taxpayers money and so if we do want to use it we have to go back to the voters and ask them to use it and basically this allows us we're asking to take five hundred thousand dollars of our fund balance and apply it towards revenue which if you remember back in that tax calculation helps to reduce your overall spending and we're asking to take a half a million dollars and apply it towards that then we're asking to take a million dollars out of our fund balance and put it into our construction fund we have a pretty lengthy and detailed five-year capital plan capital improvement plan and if we can take a million of that of our fund balance and apply it towards that construction plan it's going to jump start our ability to take care of those issues and then the 1.8 million we'll just it's going to sit all over to the next year follow the next year I mean this is our our reserve fund too so we do we don't want that to go below a million dollars so we do want to just you know be a little bit conservative and making sure that we have the money in case we need it for an emergency of some kind and jean it's part of your five-year plan five-year plan that's right and finally my favorite subject buses we do have a fleet of 62 buses that to serve all of our towns and we just on a rotating basis we you know replace five to six a year just to keep the average the average age of the fleet at 18 at eight years which sounds that doesn't sound so old but if it's the average is eight we have 16 year old buses on the road so this it's just our normal replacement rate finally just a reminder that in the in our state if you are paying on your homestead property tax and if you make less than 147.5 there there is a property tax relief here's the website and the phone number but there is a people should not it's an attempt to not we don't want people getting placed out of their homes for for education taxes and so it's the state's way of making sure that the that's a little more fair across the board so just a reminder open early voting is open and voting is on tuesday march fifth do you guys know um just off the top of your head it's the polling places i know you have a lot of different towns but your district they're in the schools in each town i think there's a traditional except for shelbert shelbert's in the town hall town hall well um thank you everybody for watching today's continued coverage of the town meeting election forums um as they said town meeting day is on march fifth but early voting is open now is open now so there's no need to wait and um you can join us on march fifth at seven p.m. for our election results show which will be covering a large part of chitlin county so thank you everybody for coming in today thank you thank you