 This conference will now be recorded. Okay. So I'd like to call to order the South Fronington steering committee meeting of Wednesday, October 27, 2021. And welcome, everyone, and we'll start with the Pledge of Allegiance. To the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Hey. So on instructions on editing the building and in case of an emergency, and a review of technology options, just see. Great, thank you. So as you can all see, there's two exits in the back of the room. We leave either one, and then go either way, right or left out of the outside doors. And then I know technology for folks participating online. We are not actively monitoring the chats for comments. However, if you would like to speak, I would like to know in the chat that you would like to speak. I would be happy to pass that on to the chair. Thank you very much. Oh, and then one, sorry, one other note. We do have assistive listening devices. So if you are in need of that, and let myself or Andrew know, we can set you up on that system. So it would be directly. I did hear you. Thank you. Well, great. Thank you. Agenda review. Are there any additions, deletions, or changes in the order of the items? The address to the number of the scores. OK, that would be a new item. Yeah, go ahead. This is Laura Roundtree. Tim Barra. Good night, Mary. Thanks, ma'am. And you met Jessie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so welcome, Laura. Hey, thanks. You're first year. Yes, thank you. Yeah. Whoa. Until time eating day, but then we are going to strongly encourage her to run again for the remaining two years of that term. So thank you. Well, at least you really know what she's got herself into, if she has to run. So we're so glad that you stepped up to the plate. And I see that Dr. Childs is on, so welcome to her as well. So we have the school board and the full component. We're missing one. Oh, OK. Is he one of the callers, maybe? OK. Great. All righty. So are there any changes, additions, deletions to the order of the agenda? I see none. Are there any comments and questions from the public not related to the agenda? There's no one in the auditorium, but we do have two callers on line. If either of them have a comment, seeing no indication, we'll move on to approving the minutes from May 18, 2021. Seems like a long time ago, doesn't it? So they were sent out, and hopefully everyone had a chance to review them. I'll second. OK. Any further discussion? OK, all in favor of approval of the minutes of May 18, 2021, signify by saying aye. Aye. Or a thumbs up if you're on the. OK, so they are approved. Item six, the city's going to provide an update on the recent citywide reappraisal. And Dr. Duff, I have trouble with his last name. I have been pronouncing it. Bulldog. One of the syllables, right? We'll provide that to us. Well, thank you, Helen. I think in your packet material was the presentation of our clients, and I presented sort of closing out the reappraisal and what the final results were. I'll walk through that, but sort of speak at a very high level and give you a little bit of an update of what's been happening through the BCAA process. Typically. Thank you. That's much better. Well, not these old eyes. So as you can see, there's been sort of steady, grandless growth in the city over time. Sort of average is 10% or average is about that 1.1% increase. Obviously, because of the reappraisal, we've seen a much bigger number of the last citywide reappraisal was back in 2006. We were initially supposed to do a commercial only reappraisal back in 2018. We've seen zero responses to RFP at that time. Burlington was also about to go through its citywide reappraisal and we reissued an RFP for the full citywide. And Tyler Tech was selected as the only bidder. The reappraisal was course finalized in June of this year. What the results ended up being at that point in time, we were looking at about a 31% total increase in grand-less growth. This was from about 3.1 billion to about 4 billion. Where that increase occurred, I think as many of you know, disproportionately impacted residential condo parcels, that number went from about 1.3 billion to almost 2.6 billion of that total number, which is a 95.5% increase. At the same time, there was also a decrease in commercial value of the 713 commercial properties. That total value went from about 1.76 to 1.45 billion, which was a 17% decrease. Of course, from the municipal side, because there's such a large increase in grand-less, total amount to be raised by taxation that was approved back in March from the main flat. Therefore, the tax rate pre-reappraisal was set at 55.5567. And that was reduced and set by council following the reappraisal at 0.4350. And again, this is kind of comparative data to the prior grant. You can see very clearly here. The proportionate share that is now borne by the taxpayers, residential condo, very much larger share of the total amount to be raised by taxation than in previous years. I've gone through some of this summary of impacts already. But just to touch on, I think, a really key point is at least on the municipal side, a tax rate for an average residential condo or an average residential property. Average condos and average commercial properties have all decreased. Just some kind of broad outline. There are approximately 700 grievances following the reappraisal filed with the title of Tech, which is a little bit less than 10% of total parcels in the city. Of those 700 grievances, about 80 went to the board of civil authority. The board of civil authority, which is now just finalizing its process, reduced the value on four of those 80 properties. I think one of the things we saw is that they were based on the formula that title of Tech used. There were a few neighborhoods where one property owner saw a significant increase, and the other, their neighbors did not receive the same increase. So those have been flattened through the BCA process, as well as there are about 39 individuals that either were through prior to their hearing or were through following their hearing. And our tax assessor, Martha Lyons, has been a really great one with some of the property owners there. There are nine appeals that were affirmed at the assessed value. And remember more decision pending, there's one more hearing, and one appeal that we know that's going to the state. And I just want to kind of do a shout out to the board of civil authority, 19 members who were very tirelessly going through these. Thank you very much. A lot of meetings. Yes, a lot of meetings. A lot of time. And just to get a sense of what those reductions look like as a result of the corrective process and the errors and the emissions, the total grain list has dropped by about $16 million from when we set the tax rate, which puts about a $65,000 shortfall on collection for FY 2023. But that number is always fluid, so that may change throughout the fiscal year. So I think if you guys have any questions, happy to answer, but sort of the high level outline of where? Yes. Why did the grand list drop by $14 million? $16 million? Sorry. So through the BCA process and the appeals process, the property values? We, and those judgments, went down $14 million? Yes, overall. Well, there was a total of $400, and Tyler lowered some of that. All right, so it's not. OK. Yeah. They weren't that generous. No. OK. Yeah. Yeah. And residential property value was $27, but then the tax rate decreased was only about 22%. How are people having lower overall taxes on a property on average? Yeah, so I think that shows that there were some houses that were really far out of line. And the fact that they're catching up, they're taking on a greater share of that burden. But for the average property owner, it actually did decrease slightly. Any other questions or comments? All right. All right, thank you. So we have $65,000 shortfall in the entire amount of dollars collected for both municipal and school. No, that's just the municipal number. That's just municipal. Yep. So we'll have to find that, I guess. Or. Yeah. Underspend, yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, and we always budget for the tax collection interest and fees potential in there. And that will eat up, I think, a good chunk of that shortfall. Hopefully rooms and meals and we'll pick up. We did budget that very conservatively for this year. We did. And maybe you've already talked to David about this. What was the impact on school collections? Because you guys collect school taxes on behalf of the district, too. So what was the impact on school collections? I don't know if we will know that until the, when we do the shore up with the state, when they do it based on the equalized pupil. And I'm fairly certain that this will not impact the school number, school budget number. All righty. So moving on to item seven, then David Young, the superintendent is going to provide an update on enrollment and demographic data. So I don't know who has control of that. I do. Thank you, Jesse. I'm sorry. You know, I forgot to ask anyone in the audience, I mean online if they had any questions. I apologize. But no one seemed to be ringing a bell. Okay. Sorry, I'll try to remember. So I think you can make this bigger too, Jesse, when you get a chance. I'm not gonna go through this page by page. This is a report that was recently received from Jerry McGibbon, who was a demographer and was provided to the school board on the 20th of October as an update to kind of our current trends in enrollments. The first page obviously just is looking at kind of historical past and taking us beyond 2020 into 2025 and 2030. You can see just kind of the population expectations, which we think is important and helpful, both city and school. Again, I think we could talk more about this and long-term effects on both school and city services. But again, it does show an increase over those expected out years of 2025 and 2030. I wanna go to the next page. And this next page talks specifically, I know it's a very busy page. In the 21-22, it's highlighted in red, is the current year that we're in. And those are our current numbers that we have. I think it's important that you recognize pre-K, that's not all of our pre-K students on the very top. We do bring in students into our pre-K programs at Orchard, Rick Markott and Chamberlain. And that equals to 67. We hold that number fairly flat just because it's a number that we can accept and support into the schools. There is more and you'll see a slide here in a bit on that number. So this does include pre-K. And at the bottom you see the totals there that demonstrate the increase. So you can see what's happening in those out years of 2022, 2023 and beyond. In general, you see an uptick in enrollment. I wanna pause just for a second to say that, one of the things that's been really positive is that collaboration with the city has been really good. Jerry has worked with all of the current plans and in-process developments to factor those in. Typically, the demographer and I don't wanna claim to know that side of the work or the business. But what we know is it's a very calculated number that has to be used for every potential house or home that will come onto the market. What I also wanna recognize is that we here in South Burlington have definitely seen, I would say, possibly connected to COVID an uptick that we have seen representing increased numbers on the enrollment. And so we expect that probably that will happen again. There's a couple of things happening here that we know that South Burlington and Vermont is a desirable place to live. We're seeing what I would say more in migration beyond what probably the demographer may be able to plan based on demographic projections. So as I communicate with the principals, I'll be taking this data and also adding some additions in here as what I'll call probably the post or COVID slash post COVID numbers. I may be increasing those slightly in every grade category and you'll see that here. I'll talk more about that in just a bit. Again, I say that because there's been some past here, we've also had in this particular location of Rick Markot, we've seen the demographer projected the units coming on here right here on Market Street. And that yields a number far out exceeded the number in what we thought. We have another unit that's coming on. So that's in part connected to the rationale and reason. All I'll put a little bit of a buffer on that. What I'll do with the principals then will ask that they then resource based on that number. And what does that mean for classrooms? What does it mean for staffing and support? So anyway, this represents that number. And you can see kind of the K5 population, the 6-8 population in the 9-12. Let's go on to the next. Yes. When does the high school population make a jump? Because we see the pre-K-5 really growing over the years. The demographer does not really have the high school growing. There's a few things that I would say probably need. We have, again, we just received it. There's a few questions that I have related to kind of the high school population. Remember that the high school does receive tuition students. And you can see that reflected in the report too. And we locked down those projections on the out years. We don't move those around. We look at kind of what was the previous, where are we at currently, and we kind of move that down just a tad on what we expect. It's a little bit of a guessing game on that, although we've had a pretty solid number on that tuition number for those out years. Can you turn it up for one second, Megan, to answer your question? I have extreme questions about this report. And I really pushed Jerry McGibbon when he was on our school board meeting last week. Because this does not reflect at all what projections were just a few years ago when we were doing all that work on the middle school and high school. Because that high school number very clearly was, within a couple of years from now, supposed to be at 1050. And our elementary schools were supposed to have flattened out by now in his estimation. And so I was very blunt in our meeting. And I said, I don't understand how, as a board member, I'm supposed to use these projections to make any kind of long-term capital decisions. Because at this point, we are now at crisis in two of our elementary schools. And that was not something that was predicted. And he's been doing projections for us for years. And that was never a blip on the horizon, that we were going to be that stressed at the elementary level. And the high school really looked like it was going to be completely over the top. And so these are a complete reversal of those numbers. And like you said, it doesn't make any sense if the elementary schools are getting those many students that we don't see that bubble start to flow through the high school. He had a lot of reasons for his algorithm and how it addresses things. But one of my ongoing frustrations with him, and we've had this discussion the last time he did this report, I sat with Marla and him. And he kept saying, well, these are all multi-unit developments that are really, they're multifamily. They're going to be young professionals or older people who are downsizing. Those aren't really going to bring families. We've had this ongoing discussion that this model that he uses for other parts of the country doesn't necessarily fit. South Burlington, because housing costs are so high that you're seeing lots of families cramming into what might normally be a young professional type situation, but people are staying in them longer, too. And their kids are coming through our system staying in those buildings. And so yeah, I have some serious questions about it. Sorry to interrupt, David. But yes, we've definitely raised a lot of the same ones with him. And I'm at the point where I feel like we are almost in a guessing game. And I'm not sure of the value of this. And yeah, I think going forward, it would be helpful for the school district and the city to talk about a shared resource and maybe picking a different demographer or somebody who knows the local situation a little more deeply, who can really sit and build a different model. Because I think what he's doing is plugging in a lot of numbers he has into a model that exists. And that seems to reflect most of the country. And it's not giving us a stable picture of what's happening here. So I will leave it at that. Thank you, Bridget. So moving on to the Rick Markot, which will highlight a little bit more of where we are as emergent issues. So you can see the red column, the 21-22 for Rick Markot. And you see where we are over last year at 415. That does include the pre-K students of 23 in that building, 415. The school really was set up for, and these are even old standards from the state, which haven't been updated. But the threshold limit there is 323 students at Rick Markot. So 323, and you can see where we are at 415, which pushes a decision bucket that's important for us to respond to. Currently, we're making it work. We have the students in classrooms, but you know as you increase enrollment, it's these congregate areas, the cafeterias, the gym spaces, the scheduling, the passing in the hallways, the library, all of those begin to have pressure points that get put on them that really makes it difficult. It wasn't too long ago, and again, I'm not providing you with the history before, but Rick Markot was for several years, in my earlier years, in that 320 and below, 315, 320. And so you can see that there is, and again, this is a good scenario to have in the school business, particularly in Vermont, where we're seeing increases versus many others seeing decreases. But we're definitely here at Rick Markot on this particular site. We're in a need for a response. So as I told the board on Wednesday, and in my Q&A session, we are at a place where we need to make some decisions on what we're going to do to improve this. So there'll be some options that will come out. We're looking for some representation in committee, committee folks to help us figure this out. And it's a need now. It's not something that is going to go away based, again, on the demographic projections. And there are not significant increases year over year, but the most important thing, I think, from the data in those out years is that it does not go down, right? If it's not a blip, it's not just one year, and then we go back down. So it means that we need to respond. Remind me again, what is the optimum number at Markot, or what can it comfortably? This is an old standard, and we did a lot of work, and we're in the process of now re-evaluating our elementary schools. There is new data out for like Massachusetts who uses, they're very up to date on facility and use of space. They'll likely come out with a number that will be lower than that, based on kind of the newer research. But right now it's at 323. 323 is what we've been working off, okay. Yeah, and that's been kind of a decision point, and we have been over that, as you can see, and this has been a talked about conversation for a bit, but it's definitely reaching a very important component. So next year you'll be 100 over. Yeah, so I owe it to the board and the community to come up with. That's like four classrooms, right? Yeah, so I owe it some responses. Let's go on to Chamberlain. Chamberlain, just so you know where they're at, they're at 269, their threshold is somewhere in that just around the 300 mark, right? About 325, 330. I think that number really is too large for that school, but as I said earlier with newer standards that will have applied, it will likely be lower kind of in that just below 300. So again, I think they're in a good place. This often will surface when you say, oh, maybe we can redistrict, but can we redistrict that many families over to that school and solve the problem in either the out year or the out years? The answer to that seems like it's unlikely, but again, I owe it to look at that as an option as well. And what was the number again, the ideal number? It's right around like 320. 320. Is what our old one was, and this is a fairly old marker that we had previously shared in the master plan. So just to be consistent with that, I do expect that we'll get some newer threshold limits with the state of Vermont doing some updates and also working more collaboratively with folks like Massachusetts. And John Stuart had done some interesting research years ago, and I did not realize that Rick Marquott is actually the smallest school out of the three of them in terms of square footage. I always had in my head that Chamberlain was the smallest, but in terms of actual just raw square footage, it's actually Rick Marquott and that's why they're, but the way Chamberlain is designed, that's why their number is about the same. So yeah, sorry. No problem. And then moving on to Orchard. Orchard is, as you see here at 441 and their current threshold is at 350. So here again, we've seen pretty significant growth over time, many, many years, at least in my beginnings, they were in the mid 300s, 340, 350. We went through a redistricting back in 1998. We had spaces in the other two schools, Rick Marquott and Chamberlain, but again, you can see what's happened here with pacing. They've all kind of caught up and certainly Orchard and Rick Marquott are over. So those are the, that's, I can't give you a little bit of a view of where we are. I think as Bridget said earlier, that the demographer, again, smart individual, but it's very hard I think sometimes to get it plugged into the Vermont kind of current realities, particularly what we've seen over the last two years with housing sales and people wanting to, what I would say, in migrate to our state and to our city from the perspective of schools, I think has a factor on this. And I think it will continue to have that as we go into the out years. But again, that's speculative. And as Bridget said, we've challenged some of these conversations with the demographer and of course there's no mathematical equation that he can plug in to say that's right or not. Again, we do have some challenges here with him on just some of those numbers, but in general, we don't often question the demographer and the data that goes into that. That being said, I think it's an important conversation for both city and school. As Andrew started out with kind of looking at the reappraisal and some of that growth, there's a lot of factors I think that could be plugged in to look at the future in South Burlington and the need for what I would say services, education as a comprehensive package. David, do you have, do you keep a comprehensive spreadsheet of inflows and outflows? We do. Again, it's pretty fluid, right? But in general, we see increased numbers coming in as opposed to going out. And that's obviously representative of the data. Right, but does it have the neighborhood they came in from and whether it's new construction and whether it's an apartment building? We have not necessarily got into the high, high depth of looking at where emigration is happening. There's a fair amount of complexity with some of our houses that have housing stocks that turn over from somebody that's been older, have moved to a different location, and then family has occupied in a smaller residential area. And then a few years later, we find that they're moving to another location to afford them a bigger house to accommodate a larger or growing family. We have seen some of that. That does put some stressors on us because we're geographically divided by where kids go, right? So sometimes those are crossovers that happen that we need to take into consideration and provide the opportunity for waivers for children to finish those things they're schooling out. So in general, the next page- Can I just piggyback on that? Because that sounds like an exercise, if you will, that the city might be able to help in terms of, as we bring new housing online or change housing. And I think that that's important data for the city to understand as we plan for development. So what really is happening, rather than this 1.3 children in a house that, who is a third of a child anymore? I mean, it doesn't work. That's sometimes the point, I think that's the point that Bridget's saying too, based on the demographer, for the demographer data on that particular housing stock, it will yield you X number, right? And if you tracked ours over time, would it go from a 1.1 to a 1.5 or 1.... I mean, those types of things, based on kind of what we have seen as a run rate over time here in our school system. Again, a good situation to have, however, when it becomes a situation where it begins to impact the opportunity for students to be available and to receive instruction and their ability to socialize and make the connections that they need to, it starts to become a problem. And like anything, just like when you pack your family into a very, very small space, sometimes the behaviors and the anxieties will emerge. And that right now, we're certainly seeing some of that that's also coupled with some of the COVID current situations and frustrations as well. So we're not alone in that. I think across Vermont and certainly many schools across the country are seeing increase in anxiety and behaviors. Again, I feel like our staff and parents and guardians are doing a great job, but we're not absent of those things either. Go on quickly just to the middle school. The middle school continues to be only a three grade school. So that volatility obviously is both in and out. They've got one grade coming in and one going out on any one year with one staying constant within them. So again, it's been fairly manageable. The middle school is able to handle up to about 750 students. So they're obviously appropriately and below a bit here to be able to handle that. So remember, we also have occupied considerable amount of space in the middle school and in the high school. About four classrooms, we maybe about five classrooms really when you add them all up with care footage. And we have recently, as you know, thankfully to your move here, we have moved into our new space starting this past Monday, the Monday before actually, we moved into the new space. And all last week folks moved into what we now say is 577, not 575, but 577. So we're excited about that. We've changed our sign, but that being said, we vacated some space out of the middle school that will allow them to do some things differently and also allow us to think a little bit differently about maybe some options moving forward to rectify some enrollment areas. At the high school, again, the high school as Bridget said earlier, we have some questions in the queue here because this is where we've seen some differing data in the past years around our enrollment at the high school. I also wanna be clear that as you look at that high school tuition transfer, that 152 students is certainly down. And much of that we think is also attributed to COVID. A lot of the high school fluctuations I do think are related to COVID. Some doing more of a home study program or going differently to make those things, those ends meet. I think that we did drop that. We dropped it from our typical kind of 180, 177 down to 172 based on that. But we still are a very favorable district for folks to come to us from Georgia, all of the islands. And that represents that number. And what is the capacity? The capacity there really is, they're still over right now. I think it's, as I remember, I didn't write that one down. They're right around the 900, 850, I think is kind of desirable. 880 is what, the old standard. What was it, 830? 880 is the old Vermont standard that hasn't been updated yet that we were using when we were doing master planning. And even 880 on a capacity there, the congregate spaces, I know I overused that, but the cafeteria, the gym spaces, the auditorium, you know, those, the hallways are just not adequate, right? We had all of those kind of access points are not actually even anywhere near what they need to be, which is part of the work that we did in the past. This is, again, the master planning and visioning is not off the table. We've got an emergent issue of phase one, which is elementary. We will be planning to circle back to figure out where do we go from here with a high school, primarily a high school that's really in need of some attention and a focus. So those, the next pages that we'll follow, I'm not gonna do that. It's certainly on your own, you can. It just, what the following pages do, it does isolate pre-K, again, pretty solid pre-K population, all of the kind of looking at over time all the way out to 2032 shows you that pre-K population. Then the other charts just drop off pre-K so you see resident population or resident or K through five population, you see isolated. So with that said, again, pretty good situation to have on your hands with enrollment. Many of our fellow districts, my fellow superintendents are dealing with looking at what to do when enrollments get to a point where they're low and they can't continue to be able to provide what they need to based on the reductions that have had to happen. Happy to answer any questions if you have any. Tom. Chairman. Yep. Yep. So I wanna preface this by saying I'm not advocating for either of these options more from a parent perspective and a city councilor. As I look at these numbers, I would love to hear from the school board if you are approaching the two sticky topics of redistricting the elementary schools to balance the populations, rebalancing where different neighborhoods feed into different elementary schools. I heard that on the table, I think two or three years ago. And also with the now expanding space available in the middle school, is the board at all looking at in the short-term horizon moving fifth grade to the middle school as some other schools across the state do have? I'd just love to hear your thoughts on that, not advocating for either. I just wanna know if that was on the board's minds. Yeah, so we're supposed to hear from David at our next meeting on November 3rd about a variety of options that he would recommend. So of course all those things in terms that we have been talking about off and on all the way through. The challenge off the top though of redistricting is that as David said, there's not a ton of space at Chamberlain. We would quickly be at capacity at Chamberlain. If we tried to shift students there, that doesn't really solve our problem. So the pain of redistricting and that whole process, which is extremely painful, just challenging for families who are then gonna have to readjust just to buy ourselves a year or two years. I don't wanna guess what David's gonna recommend, but I would say that that would probably be challenging. I would say that there could potentially be a feasible scenario of moving fifth graders to the middle school, but again, David hasn't presented his recommendations to the board yet. Yeah, just a quick follow on. Again, I haven't provided that to the board, as Bridget said. I do think that all of the options will have kind of what are the pluses, a T chart if you will, what are the pluses, what are the impact or the negatives, and what are any costs incurred as well as opportunities for students. So those certainly, doing nothing is certainly an option and you have class sizes that then climb and you have those congregate spaces that continue to be a problem, but that's an option all the way up to, looking at bringing in trailers or putting on an addition into those schools are certainly options as well. And those obviously have pluses, minuses, costs attached to them. I do think it's important to note that in the state of Vermont we don't have, again, we've talked about this and we maybe can talk more on it during the legislative portion of the budget of the agenda, but we don't have a real functional arm of anything in the school side of looking at facilities. We have facilities that have been untouched really for 60 years, 70 years. Burlington is our good partner. We love them, but they're in a situation where they have a shutdown high school. My guess is if we did similar assessments, we probably would have a percentage of schools that might be in need of similar situation. So the need to have a more responsive and robust plan into the future is certainly a need. And so I recognize that we're a little bit of a leader. We've worked hard to have a maintenance in our budget. We've kept anywhere between a million to two million every year to just try to maintain our facilities, our heating, our handling devices, those types of our roofs and those go into the cost per pupil, which are often not necessarily compared adequately or consistently with other parts of our country. So again, I'm hopeful and maybe as a result of COVID as bad as it is, there'll be some additional attention put on facilities. Certainly air handling is being a focus, but holistically I hope that there'll be an outcome here that will yield putting us in a better place. David, can I ask you a question on the move of fifth grade to the Tuddle Middle School? You said originally or several years ago that there's not enough room for that. Can you reiterate that? Because that's something that people look at and they say, well, let's just move the fifth graders to Tuddle if there's room. Yeah. Well, I don't want to get ahead. Again, I owe it to the board, you the board to give you the options and kind of the plus minuses and those costs. Obviously in the previous, in that particular response, you know, we were housed in there, you know, so we had about four classrooms of spaces. Things become much more manageable with that. So there's definitely possibilities as that is an option for us to consider. There'll be about four or five options that I'm currently looking at. And I want to be really sensitive to, you know, mom's, dad's and guardians, and most importantly, our students. You know, these are important decisions. I'd like them all to be ones that are going to be beneficial to our students, right? Benefiting them, not hampering their opportunities. So that's, I think, the main focus here of the work that we'll go ahead. Good. Are there more questions? Megan. Yeah, I'm curious if there is, you know, on the table, perhaps discussion of additions of one of those congregated spaces that would expand, but also perhaps free up, currently used congregate space to be repurposed. Certainly an option. What I know, again, these options haven't been shared with the board or vetted. So what I know just historically that when you do put on, let's say I can put on three mobile classrooms, right? I can add three classrooms. Therefore, does my capacity go up? I can have three more classrooms, but then you need to look at all of the other spaces. What about parking? What about playgrounds? What about bathrooms? What about cafeterias? What about gym? And you need to be able to schedule art, music, physical education. And at some point when you get big enough, you just don't have enough time in the day to have this room be used for music if you have X number of students you're trying to cycle through. So those are all important factors. And can you add on congregate space? Yep, you're adding on additional gym space with higher ceilings becomes a different part of the equation too. Again, depending on the school or schools that you might be talking about. Right, right. And that's what I was thinking of perhaps a new gym or where the gym could become a new art room and something could be repurposed in some way. Yeah, so those again will be explored. I'm a little bit cautious. We just went through a pretty significant upgrade at Chamberlain with the positive ventilation package. That was a significant project and we needed to borrow, delay the start of school by four days, three days so we could finish the project. They were outstanding and the project was very, very beneficial and positive but nonetheless it was not easy to fit in sizable amount of work to be ready for the next year as we conclude our year in the mid to late June and we reopen late August. So you don't have a lot of time and I think everybody's probably pretty much aware of some of the construction concerns but certainly we've been successful or were successful at Chamberlain and I would think we could probably be did the same. What's your timeframe? I mean, you look at the numbers and you don't have five years to sort of find the perfect solution because it won't be perfect by the time five years out. That's right and I think that again, this is important why I wanted to make sure it's shared with you, the city folks too that it's important, right? The learning environment for our children is important and I owe it to them to make sure that we're providing the best we possibly can so it's an emergent issue that I'd like to see resolved or begin to be resolved next year in 2023. What I will be doing with these numbers, again, I'll be very clear with the board that I'll be putting on kind of David Young's what I'll say enrollment buffer. So where I know like here at Rick Marcot when this new development came on it exceeded enrollment by probably around 30 to 35. I'm gonna put on a buffer and then say to Kathleen Kilborn, for example, what would you do? She probably will say in the particular about classroom size, she would, I don't have any more classes to use. I'll have to increase the class size from x to x, right? And then that will obviously fuel my decisions and back to the board to say, are you wanting to have that class size? Are you wanting to have those disruptions and give them the options to help and make a decision on which option would might be best to explore? So I'm thinking also in terms of any kind of bonding or capital expense that would need to go to the voter. And it sounds like this March is probably too soon but is the anticipated and we can also have a special election for those issues but I mean, what do you see as maybe the earliest time? Cause we need to work out our capital expenditures together and not have it. Right now, I haven't signaled any sort of bonding need but at the same time, we've just gotten this data back. I'm trying to be very deliberate with decision-making. We do have assessments coming back on the elementary schools similar to what we did with the high school and the middle school around electrical, mechanical, structural and hazardous material. And now we have enrollment to go with that as well. What I'm hearing again just from the general report which we'll get back, we'll get the full report back somewhere in December. Certainly I wanna have that also combined or verified in the budget direction but in general, I'm hearing that the buildings are in pretty good shape. Again, I wanna just put a caveat that I haven't got the report but I'm hearing in general that that's the case. If that wasn't the case and I had other concerns then that would prompt another probably options that need to be explored. But currently, that's kind of the thinking process. As you know, we're gonna talk here in a bit about impact fees. Impact fees obviously have been triggered. We've triggered that and are in the process of doing that. So the combination of the collection of data and then looking at the resourcing up to and including impact fee may be helpful for us as we move forward. Brian, would you like to ask a question or make a comment? Yeah, if I could jump in. I mean, this also relates back to two years ago when I first got on the board talking to Gary Marquess. You know, it's not just an enrollment issue. His feeling at the time he told me was that the HVAC is starting to fail on a weekly basis at the high school and that was part of the reason for moving too. And if we just try to fix the HVAC at the middle school and the high school, my recollection is that is $55 to $60 million before you talk about interest over a period of several years because not only do you have to fix the HVAC but you also have to put students and trailers while you do it. And you also have to come up to code on ADA, fire, seismic. So we're not talking about a quick easy fix with a little bit of additional space. In some way in the next few years or several years, handful of years, we're gonna have to reckon with tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure upgrades. And I think we're trying to make this sound a little bit too easy or a little bit too fast tonight. That's my concern. I think Brian, your point is good. We have an emergent issue with enrollment but not to be silenced at all by the work that we did a couple of years ago just at the beginning of COVID where we I think very appropriately looked at all of the kind of conditions at the high school and the middle school and made what I feel was a very logical decision around how to begin to move forward. My worry, of course, is similar to Brian's in that we've got electrical switching units that are working fine and they're very, very costly. And we're just continuing to keep our fingers crossed, do the maintenance that we need to do and do that. But you're right, when you add up all of those pieces, and again, back then that was a bit ago, was somewhere around that $50 million just to address some of those identified shortcomings between the high school and the middle school, I'm sure now they're different, right? With a different factor. We have escalation going on that's somewhere in that five, six, seven percent now. And we'll see how Barlington emerges with some of their resolve on new construction. But you're not wrong. It remains a very important issue right now. I'm also not wanting to, particularly in the COVID environment, flood everything back open. We definitely need to address the elementary enrollment. Phase one, phase two will be to look at how we move forward with master planning again. And if we are unable to do that, then we do need to circle back and address those shortcomings that Brian alluded to and need to address them, right? We can't just continue to just say we didn't want to do it. Therefore, they're gone. It's not gone. And in some cases, the risk will increase as we go into the out years. Thanks. Any other comments or questions? All right, then we can move on to item eight. This is our discussion of initial plan for the upcoming FY23 budget process. And Jesse and David are gonna be making us there. The superintendent and I thought we would both kind of give you briefings on our schedule, what we're anticipating, what we're seeing as we start our initial budget planning. And then of course, answer any questions you may have. So David, it's okay with you all just keep going. Yes, I've talked enough so far, Jesse, so yes. So we included in your packet the city's budget schedule, high level. This has us bringing a proposed budget to the council at their December 6th meeting. And then wrapping up in the middle of January with council approved budget and obviously a steering committee. David, we do need to coordinate a teeny bit on the January steering committee date. A few changes that we are implementing for this year's budget cycle. We are fully integrating our capital budget into our general fund budget and enterprise fund budgets presentations to the council. So they will see that all as one piece as opposed to two separate pieces as they've done in the past. And then we are also having budget presentation hearings based on focus areas and service areas throughout December and January. In September, the council did have a goal setting session and provided us high level guidance as we think about building the FY23 budget. So the main guidance they gave us was to focus on maintaining the services we have. They wanted to see a tax rate increase below 3%, so below cost of living. I think that was focused on the affordability of the community, especially as the community is coming out of COVID, coming out of the reappraisal and wanting to be very sensitive to the taxpayers' experiences. That wasn't unanimous, I just wanted to. I never said below three. And then we are also focused and then we have a few specific projects we're focusing on, but at a high level focusing on the ARPA dollars the city is receiving and how we strategically make the best use of those in the FY23 budget and over the next several years. That will also be a topic of consideration for the upcoming policy retreat, or trick or retreat as Councillor Barrett has named it as it is Saturday. One other thing I wanted to highlight that I provided to you in the packet was our currently conceptual schedule of our upcoming TIF votes, bond votes. So those are bond votes we will bring to the community that we are required to do prior to the end of the incurment period of our tax increment financing district. So we are intending on a November 2022 TIF vote and likely uptown meeting day 2023 TIF vote. As you all likely know, those are bond votes that are specifically tied to the increment that will be raised within our TIF district and are not general fund obligation bond votes. So slightly different than a bond vote that a school may take, for example, and we certainly will highlight that over the course of our advertisement, but wanted to be sure we kind of called out our intentions on that in this conversation tonight. So I think that is what I wanted to highlight. David, can I turn it over to you? Sure, so similar to us, we've got a calendar that's out there and it was shared with the board. It always feels like we just get the year going here we go, we gotta move. So we will get a little bit more direction from the board this coming board meeting next Wednesday. And we're generally expecting what the administrators are currently in preparation. We have a pretty long budget meeting tomorrow morning, but they're looking at providing what we call a level funded budget, continuing service budget and a desired budget. That's easy to say harder to do because we do have this infusion of this current COVID recovery dollars or ARP-SR dollars that will be in play as well. So we're looking at, we need to be able to respond to the needs of our students and in an appropriate way in response, but at the same time, we do need to be thoughtful that as the ARP-SR dollars or SR $3 sunset in September of 2024, the goal here is that we are able to be back in a place where it's sustainable on a tax rate from a tax rate perspective. So that's the overarching objective and goal for us. Obviously overarching objective and goal is to provide the best possible education we can to the students that the community will support. However, we do also need to be thoughtful around the utilization of the SR dollars. And we have moved through SR one and two. SR two obviously was much more directed at a response to allow you to do just that. And ARP-SR is really to be able to use the data that you're seeing, some of the current conditions that you're seeing and be able to respond to those in a way that will help move us forward. Other than that, more details continue to come out on the ARP-SR and the utilization and how we apply for and do all of those things. But that's where we are. So pretty tight timeline as well. One of the complications for us, and I'm not saying there's not complications for city, but we, as you know, don't get a lot of our data from the state until the end. So as much as the board may say, we want you to be in this, they may say in this particular area of a tax rate or a percent increase, percent tax rate, we really don't know. There's a lot of factors on how the yield might get set. You know, obviously we have control over what we would put in the budget, in the general fund budget, what we'll have for our funds, but then those other factors often are major drivers to the tax rate that make it difficult. So it's right up until that end, that January timeframe, Jesse, that we do need to coordinate. We're often getting, by state mandate, we're getting those factors in. In some cases in the past, we've got them, we've been informed that they're gonna be delayed and that holds us up, you know, the ability to be really accurate with our taxpayers. That's always been an issue for me and many of the board members that have been veteran is that, you know, we wrap up the budget and then we make up the budget book and then, you know, we progress after that and we have some folks, many who probably could be watching say, that's not right and we're saying, well, you're right, because things changed after that. And that's a little bit of the perplexity that we have around the school funding, which, you know, certainly in my years, you know, has never been provided to us proactively. It's always been kind of the after the fact, which is really hard from my perspective to build, you know, systems or responses to programs when you don't really know, right? It's, again, I think we've done a really good job and thank you to the board for the support, but it's been hard to try to forecast out years and to do what we would say more systemic planning. Thanks. Okay. Is there a question? Brian, did you wanna say something? No? Okay. Okay. You can have, take more than one chance. I have a question for the school. Do you have a forecast on what your healthcare increase might be this coming year? Well, we're under the statewide healthcare and so I don't really know. I would have to say that I'm not yet privy to what that increase will be. It is a statewide healthcare system now that all of our school employees are under now. And that's being renegotiated, again, at the moment. So I think the current one goes through the middle of next year, yeah, it's sort of an awkward timing and then they have gone to arbitration, again, which is kind of the final step in that negotiation because they could not come to terms. So again, last time that happened, we found out in late December what that was going to look like. So I'm guessing as best I can that that might be. We haven't had an update from Elizabeth in a little bit. She's still sitting on that commission, on the employer side. So yes, that is a little bit up in the air. So just to be clear for people that are listening, right? So there's a union negotiation with the state over healthcare. Yes. And there's a separate union negotiation with the school district over salaries and compensation, right? Salaries and working conditions. Yeah, that's no different than any collective bargaining agreement. Those are collective bargaining. But before the state took over, you had both. They did. Right, yeah. Thank you. Okay, let's move on to item eight. This is sort of a joint update on additional efforts and we have a six or seven items. One from the, I think, I'm sorry. Oh, item nine, I can't read my mind right now. So the first one is the discussion of potential charter changes and that's really coming from the city. So what the superintendent and I thought was that we would each give a minute or two briefing on where we are. Again, this has really meant just to share information, make sure all the elected officials know the same things and then happy to answer any questions. Do you want to talk to charter change or would you like me to? No, you can. That's fine. So there is some discussion, although we will be talking about this more at the retreat on Saturday about having a broad conversation about governance on the city side through a potential charter change. Thinking about number of counselors, potential wards, things like that. Again, no direction yet from the council on what they would like a charter commission or if they would like a charter commission to explore that. But there is kind of community conversation about that. If that is to move forward, I think we would like the school trustees, school board to be involved in those conversations since obviously the governance structure of our community is equally shared with the school board. So very nebulous update right now, but wanted to just loop you into some high-level conversations. Awesome. So I'll talk briefly about the impact. Tom, did you wanna make a comment? If I might, just on what Jesse just highlighted, I would recall hearing from the school board a year and a half, two years ago that they were also interested in looking at school board members or at least having a conversation about it going up to seven or so. I think with what is being proposed for the redistricting South Burlington, the legislative districts will be expanded. We are looking at five and there might be six or seven, how it shakes up where we split off. I think this is a good time to explore it. So I hope the school board is interested in that conversation that Jesse just framed. I know this Saturday, I personally think it's all on overdue to look at how many counselors we have, how many school board members we have, and it fits nicely with how the census is gonna shake up our legislative districts. Yeah, I would agree with Tom. And we have talked about it just in very high-level terms a number of times over the years. The challenge we've always had in the past was being concerned that we would be able to fill seven seats or however many seats that seem to be changing, which is great. We seem to have much more interest in, for good or bad reasons, that we have a lot more interest in running for the school board. And I don't know what that will look like. So it'd be a long term thing, but I would hope that if we expanded the number of seats that we could. But I don't have it, I haven't re-released amongst the whole board to speak for myself. I regard that we have had a discussion, particularly because the school board does do direct negotiations with our three unions we also obviously have a lot on our plates with master planning and visioning. There's a lot on our plates with social and racial justice in the school system. There are a lot of different moving pieces that all require subcommittee work. And when you only have five people, it makes it really challenging to just get all the work done when you're talking about volunteers who are trying to do this in addition to everything else they're doing in their daily lives. So yes, I think we are here for that discussion. I don't know what the easiest way is for us to fit into that discussion, whether that is having a discussion after you've had your retreat, whether it's coming to a council meeting or having counselors come to one of our meetings or what the best way of collaborating on that and sort of getting the school district into that conversation fully as well. Okay, thank you. So there's no other comments. The school impact fee discussion. So I mentioned impact fees earlier as a result of seeing enrollment increases over the last and potentially increasing. We did want to trigger an impact fee study. And so Jonathan Slason from RSG is currently in the process of doing that. And again, as I said earlier, we've got a committee that's now been shaped up. Thank you to Jesse and some of the council to help be on that. We think that's an important component to at least understand whether or not that we do qualify. In the past, we had an impact fee, but as enrollments, again, I don't know exactly. I don't have it on the top of my brain when we had, when that sunset, but it was about, I'm gonna say 11, 12 years ago where we sunset the impact fees because enrollments were steady or going down slightly. Now that has changed. And so we've, we want to commission that study again to see if there's a relevance to having an impact fee again. So our RSG is in the process of pulling that data together and we'll be setting up a meeting with about five folks. Bridget will be one of them. Tim Barrett is gonna be another one. Paul Conner is another one. Gary Marquess from our area and myself. So we'll be looking at that and we'll be reporting back. Thanks. Okay, yes. Just perhaps to state the obvious, the whatever the impact fee plan that the school board developed would ultimately have to be approved by the council. It's the way the legislative process works around that. So I wanna make sure you all are kept in the loop. That's not something we could impose, right? It would be brought to the council. Okay, the next item is the school resource, resource officer discussion. Who wants to lead off? David. Yeah, so I'll just start the school board's interested in understanding kind of the purpose relevance and kind of the effects and what we can continue to do to support or look at that differently. School resource officers, we're very, very honored to have our South Burlington Police Department have school resource officers in our schools making really important connections with our students of what we think. But it's also important that we look at this from all the perspectives of students. And so they're just, we're in conversation about that currently and the board does have it as a standing item on our school board, just on the school board agenda, just to review where we are as well. So, yeah, I don't know. Alex, did you wanna say more about that? So Alex is the lone subcommittee member at the moment. He and Rebecca Day had taken on the task of organizing a process to gather community inputs and feedback with respect to the SROs so that there could be a recommendation to the wider board about what we should do, whether we should change the program in some way, do away with the program, enhance the program, what should happen going forward. And of course, Rebecca left. So, Alex, I don't know if you have any thoughts you wanna share about what that process might look like. I'm happy to share a few notes and this is more free association rather than an outline. But some of the things we're interested in is the typical days of a school resource officer for guidelines where we do have three people at least who have expressed interest to the board in being on the subcommittee or on this committee. It would be kind of like the citizens budget advisory committee where you have citizens from the greater South, all of South Burlington, not just board members or students. And we have received three emails recently, not recently, but in the past few months of people who are interested in. So there's a strong interest and I'm pleased about that. We're also going to be having hopefully public hearings for all comers. People who would be on this committee would have to, we're gonna ask them to commit to all of our committee meetings, not just show up for one or two. So there is a reasonable, but definite time commitment that people would have to make and we're gonna remind people that they'll want to have them there. And let's see, hoping we can get you, Jesse, in the committee as well. Interesting. Okay. We have lots of interest from our police department to be involved, but oh yeah. Excellent, and one idea that Bridgette floated with me was advertising in the other paper for members, for citizens to join the committee as well. And we haven't, you know, we're more like in the brainstorming phase of that as well, partly because we lost one of our board members. I am in the brainstorming stage. And I know that you had mentioned, Jesse, that Kevin Grealis has been offered up by Chief Burke as someone who would be great on that committee. And he had been on SRO for a long time in the district, so he sort of knows both sides of the equation and has worked with us on the Black Lives Matter, the initial flag raising, and he's been very involved in a lot of the issues that we've been discussing as a board in his previous role as an SRO. And as a South Burlington resident and parent, yeah. So again, I think, you know, it's a desire to look at what we're doing, how we can maybe do it better, and being very sensitive to the students' perception of a school resource officer. But I think just, I want to be repetitive here, the school resource officers that we've had have been outstanding from our perspective and very cooperative. But remember, we have to have that lens from how the students are, right? And maybe what we can do as we continue to progress. So it's going to remain on there. As Alex said, this is kind of work in progress. And I know Chief Burke is always interested in how we can do this better, how we can be of service to provide public safety generally. So lots of openness on our side of the table, too, to think about the future of those positions. And there currently are SROs in place. Yes. As I said, they have done and continue to do a good job. But that's my perspective and our staff's perspective. Not always have we received the feedback from students. And that's a really important piece of how do you feel? What do you think? And being a little bit more of a listener to those things. But we've been very pleased and felt very supported by Chief Burke and the police department. Well, I think it's a really important issue to have very transparently the conversation so the public, when they weigh in, know what the conversation, the pluses and minuses and the whole issue, all the issues are so we can together move forward with a plan or a program that meets as many expectations as we can. You certainly can't meet everybody's, but that's good. The next item is the I-89 corridor study update. So this is me trying to channel Charlie Baker for a second. No relation, by the way. So he provided a memo to you all that we provided in your packet, just reiterating kind of the background of this long-term visioning study for the I-89 corridor between now and 2050 and then outlining the next steps in that process. So that's specifically what I want to highlight tonight. So there's this, they're working now on the improvements that were identified that I think you all have heard Charlie talk about a lot, 14, potential 13, the potential of 12B and TMD updates. So they are looking at convening some more public meetings towards the end of the calendar year to present their next step of recommendations coming out of the research around those bundlings. With your permission, I would like to suggest to them that they provide an update to you at the steering committee meeting you'll have in January around the budget. I think it might be useful to do that together, that next update. And then the next set of tasks will be to draft the implementation plan. That will be done right now, according to a schedule in the March timeframe. And then final report in the June timeframe. So they actually may line up very well with our upcoming steering committee meetings. Okay, the airport sound monitoring update. Yeah, so I touched on this a little bit earlier too, but this is related to the FAA's positive sound ventilation work that was done on the Chamberlain Elementary School. As I said, completed at the start of the school year. There is installed by the FAA sound monitoring equipment. And we're going to be just, we're trying to get access to that data through our FAA contact folks. We would like to just be privy to what the data is showing. As you know, the district had a fair amount of work on our own to determine kind of both inside and outside sound levels. We definitely are hearing that it's a major, major improvement in the classrooms. So that's a positive thing, but we do owe it to the, to our students to make sure we're monitoring and looking at that. And we'd like to be able to know what the sound metering is showing. So we'll be collecting that. And also at some point trying to just put it together with some sort of a semblance of the data that we collected, the data that the FAA collected and the current kind of ongoing sound stuff. So is there a sound monitoring system just for the school? Because I know you also have the one for the whole city. No, it's actually on the self-reliant, it's on the Gertrude Chamberlain site. Right. It's spent. That's what you're talking about. I'm talking about, it's one of two, right? Yeah, so that's that. One of three. Three? Yeah, the one that I'm talking about. Willston Winooski and Cecil. Yeah, the one I'm talking about is the one that's located on our property. Oh, okay. It's a fenced in, you know, it stands about, I don't know, 25 feet in the air and just has a, you know, obviously a sophisticated microphone on the top of it. And that's the FAA data collection that I'm speaking about. I did watch today, because people have been talking to me about it and it gets up to a hundred decibels, according. If it's the same one we see on the screen. It should be the one that you can access on the website and it's open to anyone. Yeah, it says which one is, which location is it saying? That's the, I didn't know. It looked like it could be Chamberlain school, but definitely our neighborhood is where the number was being posted. There's like circles. I didn't see one for Williston, though. I don't think theirs has been installed yet. Okay, I think there's two and there's not one there. There's another one in South Brawlington. Is there two in South Brawlington? No, there's just one in South Brawlington. And then one in Winooski and then there will be one in Williston. Winooski got up to 105 and that's like a 10 minute lag between the actual time and what you see on the screen. And we know that it's of course the V-Tang jets that are making those high decibels, but you can't see those jets. You just see the commercial airliners in the airspace there, but yeah. So anyway, we're just interested doing our due diligence around the work that we set out to do and we wanna make sure that we're paying attention to that. So the free press reported on this two days ago, a nice little article with no reference to any website whatsoever. It's on the Winooski City website. No, I believe it, I believe it. But I mean, it's just like, usually they have a tiny URL or something, or the full URL is like, you couldn't click on it or anything. Like, thank you. So I just have a question, David, about Chamberlain. So the changes that were made were HVAC changes so that were there also window changes as well? No, no window changes, but for those of you who've been in old schools in the past, you have unit ventilators that are along the outside wall. And those were the primary heating devices. Those unit ventilators had basically full outside access. So if you looked at the unit ventilator in the bottom lower portion, it's all vented. And so there's really no sound mitigation there. Those are all gone now and blocked off. So those are all sound mitigated there. So that has significantly changed the environment because they're no longer using that system. They have a separate unit that are doing the classrooms. And you think anecdotally that it's quieter now? There's no question. There's no question? I mean, I'm not in there. I just hear from our teachers who are there every day who have had to speak about, they gotta do the pause, even when the windows were closed. You have data from before you made the change, right? Well, we have data, but I'm just giving you some anecdotally that it's improved. Again, part of our due diligence is to look at the data. Will you go in and measure again now that you've made it? I'm not sure. We'll kind of see and compare what we had from both inside, outside, what the FAA recorded inside, outside. They, the FAA did that differently than the way we did. We did real time. The FAA came and they did simulated, right? They did open your windows and have a big speaker that pushes big kind of white noise to close your windows and do it again and they had sound monitoring there. Again, just rendering our due diligence. It's not, you know, we just need to pay attention to the learning environment for the students and we will follow through with that data collection. Good. Well, I think it's great because even on UVM's campus, I have a pause. And, you know, when students are taking exam, they're, you know, they're distracted. It, it does have real impacts. So I'm, I'm grateful to you for following up on that. I know that was a long drawn out process and it took tenacity and determination. So I want to thank you both as a member of the community but also as a parent. So thank you for that. Some things as you go along seem to be big then, but now not so because it seems like they keep things seem to be a little bit bigger and more challenging, you know? Yeah, we, there was, there was a fair amount of time that went into that. Yes, many years. We're happy for the, for the outcome. If there's no further comments, is there a question? I just want to share a note that was in the chat and it was from 745. So I think it was from the SRO conversation, but it could have been from the 89 quarter conversation by Dr. Child saying we need to make sure people of color are included. I would argue that's relevant for both agenda items but I just wanted to share that she was, had shared that on the chat. And you can use front porch form to advertise for these committees, right? Okay. Yeah, no, Corey Burdick is pretty plugged into all the different avenues of how to get word out. She's been really helpful in the last few budget processes for getting information out a little more clearly and rapidly. And so yes, there are many avenues to, to recruit for those committees. Great. Okay, legislative issues for upcoming focus. So this one, we really wanted to just leave brainstorming room for you all. If there are items that either the council or the school board are thinking about, testifying about during the legislative session are there ways we can be mutually supportive to one another? We don't have, I don't have specific items to bring up. No, I think it's good. The school board has a Vermont School Board's Association which will be collaborating on some items that they'll move forward. I would be remiss to say, I think there's opportunity legislatively to look at how we can continue to recruit and bring in teachers and staff that are representative of our student body. Teachers and staff of color has been a hard thing for us to do. Across Vermont, I was at a conference today brainstorming more about that. I do think legislatively or through the arm of licensing, we could make things a lot easier. We typically license teachers through a pretty easy process if you're in the pipeline, but if you're not coming from a different area, we make it difficult. And I think there's some things that we can do to do differently, both from an AOE and a Vermont legislative priorities in that regard if we wanna make some changes. I think the other area for me is continues to be just education funding. I highlighted some of the complexities currently where it's really not, we are not in a place where we can necessarily, appropriately, proactively plan to the future, we're in more of a reactive state, given what I've informed you about. So I'd love to see that to become prioritized sometime in the future to look at how we can do a better job there. Well that, and that's coming to a head this year because they're implementing an implementation committee essentially for this waiting study that UVM did. And the waiting has to do with the calculation of our equalized pupil number, which is one of the main factors that determines what our tax rate is. And the initial, I wouldn't say the initial, the final report from that committee had some estimates in the back of how this would impact different communities. And South Burlington is in a situation where we would see our equalized pupil number likely decrease, which would mean, and it's not meant this way, I completely understand that, it's not meant to take resources from one community and move them to another, but that's the effect if it goes forward the way it was initially drafted. And so that is definitely of concern for us and that is something that we'll be talking to the legislature about and sort of trying to advocate that opportunities not be taken away from South Burlington students or on the other side, it's raising taxes for the same number of services that we're providing to students if something's not done to sort of change that. So that one for me, the waiting study which goes into the broader picture of how school funding is done in Vermont facilities continues to be an ongoing discussion. So I think we're all a little bit concerned that facilities, there's been some federal money to focus on HVAC because of COVID and there's a little bit of a concern that there's not enough staff at the AOE right now to do a broader review of all school facilities and all of their issues. And there's a little bit of concern that there's gonna be a lot of money thrown just at HVAC and there's still gonna be these 70, 80-year-old buildings that have no plumbing and have outdated electrical systems and aren't up to code for ADA and don't have the right learning environment for students. So we're a little bit concerned about hoping that the state will take this time when there is some money there to do a more holistic review of all the school buildings in Vermont. And so it was waiting, oh, and pensions. So pensions kind of got sidelined last time, but especially teacher pensions are something that I'm sure are gonna come back up this legislative session. And that's a really tricky problem that all of us are gonna have to grapple with. So those are the three things for me that are at the top of mind. I haven't reviewed those with all the other core members. Alex, do you have more? Yeah, Bridget, I think around 10 or 12 years ago, the state offered 30% matched for school construction aid. And we'd love to get back to the good old days when schools had that kind of support. Yeah, the facilities, just to piggyback on what both Alex and Bridget have said is a liability that is continuing to grow. We highlighted a little bit of that with Burlington earlier, but I think that that is a huge, huge need that needs to get some attention. It may be we're at a better time than ever before with kind of recovery, infrastructure, the focus to be able to begin to do some planning, but Bridget's exactly right. There are schools that are doing some upgrades to HVAC, but they've got a roof that's updated. Nobody knows it, but it's gonna fail, right? So we're, I'm happy that the legislature passed some money to do some inspection in inventory, but my guess is it's probably not gonna go that far and depends on how you deploy it. You'll get back the information that may not be overly conclusive. I think that's a huge, huge liability for stop-gap situations that might happen with our students. Not every community has a Macy's-type school to go, a place to go into. It will have to go fully remote. And when you look at the economic engine associated with schools, if kids can't go to school and have to be home, then there's all kinds of other implications that could hurt business. So that one was a big one. And I think on the waiting piece, so much needs to be, my worry again, it has validity, no question. But at the same time, you need to look at all of the inputs and outputs of budgeting related to the situation. We have schools that receive small school grants still. We have Title I that helps with offsets. We've got a yield dollar that often changes. You've got common level appraisals that changes. And my desire is, and hope is, is that you look at all the factors, not just take one, but look at all of them in concert because when you just do an isolated one, you may then say, we hope that it would result in this effect, but in end it actually had a major effect and then that can hamper. So just more thoughtful conversations around the impacts associated with some of those actions related to education funding. Okay, I think Tom Chittenden had a comment. He went dark, he's on green. Sure, and I appreciate all the comments said so far. I don't need to dominate the conversation. I don't know how closely people are following the implementation task force, but the last meeting, they introduced something that I'm getting emails about, which would be to actually remove the current weight for ELL students and instead shift that entirely to categorical aid. So there's gonna be some modeling that's gonna come out next week or the week after. I would love to get some thoughts from the school board as this is a model that was not in the original report that they are putting forward that it would be useful to hear South Burlington's perspective and any concerns they might have about shifting out ELL is funded away from the pupil weights. Currently, the weighting formula has that point two, additional to 1.2, a student that gets English as a language, that is in English as a language learner is counts as 1.2 students. That the proposal at the last meeting that they asked for numbers from the joint fiscal office is to remove that weighting, which actually predates the Act 60 1996 alteration to our current weighting formula and instead shift towards entirely categorical aid away from pupil weights to give a 25,000 base amount for the first kid that needs ELL and then 5,000 on top of it. So I'd like to hear from South Burlington and all the communities in the Chittin County Senate District as to how that will factor into their calculations and planning for how they support ELL students. You know, sort of opinions, but maybe not necessarily data, you know, Violet Nichols or Joanne Godak probably are the right people to, I don't know, somebody on your team is probably the right person to talk to Tom about what that kind of impact would have. Yeah, we're certainly happy to have conversations. And again, go back to the same thing, right? Know what else is happening in the funding mechanism. So you take one out, you know, what does it do to the others as changing dynamics happen? It's a better or comprehensive understanding, but I appreciate that feedback and always happy to talk with you, Tom. Okay. Well, we've whipped through our additional efforts. Is there any other business? Well, we've dominated the conversation on the school board side about legislative issues. Are there any from the city side that you will be focusing on? Well, we always generally track stormwater changes and MS4 permit changes, but that's very in the weeds, literally. We also will continue to track the TIF legislation. Looking, there was a request last session for a two-year extension on the debt and permit period. We got a one-year extension as COVID continues, and we are certainly still in the midst of it, likely looking for that additional year too, which could ultimately affect the bond conversation we were having earlier. We're really trying to get that in at this point. And then there's several other, we will be tracking very closely how the legislature allocates the additional COVID relief money they have, and specifically how that goes to supporting our residents, supporting folks who are potentially delinquent still in utilities or rent payments, and ensuring that that is communicated as much as possible to all of our residents. And then responding to whatever emerging issues come before us. You're also on the cannabis commercialization board, right? I am not. Oh, you're not? No. Oh. I thought it was. It should. I thought it was in the minutes. It was in the paper. And where are you on? The League Board? Yeah. I read somewhere. Well, yeah, it's in our minutes. No, I think what you read is that the Economic Development Committee has that as one of their work products. Jesse was also on the board, so that should maybe be corrected. We're going to find out. Jim and I have been talking about the minutes lately. Yeah. You're not, really. I will find that, and correct it. We are tracking what the Cannabis Control Board is doing, generally speaking, to promulgate the regulations and what that may mean for land use updates we need locally. We will have that option. We also, one of the things we'll talk about on Saturday is the extent to which we want to prioritize Economic Development Committee, bringing forward a recommendation to put retail cannabis on the ballot or not. It was not on the ballot last meeting day. It is likely that if we do not put it on the ballot at some point in the future, it will be imposed upon us. So that is something in a more regulatory world we are tracking. So that's whether or not it can be sold here. Exactly. The voters will get to decide. Yeah. The voters will get to decide if we put it on the ballot. If we put it on the ballot. There was a, there is potential that the legislature may say if a community doesn't put it on the ballot, it is automatically allowed. Oh, interesting. So it was an opt-out. Yeah. Okay. Any other items that... I would, oh, go ahead. I just wanted to say that I saw your new sign at 577, it's very nice. I'm very impressed with the paint job. And we passed the 60-day license agreement at the last city council meeting for the lease option. And I just, I know that you freed up some classrooms at the middle school. How are you liking your new digs and is it working out for you? Seems like everybody's unpacked before I have. I have boxes in the corner still, but it's working out great. Oh, good. I think people are enjoying the additional space and remember the history of our district, except for Lincoln, we've never had everyone together. We've had people spread all over. So we're about 70, some odd years old and we've never been in one place. So this has been history for us. And we do need to talk about, like we're parking in the back, but there's nobody parking. So I kind of, I'll talk with some staff. We have a meeting. Just have a few cars planted out there. We don't need to plant. Right. Like we're available, but it is also a different time with COVID and people coming in and moving around, but we're excited about the opportunity to grow in the space. Cool. And my only other question was, how are the schools handling COVID right now with whatever your infection rate is? Yeah. So, we're doing pretty well. We've had recently, last week, we had 23 that would need it to be out as a result of what we call close contact, but that's far better than many others. We're hopeful for a continued positive trend there. Soon we'll be into what they are calling a test-to-stay protocol. And it is, so if you were identified as a close contact, these are would be individuals that are currently unvaccinated, right? Our younger population. Then you could enter into what we call a test-to-stay program, which is an rapid antigen test. And we're thinking, we'll probably do that in the conference room of 577. Once the individuals are identified, the students identified as close contact, they could come to that location, have a rapid antigen test done, which will read results in about 15 minutes and then be able to get them, if it's negative, get to school versus a simple seven or 10 day quarantine period. This is primarily to help mitigate absenteeism, right? And so we're at the same time, we're gonna be sometime soon, we'll start to get vaccination distribution going out for that population of five through 11. And we will have some sites and we'll make sure to communicate that to the city as well. Some sites where school sites will be also available for vaccinations. The combination of that, some hopeful progress will hopefully be able to be back in a more of a normal state. I do not necessarily envision that, again, depending on what the infections are, that we'll be able to get out of mass. And the predominant reason for that is that, you're still, at least the data still shows that vaccinated people can still move the virus. So we still have a good number of our community population that won't be able to be vaccinated that are under five. So, and we have many young families, young children have younger siblings that are under those ages. So we'll again, take advisement from the medical folks. They've been very, very supportive. I've had on an ongoing basis just a Q and A session and we've had somewhere that varies between 40 and 80 people on and three of our local doctors that live in the community have been on every one of them and have been just awesome, kind of just volunteering their time to answer questions. So, that's great, very helpful. So we're, you know, optimistic. Good. I just had a question, because the Board of Civil Authorities gonna be looking at the legislative redistricting tomorrow night. And I don't know if the Board has had any chance to discuss it. Is there anything that we should be aware of with regard to legislative redistricting and specific district to the school zones is different? Oh, yes. Legislative. But I'm just talking about all the things that you were talking about for the legislature. We're gonna have two legislators in the State House who would be shared with Essex and Williston. And so I was just curious. No, I haven't really discussed it as a board. We haven't and I'm not really sure, you know, that we haven't been updated on what that progress is and any updates, but certainly something we're wanting to be interested in. We're very collaborative with, you know, our Champlain Valley partners. And certainly be happy to hear more about it. I'm gonna be just on how that would play out and what that would mean for us and, yeah. Okay. Is there any more business? Okay. Well, I would entertain a motion to adjourn. Don't move. In a second? Second. And all in favor? Aye. Aye. Great.