 Election coverage by town meeting television. This is one of many forums we are bringing you in advance of local elections and town meeting on the first Tuesday in March, March 1st, 2022. Town meeting is traditionally where voters weigh in on local government representation, municipal budgets, school budgets, and local ballot items. All candidates on the ballot are invited to participate in town meeting TV election forums. Town meeting TV election forums introduce you to community decision makers and connect you with the issues that shape your local community. If you are watching this live, we welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. Again, if you are watching this live, we do welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. You can watch town meeting TV on Comcast, channel 1087, Burlington Telecom, channels 17 and 217 as well as online at town meeting TV's YouTube page. You can simply type that into Google. That's what I do. You just type town meeting TV and you should find the YouTube page and find live or you can find it under playlist and you can find your city or region or community. That being said, this evening we are here speaking about the Winooski school budget and I am fortunate enough to be here with dedicated school board members Alexian as well as Kamal Dahal and they are here presenting the Winooski budget the Winooski school budget and welcome and thank you and please feel free to present. Thank you, Annie. Can everybody see the screen? Yes, it's great. Perfect. So good evening everyone. Welcome. I'm Kamal Dahal, a school board member and I am joined today by Alexian, a fellow school board member. So the intention tonight obviously is to present the public budget for 2022-2023 school year. Alex and I will be taking turns walking through the presentation and as the host, Annie said that we have some time reserved after the presentation for public comments and questions and just to repeat the phone number that Annie said it's 802-862-3966. So with that let's go to slide two please. So we begin our presentation with our school's end statement. It's displayed in the slide here but I think it's worth reading it out loud. All students will graduate from the Winooski school district. College and career ready at a cost supported by a majority of Winooski community. Winooski school district students will lead healthy productive and successful lives and engage with their local and global community. So this end statement is both our mission and business statements guiding all of our policy decisions. We assess each of our decisions especially the decision of our priorities for upcoming years and of course the budget to achieve those priorities and we ensure that our priorities all align and support our end statement. Can we go to slide three please? Okay so this one highlights the Winooski school district graduate expectations. As you can see here critical thinking, communication, well-being, creativity, persistence, culture and community are key expectations we have from our graduates. We monitor our expectations by ensuring that our students graduate with the list of proficiencies which will be listed on the following slide. So as you can see the list of Winooski school district graduate proficiencies includes proficiencies in writing, speaking, civil discourse, critical reading, non-native language, setting goals, physical health, proficiencies in visual arts, STEM design, math and scientific reasoning, cross-cultural engagement, financial literacy and so forth. So let's go to the next slide. So this slide lists some of the amazing highlights from previous year 2021. We had three residential scholars for 2021. Hussein, Evelyn and Penny, congratulations to them by the way. We have anti-racism work going on and of course the capital project. So now pivoting to our current enrollment data. As you can see here we had 74 total enrollments for pre-K, 354 I'm sorry, for K to 5, 154 for middle school and 220 for high school enrollments, totaling 799 students. So this slide shows the population breakdown of our students. As you can see 62% of our students qualify for free or reduced lunch, 35% are multilingual learners and 28% almost one-third of our students meet the eligibility and are being supported due to a disability. Just a side note here on the previous slide. We've adopted using the word multilingual learners instead of English language learners or ELL recently to ensure that the primary or native language of our students are not seen as a liability for them and instead seen as asset for their growth. So with that let's welcome Alex to discuss the budget highlights and key investments. So thank you Kamal. I mean as you can see that our community is always changing and there's been some exciting things that are happening especially with the capital project project. One of the things that we realized as part of the key investments that we really wanted full-year busing and as you can see with the current code it's kind of brutal to have our children walking some of this minus nine degree weather and that and I think we're putting the investments in busing because we understand that students who are in school learn better than students who don't go in school. We also have created space and understand that there's been a strong need for pre-K programming and that means that with the new spaces that we have that the community has invested in we have room for additional classes which means that we also need new positions to actually stack those classes so that we can the community can grow along with the space that we are creating. Of course the space that we created and I want to remind folks that like one of the main reasons why we wanted the expansion of the school was that the school was actually developed for only 600 students and as you saw from the previous numbers there are 800 students but with that expanded space we also need a custodian to help maintain and so that we have that kind of maintenance of that staff so that it's there for the long term. The other two types of investments that we're doing on is looking at a power school manager which is kind of like the technology to really help us understand and better inform the knowledge the needs of our students as we move towards a proficiency as we have been in the proficiency based education and a school district registrar who often all these kind of activities have been passed on to other administrators or teachers that are not allowing them to focus on what we want them to focus on which is teaching. The other other investments that we have seen is that we're actually transitioning some of the federally funded positions that we've had that were federally funded that are now to our local budget and that's going to be a 1.25 FTE and then there's this capital project depth service we're going to have to start paying back some of that loans but with that said I've got to admit I've been so impressed with our administration as we're making plans to figure out how do we make the debt burden less as we move forward with our capital project. So what does this mean from a number standpoint? This means basically we're asking we're going to see a 1.78 million dollar increase in our overall budget and if you can see where the percentages are you can see a large percentage of that money is in that transportation. We're estimating property taxes to be about 6.03% but let me get into that a little bit more as we talk and move forward and what that means on the estimated education spending per equalized pupil increase is about 24.5% so here's where the budget highlights are is that and let me is that you see the 9.08% increase that we've mentioned and then you can see that we had a decrease in 6% and you're wondering like wait Alex you just said that we have 800 students how why are these numbers saying that we have 974 and or and now it's a decrease in 912 and that is a very good question and one of the things that what we have learned in education is that it costs it costs certain amounts of money to educate students at a certain level and in the 1997 the state actually said you know it's going to cost us more money to educate high school students it's going to cost us to educate certain other types of students and that's where those numbers kind of like are calculated to see how many students that we have. I'm going to on a future slide kind of show you what that really means because I'm going to tell you since 1997 we've gotten better on understanding who our students are and like we've as a school board has collaborated with other school boards to say that we need to update that system so that we can properly educate our student at a tax rate that actually helps with our own local community but on the warrant you will see that we have increased our spending per student 24.1% and you go what is the tax rate calculations and and really and and people will say that this is complex but there is a couple of ways of how tax rate calculations are come one is based on the homestead tax rates that's what if you those who own property and and basically there are three levers that are influencing the tax rate one is education spending which leads into the per pupil spending equalized pupils that is what your local school board has the most control of when we're designing the budget and how we're actually trying to meet the needs of all of our students. The per pupil sale in the town tax rate that's actually a combination of all the school boards putting them all together and then the state has to figure out how to fund that actions often this is the yield and this is often the hardest part that we can't necessarily always predicts the tax rate that we can give you because these numbers don't come in until after the town hall leaving vote on March 1 and then the town tax rate which is basically the home tax rate this is the CLA and this is basically the notion of like how much is your property worth and it's based off on a scale of 1.02 usually from 0.8 and basically it's kind of estimating how much how much is your property really worth and note we haven't in Winooski actually had a CLA update in a while and so our CLA is actually around 0.76 which means that at 0.8 usually at state levels we're supposed to update all of our property values at this time but because of COVID that has kind of been delayed a little bit. You can see also for those who don't own property and I'm going to show you that there's actually a mixture between property rates and tax rate income a mixture that with your the tax rate if you're paying based off of your income is going to be dependent on the pure people spending and also on the income yield. I've got to admit trying to explain Vermont's task code in just three minutes I hope I gave somewhat of a good test space I'm looking at Annie here and see she's smiling like okay Alex you kind of did a decent job but don't worry we have a video that you can watch on the Vermont's like taxpayer face and really kind of help you explain and I really do recommend that you go to that and kind of watch the video and read it because they worked hard on doing it and it's often hard to kind of explain the whole process and so people are asking well how does this work and why how to explain the whole household and income well it's because when you say how does it affect my taxes I really need to get to know your maybe a little bit too personal information like I need to know your income and your household property and all that because if you're below 90,000 it's really based on a flat rate in fiscal year 22 is 2.49 and fiscal year 23 we're predicting a 2.55%. If your income is between a household income is between 90,000 and 138,500 it's actually going to be a combination of your house value and your property tax credit and your income and then if your household income is above 138,500 it's solely based on house value okay and we actually have these kind of cool charts to actually show you what you paid in a fiscal year 22 if you were between the 90 if your household income was below 90,000 and below you can see the difference so if you're making 90,000 your overall yearly increase is going to be about $54 in terms of the overall income and in terms of how your taxes impacted this is also now the middle group of those who are between like 90,000 and 138 then we actually also look at how your household income assess house value is and you can see the differences in terms of your tax rates and what it would mean on a yearly basis please know that if you notice I'm not saying only if it's only increase because I understand that this is a hard time for everybody especially as we are dealing with another COVID situation and the cost of inflation is here but I want to see and I hope that you're seeing that the invest you notice that I also use words of like investments like these were real strategic investments that we were making in terms of actually improving the school and really helping our community grow with the school as many of you all know in my five years here on the school board I've often said that the school is the heart of the community as long as we grow our heart we'll also grow the Winooski school Winooski community together and that's what makes this a special place to live in now I'm not saying that you can't do anything for yourself but we really encourage you to like look at the property tax relief forms and if you haven't done so please fill out the hi 144 forms I know through my own mortgage company that they fill it out for me but double check that your company is doing the same thing because you do get tax relief on that when you complete those forms and it's going to be based on your household income whole value in the school tax rate of the district so know that there are small things that you can do to help you with helping with the taxes I mentioned earlier that the education rate is based on the pro on equalized pupils and I'm going to say in the last year our school board and I have been working working hard to testify for the legislation to update the pupil weights because the current law as I mentioned shows you that we had 912 but if we actually use the study this was a study by done by UVM and Rutgers to say hey you know your weights are a little bit outdated and we're not you're not actually you you're not actually putting we're not actually creating a system that allows you to properly educate your students and we really need to revise these students and because we have because if you notice we have a multilingual language group and because we don't have a lot of children from wealthy from large means and social economic status levels it takes more to educate those students to a certain degree and I and there are proud investments that I think that we made including you know putting like healthcare within our school district we don't pay the doctors but we peel the space for them to actually have that so that we know that healthy students learn better when they're not having the sniffles and it also meets the needs of our community members and our parents we don't necessarily have the time to take their students to take their child to a doctor and they can actually use the services that are within the school and you can see that like 912 versus 1200 there's a large difference in how the state sees the students and you can also see how that would have impacted our tax rate and so we are working tirelessly and we encourage you and you'll see on the last slide about who you can contact I encourage you to contact our state legislators our senators about having them approve the weights because it would help our community a lot just on a base of the budget here I just want you to know that you're actually going to be voting on two budgets when it comes to when it comes to the ballot one's going to be the federal budget federal budget that we want you to vote and we hope that everybody votes yes on that because this is the federal money that they give to us to help educate the students that we have in our community voting yes on this is very important because if you vote no this is going to come out of our own local budget and stuff and so I'm hoping that you're paying attention and not just you know regardless of whether you like our budget or not please at least vote yes on the federal budget and say yes this is actually taxes that we already paid at the federal level that we want to utilize for our own local community and stuff just to be fair and I want to be transparent about like the money that we have here and in our capital reserve in our fund balance we we have we built out 320k in our capital balance of reserve and that I think is actually something that we need to do and build up this came very useful three years ago when one of the main pipelines burst at the school and I joke that we were creating our own ice hockey rink but that's not what we were doing it was because the pipes were 90 like over 100 years old and they burst and one of the things that when we were projecting on the capital planning project people were going well why don't you build into deferred maintenance and I guess said okay we're going to start building our deferred maintenance budget here so that we make sure that we take care of that new building and the renovations that we've taken care of I also want to say that we have a large fund balance of 2.92 and this was partly due to the fact and it seems larger mainly because our school administrators work really hard to get us a variable very favorable loan from the USDA and what we're thinking strategically is how do we use this money so that maybe we don't have to take out the full 57.8 million dollar bond that we we we off the city the voters have authorized the vote but maybe we can borrow a little bit less money which will also save us long term money so I point these out because I want you to know that we're a very strategic school board they're thinking very thinking about our investments protecting our investments and I also want to say that we also made hard decisions we looked at the range of students and where they are and we had to make we we didn't just add we also had to like make some cuts to certain areas so here's the caveats that I have to give you caveat is is that this is all estimated based on the current information that we have there's always revision by at the state level and if you have questions and if you have opinions of this here are those numbers for you to call and kind of like just share your thoughts Taylor small and how close and are both are our Winooski state representatives so please if you have issues don't forget to call them too and I'm sure they enjoy the phone calls um I just also want to give you more details like here you can also contact any of the school board members that will want to be that you want to talk to we just I know we ran through the whole budget I know there are people that love the detail here are the links where you can get the more detailed budget so that you can actually see I also know that like it's hard for sometimes to just call in on a tv show note that the city in the Winooski school district are going to do another budget presentation that's kind of going to be a hybrid senior citizen kind of hybrid in person kind of approach and it's going to be done on Thursday February 17th at 6 30 p.m. and um we're going to do um do that and then there's also the annual meeting on February 28th that starts at 6 p.m. the city presentation will be virtual the school presentation will be both you know will be in person to vote for articles one and three and then we'll do a virtual presentation at 7 45 um I also want to just remind folks that and I apologize for not putting this in the slide is that this is this is an exciting time in our school in our city in our school district because all residents can vote in Winooski and there are going to be translation and I apologize for not putting that slide I know the city has done that part for themselves but um it's um I hope everybody who can and are willing will vote and um and come out and be part of the community that we want you to be part of and be part of the decision making so um that's our presentation um Annie do you have any questions or do we have any phone calls like we're ready right that's great first of all well done both of you this is fantastic there are currently no calls um but uh I I I did keep track of what you're saying and I I know that for me some of um when I first started becoming engaged and involved in my community I was uh needing to learn some things so questions I would have if I did not better understand them now as I do are such things as um can you please repeat that important yes vote the you had discerned between the budget vote and an important yes vote that someone needed to do can you just repeat that very succinctly one more time if you don't mind now it's Ian I appreciate it um Annie that you're letting me do this because um there's going to be two votes one one is for the federal budget and one is going to be our school budget please pass if you're a voter what does that look like what is the difference is there one that do you have you do you know what the ballot looks like yet is that one first or second is how is that clear to me as a voter that is a good question and I do not know yet but that's okay a little early it's not much yet okay go ahead sorry to interrupt you but yeah if you see it please recount carefully that one is going to be the federal budget and that is the one that uses federal monies to help our budget and stuff and that's a yes that's almost an I hope so you're asking you're asking for people to say yes to that definitely get us on that one and then I will influence you on the decision on the other one that's going to look at the presentation right I hope you vote yes but I will you know sure right I'm sure your school voters were at heart on this um and then something that I never understood which is what is a fiscal year and when does that start and end I mean I know now but yeah no that is a very fair question and those who live in the real world wish why can't everything start from January to December right the fiscal year and it is basically starts from July 1 to June 30th it uses a mid-term kind of approach so what you're voting for is on a school budget for July 1 2022 to go all the way to June 30th of 2023 but thank you sorry so no the thing I was just saying thank you for the question so that's what you mean when you say this and then another question I always find amusing is what I always hear is fund balance but I know it's fund balance but can you just very briefly explain to people who might not understand what a fund balance is that's our safety net kind of thing like a little bit of savings that we have for emergencies like I wish we didn't always have to have it but like I also realized that I don't live in a perfect world and emergencies do happen and it's healthy to have that it's healthy to have on on that level and do know that we use it for strategic reasons right that people may ask that it's a good question about like people ask why don't you use it to help lower the tax rates and and and the mic mic to Carl who was a former school buyer was like well you'll pay it twice back in the future year right right and so it really should be thought of as strategic investments on one time things or emergencies so it's a very good questions and I think you know I hope that you're trusting us as a school board that we have done some really good strategic actions for our school by using the fund balance in a very smart and fiscally responsible way great and then I think if you wouldn't mind repeating the the dates for your presentation hybrid and location if somebody wants to go in person and then your annual meeting date and time if you can have if you have those two things um our our we're doing another city in winewski district budget presentation that's going to be hybrid at the senior set a winewski senior citizen center sorry senior senator on february 17th starting at 6 30 p.m and that's also available online yes and then we're also have an annual meeting um which is our basic one that's usually in the um at the city presentation will be virtual the school presentation the first 15 minutes will be in person but the rest will be virtual budget and if you're asking why is it in person well it's because of how our charter is written and um and we have to follow our charter rules and stuff great uh and then uh come on yes did you have anything you needed to add I didn't I didn't uh suggest that you did I'm sorry no uh uh Alex and I worked together um coming up with this presentation so everything that I wanted to say Alex said it already great uh great I think you've both done a great job uh here at town meeting tv uh uh I know that town meeting tv is always grateful to those who um work so hard in their communities such as yourselves and for the time you dedicate to the school board uh your community I'm sure is grateful and we are grateful that you are involved in your community and I personally am grateful to town meeting tv especially during the pandemic for what they have brought to all of our communities for our ability to stay connected and and interrelate and and be together and and and better understand one another at this time it's been so great and I'll say the same thing too we're grateful for you giving us the opportunity to help the transparency of sharing this information with our community members so thank you for all you do and thank you for the town meeting tv station and giving us this opportunity so thank you we appreciate the opportunity thank you great so I will close us out by saying thank you to the to the those viewing for tuning into town meeting tv ongoing coverage of local community candidates budget and ballot items you can find this and more forums at www.ch17.tv don't forget to vote on or before the first Tuesday in March town meeting day March 1st 2022 early voting by mail is available by contacting your town clerk's office polls will also be open from 7 a.m to 7 p.m thank you so much for watching uh thank you school board member yin and school board member uh dahal and uh town meeting tv thank you all so much