 We're going to move on to 2.2 while we're waiting for the board. I think. Yeah. Can you do that? Yeah. And I've been saying this to most of the chairs. I want to serve the boards in the Act 46 transition. One of the things I want to make sure is that we just have clarity and what is being asked of the central office and myself. And because of that, I would like to ask for any information requests or for any something to be done. For that to be done, I'm ready. And it can be included in the minutes. I'm not looking for that someone has to sit and write it as a chair, but that is really clearly needed. So there isn't any interpretation or judgment that I have to take because I don't want. This is a little bit of a piece of saying, let's be really clear about what the direction is like us to do. It's not that we're willing to do whatever you'd like, but I just don't want to be interpreting or having to make judgments for the boards in a point where we have some questions about Act 46. And I just ask for clarity as your employee and for the central office work. So for instance, there was an act for me to seek legal counsel or judgment for one of the boards coming out of the carousel meeting, and I didn't think that was appropriate. I was willing to bring options for legal counsel so the board can make the decision on who they wanted to work with. I'm more than willing to give you my recommendation as well. I'm always willing to give you my opinion. And for you to act on that. But I think that that's in this place where there are some questions about where in this place a forced merger I think is better to be clear about direction and what needs to be done. Once we broke out of the full board meeting, everyone went to the separate carousel meetings, other than legal counsel. Have there been other requests that individual boards have? There were requests around property division and all that. So I had to stop Laurie from doing that work and talk to Chris Winter about that. And so that. Talk about that as well. So it's, hey, Chris and Romney's had some questions and just getting those. We really need to because I've talked about where this office is right now with Washington Central. We're paying a lot of overtime to a lot of people in this office right now. It's not trying to be controlling about the commission. So I'll be controlling of the amount of work we've got within the office. So I'm trying to be really deliberate about the amount of work that everyone has to do. Thanks very much, sir. Comments. Yeah. Thanks. And most of the board chairs are. I don't think there's anyone that is a chair that we haven't had this conversation on at this point. It really came from the carousel meeting. So let's go to 2.1. So it's a small packet, but you just turn the page. You'll start to see the changes. We do this as a level service. Pledge it. And there are, as you can see in here, I'm just going to walk down through the first page. And then if you remember last year, the Supervisory Reading Board changed to an assessment model for all charges. So that really changed our next page, the page to read it. We'll go through and I'll explain that then. So that really changed from what you've seen in other years for the playoffs. Some of it looks similar, but some of it's condensed. So overall, the budget that we're presenting you, it's a 1.96% increase for $174,000. The majority of that increase is in salary increases and benefits. While you know we added Medicaid and another accountant, those came from, the Medicaid is being paid for through Medicaid revenues. And the accountant piece is being paid for for the software changes and some of the HRA. You'll see a change where we're seeing an estimated 11-20% health insurance increase cost for premiums. So that gives us the $30,000 increase. And then other benefits such as unemployment, our dental package that you approved, and others are actually reducing our cost of the other benefits. Our major increase for everything is really healthcare outside of salaries. So that gives us a total of $130,000, almost $131,000 increase. You can see we're having some decrease in state play students. And then you'll see that student transportation is going up a little bit. One of the things that you approved last year was having a case manager to do all our case management across the SU for state play students. That's with that $41,000. And can you, I'm sorry, I skipped over the $75,000. Lauren, can you help me with the $75,000 and the shared service? That's the new position as well as the BSBA dues that we are basically running through our budget and then assessing out. So there'll be a revenue below the line. It's not dollar for dollar. We're actually having more revenue than we do the spending based on what we're currently projected to run. So where it has an A and an A down below, you'll see the revenues that match up with the expenses. Yeah, we still see the C's. C's transportation. So we'll have more transportation aid from the state. And the case management is dollar for dollar. Because at servicing state play students, I have case management. And then the special aid. There's more expense than revenue because for some of that we don't get 100% reimbursement. Some of it's at 56% reimbursement and some of it's at 90%. And that's changes to what from special aid from this year to next year. That's our majority. That's one of our biggest areas. But we're all in expenditures. We have revenues increasing to offset that. Yeah. Do you want to just keep going, Bella? Do you want me to? I think we've just covered everything that's on that. If you want to stop and ask if there's any questions, you went pretty quickly. You did better more than I did with the cash revenues from below into the expenditures of the letters. So let's give people a minute to look at that. Keep doing what we're doing. Let's smidge in under 2%. Yeah. That's the overall summary of the budget. Are there any unusual variables this year outside of the normal ones? Like ATM and tax rates and all that kind of stuff. So that's all in the school side of this. So that doesn't have this part of it. Right. When we go to the next page, you know the way I'm looking at it through three lines. Special aid. But on this side of the budget, there's nothing here. Yeah. There's nothing really. So is there any new intervention on salary analysis? So that analysis that you had asked today, I put that aside because I just haven't been able to get that going. I'm just. So that's one. That one. That one. That you've seen committed fund balance. So that we have not done that project. Just frankly, don't have the capacity to get it going. Even though we're having outside consultant. Okay. So I was going to ask the same question asked this morning. Yeah. The 32 budget, which is this budget include or preclude any initiatives that would bring a significant improvement in student learning along the line. Along the lines of gold number two. I think that a piece that's in here right now is and my answer is different for this one than was for you 32 this morning. One of the things that this board has been champion is been job coaching. We have kept the job coaching level for what we currently have. We haven't tried to, you know, initially when we talked about job coaching, we talked about expanding each year job coach. This past year we did that. But we did it through consultants and retired personnel who's coming. So we are still anticipating federal grants to support one of them as we do right now. It's actually a point eight. That's on Dorsey. And then we use because of the work you 32 is doing for coaching over there because a lot of the math work is happening at the elementary schools. It is happening to 32, but predominantly elementary schools. Their work with project based learning and supporting that work. We have a partnership with grade schools partnership to come and get job embedded coaching. Two days a week to seven, eight, nine to 10 grade teams. So far it's been great. So would more money or another coach yield significant improvement? I think so this is why I want to say I think anytime you invest in your staff. You're going to get improvement. It's a delayed effect. That's just the way it is. I mean, I think it's true in education and outside of education, you have to help your staff grow and then you'll get student learning. Have we been using coaching enough and it's efficient levels to see what the delay effect is coming to the surface now? No, I don't think that we've done it in the right model because they're spread then right now. And they would tell you that. That's hard to get, you know, if you have embedded coaches at each building that can do that type of work. And we had different degrees of that across our buildings. So if I could summarize the response to Harry's questions. Yes, basically. Yes, there's some in there. Yes, we could use more, but I didn't, you know, we didn't bring anything new. This is the level of service. Yeah, I understand. It's the same service. Is that clear enough for today? That's pretty clear. I think we should consider it. I was sort of against this last year, but having seen the U32 budget, having seen this, I feel like it's a different environment. And I think we should consider it. We're currently right around 3%, with a lot of assumptions and unknowns. But I think last year we were looking at a higher, at the shift in assessment, right? Yeah. That gave U32 a 5% increase. Yeah. So personally, I'm feeling good about that. I mean, all the elementary budgets except for Calis and Worcester, all the budgets at all the schools, and East Montpeliers and the Lowe, they're under 2% right now. They'll see that at their board. Their board hasn't seen that, but I've seen what's coming out. Right around 3 or below. The piece for Calis and Worcester are the small schools grant. So there's a revenue piece coming in. And for Calis, it's another piece that they won't be able to access title dollars anymore. Their poverty's gone too low. They'll get more people. Poor people. So wouldn't another coach help? Yes, I think I always would. And let's talk about it. That's where we're trying to improve outcomes. And do you think that approach is the most effective way of doing that? Can I ask a request? Can we go through this first before we start talking about it? So we actually stick under a time. Park that for now and come back. Sure. So if you take a look at the next page, page three, the assessments are broken out into SU assessment, which is what we've always kind of thought as core operations in previous years. The transportation assessment and the special education assessment. You'll see that I'm just going to go right down to the box. It's down the bottom. The transportation SU assessment are almost flat, I would say. They're less than, I mean, transportation is $4,000 out of almost a million. The SU was out of $2 million and it's almost $14,000, which when I calculated it was like three-tenths of a percent. The special education is the place where things are changing the most. That actually is helping some buildings because there's some buildings that will actually send some big changes in special education because you decide to change the assessment methodology to how you set a fee for service. That will make the peaks and valleys a lot smoother for everybody. So then down below you would see the assessment changes based on that $174,000 increase to assessments. Laura, what did I forget? Just we're using the same equalized pupils. We don't have the first draft of that yet. So we used last year's equalized pupils. So it assumes everyone has the same percentage share of our budget at this time. When does that become final? Around December 5th is when we finalize it. The state finalizes it officially on the 15th. They give us a first draft on December 1st. That's probably like right after we do the full board meeting. Laurie and Michelle are so good with their data that we're using down to one or two kids by the middle of the next week or two. They'll be down to one or two kids. R-U-N-O-E and some other district about who owns the kids. We're literally down to that level. Very easy. Very really on the one hand. Is it us? Is it not failure? After that, you'll see the budget. One of the things, and Laura, can you talk to about how we've had to change the budget out of our outplans? Because this is a lot smaller than people used to see. I think you've heard me talk in the past about how the state has come up with a new uniform chart of accounts and they've been evolving in the last five years on what that's going to look like in the past year. We took a step forward and started implementing some of the recommended or required changes. It's required by law. That by next fiscal year we'll be up and running with the new codes. So one of the improvements was the SU assessments are all together instead of, you know, separate. So when you look at your individual budgets, it used to say like a fiscal assessment and it used to say curriculum assessment, technology. You'd have to dig throughout your entire budget to find out what the Washington Central cost was. And now that's all combined. And so having said that, I've had to spend time for every budget restating prior years so that you're looking at comparability. So the SU assessments are all added up if you look at the revenues. As far as that goes, the special ed reimbursements, you can see I've bundled the new titles and descriptions to try to match up with the new state requirements as well. As far as our budget goes, Bill, things didn't change quite as much as at the schools. I guess I'm thinking from this morning from the word point of view. From the word point of view. Carrie was there in a second. The reason Carrie this morning, the reason I caught that was like, wait a minute, I know we've changed stuff. And we hadn't changed on that report. Right. That's how I got into that conversation. Yeah. I was like, okay. Now we're all reset. So yes. So I think that kind of covers it in a nutshell. This report looks very similar to what you've seen in the past. This page. It was the assessment page. What page is this page? The page four? Page four. Page four is pretty similar. Page three is similar to this change. For us. That's my presentation of the budget, Matthew. Great. Any questions? Other questions for Bill or Lori? Are we too low on the amounts? Are we too low? Yeah. Yeah. That's three percent of 3.3. No, I think we're blind. I have no idea. We don't. We don't own anything. We don't own anything. So should it be lower? I mean, is there a reason to have the fund balance as high as it is then? I mean, what kind of emergency things would come in today? Is it all that we would want to be worried about? That's a good question. I haven't really given that deep thought, Chris. I'd like to get back to you on that. Can I just say that? I think it's a good question. I think it's a really fair question. I just haven't given it a lot of thought. I don't try it. I mean, when I think about that. Well, I don't reckon we're responsible for the upbeat development. Yeah. Right? So that is a, I mean, I could hold money for that. Well, we have a fund in the next page. Oh, for the money? Right. So you think that the garbage should be 3% to 4% or something like that? Or lower. Yeah. I mean, this is like, we had this conversation the other way, because they're so small. What's the biggest risk? Yeah. And what could happen then? We can do. So I would need to go do that analysis. What's the biggest risk? That's not insured. The cost of that spends funds right away. Well, and how we would handle influx of special ed students. Now that we're in an assessment model, if we ran a deficit, would we build it back? Or would we use our fund balance? I think those are the biggest risk for me other than the building. It's the new special ed programs. Yeah. Because then we, the thing that made this budget really tough and I'm very grateful for the time you gave Laura and I and I have to say Kelly as well. Special ed has been in a real flux this year. And there was almost a rebuilding of all the special ed budget. Actually, there was rebuilding the whole special ed budget for this year because of the changing of students. There's been a lot of influx and outgoing of students. So our next meeting is on the 20th, two weeks from today. I guess you, would you like, need direction in terms of where to go next? Well, let me say two questions I heard. Sure. I have a question about the fund balance and the appropriate level. We were having a discussion around job coaching and Chris asked, is that still the place you would go? I know if I had Jen here and Principal Dem, we're actually next few days at professional development around job coaching with all the job coaches that are building base or SU base. So I think, I know that they're in support of it. I'd like to get you more into that. Yeah, the cost, I can tell you, we just use 80,000 dollars for a teacher's contract. That's our generic response. But money is only part of the equation. It's capacity to you. It's capacity, supervised, and deploy. And one of the things, that's one of the things that really came out of last year's job coaches work. And Ellen Dorsey would be the first one to say that the more we're building base, the more effective it is. And the faster the changing student outcomes. That when you have the coach around for the ad hoc, that's very powerful. You know, not the scheduled time to be there. Yeah, I think for me, for, oh, sorry, go ahead. Well, I just remember that last year, I guess that's when it was, most of the job coaching was at the high, junior senior high school. And you wanted to increase it in the elementary school because it was better to catch the kids there. You didn't have so much to fix. And so I'm guessing that you really can't see any difference yet. It hasn't been long enough. So the place where we've had job coaches in, bedded for three years or more in the school, we're seeing the change in student data. Okay. And that's primarily where people are dedicated to a part of their position to do that. If I took Berlin, the folks who have been in Berlin, are mainly interventions and not job coaching. So that's the piece that, you know, you say, wait a minute, it sounds like we've had the same people, but East Montpelier, they've been good to carve out, hey, this person is, you know, Steve, correct me if I'm wrong, but some of them are like, Christy, oh, I can't, Kathy Christy, thank you. Kathy Christy, it's two first names. I'm, like, switching my head is, Kathy Christy was, you know, she says, you know, for half of my time, I'm dedicating to job coaching the other half and dedicating to interventions. And we did that with other personnel she knows. Well, so I'm not an expert on East Montpelier, but we might also provide a good model for what effective coaching, effective amount of coaching in-house can do compared to ineffective amount when you compare our literacy and math results. Yeah. Because we were rich on our literacy and we were poor on our math and the results are dramatic. I don't think that's a question I'll have. It's dramatic. Yeah. We have the interventionist, but not coaching. And I think that's a piece of it. Yeah, that's how it's true. Yeah, because in math, they moved the needle on frame-reduced lunch to students on literacy. They made greater improvement than the other students did. Both students improved. And that was through the teaching. Yeah, through the teaching, the coaching, the coaching, and the interventions. You have to have all three. You got to have all three. And I think we're making that slight move at real end with literacy than on math. Right. And so with math, right now, there was at East Montpelier this past year and the past school year, there was about a half time of literacy coaching and a .1 of math coaching. So there's that amount you have to have. And having a building-based, you know, if we could be there, that's where I would be. I would have, I mean, I would say it right tomorrow. If I could do that, I would do that because it's, I had that same experience when I was a curriculum director. I had title funds up in Orleans Southwest and we were able to move it and we were able to put a literacy and math coach in every building because we had title funds. So when you see a building-based, someone who's always in the building. Always in the building, doing that work. So does Middlesex not have anybody in the building? They have a literacy interventionist who does a little bit of coaching and then they have an MTSS coach that's a part of time. What about Worcester? They just has a, actually through title grants, they have someone that can do some coaching and literacy and interventions. They do not have a math coach. Cal's has two folks that do interventions. They try to do some coaching on the side, but it's just, you can't be doing it on the side. You've got to have it as part of your day. And the coach's model is about a third of their time is doing their own professional development. So they're improving themselves to help improve others. To kind of go to your question earlier, Carmen, you know, does this improve? You know, I can sometimes be the stick in the mud of increasing expenditures. But outside of East Montpelier Elementary School, I think we still have a math, a need to make some significant math improvements across the issue. So in my mind, it may not even, I don't want to go there. I would still rely on the administrators to allocate where it was needed. But I would hope if we bumped coaching that it will make some impact around math. Yeah, we needed that. There's two pieces with that in the math side. It's easier to find a literacy coach than it is to find a math coach. And people that are math, very good at accomplished math coaches, they can choose where they want to work right now in the state of the month. That's the iron climate. So you have to be out early. You have to be out really early to get them. And you have to have a way that's attractive to do it. I saw six or eight math coaches that were in place in the Moio County. They all now work in Chittenden County. They get paid more. They have a more attractive job. They have more flexibility. And they have more... They have a defined... They are jumping buildings that are in one building. So I... You know, you're not going to get a lot of argument on me about hiring another, you know, teaching coach for sure. I would want to say that, you know, I think we're sort of wrestling with this larger question right now. And this is something I would say to all the boards as well as to you, Bill. You know, we're sort of looking at the big picture-wise, like we want to improve, you know, our math performance across the school system. And we're trying to look at, like, what kind of targets do we want to set? Like, is there going to be this or that or how many kids proficient or, you know, using what techniques or whatever. So there's a larger question for me. This goes to what I think Kara was asking was, is this the particular thing that is number one on the list or will move the needle the farthest or and then what are the other things also that, you know, we might consider, like, as a set. So if this is low-hanging fruit and it's like, it's just a no-brainer that, like, even if we weren't having that conversation, we'd be doing this. So the research on school performance and school, I'm going to use the word that's in the literature, school improvement, says that until you're starting to about 75 to 80 percent of your kids meeting the target you set for them, you have to provide support to improve the classroom instruction. If you want to make, if you want to, and then after that, really interventions start to do it. But you've got some sort of practice of what's called tier one instruction, which is the classroom instruction. Is that most effectively done through coaching or someone who met that through coaching? It's been the most effective way to do that. And is there a certain level of coaching where if you're not getting there, the effective... So it has to be paired. It has to be paired with the literature that I've read on it. It has to be paired with your super... You have to have everything in alignment. So your practices that you're using for instruction, your coaching, and your supervision and evaluation, all have to be looking at the same target and the same definition of what good teaching is. For either that content area or overall... Overall, I should say, not over and over. So we use a dangerous framework, and then what we say are the best practices instruction for literacy, what are the best practices for that? I just have a suggestion to, in the interest of time, make sure that you get to your answer. So we have the question about the fund balance. I think that the request, I guess, of this conversation is, we're certainly interested in seeing what investing in another instructional coaching position would look like. But I guess at least for myself, if nobody objects, I would also say... I agree with you on getting what other opportunities are there that we could... Yeah, I want to give you some latitude, I guess, is what I'm saying. We're interested in interventions or investments that will improve student learning outcomes. So feel free to be creative. I will tell you the next leadership team, because of what we heard back from the board at the SGU meeting, we're doing a lot of work on what are those other things we want to do. There's been some miscommunication, thinking that Nate Levinson, what he said was our model, our model's an implementation plan. Nate Levinson brought a piece of work that's part of a multi-tiered system of support. Nate Levinson is not our plan, the plan is the implementation plan. And just to remind us all, Bill's been saying over and over again, money is just one piece, actually there's a lot of thing for our buck by just changing our practices. And changing our structures within the schools. I'm not talking about changing. Which is probably quite harder in some ways. More difficult. Scheduling what people do for work? Yep. All the... More specialized. More specialized teaching. We're asking elementary teachers to do a job that's not difficult anymore. When you need to basically form master's degrees to teach more subjects. It's hard to do. I get a lot of respect for trying to do it. I think that's what's in my opinion, because I might need data to support it. But that can be part of what the math problem is. That a lot of... That's not an area of expertise that a lot of elementary school teachers bring. Right. So are we comfortable? Yep. So if there's... We have our next meeting on the 20th. Would you like me to have Jan come and talk about coaching? I think great. I'll ask her if she can do it. Yeah, it is. And thanks, Lori, for being here. It would... It would... What about the accounting software? Yeah, it's on the website. It's on the website. It's on the website. Thanks for giving us some information on the 15th. So if there's nothing else, we're adjourned at 6.