 March 22nd, meeting of the Allenton finance committee and tonight we are hosting the school department. Wow. Their presentation for their questions. Dean, do you want to do introductions? Yeah. So. Quick thought. So. As we all know, the school department is the largest budget in the town when you add in non-direct school expenditures. So the capital budget pension cost that people who are coming by ATR and things like that becomes a big number, which is why we invite the school administration and we spend pretty much the whole night. We have a robust discussion. And you know, we tend to ask a lot of tough questions, but we respect all the entire way. Right. To that end on respect, I'm going to share my one pet peeve. I know people around know this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I do believe part of decorum is it going referring to school leadership in a very formal tone. Right. I do call it Tom Andrews Sandy. I do not call the superintendent whatever her first name is. Okay. And that's what I believe because I believe it, it, it maintains the ability of a topic that becomes quite passionate along the way. So. Um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, They recognize that they picked a great superintendent and so in the last couple of weeks, they finalized a five-year extension. I did a long long extension break with our current superintendent and so hopefully she will be here. They got, they do like five more of those. I think they get to close to retirement. We can just keep the train running or everything will be good. So that's about it. So without further ado, it's my distinct pleasure to introduce to you everybody. I think for the first time in person, Dr. I was the phone superintendent of schools and assistant superintendent of my voice. And with them, school committee members. Oh, yeah, them. Okay. Thank you so much for an introduction. Thank you, Mr. Hi everybody, I'm Liz Homan is wonderful to be here in person. This is quite a treat. We did this all via zoom last year and so it's really nice to see faces. And I'll hopefully be able to put a few more faces names as we go along. I'm going to get us started and then I will be handing it over to Mr. Mason to talk through some of the numbers with you. And then, of course, we'll take all of your questions and look forward to discussion afterwards. I want to begin by introducing some of the sort of foundations of the school department's budgets proposal for this year and grounding it in some priorities. But of course we always like to start with the kids. We're proud to put the students artwork on the front cover of the school department's budget last year and this year. And so here's some fabulous artwork from our Arlington young artists. Gracing the cover of this year's FY 24 budget proposal. I want to begin a little with a little bit of an overview of some of what we've been up to over the past year or so. When I visited when we visited you a year ago, we were talking about district level goals for that school year. In the meantime, we're going to talk about the things that we've been doing for the past year and the next year. So we've been working on that for a long time, or since then we have engaged in a pretty comprehensive process with members of the school and town community to create a five year strategic plan for the school district. That includes a new vision statement, mission statement, four strategic priorities that I'll talk about in a moment, and three initiatives under each of those priority areas, some of which of course have costs associated with them in order for us to do some of the strategy that the community has associated with them. And then we have a smaller contingent of that group, comprised mostly of family members of APS students and staff members in the system to develop the initiatives themselves and the actions that's associated with them. And then we went through the exercise of associating dollar amounts with each of those initiatives so that we would have a five year budget outlook as well associated with the strategic plan. So once we developed the plan itself, that budget impact outlook is helping us make some assumptions about what will guide our budget planning for the next five years. And it has guided a lot of the planning for the FY 24 budget that you have before you. So I want to begin by sharing our vision and mission statement for the Arlington public schools. I'll not read these to you, but what I will highlight are some of the things that are particularly important to us as a school department. So I'm going to go ahead and share with you some of the things that are particularly important to us as a school department as we began the school year and as we've thought about this budget. Really at the core of the vision is that we are striving for equity. We are striving to be a community that really foreground equity and has it as the central spine of the plan itself, not as a separate initiative, but as the core of what we're trying to accomplish, making sure every single student and all students can access all of the resources that we provide in the Arlington public schools. So central to that vision is that all learners that includes adults will feel like they belong and that they will experience growth, which is sometimes uncomfortable. But through experiencing growth and learning, they will also encounter joy and connection with their peers and with their colleagues, which will empower them both to shape their own future and contribute to their communities, which we know is one of the wonderful assets of Arlington engaged community. We want our students to be part of that into the future. The four strategic priorities are central to the goals that we will set every year and the initiatives and the action steps that will guide them. So we have four areas that we've used as sort of our guideposts for making decisions about budget. If it doesn't fit within the plan, then it doesn't fit within our budget priorities. So we really are trying to make sure that we are looking ahead at what's going to get us towards that vision and what is aligned with the initiatives. If it's not aligned with the initiatives, then whether it's part of previous budgets or part of the new one, then maybe we need to exclude it. And so when we talk about the numbers, we'll highlight where there are efficiencies. Efficiencies are things that we think we can do without so that we can do some new things. And we've been doing our best to be as transparent about those as we can. So our four priority areas. The first one, ensuring equity and excellence is really about teaching and learning for kids. The second one, ensuring that all of our staff, including all staff is about making sure that all of our staff feel included in the work that we do every day and that their expertise is able to be brought to the table and developed. The third one, improving infrastructure operations and sustainability is about making sure that all of our teachers and staff have all that they need to do everything they need to do for students and that our facilities are up to date, modern and inclusive for all of our kids. And sustaining collaborative partnerships. So that we can make sure that all of our staff, all of our staff members from our community, we're taking feedback in and we're adjusting our programming in accordance with whatever their needs are. So the priorities and highlights that you'll see in the FY 24 budget that you likely seen in your review of our materials. We had several priorities that were guiding the decisions that we made about the budget this year. One is increasing enrollments at the secondary level. While our enrollments are leveling off at the elementary level, they are increasing at the secondary level. And there are different licensure requirements for teachers at the secondary level versus at the elementary level, which means that as enrollment increase at the secondary level, we have to make sure we have the sections at the middle schools and at the high school to accommodate the growing number of students at the secondary level. We want to make sure that we're ensuring equitable distribution of support staff at the elementary and secondary level. We've had an increase in English learners and students with special with IEPs for special needs at some of the elementary schools. So we adjust staffing levels at those schools to make sure that we're accommodating the needs of those students. We want to expand the capacity of the system to address our achievement and opportunity gaps that's tied to that equity and excellence priority one on the previous slide. We're working on expanding our operational capacity in response to organizational growth. So as we gained students over the past several years, that puts additional strains on our central office employees and support staff and transportation. And other needs that we then have to accommodate as well. We also need to staff the new Arlington high school building that building came with a lot of programming expectations associated with it and new programs that are very exciting, but those new programs obviously require teachers to implement them and staffing to supervise them. And obviously planning for the implementation of that five year plan. So some of the things you'll see aligned with those priorities in the budget are additional English learner teachers to match increased enrollment of English learners, students who are in the process of learning English and need to be brought up to fluency very quickly so that they can engage in grade level programming. An additional 0.5 special education team chair at the Gibbs to reflect an increased enrollment and IEPs at the sixth grade level. Additional elementary librarians in accordance with the five year long range budget plan that the school committee developed several years ago as well as in accordance with the new strategic plan that we're worked on recently. Licensed elementary math interventionists. This is if there's an efficiency associated with that that Mr. Mason can speak to our icon later. More teachers like I said at the middle and high school level to support growing enrollment and additional operational staff in the business office, the AHS brand new beautiful auditorium, town and facilities and a few other key areas. So that I will turn it over to Michael Mason who will talk to you about a lot of numbers. Good evening again. Finance committee members and those that are remote. I'm not sure how many of those are remote. Thank you for having us here tonight. So this. Let's start off with talking about enrollment. And so what you'll see in the on this slide. That you've been said before. Early before this meeting is that there's a. Six years of actual enrollment and a five year projection. I'm not sure how many of those are remote. That is a six years of actual enrollment and a five year projection included as well as compared against a prior enrollment projection that was done in the last one was done in August 2016 by McKibben. And that is what you'll see in the arms line. I'm showing a moment. A moment trend that was increasing and then eventually level off in the coming years. And then you'll see that compared to our actual enrollment with internal projection, which is the green dotted line. That green, that green dotted line has a projection of. These are the weighted average. Five year rated average. And that weighted average has been. It's actually a frozen snapshot of our projection. Our trends that were we were seeing prior. To the pandemic. That projection has been held pretty true. In terms of, you know, projecting our enrollment in terms of what we were expecting for students. Then we also, due to the pandemic, we did contract out to another vendor. Called the city insight, which is now power schools. And they provided two different projections. A conservative and a moderate projection. Those are the purple and I would say greenish brown. That's up there. I may be a little cold disoriented, but that's what you'll see in those two projections. The moderate projection shows a similar projection trend to the McKibben, but at a lower rate, not showing a recovery after the pandemic per se. And you'll see that the conservative was actually showing something that is highly unrealistic. And it's not the trend that we've been seeing. Go to the next slide. So this slide is the last five, the last four years of the revenue that we were receiving for the funder operations for all the public schools. We've received funding funds from several different sources. Those sources include obviously the local tax payers, contributions. As well as grant funds. Some of those have great funds over the years been COVID, COVID-19 over the last COVID-19 related grants over the last few years. So that will be, you know, our phone and then we have some extra related plans. Every student succeeds. And that was tied to providing support for COVID. Then we have our special revenue. Those are. Those sources include obviously the local tax payers, those are revenues that we receive for tuition that we charge maybe for our preschool students. And as well as renting out spaces and any services that we may provide to the community that we are collecting fees for. And it also break out the local kind of the town appropriation in two categories, which just kind of give you a comparison of between what the actual local contribution is from the tax payers in Arlington. And the chapter 70 state aid, which is a formula that it provides affordable funding across the state. So as you'll see is that the town appropriation is the largest portion of our budget, which is what we come to seek support or from the town every year to support our students. And that, that includes that it's part of the long range plan formula. And so of that formula, there's different various revenue sources that funds the town's budget, which includes the chapter 70 state aid. And then obviously the local contribution that the tax payers out. And then they're very small portions circuit breaker, which is a reimbursement that we receive the town receives for special education at a district tuition, which is, you know, when we have, when we send students to outside schools for services that we cannot provide, we get reimbursed. When they pass a certain threshold. And as well as I spoke to the grants and special, special revenue before. That same pie is then we're looking at when we're developing our budget to split up. And in a split up into six budget transfer categories. And as well grants. And so those budget transfer categories include administration costs that's cost the lead and run the district curriculum instruction to support the instruction has happened in the classrooms. Secondary and elementary education, which is based on the great levels that are supporting the general education population and a special education, which supports throughout the continuum. And even out the students that are receiving support outside schools. And you'll see that elementary and secondary education and this proposed budget is pretty even in terms of how we're funding it. And then special education is another 25%. We'll go to the next slide. And so this breaks down what are our total, how our total budget comes to the total number of this year, operating budget. So our total budget is going to be about $96 million. Once again, this excludes capital spending. This is just the school committee. Control funding. And so. $88.9 million. We're expecting to receive from the town appropriation. And so, and we want to, to the point out that, you know, this year we're seeing a substantial increase in chapter 70. State aid on the town side. We don't necessarily directly receive those funds, but it's part of the funding formula and part of the calculation of getting us that $88.9 million. And that big jump that we're seeing this year is tied to enrollment growth, but as well as the, the continued implementation of the student opportunity after the state level. Then we also, we love to fund our grants. It's hard to predict what the grants will be in the, in the upcoming year. So it's the best that the conservative usually they do grow very slightly. But not as much as the growth to the, to the, to the rate of inflation. So we'll get an update in the summer and we typically go back to the school committee and provide those updates. But in our proposed budget to their level funding. And then we separated out the COVID related grants. So we are carrying over S or three, which is part of the opera funding. We got about 1.3 million, 1.3 million dollars. And as an S related, S or three related funds. And we're going to carry about $900,000 over, which will explain how we're anticipating to use those funds and to spend the last remaining year. We do have to spend it before next fiscal year is over. And then we are anticipating to use about 26% more in our special revenue funds. We're not necessarily meaning we're increasing fees. At that rate, it means that we are upticking some of our spending. And our balances. And then circuit breaker is actually has, we've seen a reducing revenue and you'll see that our, out of district tuition, which is with direct reimbursement to a district tuition and transportation. Since that has gone down, we're going to see that revenue source go down. So overall, we're going to see about a 4.9 million dollar increase year over year from our prior to the budget that we're currently out. So overall, let's give you a high level summary before I hand it over back to Dr. to explain some of what we're going to do with our additional funds. But overall, we have about including the S or three spent additional funds. We have about $5.4 million that we're factoring for a budget increase. When you factor in, after you take out contractual obligations, things that we've already negotiated that we are obligated once we're subject to appropriation, we have about 2.4 million that we have to pay right off the top. After that, we're anticipating this year on the state has released the rates already for fiscal 24 for out of district placement. Based on our anticipated enrollment. We're see we're expected rates are expected to go up, or they are going to go up by 14%. That was set by the operating services division of the state. And we also are expecting to see utility increases. The new high school. Operates efficiently, but there's a lot more services, like a lot more equipment that's being used. And so, and this doesn't take account that we're seeing a large impact for our budget this year, but we're expecting the new contracted rates to actually come in. So right now we're paying market rates for the current high school building project or the high school building. And we will be walking in a newer rate that is not as expensive as the prior rate to the old bill. That's actually a 30% cost increase. Department budget adjustments are basically Department heads, principals, school leaders. We part of the budget process. They come in, identify. Okay, here's the things that we'd like to spend on. about $585,000 for their discretionary spending and their budgets to support direct instruction to students and to provide supplies and materials to the teachers. And that leaves us after taking out about reviewing positions and looking at what we do not need or what we possibly can do without, we take about $1.1 million to leave us with $2.8 million for proposed additions for the fiscal 24 budget. I'll hand it over to Dr. Oman if he wants to talk about what he wants to do. So listed here, and we're happy to answer questions about any individual ones of these, but I'm not gonna read through each of the next several charts. Just pull out a few highlights and then we can go into more detail as you all have curiosity about any of them. But this is a list of the efficiencies. These are essentially things that might have come out of the budget this year. Some of them are in order to restructure. So as an example of that, the communications director grants in Title I is a role that a lot of different tasks have been sort of consolidated into a single role. We don't have a communications department in the school department. We have sort of that sort of lumped in with grants in Title I management right now. And so part of the strategic plan is to create a welcome center for families that will also address them and the needs of our growing English learner population allow for increased availability of translations and interpretation services for families. And it breaks that communications and grants roles into two separate roles. And so that's an efficiency because it comes out of the budget in order to create the additional too. So what you will see here is that there are things listed here as efficiencies that allow us to then reallocate those funds towards something maybe a little bit more strategic. The math intervention paraprofessionals is another example. We've been trying to work towards having more licensed professionals doing intervention work with students. In other words, having a licensed interventionist who is licensed in mathematics, working with students might need additional support in mathematics as opposed to a paraprofessional who wouldn't necessarily be licensed. That comes at an additional salary cost. But we can offset that by eliminating the paraprofessional and adding the licensed professional. We've done a similar thing with special education over the last couple of years where maybe in order to provide service delivery it would be more advantageous for us to have a licensed special educator in the classroom as opposed to a couple of paraprofessionals who can provide additional help and support but it'd be better to have an additional licensed professional in the building. So there are a couple of other paraprofessional roles like the library paraprofessionals that are going towards including a licensed professional in one of the schools. So that explains some of these budget efficiencies. I'm going to walk through additions by level. At the high school we are proposing some increases to classroom teachers to accommodate additional enrollment and section requirements in several different disciplinary areas. Theater manager which is common for districts that have theater like the beautiful one that we have at the new high school. This role will both do some student facing work to sort of help students run and manage the theater as well as allow us to actually spread that space out or use it with the community or other community organizations to make that a highly utilized space for the entire community. The high new high school also comes with a cafe in the sort of main core area and a smart lab sort of a copy center that the district can use to consolidate copy costs and printing costs and do some of our own printing in house. Those two spaces need to be staffed. So we're beginning our work towards that with some point by staffing of those two roles. Some additional special education, reading support and paraprofessional support as well for the high school. At the middle school level we are really trying to accommodate some of the expanding enrollment to some bigger classes move into Odyssey middle school. We have also an increasing number of English learners at the middle school, many of whom are moving in at a level one which essentially means that they don't have any English proficiency and so they're coming in and we're teaching them English from the outset and that requires some additional staffing to accommodate those students needs. We have done a lot of work over the past couple of years to expand the LCs at the Odyssey. So we now have the number of sort of core area classroom teachers that we need with five LCs in each of the two grade levels at the Odyssey. But what we didn't do in those expansions over the past couple of years is add the teachers in facts and some of the elective courses. And so those course classes have gotten very large over 25 students in some cases if the classes are not balanced because of schedule constraints and student services sometimes those classes will be upwards of like 30 and 35 students. So we'd want to bring that down as much as we can and then additional team chairs well to accommodate students with IEPs. So at the elementary preschool and elementary school levels we have a SLC or a supported learning community that's moving from bracket to hearty. That is actually offset by an efficiency in another part of the budget but that's a teacher that's just relocating. We need an additional English learner teacher at the Pierce as well as in special education liaison. We are also doing the math interventionist adjustment at Pierce and Stratton. We did it at Bishop and another school last year but I'm not remembering which one. So that will get us to license math interventionists at every school which is very exciting. The instrumental music teachers is an expansion in response to significantly expanded enrollment in instrumental music. After last year we eliminated the fees for instrumental music at the elementary level and we have more kids who want to play music which is fantastic but we also then need to accommodate the students who would like to participate in that program and we're adding two librarians which I noted one of which is offset by elimination of two library paraprofessionals in the budget. And then at the district level we are doing a number of adjustments this year some of which I spoke to a moment ago. This curriculum specialist one is just a change of title. It's an offset. There was an efficiency associated with that one as well. The communication specialist like I said that one actually I believe the specialist is on Essar. Correct. And the director though is on the general fund budget. So this is the one that is the breakout this and the grant administrator of that role that is currently consolidated into one role. The building systems manager is to aid all of us townwide it's going to be stationed at the high school to sort of ensure that the systems in that new building are tweaked and working efficiently and that all of our automated building systems like HVAC systems and electric systems are running efficiently but will also be something that is shared with the entire facilities department to ensure that all buildings across the Arlington public schools and in the town are running efficiently. We needed at the high school it was built into be some of the assumptions about the high school project and it's going to also help out facilities on the town side to have that role in place as well. And then we have some reserve positions in order to ensure that in the event we were to have some of the surprises with enrollment or needed to make any adjustments to section sizes at the elementary level that we would have the capacity to do that. A few ESSER additions this is how we're going to be planning on using some of the ESSER funds that are still there that we need to use up by the end of the year. We're using these funds to move forward on some of the strategic priorities we have but that we couldn't make room for in the general fund budget. That is to add some diversity, belonging and inclusion specialists to help with professional development tied to the strategic plan. Family and school transition liaison this is something that we think every single school should have as part of their core programming but we don't have any at the moment. So because gives in particular is a school where students go through multiple transitions they go into sixth and then out of six into seven. We're hoping to pilot a transition liaison role there to aid in those transitions and coordinate some work over the summers and with families because that involves a lot of meetings and a lot of handoffs. We want that to go as smoothly as possible. We're adding a director of high school counseling to do some specific mental health and counseling support at the high school. This is a role that would allow for more capacity for the deans also to aid in some of the instructional leadership work that's going on at the high school and is something that will also allow for some scheduling and 504 coordination to be housed in a single place which has been sort of spread out across my school. And the communication specialist is here now. So it's in two spots. Oh, that one. Yeah, there's an error on the previous slide. It belongs here. This is correct. And we launched instructional leadership teams in partnership with the Arlington Education Foundation last year. And they provided a lot of dollars for a stipend so that we could expand shared leadership across the schools and have more leadership teams that teachers were involved in so that they could help do decision making around programming for students. And that's been very successful and very impactful for some of the work we're doing in the schools. And we want to continue to increase some of that teacher leadership across the system. And so we're going to use Esther dollars to continue doing that as the AEF funds expire. And then there are some other one time projects that we're anticipating using Esther for that are in the strategic planning to infrastructure and making sure that our HVAC is up to date and we're still working on exactly what which projects we will use that for. So a timeline, we are here with you tonight. So we are here and we're looking forward to the discussion and to visiting town meeting later on this year. And we're happy to take any questions that you have. Thank you. All right. So questions, Annie. Yeah. So if we could go back very quick like to slide 10 in the presentation. I think we talked to and I'm sorry I should have said Mr. Mason. Okay. I think we talked about this last year but I just want to double check that when you say grants on this slide what you really mean is grant expenses. Yes. This is the out go. Your grant expenses match the grant dollars. In terms of the revenue that we're receiving. Yeah. In other words, can you isolate those expenses and say, yeah, these things are grant funded if the grants went away, these are activities we would no longer do or is it more mixed in with other things than that? So these grants are entitlement grants that are highly unlikely to go away. These grants include funding such as IDEA which is Meaning for Special Education. That's the largest portion of this. But yes, if the funds went away we would have to either have hard conversations about how we would go forward in terms of providing those services if they are still desired and required or eliminate those or whatever resources that were tied to those grants. So those are the isolated grants that specifically for those grant-related purposes. So I'm Title I, IDEA, Title II, Title III almost. And we're doing fund accounting to prove that those activities matched with the grants of the product. And we do time and effort certification so to ensure that everybody who's on those grants are actually provided those services. Providing those services, okay. Can I just add the federal grants as subject to any of your audience? Yes, I assume so, but sometimes I ask questions so that everybody, I don't want to just. Sorry, Pat, have it. So then I just want to say a couple of other things about the budget. First of all, I love any budget where we talk about the budget funding priorities and values. So I really appreciate that that's how you started this conversation. It's a little new. And I'm really excited to see librarians coming to Dash having been traumatized by the removal of libraries for my kids for instance. What could you tell me? So you're putting back two elementary librarians. Are they splitting schools again and how are we covering all? So this is the, the addition of two is actually to accommodate a pilot of a full-time librarian in two of our schools where we had the capacity to eliminate a paraprofessional role at that school and put a fully licensed librarian in that school. The hope being that in another year we might actually be able to return to full-time licensed librarians at all of our elementary schools and that maybe in another year we would have full-time licensed librarians at our two middle schools as well. That's currently split. There's one librarian for the two middle schools. The model that, and I'm happy to speak to this more folks are wondering that we would like to get to is to have a fully licensed librarian at every single school. Splitting that particular tier one sort of core resource across schools means that on any given day you may or may not have a librarian at the school to provide services to students. So what we'd like to get to is a fully licensed librarian and paraprofessionals that are shared to help with cataloging, shelving, leading some of the sort of tasks that go along with the library but are not instructional tasks like knowing which books to put on the shelves, for example. So that's what we're working towards and so the elimination of paraprofessionals works because it gets us closer to sharing the paraprofessionals across schools. Got it. So which schools are in the fight? Pearson-Straton will be the first two. I'm going to stop smiling now. Other than that, this looks great. This is a budget I can understand. Thank you. Other questions? Rebecca. I had a question. Thank you. I had a question about special education out of district. So if I'm looking at page 106, this is my first year on the finance committee, by the way, so maybe there's a history to this that I don't know. If I look at that out of district residential spending from the actual spending from fiscal year 2020, it was all the way at 1.3 million and now we're down to 104,000 which seems miraculous and too good to be true. So do we, what's the explanation for that? Because I'm just used to thinking special education just goes up so quickly because we have out of district is basically flat and residential is down. So thanks for saying, like that's great if that's... Yeah, like out of district tuition varies based on the needs of the students. And what students that we have at that particular time. And I will say that as working closely with the assistant superintendent of student services, they do have a comprehensive tracking system where they have an understanding of the current students that we have, but sometimes the students come in and we're not expecting those students or they have all of a sudden need the services. And so that's why you might see that discrepancy because the residential services are not necessarily as consistent but that's also why the formula and the long range plan, I believe is established a certain way because there's been this unpredictability in the out of district special education standard. And so that would be the simplest way that I could explain this. I hope I answered your question. So I realize, of course, we're not gonna talk about individual kids but is the suggestion that basically like those children out in the Arlington public schools or something or be... They could have outgrown in the Arlington public school district. They could have moved and are no longer in Arlington public school district. They could have no longer needed that particular service and getting a different type of service that might not be as expensive, but... So we have strategy-wise. And I think this graph, which was not in our presentation but it's helpful for understanding this. It can sort of illustrate some of the strategic work we've been trying to do with regards to special education placement. We would rather include a student for as much as we possibly can for as long as we possibly can before we begin to place them in substantially separate programs or out-of-district programs or residential programs. And that effort has been paying off over the last several years. It does mean that we have more students in the district, in our classrooms, in our general education classrooms who require additional services in addition to what the classroom teacher is providing. But what you can see is that the out-of-district line, which is the red line, has gone down over the past. Several years this is showing for the past 10 years. And the in-district special education line, the students we're keeping with us, has gone up. And they've crossed several years ago right in the middle of that graph. And that just means that our spending moves to being in-district services that we provide as opposed to out-of-district, which can be more volatile in terms of we don't set the tuition rates for that. So we don't have as much control over it. And then we don't have as much control either over how those students get placed in services once they are out-of-district. We're part of the team and we still have a coordinator that works with those families, but we're not the primary educators of the student at that point either. So we're really proud of this because it's great that we're keeping the students with us, that they're learning with their peers, that they're getting more opportunity to access the Gen-N curriculum. And it's some of the reason for those changes that you see in the numbers. I get that one thing. That table that you're looking at is also just the general fund spending. So we also spend for out-of-district, we spend from the circuit breaker account. So some years, a different CFO, we have allocated those funds differently. So there probably is more spending on out-of-district residential that's not being shown right now because we're funding, we decided to fund it out of a different pot. So that's a little bit of misleading chart. But goes from the circuit breaker, goes straight to the out-of-district. Like it wouldn't show up on here if it comes. It would show up on a different table. Just that view is a little bit misleading. Some of the schedules are limited to just the town appropriation. I mean, I think moving kids back into district when it's appropriate for them, I think it's fantastic. I was just thinking residential is for the very neediest of kids. And so the idea that the very neediest of kids disappeared or moved into the district was, it is fantastic when they moved into district when that's, when that's needs for kids. And then, sorry, may I ask that question? Yeah, sort of from a longer-term planning perspective, I know that this is impossible to predict. But if you're thinking forward, now that we have this nice new high school, I think maybe there's some expectation that in the future years, if we see more kids in the high school, just because more kids would choose coming to the beautiful Arlington High School with all the fantastic facilities, do you have any guess for whether we expect more kids to be at Arlington High School choosing that over, say, private schools or moving out of charter schools or moving out of Arlington versus kids coming from there? Just because that makes a difference before not spending a minute at what we're spending more on Arlington High. Do you have any sense from what we expect? I wouldn't put a stake in the ground with numbers. I would say it's certainly our hope that the new facility once this, particularly once the next phase opens, will be very attractive for students to either not go to private school or to come back into the high school from private school or to choose the high school over Minuteman as a potential option unless the programming is what works for them. And we, in an effort to ensure that are doing visits with our eighth graders. We did a visit with our eighth graders very early this year before they were having conversations with Minuteman, for example. So that they could see the facility and see the space and sort of understand the programming at the high school a little sooner. So we're gonna continue doing that and do a round of that after we open the second plane to show off some of the new programming we can do. Thank you. Grant, do you have a question? Yes, thank you. So you mentioned the level one students increased. How is number of questions not policy or strategy? How many level one students do we have this year now? I would have to go and gather those numbers. I can say that at, I know that in the first several months of the year, at least 10 families entered the district whose students did not speak any English. So we're level one English learners. At Pierce Addison and Thompson in particular, we've had increases large enough to warrant additional staffing. So you sort of tip over once you have more than 15 students to an English learner teacher who might be going into the classroom with those students and doing pull out specified support, then you want to take a look at your numbers and the levels of those students to decide whether or not you wanna add another teacher. At Thompson and Addison in particular, we had a lot of level one students add in this year that have led us to take a look at staffing levels of those students. Thank you. So that sort of kind of goes into the second question is what, how much would you say the increase is? So we went over some sort of limit, it sounds like, what about 10%, 20%? Again, I'm not gonna answer that without the numbers right in front of me, but we look for about a 15 to one ratio of English learner student depending on the profile and the level of English proficiency of those students. All right. Okay, thank you. Also one other question that I may, but it might be, it's very non-educational, very operational. How are the utilities, I know the costs of, you know, meeting and electricity. How are they shared with the town as the school buildings? How are they shared? Yeah, are they separately built? Yes. Each building is needed separately. So the high school has actually several meters for that example. So the old building currently has, we're running off one meter and then the new building going forward, we'll have one meter, but the current new building is a separate meter. So each building though, usually has at least one meter that is running off and we can build independently for each of those schools. I see, okay. So you need to know from school to school, which ones, you know. Correct. All right, thank you. Other questions, John? Sure. Thank you both for the presentation and for all the work that went into it. Without getting into like all the details, maybe just at a high level. If I go back and look at the budget from FY 2020, there was 6,047 students in schools. This, and then in the current year, there's 5,987. So, you know, pretty much pretty close. Actually a little about 50, 60 student drop. However, there's, if you go back to the FY 2020 budget and you compare it to the FY 2024 budget, there's 82 additional FTEs and then the budget's gone up in addition to the, for those, in that time period, the budget's gone up 14 million. So I'm curious, is that, are there any macro trans driving those increases? Is it COVID? And if it is COVID, should we, you know, consider like a post COVID budget? So any macro trans driving those or is it just a lot of specific details? You can start. So I would say our per pupil expenditure, the only to public schools is below, is a right around median and below average for the town manager 12 for our peer communities. And there are expectations surrounding core programming that we've been working our way towards over the past several years in Arlington that were part of the promises of the previous override and that are built into the APS strategic plan. So just as an example, if I'm asked, you know, what's the core programming, core staffing that you would expect any school to have, any well run, well staff school to have? I just mentioned librarians, we're working towards this. I mentioned technology teachers. We don't have a technology teacher at every school. They're sort of split across multiple schools. We're working towards that. And I would expect that schools are sized to have an assistant principal. We accomplished that in fiscal 22. So that was an addition in fiscal 22 to just have an assistant principal and a principal, two leaders leading each school to have literacy and math coaches is typical in a schools that our peer communities have, they have these roles. We accomplished that in FY23 and math coaches in FY21. As I mentioned, we'd love to have family and community and liaisons, we're just adding one on a grant this year. And then there's the service delivery professionals making sure that we're meeting the needs of our students with IEPs, making sure that we're providing intervention services before we hit a point where a student might need an IEP and then need specialized service. So we need to use ratios like the one I just mentioned for EL, 15 students to one EL teacher to guide when we add and when we don't on that. And we've been improving our capacity to do that over the past few years, which has led to increases in special education spending that are mostly tied to and linked to services. So I would say that a lot of what you're seeing there is tied to us prioritizing professionals, licensed professionals in the classroom over say paraprofessionals. So that will drive salaries because the salaries are higher and programming expectations, making sure that we have these core program staffing as well as the specialized program staffing that we would expect in order to be able to serve the needs of the students. We have COVID contributes to this because COVID created the need for additional staffing and health services over the course of the pandemic and expectations around what health services will look like and health response time will look like, special and social, emotional and mental health needs. And we have now more students for presenting with potentially intervention needs or special education needs. And we're trying to make sure we can meet those as quickly as possible to avoid having students in less inclusive spaces. So that'd be my prediction for what's driving some of those. Yeah, okay. That makes sense. And then like I said, I could get into the weeds. I don't want to bore everybody, but like for instance, like the Hardy School seems to have nine new FTEs. It was enrollment were down there. I don't know if something's going on at the Hardy School. Which potential differences in how that's going to be. So the budget's up by 1.3 million. I could go up and down the whole thing. It seems like the HR department is up significantly. The business department is up significantly. So I'm just wondering is it, has there been a top to bottom analysis, you know, for the post COVID world? But I mean, the explanations you gave were great, but I'm just wondering, you know, are there some other costs that we should be looking at too? Yes, so what I will add to Dr. Holman's response is that, so some of the FTEs and you're going through various budget processes is also cleaning up data. And so what you're also seeing is that there's a variance because when I started doing the budget process and coming into Arlington and what was previously put into the budget are shown in the budget book versus what you're seeing. So sometimes year to year, looking at the numbers is not actually the best way, even like try to delve and do an analysis. What I also will add is that, like for example, for the Hardy School specifically, is that during the pandemic, there were lower paid staff added to the budget in anticipation of absences, the cover absences for teachers and staff and also just requests in terms of how to cover space that supports student spaces. Like they were looking for an example would be almost like a campus aid, but they were like building substitutes where they would support the students between moving between like going to the bathrooms and watching space like that. So we increase the budget and you'll see that in the budget in those years during the pandemic. But yes, their enrollment did decline for that specific answer, yeah. To your question about do we do analysis to assess increases in budget or staffing to a particular school against enrollment, against like needs, the answers? Yes, we do, and this is a new habit of ours to do roster reviews with each of the principals and building leaders as a component of the budget process that we undertake so that we are asking that very question, what is it that can be eliminated or added to based on the needs of the kids in that school at that time? Hardy has also acquired a learning community from the bracket. So we've moved some staff over and we're also working to make sure that we code positions to the schools as often as we can in the budget and that isn't necessarily the way historically positions have always been coded. Sometimes they've been coded system wide and as we get more positions into, for example as we have more elementary literacy coaches coded to a specific school because we finally got to have one at every school or we get a librarian coded to the school because we finally got to one at every school that's gonna show up as a new school FTE even if FTE came off of the system wide roster and so it will look like an increase there. So if you don't offset it against all of the other areas we're moved around, we won't catch that. Yep, however though, like I said that I mean, it sounds like you are doing the analysis but that wouldn't necessarily explain the system wide increase of 80 FTEs. In other words, I see the reclass and how you keep your records and data may change year to year, I can completely understand that but again in the day, it does seem like 80 plus additional FTEs over that period. And programming can explain a lot of those adjustments we think improvements and increases to programming as expected. Additional service. Thank you. Yeah. First of all, I apologize for this. I think I'm duplicating what Annie asked but I just didn't hear the conversation. You're eliminating our communications and grant person in finance and then adding a grant administrator at a reduced level and a director of communications at a much higher level. Is that what's happening? Yes. Do you feel like you're fully using AYCC? Yes, they provide excellent services to our schools. So we refer students where we hit a level of service that we can't provide with the social work that we have in the system. We have an agreement with them in the amount of $30,000? Yeah, $38,000. $38,000 every year for them to provide additional counseling services at our schools and then we use that referral service with them and they'll come to our schools and provide services alongside our social workers. And my final question, I don't know is I know you're in the process of a plan. I can't remember if you called it a three year or a five year plan going forward. Maybe this is more of a suggestion than a question. And I made the same comment at the Long Range Planning Committee meeting, but in June of 26, which is only three years away, we're facing a possible override and something in the range of $20 to $25 million. As part of your plan, are you putting together sort of an emergency budget reduction? I was thinking about that. Yeah, the plan is built by the community and what the community has said that they are hoping that the schools will provide. And so we would certainly have to do if there were to be a failed override and emergency budget set of considerations and we would use some of the same processes that we've engaged in in trying to find efficiencies for the budget in order to do that. It would be a much more challenging process to do that if we were to have to engage in that now because we would have to take away services that we know are needed in order to do it. But no, the five year plan is a forward-looking plan developed by members of the community to reflect what the community feels the schools need to do. It doesn't include that sort of scenario. But you have it in mind. We have it in mind. Good, thank you. Sophie? So past year, so due to federal lawsuits, there's this proportionate share plan where public schools, private schools in a community can ask for public school support to go into the private schools. Have our private schools in Arlington asked Arlington Descendant Service providers and how does that show up in the budget? So that falls under our grant funding. So we have proportionate share in the IDEA special education grant and each year... Entitled. Yes, I mean, yes, entitled, entitled one. And each year, the private schools do get a portion of the grant to use. And we're allowed to carry it over for, I think, two years and then we are supposed to be posted to the schools in the community before we decided to turn it back or maybe they could not spend their funds. So that's the process that's been in place and those would be part of that 3% of grants. Those dollars are in there. It's not 3%, but it's much smaller than that. And mostly they use it for professional development and sometimes supplies and materials for the PD and for students. So are you actually, are you actually sending staff to do support for students on site at the private schools then? So there are staff that are on site for those schools that are participating in those funds or receiving them in those funds. We have students who receive services from us who might be a student at a private school. They receive those services on our site from our service providers. So that wouldn't be... So you haven't gone, because I know in Cambridge, some Cambridge providers go to the private school, but we haven't sent anybody into the private school yet. There's two different programs that we're talking about. But bottom line is that there's the program where there's staff that we pay that get professional development and that they are provided services at the private school. And then there's the services that we... Our service providers, they come to us. That's not the portion, Sharon. Right. Thank you. Other questions? Charlie. Thank you. Just to mention, and Dr. Holman, I want to say that this presentation and budget continues the tradition of increased clarity and transparency and visibility that we saw last year. It's just a pleasure to have you graduate before. Of course, the increased visibility and transparency leads to additional questions. So I have three questions, three areas I'd like to ask a question about. So the first is, as John was mentioning, he had this high little view about the changing number of personnel and the riding costs. And you had some answers about the past three or four years which were made sense to what was happening there. But on your website in February, you posted the first version of your budget and there was a table in their position control table that showed fiscal year 23, fiscal year 24 salaries and FTEs. More or less the FTEs were around 1,000 and the increase between 23 and 24 was 0.8%, I think six people. Which I think reflects very well on your focus on efficiencies and trading, you know, one position for another that's not necessarily needed or whatever. However, the salary increase for the same number of people went up by 13%. Now this included all the positions in the school system, I believe. If not, you can tell me that, but I think it does. So what troubles me is that you mentioned earlier about the teacher's salary level. And I've been doing some research. There is state data on teacher salaries levels going back to about 2017, maybe, I'm not sure. Certainly the Arlington teacher average salary level is below the median in the state. But the rate of increase is in the top, it's about number 40 out of the state, 4.4% a year. Higher than the rate of increase in most of the, I think it's higher than at least some of the town manager 12, I haven't looked at all of it. The last couple of years, the average salary, teacher's salary Arlington went up 2% to 4%, I forget which year it was. So let's go back to 23, 24. And I don't know how many teachers were in that position control table versus non-teaching positions. But let's just take the assumption that 60% of teachers and 40% are not teachers. If the 60% are getting an average increase of 24%, let's say 3%, then the remaining 40% are getting a 30% increase to come up with that 13% average. I mean, this is the mean value here. It's the way mathematics work. So my question is, if the first question of three is if the position count is essentially the same and the salary increases are going up by 12.9% and a big chunk of the personnel are not getting 12% increases, who's getting all the money? Good question. And why? And I think this reflects on John's comment that we need to have, I think we need to have a little more discipline in a top-down look at the entire budget. And the elephant in the room is that in the five-year plan, at least the last one I saw the school department is looking for $9 million increase in the next three years. And I think where we are should be informing us as to where we're gonna go. And we don't wanna, I certainly don't wanna go someplace where we're gonna be given 30% increase just to some component of the staff. And so that's the first question. I don't know what your thoughts are on that. So answer your question first in regard to the positions, right? So overall we're seeing, we are seeing increases of positions in this budget. And so when you look at that position schedule or at that time, it reflected also new positions being added. So that variance, unless you back up those new positions, you may not have the actual correct increase, right? So your number was including the increase of those positions. We did, in the newer version, we had removed it out. So understood that it's not as transparent in that sense right now to make the point that you wanna make, but those positions would need to be back up. So that's not 30%. On average, people are seeing about a 4.5% increase, which you had shared, Mr. Foskett earlier about Arlington in terms of seeing the average teacher salary increase. Part of that is a factor of many things. Oh well, a couple of things. That is partially based on higher on practice. That the people that are part of that, of the comparative years are not the same group of people. And so when we are actually hiring staff, more, their principals have been looking at more talented staff that are demanding more money coming in. And so when they're coming in, they're coming in at higher stops and they're not growing much after they come to those highs. They may come in at step nine or 10 versus coming in at step two or three. And we top off at step 12. And they're not, some staff are coming in and then they're finding it, oh, it's better to get paid in Cambridge because they pay a lot more over there. And it's not necessarily comparable to the communities that we compare ourselves to because coming into 12, there some are nearly like right next to us, about against us. And then some of them are in different parts of the state, but the communities that are right next to us are paying substantially more. And so when we're talking about like long-term planning is that we have to create something that's competitive to show when we're trying to recruit people beyond just placing them on a table. So what you're seeing when you're talking about these figures is more about practices that are in place, per se, when hiring, not really showing that our teacher contract is moving these teachers at a faster rate. It's more that teachers are coming in and going out or staff is coming in and going out and we're hiring at higher rates to be competitive. Okay, that's a sort of a subjective answer to quantitative question. But I guess at some point I'd like to understand what drives that 13% increase when you have the bulk of the teacher group not getting any idea of the 13% increase. So what's it gonna, I would love to have a conversation with you offline about in terms of the numbers that you're looking at because I think you're including new positions that are added at higher rates. I'm including all the positions in the position control team. That include new positions. Zero point eight percent growth one year to the next in FTEs and almost 12.9% growth in total salaries. So okay, let's not drive that horse into the ground. The second question is you have $937,000 here in new answer positions this year. That money is gonna go away. Are those positions gonna go away or are you trying to roll those positions into the override program? You're very careful about what we place. Yeah. Before you answer that. It's not that much money. That's why we want to clarify. So it's misleading to say it's $930,000 being added as positions because it's about five to 600,000. It's much to be aware of that. Is your total? No, that's other one time spending. It's at the bottom. So if you look at the slide, it's other one time spending, meaning those are not gonna get added to the base. They haven't, the exact spending hasn't been identified or approved by the school committee yet. So if I may interrupt and just rephrase the question, then is the 600,000 or so gonna be rolled into the base budget or is that just? So a few of the positions before Dr. Holman responds, two of those positions may not move into the regular budget because they are one year positions. Okay, that was my question. Yeah. Yeah. And the others of them are trial positions that we want to try out. It's really temporary spending. Decide whether it goes into the base budget. So the third question is somewhat similar to what Rebecca raised before about the space entity spending. And I think, Mr. Mason, you know that this is one of my favorite topics. Yeah. I again, if you look at what Arlington reports to the state on special education spending, that number through what I consider good management on the part of Arlington is going down. And if you look at the last five years weighted average, it's probably 5.5% in traditionally the school, the system has asked for 7% growth in that spending category every year. And we're realizing 5.5%. And I know this year, I think it's 6% or 6.5% in your budget, the proposed growth. Why aren't we forecasting what the weighted average tells us we're actually spending? That's a good question. Mr. Fox, this is what Mike appeared real quick. And I can tell you that I'm looking at the, if you were to look at the compound annual growth for special and spending. I've looked at all the numbers. Yeah, I'm telling you based on, if you look at, so the five year compound annual growth rate is showing, yes, a trend that you would say that would show a substantial decrease, right? But if you actually look at it, it's more closer to 6% currently with the concluding our 2022 data that hasn't been released yet. I don't know what, I got it from the state and I just took their tables and it was a little bit more than 5.5% compound annual growth. So maybe it is 5.8% or something, but we're forecasting 6.5%. And I just think, you know, if the, it's a testimony to the improved performance of the system, of the school system that this number is going down. And that should be reflected in our budget. That's my, it's just a summary. So if I could just make one more comment, I appreciate that point. We do have to be mindful that there's the fluctuation of special education out of district spending. And so one point that we made in this year's budget, I presented today, was that there's a 14% increase in OSD and the enrollment, even though it's been showing downward trends, does not mean it's not going to fluctuate. And it's, I mean, it can go up and we're not anticipating that. And we don't have a way to really buffer us from that. So we do, I think it's very important to be mindful of that. So just a question. I thought that we at town meeting approved a number of years ago, a special reserve account to handle, I can't remember whether it was on the school side or the town side, but we have somewhere an account to handle the big fluctuations in special education. And we're supposed to be putting some money into that every year. The reserve account doesn't have enough money to handle the types of, could you ever stand up and speak a little louder? Actually better, my back's a little tighter. The reserve account doesn't have enough money, can't have enough money to handle the source of variation that we can see. But the other thing is that, do we have the table that shows the ages of the kids? So one of the things that we've been doing is keeping a lot of the kids in district. And no, that's not. This is a different way to look at it. We'll do it. It doesn't, okay. This is based on different groupings of middle school, elementary and middle high school. So. Okay, which, you know, what's what? So the yellow students here are high school students out of district. And this is from 2017 to 2022. So yellow is high school students who are out of district. Red is middle school students who are out of district placed and blue is elementary level students who are out of district place. You see the overall decline. And as students are aging out, that yellow bar gets smaller and smaller. So as students continue to age out, that all of the bars will go down and that yellow bar will eventually age out over the next seven years. But doing that means we're spending more in the schools, in district. And not all of that spending is coming on the special education. That's right. Okay. What is so important to the state? You're required to report these things to the state. You have to have, you have to believe that you're giving the state the correct information. So I don't want to argue anymore, but the only other suggestion I would like to ask is, there's no reason why if this money, if this is declining, that we should not be taking, if you're going to go in 6% or 6.5%, you should take the back, the difference between the 5.5% actuals and the 6.5 and put it into reserve funds and handle fluctuations. If there's no money in the reserve fund, it's because you haven't put money in it. I'm not upset. I'm sorry to be aggressive here, but I do think it's a great budget. I think the presentation is great, but if we're looking at $9 million increase in the school spending the next five years, we need to have a, I think a more disciplined approach to these various spending categories and push them down, not have large increases. Jennifer. Thank you. So you might imagine I'm going to defend the schools. So one of the stories seems like they were telling us is that we've seen increasing professionalization. So some of the concerns that Clayton Charlie was raising is that you have part of professionals being taken off the books, but you have a library professional who's making a lot more money, right? So it's not that a single individual is getting 30% increase. You have people who are making a lot more money. And the other story that you're telling us is a story that with us for the taxpayers that we really are getting to a point where we have a much more functioning school system than we did a few years ago. And I just want to tell you a personal thing. When I came to Arlington, the level of school services, which was very, very fun. So I think the feeling sometimes that the finance committee is at any crisis that, right? But when I came to the school system, we did not have a dedicated nurse. We certainly did not have a librarian. We, say, oh, PTOs are paying for a copy paper, which am I, of course, that's not happening more. The lot of burden on families, kindergarten fees, we had one of the highest sports fees in the area. And then certainly compared to our comparable communities, high instrument fees. My son can then not be able to read in second grade at a level B, never receive services, right? So we have, we are coming into it. We now have a school system that is much, much better functioning. That is actually functioning at the level that an individual is deserved. So I think we have to take that into account when we look at these numbers. I think that everyone in this room is proud of the work that has been accomplished by the schools in the recent year and I don't think we know about that. What we're talking about is just being fiscally wise. Dean. So I'm going to look back to Charlie's question. Like while he was asking and I thought the demonstration, I think might be helpful. Do you have your budget book? With you. Yes. I can bring it over to you. No, it's not that. Yep. We can't pull it up on the screen. No, no, I can articulate what we're talking about. Very simple. So if you go to page 125, yep, which run the position control. You're going to find an account on the program description, 6824 conclusion support. That line item says that we have two FTEs this year making zero dollars. Next year we're going to have one FTE making 32,000 dollars. So if that phenomenon repeats itself multiple times, it creates a picture of a school system that is doing exactly what Charlie was talking about. And I think if you could kind of discuss on what's in FY23 budget actions, whatever, and what's in FY24, it might be, I'll put it on the screen by these quick ones that are showing up in the document. I can share it on the screen. Yes, please. Yeah, okay. Because right now my dad is on a diet. I'm trying to. What page? Go to page 125. Awesome. You go to 6824. That's only a 60 example. Counts 6820 says on your program description, 6824 conclusion support. Page 125. Are you looking at the old budget board? Yeah. On this? Are you looking at the one that was voted? No, I'm looking at the one I printed out. Okay. Let me pull that one up. I have that one too. We can do it either way. I guess my point is, I could find another one. You go to the position control document. No, no, none of us. Which is why I think it's alumni. Which is what Charlie was looking at. What's the page? I'm sorry. Page 125. Page 125, okay. Okay, can we try to make this a little bigger? Page 128, maybe? Page 125. We're throwing it every page. Yeah, I'm going to add that one. You can find the one every page. No, maybe not that one. In the early budget board. Do I want to look at the next page? Yeah, I'm interested. I don't want to look at the next page. This is page 125 with the previously circulated one. No. One of us. Dean, if you pass it over to me, I can pull it. I can spot out exactly what you're looking at. There was a section that wasn't included in an earlier version. It happens. This happens a lot in the early budget. Yeah, yeah. So if you look here, you're 6824, right? 60 to where am I? We're radius. Sorry, 6824. Zero dollars, two FTAs. Page 32,000. One FTA. If you roll this phenomenon down to the bottom, you end up with no change in FTAs because you got two here and one there in different places and then you end up with what appears to be a massive exchange of dollars. Gotcha. And this was corrected later and we removed some lines out of there. So this earlier draft that you're looking at, I apologize if you're pulling that. It was incorrect at that time. If you go to the current document today, some of it, some of the data is not there and some of the FTEs have been corrected due to pivot table back, back door error. So that was going on. So that's been correct. Actually, you can hear that by table that looks like that with us because you can't pull that information out of your current budget reports. So the budget that was sent out with the agenda, just like in the past, I can't remember what day it was attached to the agenda. That's the updated one. It'll have a March 16th date on it and it's like something about voted is in the title of the file. It doesn't have that date. Okay. So the position controls it. So not with the FTEs. So are you looking for the FTEs are on there, what you're looking for is a dollar amounts, which was removed. So a little bit of comparison. Yes. Dollar to dollar and FTEs. Yes. As we were going through further correcting the budget. Due to potential negotiations, we had to remove money, the dollars out in the future. Once everything settles, we will, I will gladly provide that back. We took it, we took it out of the, out of presentation for other purposes internally. So we'll get it back out in the future versions and we'll send it to us. Other questions. Yeah, so I'm getting back to enrollment. Just your models include the new construction that's going on in town. My rap is over a hundred units, 1021 to 1025. Now South is moving through the process, which is probably the 50s. Sunny side places. There's some smaller ones and there's planning department with them. Do your models include any effects of that? So the models, these models that these models would not include those particular changes. There's a lot of variables that, you know, that the models would not catch what it does consider only that based on the data from vital statistics is the birth rates of Arlington. But that doesn't mean that somebody can be born in Arlington and years later the family job work elsewhere and they go somewhere else. Right. It doesn't include real estate trends, sales, agency rates. So that's not included as an assumption. It doesn't also include the new schools pop up, you know, alternative education options pop up, you know, and it doesn't reflect any other economic factors that may come down the line and which may influence people to either stop paying for private schools and bring their students into the public school system. So, just, all right. And then the follow-up to that, I have a couple of small questions. Well, the elementary is overall we're kind of decreasing in the last few years and some have like pretty big drops. Pierce was increasing and it's a small school. So are you running into space problems there? We have the space at that school to house the three sections of each grade level. And that's what we anticipate it's going to level off at. Good. All right. Just to give on to another topic that was brought up to the interventionists, I mean, like the math interventionist part of the point of that, right, is to avoid the need to have a student need substantially separate and enhance more expensive instructions. Okay. Finally, I noticed there in page one or four, the athletic. The fees, but the athletic budget has jumped substantially. Is that due to a reduction in fees or. Well, yes. If you're seeing it on that, that report on the general fund side, it's an uptick because before we used to collect fees and they would be offset by a revolving fund where we would collect. So there are, we did. There was changes to some stipend levels a few years ago where they made a step based on if staff stayed on board for a continuous amount of time, they would get a bump in their stipend. So there are some changes in terms of pay. That's also being considered. Yeah, but these were just, these were very, these were big jumps. Yes. Many time. The budget should be around $850 to $900,000 for the athletic department in total. Final question on that. I noticed that this was ice hockey. The boys ice hockey was way more expensive than the girls ice hockey. I was wondering, you know, what drove that. In terms of, I think it's, um, that's mainly, there's a lump sum payment that we pay to the recreation department for the rental. But it's, it's not just for the boys. It's just where it's being hosted. So that's why you'll see that big up job for that. Yeah. Cause one is like, the boys was like a hundred thousand and the girls was like 18,000. Yes. There's a, there's about a $60,000 charge in there that we pay. There's recreation department. And you're just accounting for them. All right. On the issue of sports, I noticed that we're starting a ski team. I don't know how many communities around here have ski teams. I do not know the specifics on Nordic skiing. In the immediate area, there are, the new ski team is a Nordic skiing cross-country skiing. Um, that was very much advocated for by members of the community. And there are a few, but I don't know exactly how many. Um, and then we also have the, you know, Alpine ski team that has existed for the last couple of years. That several communities have. And Nordic is using Western? West them ski center. I'm tapped to ask. Mr. Do you have other questions? Um, so some of them are simple. Which schools do not have a librarian elementary schools at the moment? stratton. The rest of them share the other librarians that are in the department. And is there a reason it's there appears some stratton and not elsewhere? That mostly has to do with with funding the additional librarians through attrition and current staffing of paraprofessionals. So we want to be we want to try not to disrupt too many people's jobs in the process of adding new goals. Okay. What are some of the additional services? I mean we've heard some of them what are the big ticket items? In terms of academic services and interventions. Which which let's do let's start with academic. Okay. One of the goals of the strategic plan and some of the things we've been working on really recently is making sure that we get early intervention services in particularly reading and math to students as soon as they signal so that they need it. So we do more assessment now particularly in early literacy. This has been an ongoing initiative over the past several years to do additional reading instruction that's aligned with the science of reading and have additional interventionists available for students who need it. Because they signal on a screener which is also a service like we have to pay for the screener software and the materials to do the screen. And then we have the coaches who kind of help the teachers determine based on the screen who needs additional services and then we make small groups and then the reading specialists will provide services. So that's one example. Math interventionists do sort of a similar role. We have specialists in social studies and science. Those are newer they're not brand new positions but they're newer positions that provide additional curriculum support for teachers and resources in those subject areas so that they can create that as well. And the elementary school. At the elementary level. And then you're talking about losing teachers. Are we losing the novice teachers? Assuming novices first and second year the intermediate teachers three years or more or the advanced ones that are 10 or more? Yeah I don't have numbers in front of me in terms of exactly how many. We tend to but in exit interviews which is sort of the data we collect and we're working on some better tracking and more granular tracking of this over the next couple of years. We have a lot of teachers who stay with us through gaining professional status but who don't live in the immediate area. They might live outside of the 95 quarter and who when they reach a certain point in their career maybe they have children they own one to own a larger home and so they move out and then they will get a job further out closer to home. That is a growing trend I wanted something closer to home we see in our exit interviews. We do have staff who within their first three years might choose to move out and I increasingly see staff moving also in to Cambridge to Newton to other districts that are paying a higher salary and they will tell us the reason why they're moving is because they are higher salary. And there's those ones are within the first three years at least the first three years? The ones that move for higher salary I would say varies between zero and 15 years of experience. Typically our more seasoned teachers doesn't do with us for 15 plus years or staying with us. Anything else Ken? Other questions Annie? So I'd like to go back to the subject of special education. I'm sorry Annie we can't hear you. I'd like to go back to the subject of special education and the reduction in those costs again because for me it's a red flag in the opposite direction from the way it's a red flag guitar and that is that I would like to know what you are doing in terms of KPIs and process to ensure that your staff are not motivated to reduce costs by fitting square pegs into round holes and that you are ensuring through some kind of independent verification testing assessment whatever that students services are being matched to student needs. Simply because of you know anecdotal experience from people that I know whose kids have gone through the arts and schools who felt that their children were being steered towards programs that were not what testing indicated they needed. Simply because those were programs that we had. I'm not making any accusations here. I'd just like to know aren't you sure those reductions are honest reductions and not simply convincing parents to accept what we have to offer as opposed to what the traveler needs in order to reduce costs. Am I making sense? And I know sometimes parents are very emotional about this. You take it from a programmatic perspective. I will take it from the dollar perspective and not to put student success in dollars and cents. Be mindful that the special education numbers that we've shown in the budget is specifically items that are identified as special education. Students with IPs and subsector programming or pull out tier two level services. But some of those services those tier those pull out or pushing services are interventions and they're not labeled special education. So they're not in the SPED budget. Correct. They're in the general education budget. Yes and you can there's a schedule that wasn't included in the initial budget that if some were looking at the initial budget. We we spotted that didn't get pulled in and now it's there. It's the schedule for special education and interventions. And so you'll see our commitments to still supporting students' needs. And there's anything you want to add on the programmatic side that that's well. We did add an additional supported learning community last year specific to students with specific learning disabilities particularly in reading so that we can expand some of the programming we have available. One of the things I know I heard loud and clear when I started in the role was that we needed more transparency around and better communication with some of our students with families of students who had IPs. And that's something we've very much been working on without knowing you know the precise concern and experience of any particular family. It's hard to know what the discussion has been with the 18 at school and what the recommended programming was and for what reasons based on what testing. But we do have circumstances where families request outside testing and the school department pays for the outside testing so that we can get additional expertise in. And there are times when that's exceptionally helpful to our teams because we didn't do we don't have access to a particular type of profiler testing. And then there are times when that comes in and it doesn't match with what our team is seeing when they work with that student every single day. So each circumstance is unique and we try to treat them as unique and give the best recommendation that the IP team can and that's within their jurisdiction. And you know I try to back up those teams as much as I can because that's what their role is is to collaborate with the family to find the best placement possible. And if that's not within the means of the school system and we feel it's important to place the student in our district placement then that's what we'll do. I just wanted to kind of have that discussion because you know I know it's been a concern in the past and I understand that it's a very complicated and sensitive area. And so you know when we did the original analysis to set that limiter in the five-year plan at seven percent, seven percent was not the number we came up with as the growth in special education year-over-year. It was higher than that. So that was a number that was set based on what we thought was realistic and not what the actual increase in cost of us. So that's working. I'm really excited about that because we didn't expect it to work. I will say that I'm very pleased to see us expanding the sort of level of support for education in our schools to add back librarians, add interventionists, to add curriculum specialists. Having had kids go through the school system I can tell you that and I don't want to brag or anything like that but I spent a considerable amount of money supplementing the education of my youngest child because of things the schools didn't offer and because of her particular talents. So I'm really looking forward to the commitment to support the talents and skills of everyone in the school. I'm not upset with the schools about that. It was what it was but I always felt bad because I couldn't afford that and their families at times they can't. We have kids who are just as talented as mine. So hopefully we get to a point of equity with this forward-going budget. Thank you. Any other questions? No more questions? All right, well thank you very much for your presentation. Thank you for answering all our questions. We appreciate it. Thank you all. Thanks for being here. Let's quickly move in. What's the difference? It's about numbers. Everybody should be looking at the nymphs of the 15th. And there's some on the table around but not as many as there would have been if I had more paper. All right, right. So on page two, article 41 is, the numbering is off. Does anyone have any other corrections to the 15th, Jennifer? Sorry, this is the minutes that refers to the parking benefits of the electric vehicles. It's the 15th. That's what that's right? And my memory might be wrong. I thought that the minutes didn't maybe reflect exactly the funding sources. It refers to parking benefits money and then the town paying for the electricity. But don't we have also some money that comes from the chargers? So I just felt like the minutes didn't quite capture that. What number are you on? It's the first thing on the second page. I think the important thing is the net positive on the meter. So I wasn't sure what the right thing is. It just seemed like it didn't reflect that we're getting the meters are paid. We pay partially the electricity. Some of the money is being covered for by the bank benefits. And then there's additional money, right? That's what I remember, but I might be wrong. The companies that are providing these chargers, is that right? They might be wrong about this memory. So Brian, do you know the answer to that? I'm just catching up on where on the minutes are we looking? 33A and 33A is at the top of the second page at the top. Thank you. Basically the user of the charging station pays everything. And that's not in here. It just didn't seem like the way it was raised or captured what the reality was. I think that's where it makes it sound. You plug it in and they charge you not only for the electricity, but they charge you for your share of the parking. Right. Some places are located where there is no parking. Right. This one says electricity is charged is paid for by the town. Right. With a portion of the inverse by the parking fund. It just felt like that didn't quite reflect what we had talked about. It should be paid for by the user. I think that's the mechanics behind it. Possibly how it's like assessed. Okay. You can. Yeah, you can say it's assessed to the town, but it's paid for by the user. Okay. So the electricity for electric vehicle charging stations is paid for by the. Okay. And then should I just get rid of the rest of that? Or. To the portion reimbursed. To the parking. Fund. I assume the company. Or. With a portion taken for parking. Yeah. Portion. It reflects the parking charges. Reimbursed to the town from the company. I think we should just cross off the meter. Okay. Okay. So I don't think I have the wording yet. So can we just. Can we just repeat that, please? So. Electricity for electric vehicle charging stations is paid for by the user. I think we should just cross off the meter located in the Jefferson cutter house. Because there's two more. Yeah. One. Two. One more thing. Brian, you're comfortable with that. Okay. So I don't think I have the wording yet. Okay. So I don't think I have the wording yet. So I don't think I have the wording yet. So I don't think I have the wording yet. Electric vehicle charging stations is paid for by the user. And I'm sorry, then a portion. Okay. To the parking. It's not a portion of the church. We should be reimbursed. If I'm using to the parking. If you want to say. That way. So you can see electricity and parking fees are paid by the user. Right. The user pays it. Throw some to the town. I'm not sure exactly how the town. But a portion is for the parking fund and a portion goes to charge plan. I assume. Because charge plan is a profit making company. Assuming there. You just say a portion. Okay. You said with that. Yep. All right. One more thing. And this is again, where my memory might not be quite right. I had thought that the time manager said that there's a very tiny bit of money. That we would be paying the people whose land we were taking to create sidewalks. But it was not very much, but I could be wrong. Does that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So we can for an appropriation. So this is. This is for, it says no. Anticipated costs. Appropriation. No. This is for, it says no. Anticipated costs. No, it is very preparation. It says costs. Okay. There are costs. Like it's rolled into the project. Got it. Got it. Any other questions? Is there a motion to approve the minutes at 15? So move. Second. Second. All right. Any further discussion? All in favor of approving demands. Okay. Okay. So the. 15th. Revised. Say aye. Any opposed. The extension is okay. That passes. Let's look at the minutes of the 20th. And paragraph one. Sorry, I can't see it yet. The wifi in here is pretty, pretty slow. So. Okay. Okay. One. A. Really still. You must have fixed that. You must have fixed that. Okay. Any other corrections? The 20th. Okay. Okay. Anything else? Three little errors, but I'll let her. All right. Yes. I think it. And well, let's see. Seven 50. From previous year. I think it's two. Sorry. Number one. Well, it's used to be D now it's. Yeah. It's used to be D now. Russell. Russell. And then. Should be invasive. Instead of those bases. And then on the last page, cemeteries. With these and then the back! On that page. So now, I think the corner of that. is one. Oh, yeah. I always do that wrong. Sorry. What's this now? Cemetery. It's an F. Should be. All. All using seven a. Did you just fix that out? Thank you. Yeah. You should probably protect. Okay. Anything else on the minutes. Sorry, is it spelled worse? Cemetery is a number five. See both the cemeteries budget and then five. It says transfer of funds slash cemetery. It probably be a good idea to just do a search and replace. Okay. Any other corrections? Is there a motion to approve the minutes of the 20th? Second. All right. All in favor. Say aye. Aye. Opposed. All right. Who's the abstention? Young first thing. All right. Everyone in favor. Raise your hand. 15 in favor of zero. Against and to abstention. And then those are. Sophie, you know. Budget. You have a motion. Well, that would require the exact amount. And I don't know the exact. That is a really good idea. So I move the school budget as presented. And we just say that. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Thank you. All right. All right. For full budget. Eight, eight, nine, four, seven, three, three, four. Second. Second. All right. Thank you. I said, I still can't get past the 84 or 83, whatever the numbers, additional left teams. I think, you know, maybe you can afford it this year with an override, but then, you know, you do read in the papers that the, you know, the teachers unions are very aggressive. You know, can we afford this next year? This is the new base launch. And I know, you know, I think the school budget is excellent. Love it. But, you know, I do look at the detail and I see, you know, additional HR department has went up by about a 40%. The finance department within the schools has gone up by another 50%. I think that there's just a lot of additional FTEs in the school system that we may not be able to afford next year. We may not be able to afford the year after that. So, you know, some of the, some of the elementary schools have gone down in enrollment, but you know, like I said, the heart has gone up, but has nine additional FTEs. And then I compare it to the town personnel trends, you know, so those 83 additional FTEs in the last three years, three or four years, depending on how you measure it is almost double the additional FTEs in the entire town since 2004. The entire town has added, maybe 40 FTEs in the last 20 years, and now they're going to add 80 FTEs just in three and a half years. So, like maybe we can afford this year, maybe with an override, I just worry about the next year is if this is the new base, baseline, you know, of course, the pension and that would have to have care costs. So I, I have concerns about that. Okay, Charlie. Yeah, I'm also going to vote against this. Partially for the reason that John just mentioned, I do know in 2000, I believe it was 2019 and 2020, the school had a forecast of, say 20 or 30 increased FTEs, and they actually hired twice that, above their budget. I still don't know what they're doing. And then secondly, they started this disparity in the, in the salaries that I mentioned in that table, which they very cleverly removed from the budget. It's going to drive the, the increase that the teachers need, that they weren't given. Okay. In other words, this money has been spent on other than teachers. So they're sitting there looking at 3% increases. If somebody else is getting 30% or 20%, that's just, that doesn't make sense to me. I'm not in favor of this. And I think it has, it has a sort of an, until we see something better, it's a very, to me, a very negative sign. It's not a sign for the overwrite. Yeah. Thank you. Conflicted on this. I don't have, when I vote against that, rather have an alternative motion. I don't have one for this side. Same as I, same as in previous budgets that dislike and voted for. So I wish I could think of some alternative, but I am conflicted about it. Thank you. Rebecca. I have a question just as a person who's new to this about the mechanics of having the additional people that seem to be sort of a surprise. How is that possible if they, you know, are they not reflected in a previous budget or. Like I don't know. So maybe I'm not being clear. So I went back and looked at the FY 22 budget. And I compared the FTI FTs in that budget to this FY 24 budget. I just did basic subtraction. So I wasn't surprised. I mean, it was there for everyone to see. I did actually submit questions to them with department by department increases. So yeah, I hope I didn't give the impression that there's any surprise. It was all there. You know, I wonder if there, if there could be more, I think they will maybe not as prepared as what the helpful on the specifics. So for example, with the hearty school, if they had been able to say, my understanding is they have two or three new special education classrooms, most of them very high levels of funding. So I don't know this to be the case, but if they had said we have three new classrooms in the hearty something like that. Yeah, I don't, I paired my questions down. Actually, I didn't want to really bore everybody, but they, they had all my questions had. So I guess I would have liked to have been heard. If there's an explanation for the nine and hearty, is there an explanation, you know, is there a new, there was a reference in the new instrumental music teachers, you know, one of the time that would be very helpful. It's possible. Those things. Got it. Yeah. Yep. That's true. Yeah. Yep. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. So I would just like to start by reminding everybody that. What would we do to give the schools the general fund dollar amount? So when you look at the allowable increase, which I believe for the schools is three and a half percent. Plus a differential for changes in enrollment, which can go away. We may reduce it because while it's gone down, we're going to increase it. It's a 50% of student cost differential. We put into the new students, we can recognize that one new student doesn't require 100% of that budget, which includes the administrative support and a new teacher. So they're living within that number. They're getting the same increase that we give them year over year. How they're managing to hire positions that didn't exist before. I don't know. Okay. But if they're actually doing that, I think somebody less because they're living within the three and a half percent. So the question here isn't if you really want to question the details of their budget, which I'm not sure we can because we give them a dollar amount and they have control of how they distribute that dollar amount across the budget. It's polite for them to come and walk us through the details, but we are not allowed to tell them you can't spend this money on X or must spend it on Y. It's just not our relationship to this. What I would suggest though, if you are concerned about what we are talking about in terms of how they spend the budget is that the question is not, can we afford it? Not. Why do they need 80 more people so on and so forth. So the question is, do we believe that they're the living or quality education at the level required by the students in Ireland? And that is what the goal of the superintendent and the school community should be to deliver to the students of Ireland education that they need to the fullest extent possible. And we can afford that. You say we can afford it and in fact we should afford it. I would argue and again, this is not a financial argument. So taking off my finance hat, putting on a different hat, I would argue that we're morally obligated to do it. So I have this argument as for example, it's the treasure of my temple. I've had this argument with a board that we're saying we can't afford healthcare for our employees. And my answer was we're religious institutions. We're ensuring our employees. We'll cut other things. We'll do other stuff. We'll raise things. We'll do whatever we have to do. We'll look ourselves at face. We don't show our employees. So that is continuing my argument about the school. What I see Dr. Homan doing that I think is different from what we've seen years past is that she's actually laid out a five year strategy. She said what the budget priorities are and she's shifting where resources are sent in her budget to match the actual values and the actual priorities. So I think that's the correct way. And I think she should be encouraged to do that. In terms of the practicality of Charlie's argument, Charlie's looking at top line numbers. But if you're going to remove two pair of professionals from libraries and replace them with two librarians, then the cost of salaries is going to go up more than two and a half percent or four percent or whatever, because you're going to pay those two positions much higher salary. And that is the counter argument that everyone's trying to figure out what the details position by position to see whether or not and who is getting these kind of reasons. And then finally I would suggest that when you have a thousand employees in an $88 million budget, you should have multiple people in your finance department and your HR department. I work for a company that has maybe a hundred employees and we have three people in HR. And our budget is no way or near $88 million. The idea that somehow we can do without an administration is us looking for a lawsuit. I don't think anyone's saying we're going to be without an administration. We're questioning. I think John is questioning. In addition to the administration and I'm saying you have to look at it on a scale with similarly sized organizations. Yeah. In a similarly sized organization would have a similar staff just because it's a school doesn't mean they don't need the same people in those same administrative positions. I'm very sensitive to the idea of spending money on administration that we don't need because I want that thing going to kids. But I've not seen that in this one. I'm not seeing that. I haven't spoken to Carolyn and then Dean, did you have a hand up? Yeah. And then Alastair. So one of your questions and for those of you who are new about, is it a surprise? The current finance person who was here, tell me his name again. Like Mr. Mason. I only started what three or four years ago. Yeah. And the budget prior to that was a complete disaster. Yeah. And year over year it would show up differently when they presented to us. And they were trying to get better at it, but it was just sort of a shift to something that seemed even less transparent. This is a huge difference. So, so that's one point. I am concerned. There's two things I'm concerned about. One is, is the 7% for special ed. A state mandated number. So we're seeing them consistently spend between five and 6% at most. So maybe, okay, maybe 6.5 some years. So is there a chance of lowering that number. To 6.5. So. This is the last. Okay, okay. So in the long range plan iterations. We are dropping. Yeah. So that's something worth forgetting, which is way, way, way, way. Wait, sir, Carolyn has the floor. Continue Carolyn. Dean and then now tossing. So I'm glad to hear we're going down. 6.5%. I also like Charlie's statement that if we're not. If the. The spend money, I'm going to call it spent. If that's the right phrase or not. The spend money. And we're not going to have it for that. My question is, where does it go now? Does, are they allowed to use that money towards general or no. They said last year or the year before that they're spending it on other education costs. So it, the money's gone. Right. So that's so, so I have a problem with that. If it's spent money, it's spent money. And that's all it's for it either goes back to the general fund or it goes into that. Other funds. Because. And I'm very concerned about us increasing the professional level. Of everyone other than teachers, because the teachers are going to ask for more money. And they're going to need more money. And what paraprofessionals we have left. Are going to need more money as well. And she is talking about having other paraprofessionals. And they deserve more money. And we're going to be negotiating with them in two years. And so we're going to see the budget go above the limited, the 5% of 6.5%. So that's my concern. Dean. So. I mean, it's almost cool. Right. And he'll say though, I think John and Charlie bring up very valid points. And we have to take a look at the future, right? So. I repeat what I say every year on the state anyway, which is, you know, I don't, we're not going to manage the school department. And now that we have to validate the budget formula, making sense and picking through an F7. It's all in the sense, right? So I do it every year. I go to state testing website. I don't manage the school, but I can look at their numbers. And I pull down total spending that they report to the state. And I pulled on their per pupil spending in their enrollment. I benchmarked into town manager 12 because at least let you know directionally how things are working. Right. So when I started doing it for the 2008-2009 school year, you have 4,800 kids in school. And I'm going to repeat that 2019-2020 school year was 6,200 kids. It's a massive increase, right? Abilities to overall state, state enrollment at that time, just to get people's perspective on it. 2008-2009, we had 990 public school children. 2019-2020, we had 982,000. So we actually went to town, 7,000 total public school kids. So the Phenomenon and Arlington law, similar to surrounding inside 95 community, you've got one in Chester Brookland, it's the same white Phenomenon. But that did actually, it's the baseline against the town manager 12 is it brought us from 42, it's only Brooklyn as a larger school population. At the same time, so then I go and I say, that's interesting, right? So now let's look at it against per pupil spending. And I don't carve on it. Some people are doing district versus out of district. I don't, because I don't make, that's a management decision, I think it's about a district. I'm not very sure about it. So 2008-2009, we had $11,700 per pupil. They're ranked a sixth in the town manager 12. As our school population starts to rise, that per pupil benchmark rose. We go down to eight, we go down to nine. It becomes really scary. Because as we hear, as we said, we start to eliminate things. We start to lose services. We then start to put some real commitment against it. We start to put that net in student spending. It was first 25% and 35% that was 50%. We had an operating override camp in 2019, when we said we were going to put additional money against it. Low and low, our benchmark starts to rise against the other communities. After bottoming out in nine in 2013, we leveled off at eight, we get some movement, and that went at six. We're in the middle. I'm not advocating to keep spending until we're number one. But it gives you a guiding light that can mean between all the noise that the spending has been appropriate. Now, what's also interesting after you do this, is if you start to, it's interesting if you start to say, because this is the thing that always got me, a lot of people will say to me, well, the town's only going up this small amount, right? Well, the total amount of roads in our town hasn't changed, so you're not going to plow me. You can't increase the, deep down here, the snowpline budget more, because the roads aren't going up more, right? And the population is generally the same, so you don't have to have to pass the influx of new police officers and firefighters and things like that, when you're not spending a lot of children, you need to spend a lot of children, right? So when you then benchmark, it was going to be some of this to you, to benchmark our people spending, like, it just, to a digital budget, take the people that were looking at increase year-to-year, and the increases become, I'll start 2013-14, 4.3, 2.3, 4.5, 1.7, is a percent, 2.6, zero. And then it goes right up, you do the COVID, right? It goes 7 and 14, right? COVID just didn't turn off. And so what that gets me to, is we're not spending poorly on the school budget. We can argue, we'll break down some of the big parts, right? So that's why I support this year's budget. What I said that I said, I said that John and Charlie bring up great points, is there was a chart that showed, it's going to level it off. So when you're putting in heavy investment, for net new students and things like that, and let involvement start to level, that driver's gone, right? So you really have to take a look at it, and say, okay, what's the appropriate level of dollars for a phone, right? And how does this balance between our role, as a finance committee versus state role management, right? And the, like, so the example I'd give you is, when they talk about increasing teacher salaries, I always, I look at it, and I always struggle with that, because like, where, when I put it out for people, it's kind of like, where's six, the time that you're 12, Belmont's 13, they use Belmont as an example of where teacher salary should be. And I'm like, okay, we'll just take the school model of Belmont and put it in here. They have highly regarded schools or in the top of all those rankings put it out. Like, why am I, I'm not managing the school department, right? Lower special needs. Well, that's not my argument. This is the point though, when you go back and forth, so that's kind of the, so I look at it, and I'm like, great. So that does ask questions about moving forward, right? I think a lot of those are policy questions. Like when I bring up that example of like the thing, like that's a policy question. I can tell you category with your own schools gets damaged, probably not underfunded anymore. The numbers are clear, right? But so when you want to do that, the next level of stuff, that's policy. That's not me. I'm not policy. I'm spreadsheets. And so that's why I feel like it's sort of both, right? I think the budget should be approved. I think they have been good stewards of the taxpayers dollars, but I think there are some questions as we move to that next generation or that next iteration of enrollment, what, what spending looks like. So thank you. I'll talk to you. Please don't be. First of all, keep in mind, we only control the bottom line of this budget. You could vote against it because of these 10 people and somebody else could vote. And we make those recommendations to the school committee and they could totally ignore us. You want to make individual changes in individual budgets, then you should run to the school committee. I'm going to support this school budget. Because it complies with a plan that we have had in place since 2006. Now, some people in this very room, declare it's not a plan, it's a projection, but I think it's planned. It basically sets. What people could, what the increases are that people can have. It started. I think with 4% on each side. And then a modification on the health insurance. And that got us through, you know, you got an override through with that plan. That through six years before we get more problems. We got an older override and modified it a little bit. We made a modification for special ed because special ed was going up faster than the others. So that modification was made. And then as the, as the budget was going up, enrollment was going up. I'm talking skyrocketing. You don't see this in any other part of the Commonwealth, except within 128. And it started. So we modify the plan to say it would go up. Average per student probable times the number of increased students time 25%. And then, you know, the school committee members on the long range planning committee. Bump to, you know, they thought that was too low. Bump to 35% retroactive. And I sure got it up to 50%. Some members didn't think that was even high enough, but you know, that was what everybody settled on. So we can move ahead as a, as a community. And I have seen. Motions made at town meeting. And I've seen a superintendent of schools, not this one, fire one, get up and say, thank you very much, but we really support the recommendation of the finance committee for that. Turn it down. Never find another superintendent who ever does that. And none of the school committee members got up to argue for the extra money. This year. We haven't. We haven't. Planned all set long range planning committee. You can watch it as a public meeting. And everything was set. And then low and behold, the state came in with three and a half million dollars. More money for the town of Arlington. All in chat. Virtually all of it in chapter 70. And. There wasn't a peep about changing the plan. From the school department, the superintendent or any of the school committee members. They went with the plan that they had agreed to. And I think we should too. We shouldn't change something in the last minute. There's going to be a modification to the plan. We should make that upfront. And ask the revisions be made in the next budget cycle. So it's right up front. The problems we have. Now. I'll vote for this plan because of all that that I said. I'm not support an override that increases any additional spending for either school or town. Every time we have an override, there's a jump in to get more money. So. I'd urge you to support the recommendation of the. Head of the, our subcommittee. And the school committee recommendation, recommendation, long range planning committee. You know, to move ahead. As a town united. And if we have problems with the override, which hasn't been decided yet. It's a selection decision. Or, you know, going into next year, I've got some big problems because. Of the 2026 override. We need to start planning for that. But. At the beginning. Not, not, not at the last minute. So that's my recommendation. Hope you go with it. Thank you. Anybody have any other. Comments. Quick questions. Just kind of clarification. So I hear a lot about the plan. It sounds like we're just kind of following the formula almost, which is great. And just, we fall into the trap of all the COVID money coming in. And then. You know, so basically the baseline went up because of COVID. Okay. Throwing that out there. I'm sorry. In other words, like, you know, I've always gone up like, I heard like 2%, 4%, 7%, depending on what you're actually looking at. But then for the last two or three years, we got a lot of COVID money. So now are we just saying, like, Hey, we just, you know, where's, you know, that COVID money's going away. So. One of the things we did, you know, if you look at this part, if you look at the town manager, you'll see that it has different markets. And one is net new student growth. Okay. And so I had gone off on the high point of 2019, 20, which is like 6,200 kids. Follow me with that number drop created an odd scenario where we get funded for an increase in students who received a decrease in students. Okay. At that point, we would, what goes up the way the mechanics of it work. Yeah. Money for net new students. You take away for. Lost. And so the following year, which I believe was the 22. Let's go with 2122 school year. If you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if, if you, if you switch to school year. If you look in your budget, what you're going to see in negative for that net new students, like a million three year shots. So, right now. And so we removed the net new student growth from. Four courses. Yeah. I'm sorry. What else. $1,000,000, $1,000,000. I just made it up. We took it out. And then. You are right during some like one time. Are you really? Great. So like one up 2%, 3%, 4%, 1%. And then you kind of like critical 21, 22 or way. No, I said 714. I said it went vertical. Because that's what I'm talking about. What happened? Right. Because it was, it was a, it was a normally with a budget was going up. Like you said, we added to the budget and the students went down. Right. We were expecting that's why the purple pupil went up. Yeah. We budgeted for 6, 6,200 kids and 5,800 children. Right. And then the COVID money got overlaid on that. And then we adjusted it the year after. So the numbers I have, which I was, it was a crafty political argument. You caught it. Right. I have one year of years. We don't have the years just closed out 2022. So it doesn't show the adjustment. Right. We're running out of time, Brian. I think everyone, but people have been like maybe for a while now that school budget drives me crazy. Also, it's two thirds of the entire town budget. So we have to pay very, very careful attention to it. The only thing we're allowed to do is say, yeah, your name. We don't get a check. We do not have the opportunity to say, you should add teachers. You don't add teachers. We're looking basically to bond on this. Even if we approved the budget and said, you have to spend a year. They're not required to. That's the one budget in that the stage is set. Totally separate. That's the first thing. Now it's not the time to demonize this budget. I'm petrified with this budget five years out on, you look at the five year plan. It's up 25% and the growth in the students that they're projecting is basically flat. I'm basically four approving this one, assuming Dean goes into the school committee and tells them that they'd have to basically sharpen their pencils for the future. Because that's really what's on the line here. I mean, it's, you just can't have this growth. I'm unchecked. Alice, right? We don't, we don't have the, this is not the time and the place to turn this down. I mean, they've done everything that they're supposed to do. Grant. I would have a, well, quick question and I would hate to take it from Charlie, but. So we can say yay or nay, but we can also make an alternative motion for an analysis board. Right. You can. Well, I suppose we could. Okay. That's a question. Absolutely. Okay. Sorry. Charlie. Yes. Thank you. I just want to say that I. I don't agree with any of the subject of what we. Are more likely to do or can do. We absolutely cannot tell the school committee what to spend. Mass of money on instruction or otherwise. I think what Brian said is absolutely correct. And that's. First of all, not permitted by law. And it's not something that we should be doing. On the other hand, if we were supposed to be recommending a budget to town meeting. And my perspective, if. If I see that the management or the budget. And expense. Processes and policies within the school department. Aren't leading in the right direction because of the, you know, the number of employees that raises their giving or other policies. I'm just not going to support the budget. That's my. Not only my prerogative, but it's. My view as a county member as a finance committee member. You know, it's an obligation that I have. So. That's my. Just two small points. One is that when we did our last, our very 2019. One of the things that came along with it. And then we had the budget. We had the budget. We had the budget. We had the budget that we had the 300% increased. 7% and for special ed. But there was also a five year plan that was pet been presented by the school committee to increase spending. Now. The long range plan in committee decided to find four years. Five year plan. So there was a bomb. So some of the. Increasing positions and money that you're seeing. Is because of that. So that was one of the things that happened. Just one other small little point is one of the stories is happening with our district right now. Is that we're seeing a moment shift from the elementary school. Where. You might need to build new classrooms, which we don't have to do anymore. Because we have a lot of capacity there now. To the middle and high school where spending. Looks a little different. And so you are going to probably likely see as those. Large cohorts moving to the middle and high school. Some changing of funding priorities. And, and, and frankly. High school students are a little bit more expensive, but it also just might mean that things get changed around a lot. You might just see that. It's not. You can't say here's 6,000 kids. And here's 6,000. If the profile is different, you're going to see different priorities. Okay. Anybody have anything else? All right, let's take a vote. So there's a motion that's been seconded. So all in favor. Of the motion, please raise your hand. Working in favor. All opposed. The abstentions. All right. Is that what you want? Yes. Yeah. We have six minutes left. Could we do the composting in six minutes? I actually think I can tell you the thing about the engineering. That would be quicker. Okay. If we want to do that. How close things feel at least kind of a long time. Or maybe we should do it now. Get it up real quick. I don't think we should do that. Let's do engineering. Okay. So we were left to some questions. I did a lot more deep diving into the answers. And I'm glad I did. I have a few more things. Can you bring it up to screen actually? Yes. So it was. Page 89. And in the book. I'm going to read it. Okay. So we were left with, if I remember two questions. One was about the mobility insurance. And what it turned out after lots of back part of Julie and Mike. Is that Mike actually just spoke. And that those. Engineering. Improvement. Are actually not the ones that were in the. In 2019. 2019. Is. 200,000 in the capital fund. And 50,000. To. So we were left with, if I remember two questions. One was about the mobility insurance. And what it turned out after lots of back part of Julie and Mike. Is that Mike actually just spoke. And that those. Engineering. Improvement. Are actually not the ones that were in. In 2019. So we were left with. The capital fund. And 50,000. To help with additional transportation. And it isn't going up. And you definitely make that case. I think they. That's something more interesting. Not going to happen. But it's actually not this amount. Mike did say that, but it's not. This amount though is. There's a couple of things that happened in the last few years. Some bike racks. The one thing that was mentioned. The one thing that was mentioned. We talked about it. I mean, I was talking about the amount that was on Arlington Heights. There's a pedestrian. And that was added. So it's things like that. So, and those are actually things that Mike has control of. So when he originally talked to us. Yeah, we talked about a lot of things. I'm not. He knows his stuff really well, but it was just sort of a confusion that we got. The second thing that I did a deep dive into, which was really interesting is the money that we saw in the actuals being much higher than the budget map. understand it. And so here's what the story is. The amount that's budgeted is the amount that they expect to contract out for things like serving and mapping and stuff that the engineering department usually does. They don't want to raise that budget amount because that's you know that's the money that they need. They also don't fully want to put the actual spending in the actual budget because that feels misleading to them because the actual spending that bump that we saw was money left there from other departments that was repurposed to really you know to projects that are in the back because one of the interesting things about CBW is it is a department that has multiple different divisions. So most budgets don't have that and it's a budget where Mike has a discretion to move things around and to zero out the budget. So most budgets you can't do this but there's like a couple bit budgets that have divisions where if you shift things around. What I've asked for in the future is a list of that sort of money that's spent on those extra projects in the budget explainer which really thought was a good idea. Basically she her position is we definitely want to present we're not hiding anything we give you the actual they're not hiding anything but we want to present in a way that's not misleading and we were trying to do that here. So I don't know if I need that because it's clear. Clear? Okay so I'm gonna I would like to recommend the approved budget as presented. Second. All right any further discussion? Questions? All right let's take a vote all in favor of the engineering budget as presented in the budget book. Say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay so everyone who in favor raise their hands. Fifteen. Fifteen to four. Zero against one. Let's do that again. All in favor. Sixteen in favor. Zero opposed and one abstention. Okay. All right thank you Jennifer. All right so we'll pick up we'll do the rest of the DPW facilities budget on Monday hopefully. Who else is coming in on Monday? Um so first at 730 is the commission on disability and then at eight is the historic district's commission and the other historic commission that whose name I can't remember they never got back to us in time so I did tell them that we would be voting to level fund them. All right for a disability commission there was a question I asked him to reach out to you but someone on the commission was asking whether it could be remote or hybrid because it's somebody from the disability commission but I don't know they told him to reach out to you so I don't know if that person's. I haven't gotten anything yet from him so that would be they were asking about the building and access so I don't know. We have the ability to migrate don't we but we'll stop well who will get in touch with us? I asked him our town's ADA coordinator he's just presenting along with commission members to reach out to Tara if he needs it. Okay he has not at this point with them or not. Okay I reached out to him just a while ago to remind him to send the materials by tomorrow so that will work. Try to touch base one better than the other. Yeah I just because I need to if I need to post the budget by 7 o'clock tomorrow which I prefer to do a little earlier then so I'll reach out to him and try to because we we need to put whether it's remote or hybrid or whatever it will be we'll we'll be meeting here whether we enable someone else to join we'll do that but we'll be meeting here both on Monday okay all right motion to adjourn. So moved. All in favor?