 the Rocksbury Board of School Directors at 41. This order of public comment can vary none. We can go to Consent Agenda. Do I have a motion to approve the Consent Agenda? So moved. I'll second you. Second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? I'm assuming we didn't drag open. I honestly wrote an email to ask if they needed a ride up here and never heard a response from them. So I know there's lots of things going on right now in student lives in terms of college acceptance and all that kind of stuff. Probably other pressures on them at the moment, but I did not hear back from them. Well, we will give them an excused absence. I guess so. Let me just plug this in. And then also, Mike was off today, so you're going to fill in for Mike on language immersion. So I don't need to. I'm going to do the best I can. So there's my lovely family. It's not what you all need to see right now, though. My husband doesn't usually look like that. I promise. Oh, there's a few mirrored right there. She went through for you. Teamwork in action. Thank you, Benjamin. OK. So these are Mike's slides. So I do not want to take any credit or think that I am any kind of expert in this. He is much better versed at presenting around the language immersion program, having more experience than I. But like Jim said, he is having some things going on right now, and it wasn't at work. So we're taking it on for him. So if there is additional questions, then I'll have Heather write them down, and we'll get the answers to you. And I'll do the best I can tonight. But this is very quick. So just looking at why immersion in your board packet, you also got a white paper before I start on this. That was written by Jen Botsinger, who's a current superintendent in Orange. And she wrote that as the director of curriculum for Chittenden East when she was there. So Mike had taken over for her, so therefore took over the foreign language immersion program and getting it in place. But Jen is the reason it starts. And I want to make sure that she gets credit for writing that white paper. So this is all in that paper. If you had a chance to look at it, it's pretty researchy. And I understand that. Why immersion bilingualism is so very important, as is by literacy, as a former international school teacher myself, with tons of bilingualism in that environment, as well as a teacher from an inner city school that had a whole lot of Spanish and English, I can attest to the importance of bilingualism. And it's one of, I think, a knock on American education that we don't have more of it, quite honestly. So that piece, there's also by literacy, which is huge. Academic achievement, as you saw in the white paper and in some of the other research, there is a proven, there's plenty of evidence around increased achievement with students who are bilingual over time. Sociocultural competence, global competitiveness and communication, all of these things are quite important and important to this board and important to our community as well. And bilingualism can help that in immersion. So the purpose of the study that we're proposing in this particular budget would do this work. It's working with a certain company who does this as Mike mentioned in the last board meeting. And it has the seven pillars that it stands on. So throughout the study, it helps the committee go through, whoever's studying it with you, go through each one of those seven pillars. It also has rubrics that are attached to each one of those pillars so that we know where we are and what the next step will always be. So it helps us really dive deep into the necessary thinking that needs to happen in order to put a program such as this in place. They're experts, they've done it in plenty of places and they have evidence that they've worked. So that's part of what the study will do. It will address those seven and it's pretty hard work. We wanna do this as an administration decision when we have a committee. Obviously a group of people who are stakeholders and any decision that's made is done through this committee, not through administrative ones. And that committee will be responsible for generating questions to investigate, visit, research, and report. And this visit is in there because we think it's important to go to other places who currently have emergent programs to see how they're doing and talk to the people on staff. Around that we have Jericho Elementary, right now who's in year two, Richmond Elementary, we'd be starting at a very similar time we were, we are, because they're starting a new one. So we have some local places, but we also have some places in Massachusetts that we could rely on which is not very far, far haul from here. Things that we don't know about is we have no idea what language because that's a committee decision. We have no idea about the location. We have two elementary schools, which one would it make the most sense of? The committee would have to really dive into that. The staff thing, we haven't talked in depth about that. We just don't know the answers to that. The study would help us find the answers to those kind of things. I'm gonna send you these quick slides afterwards only for these links right here. It has the link to the white paper, also the foreign language brief, which was written by John Elbergini, who's the superintendent over at CESU and Mike. And the reason why I like it, you don't have it. Do you have your materials now? Take a look at that, because I thought that I had not seen that before. I looked through the board packet. Mike hadn't shown that to me before. So looking at those questions, we're very similar questions to ones that the board raised last month or last board meeting. And you have three separate school systems who are in the thick of it answering those questions. And they were asked very specifically by John and Mike. They're not just general questions. So I thought that was great. And you can see what CESU is doing right now. But that's really what Mike had planned. And then he was gonna talk about his experience and bringing about the program, but I can't speak to that. All I can speak about is from a parent who lives in Jericho whose kid couldn't participate because she's too old. So I can only tell you what the feel of it is at Jericho and that it's not separate from any of the other classes and that it's part of the school. And when I go listen to concerts, the kids sing in Spanish. And that's just the way it is and everybody else claps along. So that's my only experience with it. I can't really answer anything more. Go ahead, Steve. This is a question to take back, maybe, but I read the part about the 504 and IEP students. So that's a challenge right out of the gate for any of these programs. And there's a mention here about self-selection out by families and others saying, look, we just don't help and the others are like, well, we offer it, but it's shaky. Yeah. So I think that that's a piece of the bigger question about just general equality of access and if our district, overall district goal is moving towards equity and inclusion and making sure that the kids who are struggling at home aren't somehow on the edges of our educational system, how do we do immersion and include? Yeah, and I can speak to a little bit of that just because I've had these conversations with Mike in the sense of there's significant evidence that if a child has a special need that's language-based, there's a lot of evidence that says this is not the best place for them to be. And Chittman East was very honest about that with families when they were talking about immersion with kids with special needs that are language-based. So not all special needs are language-based. That's important to understand. So that's just a snippet for that one little piece. As far as services and things, I don't know how they're handling it right now. I just have no idea about that. And then you made me think of another one too. What was the second one? Well, I just think the, I don't know. I mean, I just think, I mean, I'm a huge fan, right? But what I'm concerned about is that we create sort of like a privilege thing versus everyone else. I know what I was gonna say to that. Can I just answer that real quick? Another thing that I know Chittman East has done is that when they have the lottery and people apply to the lottery, they hold slots for students who are free reduced. So the lottery is less than that to try to address the equitability in kids who may be on the fringe in other places. And the self-selection out, you still have to kind of encourage some in, you know, or whatever, right? So, yeah. So they had procedures in place. This particular group helps you think through all of those things that we may not think of as, you know. I was interested in the white paper about the have-and-have-not part, that the culture they spoke about, you needed to work on the fact of these kids are segregated or separated. And that was an interesting thing to think about. And it was interesting to hear you say from a mom or a student who doesn't know how to get it. So... Because she's old. Not because she's old. She's too old. But it's an interesting thing to talk about. And the other thing that I didn't see in the seven, but it's probably in there somewhere, is I wish this group would also talk about evaluation of the program. Oh. So it is in there. It is in there. Yeah. This is a longer brief as to what this group does. And that piece is, as part of it, teaching you how to assess and evaluate the program. Another thing I really dug into this today, I skimmed it before, but I really dug into it, that I think the board, I noted to myself that I think the board really wants to know as a piece of this is a considerable focus on sociocultural competency and equity piece in terms of sociocultural awareness and that kind of thing. That's a significant part of their push in the immersion process. So in a way that I know that the community of molecular values. So that's just something that stood out to me as I was digging into this today. So Mike will absolutely come back and talk to you guys. He just couldn't tonight. So if you have more questions or want to know in depth more about CESU's experience, he's definitely a better voice to say that than I am. Jim, you were going to say something. Sorry. I've got a question on that count. I think the comment is just keep in mind that the study is going to really show us how. We're just starting. How to get there and how to answer I think a lot of these questions. I guess I have two questions. One, how much for the group to do the study kind of look to the board and others for input about the type of questions we want answered? And second, which is a question you can totally punt on if you want to, what would be a language-based versus a non-language-based learning disability? So let me address that. Like a language-based disability could be a specific learning disability in reading, for instance. It could be a speech and language piece for kids coming in with significant articulation challenges. I'm not sure if presenting content in a different language and asking them to learn a different language might be the best route for that child. It may be. It's just, we would have to question that. We would have to really take a hard look at that. So those would be two examples of a potential language disability. Your first question, I would imagine that there would be a member of the board on the study committee. I would encourage members of the board to be on the study committee if not to. I'd be very interested, yeah. So that would probably be your liaison to the information. Can you clarify about the committee's role? You said something about they would make the decision, not the administration or something like that? They would be the people who'd be really digging into the questions and deciding what's gonna happen next. So I like to have a decision-making matrix, right? We use it at our league meetings when we need to and hard decisions need to be made to be clear. Some decisions I would imagine that would probably not be a clear statement. Some decisions may just be a board of administrative decisions, right? And we'd make that clear. It may come down to location. That could be a really tricky conversation to have. And so we might say, and I'm not positive on this, but we might say in deciding location, we're gonna see here pros and cons of both buildings and the committee is going to inform the administration and the administration will make the final decision based on everything that we've heard. So there could be some decision-making matrixes in there, but the committee would be responsible for really digging into some hard conversations that would have to be had. Isn't it likely that the committee digs into it and makes a recommendation to the administration and the board and then that decision goes there somewhere? To the administration. Go ahead, Andrew. So in terms of this committee makeup, are we thinking that it would involve maybe at least one board member, maybe a foreign language teacher or two in our district, some community members who are invested, interested in this or might have expertise in this? Is that what we're thinking? How would this, I just post this. There's specific language in here as to who the steering committee is. And yes, to all of those things. And also EL teacher, a general education teacher, principal, thinking a little bit outside that as well. But there is recommendations in here. Like they guide you through that programming process as to how to best select people. Because you want some naysayers in this particular process as well. You want some people who are gonna be like, the devil's advocate, if you will. Sure. Oh, I have a question that Andrew brought up last time. And that this looks great. It looks like a good plan. How would we choose them in preference to somebody else who might do this? I'm gonna go with what Mike said last time that when CESU researched that, there were two people, two companies to go with. And when I was talking to Mike later about that, he said there are two companies and the second one is a spin off of this one. So it's really people who have gone off the reservation for these to earn their own money in their independent consultancies from what he understands. We can do more research to see if there's more. Nothing stopping us from doing that. And I would say that my colleagues probably at Chittenden East probably did a considerable amount of research in that already, but we can certainly do more research. There's nothing holding us back from that. To add to that, can you just send out an RFI and notify these different companies? Yeah, that's probably how we do it, how we do it, yeah. That wouldn't be too important to you guys, would it? No. I think we showed it to taxpayer dollars. Yeah. Thanks for pushing this forward, yeah. Seriously, thank you. Yeah, that was exciting. It's a great event, yep. I understand I'm not young enough to participate. Come visit Steve, come be a reader in there and read some new books. And again, I apologize for Mike that he's not here, he truly wanted to be. Could it be tonight and for my inadequacy of taking his big shoes? Thank you. Next thing. Do you have something else? Well, Jim's the chair here, Jim's the agenda man. Yes, I think that's it for the superintendent report for your long meeting. Yeah, so I can take any questions from the superintendent report. Originally when Jim and I had planned out meetings, or year-long meetings in advance, this meeting was supposed to be a real diet, a deep dive into the entry plan and what I found. But we didn't think about that it's also budget season and that's just way too much for a board agenda. So when Jim and I were talking about the superintendent report for this week, we thought we'd just kind of hit on some things. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you have from what's there. Again, we're gonna bring the entry plan back, but this is just a quick, quick hit. I think so. You're in three meetings, right? Oh, I'm in two. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit more about what it means to have a system instruction in place for improvement. I mean, I just, as someone who's not in that, doesn't live in that world of education, even just an example of what it, Yeah, I'm gonna give you an example. So in my former district as the curriculum director, when I took over right as the commentator had come, you know, the unpacking had been done and I came into the spot where we needed to write a curriculum off of the new standards document. And so we had to think about how do you do that? What's the best way? What's the most efficient way? How do you get the smartest minds in the room? How do you train people who are gonna stay and be able to continue this work? All those things come up in my head, right? I had in each of my elementary schools coaches in reading and writing. So I made the executive decision that those people would be the ones writing curriculum because they're the ones who run PLCs back in the district. They're the ones who really control professional learning. They're the ones who do data analysis of the wazoo. They were the best people for the job. I had a structure in place where I met with them monthly and they were able to be pulled from classroom or from their schools like the day before a holiday or day before a vacation because they don't see a lot of kids on that day, right? So because I had those people and we set up that structure that they would be doing the work and they would be the ones who have the means to go back to their buildings and teach the teachers the curriculum and work through challenges and bring back revisions for me as a curriculum director so we could work through it together. That process, while hard, was seamless. Teachers responded to it. They responded. They were the most knowledgeable people about the curriculum and our teachers were able to work off of it. You know, begin to plan units off but make common assessments. That same work didn't happen at the same time in Montpelier and Roxbury and so when Mike, as the director of curriculum is taking over, we have no structure in place to get that work done. So, and it needs to get, it should have been done four or five years ago. So right now we're having to decide who do you include? Who do you have do it? Do you staff me anytime to do it? It's gonna take forever. That's like 45 minutes every once in a while that principals don't need it. Do you pull teachers from classrooms to do it so that it influences the kids? And there's a subclass. Do you pay teachers after school to do it in which case how do you decide which teachers to do it with? So we have so many questions. We don't know how, like that work isn't able to be done quickly and efficiently yet because there's no structure or system to do that kind of work in place and there's a few other instances that that kind of forward thinking hasn't happened. And I'll give you another example too. I was talking in Liberation, the nation's the other night and they're asking about the SEL coordinator and they said, well, we have APs just train them. And I said, okay, so Steve's my AP, he leaves. APs wanna be principals, right? They're not APs for long except for Jen, the high school she wants me to be forever. And she's very good at it. So when Matt Roy leaves at the middle school, which he will, and he should because he's gonna be a principal sometime, we gotta retrain whoever comes in. There's no system in place, it's dependent on a person, right? And so with a social emotional coordinator, that person can come in, take an audit of what our strengths are, what our weaknesses are, where the capacity needs to be built at the teaching level, at the administrative level and start putting in systems in place. So when a person new comes in, the staff can say welcome, this is how we do it. This is what works for us. Here's our evidence for it. And we currently don't have that. It's very person dependent. And I'll add to that one of the things when I worked with the State Department, it would happen I'd go to school and they'd say, we've all been trained in X. And I'd say, well, really? And when did you do that training? And they'd say, well, three years ago, everybody in the building was trained. And I'd say, really? So tell me how many people are here that were here three years ago? Oh, the answer would be, you know, three. Compared, and that, this kind of a system takes care of that, your training from the end. So everybody gets trained right along your year and everybody's has the same background. Yeah. And you can develop expertise in a different way. That's what I'm kind of thinking about there. That's really helpful. Thanks. Any other questions about the things I highlighted that I'm really thinking about? I'm loving the data collection. Yeah, really? They know because they heard me for a reason. I'm so glad that we're going to work on it. Yeah. I like the geek out on data. It's really hard to do that right now. I also just think I'm really impressed that we're able to talk about our weaknesses in writing. And I think that we all need to be able to do that. And then, you know, it doesn't mean anyone's rendering a verdict on anything. It just means we're continuing to work. And I think that the more we can call out our own areas that we help in and we need to work on it, I think it's going to be more transparent for the community. We're all going to be on the same soap box in terms of the way we talk to people. It's like, yeah, these are things we haven't done as well as we want to and we're going to work on these. Rather than, no, we're good. Which is what happens when you don't point out areas you need to grow in. So thank you for doing that too. I think you're never perfect. I have two statements that I use a lot. It's when you know more, you do better. And the second one that I have in my office actually up on the dry erase, so people try to erase, but I don't let them, is that data is information, not condemnation. So we just need to really think about how do we use it as information so that we can get better at what we do. But I mean, just seeing the lack of data collection. Like, I'm like, yeah, that's cool. We can fix that. That's a fixable problem. Yeah. It's not like a lack of intelligence. And actually collecting the data will tell you what you're doing really great at and not doing so great at. And then you'll know how to fix it. But also on data, and I've talked to Andrew and Libby about this. And we've had some requests in the budget process. Andrew asked for kind of long-term budget data. Michelle's asked for some data. I think about what's going on in the classrooms. You or Ryan asked for data about class size numbers. What we thought we'd do is, because some of those are kind of like, come during busy times or, and a lot of that data's not there or not collected necessarily in the way that we want. So what I thought would be useful conversation to have after the budget process is over is kind of what sort of data would be useful for the board on kind of an ongoing basis. Then have just a non-discussion with the administration about is that data that's available? And maybe a deep dive on some things where we might feel data might be useful and the administration says, well, either that data's not gonna tell you much or it's gonna tell you something different than you think it's going to. And then kind of make a decision to the board about the type of data we'd like and then give the administration time to put that together and put it in the form we wanted to. So we are kind of getting that data on a regular basis. We're not having questions on Monday, like could you, on Wednesday's meeting, tell me about all the teachers and what schools they went to and how many kids are in their classes and how many people are named John. Yeah, so there's some expectations about what's out there and I think reasonable time for the administration to get together. So the budget, each year we have a certain set of trends that make sense and you know a year in advance about what sort of budget data trends the board's expecting and it's clear. Does that make sense to folks? It does and as a matter of fact, since I think the bottom line is we would like to know how the students are doing. It would be interesting when we begin that conversation for Libby to tell us what it is she thinks we are up to tell us how the students are doing. Yep, in addition to that, that's where I can thrive in. But I'm not, like I don't thrive in budget, you know like predicting what kind of questions you may have around budget. So I think it is definitely helpful to think it's a little board hat too because I've been a board member. I don't have that hat. So yeah, the student data I can, I'll definitely be sharing that for you once we collect it in the way that works. Yeah, I think that's why having discussion is good because yeah, there are questions that the community asked of us. Yeah, that might require a certain set of data that you might not find super useful or necessary, but yeah. Actually what I was thinking though was she might have a set of data that would answer whatever that big question is without the data that they are specifically asking. It's just something we haven't had before. This is an exciting time to start thinking about collecting data because it's our first year as a new district. So if we start collecting data right now, we have the whole history as this is the history. Three or four times that we're exciting in collecting data. Yeah. You need to hang out, I'm changing the vision. Literally don't work as I am. I'll see you shortly, Jim. Excellent, so any more questions for Libby? So next up is a budget presentation. The main purpose of doing the full budget presentation twice is to give Roxbury residents a chance to ask questions. I'm guessing Ben has some familiarity with the budget already. And there's a Waterbury resident, may not. Yeah, so there's a plumber. So I guess a question for the board. Do you want Grant to go through the full shebang again because that's already outtaped for folks who want to, this is not a live recording, right? Actually, well, that's a good question. I'm not sure if it's working live right now with all of us, too. Okay. But they're working at it, they're live. It's supposed to be live. Okay, but we have, so my question. Who do you have? We're recording this one and we recorded the last one. We do have the last one. So my question is, do we want to go through the whole shebang again or do we want Grant to just kind of maybe do the overview slides and then tell us about things that are different or are in different forms? Yeah, we change things. I think both changes from last time to this time and also changes from kind of the last year to this year kind of big points of change. Now, not that you're not scintillating you're wonderful in your presentation, but. That works fine for me. You may have to be patient because I've got about 50 notes on every slide because I was expecting to go through the whole thing so I may be hunting and pecking great notes today. Hover is easiest for you, but you can. Anybody in hard copies? Hardly differences. They are different from the last time. They're not different from what I sent or what Heather sent out. So you're good? Yeah, I can use the hard copies to follow along. Yeah, it's different from the last one. We did send it out on Monday because we were waiting to see if the state is going to give us any information first. And I am glad to give out as many as you'll take because that means I don't want to care anymore. Oh, do you have any? I'm just going to grab a drink of water but I'll take a look at yours. Here, just take a look. I'm going to get some honey slats. All right, be smarter than the rest of you. All right, so I will try to just make sure I hit some of the highlights and changes. On the outline, so speaking of changes there's now a section for changes from the December 5th presentation. I would ask, as we go through this, if you can also think about the public forum on January 2nd and if you have any ideas on how you might want to make adjustments to this presentation for the January 2nd public forum, if you can think about that so that we can take some notes down and make some adjustments. Nothing has changed on this context slide. I will change. I have foreign language on your hard copies. I've changed it to rural language, being more appropriate. I'm sure we'll get into the bussing discussion and the use of fund balances, something that will pop up later as well. So the changes in future slides, you're going to see some cells that are highlighted in blue. Those I tried to highlight in blue, things that had changed. Things that are in yellow are still things that are unknown. The dollar yield and non-residential rate we have, it's still kind of an unknown to some extent because it has to be set by law. But those numbers are probably as good as it's going to get until after town meeting day. Some of the other changes I had on one employee, I had an error, so I had to fix that. That cost $8,000. We took another snapshot of all health coverages. And of course, they all went in the wrong direction financially. People went from two persons to family. I think I had one financially. I mean, it's a great thing. Which doesn't sound like a big step to God, but not in this moment. Tech center tuition went up about $6,000. We were talking about central Vermont Tech Center. They gave me a new tuition rate, which when I factored that in, raised our expenses considerably. That may come back down again because we don't have our six semester average, which that's how you end up figuring out how much you have to spend. It's based on the average number of kids over a three year period times the tuition rate. I did say while I was there that we had more kids than we had any of them. We have, and our six semester average is right at 10 right now. And the good thing is, because it's over six semesters, if you have a big jump in one year, you don't have to pay for it all in one year. It gets spread out. So right now I've assumed we're gonna have 11 as a six semester average, which hopefully that's safe. For revenues, we got a new number for the small schools grant. The AOE has told me that the small schools grant will be the amount everybody received two years ago. And so I got that number and it's about $3,000 less than what I had before. I also heard that by statute, that goes on in the phrases in perpetuity. So we're always gonna get that small schools grant. That's another benefit of voluntarily merging because those who didn't voluntarily merge will not continue to get the small schools grant. What's the total note on the small schools, do you remember? It's, what is it, 70, right, I would got it. That's fine, it's in that range though, but 70 some thousand? Yeah, I'm actually gonna give you the exact number because it's not hard to find. It is 73,722. And it will be saved at that 2016 number forever or whatever? Correct, it won't be inflated but it won't be cut back either. So it's about 74,000 dollars. Special education in total, the number is about $36,000 less. So Ruby, when you condemn me for always being conservative, there you go, I was optimistic and see what it got me. Transportation aid, we won't get a better number I don't think until town meeting day so I should probably stop saying that it's an unknown. I did bump it up by a couple thousand dollars because we're getting about 90,000 this year and I figure we'll probably at least get a couple thousand more so I increased that by 200. You approve the announced tuition rates which are $100 more for elementary, $200 more for secondary so that means 600 bucks in revenues. Something to think about if I forget to bring it up later is for tuition revenue, I've assumed that the kids that we have paying tuition are gonna stay but that we're not getting any more. That might be an assumption that we should change. Maybe I should assume that we're gonna have one more or two more kids because we usually get some transition. We're gonna have some 12th graders leave. We typically have some come in. I didn't bank on any but that could be something we could tweak. So you didn't bank on replacing the graduates with new? Right, if we had two 11th graders I figured we'd have two 12th graders but if we had one 12th grader I assumed they would graduate and didn't assume we would get another ninth grader coming in which we might. And on the expense side, how did you do the tuition out money? Tuition out, so really, I assume you're talking about Roxbury ninth or 12th. For that, I assume that all the kids I'm paying tuition for right now I'm gonna have to pay tuition for next year except not 12th graders because they should graduate. And anybody that moves in goes on that. The worst case scenario basically. Goes to the hot payers. And that's a great place to be because I've been a business manager at a school ad school choice and that was the one thing that always would bite you because people would move in and you didn't know about. Well now if they move in they don't get school choice they're gonna come to our schools. So I don't have to worry about that unknown. That's very clear. Although is it possible? It is that if they came here for a year they can still choose tuition. Under grandfather? No. Once they're in they're in, are you sure? What do you mean once they're in? Not that they would, let's say somebody came early. We had one or two or three that could have tuition and did not. Yeah and I would say that, I mean it might be a legal question but if you had somebody that voluntarily came to Montpelier High School this year. And didn't have to. They could have had school choice and they wanted to go to Northfield next year. I think my position would be no because it's to continue at the school that you've chosen. That's the policy reason, right? But I'm not sure it's the law. Anyway, regardless, I don't know if you can figure that out. Why would they want you? It's not going to happen because everybody loves you. That's it, once you're here, you just struck it right. Tell your friends. All right. You've seen how pessimistic you were being, that's all. They're all going to go back now. No, not that bad. So tax factors, the unknowns, Apealized Pupil is kind of still a big one and I have been, I think, conservative on what I've been using and I hope it goes up. I am just very concerned about Apealized Pupil account because the AOE has a new system where they collected census data and I'm just not sure how it's going to look like in doubt. And so we'll see. It's not out, they are starting to release some numbers like drafty draft numbers. I would hope in time for the public forum that we might have a number. I do think that it's going to continue to change during January because of just the nature of the data that they're seeing. Dollar yield and non-residential rate, we've got that as good as it's going to get. CLA, last year we had it on the 15th, the year before we had it on the 23rd. I haven't seen it, but it's got to be anything. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I initially heard it was going to be closer to 91%, now I hear it's going to likely be a little less than 90%. So I was using 90%. Yeah. Make it 89. That, just to give you kind of a reference point, for equalized pupils, if you want to jot this down, if we have an increase of about seven pupils, it's about one cent on the tax rate. For CLA, a change of about 1% on CLA is probably two cents on the tax rate, about. So 14 pupils equals 271% of the CLA, is that what you were saying? Yeah. CLA is important. Yeah, yeah. Very important. So we'll see how those things go. The other one I know is going to come out fairly soon is the Career Center six semester average. That impacts your revenues and your expenditures. Expenditures more so. The revenue is the state pays part of the tech tuition on behalf of us. And so we get a revenue for a little less than half of the total tuition amount. On the expenditure side, you show the full tuition. So there's a little bit. About 16,000 per student, what is that? Randolph is probably closer to 17. Central Vermont was closer to 16, but now, it's probably closer to 16 and a half, I think. They've really jumped up. So anyway, we'll move on. Yeah, I don't understand. So like I said, blue, and I didn't get everything that was in blue. Technically, the total budget changed because the general budget changed. Non-tax revenues changed because of special education. Equalized pupils is yellow, because it's still an estimate. You can see I dropped it about six kids. And we have more kids. So I would hope that the number goes up, not down, but it will have to stay conservative, because I learned my lesson. I didn't change anything really on here. I may have changed a few call-out boxes. The thing for everybody to remember here is the caption is right. This is just Montpelier High School, Main Street, Middle School, and Union Elementary. K-4, Roxbury kids are not included on here because it would mess up our class size analysis. But, fifth through 12th grade students do get factored in as they transition into the middle school and high school. And we talked about this. If it's colored yellow, it means we're getting real close to max class size. If it's red, it means we're over. So according to this, we'd be looking at adding classroom teacher, A classroom teacher, probably in the 4.20. We're gonna be very close next year. But, but yeah, 22 looks like the year. We'll see how the enrollment projections continue to trend. And this, since we didn't have Roxbury, this just completes the picture for K-4. Staffing. The only thing I changed here is I took out some of the words on the Human Resources Coordinator because we decided to go ahead and show a separate slide. And it's a little wordy. And I'm not gonna go through everything, but I will tell you that it's not a complete list. This is just like a few things that popped out as we were talking about this position. I will admit I am a huge advocate for this. I will say that we're getting the job done, but it's among five different people. And I'm one of those five. And I will tell you that if we had made a different choice for HRA vendors, we'd be done. We would be done. There's just no other way around it. And I think I've mentioned that there's a statewide uniform chart of accounts coming up that we're having to have in place by July 1, a new HR finance system that we're gonna be supposedly ready to go on July 1. Those are gonna create a lot of transition work for two of the people, two of the five people that do some HR work. And whenever we do this, there's gonna be an opportunity hopefully to do some automation for time sheets, leave tracking. I need somebody to kind of run point on trying to get those things up and running. We just don't have the capacity. For those of you who have been around for a while, you know, the business office used to have two and a half people and that half person just didn't work. It's very hard to make that a very effective or efficient job. So we just went with two people publicly. I do think there is a strong need there. Strong need there. And I'm sure Becky would. Totally agree. HR and finance are two areas where it's not getting any less complicated. I mean, it just gets more and more convoluted. For us, another thing is with the merger this year, we got to do two of everything. Tax documents that we send out and W2s and 1099s and all these things. We have to do two sets for everybody because they were MPS and now they're MRST. So it's an area where there's a lot of liability if something falls through the cracks. And I would say we haven't let any fall through the cracks, but I would say there's a risk that we certainly could. Gita. And I'm looking at job descriptions for all positions and I can't imagine you had any time to get too many of those and you've got a lot of them to do. We've got one for you. We have one for me. All righty, we've done that. Well, let me ask you something, Tina. Did you have job descriptions at all the schools where you worked? Do all the teachers need job descriptions? It's not a case of all the teachers need job descriptions, but I don't know that we have a job description for any position. I mean, do we have a job description for him? Probably not. Do we have a job description for the coordinator of special ed or the, you know, we just didn't have any job descriptions. So for the big categories. What I'm wondering though is how the job description thing I've asked the teachers at other schools like you have job descriptions and I haven't heard from anyone that they have job descriptions, so. I would say that without a job description it's hard to evaluate. That's it. I agree with you completely. We also employ more people than just teachers. So that's what I'm interested in. So I would assume that there's a general, when I was a principal, what is a general job description for teaching and that's what I use to evaluate teaching. It's not like the second grade teacher has a different job description than the third grade teacher. Same thing for custodians. There's a job description for custodians, a job description could be out there for IAs or teachers. It might be broken down by different types of teaching, but it's really all the other positions that you should have and like. Certainly administrative. Yeah, and I've gone to like my old district, Essex Westford, they have them all posted. I mean, there are dozens and dozens of job descriptions for school personnel that are out there and we literally have one right now which makes it kind of difficult for supervision and evaluation. I don't wanna sound like I'm not a proponent of having job descriptions because I certainly am. I was just curious to know. Do other people have it? Yeah. Well, I have to tell you that the world doesn't do supervision and evaluation well. And so you don't notice, you don't have them in some cases until somebody tries to evaluate somebody and there's nothing to evaluate them against. Which is what just happened this year. We've been, an administrator was told you can't evaluate me, I don't have a job description. Which I'm surprised hasn't happened in the world. Yeah. You know, because without a job description, you really can't, the employee can say, oh, the long wall, I didn't have this, I did not know I had this expectation. And this, and to kind of get to what you were at, because of the fact that it may not be critical every, each and every day, that's why this is one thing that didn't get done. And hasn't. But it would be good to have it done. And if we had a position like this, I'm sure we would start chip on the man. So this HR coordinator position is scheduled for a higher on July one? If the budget gets approved, yes. Would we consider hiring two months early and taking it out of some one time money? I'm just, you know, there's a lot to, maybe that's not a hard, maybe July one, not a lot of new things are beginning. But it sounded like they're working. Well, I know, you just said they're working. You just said they're working. You just said they're working. So what I'm wondering is if you get somebody for not a lot of money out of a budget to start two months early, you've got a wonderful time to get them ramped up, get some things in place, maybe help get some of that stuff in place for July one. I don't know, but I'm saying it's not. You do mean after the budget has been passed, so you know the community approved. But that's a long distance still. You've still got time to do the hire. And if you try to push that for a May one hire, you will get a big load off your shoulders for not a lot of money because of the timing. Just because of the timing, nothing else. It would definitely, I would say once the budget, when the budget gets passed, I would say it would be great to be able to put it out and see if we get some great candidates, I would definitely come back to the board and ask if it would be okay to hire a month or two early. It really depends on the strength of candidates. Again, yeah, you wait until you get the right one. There might be good candidates that can't do it until then anyway. Right, that's true. But I was saying this position may not fall on a typical academic calendar hire. Maybe it does. It depends on the candidates, yeah. But that's a great idea, Steve. It's just, I see it every day where you get somebody who comes in and it's not intuitive to know where to go. I mean, if they come in because they need to do fingerprinting and background checks, have them. Or they come in, if they come in to sign up for a health clinic, that's Joanne's. If they are interested in a contract for IA, that's spooky. And then there's just daily crises. Just daily, I don't mean like evaluation crises. I mean more like just where does this fall in our policy kind of thing. And health is the big one where we get daily things where, hey, I got this bill. I don't know if I should pay it or not. And you have to kind of go through it with them, put on a website, that kind of stuff. And that's a bill here at that point. But I can tell you a very definitive story from one of the first couple months I walked into the business office and there was an employee in tears sitting next to Jo who's trying to talk her through in a public space through health care that her husband, you know, like, that's not Jo's job. Jo is a fabulous person and a wonderful person with payable. That's not her job in the public space to work with an employee who's obviously upset about and trying to figure out the healthcare system. It's just, it's not good for our employees. And there's privacy issues too. Yeah, all of the healthcare, not HR in general should always have a closed door. Yeah. And we're suddenly private because the business office is just the three of us, but there's a lot of traffic that comes through there. So. Well, this is not an HR department. It's the business office. Yeah. And I can tell you, like in my old Essex Westford, yeah, the budget was three times higher, but they had an actual HR department with a director, system director and administrator and administrative assistant. I mean, there were three or four people in there and we've done. So I've already hopefully have a good go on this. I would probably take, this is an example of something I probably would take out for the public forum and then just put another bullet or two back on that previous slide because I don't think we need to go into this level of detail. This was more for you. Yeah. You know what's interesting about this slide though, you might have it not there, but I don't want to say it printed so that somebody who says, really, an HR person, what would they do? You're gonna get that. Yeah. I think so. Yeah, me too. And I will probably put a lot of slides in back up so that we can get to them. I've gotten that from people who are super supportive of our schools. They're like really an HR coordinator or the administration, they've ever justified that. And I feel like you guys have, I mean, I spoke with Libby for half an hour the other day and Jim for quite a bit about this and I feel like it is very justified, but it's something that I think. Yeah, you're right. Because it's not what is this gonna do for my kids. Exactly. But it is eventually. I mean, if we can't take care of our employees, they're not gonna take care of our kids. Tell me if you have time employees and I want to be a jerk worker. Yeah. I can't comprehend how you could do this. Yeah. I mean, it might be that it's not this slide, but a slide that ties this to how it actually does allow the district to better serve its employees and their board students. You know, a couple of bullets, we could maybe put our heads together. But I mean, that's really what we're trying to get at. We need to serve our employees better by giving them access to this. We need to have time available. Other people do other things. This is ultimately about the district accomplishing its objectives of educating students. I think the good example to throw out there is we all know that there's gonna be statewide health negotiations next year. When that comes down, we could be looking at redoing everything we just did for HRAs. And if we have to do that, we need to make sure somebody is taking care of the employees because if you have teachers in our office that are upset and crying over the bills that they're getting hit with, they're certainly not gonna have their head in the game to try to do the best for teaching our kids. So that is kind of one of the real examples of something that could happen starting next year. And I also, I think we might not want to get too cute about this too and just kind of say to people here who bring that up. So this is a 200 plus person employee organization. Do you think of another 200 plus employee organization that shouldn't have an HR director? And I think, you know, does your business have an HR director? And I think most people would be like, what got the two boys an HR director? Of course we need an HR director. Who do I go to when I have questions about my health? So I think, you know, just having some frank conversations that, you know, in addition to educating people, this is a place that employs people and has extensive employees and a pretty extensive budget. And I can't imagine how business managers survived in districts who didn't choose our health care. I hear about them all talking about labor contracts. Yeah, I mean like, yeah. Yeah, one anecdotal experience I was even thinking about after talking with Libby the other night was the idea of, you know, harassment, diversity training. That's something that state employees receive and it's extremely helpful. And hearing from some of our two student representatives sounds like that type of training might also be helpful in our schools as well to raise replies or it is. Listen, HR, are there any specific questions? No. Okay, let's keep moving. All right, and I think a lot of this is gonna go pretty quick because I'm just gonna highlight the changes. I think that for the informational session, I'm just, and if you remember last year we did this too, we only started looking at expenses one way instead of two ways. So I think we'll probably cut the ones by category and just go by programs, which means this, special ed, general ed, co-curricular. So we'll take a snapshot looking at things this way. And on this slide, once again, I tried to kinda hit in blue things that had changed, which most of that has to do with the salaries and health benefits that I talked about where I had the tweaks and things. Those hit under the categories of general ed, special ed, and buildings and grounds. Those were the people that I was talking about having to make adjustments for salaries and health. The other one that's highlighted is career center tuition. I mentioned that I had a higher tuition rate that I had to plug in. So those are kind of the big numbers that had changed on the expense side. I think in total it was about $49,000 at the exact total, and most of that was health benefits and new snapshot. So I will skip by category, which is salaries, benefits, tuition. In revenues, we have a very colorful chart. The line items in blue have changed. Education spending is gonna change anytime any other number changes because it balances your expenses in revenues. Small schools grant I mentioned is about $3,000 lower. Special ed intensive is about $60,000 lower than I was using, and they're basing that on 56% reimbursement of eligible costs, and I was using a higher percentage, so that kind of bit me. The block grant is about $24,000 higher than I had before. The extraordinary and triple E, which is essential early education, those were off only by about $1,000. So they were very close. Tuition, that $600 waterfall of money based on the announced tuition. That would be the area where, if I assumed that we're gonna have more than two elementary and two secondary students coming back, and maybe at least one new high school student, that would be another 16 grand in there. So that would be something to think about, should we be more realistic there and assume we're gonna get one more tuition. In yellow, tech on behalf will change based on the six semester average, and that's really about half of the tuition bill that you get. Transportation aid, I think I'm gonna stop highlighting it because I don't think we're gonna get a better number. Balance forward is the fund balance revenue that we're gonna use. And remember, the whole idea behind this was, we thought we were gonna drop our one-time expenses in projects from FY19 to FY20 by like 250,000, and we only dropped it by about 168,000. So to meet the goal that we set, we said, well, we'll use $87,000 for the fund balance, which basically is like dropping your expenses by another 87. So that allowed us to hit the target. It's something I highlighted because it's your decision and it's something we should think about because in FY21, if we look a year ahead of tax rates, if we drop our project costs down by 87,000 and then take away this fund balance, it's not gonna help the tax rate at all in FY21 because you're dropping both. If we drop it now, it's a near-term hit. It would be a challenge for our tax rate this year, but next year when we drop our expenses and the revenues, we're not gonna have to mess with revenues, we're really dropping expenses and we're dropping our ad spending and would help us drop the tax rate and absorb some of that 2-cent tax and merger incentive that we have to kind of soak up. So it's something we're thinking about and it may not be something we decide way away. It may be we wait until we get CLA, we wait until we get equalized pupils and if those things are favorable and drop our tax rates some more, maybe we say, you know what, that's a good number to hit for tax rate purposes. Let's adjust this so that we don't have to worry about that. I would take it out now and then put it back in if we have to. That's the other thing because if we go to the public forum with a tax rate of whatever, six-cent increase, and then we take this out and it's a seven-cent increase, that's a harder thing for the public to have to absorb to it. But if you all are okay with it, especially if we get a CLA number that's okay and if we get equalized pupils that is favorable, I can start dropping that down some and then I can maybe be a little on the optimistic side of dropping it down because we can always, like you said, put it back in. So I will drop it down. It'll be somewhat lower than this, anywhere from zero to this, but with your permission I will reduce it some what. I'll have to decide. Unless we kick that problem can down the road, the better. I have one question on this and I'm in agreement with Steve on this. In terms of our anticipated unreserved fund balance, last time the finance committee met we were looking, we were anticipating it's gonna be around $900,000 on the year. Do you have any sense, has that changed heading the next year? Do you think that might bump back up a little bit? It actually bumped up considerably at the end of this last year because we ended up with a good size surplus. And the number now I can say based on our final audit, which I just got is it's $30,000 less. So it's 870 is what our fund balance is. And I can tell you now, I'll tell you later too, but what happened was, we got a land water conservation grant that 150,000 for the playground. We actually got $30,000 of that. And I basically kind of double counted that. So that needed to be taken out of the fund balance. So instead of 900, it's about 870, which is a good fund balance. And I think right now we're looking pretty good for 19 to finish on target or maybe a little bit of a surplus. I think it's great right now to have that money available because as we're getting ready to put out RFPs for that bond, the prices just are scaring me with what we're hearing are happening out there with construction RFPs. So it's nice to know that we have a little bit of flexibility there to be able to put back something if we have to. You never know what's gonna happen in construction. And in a few cases, we may try to move some money around during the 2019. Like I know we're gonna come in under budget for tuition for nine through 12 because I have my first semester bills in is a lot less kids than we anticipated because they moved or they're going to tech center. So I know I'm gonna have a good amount of money there. If you looked, you know, the van is out there right now that I drove the kids down after school today. We went ahead and bought that van because I had some money left in merger. And I knew I was gonna have some excess. So I had talked at the beginning of the budget process about a one-time expense for a van. We already did. So, you know, those are some things that if we see that we can afford it, we'll do it. I'll bring it up as part of the quarterly reports to say, hey, this is what we're looking at doing. But it helps everything that we do will help us to be able to deliver a bond project that is at least as close as possible to what we advertise. All right, let me move on. The capital plan, one of the things I was looking forward to being able to explain if we had Roxbury people here was, yes, we understand Roxbury is not on this list, but there's a reason why. The reason why is because the roof is in great shape here, the heat plant's in great shape here. There isn't any kind of major capital project that we see in the near term for Roxbury. That's why it's not on here. I will also say that if you've been to the kitchen, you'll notice that we did a lot of work in the kitchen this year. We're gonna do some work on doors. The card readers still this year. There's still money that we're spending this year in this school. And next year we put $62,500 in project costs for Roxbury in the general budget, not in the capital. So, like the bathroom around the corner, there's two bathrooms there. They both could use some work. So either we might do a big project in one bathroom or do a little bit in both bathrooms to make those better. We're gonna do some work in the town hall. So it's not that we're ignoring Roxbury. It's just there's not a big capital thing that we see. Although something could pop up and we can certainly adjust anything beyond FY20. FY20 we said last year we were gonna do bathrooms at Main Street. That's what we're gonna do. FY21 and on, we always have the time to make adjustments there. I don't think there's big expectations that we have to do any of these things for sure. But this is a good snapshot of at least what we're seeing out there. I mean, the one big thing that's on this list is window replacements. But we do have to tackle it some way. And there's a lot of it. I don't think Roxbury folks should would be too surprised. I mean, that was, Ryan can attest this. That was one of the strong things that Roxbury came to my pillar with was like the buildings that will be part of the new district, the building has no deferred buildings. And whereas, we were like, well, you should know right now before we get married that we got a ton of deferred buildings. And then we're gonna have a big bond and they're like, okay, well, you know. So I mean, it was very interesting that dynamic was like one district comes in with everything ready to go. The other one with a mess, frankly, on the buildings. That was the deal from the beginning. And I will say the one thing that wasn't it. The kitchen was a bit of a mess. Yeah, yeah. It's where it's in starting to plan for that. And they did put an initial investment into that right as we were transition. But we put a significant amount of money on top of that to get it done. I think what's cool too is if something, like you said, if something does come up, all of a sudden, you know, some of the septic fails or whatever, it's like they're part of a larger base now so that that can be absorbed and solved without a budget crisis, which is a good thing about that. We could get one. Yeah. And another good thing is from Roxbury's perspective is the tax rate calculation. I love this slide because it gives you the mathematical operation so you can actually do the calculations and know how it works. I mean, it is a little over bearable. Only a business manager. I know. I love this slide. No, it's great. I love this slide. I appreciate it too. I don't know how to hear that. Thank you. The reason why I say Roxbury is happy about this or should be very happy about this is their tax rate went down this year. It's going to go down next year. I guarantee it's going to go down the next year just because of the merger. And it would actually go down a lot more, but it can't go down by more than 5% by statute. So I will say that I would say if somebody from Roxbury was here looking at this, I would tell them the one thing you should take away from this is if I add $1 million to the budget, it's not going to change your tax rate. If I cut $1 million, it's not going to change your tax rate. I mean, that 1.654 equalized rate is as low as it can go. And I would literally have to put millions of dollars in the budget to make it go up. That's just if you live in Roxbury. Just for the Roxbury tax rate, right? Did Roxbury just redo its grand list? Is that why you're at 100%? Must have been in the past few years. It's been at least three years ago. It's been a little loud out. It may change this next time. We're trying to figure out how long it's been. The realtors are saying that Roxbury Real Estate's hot right now. I don't know if it's true or not, but I'm hearing that. I hear lots of families with kids are moving in. And that's a good and bad thing. I mean, it's great for the community and everything, but it will be bad for the tax rate because that means your CLA is going to drop like a rock. Every additional student doesn't make up for that, right? He's got to get 14 of them. So the big things on this slide are what's highlighted in yellow. Just chomping at the bit to get equalized pupils. I'm chomping at the bit to get CLA. I'm hoping that we're close in the CLA. And I'm hoping that I'm way under an equalized pupils and things get much better. I'm not sure that we're going to have the equalized pupil count by January 2. I hope we do. And if it's a good number, if the CLA is close and the equalized pupils goes up, it's going to make me feel a lot better about taking out their fund members. So you're projecting an actual decline in the equalized pupil from FY19, or you're putting in as a placeholder? I just made it a round number, and I didn't want to go up, so I went down. By all stretches of my imagination, it should go up. It really should. But there is this weird thing on equalized pupils. They take your average daily membership over two years, and then they have all this weighting. Like, a high school kid is worth more than an elementary school kid, and a preschool kid's only worth 0.46. But if you have kids that have ELL needs, they get weighted heavier. If you have kids free and reduced, high, then it gets weighted heavier. And then what happens is you have a total number statewide that's a lot more than the number of kids you actually have in the state. And then what the AOE does is it says, what do I have to multiply this by to get it to drop down here? And they multiply everybody's equalized pupil by that equalizing ratio. And that's a scary thing, because I don't know whether that's 93 or something. So you can't do the math. I cannot do the math. There's no way, because I don't know what the equalizing ratio is. Brad James does, yeah. He does all the math. And in fairness to him, I can't really complain about him not giving us an equalized pupil count, because there are schools that don't have their data in yet, because the statewide launch-to-mode data system is very challenging for you to feed your data into it, and has to be exactly precise the way it gets in in order for it to work. And it changed this year without any technical support, but as to how to do it. So that's why I'm not sure when we're going to get that and what it's going to look like, I'm really hopeful that I'm very pessimistic about it. Ah, I'll see what else. Hopefully pessimistic. She asks, do you remind me which of the school year the Roxbury Montlear have the same pre-CLA act rate? How many? Is it five? It wasn't five. Is it three years after the merger? That the rates go together? Oh, good thing we're supposed to get together? Oh, it was supposed to five. Probably equalized. It was probably about the time that the merger incentive expired, which would have been about five years ago. But it's a 5% decrease. So that absolute number is getting smaller as their number goes down. So your tax, it's not a straight line in the words. Right. And it would be getting there a lot quicker if there wasn't that 5%. Because you can see like the equalized is the number you need to look at, because everybody's CLA is different. So if you look at the equalized, or Montpeliers at like almost $1.50, Roxbury $1.65, that $1.65 would be considerably lower. It would be the same as Montpeliers. I was just trying to remember which fiscal year that they would be the same. But right also, it's not going to work that way because the monthly rate will keep going up. So they're going to meet the middle. Right. And mathematically, when that will happen is whenever the merger incentive goes away. Because the math will tell you that the equalized rate will be identical when there is no incentive and there is no limit on the decrease. So whenever that 6 goes to 4 to 2 and then hits 0, then this chart will only have one cell right here. And so by definition, in five years, they will be identical except for the CLA. I'm not going to talk too much about this because it could change. I mean, Roxbury's number should be pretty close, except the CLA is going to impact. So for Montpelier, you've got Pupilcon and CLA that are going to impact this. For Roxbury, you really just have the CLA that's going to impact this. And I did add on here at the bottom, it is something to remind people that in Roxbury, for example, these impacts are a worst case scenario. This is for families to pay 100% of their education taxes based on property value. Two-thirds of the people don't. Two-thirds of the people get an income sensitivity. So it will be even less than this for most people. All board members need to have that committed to memory. Is that something that you speak? That the asterisk on every single conversation of two-thirds of the people are not going to see this much increase. Non-residential, I changed the tax rate based on the commissioner's recommendation. But the other thing to remember here is this is not impacted by school budgets at all in a period. The outlook, so we'll spend a little bit of time on these next two slides and then we'll be done. So the big thing is that two-cent rate decrease every year means if we're going to try to keep tax rates level, we would have to cut about $250 to $275,000 in expenses. The enrollment and staffing, since they're both going up and the enrollment is going up more than staffing, probably, the spending for people should be pretty level. It's not a big impact. That means your tax, that's pretty much tax neutral because both are going up. The expenditures that we know we're going to cut, $40,000 in grandfathering in the next year, 80 and then 80, and then it's done. And wasn't that working about that two cents? When we talked about the mergers, the two cents goes away, but also what we're paying into it? Yeah, the thing that's interesting is because we're seeing that huge drop in FY20, there's less of a drop now in the other years. So it's not that nice slope of like $100,000 a year. It was like $200,000 and now $40,000, $88,000. So far, if you're keeping track, so far to absorb the $250,000 to $270,000, all we have is $40,000. We could decrease these one-time facility costs for $87,000, but if we also have that fund balance and get rid of that, that's tax neutral. If we don't have the fund balance and we get to cut $87,000, well now that's another $87,000 towards the $250,000. Transportation aid is going to increase about, probably only about $20,000 in FY21, but then $48,000 in FY22 because of adding Main Street busing. Monic expenditures are pretty level. We don't have to worry about absorbing a big one like we did this year because of the first year bond principle, but as construction bond costs are going to get out of here, the VMware's bond for retirement actually is structured so it goes up a little over the years, so they're pretty much level. So the outlook is we have a lot of money to have to cut if we're going to keep taxes neutral and we have maybe half of that if we take away the fund balance this year. Maybe a little more than half of that. We're probably right about a half of it. Budget summary, did I skip a slide? No. There. Budget summary, I mean that'll change whenever I get new data, but the discussion points is the other big one. So I beat the first two bullets to death. We talked pretty considerably about the third bullet. So really what I'm looking for is if you have any other thoughts about the public forum presentation, last year we had a few education-centric slides, overview type of slides that we had thrown in there as well, things that aren't in my alley. So we could look at maybe adding a few slides that are like that. I will take out some slides, especially the ones that are like by cost category and put those in back up. I'll take the HR one and put it in back up. But I'd open it up to you as far as with your bike. I would say a couple of things. I think we should have a general slide about the market, like maybe more of the new slide and a grant slide. I'm sure just overall, how's it going? How's it going? It's going great. How's the finances going? Well, the operations, too. Both. Well, and I think the finances, so what's happening that, by the way, we didn't have to pay for it kind of thing. I mean, I think people were worried that the merger would cost a lot of money for some of those groups or something. And I like having the like what do we do slides that are like we have four buildings, we have to spend employees, we have to spend, and it was our payroll, we had kids, we had that. Do you guys agree? I think I'll play just to ground people in what we do. Well, remember we talked about the big challenges for the year. We're going to be the mergers, equity and one other thing, I don't know what it was. Personalization? What was it? Personalization? Personalization. It might have been. So the question is, how does the budget react to those three priorities? And that was something I think we did really well last year was how the budget kind of relate back. And if there was any way to do a cover sheet, you know, the merger, here's what we did, here's what's ahead, here's the budget impact. I don't know, I mean, you can keep it general. I know it's, I don't want you to dig up like create new research on this, but there needs to be educational context as you were saying, some educational slides. I agree with that too. But I also like, I also just like the what we do context. What we do as a school district period. Like when people show up and they're interested in learning about the budget to ground them in, this is how big our organization is. So this is where we educate people. This is the scale of what we do. I like that. I like that. And not only that, I still have people say to me, what are the grades at Roxbury? When did our kids come? So that idea of, okay, Roxbury consists of these grades, then they come to Montpere. It sounds like we've said it five million times, but I've heard that people ask me that. And that's sort of how did the merger work. You know, what actually happened? Oh, Roxbury now is eight or, you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah, and just to think about it as your presentation, I think we're a little, we're a little, there was kind of a deep dive into a bunch of very kind of factual information on just what the schools looked like. Yeah, I think that could be a, I think it'd be a quick overview. We just got four schools. We got four buildings. They have this many kids. Yeah. We have two under employees. We have two under employees. Exactly. It's not a lot. It's just, this is what we're talking about. Maybe a little more on kind of vision and what drives the budget. What ends, how's the merger going? Kind of just a, here's where we're at, here's where we're going to go. Everybody always asks me, how are the kids getting here? Is that okay? Cause it was questioned during the merger of transportation. Well, maybe instead of trying to get it. Yeah, I think all that quick overview is good. I'm wondering though, how do we tie why this budget? What is it that, why this budget is the budget it is? And what are you trying to do this year in the schools? What are you trying to do next year in the schools? And why this budget? How does that do that? Yeah, I think that's a direct connection and correlation just as I kind of played out just without having much thought to it. But it's that question alone is a direct correlation to the two staffing pieces that we put in and the lines with the systems and structures that I was talking about in the suit report that those positions are meant to build capacity in terms of systems and structures and what we're able to do. It's dry. I know, it is dry. And I think maybe that's what you say, right? It's like, this is my first year, full year. And what I'm trying to do is get everything organized, get everything best practices, professionalism, build a good culture, you know, and say that. Which is not a lie, that's exactly what I'm trying to do. But that's good. The community will feel good about that. Oh, we got a strong leader to understand systems. And those three things that you put in the report for this board meeting are those things that I think people want to know, oh, we have a new superintendent. And by the way, she noticed that we need these things. Yeah, that right. We're going to do those things. And maybe part of that is we're not trying to be, we had a big year last year with the merger, or this year with the merger. We've had, it's been a huge year, right? We had these two big things. Oh, that was the other thing, was to execute the bond properly. And so we've gone through that. So great, now we've got, we're wrestled back to the ground, but now we've got to start looking at systems and culture and not try to be too ambitious in the coming year other than finish the things we started and get some professionals of it and some system in place. So we're going to take a breather. We're not going to, you're not going to see a new, anything in this budget other than what you would hope we would be doing. Yeah. And maybe that's the positive. Right. And I think that's a positive statement. You're not seeing new initiatives that are going to be terribly sexy this year. It's really good. Well, there is one, right? Yeah. But that's just the beginning of the beginning of the beginning. It's just starting. Well, I think even that fits into the approach of look, I'm responsive to the community. Yeah, I'm responsive to the community, but I'm just responsive to the community. But looking at systems and looking at how do we, how do we achieve educational ends by looking at what we have, looking at culture. And we're not, it's not a program, it's a study to see how can we implement a program. Even that is not going to be a new initiative this year. It's starting to get ready for out there. It's a systems approach. Yeah. So if you can say that in a way that makes people feel like that's exactly what this school district needs this year is that. So the other thing that might come up is, so how are we doing that? What, you know, how's the construction? Even though there's a playground here, it's going to come up, you know? What is the playground? Where are we on track? Are we spending more than we thought we would? Are we, you know, all those questions? That transportation and Roxbury will definitely be three days in a row. Possibly snow days. Not really much, really. I'm really getting out of it. There's so many questions of us. Oh, I know. That's when the Superport was last week. I knew it. So we're ready for it. They'll last for a minute. There's a lot of joke everywhere. There's a certain number of people who are convinced we're going to have more snow days because of the merger. And unfortunately, we have more snow before Christmas. Right, and we have it coming through. Coming through. Okay, so it's a cruel joke. I had to do two snow days before December. I know. So one thing that I think might be nice, a grant would be to have like a basics of a school budget in Vermont. Kind of like to explain like how the tax factors and fit into what happens to the budget. Because like, if I came in not knowing anything about how it works in Vermont, I would think, okay, your budget that you're making is like is the budget. But then there's all the state things that affect what actually happens. And well, I guess what happens to the tax rate. So some sort of, I don't know where necessarily, but like something about like the breakdown of what happens. So we set the budget and then this is what happens to get the tax rate. And I know you like the slides at the end but I do sort of address that, but not like in an overview sense. Do you, does that make sense? So you're looking for something earlier that basically just talks about the education fund and how that works. Yeah, that. Good, I'll be glad to have you explain that in 30 seconds or less. Yeah, before like people are sort of like all in the details. VPR has spent like 10 years trying to educate Vermonters. Yeah. So what if it was more of a, I like that. Maybe it was more like a, as we build a budget in Montpelier, we have to remember that there are these five things that happen to us. They come from the outside that are going to ultimately turn our dollars into a tax rate. And we don't get to control those and we don't even know what they are yet. And then here they are, boop, boop, boop, boop. Yeah, and I think there's still a lot of people out there that think that you get money based on the number of kids, you know, the old block grant mentality which it hasn't been like that for a year. So maybe there is something I could put together that's at least like the basics, the very basics of how it works up front. You don't have to worry about the wheel either. There are a couple of really good resources like this. I was just going to say, the BSBA put together a cartoon from the Ed Fun last year. I watched it like 15 times when I was before I interviewed for you. And I still don't understand. Yeah, if you don't put a clown nose on how you're doing it. The nose is a quick link to send people if they ask too. Like here, try out this cartoon. I just think it would be awesome if I could put a link to a cartoon in a budget briefing. I know. We could totally show that instead of you talking right now. See how warm it is. Just, it's a totally crazy idea. Just to do it, to what with it, what you will, but I just have this thought that you could take the slide at the end, but just last year's as the first slide. But if you started with this and kind of briefly explain how this year's budget, that we are, where all these numbers we already know. Or even. Like that could sort of frame a little bit for like this is this year. These are these numbers that we didn't actually know. You know what I mean? Like this is where we're starting. Okay, now we're going to go through what's happening and then kind of end. That's a dense introduction. Yeah. You know it's hard. How does the very first word out of your mouth? Or maybe nice round numbers. Something in the right. We need one of those honors to bill. Thanks for that. Totally. School high. Rocked. They're actually like public assets that's too creative. Like it's outdated now, but yeah, it's very similar to that. It was like eight years ago. Well, I will think of something I can put together. I obviously you, it's hard to think about doing it in a less than like five slides, but I think it's something that we should try to build onto just one slide. If I can do it and if somebody comes across something that, oh, this is perfect and send it to me. Otherwise, I'll just start looking around and come up with something on it and see how we do it. I think you just a quick overview. Like these things are really complicated. We don't control these, but here's just kind of. Here's what we don't control. Here's what we don't control. It's a lot. You know what you can do is you can have a handout that has the details. You can give it a really quick brief. This is kind of how it works, but if you want more information on the table is the second handout to come up with. And that may be something you could get off of some already produced resource. Yeah, I can put a slide together and ask some links on it. The cartoon. Any other thoughts? I think it's okay if it's trying. People don't comment. They're not budget people. Yeah. We don't have a hundred people that show up for this in case you're noticed. Well, I think just, yeah. I think the point is to communicate what we're doing in the law and not to make it sense that we're gonna live. But if that's true, then I think we have to leave. What are we trying to get done? Exactly. What are we doing in the law and then there's the budget for it. I do think what Steve's getting at though, and we've brought this up at numerous meetings before. Slight digression here, which is without a real vision statement, or with an involved community to really iron out what do we want from our schools? I think we're gonna continue to have trouble with this type of communication. I think our approach this time is great. I don't, I disagree. I think we could have a vision session till we're blue on the face. I don't think it was Matt. Okay. This is quick. How about this? Here are goals as a district. If we have like three to five goals as a district, this is how this budget is helping us meet them. We don't really have it. We're working on that. Right. That's what I'm saying. And I think that's what we say is, if it was three years you can have it be like, we all know that we set these as our goals. We all know that this is where this district's heading and this is what we want to achieve. Here's what we're doing this year. Great, we don't have that. This year it's, you all know we're a brand new district. You all know we don't have any goals yet. So in lieu of that, we're gonna get a really solid institution. We're gonna build a really solid institution. I know. We're gonna build a really solid institution that can build on that, right? And that we're gonna finish this disruption we just finished and make ourselves strong. Look, we had these three goals. She gave us today. Well, we can, I'm gonna say the royalty because it's me, right? So we have a new district and we superintendent who's leading a leadership team relatively new. We need some learning to, we need some time and we appreciate the community giving us that kind of time as we build the structures we need to in order to move more efficiently for all kids learning. And that we will get there, right? But it's on my shoulder. So that's what we're gonna go with, right? It's not your shoulders. It's our shoulders to get those goals in place and to know exactly what we need to do. And you guys can say either yay or nay to those goals. And it's been a challenge for going on 13 years for me to try to build a budget that really links to action plans and links to this and links to that because the fact of the matter is 70 some odd percent of your budget is salaries and benefits for the people that you've got. So, I mean, the majority of our money is gonna be for doing just the everyday stuff. And we're always gonna be able to call out a few things but it's never gonna seem very significant in terms of the total percentage of budget, you know? Like, hey, we're gonna do this $22,000 word language emotion, which is 1% of the budget. You just never can get that big chunk and say, well, 20% of the budget is for this goal and 20% is that. No, 70% of it is just to have the people come back. But 70, 1% of my tax increase is for maintenance versus initiative. And I mean, as a taxpayer, if I see my tax are going up 100 bucks, are they going up 100 bucks because you guys are doing a bunch of new stuff? Are they going up 100 bucks because you're just trying to pay the bills? And I think the answer this year is mostly we're just paying some bills. And that's why the tax increase is small and you're not seeing a lot of huge new initiatives out of this. Although, we're adding a person and we're adding busting. And we can talk about why we felt that was important. And we should say that, right? And isn't it at this point accurate to say that most of the tax increases because of the CLA? More than, I mean. You could say, well, equalized pupils right now is causing a little bit of a problem. But CLA, yeah, CLA is probably $0.04 of the six. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean. It's complicated for a problem. It's just complicated. It's all within that range of, there's not a lot you can do. And that's explaining the CLA in 30 seconds, isn't it? Well, it's better. Two cents is because we lost two cents of tax margin or merger. And then four cents, CLA. Yeah. Six and eight, please. I mean, there's other places where we gained because the yield went up, up some downs. But it's okay. I mean, I think the message is this is not a year for a new merger, for a new bond, for a new anything. Other than, yeah. And it's a good thing because you're paying the most on your bond this year. And we knew that, so we're not doing other big things. Yeah. I think that's sort of fair. People might be relieved. It's like we got new administration, new district, and the biggest bond in history. Okay, let's take a breather. Right? Yeah. You can just do this and take a breather after. Whoa! Don't underestimate how excited people will be about busing and a meaningful stuff forward. And a new superintendent. Those two things have been rock stars. Well, I've been hearing about those since I've been on the bus. Well, it's true. It's true. And the playground. And the playground playground. So those are pretty sexy things. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe what I should do is, you know, that slide that shows by category all the increases and decreases in the font's about first in the size pool. Maybe what I should have is more of a, have that more as a, you know, here's this slide that goes into all the real details if you want to look at it later. But in front of that, maybe I should just talk about budget increase is X and here are the big pieces. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah. You know, size 12 font instead of size four font. So I could look at trying to do that too. Kind of prime them for that page. And now many slides you want, right? After you do it. I think you've done a great job. Yeah. Oh, great. Yeah, no, it's fantastic. Thank you. I appreciate it. Let's see what we can do to make it a little better. Yeah, this is your third year of this here. This is my third one. Yeah, and all three have been fantastic. They really have been. Even though the slides are endless, I love all the information. We're not that nice. All right, what can we do next? That was the, I'm just going to assume that our board discussion on the budget, which in a while we'd skip to a follow-up comment next year. I think we're done. I had a 32nd thing about my trip to the career center. I think we will, as we're the legislators to go to the open house of the career center, which can vary, which I did go to. And what was interesting to me is that, besides visiting all the places, at the end they gave this little presentation, which explained that very high school wants more of the space the career center's in. So the career center has to go somewhere else. The career center wants to go somewhere else. Well, I'm getting to that. So the career center's vision is that they'll build a new school and it will be a whole high school, nine through 12. So students that attend the career center will enter in ninth grade and go four years there. They won't come to another high school. Interesting for me to hear. I did say, okay, Montpelier's different. We've been gaining population. The rest of Vermont is losing population and you would be acquiring that population from those high schools that are losing that. And I was saying to Grant, they had the great answer, which was, it's not losing, we're not taking. We're discussing the entire educational career of all of these children, which is, of course, true. But I just thought, I don't know, that's what they're thinking about. They'd like, now imagine how much, talk about budget. Imagine how much it would cost just to build a whole new high school. And then think about how much it would cost to build a tech school. We don't have any like they're proposing in Vermont. They haven't been Connecticut, Massachusetts. And they, as far as I can figure out, they don't understand how they would get the money. They thought, perhaps, the state would give them. It's a publicly funded, competitive high school with other overlapping districts, effectively. I mean, it creates a real problem for public education. Well? Public funding of education. Their answer, of course, would be if you're looking at the whole education of the students. Wouldn't you want? Well, that's your argument for school choice in general. It's just student focused, not community focused. Yes, that. You'd like to hear what they're talking about. That's not a systems approach. No, it's not. No. Sorry, you have to consider the system. Not just the welfare of the students who choose to attend there, but the welfare of every student. That's to be balanced. So it has to be, it's a tough one. I've been keeping Jim in the loop. Sorry, Steve. I've been keeping Jim relatively in the loop when I get new information about this particular thing. I don't think I'd be speaking out of turn if I said that there's a little rogue behavior going on. Yes. Well, and the mere fact that, that's what I was saying about building a new building and a whole new school costs a lot of money, and there's... And I don't want you to want to think that that is coming from the board of directors, school board of directors from Barrie, or colleagues of boardmanship, if you want to say. What's the governing body of that school? There is, so I sit on kind of a commission that is leaders from every sending district and the principal there, any... And that governs it? The Barrie board, technically, is there. Oh. They're, I mean, they're under a Barrie contract. But decisions like that would be made by Barrie? Not decisions of that nature. It couldn't be made simply by Barrie unless Barrie was funding it, totally. Because in essence, that is a shared, exactly. That's a shared entity, even though it falls under the jurisdiction of the Barrie board of directors. So they would need to do something that scale. They would need to get the... They need to get you guys on board. Well, they would need to get each district to approve the new agreement or whatever. Okay. Where does their funding come from, comes from the different schools? Can I have to call this fact just a bit? This is not their agenda item. And we're getting, I think, beyond an update in terms of, we could have it as an agenda, especially if it moves forward, but I think if we get, if this is something we need to react to, and it may at some point be... I think it's too early to react. I think it's too early to react to it, just why I kind of wanted to go from on a date to, yeah.