 Hello and welcome to Town Meeting Television. This is ongoing election coverage in advance of Tuesday, March 7th, when you can go to the ballot in Winooski and vote on local issues. Town Meeting Television hosts forums with all the candidates and we also bring you budget presentations and ballot information sessions so that you can be prepared to vote. It's important to know that you will not have ballots mailed home automatically if you want to vote by absentee ballot. You need to contact the Winooski City Clerk or your community's clerk and request an absentee ballot. And it's also important in Winooski to know that Winooski will have all resident voting. So all residents of Winooski regardless of your citizenship status are invited to vote in local elections. If you're tuning in live tonight, we welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. And we hope that you will continue watching Town Meeting TV on Comcast 187, Burlington Telecom Channel 17 and 217. And you can also watch any of our programming at youtube.com backslash town meeting TV where you can also watch this program with auto-generated captions. I'm here today in the studio with Alexander Yin and Kamal Dahal, School Board reps. Welcome and thank you for joining us. And they're gonna walk us through the Winooski School District budget, the FY24 budget. And maybe also just because we throw out terms like FY, just say what FY means and when your budget year is, things that we assume folks know. And so go ahead. Thank you. Thank you, Megan, for that introduction. Like Megan said, my name is Kamal Dahal. I am a Winooski School District Board member and I am joined today by my fellow board member, Dr. Alex Yin. And we are here to present the fiscal year 2024 budget for Winooski School District. And first of all, Megan, Alex and I would like to thank CCTV for giving us an opportunity to use this media platform to keep our community informed regarding their upcoming vote. Excellent. So with that, let's go to the next slide, Alex. So on this slide, as you can see, we have our end statement. This end statement developed via community focus group input in 2012. And it has been the vision driving the work of our board since then. For those who are not able to see this or read this, I'm gonna go ahead and read this out loud. It's worth reading it out loud. All the students will graduate from the Winooski School District College and Career Ready at a cost supported by a majority of Winooski community. Winooski School District students will lead healthy, productive and successful lives and engage with their local and global community. So with that, let's go to the third slide, please. So on this slide, we have our district's graduate expectations or GACCs such as communication, critical thinking, well-being, creativity, and so forth. The rubric that are linked on this slide, each of these GACCs details how a student can move up through different levels of proficiency stages. So let's go to the next slide and discuss graduate proficiencies or GPs. So as you can see, on this slide, we have a list of graduate proficiencies areas for each of this proficiency subject listed below, students are assessed using the proficiency rubric from the previous slide as a guide. Let's move on. So on this slide, we have listed our district's strategic priorities for upcoming year. The strategic priorities for our district for the upcoming year is literacy and mathematics curriculum, instructions and assessment, equity and anti-racism, climate, which is the social and environmental, educational environment at a school and whether it creates a positive setting for learning, academic achievements and students' growth, proficiency-based learning, student support or multi-trial systems of support, and of course operations, transportation facilities. So next slide. So this slide is just a snapshot of our district's current enrollment data. As you can see, we have a total enrollment of 796 28% of whom receive special education services, 35% of the students identify as multilingual learners and 61% of Winiski students identify as PIPOC. 56% of the students live in a low-income household. So to educate all 796-in-role students listed in the previous slide and to ensure they're excelling through the proficiency level, we need to have a budget. And that's why we're here today. So for the next year, the district doesn't foresee any increases in staffing or supplies except for the ones listed on this slide here. So those are two federally funded teaching position moved to the local budget, also known as iLab teacher positions, increased operation expenses for maintaining, heating and cooling new facility, curriculum materials, JFK planning time or two general instructional assistance negotiated as a part of current teacher contract, snow plowing services. In fact, it's no plowing services until this year was provided by the city of Winiski and that is no longer gonna be the case. So there's $100,000 allocated for either contracting out those services or purchasing plow and hiring a staff to run that plow. And there is a 1.65 million increase for capital project debt service compared to this year. So let's move on to the next slide. So if you look at the numbers here, our budgets have increased 20% compared to the last year's budget. And if you break it down by function, you can see that the debt service long-term that is plus 115% is the primary driver for that increase. And just to make it clear that the capital debt service is for the next year increase is because we are going to pay the full amount of the bond. The budget increase could increase the estimated property tax by 9.66%. But just to be clear, that doesn't necessarily translate that you are going to pay that much of an increase because your exact property tax increase are determined by your income property values and other factors. Likewise, our estimated education spending per pupil increase is 16.16%. So on this slide, it dives a little bit more into the capital service debt. Again, a primary driver for our budget increase next year. The fiscal year 2024 budget includes the first full payment to the USDA for our capital project loan. That is $3,050,210. In 2019, when the Winiski School District Board presented the capital project bond vote to the Winiski voters, they estimated needing to borrow $57.8 million at an interest rate of 3.63%. The total cost of 30-year loan would have been $91,416,447 with the first year's payment estimated at 3.7 million. In October of 2022, the Winiski School District Board closed on a 55 million loan with the USDA at the historically low interest rate of 2.25%. The total cost of 30-year loan is $74,181,234. So I just want the voter to see the difference between that 91 million and 74. And to be clear, this capital project is for building the new high school. Correct. So I think that's important for folks like capital. What does that mean? Buildings, yeah. And I want to make sure that when we get it right, it's not just building, it was renovating some of the old space. Like for folks who don't remember, we had a boiler that was from 1955. Like it had gone past its life cycle, 20 to 30 years. And what folks might not remember is the fact that if the boiler went down, which could have gone on on that really cold day that we just had, the only way to fix it was to eBay the parts because those companies don't exist. Yeah, yeah. So I appreciate you mentioning capital because we take it for granted that it's just, what does that really mean and stuff? And so the fact that that was built when it was built, it came in at about 16 million under the expectation. Right, over the lifetime of the loan because I think we estimated the interest rate to be a little bit higher at 3.14%. And I appreciate you asking this because it shows that like when we pass the bond vote, and let's be fair, the bond vote only passed by 22 votes. Right? Yep. We took that, yes, we were excited that we got the bond to go help build the school for the residents, for the students that we know that they deserve. But the administration and the school board still work tirelessly to ensure that we could make it at a cost that was affordable to our resident, leading by what Kamal had stated at the very beginning about a cost that is affordable to all residents in our community. And not to spend too much time there. And I'm not from Onitski, but is that the high school campus or is that the... And for those who are not familiar with the Winooski kind of district, the Winooski district, it's a building from all the way from pre-K to 12. This was also an opportunity, like one of the things that we know in our community that was asked for is like, how do we handle pre-K? And we created more space so that most of our working families have an option for pre-K. Now it's been hard to staff because of certain restrictions in the state, but we also created that space so that our community can grow with the building. And there's also a health clinic in that space is that correct? And once again, this is really appreciation to some of our senators who helped kind of got some federal funds to help that because we also understood that as you all know, education is not just, hey, a student sits in the classroom and just gets knowledge. There's a lot of environmental factors and we have a working class community where they can't necessarily take time to go take their child to the doctors. So we have a health clinic, a dentist that's right there so that parents don't have to take off time for work. Students don't have to miss a lot of class time. Students can actually get the health services that they deserve. And once again, this is not Winooski paying for the health service. We created space so that the health services could be closer to the community in need and all that. The payment of the health services is still done by the parents. Great, thanks. So on this slide. To the numbers. Yeah, we get to the number in dollar amount. So the budget in fiscal year 2023 was, as you can see here, 21,287,921. And that has increased to 25,447,670, which is a 20% increase like we've mentioned before. So likewise at spending for equalized pupil has gone up from 19,829 to 23,034, which is a 24.5% increase. And can you help me on this? So when you say that spending per pupil, I mean, does it cost more to educate a kindergartner than it costs a high school student? Does it, I mean, this is sort of an average across the. Yeah, I'll talk about when the last two years of my work, right, like in advocating, you're right, you know, Kamal earlier shared a slide that showed that we only had 800 students. So like, what do you mean we have 900 students? And if you look at the education funding formula in Vermont, it recognizes that it costs more to educate certain types of students, right? I think it costs more to educate high school students than it does a fifth grader. In the 1997, like when they created this funding formula, I think there was a recognition that, you know, a little bit recognition for poverty, a little bit recognition for not as much on the multi-language learners, but there were like these little weights that kind of do that. And that's why, like when you look at this, you're going like, oh, how did we get to 908? It's those special kind of like extra additional weights that go into this. And from this point, you can see that we had a small decrease, but it's kind of like you're setting up for the next kind of slides for us to talk about the next story about how our district was not happy with a 1997 funding formula that a faculty research done by University of Vermont in Rutgers said that this was outdated and it was pretty much promoting inequities in our system that made it struggle for our community to actually properly fund our students. And we worked really hard on getting those funding formulas upgraded. And I'll show you what the results are as we move on to the next slide. And I think this is me, right? And one of the things that we wanted to share with folks is that we actually are going to apply some of our funding balance to help lower the tax rate. About 1.47 million is available so that we can really lower and build a bridge for the fiscal year 25. And what ACT 127 is, is what we just discussed a little bit. A little bit about how, hey, it costs actually a lot more to educate a student in multi-language. And once again, I don't want to say that there's a negative. It's just a matter of fact. Our multi-language learners help provide the liaison to our community. Whereas a lot of, sometimes when money is just tied to federal grants, it's only for the instructional need. But we all know that education is a family endeavor. So it costs us with multi-language layer who do a great job of connecting our families who don't speak English, to kind of be involved in the education system, right? There's also other needs. Like, you know, we do try to provide clothing, warm shoes, warm socks when we notice. And so these weights have been readjusted and that's why we're using our federal funds, our reserve funds to kind of lower the tax rate knowing that next year if our legislators don't change anything, which is always something that we worry about and we're monitoring on that, that if they don't change anything, we should have a better tax rate and more what they call taxing capacity, meaning more money for our buck and how we can properly educate and give the equity that our students deserve in our district. But what we also wanted to just say that, like applying this fund is 15%, but I wanted to kind of give a breakdown. Like, our fund balance as of June 30th of 2022 is about 3.3, 3.4, rounded up a million and there's things that we care about like that campus climbing to equity. And so we have an anti-racism steering committee that we also are kind of funding out our fund balance because a lot of people think equity doesn't cost money. That's not true. You need to kind of pay for the support that we're looking, we invested in that. We actually had a little bit of overrun because we rescinded some teachers. We were gonna cut two teachers from the previous budget, but after the fact, we rescinded that. So that's an additional money, capital project needs. So our projected balance is 2.6 million at the end of this kind of fiscal year. And our auditors recommended that we should always have about 4% of our operating budget. And so that comes down to about 1.1 million dollars-ish of our operating budget. So this gave us 1.46 million dollars from our fund balance to apply to lower the tax rate to 9.88%. And we thought that that was a wise decision because we didn't wanna make cuts that will rescind the good work that we've been doing knowing that we had a good bridge year coming ahead. Can you just explain on the bottom left there it says the result is a tax rate that is 15 cents lower than it otherwise would have been. Yeah, and I think so, you know, people always wonder, how does the math work? Like you increase the budget 20% and it only means your tax rate 9.8, right? Truthfully, if we actually didn't apply to any fund balance, our tax rate actually would have been 17% and stuff. So that 15 cents lower is kind of that math to say like, hey, we're applying this fund balance so that we can lower the tax rate. And yes, I'm not gonna say that 9% is a great number, it's hard. But this, we wanted to keep it as affordable too, like as many of our members and that's what we did. And maybe you're gonna get into this, but I think the question that I would have as the voters, what's the impact on me as a homeowner or a renter? That's a good, another segue. Jumping ahead on me, Megan. And one of the things, what is ACT 127? ACT 127 is gonna change the equalized of people, so if we had the weights this year, our equalized people count what goes from 900 to 1,242. This meant that our estimated tax rate should have been 1.56, right? Which would have been a decrease. It's actually calculates as a decrease of 14.4% with the same budget increase, right? So this is projecting forward for FY25 potentially, maybe. This is what would have happened if the law had applied this year, right? So if our legislators, our state reps, if you want, make sure a tail is small, like Daisy Probeco, are aware that they are not gonna change this act on us. So, you know, tax rate calculations come in in kind of two kind of buckets, homestead tax rates which involve why we focus on the equalized spending because it has impact. And then the other big thing is the CLA, which is the common level of appraisal, which basically says that like, how much of our home selling compared to the rate that's on the common list of approval? And unfortunately, this is the other hard part. In Winooski, we haven't had an appraisal and so that's around 76%, which means it also increases our tax, you know, it increases our tax rate. And there's also the income sensitized tax rates, which only is based on the per pupil spending and also on the income yield, which is not determined as you well know until May and the legislators kind of do this. So when people ask us, how much property taxes do I pay? Like we recommend that they go do this website to kind of learn, but it's hard. It's just hard to tell you, I can't sit down and say, I know your tax rate because one, you're gonna have to tell me what your income is and then also then your property tax, your housework because there's kind of different levels. If you're below 90,000, then you do the income. If you're between 90,000, your household income, if you're between 90,000 and 134,800s, it's between your house, it's a mixture of your house and your income. And if you're above 134, it's totally based on your house. So when you look at it like, you know, what does this mean? So say you have a house cold income at 90,000, in FI 23, we had a 2.3% kind of increase. So you were paying $2,106. With our current proposed budget, it's now gonna increase to 2,358, a difference of 12%. And but it increased overall in dollar amount, 252. But what's that based on the house value of? Nope, because this is, remember it's household income. If you're 90,000 and below and you own a house, it's totally on your household income. Got it. And so this is how it plays out if your household income is below 90,000, if you did some calculations on that, right? Now, the hard part is actually like trying to do a slide that's in between a household income and like property value. So we skipped that one and just said, let's say your household income is above 134,000 and 8,000, then it is completely based on your house site assessed value. Got it. And so if you had, so your income is above a hundred, your household income is above 134,000 and 8.8, right? $800. And your assessed house value is 150,000 and FY 23, you're paying $2,953. And FY 23, you're paying 3,239. So your difference is, this is the 9.66% of your tax increase. You're paying 200, you're paying $285. Got it. More on that. We want as a Winooski residents to say, like, you know, there is a relief credit and like everybody should be filling out their, if they own a home, they should fill out form HS-122 schedule HI-144 because Vermont does provide some tax credit and relief on your home and most people are eligible, but they have to file it or someone in their bank has to file it for them if they're paying a mortgage. So that is an announcement. When you come to vote on the day of voting, you're actually voting on two budget. One is a federal fund budget, which is basically money. We're basically saying, hey, as a town we're gonna accept these federal funds. If we don't accept, like let's say if we vote no on this, this means that the town has to come up with 3.491 million dollars. So that's one budget that we wanna make sure that people know. And then like I think our caveats is, is that because of income yield and property yield and the equalized people, some of these numbers aren't exact until the state Senate kind of gets it. And so there's always revision by legislation. And if you have opinion, please don't be afraid to call our representatives, Taylor Small, Daisy Barbeco, the speaker of House, Jill Koronsky and the governor Phil Scott. And then just a little bit more information. Here's your school board. Everybody in our town will be getting a budget flyer mailed out, but we're also doing a city and Winooski School District budget presentation for the community on February 9th at 5.30 p.m. at the O'Brien Community Center. And then we'll do another presentation, our annual on March 6th and stuff, so. And I assume we're probably gonna be recording that. Oh, cool. Looking to see if we're getting a nod on that or not. Right. We're getting a look. Hopefully. And so, you know, early voting does begin February 15th, March 7th, 7 a.m., sevens are wild here. So like, you know, come down and vote at the senior citizen, Barlow Street, please vote. This is the... Can we just rewind? So you're saying voters are gonna see one language or you're saying they're gonna see two pieces of language on the budget. Two pieces of language. One is for the federal, accepting the federal funding. And then the second one is accepting the school budget. And at this point, it's gonna look like it's a 9% tax increase. Yes, at 9.66, I should be careful, you know, and so. And if folks want to, they can find this information at WinooskiVT.gov to see sort of the expectation and to find more information about how to file for, file their HS122 for some relief, if need be. Right. We only have about one minute. I'm just, do we have, is there anything more that you wanna make sure that folks know? I appreciate what you just said earlier on that this is a voting for all residents. And I think this is a big part because if you look, we have a large new American population. And I really encourage our new American population to know that their voice matters. And being in a place that's about democracy. Yeah, and if you live in Winooski, you pay your taxes either through your rent to your landlord or through owning a home. And you're gonna, you know. Right, and I hope that what we have set as an example in Winooski is that your voice matters and that our voice is loud because that's why we built the school for all of our students, you know. And I do, and I'm gonna emphasize this one more thing, and I'm sorry, Kamal, is that this is truly an investment, not just in our children, but an investment in our community and it is an investment in our democracy. And so I hope everybody comes out and votes. Great, thanks so much. Kamal, any final words from you? I would reiterate the same thing that Alex said. No matter how you vote, please do and participate and vote. That's important thing. Yeah, great. So March 7th, polls are open seven to seven and we will have our results show here tonight. I mean, that night we'll be bringing you the results as we get them from the clerks and community members and I hope you can come in and join us and give us an update on election night about how the vote's gone. Thank you all for watching and continue to tune into our programming here at town meeting TV. That's all, good night.