 So it's 632, so let's call this meeting to order. Today we're going to talk about the budget and the interlational meeting as sort of our clear objectives. Is there someone who's willing to be a evaluator for this meeting? I know what the forms are. Forms of forgot to get out from this. Richard, could you grab that thing along with you? But I have forms. Thank you. Is there someone who's willing to be the evaluator? Thanks, Anne. So we want to welcome, come to see our meetings, or anything in particular, anyone would like to comment at this time before we get started? Is there someone here to represent Kat? Is she requested to be on the agenda this month? Very none. We will move on. Is that who was here last time? Yes. Yeah, about the bus stop issue at Brayden. So she requested in writing, and so that's why she was on the agenda this month. And that's for you. About size 2. OK, next is we need to set the date for the budget informational meeting. By statute, it needs to be a certain number of days before town meeting and the vote. 10 days, Laura. 10 days. So it's necessarily during school vacation, which is always unfortunate. Lane, was there a certain day you wanted to hold that budget informational meeting? Yeah, the 24th, which is Monday the 28th, which is Friday, are both bad. 24th is the actual board pre-meeting. Anyway, and then the 28th, I'm off at a class that I'm taking to help kind of overhaul the evaluation system for the teachers in the district. So the 25th, 26th, or 27th, and Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, any of those days are wide open for me. Whatever is most comfortable. Do we usually hold it on a Wednesday, do you know? I can't remember from past. Yeah, it seems like Wednesday is generally going to be out of town those days. Yeah, it's school vacation, which is always a hassle. I don't expect there's going to be a lot of folks. I've had five community forums on the budget. So typically, we might get one or two, but. We typically hold it in the high school. So Brian's going to be away that week. How does Wednesday look for everyone else? Does that look doable? So that would be Wednesday, the 26th. OK, can we set it for that? Six or 630, either way. All right, I'm not going to be there. Let's do 630s on that. Can't 630 people? And I'll do it at the high school. Yes. Yeah, just talk to people at the moment. So that's the 26th at 630. At our HHS. Yes, the media center. Thank you. We also have a day before town meeting, correct? Monday is also a meeting. Do you know the time of that? It's usually not enough. It's usually in the auditorium. It's usually 630 as well. And actually, it's going to be the media center because they have a play going on. So we're going to be in the media center for any of them. So that is another school board. And that's at 6. That's Monday, March 2nd. Yeah, it's always the evening before the vote. Well, that's what's worn done here. I mean, I can change it if you guys. But it's always been at 6. So what's the date to end, I'm sorry? Wednesday, February 26th at the high school in the media center at 630. That's the budget informational meeting. And it's sort of a discussion of the budget. I forget what they call it, a reorganization of the annual meeting. Yeah, yeah. And it will be what's on this morning, the first four or five articles. And so that's on Monday, March 2nd at 6. That's the draft. I don't know if that'll get approved tonight. That will also take place at the media center at RUHS. Cat, I see you arrived. Do you want to do, we've, my husband is on the phone because in the last session, I was called to my office. OK. You are on the agenda. We have time for you right now if you want to present your complaint. I believe you all have all the information, all the email, the response center, et cetera. Have time next week. Typically, with a board presentation is how it works. As you present what your concerns are, the board asks me to present. They ask both of those questions. They make a decision. Otherwise, what we end up doing is if I'm passing them information prior to, I can be shading them. So we just want to make sure that everything is fair and appropriate. So we have senior emails. But I do have it all here for anybody who wants to produce it. What we need to hear from you is the concern. And we're not going to debate he said, she said sort of thing. Just why are you here? What concerns do you have? I'm crazy that people see the roads are not safe. They would not be maintained properly in winter. I addressed this with the select board in virtue. They said that as they should, they take care of these school bus routes first, which everyone agrees with I would agree that the bus routes should be made sure before other roads. And that in order to maintain the stretch that it would take to go from the current loop that they make to add on the section to go to the defunct bus stop that I'm asking to be reestablished, which would take them an actual one and a half to two minutes. So it's a non-imposition. They said that they will not be able to change that until they find out if the board is willing to consider reinstating that bus stop. And that is all in the minutes of the meeting that I was at with these town board, the select board. Is there anything else you want to add? You have all the information in front of you. I don't know what else I can add. Basically, I just want to make sure my kids make a school out of it every day to go from school. And there's another family that lives out there as well that is more than willing to utilize that bus stop. So it's not just my children, but my children are young and they're going to be in the system for over 10 years. And I want to make sure that they have a good bus stop. OK. So I can kind of talk through the process that was done in making the decision. I'll also talk through a little bit about what the board policy is, what the state law is. But this map actually has been in existence since October when the first kind of request came in to consider a new bus stop, a new bus route for the buses that go up and around where Mrs. Ernest lives. This is Flint Hill. This is Braintree Hill Road. This is Bent Hill Road that goes down by Braintree Elementary School. Currently, there are two bus routes. There is one that comes up Flint, which I'm actually surprised it can get up that hill in the wintertime. And then it turns here, goes down Braintree Hill to Route 12A. There is another bus that comes in here on Thresher Road. And then it turns down Bent Hill Road and goes down towards the elementary school. Cat is up here. And when the request came in, the first thing that happened was the transportation director went out there in a van and took a look at all the routes to see what was possible. He came back and reported that it was not a safe route for the buses. He talked about the need for turnarounds, buses backing up. And I said, OK, well, it's appropriate for me to go out and take a look as well. And so I had two specific questions for him. The two that I had were here and here. So this is Rollin' Park. And we talked about it, and we went up and took a look at things. Now, what would have to happen if we put a bus stop here is if the bus from Thresher came this way, right? It's going to have to stop at the stop. It's going to have to back up Rolling Rock Road, which is cantered downwards. The backup is easy enough. The problem is right here. It cannot make the turn to do the turn around. In addition to that, this stretch through here, there's an area where there's a very long downhill and a very long uphill that is very steep and very narrow that a car would not be able to get past a bus on if they met. Can I finish my presentation? Because I did talk to the select board. One of the reasons that I think things got a little testy last time is because we were interrupting each other. So I think it'll be easier. And then if you want to ask questions, you can grill me as much as you want once I get done. So again, so this was incredibly narrow. Coming from this direction, if you came here, right? The problem is you can't do the back end to make the turn around. It just isn't enough space here. That's why those areas are shaded. We also looked here and said, OK, if the bus is coming up the road and comes this way and they do a pickup here, the bus has literally got to go past. It's got to back all the way up. And then it's got to turn to come back down. Same thing is true if it goes this way. It's got to back up, turn, and go this way to go all the way back down. It's horrible to have these buses backing up especially for this distance. And with cars that are coming, it's just it's not safe to do. We did take a look at a couple of other things. I spoke directly with Megan O'Toole. Let me throw this up here. Talked to who I spoke with as well as the road foreman. And both Danny and I actually spoke with them independently. And they both gave us the same assessment. Both of us looked. We drove the roads. We spoke with Megan O'Toole. We talked. She's from the Braintree Select Board. We spoke with Jeff Masterson, Braintree Road foreman, and as well as our own bus drivers. And a couple of things that they said is, one, there has not been a bus route up there in their memory. And their memory goes back to 20 to 30 years. So that's checking with our own bus drivers and that's checking with Jeff Masterson himself. Said it in front of his select board chair in my office. When I'm done. When I'm done. And then you can ask the questions that you want. He also reiterated, we met in my office, that that stretch of road is the last that is done on their routes. And he could not guarantee, even if it was safe for the buses to travel up there in the wintertime, he could not guarantee that he could have it done in a timely manner for pickup and drop off. And he said that in front of me and in front of Megan O'Toole. He also told Danny that. In terms of our board policy, it's this. Daily transportation of district's pupils is a privilege. School buses will not operate on roads deemed by the transportation supervisor to be hazardous or unsafe for buses. In the case of a request by parents to add additional routes, the decision, whether or not to do so will be made by the superintendent in consultation with the transportation supervisor. So at my level, the request should have stopped. But you're here in front of the board and I'm happy to have them consider the request. But it is not safe to put buses up through there. It looked unsafe when I was driving it in the summertime. Again, the bus is 40 feet long, it weighs 14,000 pounds without kids. But in the wintertime, you know, it's the potential for things to be catastrophic up there. With you on that route was the gentleman who had two buses that had to go to the branchry school. I spoke to both of the bus drivers, the female is the bus driver that goes up, Thresher down, Beto, the male is the bus driver there, he's up, Flint and goes down, Branchry Hill. What he said was that he didn't do that drive-thru, he could not turn around at Summit Road and I said I wasn't expecting that. He said he could definitely make the turn around at Olden Rock Road or at the intersection where the church is located, which is that triangle there. He said that has been done before and it's not a problem. That is what he quoted to me. He enters the bus stops at Olden Rock Road if they'd like to check something in writing versus their memory they will find out because it was stated at the select board meeting by a couple of members of the select board who actually used that bus stop. So I don't understand how they remember even about 40 years if per se that bus stop was actually in effect, which it was, they're either forgetting something or they're really just not telling you the truth and that's a possibility as well. The truth is irrelevant. What matters in this conversation is it's safe. It is not safe. That particular road is one of the safest roads. It is a wide, flat stretch of road. Extremely wide, extremely flat. Bus roads that go up bent and come up thresher and come up Flint are much worse. They are much steeper grade. There's absolutely zero reason why that can't happen. I don't understand who did this survey but I believe that if they did do the survey and in earnest, this is what they say, I would like to see it in writing because I'd like to argue that because that is ridiculous. Kat, the argument, like I said, it stops here with whatever the board decision, it should have stopped with me. I spent a good 20 hours with Dan looking, can you not interrupt me please? You cannot tell me the argument should have stopped with you. I'm going over your head apparently because I do not like the way I was dealt with by you. Okay, so are there any questions that any board members have for either Kat or for Laney? Do we have a copy of the minutes from the select board? That was not a member of the select board meeting. I can't confirm or deny what's been said. Do you have a copy? I don't have it with me. I've looked them up online and there is no conclusion or anything, there's just simply that you came and presented there wasn't any conclusions. What I actually asked the select board Megan when she was there, those shaded areas on the map around Rolling Rock, I said it could be possible if folks were willing to cut down a few trees and build the area up a little bit for the bus. So we were doing everything we could to try to make this happen. That particular area has actually been widened in the past five years, quite a bit. I have a question, we don't guarantee transportation. There's many places, for instance, in Brookfield where I live where the bus is not provided. For instance, in West Brookfield, parents have to transport their kids to route 12 for a bus pickup there. So we don't guarantee bus transportation. I'm wondering what happened last year with your kids? Well, I mean, I don't know when and if there was a bus stop there, but I do know that several years ago we had the same question in Brookfield and it was decided not to add more bus travel just because of the expense. People bought their houses where they bought their houses knowing that the precedent there had not been. We're gonna take more than an extra two minutes maximum which I was told by the road foreman Jess that it would take an extra two minutes for that particular driver, Charles, to come up and do his flint at Brantree Hill Road, come a little bit further and be able to do the stretch that goes up in terms of our road work. Okay. Is there any other new information that needs to be presented to us tonight? And we will, anyone from the board have any further questions or if they want voice now? There are two buses that go to the Brantree school, right? What about the kids on further over at East Brantree? Does the bus run over there? I don't have to hold the actual bus to do that. Beyond Path, like, is there a front in Brook over there? Yeah, it's on Menard Road. And does the bus go over there? It's going to be something that comes up to East Brantree. Because it seems like the problem is the bus doesn't come across the hill. There's kind of like two separate loops, but no loop that comes through there and no way to pull the loop through across the hill is what it seems like. Because if the bus just had to stop and then could keep going, I mean, you just have to change. You just have to completely alter the bus routes. Like I said, part of the problem also on the left-hand side between Rolling Rock and Thresher that turn, there is a very long stretch and I invite folks to go and drive it themselves. Of course, I did it in summertime so it's probably going to look worse now. It's a long downhill, it's a long uphill, and it's narrow, and the narrow is the problem. To Kat's point, I'm actually surprised when I drive up Bend Hill that the buses can make it up Bend Hill, and I'm surprised they can make it up Flayville. There's no objection. I think this is something we should talk about later in a few different documentation and see what we decide. And how will we let her know what we've decided? You can, usually, you can do it in writing in the board chair for another meeting. It also sounds like this is something that we've delegated to our superintendent to decide, so I don't know that it's our decision. Yeah, it's not our decision. It's not. Well, it's our decision to make sure that he's treated for fairly. Exactly. So we do need to look at the argument, but ultimately, as long as he's following policies. We can't change the policy. Yeah, so that's also something that you should know. As long as he's... He's going to write down that this is the next one, he just writes, can we return five students? In matters of busing, it can be for what they call administrative action. So that's like if we have a bus route in a child, let's say gets on trouble on the bus, and the principal says, no, no, you can't ride the bus anymore, and then it gets appealed to the superintendent, and the superintendent says, no, no, you can't ride the bus anymore. That could be appealed to the board. That's an administrative action. But they're very clear in terms of bus routes. And that was taken into complete consideration, and Steve Kenny was spoken to as well. Yeah. Okay, thank you very much, and we will let you know in writing what we decide. So you guys, every single year, every single month is necessary. It's not fair, in my opinion, in my husband's opinion, every parent that I've spoken with, that an old bus stop cannot be instated. And if you'd like to get that occasion of where that bus stop was, and if you think that it was used, then we're gonna have to get that for it, as well as we're gonna do that with this. Next on our agenda is a discussion of the school calendar. This was also brought up at a great meeting last month, and the meeting is going to present a little bit to us about how that calendar is devised, and some of the rules we can and can't use to amend it. So in terms of the calendar, there's rules that come from two sources. There's rules that come from state law. There's also rules that are embedded in our CBA, our contract with the union. In terms of the state, we've got to run school for a minimum of 180 days. 175 of those days have to be student days. Days that the kids are here, that we're in the process of educating them. Those do not, in service days, don't count towards that 175. We have to have at least five teacher in service days by state law. So five full days that the teachers are here being provided with professional development and professional development time. In our case, our calendar is a little bit special because it controls all the sending districts that send their students to the technical center. So usually we start up in October. I start talking with the cabinet about it, about what fits our needs for the professional development plan that we have for the coming year. They kind of hammer out where they would like to see the days fall to be able to deliver that professional development to the teachers. And then after that, I go and I actually talk with the superintendents from the other district. And there's some wiggle and a jiggle and just to make sure that everything fits everybody's needs as best as it can. But it's got to be decided in full by April 1st. In terms of the CBA, there are a couple of additions there. The teachers can be here for a maximum of 185 days. They may not start. One of the questions that came up was, why can't we front load the professional development days by one of the community members? And the reason is because under the contract, we are not allowed to start the teachers more than two days before the students arrive for that first day. And in addition to that, both of those days aren't technically PD. One of those days is for the teachers to work in their classroom and get prepared for the next day. 179 days based on our contract are student days. Two of those are what we call contingency days. And we kind of talked a little bit about this last year in negotiations. In other words, the first two snow days of every year, even though the teachers can be here for 185 days max, because of how it's written in the contract, they do not have to make them up. So that's what the contingency means. And then under our contract, they have to have six full days of insurance as opposed to the five. One of those days being the, an agreement that they, is that day that they work with the kids. Right, so in service days in general, there's six full days are required by our contract, one days for the teachers. One of the reasons that we are providing the professional development on these PD days while the teachers are here and in session, it's part of it has to do with cost. An in service day, if we were gonna have just the teachers here pay them additional to come in for an additional day so that we didn't have to have a half day for the kids to do it, it's $40,000 a day just for the teachers to be here on that day. And that does not include the cost of the trainer or the training that goes on. If we were to have the entire district here, if we had the support staff and everyone else in to be trained on a day that's outside of the contract, the cost would be closer to $7,000 a day. So one of the reasons that we use the days, the way that we do is to control that cost. One of the reasons that we use the half days is because they kind of allow us to do two things. As long as the students are here for half a day, as far as the state is concerned, it counts towards their full days of school, that full day 175 day count. So it allows us to get a full day count in as far as the AOE is concerned and it allows us to do a half day of training. And lots of times we try to put the trainings on the Tuesdays or Wednesdays, depending upon which part of the district the training is for, because those are typically the days that the teachers stay late under the contract anyway. So you know, they'll start at noon and they won't get out till 3.45 or 4.15 or so on. So just parts and pieces. I can throw you up there with the list of questions on that, what the calendar kind of looks like for next year. This has not been in front of the superintendents yet. The next meeting that we have next month, the superintendents will be talking about it. So August, you see the blue days, those are the full day in-service days. The green days with the slash through it, those are the half days. We talked a lot about the need within the district to have a professional development line. You know, we talked a little bit about, you know, wouldn't it be nice to have a curriculum director? But you know, if we don't have that, then one of the things that we really need is a professional development line so that we can start going after providing training to the teachers that they need to get us where we wanna go on behalf of the kids. We talked about, you know, building a science curriculum at the elementary school. We talked about revamping the core curriculum to the high school, which is the science, the L.E. and the math. We talked about bringing in a facilitator next year if the budget goes through to be able to provide some social-emotional teaching for the teachers so that they can interact in a more positive way with the students when wider things happen. So there's a whole plethora of things that we have planned for next year. And the way that that is reflected in the calendar is you're gonna see that those full days, the blue days, they're all up front in the first three months. That's time for the facilitators to come in and actually interact with the teachers and do the bulk of the training. And then the green half days are there to do the follow-up. You know, are you using it? Okay, we've got the curriculum, documents, revamp, people are using it. Now on these half days, it's time to start taking a look at the assessment tools that we put into place last year. What is the data that's coming from them and how the facilitators train those teams, especially at the high school, how to sit down, how to analyze that data. Learn those skills to be able to carry on those meetings themselves within a department. And then to be able to go through a process to do some brainstorming and some problem solving. Oh, the data's showing us that on these four standards every year, the kids are really struggling as a department with our own knowledge. You know, what are we gonna do differently when we teach the students these concepts next year? So it's really trying to get that model in place. So the calendar that we've built for next year, again, assuming it pass muster with Bruce and Suzette, the other two superintendents that are involved here, this is why we structured it the way we did and why those PD days are in there. So questions, thoughts. I think we still end up with a lot of broken weeks in the first, up until the end of December. We have more broken weeks than we have full weeks. We do. And it's more speaking as a parent than a board member. I found the half days doesn't amount to a lot of education for the students that are there. We're talking about they wanna have the training, but I know my son, on a lot of the half days, they'll watch a movie. And one of them was Jurassic Park, so I'm not sure what educational value that was, but it seems like every half day, they don't get a lot of instruction. So would it be better to combine those and give the kids the whole day off and let the teachers have the full day of development? Then you extend our calendar, right? Extend your calendar and then you owe me $70,000 to bring everybody in for that additional day. And that's if they agree to it because the contract spells out very specifically how many days are there. The half day piece, I am in agreement with you. This professional development, the amount that we have those days was not intended to be always as much. The six days have to be there. The half days, as things get into place, they were built as a structure to get things into place, to get things up and running the way we wanted, and then we can pull back on them. Now, the other piece to talk a little bit about with the half days right now, the other way to think about them is kind of turn it around a little bit. There is a much greater, there's gonna be a much greater impact because of the PD than anything that they lose over those half days. Because right now, and again, this is not a criticism of the teachers and they can't say that enough. This is not criticizing the teachers. This is, the district has not provided the structures to the teachers over time in terms of curriculum and PD to get things where we want them to be interested outcomes for kids. But we gotta provide the time. There are alternative structures if folks in the community is willing to add some days and during negotiations, we can do that. We can, but it's about 70,000 a day to do. Just to put a perspective on it. What are other districts doing for that kind of? They all have half days, once a month. Okay. Yeah, that's the norm. If you're- I think I looked at some calendars of the Chittenden County Schools and it looks like, and I don't know, because it looks like they have like every Monday, certain months, every Monday, they start at 10 in the morning instead of, and so they just have that built in. Elementary. So it's really predictable for working families. Elementary schools are a little bit different than norm. So I can't say every district, but the norm across the country is that it's a half day a month secondary level. At the elementary level, it's a half day either a week or it's a half day every other week. That's the norm across the country because the teachers do need time. It's not just that time isn't just to sit down and do the actual professional development, the training, but it's once they've got the training, it's their time to sit down as a brain trust and a collective and put it to good use and talk with each other. Build back camaraderie, get this professional learning community. So we've been out of the norm in terms of curriculum work and professional development for years. So on the one hand, we can keep it in place for a couple of years and get stuff up to where we wanna be. We can pull it out, but nobody can complain if we pull it out that things aren't moving forward. So have you considered making a more regular schedule, say like every other Monday or some sort of regular schedule so that families do have more of a routine building? The basic logic between the half days and we've actually already cut back to that we used to have. When they sat down, they were trying to prevent as many choppy weeks. They didn't do quite as good a job of it this year as they did in previous years, but the other thing that they're always looking at is look, if we have to build in a partial day or whatnot, can't we put it so that it either extends the vacation or it's adjacent to a conference day? You'll see a lot of that in this calendar so that the parents are getting a little bit more time at home. Yeah, I think this calendar actually does that better than this current year's calendar. Yeah, so trying to make those connections for parents. So there is quite a bit of thought and logic goes into it. Is the conference day considered a student day or not? Yes and not. One is one's not, if I remember. Again, I have to go back and look at all my notes when I was pulling through it the first time. I literally have to sit down, look at the state laws, the contract, and then some of the other agreements that are in there when I set up the calendar each year to make sure that I'm not scrolling up. But they used the conference days. There was something that happened and you two might be able to speak to it better than I did. You used to have two and then there was some disagreement over, did it count for a conference day, did it not? And then it's. I'm glad to speak. Yeah, go ahead. You have to count, according to this new calendar, you have to count the conference days as student days and this year the same thing because otherwise they don't have 179 days. Yeah, so the contingency days are there. They just, we gotta make sure that they have them. That's what they're talking about. That's what they're talking about. They're considered student days. But there was agreement at one point in time about whether the conference days in the past five or six years ago about whether they counted for in-service or not because there were two. And it sounded like in the end the agreement was okay because one side is saying both should count, the other side is saying none can count. The agreement was that one counts and the other does not. I was not privy to any of that. Yeah, so that's the model. But that's what I heard when I was pulling stuff together. So your expectation lane is that, and right now it looks to me like we've got seven half days and two conference days. You are. Expectations that we will in future years need fewer half days? If we get the training done and we get things moving forward as we are, we should need fewer. Again, the norm is one a month. We're at seven, there's 10 months in the school year. You know, I think reasonably, probably four to five would be reasonable. And the expectation is that, you know. Two years, you're a heavy training this year, a year to make sure that we're coming in, we're checking in, we're making sure that people are using what they've learned. And that they're self-sufficient. You know, a lot of this work isn't meant to be necessarily led by an administrator. These are skills that groups of educated people just use in those professional learning communities as long as they've been trained. They sit down, they examine their work with each other, they use some data to inform it, and then they make the decisions about, you know, how they're gonna proceed. Those are, they need time to be able to do that. But my arguments for what they're worth. Any other discussion on this? And then, this is decisions. Yeah. So, we're responding in part to the questions last month. Sounds like this is pretty routine. It's happening in the other districts around the area. We gotta hold this feed to the fire. Let's have some results. Let's have some results. If you don't have results, there's no reason to, yeah. Right. So, we're gonna do it, let's have some results. I have heard feedback as well from parents who feel like there's a lot of missed time, very long vacations, and these half days, you know, to follow what Brian has shared. I've heard from others who are concerned the value of that day for students. And I think that's something that needs to be strongly considered. And I guess the feedback where I would be comfortable to be able to justify these half days to concerned parents, taxpayers, is to show the benefit coming from them. We'll talk about some of the benefits because there's been significant ones at the elementary, which has been using it for that purpose for the last two years, when we get to the budget discussion piece. High school, as we've kind of touched on before, their main focus for the last two years was that mandate from the state about the, you know, the proficiency-based grading and the graduation requirements, which the state dropped on everybody. It gave them no guide on how to do, and so every district across the state was scrambling around for five years, trying to figure out how to put them together. That's what they spent all their time doing. But they're in the position now. We're starting next year that we've got those facilitators at the budget that goes through will be coming in and doing this work with them. So that's the goal. What they used this time for previously was those, the graduation requirements. So the standards are pretty high, correct? Questions or comments? Okay. Thank you. So next we have a discussion of the budget. I need to present that. So this, yeah, this, we've been, there's been five presentations now out and about. I'm not including the discussions at the board. So unless people have specific questions on some of the pieces that are in here, it's not all the details. When we get to the actual numbers, it's just the, you know, this is the discretionary, this is the non-discretionary, because we've talked about the specifics so much over the last couple of meetings that it shouldn't be there. But typically this budget presentation and the one that's done in front of folks for the annual report usually starts off with taking a look or reminder of what the general vision is and then kind of moves into, you know, how have we done? You know, what progress have we made towards that general vision? And then how is what we're planning for the budget or next year designed to keep us moving in that direction? And so that's kind of what I'll talk a little bit about now. Don't want to necessarily read this for you, but there is a big broad general vision out there for the district for the next decade and all the parts and pieces in terms of your ends actually play into this and support this. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to revamp things so that the schools are producing such positive outcomes for kids that we actually have parents that are moving into the three towns to take advantage of the quality education we provide. And there's a lot of reasons for doing this. The biggest one outside of just what we're providing for the kids, because they're the primary reason we do what we do, but there's a tremendous amount of economic impacts that are positive that can come out of this. The more people that we have living in the town, the more people the tax burden is spread over. The more people that are living in the town, the more likely it is for businesses to move into the town to support those people. And again, the tax burden is now spread over more entities. It also, they tend as the quality of the schools go up, you have the opportunity for property values to rise. And then the other thing that would be kind of neat is if we get some businesses moving into town, we get more people here, is for this to be a flourishing area where the students, as they graduate, if they decide that they wanna come and they wanna live here, they can do it and they can make a high wage, would be the goal in the end of all this. But it all comes down to getting people moving in. And that's why you've probably heard me harp over the years about the importance of increasing enrollments. As the enrollments increase, money starts to flow in and we can do more and more on behalf of kids. So we've kinda been investing over the last two years primarily at the elementary level. But we've been building programs kind of in two areas. We've been looking in the area of curriculum, what's taught, how it's taught, how we measure learning, so that the teachers have the information to adjust their instruction. So we've got that piece that's going on and the perfect example at the elementary school is the revisions to the math program. We made sure that at the K-3 level, they were using the Bridges curriculum that was brought in and worked out with UVM a few years back, that they were actually implementing it the way that it was supposed to. And then we did the adjustments that were needed in the Bridges curriculum in grades four, five, and six, so that the teachers were using it properly and appropriately to be able to connect with kids. We also spent a year of offering two graduate courses that most of the elementary teachers took in mathematics, which were the eight principles of math. I'm a lot of you have heard about the Common Core. The Common Core really didn't change much about what's supposed to be taught to kids. What it changed was how it's taught. And so they had an opportunity to take two graduate courses right here taught by one of our own instructors who also teaches at Castleton State College to come in and learn those eight practices and put them into place. So there's been a tremendous amount of work that's been going on. At the same time that you've got the work that is geared strictly towards academic improvements, you've had a lot of work that's been happening in terms of the social-emotional realm, putting in programming to work with the students of trauma to make sure that when they come in every day, they are open and ready for learning, that their emotional disturbances that they're happening are not preventing them from being able to access what we're trying to do academically. And so those two things have been going on at the elementary level. Some of that is also stretched out to the high school. There's actually been some social-emotional programming supports that have gone in at the high school level as well as partners starting to build their structures up with the behavioral interventionists and the inclusion of an adjustment counselor to work with the students who act together as a team to change behaviors. The results at least at the elementary level, we'll talk about first and then the high school level, whether or not you realize this over the past two years and it's important to understand what this number is telling you. The entire elementary population in this district, that's all three elementary schools, over the past two years, 10% more of that entire population is hitting proficiency or exceeds on state and national testing and math and ELA. In terms of the annual snapshot. And this data is actually two years old because they don't have last year's data yet. So this is after the first year here. And last year's data, when we get it, will be even better than this because the scores are higher because I have the raw scores. Brookfield and Randolph Elementary Schools are rated by the state as meeting all academic proficiency requirements. That's in math, ELA, science, and phys ed. Puts all four of those together to make that determination. Not only that, but the piece that we're talking about with why professional development is so important is this last measure here. In terms of how quickly the overall student body and the elementary grades, their achievement is increasing, they're at the highest level, highest rating that the state can give. So not only are they improving, they're improving pretty darn quickly right now because of this work that we've invested in. Braintree Elementary School has achieved the highest rating in both categories. So they're at exceeds across the board in terms of student performance in those four areas. And they're also achieving better and better every year and accelerating grade. So there are some very good things that are happening because of the work we've engaged in. Compared to two years ago, each school in the district, Braintree Elementary, Brookfield Elementary, Randolph Elementary, Randolph Elementary and High School has gained at least 15 additional students. And this is not counting the students in the preschool programs. If you take a look at the little graph here, right? This is a number of kids that are in our first grade program this year. This is the previous year. This is the year before. This is the year before. Every year it's grown at a steady rate, right? We keep talking about the enrollments. Our enrollments are going up. We're bucking the 20 year trend in the state of Vermont of declining enrollments. Matter of fact, they're predicting that the declining enrollments in Vermont are supposed to continue for the next 10 years. That's not happening here. The reason Randolph Union High School is in green is because they've gained at least 15. They probably gained closer to 30 or 40. I haven't had the chance to track them all down between vast and tech and to get the actual number on it. But I know the number that the state puts on it is 381, which means we're up quite a few there. So the budget that we're going after this year seeks to do a couple of things. We wanna keep things going forward at the elementary school at the same pace that it's been happening. But we also, because they're making good strong gains and things are happening the way that they should, we also wanna start turning our attention to the place that needs it most right now. And that's our middle and our high school age students at REHS. Before we kinda talk a little bit about how the budget's gonna support that, there are a tremendous number of successes at the high school that people may not be aware of. It does need some work when it comes to the core curriculum that that does not mean the students are not learning. The high school has a very long, strong history of really serving well the social and emotional needs of its students across all grade levels. The students even in the safety surveys I did for two of the years now, they state that it's a comfortable, it's a supportive place. It's also a place where they feel that they have voice. And what that translates to, to these numbers up here, our students have fewer absences. They tend to stay in school, not drop out and make it through to graduation and graduate than their peers in other districts. The national stage graduation rates are probably in the 70s. Across the nation of Vermont, it's around 85, it can be as high as 89. Our graduation rates are typically between 90 to 95%. So the kids are here, they, despite, talk at times about things that they like being here and they are attending the school and most of them are making it through graduation. The other piece that people may not know is that that high school attracts over 33 students from other districts who pay tuition to come here. You know, we talk about the value of increasing enrollments. At between $10,600 and $17,000 per student, those additional kids over the last couple of years are adding quite a bit on the revenue side. So yes, on the expense side, that the town is paying more to help us start to get these programs in place. But over the course of time, as these enrollments come up, go up, there's gonna be a break-even point and hopefully if we do things right, we're gonna get past that break-even point and the extra revenues rolling in from these additional students is gonna far outweigh what we need in the budget. And the budget will actually start to go down. When talking with the parents and the families about why they've chosen the high school, these are the things that come up. The advanced placement courses, there are between 10 and 12 advanced placement courses that regularly run at RUHS. There are three or four that run every year. The rest of them, they alternate years. The project-based learning opportunities and internships, if you're a student at a traditional classroom environment is not your thing, we actually have a program there that a lot of you are familiar with where the students can sit down and they can map out the path that they will take to achieve the learning standards in an alternative setting and graduate. We have extensive extracurricular and athletics program and we've got a full-time athletics program and the number of extracurriculars we have is outstanding. One of the deficiencies that we had in previous years that is now in place is we've got a $70,000, $80,000 robotics program that's up and running with 12 kids in it. They're doing some beautiful work. They're getting ready for the competition and that's extension in a little while, another month or so. And there's also coding courses that are in place, both to support the robotics and for kids that have an interest in computer science and programming. And then the other piece that we've already kind of touched on is they've got that multi-tiered system of supports. They have plenty of programs in that school that any student who may be struggling, whether it's emotionally or whether it's academically, if they want to avail themselves of it or they can get the help that they need. The things that the high school needs right now is they need a comprehensive overhaul of their core curriculum. This is work that is typically happening every year in most districts because we haven't had the structures we haven't been able to provide for that. What does that mean? Well, core curriculum, science, math, and ELA. Those are the big three. Those are also the most public three. What does this mean? It means we need to teach what the state and what the nation expects our students to be learning. And those aren't half hazard standards that the state and the nation has decided upon. They spent a lot of time going out and checking with business and taking a look at what the future of the world holds in deciding what those knowledge and those skills are that students need when they put them into place into this common core curriculum that we talk about. And that's to make sure that students when they get out of high school are successful regardless of what path they take, whether it's just going into the workforce or it's going into the military or whether it's continuing on with college. Again, we talked a little bit about this, the second piece, training in best practice. So we've got to get those facilitators to get them in there, help them revise and align the curriculum of state and national standards. But we've also got to give the teachers training in best practice when it comes to delivery. The biggest thing that the common core did was change how you teach these subjects. It looked at the research base. It saw what was most effective and that's what it prescribes when it comes to teaching math, science, and ELA. That's what that eight standards was all about, the eight common practices of math at the elementary school. Those are the practices teachers are supposed to be using and the mindsets that they're supposed to be developing and students around mathematics to be successful at. They've also need some training and using the assessments. This is more so at the high school. To inform practice, they have the assessment tools in place. That was the structure we put in place last year. They're looking at data, but they need some training to be able to analyze it and figure out best next steps to take to improve things. And the facilitator can provide that. And then the big thing, which this graph up here has to do with, is we've really got to re-envision what happens in the middle school years. That was some of the talk about potentially moving the sixth grade early on. But what happens in the district is this graph is an idealized graph. It's a composite of the last 10 years of data in both math and ELA. And it's a distinctive pattern that falls out every year over the last 10 years. At the elementary level, the students are growing, their score, they're performing very well. They get fifth grade, there's a decline. Fifth to sixth grade, there's a, excuse me. Fifth to sixth grade, there's a decline. Six to seventh grade, there's a huge decline. Continues into eighth grade. And then between eighth and ninth grade, they start to make a recovery, but they never make it back to the level that they were at when they left elementary school. So when you see that and when you see something like that that's been consistent for years and years and years, what it means is we've got some basic structures and programs that are missing there to support these kids. And that was one of the reasons, first why we look at the data, but one of the things that we were able to pull from it. So one of the big pieces that's happening right now as part of this professional development is the folks from Williamstown are gonna be coming over in a few weeks to talk with our staff here on the next professional development day, talk about how they turned their school over the course of three years, they've become one of the highest performing schools in the state. And then we're gonna spend some time visiting over there. Primary focus is the middle school level, but there are things that we could potentially learn. Doesn't mean we have to do any of them, but there's some good ideas that we might be able to pick up in terms of what they're doing across all grades. But the big focus is what are you doing with these sixth, seventh, eighth graders middle school technically starts in fifth. If you talk about the students themselves, that middle school mindset, the transition kids are going through to see what we can bring in. And that team, Lisa Floyd, will be heading up, has been pulling a panel together to start taking a look at the research and what's out there to try to come up with some ideas about how we can improve the existing structure that we have here and now. So all the good stuff. We've kind of talked about the details about all these. And I am happy to go into more depth on each of these little budget lines. But basically you can take the budget and you can split it into two pieces. There's a discretionary side and there's a non-discretionary side. Discretionary are the things that we're adding that we could remove. But they're typically all the things that you're geared up for improving student outcomes, right? They're that 405,000 that you're looking at there has a whole bunch of things in there. It's the new teacher at Braintree because their enrollments are going up and we've never given them a new teacher to coincide with it. It's the professional development line at $106,000. It's the money to keep and maintain the preschool. Now, what's interesting about this is I want to tie it back to enrollments and the revenues that pour in because of it. Because we've been doing this work over the last two years, we are generating revenue. How much revenue are we predicting for next year? That much right there. So yes, I'm asking for what, $405,000 plus $11,000, $415,130 as a total to keep things moving forward. But because of the work we've already done and because of the new enrollments and because of the revenue that we generate from the after-school program in the preschools, $295,000 of it is offset right off the top. So really what I'm asking for out of nearly a $20 million budget is I'm asking for $120,130 to keep things moving forward in this district. The stuff on this side, this is the non-discretionary things. These are the things that we don't have a choice for the most part and we have to pay them. Could we kind of make cuts here? Yeah, you could, but if we do, it means that we're gonna be violating the law or violating the state mandate or violating the regulation if we come back on it. Healthcare, we spent a lot of time talking about this. Good news on the healthcare is that at least the arbitrator clarified his decision a few days ago and said that the new healthcare piece goes into effect halfway through next year. So the total impact of this is on us is up to 740, so six plus 80, it's twice the 340 is the total impact, but we're able to split the impact over two years now. So yeah, there's a big increase but the split over two years. I'm tired of those, I'd be able to add. Facilities, we're still looking for a $32,000 increase there. The reason that we're doing that is they have lines in their budget that are meant for certain specific things that we talked about buying supplies, providing for trash removal, the composting that we now have to pay for that was a mandate that came in a few years ago. Those lines historically have never been where they needed to be to actually cover the cost that they really are. From what I can tell in previous years, they were actually part of what was coming out of the reserve funds to cover the shortfalls over here. I'm trying to build them into the regular budget. You do that for a very important reason. We could still pull them out of surplus, but you put them into the regular budget because one of the purposes behind the budget is transparency and so people know what you're spending and what you're spending it on. So it's appropriate for it to be there. Special education, this one is in yellow. The increase is 255,801 for next year, which is about a third of what the previous year's increases have done. We are restructuring, we talked about that, restructuring the special education program to move things from a managing model to an improvement model. Basically, what we've got is we've got a lot of paraprofessionals who are great people. The paraprofessionals in a high school are like or release in a hospital. They manage people. They help folks clean, they help folks eat, they help folks with their mobility, but they are not in and of themselves healers. It is the jobs of the surgeons and the nurses and the doctors to do the healing. And what we have right now is we have a system that is heavy on orderlies and we don't have enough doctors to go around. We don't have enough special education teachers to do the important work of healing our kids. So basically, we've got enough special education teachers to keep them alive and not to heal them. So the change in this model is reducing the number of paraprofessionals and using that money to purchase more special education teachers, as well as changing the model for how the services are delivered to something that's more effective so that the hope is over time. We're actually treating the students, they're coming off their plans and we get our special education members down to something that's comparable. We're almost twice the state and national average for the percentage of our kids that are NIPs. And it's because the model that we've had for years is not healing the kids. It's maintaining them, it's managing them, it's getting them through the day but it's not providing the lasting effect. So this is basically in there, it's an increase but it's an anticipation of potential out placements for students. The other piece that's pretty much non-discretionary, there's a little leeway in it, but that's the fact that we've got to build in an amount for salary increases because it's an negotiation here. That's what this is. So the non-discretionary stuff is on this side, if I added everything up right, for this year it's 1.3 million. The discretionary stuff, if we're just looking at it in terms of expenses, it's 415,000. If we take into account the offsetting revenues it's actually on a new portion. So we've spoken a little bit about this at the last board meeting where, yeah, I can go back and I can cut, but the difference between paying these two together and just paying this one is so minimal, why bother? But if the budget fails and whatnot we'll have to come back and talk that there really isn't a lot I can cut. And this piece right here, this was unanticipated. The expectation was when the state kept selling it that we're going into the negotiations because we're going to cut costs, they did. And it was a surprise to a lot of districts across the state. Our summary, and again we're looking at the expense size of things. Last year's budget, 18.5 million will increase to 19.7 million. Taking revenues into account, so this is, we're spending plus what's coming in and then what's left over is what we've got to ask for. It's a 6.47% increase. And hey, if you remember that article I sent to you from, I think it was Vermont Digger when they were talking about the impact of healthcare negotiations this year, what did they say? A little 6 to 7% increase across the state. So we're right in there with where the rest of the state is. The nice thing about this budget is that it keeps us below the spending threshold. What happens is there are various thresholds in terms of dollar amount, what you're paying for student. If you cross certain thresholds, some things can be triggered. Up to $10,833 per student, that comes from the education fund. Every person in the state pays for that dollar amount equally. From here to the red line, that comes from local as well as the ed fund. Probably about 33% of it is coming from other people's pockets, not this town. The thing we don't wanna do is cross this red line because anything above $18,756 per student, all of a sudden it's triggered and it all comes out of local pockets. So we're not at the red line and we've got a pretty good buffer there. The healthcare piece is gonna push a lot of districts over the red line. Just so folks know. So we'll be going from $17,000 per student to $17.9. So questions on any of these pieces? When the state set that red line, was it before or after the negotiations? We just got that about two weeks ago, if that. The state has been actually really late on getting a lot of its data out. We talked about that. I'd like to tell you what the revenues are, but I can't. A lot of that data was supposed to be available first week of December and it never came. So it's been rolling in. Even the healthcare piece, this piece, that arbitrator's clarification was last week, like late last week that I got it. So we didn't even know if it was gonna be the full 700 and whatever, a thousand or if it was gonna be the 320 or 340. The other piece that's still in limbo in the budget is now that the arbitrator has clarified what his decision was, is now, Vihi has come back and said, oh, by the way, because we didn't know what the negotiations were just gonna end up being, is there coming back and saying, now we have to reassess what the overall, just the yearly increase is supposed to be. It was 12.9%. Now that they reassess, now that the state healthcare piece is there, they may reassess higher, maybe a bigger increase, maybe a smaller, we don't have that information put in this budget. So when they plan out this process for negotiations and put the end dates on it so late, they really didn't make things easy on folks. Trying to be responsible and plan things out. Final note, so the dollar amounts when people go to vote are gonna look like they're in discrepancy, they're not. We talked a little bit about this last year. The federal government is requiring folks to show in their overall budget how much money is federal money coming from the federal grants like title funds. So the problem with that is, is that I've gotta put that on the voting, but it's that that's actually coming from the state appropriations. The other 900,000 is actually the federal grant money that we receive in addition to it that does not come out of people's pocket at the state money. So that sometimes if people see that, it's gonna look like a huge jump, but it's not, there's another almost million dollars in there that's added onto the budget that just because we have to declare how much we've gotten from the federal government, if that makes sense. So I'll be talking an awful lot about that in the open forums as we meet up to the March 1st vote and in the communications that I see now. Bottom line, what does this all mean if we go with this 6.47% increase? Brookfield, I feel sorry for you, we'll talk about it when we get to the next slide. But a lot of these, the change depends upon your common level of appraisal. Your common level of appraisal in Brookfield was always very high. Now they adjusted it down to normal. So it means you're gonna have a, see a fairly sizeable increase compared to everybody else. The brain tree, this budget is a 4.69 cents increase per $100 of assessed home value. The average home value in Vermont has gone up since last year, last year it was 201,000, this year it's 253,000. Based on this number, average tax increase for schools for the average person in brain tree would be $119, which is $9.88 a month. Now, that's only true if you don't hit the income sensitivity levels. Income sensitivity levels are fairly high in Vermont. So if your family income is less than $90,000 and your home is valued at less than $400,000, you can fill out a little form when you do your taxes to take advantage of the income sensitivity threshold and you will not be paying this amount and will be paying something less. The formula is too freaking complicated for me to figure out, so you'll have to have your accountant probably before I get to tell you what it'll actually be. I usually can figure this stuff out and it sticks with me for about an hour and if I don't think about it for more than an hour I lose it. Brookfield, and again, this is because your common level of assessment went from 115% in previous years down to about 103 this year. Whenever that happens, you need to pay more and pay less. Usually if you're over-assessed, you pay less. If you're under-assessed, you pay more. So you guys are looking at a 13 cent increase for $100 of the assessed value, average home of 253, your tax increase you're looking at 329, which is 2740 a month. But again, as long as people know, they can fill out that form, that sensitivity, income threshold can reduce that quite a bit for you. And then lastly, for all of us living in Renoval, 4.97 cents. That's what we're looking at. So $126 going up in 1048 a month. Kind of bottom lines here. So budget, there are three things that you as a board are looking at tonight to vote on, three or four actually. You've got the OSSD budget, which we've just kind of completed talking about. So it's real important to folks have questions that we talk about them. The next piece is we'll talk about the surplus funding and putting it into the reserve funds. Then there's the tech center, and then there's, four. Things that you're actually looking at. So this is the OSSD budget. This is Braintree Elementary, Randolph Elementary, Brookfield Elementary, and the high school. Does the board have any questions? Does anyone else in this room have questions for laying about this? Either it means I did a good job or I was completely un-comprehensible. No, no, no. I don't even know what happened. I mean, some will go. If there is time, if the board votes this in tonight, there's, through March 3rd, I'll be going to another four or five open forums to try to talk with people about what it means and the impact. So let's just get people out and talk or ask the questions. I guess, here, do you know what the total percentage that the healthcare costs is? Like is it a percent of the total budget, do you have that? We could actually probably calculate it. I mean, I don't want to hold you up. The healthcare, the total. Well, I see the increase. I'm just trying to get a sense of the scope of the increase by, I understand, like what the whole cost of the health. The whole cost that's spent over two years to the impact this year and then the impact next year. I can give you a general percentage. Depends on how. So it's about 740 to 780, the total cost that we're predicting. And we did pretty good numbers. It's hard to predict. It could be as high as a million if all the support staff take, if all of them. So what we did is we checked and talked to them and said, hey, what's your family situation? The most of them were willing to share that with us. So, okay, these guys are two families. So they'll probably stay at two person. This is a single. This is a family. So based on that, we're looking at 740 to 780, total impact. So when you did that, did you ask, and I don't know if it's even allowed to ask, but are you, are you getting- They don't have to provide the uniform. Right, they don't have, but you know, how many people are gonna, are planning to take it when they weren't before? There's a lot of the support staff to get their health insurance through their spouse, or other places. So unless, unless they're working, unless their spouse is working at another school, I can guarantee you our healthcare package is better than what they could get in private industry, I guarantee you that. Hands down, we're having worked in private industry, and I can guarantee you that. So that doesn't guarantee anything, but it's a motivator to switch. It's a motivator to switch, so that's in the back of the minds as well. That was one of the things, you know, even 30 years ago when I was in Vermont, was the healthcare was always great, hey, something, excuse my language. You know, there's people on to about it, but the healthcare you were taking care of, and they preserved that pretty well through the years. So good question. Probably 20% this year, so 20% this year and 20% next year, could have been about a third, third to a half of this year's budget, it had been the whole 740,000 was there. Yeah, it was. A third of the total 27 million dollars budget, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so if anything. It's very painful. Third to a half, yeah. And again, it was, it's not that, and I want to step back as a human, people deserve health insurance. I mean that's, I have a fundamental belief in that. What happened in this process that the state engaged in was they took our ability to plan it out in a logical way for people, you know, to have this huge increase all of a sudden when they told us they'd be saving us money. Throws you for a loop. Hey, quick question on the per student. So your slide said something about $17,000, $98 per student. How do you feel that the, you know, with that budget, that the taxpayers will look at that versus the increase on their property tax through the three towns? It all depends. Last year we looked at an 11% increase we were trying to hit reset on things. And the reason we're trying to hit reset was because the folks had done a very good job of keeping things, the cost very low, but we lost a lot of things when that happened, right? We didn't get to do the professional development curriculum work at the high school. We didn't get to revamp the special education and it ended up costing us more money. So the intent was to come back this year and have a nominal, you know, not a small, what I was trying to do was come back with what I call a level service budget. So probably 3% ish total. So I actually achieved that pretty darn close, had it not been for the healthcare piece. Yeah, yeah, had it not been for the healthcare piece I would have been in that range. The other piece to realize too, is that in terms of the increases, we're building the structures to get us where we wanna go. We got a whole lot of them in last year. We got 85%. This year we're gonna get another 10%. We don't have a heck of a lot more than we need at this point in time after this year. There will always be some, you know, I might be asking for 100,000 here or there for things to really get things accelerated but we should be in pretty good shape after this year. More importantly than that is as those improvements take off and people start to look at this as being a really good viable place, especially high school, to send their kids as those enrollment goes up, right? It's gonna stabilize the taxes and it could even have them come down. With enough enrollment we could actually build things and have people's actual tax bills, personal tax bills go down. School budget will go up but their personal tax bills will go down. That's the goal, right? Okay, on that with families possibly, sorry, families possibly growing, is there any solid information that Tritown here is actually growing? Like more people are starting to come in. Our enrollments are going up and that was the graph with showing you what's happening with the first grade class for your entire population. Oh, in terms of outside of the school piece? Yeah, to be able to support that number saying that we're doing better, more enrollment. Well, is that because of the age of people, you know, the age of the children are going into the school district aspect or is it because we have newer families buying and renting homes in the three- Braintree, it's newer families that are buying homes. And it's interesting, one of the reasons it's happening, there were two or three folks that I spoke with that came in. They're from Massachusetts. It's the telecommuting for work because most work is done on the computer now. They do not have to be in the office. And they don't wanna live in mass. So they move into Braintree, they do their work over the computer and then once every two weeks or once a month they shoot down 89, they go spend the day at the office that they have to spend. So I think you're gonna see a lot more of that across the country. I think that's a big piece of the demographic shift that's happening. Vermont's a great place to risk it is. It's a great place to live and not fight the traffic. Okay, one more thing and I'll shut my app. So especially on the special education aspect, and I'm gonna say this incorrectly so correct me and then try to answer the question. So the special education aspect here, you were looking at bringing in more of the professional trained side folks and decreasing the needs kind of thing. What type of impact would that have to our community of the special educators? Are you looking for the next six years to sort of decrease in that population? Are you looking for immediate decrease of the population? So what the goal of this is, if you take all the kids in the district, right now 21% of them are special education students. They're on an IEP and that is growing by 1% a year. If you look across the nation, it's between 12 and 14% in Vermont. It's about 14%. So we're almost done. Why are we almost double? Well, my argument is based on data, so it doesn't mean I'm right, but it means that if you get me in an argument, I got David to back it up, is that we are not providing enough service to the students that need it to be able to actually get them to improve so they can come off the plans. And the data that I have is I looked at every special educator teacher at the elementary level to see what their schedules were, and at best they're able to provide 15 minutes here and there to provide service to a kid. There is no way you are going to change a kid's life that's got some specific needs at 15 minutes a couple of times a week. Hour a day in six months, you might be able to get them off the plane. So we've fallen into this, as far as I can tell, that's what I call the managing. The parent professionals are awesome because they come in, they get the kid through the day. But at the end of the day, when the kid goes home, he doesn't have any skills, any more skills than he had when he started that day because the parent professional can't provide that. Yeah. First of all, I want to say I really appreciate that you are pointing to, I think a really urgent need to address like, yeah, I think in our special ed realm, like our kids are not getting their needs back to the degree that they need to, so I really appreciate that. And I do, I think I would agree, and I think I'm not a special educator, but I worked with a lot of them. And I think they would all agree that having more people in the department is urgent need. I do have to take issue a little bit with a statement that parent professionals are nothing more than orderlyism. I think I have worked with some parent professionals who I think are probably knows those kids better and connect with those kids better than any other professional staff in the school. I think part of that has to do with the fact that they're often from the community, often from families that are more like the kids family and have that connection. So I think that's just like a valuable thing that doesn't always show up in data, that particularly for kids with so emotional reasons for being in special ed is really crucial. And then I also just have to point to, I would definitely invite the board to come check out like Gary Curley and Kelly Tucker's classroom, the product to achieve classroom, which I think is essentially doing the work of special ed. I know that that's something that you are trying to address. Totally, but I just think not to paint with too broad a brush around special ed. I'm studying around parent professionals, which I don't think you're even trying to do. I'm not devaluing parent professionals. What I'm saying is they are not the right tool for the job we need right now. I echo what Ted was saying. One of my, I think it's great having a one to three, having more special educators. I 100% agree is an absolute necessity. Kids are not getting the services and having that level of instruction that I think they need. I have two concerns. One is I think the para educators that we do have and I'm gonna speak from an elementary level are performing not the direct instruction, but a very necessary part of that child's program. And I'm concerned that that support's not gonna be there for those kids. And my other concern is that there is a shortage of special educators. So I don't know if that's been looked at or how you plan to address it. That you can put out the call to hire these people, but that they're not there. And how do you get someone who's not, how do you track them and how do you get them when they're not? So again, two things, the over-reliance of para educators is why we're in the boat, we're in the 21% of the students being in IEPs. They do an amazing job managing and helping through the day, but they are not able to review the kids in the way that they need to be needed. As far as the special educators can serve us, we have not had a problem hiring special educators. And the reason that we haven't had a problem hiring special educators is because we pay about 10,000 more than any district around us for our teachers. I'm gonna re-can of me shutting my app and I just wanna throw this real quick at you. Is with the special educators, is it possible that with these folks on the lower end of the education level, is it possible to offer them some better training to, let's say a para educator is making $15 an hour at their level? And to say, you know, sir, ma'am, if you take these courses and right away to better your ability to service these children and do better for our district and we'll give you X dollars more, is that something that we can look at as a district? They have access to be able to take courses and we have at least one person who's actually nearing the completion of their degree that's already scheduled, you know, you're gonna be in and you're gonna get interviewed next year when we, yeah. So that's one of the other nice things in the district is this, the ability for folks to go off at day classes, it's huge here. There's not a lot of limits. Again, things that do help and support. Right now, the special education, you're right, they are tough to find, but we've been lucky because the salaries for teachers are so much higher than the scratch. The Northfield was the big one is, you know, we got pretty much every Veteran Northfield teacher last year, they came here because they were all making $10,000 more when they walked to the door. It makes a big difference. And the board and the past superintendent is to be commended for that, for keeping the salaries. Okay, thank you. Yeah. We need to get going for, we need to get here until midnight. Yes, so, so we need to, now we need to, surplus RTC and these are quick. So surplus, just so folks know how this works is at the end of each year, if there is money left over the board has the option to do a couple of things with that money that is left over at the end of a budget season. In most cases the board votes to put it into a reserve fund. There are four reserve funds that are set up right now. There's a transportation reserve fund, there's a facilities reserve fund, special ed reserve fund that we put in last year and a legal reserve fund. Transportation is for the replacement of buses and other vehicles that we use in and around the district. The facilities reserve fund was initially set up I believe for the replacement of this roof, which is going to be replaced in the next year or so. The special education reserve fund we put into place last year because the state is changing how it is funding special education and we still don't have all the details to be able to calculate or predict and I am fearful that we're going to get into the middle of a school year. I'm going to have two or three high need students come in that cost me 100 to 300,000 a year and not have the money to cover it under the new state plan. So this is just to have some money there in case that occurs so that we don't have to do something horrible in terms of the budget. And then a legal reserve fund that was established a long time ago that has 42,000 doesn't need a lot in there because a lot of what we could potentially be sued for or have to pay out is covered under our viability insurance. So there's quite a bit of money. That's the amount that's in there right now in each of those. And we had some discussion about the size of surpluses. Last year the surplus at the end of the year was $546,040 that you had to vote on. A lot of that was because we had people that retired, right? They were at the top of the pay scale and they came in low and then we get some reimbursements for kids that move in that we had to plan for ahead of time and then we get reimbursed at the end of the year. This year this is our surplus. Folks have talked to you all can't you guys predict a little bit better on behalf of the taxpayers? Well, we did a pretty good job. So surplus that we're talking about this year is $85,697, which is pretty darn good and a $20 million budget. That said, where did that surplus come from? We had a lot of folks go out high. We had the retirements that went out at the top of the pay scale but we hired at the top of the pay scale. The difference was is that the folks that we hired when they came in they didn't need health insurance because their spouse already had it in another school district. So that's the savings on the health insurance that they didn't take away from. So my recommendation to the board and what shows up in the warrant is my recommendation is that that $85,000 goes into that special education fund. We have more than enough to cover the roof and then some probably twice over. This has not really been tapped and we also put 100,000 a year into the regular bridge or actually 104,000 a year into the regular budget to cover bus replacements and truck replacements if you need to. This is the great unknown and it doesn't have a tremendous amount in there and one kid can cost upwards of $300,000. So that's my recommendation on where it goes. They were reserve fund. I don't know if you guys have ever tapped it. I didn't see one. It's relatively new and it was because there was a potential problem. Yeah, just a plan for it. So that's one of the decisions that you have to make tonight when you vote is where does that surplus wanna go. The other option that you have with the surplus money is you do nothing. If you do nothing, it does not go back into local taxpayers' pockets. It goes back to the reserve fund, goes back to the reserve fund that serves the whole state which is one of the reasons people like to. Oh no, no, no. Oh no. That's one of the reasons why people like to keep you here but for transparency, I wanna keep it open and honest. So questions on surplus and then the other two are really good. Tech Center, tuition this year will be 17,778. It's down to a hundred and some hundred dollars from last year. One of the things that's happening is they're in a transition. Forestry program went out, was included with the Ag Tech. He's getting geared up to put in another program there. He hasn't decided which. He's looking at either HVAC or electrical because both should have a high draw of kids. He is also, but it's a little bit longer planning period. He is also talking about, there's probably two years out, is doubling the size of the nursing program and making it kind of a two-part because the demand is there. But right now the tuition's gone down. So questions at all on Tech Center? Would you have to vote on that one? And the other last one is the Raven Agreement. Their tuition last year to go into the Raven program, that's the one where we moved the buildings. It serves on students that would cost between 60 and 120,000 to send them to other programs. It's a collaborative. There are other sending schools that send students into our program and pay the tuition for them to be there. It's designed to be a break-even scenario. So last year the tuition was 24,285. This year it's 24,299. It's gone up about $15. Why don't tuition match inflation? It's too complicated. Number in Raven, the biggest thing, determining what the total costs are are the facilities which is improved. I can't put a specific number on it, but they've gone down and the number of kids. If I got more kids with the same number of teachers, don't have to charge each one as much. Wasn't expected that one out. But we're capped at 14, right, in our current facility? He typically tries to run it around 14. It's been as low as 12. It's been as high as 18. One of the things that we've talked about with the program is there's always a need in excess of what we have. Right, that's what I thought there was a wait list. So there are two possibilities if we decide to move that way because we have two teachers. It's designed to have two teachers. There are two teachers in the budget. The first is, is we set the building up so that if you build away from the street, you can actually build onto the building and add more space to double the enrollment. That wouldn't be too costly to do. The second thing is because there are two general areas that the kids are in, one area is the classroom area, the other area is the actual, the mechanics area where they work on all the machinery. Half the day one group is here, half the day one group is there, and then they switch and you can double the enrollment. So those are discussions that we've had. We've had a little bit of trouble. That's a specialized program. That is one area to Nora's point where we have had trouble finding a person that it's a very specialized program as part of it because we budgeted for two teachers. We've got a teacher and a parent. So unless there's questions, that's the totality of the budget. Do you want us a vote to approve each one of those separately then? I think it's in your consent agenda. It's not in the consent, it's a separate vote. Yeah, so it should be a separate vote then. It's not in the consent. But I think you can do it however you want. Yeah. You can even move, put it in the consent agenda and then just, wow. Well, why don't we, I think we should vote for it separate from the consent agenda. Do I have a motion to approve the OSSD budget as presented? So moved. Second. Any further questions? All those in favor of approving the OSSD budget, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, the budget carries. Surplus is next. Do I have a motion to allocate any surplus funds into the special end fund? So moved. Second. Questions? All those in favor? All of the allocating special, the surplus funds into the special education fund, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that carries as well. And then we have the RTCC budget, which is a little bit lower than last year. So I have a motion to approve the RTCC budget as presented. So moved. Second. Good thing. Any other questions? So give it to me, I have the whole discussion. All those in favor of approving the RTCC budget, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? And last is the Raven budget, which is nearly static. I have a motion to approve the Raven budget as presented. So moved. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay, so all those budgets are carried. Next we have a brief discussion about negotiations with unions. Laura, how about the warning? Oh, did I skip over the warning? I think we have to approve the warning. Oh, I did, okay. Yes, we have a copy of the warning in our packet. We will have to sign the warning and I have a blank sheet in here. There's a blank sheet in your orange one. Okay. All right, so this warning is a required meeting, the day before our town meeting. This is the meeting that happens at the high school at 6 p.m. on the Monday before town meeting. It's pretty much written as required, correct? Yeah. There's no really leeway changing. No, it's just the amounts in there, the budget and surplus. It's really pretty simple this year because we have just that one transfer. Yeah. Paul mentioned that not many board members attended this meeting last year. I'm not sure. Any members who were disturbed by that? Right, so just be aware of that. Yes, please try to make an effort to attend if you are around. Do I have a motion to approve the draft warning for the district meeting? So, any further discussion? All those in favor of approving the warning is written. Any opposed? Okay. I will pass around this. Everyone needs to sign next to their name. All right, now we can go on to the viewing and negotiation discussion. So I think, because it was a little while ago, six months now, but we kind of revamped who's on what. So just to make sure that folks recognize who's on which negotiating committee and if folks are still committed and have the actual time because people's lives can change, just kind of confirm that. And then I can talk a little bit about the first meeting on the CBA and a little bit too about the first meeting for the support staff. So CBA negotiating team was Paul Melody and Brian. The first meeting, been emailing around a little bit, but that's January 22nd. We should plan on meeting around 510, which is about 20 minutes before the actual meeting and that'll be right here, just to sit down and kind of connect a little bit, talk a little bit so that we're not taking time away from the teachers when they come in. Basic agenda for that first meeting is reviewing the ground rules, setting future dates, having all proposals on the table and then time to clarify. So in other words, you know, the union will have its proposals about changes, we'll have ours and then it's time to kind of explain what it means, the rationale behind it and for the other side to ask questions. It would be for the goal for that. Support staff team, Ashley, Ian, Kay, and Rachel. And then the first meeting is February 5th. That again is here at 510, here at the meeting center. And that again is setting up to meet about 20 minutes early just so that we can connect before the union team comes in. So we're not taking our time at the beginning of the meeting. So say if folks are still committed, then we should be good to go. Yeah, please make every effort to attend. It's really important that we have a contingency of board members there. Okay, so next we have the confidential employee agreement. So like the CBA, like the support staff master agreement, there is also an agreement for the bus drivers. And that was actually redone in my first year here. I think they have a year left. That was a four year agreement. But there is also the confidential employees. They have a master agreement as well. Lenny, you can chime in if you feel it necessary. There was never any real discussion about that when it came due every year. The previous superintendent kind of did his thing. And that was it. So we had an opportunity to kind of sit down with them this year. I did kind of talk about what's in there, what are some needs. And then they had a couple of needs that I want to float past the board, get some feedback on because within the next month or two I'm going to be putting an agreement for the confidential staff in front of you. I've been asking you to vote to approve it. Could you just clarify for everyone here what confidential employees are? Yeah, the confidential secretaries, superintendent's secretary, the student services director, your special education director's secretary, our payroll folks in the office. We have one over at the high school. We have a person in the technical who works on computers and things. It's also under that agreement. There's one more than this. There's like seven of us. Yeah, there's seven. You're included in that too. Yeah, it's a very small group of people. The people in my office basically and one at the high school and one at RTCC. Compared to a regular secretary, these folks typically work with sensitive information. And it's important in some cases there's training that goes along with being able to do that like the background rep rejects. And typically they get paid a little bit more than the normal secretary because of that administrative assessment. So a couple of things and looking through their agreement that actually jumped out to me as well was this. They don't have anything in there for bereavement leave. So it would be appropriate to give them three days of bereavement leave. They do not have any wording in there about their vacation days. So what ends up happening, I used to go through this as an administrator in my previous district is they're not allowed to carry over the vacation days. So what ends up happening is because the school year and the contracts start on July 1st, they don't get time over the summer to use up their vacation days that they've just earned because they earned them on a prorated basis to be able to actually use them so they end up losing them. Because when school gets out into June, you only have a couple of days to take vacation. So my suggestion is going to be allowing them to carry over those days until the first day of school in the students. They're very good about not taking them while students are in session, but to give them that ability that way they can take time when people aren't here and go off and enjoy their vacations and use them on a big chair. The last piece has to do with the healthcare language. The statewide healthcare agreement affects everybody. And I kind of did the same thing when the board was kind of talking about my contract as well as there was a line that was put in there about my benefits would be adjusted to whatever the teacher benefits. There should mirror the same in that. And so I'll be putting that in there as well. The other thing too that I'm required to do under executive limitations and because it's the right thing was to kind of take a look at where their salary sits in relationship to the comparables. So I've taken a preliminary look at that data and across the seven of them, so not individually, but across the seven of them to get them up to the comparables there is a need to add about 10,000. Total money? Total money. And so I'll be recommending that as well to get them to the comparables. I'm similar to kind of what we did with the support staff that were in the comparables last year. So unless there's discussion or comments, those are kind of my intents right now. And so you'll bring forward and bring in the next meeting for people. Yeah. Similar to what we did with the bus drivers. We'll talk about what the changes are. We can hit again in Y if we need to ask for a little bit more. Are there any other questions for Lane in this preliminary? All right. Next we've got two monitoring reports, 2.4 and 2.5. This is our second read. They were presented last month to play everyone that's had taken the time to look them over and to make further investigations if needed be. Lane, do you have anything more to say about them? No, we talked about them last time, unless there's question. 2.5 was the real easy one. That was the succession planning. In case I'm taken out by a bus. So in the short term, and we've actually already used it once, Robin. Because most of what I deal with deals with budgetary and human resources pieces, which Robin works on constantly all day long. If it's a week or less, it's Robin making the decisions. If it goes longer than that, then it shifts over to Erica. And they both have notarized letters that they can present in case they're signing for me if I'm out. And 2.4 was basically what we just went through with financial planning around the budget. And it's just ensuring that proper thought and research has gone into what I'm presenting for the board. I think everyone's read over the monitoring reports. Do you have any questions, further questions? Really? Okay. Let's vote to accept the Yale reports 2.4 and 2.5 is together. One vote. Do I have a motion to accept the token? So, a second. And any questions or comment? All right. Please say aye. Do you want to accept the reports 2.4 and 2.5 is written? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Next, we have to advocacy next month, February. Can't remember the date. 10th, I believe we have the meeting with the legislators. Did you invite Jeff, Francis and Sue? So, Linda, we've heard back, Jeff, Francis, Mark. Mark was good. I haven't heard back from Sue because I had sent it to Nicole and you get the message. But I sent it again to Sue. I sent it again to Jay. I called the new guy, Peter Reed. And his wife, he answered the phone and she was going to tell him she thought he would be really excited about it. Great. So, I will remind him all. I'm planning to do that in a couple of weeks before. So, as usual, we put that meeting with legislators as the first thing on our agenda. So, that will sort of be right at 6.30 till 7.30. We usually allow an hour for questions and discussion. That will be at RUHS in the media center. Is there anything else we need to plan for? Usually, the tech culinary provides something to you, right? Yeah, I can get... Well, I don't know if the tech will, but I'll get Karen to do something. Okay. Yeah, it's a little more complicated with the tech. Oh, okay. Yeah, I usually need water or the coffee. Yeah, I'm really very little. Yeah, okay. Yeah, no, I'll get Karen to do that. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Great. And come prepared with questions. We've got Jeff Francis from the PA and Sue from the BSBA. So, they're really people with great knowledge of what's going on in the State House. Incredibly knowledgeable about anything we can ever learn. All right. For the consent agenda, we've got minutes from last meeting enclosed with the agenda. We have a professional contract. I see just that one name. A new reading teacher at the high school. You need to set the high school choice capacity. What were you going to propose for that? It stays the same as last year. So, that's the high school choice. It's part of the state law. So, 20 out of 100 in. That's part of that 33 kids. We've got to come into the high school. This is through that program. Right now, we have actually three kids going out and 33 coming in, which is pretty cool. We've got fewer kids going out than Woodstock and staff. Approved, announced, Tuitions. Which is the sheet, guys. Yeah, right. So what we did is we set that. We had a little bit of flexibility, a little leeway. We set the tuition rate at our cost per kid out of our budget. So the folks come in and are the same as the taxpayers here. And finally, the Raven Collaborative Agreement, which I see is enclosed in here, and that is just. What we just talked about. Right. Any questions for Elaine about any of this? That's on that consent agenda. It's mostly pretty routine stuff. So let's approve the consent agenda as a whole. Do I have a motion to approve all these five items? So moved. All second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? All right. Next, we have various reports, which will all be part of sort of the year end report that's in the Herald and submitted for town, kind of approval for town viewing. We've got lanes to contendant reports. Is there anything else you want to add or say about your report? Just a couple of quick things. So the reports typically are the annual reports that we do, but just kind of in terms of superintendent updates, the board policy revamp, that work is ongoing right now. At the last kind of meeting where we met the pre-preparating meeting, it sounds like we're, board is able to attend to it in March and I'll have it ready prior to that so folks can do a good read through. We'll have all those policies updated together in one packet. After that, it's going to be a long process because then I have to take what the updated policies are and create something that we don't have for most of them and that's the actual protocols the school uses to carry them out. That'll be a bit of a long process. The strategic plan piece that we spoke of is in progress. Actually, we took a look together with the cabinet. We've mapped out the next three years for the foundational knowledge and science. We'll be doing that for the three main areas of the strategic plan over the course of the remainder of this year and then in the summer and then what should happen if the board is willing is in the fall, in the September meeting is to present, do that as the presentation of the overall strategic plan and how it ties in because that is pretty much the kickoff just prior to budget season and the budget should tie into what that strategic plan is so everything comes together and makes sense for folks. Yeah, that would be great. And then the last piece was the board elections, the two positions as far as I know you still don't have any fakers, Linda? No, but the ad goes in this week. You'll see it in the paper. So that's the big announcement is that we did put out we're putting an ad in the paper just to see if we can draw up some interest. And that's for a Randolph position at a brain-treat position. Let's get it from my good updates. In your packet is the letter from me or from us that would be as part of that sort of packet of letters between principals, superintendent and myself. If there's anything you want changed, please email me. I, it was part of our agenda packet. So you do have an email version if there's something you didn't like, let me know. I sign it, but it's from all of us really. You'll also see the other principals reports, et cetera. The financials for this month, Lane, do you want to reflect on that at all? Yeah, they, let me pull them up here. There's only kind of one kind of one note on there. So usually what I do, I kind of talked about this before is kind of rule of thumb we're about halfway through the year. So, you know, if everything's linear, you expect about half of the lines what was put into each line to be spent. Typically if it's, you know, outside of, you know, the 40 to 60% range at this point in time I'm asking Robin questions about those lines and what's going on. Things are good. The only thing that I wanted to point out because it is a quirk, this is on the revenue page. So on the revenue page, if you go down from the top that 27,708, that's the current income coming in from the after school program. So, you know, we'll expect that to be probably around 60,000 by the end of the year. That was one of the reasons, you know, we're in the budget discussions we talked about, you know, it'd be nice to take the next step, the final step in terms of the preschool program, getting it so it's full day free for four year olds. One of the reasons not to, given that jump in the healthcare costs was because what we have in place if we maintain it, it is generating offsetting revenue. Which is important. And then the other one, that's hard to find. Last page says expenditures at the top. It's the second block under transportation, it's L. And if you go down, it says unallowed special education. And if you go over, it's negative 21,965. What that is, because this is an anomaly, I'll also tell you something about the cost of special education. We get reimbursed from the state for special education costs that they go above a certain amount. These are costs for a child that we were transporting, which is probably the most expensive child in the state. And what ended up happening is when they redid the IEP at the end of last year, is as part of the accommodations, they forgot to put in transportation. So they picked up on it pretty quickly and fixed it, but because it wasn't in the IEP, the state refuses to reimburse for it, even though it was a state-placed student. And so it's a big deal. And so I've talked with the special education department. Some of it is potentially just being overworked and they went into the actual software system, had them put a little pop-up that comes up if they have a student that typically has transportation, the pop-up comes in and reminds them to take a peek. But that was, they picked that up in less than three weeks. So that gives you an idea. That's only a partial reimbursement. Gives you an idea of the expense sometimes of the severity of the needs of some of these students. So that's the only real anomaly in there. Everything else is pretty good. Some of the expenses in terms of transportation, repairing the vehicles is a little higher than we would expect, but it's due partially to my fault. The second year here, we bought two new buses, two additional buses that transport the students from Rochester and the students from Chelsea out of the school choice kids that decided that they wanted to go. We didn't replace the two oldest buses that year. So those ones are in the point where I'll be coming in to ask about, a little tap in the reserve fund for a little bit of money to replace two or three of the buses. I have a question. Under maintenance, how come the contract and services are so far out of back and the budget in your section J, line three? The second takes me a minute to orient myself. I can tell you in general, but I want to look specifically. So J, line three, and this is on the expenditure side. So they're over. So a lot of this, we are still cleaning up messes that shouldn't be there from the previous facilities director. My guess is I have to go to Robin to confirm it. But one of the new ones now was whether or not you know it, there are chlorinating systems at both of the small schools. They haven't needed to be in operation based on the testing, but because when those wells were put in, part of the permit specified that there would be a chlorination system up and running, we have to get them up and running. They have not been run since they'd been put in, which is why we were unaware of it. You know, we were doing the testing and under my tenure here, the way that we were supposed to, when there was nothing being triggered and said we had to use it. But when they came in and they did the audit and did the walk around with us and we're looking at some of the water issues, they said, oh no, that's an apartment, you have to have it up and running. So that's an unexpected expense that would come out of the contract with services. But there were a lot of things like that that we are still finding that pop up. We talked last year about the fact that they did a lot of the plumbing in-house. Right. And so, you know, $300,000 worth of water heaters and hot water tanks that had been put in because they were misplumbed and had to be replaced to be able to provide the services. It's one of the reasons that we got our own HVAC person. We hired a lot more of this because going out to contractors to do the work that needed to be done was going to be too expensive. And just logistically with formatting, how come on the expenditures, it starts with an E for instruction so we don't see what's above that? There's no information leading up to it? I think that's more, I'd have to ask Robin about her formatting. Sometimes, and again, I'm taking a guess. Yeah, I think it's here. This is ABCD. The Revenue is ABCD. That's Revenue, but this is an expensive one. This is an expensive one. But the... Go to the summary page. But the... The very first page. But the ABCD EF follows. The Revenue is ABCD and then expenditures is EFG to B. One of the things, and I am not sure, but if I were putting my money on it in Vegas without asking Robin, they're trying to, been trying to move to a single system for both data collection and finance. And lots of times what these lines are called and how the label is defined by what it's called and labeled in the software system so that it can match up the cells we're contacting. My guess is it may have to be based on that, on how the state's organized it. When you get your policies from me, the revamp board policies, one of the suggestions was making sure that you use the number and lettering system that the state board uses. So your, the numbering may not make sense, but the reason I'm doing it is because it's following the policies that the state board recommends or expects. That way somebody who looks at ours, oh yeah, this is 2.36, can go to the website and look at their similar policy and see if we're up in compliance the way that we're supposed to be. So some of this driven by that. So I can't say 100% but that's my guess. Or it could just be the way that the province does it. Actually, do you see the summary page? Do you see? Yeah, but it doesn't, it's the ABCDEFB, which I agree is right down the line, and then you start an entire expenditure phase. But the revenues don't have the ABCD? They don't. Next to it. But they are following the ABCDEFB. So I'll ask the question and I'm gonna answer the post. Yeah, it's a good question. It would make it easy to follow if the revenue state has ABCDEFB. Sure. And those of you that haven't read these before in terms of revenue, if it's a negative number, it means you're actually in the positive. They like to make things confusing in their way. So numbering system. And time for our board evaluation. We treated everyone with dignity and respect. We sought a diversity of view points. And the meeting proceeded mostly the way it was supposed to. I think there was some more time spent on things that perhaps weren't allocated in the timeline. But overall, we're at, we're within a half an hour. 20 minutes, actually. Exactly, within a half an hour. We sped it up a little at the end there. Historically, it's not a bad outcome. We're not, it's not midnight. If it were midnight, we would be getting a one for that. If it was after 10, we'd still be getting a one for that. And we'd have to own it. So otherwise, I think we did all right. We did focus on the work of the board. We had a, it can be difficult at times to focus on, to not get sidetracked onto other agendas that aren't our own. But I believe we, back to where we needed to be. Okay, we're doing that. We will need to determine the validity of the cat births request. Do we want to talk about that right now? The totality, they're in the pink folder there. Folks are welcome to look if they want copies of all of it. It's not all the emails. They were, you know, typically with a conversation with cat, there were 15 follow-up emails Linda can attest to that or 15 follow-up phone calls. But all the pertinent emails are in there. There were two investigations that I did during the time too. There are parts and pieces there. There were accusations made against staff members that turned out not to be true. And there was also a lot of, probably shouldn't be saying this as an executive session, but. Right, so it sounds to me like we should, to do due diligence, we should review whatever's in the file. Do we have any documentation of what transpired at the select board meeting in Braintree? Okay. I just have. I have the minutes on my phone. Do you? Were they, was there actually any detail? Not really. No. Okay, so I mean that's maybe a question. No, it's not that it's high. I'm just going to take those. So I was just wondering, you know, do any other things, I think that's pertinent is perhaps if we can find out whether there was a bus stop there and if there was when. Even if there was, I think at the end of the day, the decision is about whether it's safe or not and that's the next decision. Whether it's safe now. So regardless of whether there was one, I don't think that's matters. I think we have to decide if he did his due diligence in determining that it was a safe or not safe environment for the bus to be on. It could have been a man too. It may not have been a bus. That's the only thing I was thinking of. People can also have made terrible decisions in the past. Right. It could have been not safe and it was happening, but to me. But often. Confirmation on the, your conversations with the select board and the road people. I think it's, I think I typed up notes from it. Oh, because she was saying the opposite of what you were saying. Yeah, no, they, they physically came in, Megan and. Yes. Yep. They came in together, sat in my office in the afternoon and we talked about it. There is the email that I actually sent to them inviting them in. Basically the email, you'll see it in there. It's basically saying, you know, it's kind of joking around with them a little bit, was basically saying, you know, cat has been pursuing this and she's saying that the, the select board is willing to, you know, make changes to the road up there to make this happen. I said, I haven't, it might be better for us to talk in person, but I said, you realize, you know, there'd be some significant changes. There's tree cutting, there's, you know, adding to the road up there. There's this, there's that. So just make sure you know what you might be committing yourself with before you do. So we should, we should talk. And that's what kind of triggered that meeting. So I think to do due diligence, this will be available in Lane's office. People should take the time between, between now and the next meeting and review, read through what there is. Do any other further research so that we have, can make a, you know, a form decision anyway. I mean, I think really the policies say that you are responsible for this decision. And, you know, policy wise, it seems fairly clear cut, you know. Okay, I have clarifying question. This affects one family. That's the piece I was unsure of. We've never heard from the other, gotten the name of who that other family is. I've never heard from them. The thing that the board does have the power to do under your policy governance, you know, it's not something that you should do regularly. But let's say that you do this review and you find that you are in complete disagreement with me, even though it's in my bailiwick, what you could do is a vote of support or a vote of non-support on this superintendent's decision. That's a possibility too, if you felt so moved, you know, feel that we did our due diligence and whatnot. So I think, you know, everyone should review the policies that pertain to this matter and let's discuss it next month, so that everyone's aware of what has transpired so that we're not swayed by different conflicting, sort of reports of what happened. The other thing that I didn't want to bring up was Wes Gibbs was here. He was the bus coordinator afterwards. He probably would have a little insight if there was another stock object. I mean, I worked at Bringsham School for a long time. I don't remember that there was. The Dana twins, I don't think they ever rolled the bus. They're out past rolling rock, but I don't know for sure. Jeff said when he checked the date number of years he gave me was 30. Yeah, so Wes would definitely know. For over 20 years. Yeah. And then our folks that went back to 2001, they said no, my memory went back, I said no, they never did. So anyway, let's revisit this next month and let's be prepared to make a decision. You go just logistically. Is there follow-up with the concerned parent to say that that's the process? Do we just notify her that the review is happening over the course of the next month with final determination? Okay, I just think out of fairness for that communication. So that's something that'll come out of Lane's office or something like that? I don't know. Should I do that? Yeah. Okay. I'll do that. I'll be applying to her at us. Yeah, two, two, yeah, I'll get to that. Okay, I'll do that. Okay, so. How often had the bus routes every year? He re-evaluated. He revamped them last year. He did like two weeks of trials. He was trying to make sure that no kid sat on a bus for more than 30 minutes and he achieved it when he set up the new routes. But he spent two weeks kind of testing out different things or communicating back and forth with the families that he put those new routes in. But it didn't change what was going on up there. Yeah. Yeah, he stopped not, she really is. So I go to work at like 6.30 in the morning and I see kids getting on the bus in Roxbury at like 6.30 in the morning. And then if you drive down the road at 4.30 in the afternoon they're getting off the bus at 4.30. Like who would vote, just send their kid to school at 6.30 and let them come home at 4.30? Like, who would do that? That's totally unrelated to this. When you said the bus, no kid rides with the bus more than 30 minutes. He was trying to get it to 30. He was getting it to 30 of us. Yeah, they certainly did. My son gets on the bus at seven and he gets to school at kind of eight. Johnny's 6.45. That's a long time. That was his goal. Yeah. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. Of course it's been that way forever. Right, that's just. We had a 45 minute bus ride. Yeah. Yeah. Of course it's actually fairly costly, but you can always throw another bus in there. Yeah, I'm going to do that because the buses aren't full as they are now. Some of the discussion goes back to the fact that now that it's one district, you have students who are Randolph students who live closer to Brookfield and the way that the towns kind of wind around each other is potentially, I'm not offering that to anybody. But if people ask, I consider it when they do, I've got one that asked about it. I live a mile away from this school, but yet I got to ride this many minutes to get to that school. And especially some like the bus, my sun drive rides. It comes down West Street, then goes up through East Braintree when it actually passes some of the kids. From down there? Yeah. So I don't know if that's ever a thought to try to save some mileage, but it would move kids from school to school, though. And I don't know the logistics because of the drop-offs. The elementary started different times. And so that kind of controls a little bit about the buses and the timings and whatnot. That's we're opening up a whole other can of words. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, it's always worth it. That's not the works. No, no, it's not our purpose at all. So we actually now have executive session.