 Hello, and welcome to ongoing election coverage by Town Meeting Television. This is one of many forums we're bringing you in advance of Town Meeting on the second Tuesday of April, April 12, 2022. Town Meeting TV election forums introduce you to community decision makers and connect you with issues in the community that shape your local community. Now, if you're watching this live, we welcome your questions. Please give us a call at 802-862-3966. And you can watch Town Meeting TV on Comcast Channel 1087, Burlington Telecoms Channels 17 and 217, as well as online at Town Meeting TV's YouTube page. And with us tonight, we have Chief Operating Officer Brian Donahue, as well as School Board Chair, Erin Kennedy Knox, who will be providing information on the Essex Westford School District budget for Fiscal Year 23. So with that, I'll turn it over to Brian and Erin. Thank you very much. Well, thank you so much for inviting us to be here tonight. As you said, my name is Erin Knox. I am Chair of the Westford, the Essex Westford School District, and I am joined by Brian Donahue, our COO. And one of our school board's primary roles is to build a shared vision for education in our community. The key to that effort is the creation of an annual budget that can support that vision. You will see in this presentation three key areas that our community has asked us to invest in with this budget. We as a district want to continue our investment in the learning and support models, PLC and SEL, which you will learn about in this presentation, that the community and our teachers are asking for. This budget leverages tax benefits from our Essex and Essex Junction School merger, as well as special resources, federal ESSER funds, and gives the children of our district the recovery resources that they need to move beyond the pandemic. It gives us a strong foundation to build upon as we carry our vision forward. And with that. We can share the slides as we go through, but we'll just start off with an overview of all the expenditures that are proposed for FY23. As you can see in the slide, we list those expenses going down, starting with the General Fund and going down to Enterprise, and we're showing both the FY22 approved budgets for those funds, as well as the proposed budgets for FY23. And then we show a dollar difference and a percent difference. All our expenses that we're planning for FY23 are $104 million, or approximately $8.4 million more, with a large increase in our expenditures planned in special revenues. And this is the ESSER funds that we plan on receiving. So out of that $104 million, what we want to look at is how do we intend on spending that? So we're looking at about $61 million of that being spent on instructional programs. So this is our direct instruction, our special education services, co-curricular and athletic activities are all within that area. And then we're looking to spend approximately $14 million on instructional supports. And these would be all the supports from library, nurses, guidance counselors, social emotional learning, social workers, occupational therapists, that whole area that supports the students in their instruction. And then finally, the administrative supports are about $29 million. We'll be going to that area. And that is not all in executives or administration. That really also includes all our information technology, our transportation, our food service and everything else. Obviously, those are direct services to students. That's the $104 million that the district intends to spend going into next year. And Brian, just to stress that that is, it's over half of those dollars are going towards direct instruction. Yes. Which is... Significant amount. You know, when we have engaged our community through this process, that was definitely, you know, at the top of their list of things that they wanted to see reflected in this budget. Yes. The other way to look at that $104 million is a little bit of the classifications of what we spend it on. In this slide here, what we're looking at is about $62 million is spent on salaries. The primary way we deliver high quality impactful teaching and learning is to have high quality staff. And so, that just is natural that you can see that between that $62 million and then $21 million in benefits that we have about 80 cents of every dollar that we spend on our personnel. Then the whole rest of it, all our electricity bills, all our supplies, all our other contracts is a total of $21 million dollars. And that's how we intend on spending that $104 million that we're proposing for FY 23. But looking at specifically what are the new investments, so we go back to the same chart. Now what we're going to do is focus on that dollar difference. So we're really going to focus on that $8.4 million. And when we look at that $8.4 million and we look at it across the different funds, what we can see is that the general fund is the lion's share of the new investments. But second to that is all the money coming in from the state and federal COVID recovery to the tune of about $3.5 million dollars. The rest of the changes are fairly modest in CTE and in some of the other funds. So as we look at this, we're going to focus in on that general fund and what that total increase is. And that's $4.2 million, $4.3 million dollars. And the majority of those new investments is going to direct instruction into new teaching positions that are required because of our class size policy and class size averages. But also teaching positions that are directly looking at addressing the needs of some of our most vulnerable populations. So English language learners, some of our behavioral interventionists, as well as looking at like math interventionists to go through there. We're going to be making continued investments in social-emotional learning and that's an instructional support. And then finally in those administrative supports, the big investment is going to be in our facilities. We heard clearly from our voters when we surveyed them at the beginning of the budget process. They wanted to make sure that we were focusing in on direct instruction, classroom core instruction, the needs of our students coming out of this pandemic in areas like social-emotional and in our facilities, which our community has been great stewards of and is proud of and knows that they're aging and need to be addressed at work. And I think we've been so fortunate to have that tool at our disposal, the thought exchange that we did, which clearly showed us those three areas. And the social-emotional learning supports, while always being so important, I think definitely when we speak about the COVID recovery, it has so much more meaning and more need and more impact. We were so fortunate that in the FY19-20 budget that the board and the community took upon the investment into five social-emotional learning coaches. And we had no idea that that year would end in a global pandemic with us on complete remote, but it's fortunate because it's allowed us to really be in a position where we have a full curriculum, full viable curriculum, we have an assessment process, and we can really support our students with targeted interventions as well as full instructional. Absolutely. Those focus areas within that general fund, within that 4.2 million, just to be a little clearer on that, again, are focused on direct instruction, student support and facilities. But their continuation and a continued investment in the path that we struck out on in 1718 and 1819 is really to look at creating a culturally responsive sustaining system where everyone is successful and has a sense of belonging. And it really is part of our vision and our mission and our values. And we see the way to that is through professional learning communities, through a multi-tiered system of support, through continued investments in instructional leadership, social-emotional learning and also in our facilities to make sure we're there. And it really is nice when our core values and our intentions match and are such a mirror to what the community is asking us to do. And I think it's great too. I love that image. It's one of my favorite ones in that slide because it really shows how the piece is pulled together. We've talked about our board is going to be embarking on more discussions about the future of the district. That's kind of really at the top of our work list for this upcoming year. And this image is something with these different pieces that we hope to really carry forward as we start to actively engage the community about what they see as the future for our district and all these pieces play a really big, big role in that. Great. This slide really just starts to hone down and give some more detail of what those new staff that we're going to bring on in FY23. And you can see, again, we've tried to break this down to show its relationship to the investments we were asked to include in the budget. So in that direct instruction, in that support for our students and in our facilities, we're making investments using both general fund money as well as some of the short-term restricted dollars. In the capital plan, we've spent a good amount of time studying our facilities. Our facilities are aging. They are similar to schoolhouses across the state. And as we run into our schools starting to reach 60, 70, 80 years old, we're running into a place in which their life cycles are starting to run out. And we've begun to take a look comprehensively at what that needs to be. But we've also chosen to the idea that we need to do this alongside and shoulder to shoulder with the community. It really comes down to what are the investments for the next 50 years rather than what's the investments for the next 12 months. So we've prioritized some repairs and some purchases and some work that are all around resiliency and making sure we can do in-person instruction. But it really just queues up the conversation that we're going to start to engage our community around of, is this what we want and what is the next generational investment in our schoolhouses? And those key points of investment that just comes back all the way to it again is we say we heard the community, we say we listened to the community, but is it evident in the numbers? And here's where the key places are. 36% of our overall new investments are happening in direct instruction. We've got 15% that are happening in student support and we've got 13% that are happening in facilities. So our numbers are matching with what the community has asked us and it is part of our investment plan for 23. The projected tax impact, do you want me to take this? This is updated from what we've shared up to this point. This is brand new information and incorporates actions by the Vermont House on Thursday, the 24th in which they passed House 737, which was the yield bill. The yield bill is a primary building block in what will eventually become the ed financing and how we project the tax rate. First before we get into the state numbers we look at what are the numbers that are most in control of the school district and those are expenditures and offsetting revenues to create our net ed spending. And this is the driving force that happens in the statewide property tax in which we look at that net ed spending as really the true direction of the budget and its impact on the property tax payers across the state. That one further equation is to take that overall net ed spending and bring it down to a per pupil basis and to do that we use an equalized pupil FTE. So this ed spending which is going from 16.9 to 18 or about a 7.3% increase is the key number that we begin to use along with the state calculations. The big three numbers that the state calculates for us and provides initially in December as an estimate and then later on through a yield bill and eventually through a state budget is the homestead yield, the income yield and the non homestead property tax rate. Those numbers are all part of the equation that will determine what our school budget's impact is into our taxpayers. So if we take a look at this using the new information we see that the homestead yield which is increasing tremendously by 19% and the non homestead tax rate which is decreasing significantly by 10 income sensitivity that our new homestead tax rate before the common level of appraisal is going down about 8.6%. But because we work on a statewide property tax and we have to recognize the fair market value of the property we use the common level of appraisal which is at 85.5 for Westford and for the town and the junction is at 85.8, 08. When these are calculated in we see that the FY23 tax rate starts to look like $1.5746 for Westford and $1.5831 for the town and the junction. What that translates to is about a 4 or 4.4% tax reduction. So we're able to make those investments, we're able to continue our path into our vision, we're able to answer the requests of the community of what we should be investing in and with the assistance of some of the reserves and money that's left over because of COVID as a state where we'll be able to make an investment like we're doing and not have it translate to a significant tax but actually a meaningful tax decrease for people. And Brian, that was when we were having our initial discussions as a board leading up to the development of this budget, you know, we wanted to obviously achieve the goals of what we wanted with the budget and try to do it with as much obviously tax sensitivity that we could. Also recognizing that this is a unique year and that this is kind of our opportunity to take advantage of those remaining benefits from the merger and also these funds that we, these ESR funds and we don't know perhaps there might be more coming but for right now these are funds that we really want to utilize and leverage as much as we can. So I feel like kind of the mission that we, you know, we asked you and your team to do when you created this budget has truly been achieved so I appreciate that. Yeah, it was certainly not a year that we, that the needs of our students, the needs of our staff, the needs of our facilities didn't tell us that we could move slow. You know, there was an urgency to address those needs in literacy and math and social-emotional learning and I think this budget's going to do it and it's going to present some new opportunities. It really has us, instead of going back to normal, has us going forward to new opportunities. Right, and I think it's been interesting and I'm sure that, you know, other districts across the state are seeing the same thing but, you know, for all the challenges that COVID did present and I should say that, you know, in our district we've been so fortunate because we have made investments thanks to our taxpayers in a lot of the infrastructure that we have and in our IT systems that we were able to sort of weather the storm, which is not fully over yet but we're moving that way, you know, very, very well I think comparatively and I think that, you know, as we look forward, as you're saying, as we start thinking about the future, you know, these kind of investments are going to continue to serve us well. Well, again, coincidentally, the budget in the school year 1920 was the year that we went one-for-one Chromebooks for every single student, K through 12. Did you have a crystal ball? No, but it worked out really well. Where other districts were scrambling to try to get that and supply chains were broken and so forth. We had already been there, we had normed it and we had already established it so when the unthinkable happened in March 2020, we did have some better opportunities than most. And I think it's been interesting to hear in some of our discussions also with our, you know, professional learning communities that, you know, once again going through an experience of a global pandemic, which is not how you necessarily want to find some of these things out, but, you know, it does reveal, you know, ways that you can, you know, areas to focus on, things that you're doing really well, things to build on, things that you can approve on. And I think a lot of organizations, and in this case, our organization happens to be a large school district, has really, has found a lot of those things. And I think we're trying to build on some of that. In that disruption, the clarity of what is essential and what are your highest priorities really does come out. Yeah, it's been amazing. It's out of necessity, it comes out, but it's been helpful. Definitely. Is there anything else you'd like to add about the budget or? Well, we, as you mentioned, we are doing vote by mail. So our ballots went out on Monday. I believe they hit all the households maybe as early as last Friday. Yes. So we have ballots in people's hands. Every active registered voter has a ballot. They will also be polling from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on the 12th of April, and we have a budget information hearing coming up on the 5th of April. So we continue to have a chance for people to plug in, become informed, and the voting is happening now. Yes. Well, that's very wonderful. Thank you so much to Brian and Erin for joining us today for the presentation on FY23's school budget for Essex Westsourds School District. And like Brian mentioned, polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on April 12th for voting, and again, if you would like to vote by mail, you should already have it. If not, contact your county clerk, and they will get that taken care of for you. And thank you so much to our viewers for tuning in and watching our ongoing town meeting coverage. You can find more forums like this as well as this one on our website at ch17.tv. Thank you so much for watching.