 My zoom may be going in and out. I don't know. I just got kicked off a little bit and I'm here. Any of you. Well, I'm going to call the finance committee meeting of April six. 2021 to order. It's a couple of minutes after 2pm. And we're here mostly to continue the budget review of the. Amherst, Pellum regional. School district FY 22 budget. But before we do that, I need to go through some formalities. Pursuant to governor Baker's March 12, 2020 order, suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. General law 38 section 18. The meeting of the finance committee is being conducted. By a remote participation. And I'm going to ask each member of the committee. To indicate their presence and. That will confirm that they've been able to hear me and we'll know that we've heard them. So. I'll start with Kathy Shane. Yes, here. Yes. Here. Here. Present. Bernie Kuvac. President. Pat D'Angelo's present. Dorothy Pam. Present. And Jane Schaffler. Present. Okay, so I think that everybody's here. And I also want to thank. Superintendent Morris. And finance director slaughter from this regional schools. For being with us again, and we have. From our finance staff. Sean mangano and Sonia Aldrich are also present. The purpose of today's meeting because everybody from the finance committee and the council was present. For last night's presentation. So we are going to. Focus today on asking questions about the budget. That was presented. And about other concerns regarding the finances of the schools. And so I will be recognizing people. And then funding out and also recognizing other counselors. And. I know that. Mandy Hannity. Has. Some questions that. She would like to bring. And I will bring her in. For anybody who's watching for the public, I need to just explain that. This has not been posted as a council meeting. And. We can only bring one counselor in at a time. Because otherwise we would have a quorum of the council. And we would have a quorum of the council meeting. And it has not been posted. You have to. Be very measured and bring. Counselors and attendees. As appropriate. I'm going to start. See if there are anybody from the. Committee. They would like to. Start off and ask first questions or whether they would. I have some things that I have been thinking about, but I want to turn to others first. Kathy. I have a few questions on one is. I actually didn't scroll through all the line by line detail, but it is there a place there or is there a place on the website where I can see. The student population middle and high school and the. High school and middle and high school. You know, you're projected for next year and any kind of trend line. So it's a question just on a where. If I wanted to see that information, that was a general question. And then I'll do the, and the reason I'm asking is like, I, I did a couple of percent changes. So the salary line goes up by about the total salary line. And then I'll turn this over to anyone else. I was looking for what's underneath that is that with a steady number of people, is there an increase or decrease, you know, just something so I can do a context for it. So that's a question there. And then my other question, and I'll turn this over to anyone else. Is the reserves. You explained them last night, you know, the contingency and reserve line. It goes up by it's projected. So that's a question I've been asking for a year before. So what I want to know is, is that the total amount you have? Or is there another account like you have some from last year. Is that something you have to use each year? Can you accumulate it? If you. If you don't need to draw on it, can it be available for next year? So just understanding how that reserve works. Okay. I'll answer the second question first, I think. So regarding the reserves. So in the regional schools, we have E and D, which is excess and deficiency. There are some limits on that as a general rule of thumb. We try to try to keep at least 3% of our operating budget in reserves. There is a state limitation on us to only hold no more than 5%. If we get above that 5%, we're required to essentially pay the town's back. And so we're trying to sort of balance that 3% to 5% each year. And we can, so once our E and D is certified, which happens. You know, you sort of finish the fiscal year, you go through an end of year process. At that point in time, they certify your E and D for that year. You can then appropriately, you know, you know, we're trying to sort of balance that 3% to 5% each year. And we can, so once our E and D is certified, which happens. You know, you sort of finish the fiscal year. And so once your E and D for that year, you can then appropriate from that money at that time. And you have to put it into, if you're going to use it in a subsequent fiscal year, you have to appropriate it. Essentially before June 30th of that year, because as soon as June 30th hits, that certification expires. And so the amount of E and D essentially disappears. It's, you know, the pre-cash in, in a town's budget operates the same way. If it's certified, you know, it's eligible to be spent. We typically hold about $280,000 year over year as a contingency block of money. We try not to spend that unless absolutely necessary. And then we will often use an additional piece of that E and D to help support our budget. This year as we were going through the E and D process, we're concerned because we have, you know, we had several things we were waiting to sort of see. We thought our E and D number would be, would be lower. And it is decidedly lower than it has been in recent years. And so we went a little more conservative with the amount of, you know, E and D usage for this, just to support the coming budget, which is why it's only $200,000. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Doug. It looks like we lost Andy. Can you hang on for just a moment and we'll see if we can try and get him back. So who wanted Baylor to win last night? I had a, I had a back to Zags because it's a Catholic school and even though it's a Jesuit school, it was educated by the Franciscans. I still had to go with the Jags. I was, I was running for Gonzaga too. Yeah. It was a disappointment. They're kind of like, I mean, they're in the same company as the Patriots now. They've had a, you know, undefeated season and then lost it in the last game. You're trying to goad me into this conversation as a Giants fan, Sean, because I really, I'm trying to get a budget pass here. I don't want to alienate any people on this call. I feel like you're attempting fate for me a little bit, Sean. Okay. It's all right. You're all of your month friends. Thanks for your patience, everyone. And he's trying to reconnect the next now. Doug, who are you guys playing this weekend? We are playing long Meadow. On Saturday actually of this week. So. Is that in here or there? Well, everything's away in some respect. I don't recall whether we're going to South Hadley, which we're playing our quote unquote home games or whether we're going to Long Meadow. I think we're going to Long Meadow or technically, I think East Long Meadow, because Long Meadow is not on turf yet. That's a tough matchup. Are they in the same division as you guys? I believe so. They may be, they may be a little bigger than us these days. I'm not sure I haven't checked recently. All right. I'm sorry. Thanks for waiting. Andy's going to try and reboot his. His internet. And if that doesn't work, then he's going to connect my phone. So he's asking if Kathy can take over until he gets reconnected. So Kathy is taking over and I will stop. Those are my two questions for now, and I will pull this up so I can see hands when they go up. So let me lower my own hand. So. I just have a couple of things on the FTE that I wanted to share with you. You know, the FTE is in that line by line. It does have it by department. I don't think it's got it totaled, but we can certainly put that together for you as far as. You know, you know, if you want to sort of go through and mark it up and do it, you could do it that way, but I don't have it at present. A composite of the full FTE. You know, by year, it's, it's more segmented than that at this point. I think it would be useful in, you know, either total, total or middle school and then high school. And same with student population. I'm just trying to get a sense, you know, you in the PowerPoint charts, you showed some fall off on student population. So I'm just that, that provides me an overall context on what I'm looking at when I'm looking at the budget. Sure. Sure. And if I could jump in, I think the one thing that's a real challenge for us as well as every other school, probably in Massachusetts is that we anticipate our enrollment to go up significantly next year from the drop we had this year. We're ready seeing that, frankly, it won't help us with our chapter 70 funding, but because that's all based on October one counts. But as we've had an in-person return even this week with the younger kids, and that'll move up by the end of the month to the older students, we're seeing a lot of students who are private school or particularly we're homeschooled. Returning to us. And those who aren't are saying we'll be back in the fall. So I just want to caution. Sure. Your budget and not so much for you, Kathy. We've had that conversation, you know, in different contexts and a different committee. But I think for the, for the general public who's watching that this is our enrollments this year are likely to be unusually low compared to our enrollments next year. In general, we've been sort of plateauing on a slow decline, like every other, many other districts in Western mass, but particularly as we go into next year with the state making, adding barriers, frankly, to continuing any sort of virtual learning, we do, we do imagine that that clarity for families that we will be back five days a week in person next fall. We yield a higher enrollment than what we currently are experiencing. And do you ever, and I do see many other hands. So I'll stop asking, but do you ever do a forecast the way you've said that you think it'll be back up by 2% 3% or you, is it just a wait and see. Most years we do that. I think this year it's very, very difficult. We're trying to get people to commit at the middle school high school to what they're doing three weeks from now. Today's like the last day of responses. So to assume, I mean, I'm not, sort of a joke, but not really literally the surveys are due today for middle school and high school folks. They were doing, we did a little extension, did outreach. So I think it's really hard to predict exactly how that will play out. But I think particularly since we're talking about the regional budget, with Pfizer's good news last week, the fact that many, if not all of our students at the regional level who want to be vaccinated, will be able to be vaccinated likely by fall from what Dr. Fauci has said as recently as last week. I think that will also offer assurance for families who are still on the fence of whether they want to return or not from a healthy safety perspective to be able to do that. I know we've, we've talked primarily about vaccinating vaccinations for staff. And that conversation, I think as we overhead over the next four or five months, we'll very quickly shift. Many of our students became eligible. We sent an email just to help them. Our 16 year old plus 16 and up students who have one medical condition became eligible Monday. We're trying to assist them as much as possible and being able to access vaccine. So I think at the secondary level, it's a little cleaner. And since that's the only budget we're talking about at this meeting, I will. Cut myself off there. Okay. So I see. And since I'm looking at this only now for the hands up, I see Bernie, then Dorothy, then Jane, then Lynn. So those are the hands I see up right now. So Bernie. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, Kathy, you anticipated the question I had about the money. So thank you for that response. Doug. My concern about you guys, you, you, you, you met your budget targets. I'm not going to go through one by land by land and say, why this, why that. But my concern is how much of this $1.2 million reduction. One off. Versus an actual reduction in staffing equipment. Some more heavy, more tangible. Repeatable kind of situation. I noticed going through. About 29% of the reduction came from the tuition non-public. Line. In, in special ed expenses. And. I mean, we don't know if that's going to repeat. I mean, we don't know if that's going to repeat. I mean, especially given the fact that you've got a friend, everything, everything's got to be up front before the circuit breakers. Kick in. So. You know, how much of this is one off and how much of this is, is a. An actual. Reduction. That's one question. And then the other question I have that's sort of, it's covered related is regarding retirements. And what kind of retirements and impacts are you seeing on your retirement? Is those folks maybe shift from. Shift to retirement. Is there potential savings there from bringing in new people? I know that this might be tough to predict because there's some rumbling out there about a lot of, a lot of concern about teachers maybe leaving mid-year. Next year. So those are my, those are my two questions. So a couple of things. So on the sort of, you know, as we discussed a little bit last night, but it's certainly one of the difficulties in, in sort of laying out our, our reductions is that some are, are more temporary in nature. And some are more permanent nature or more direct services to students. If we look at those that are, are, you know, things like turnover savings, you know, we do predict a little bit of what, what we think we'll see in that where, where staff are going to retire or leave and, and who we hire might be a little less expensive. You know, those things, the health insurance premium holiday, et cetera, is about 38% of the total. You know, it's about $460,000 of those sort of one time, you know, savings that, that will may or may not reappear next year. I think the other, you know, to your other point, you know, in, in special education in particular, often there's a lot of volatility to what our demand is there as far as, you know, resources depends on who the kids are and what their needs are. So that always creates a bit of a, a struggle for us there. The last couple of years at the regional schools that, that level of need has been a little bit less. So that has eased the, that section of the budget a little bit. But nonetheless, you know, it depends on who moves into town and what those kids needs are, what manifests itself during the course next year, as to what and how those will change. It's a little hard to predict in that, in that regard, but excuse me. But I think, you know, the, the, the lion share or, you know, 60 plus percent of almost 70% of, of the reductions we're making this year are actual things that, that impact, you know, our, our programs and, and the number of folks that do the work that we do. Some of that's resultant because of fewer kids being in the building, even if we have an uptick relative to this year, you know, we're likely to be steady or a little below our, our overall population from previous years. So we've, we've seen a general decline in our enrollment over time. And, and at, at points in time, you know, we can make reductions relative to that enrollment level, but they don't come as, as those kinds of transitions tend to be stepwise. They don't tend to be as, as smooth as the, the reduction students. So those, those kind of corrections to staffing size relative to the number of students tend to be in, in a stepwise fashion over multiple years. Yeah, as, as to use the governor's phrase, it's, it's lumpy and bumpy. I know that. And I've also done enough budgets that there hasn't been, I can tell you there hasn't been one single budget I haven't done one. I haven't done some what we used to call slipping and sliding, but we've done a lot of cost shifting. Sometimes just a lucky break made you look like a hero. So that wasn't a criticism that was a concern about being able to sustain the school at a reasonable level. And when there's going to be considerable downward pressure on, on the budget because of declining in moments. And so thank you for that. I see Andy you're back. The group that's queued up is Dorothy, then Jane and then Lynn. Okay, well, just go to Dorothy then thank you. I'm sorry. The internet failure here, but hopefully I'm back for good Dorothy. Yeah, I have a couple of questions. And one of them is about the reserves, the D, D and E. And I'm not sure if I understood you. I know that in some budgeting, you don't spend some of the year, the money, years, but is that what you said is that's kind of what I heard, but I wasn't sure that if you have me at the end of the year, roll it over. It becomes zero. Is that right? It doesn't become zero. What happens to it is it, it, it, when it is certified, it's available to be utilized by the district in the, in the time from the end of the fiscal year until we certify that number, you know, whatever we have sort of in our savings account is, is unavailable for use is, is the way to say it. So it doesn't necessarily disappear, but it is impacted by whatever spending we may have done from it in the previous year, but also whether or not there are any new, you know, if we come in under budget, you know, that potentially will boost our E and D or boost our savings in the same way in which that happens with the town. So it does work in the same way that, that free cash does it isn't that we don't have it on hand. It's literally in the bank for us, but the ability to spend it is limited until it is certified. And then it requires the four communities. So the certification expires at the end of the year. The commission expires at the end of the year. Okay. So that means you don't have to pay for it. You just can't use it. Right. Then I had a question about the premium holiday. And the word holiday is a nice word. But it also has a bad meaning. I just wanted to make sure they said, you don't owe anything this year. Or you said we can't hit this year. Which was it. I think Mr. There's two factors when we do our health insurance renewal for the year. There is what are they charging our members and the district for the health insurance and they set that rate each year. And so this year it's going up 1.1%. Sort of separate from that if their trust fund, in other words their pool of money that they have where they've collected premiums over a number of years from all of the different clients, starts to get to a level that's fairly high. In other words, if they're carrying more cash on hand and then they're comfortable with relative to how they are anticipating usage of that for paying out claims against the health insurance fund that they have, they will periodically essentially do a give back. And what they do is they don't charge us the premium for the month. And so we save as a district, but also all the employees save as well. And that happens periodically over the years. They're currently just the number of claims over the last year has been really low. So their overall cash picture is high and they keep that separate from how they set their rates. But nonetheless, they tend to do it in a single sort of month's period of time when they do it. Doug, let me get a clarification on the exactly what you're talking about. Are you, is the region still going working with the town or are you independently insured now? No, we're with the town. So they're part of the same Maya program that we're involved with, Dorothy. OK. So I just wanted to make sure that they didn't owe it down the line. And then then Alas, it's a whimsical question when you were talking about games. Can you use COVID money to fix the athletic fields because it's outdoors and socially distanced? It's safe. We could make a good case for it. Has anyone tried it? I don't know if anybody's tried it. I think that there are there potentially, I mean, I think there are probably some some use of COVID money that could be applied, probably not in any significant way. I think it would have to be very much directed toward the use for setting up outdoor classrooms or something of that sort. I think the actual sort of, you know, fields itself or that sort of, you know, more fundamental fixing of the field is less likely to be eligible for that. OK, thank you. Hey, Jane. Yeah, apologies ahead of time. I have two very crabby six month olds around here. So if they're screaming children, I apologize. So the question I had and maybe this is a little too nitty gritty, but I noticed that there's an increase in payroll expenses under a special education, but the of about two hundred and thirty four thousand. But then the expense account decreased one hundred and thirty two thousand. And to me, that seems sort of counterintuitive. If you're increasing staffing, wouldn't you have additional expenses? So I guess I'm just wondering about that. So I would say that that as far as the staffing is concerned, most of the additional besides their payroll, their actual costs for things like insurance, that sort of thing aren't going to be into the special education expense line. It's going to be down in the risk and benefits section. So it's one piece. The other thing is when we have more staff in special education or we are able to carry more staff and cover more of the needs of the kids ourselves and we use less contracted services. In other words, we use fewer providers outside the district to provide those services. And sometimes it's just in the nature of who our kids are. So sometimes we have kids that have expensive needs and they graduate. And so sometimes that reduction expenses is is related to kids that we know are exiting our system, whether they're turning twenty two or whether they're graduating and leaving the high school. So sometimes it's a bit disconnected. And those two, they tend to track together. Do you have anything else? Or should I ask? That's all I have. Lynn, you're muted, Lynn, you know, tired. I should stay that way. I want to go back to the chapter 70 money, which is set on the October enrollment figures and wonder if based on the really unusual nature of this year, there has been any discussion about a reexamination of that and some kind of supplemental in the fall. Jump in on that one. My professional organization has been advocating to use the fall 20 excuse me, the fall 2019 enrollment numbers as proxy, given that the fall 2020 numbers we've seen such a different number across the state. It's not like a local Amherst specific issue that has not gathered a tremendous amount of traction. But I, you know, we have communicated that with our state reps, a state senator, and I think it would certainly help, particularly at the regional level, it would help things. And it does feel particularly. Well, I'll leave some of my political commentary aside, but I support my professional organization's advocacy to use a more reality based measure and metric to assess districts. There are districts just bluntly and this maybe gets a little political, but I'll just say that are in much worse shape than us that are more dependent on Chapter 70 than the Amherst com regional schools. So I know I'm talking about this district, but from an equity perspective and the social justice perspective, when you look at some of the urbans and their percent loss, it's much greater than ours and they're more dependent on Chapter 70. So the response has been, well, you know, we have all the stimulus aid coming in and so it all sort of offsets. But the stimulus aid, you know, and I appreciate the question earlier, I mean, we have pretty defined, you know, buckets where we're going to put that stimulus money that we got, you know, and I've spoken about this at school coming forward, it's really about health and safety, well-being in mental health, curriculum work and some summer programming that we're working on, not necessarily to backfill, because I think it goes back to the earlier conversation of one time money that Bernie and others raised that if you're going to use that for your operating budget, not to kind of deal with the pandemic and the results and the impacts of the pandemic, you're just going to end up continuing on an unbalanced pathway and that's what we're trying to avoid doing. So certainly, I think the question you have or suggestions spot on is something I'm very supportive of, as is my professional organization, we've yet to get folks in Boston to perhaps see the wisdom of that to date. I just want to urge that you talk about it with Paul and that we as counselors do what we can to back that suggestion because it would be a much, much better number for Amherst to go with that number. So I was the one last night that asked you to talk today some about the CARES money, what you've been able to spend it on and what you haven't been able to spend it on and then how you see the new three-year funds that are coming down the pike. Sure, so I can speak to that. So in general, there's been sort of four buckets that we've used for the ESER money that we've received so far. Some is for little construction projects, as you know, at Fort Bourbon at Wildwood. There are no quads, there are habsies. Anyone has a better name? We've been looking all year. No one comes up with a better name than habsies so any suggestions are welcome. But essentially the rooms that used to be in four that shared ventilation systems are now split into two. And there are different projects in Fort Bourbon and Wildwood because of the different needs of the buildings. They're architecturally pretty identical, but then some of the elements in the buildings actually are not. But that was a pretty healthy amount of funds, but it's meant that kids are in school right now in a way that we feel like is much safer and much better for students. They're beautiful rooms now actually. They're very large and they're able to accommodate it, so it creates a space crunch and we'll continue to, particularly as we head to next year where we lost a significant number of classrooms. So it's not a perfect fix, it's not a long-term fix, but when it comes to health and safety and ventilation, we were gonna put our money where our mouth was and make sure we're doing everything we could to keep students and staff safe. The second area was around PPE. We bought lots and lots of PPE, KN95 masks for our staff, masks for students, sanitizer, we've installed sanitizer stations throughout our schools, electrostatic sprayers, a whole host of cleaning and personal protective equipment for students and staff, and so that was the second significant expense. The third one was we did need some additional staffing. So for instance, all of our schools have certified nurses and assistants that was not unbudgeted so that if there is a student who becomes ill with COVID-like symptoms, they're moved to an isolation room. Outside the nurse's office, have the option of doing testing, by next testing, right on site. And so there are other areas, like especially in special education, we did have to look at some contracted staff. So the third bucket that we've spent it on is staffing. And the last one is around technology and technology products. So since we knew we were gonna spend at least some of the year, in some cases for some of our students, all of the remote because they're opting to, we need to enhance our systems, our training and our technology to make virtual education much more robust than we were able to last year when we didn't have the additional products at our disposal. We've also increased the Wi-Fi networks in our schools, mostly come close to doubling the speed over the last couple of months so that as we were returning in person, for students who were remaining remote, especially in high school, they were able to sort of dial into class. And that's not our model at the other levels, but at the high school it is. And we could handle the bandwidth that was going on. So that's what we've spent it on. What we're planning to spend it on again, we'll continue to have health and safety challenges. We still have rooms we're not using because the ventilation isn't up to ASHRAE standards. So we'll have, and a lot of these are larger spaces that are gonna be more challenging to improve the ventilation and all our classrooms facing during good shape. So that'll be an additional expense. We probably, we may need to continue with a certified nurse assistant and some of those models. We don't know that yet, but we at least think that that may be something we have to do. We will need to restock our PPE. COVID, you know, if someone asks, is school gonna be back to normal next year? And I said, here's what's hard. We got into this very abruptly. March 13th, I said we're closing school. March 15th, the governor said all schools must be closed. And that's been our experience. And that's gonna be the opposite of how we get out of this. It's gonna be very incremental. Things are gonna get better and better and better. I'm an optimist about that, but it's not gonna happen the same way we got into it. It's gonna happen at a pace that's probably inconsistent with people's hopes and dreams of how we're gonna do it. So we are gonna need to still have PPE. We're still gonna need to have lots of items that we need to manage that way. We are concerned about the mental health needs. If you've been reading any of the papers locally or nationally, you're aware of some of the mental health concerns that are being expressed. And we are looking to how do we bolster our staffing in case management because we know the number of students who are gonna require some more intensive intervention that's gonna be greater. Third is that we are gonna have to adjust our curriculum. Our teachers have done a fabulous and staffed on a fabulous job this year. And we know that students are gonna return not quite in the same places. We might typically have expected them to return. So we are gonna have to adjust our curriculum as a result of that. And we are starting though this is a little more elementary centric. We are still looking at our summer programming and seeing if we can add more robust summer programming to again support students in their reacquisition of in-person learning and the knowledge that comes from that. And so those are at this point our thoughts. We have not received any formal guidance from Stessie. We've only received the guidance from, you know Representative McGovern and from the feds but that all gets filtered through the state. And we have not received, and Doug I think it's true. I think I can say we on this have not received any formal guidance on specific uses and, you know, even the amounts or estimates and Stessie still is concerned that kind of one schools have been left out of this all together and they're talking about adjusting things. So we don't have a final number but in terms of our intention that's how we're intending to spend the funds. It's very directly pandemic related to speak to our earlier point and it was this year but I think some of the things we have done and some of the things we're gonna need to continue to do and I think the good thing is good ventilation is good for non-pandemic times as well. So we are trying to think about the long-term particularly as it relates to our middle school and high school which aren't going anywhere anytime soon and making sure that the improvements we're making are something that is sustainable and that will give peace of mind long after, you know COVID is as present in our lives as it is today. That was very, very helpful. And I was very glad to hear you talk about the possibility of needing mental health additional professionals or assistants both with teachers and students. Can you talk a little bit more about the adjustments to the curriculum that you talked about? Yeah, so there's a couple of things. One is that at the high school we are for next year again due to COVID we are moving to a block schedule which is a this year we had an adjusted block but this year is a very different kind of thing. So a block schedule means that students if you think about a typical college schedule that's sort of what a block schedule is. So students will take four courses a term. Some of the courses like electives actually there's more opportunities because a lot of those meet every other day. So you're able to sort of group them together but what it means is that teachers are teaching 80, 90 minute courses instead of 50 or 60 minutes. So that courses are going to need to be adjusted to be able to support students. Now, I say that's COVID related because that involves less mixing with students. Our typical schedule would have students the seven drop one with seven periods but one gets dropped on alternating basis every day. And when you think of contract tracing that's about the worst COVID environment one could suggest from a contract tracing perspective. But lots of Northampton Cambridge lots of school districts use a block schedule long before COVID was around. But one of the things that we hear from every district and if you're going to do it you really got to have to adjust your curriculum to make it work. And then you have the additional variable of students coming back. And a year where we have some evidence that students didn't learn the same level of information that they would have in a typical school. That's again, not a knock on our teachers at all. That's just the nature of some of the challenges inherent in distance learning didn't work for every kid for some students work fabulous, not for all. So we want to adjust our curriculum that way but we also want to be very thoughtful about entering into courses, prerequisites and knowing that students have going to need to they may not necessarily be in the same place come the first day of school as we would expect in the past and adjust our curriculum to make sure that we're accommodating for that to assume that everybody's right back to where we were is going to be a setup for students to get quite frustrated and not make the effective progress that we know they need to make in the next school year. I have one more question for the moment. Andy, is that okay? Sure. Okay, so last night you signaled out the math line item as it seemed like that was a place where you used to kind of balance a certain way could somebody give a better explanation now that we have just this group? Sure, I can- It's the former math teacher. Right, so and I think this is something we discussed a little bit at the school committee meeting as well is that we have traditionally in utilizing school choice monies directly applied it to a particular area of the budget in the case of the regional school district we apply it in the math teachers payroll line and we use essentially half of it at the middle school and half of it at the high school and that's what we traditionally done and so when we made an adjustment relative to some potentially new support for the district then it sort of shifted a number that isn't one that typically shifts as we go late into the budget. So that's confusing and I think for next year just as a prelude to coming attractions I may represent that more directly. There are some other kinds of funds like our transportation reimbursement or our Medicaid reimbursement where we call it out directly as a source of revenue kind of on its own line separate from where we ultimately may apply those funds and so I may do that for the coming year just to make that happen that way but the short story is that one of the things in one of the rationales for using the mathematics teachers is virtually every student takes math class and so when we're gonna apply school choice and sort of support our budget through school choice funds we apply it to a department that virtually every student takes a class in and so that's really why. Thank you. So let me tell you what I'm thinking about and see if there's agreement from the committee. We have a couple of attendees one who's a counselor who I know has questions. The other attendee is not a counselor but we do have a public comment period and if she has a comment or a question I would certainly feel important to recognize that as a part of our normal process and I don't know whether to do that now or whether Dorothy and Kathy would like to ask their questions that they've had a second round questions first since your committee members. My inclination is to go ahead and have Dorothy speak then Kathy and then get into the public comment that I just described. So if that's acceptable and I will go ahead and recognize Dorothy. Yes, I think my question may be one that someone may wanna follow up on. I am interested in hearing about the possibility of a very, very robust summer program which would have optional and some perhaps not optional aspects to it because we have been, I think Fred suggests there's been great educational loss. We've also talked about the social and mental illness aspects of the isolation that many students have endured. I think that any kind of program that everybody has to do for the summer would be great whether it's purely athletics or anything that involves playing, being together, socialization, doing work in groups but I think we also know that a lot of students did lose a base and I'm just hoping that there's some way that there's a very robust summer program that's gonna happen and I have no idea how that would be paid for but I guess it should be paid for with state and federal money. That's my comment. I mean, I'll briefly respond that I think we all share the same concerns for students that you express and as we still don't have guidance or final number from the state government on the stimulus. At this point, we have limited funding for similar summer programming that we've had in the past. As we get more guidance, we may be able to put something together and I think some students will flock to that and for other students, they have other things that they have planned for the summer, whether that's work and we have a lot of our high school students that are employed over the summer are the things. So I think when I heard mandatory, I think, I'm not sure how likely that is but I think I agree with the larger principle of understanding how we can use the stimulus called dollars that are coming our way to support students with robust summer programming. I think we're on board with that and once we get more information from Desi, we'll be working on that as well. Kathy, did you have... Yeah, just both of mine are more questions that I don't think you can answer right now but be thinking about it. One is related to the sixth grade moving up to the middle school. You started to talk about that a little bit last night but I have been thinking that if you had those kids, that cohort of children in the school, potentially programs like the language program, the music program and some that are getting on the small side to support the extra services, those costs could be spread more generally. And so you get the economy of scale that you get more students and that can you... At what point will you be able to start thinking about that and then making a plan for it and getting those classrooms ready because it might help the middle school for a budget cycle? So that's one question I had and then Dorothy raised the summer program issue but the discussion last night that started in a direction where you said, that's not gonna be your decision on the safety committee talking about potential reallocation of some of the money that's going for two police. I don't know whether the schools will ever... We'll look at what's coming out of that committee as Paul is making decisions but a potential short-term allocation would be for a summer program for at-risk kids to give them something to do. So it might be a nice match for the at-risk kids who weren't working. So just trying to think of where that kind of segue and whether that's short-term like just for one year or whether it could be thought of that way. So those are my two comments. And I know the second one isn't answerable at this point because it's not in your hands. Well, I can make a comment, a brief comment on that one. So on that one, we do have some very limited programs we have utilized in the past summer. We do have some summer support roles usually in the technology and the facilities field where we have been successful at identifying students who would benefit from that experience and it benefits the district. So I think we do have a template for what that might look like and expanding that I think would be fabulous for our students as well as for the district. So I'm not gonna weigh in on the larger point that you raised, but in terms of what might we think about and might there be summer activities and gainful employment that benefits our students and their families financially, but also benefits the district, would be very open to that discussion if that's how it comes up. On your first piece on the sixth grade, so are there economy scales to be realized? Absolutely, I mean, that's just a, I can do that in a binary way, yes, there are. I think we will, I know the school committees will start re-engaging this topic next month in the month of May. So people should be able to look out for kind of some of their thoughts and if they decide to go forward with an engagement on that, I know everyone will know about it and we'll keep everyone on the council as well as the larger community informed of the progress on that front. We plan to do that this year and unfortunately things got in the way, but it's not because of a lack of interest, a lack of desire to explore that decision point much further before it gets made. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm gonna pause for a second and see if the attendee who's not a counselor is interested in being recognized then I would, if she raised her hand then I would know that in the meantime, Athena, can you bring the counselor who's in the attendee list into the meeting? Thank you. So Bandy Hanakie is now part of the meeting is a form of public comment and the other attendee can raise her hand if she would like to be recognized. I did have a little bit of a conversation with Bandy and I'm gonna start with an observation and then ask her to follow up with questions that she may have. Doug and I were members of the old finance committee many years ago and so we've been used to looking at school budgets for a while. And the school budgets have traditionally been presented for the region in the way that they're presented now where you would take what the budget, what the program generally was for the year and hand project to the next year, call that level services and then have additions in adjustments from there. What I've observed happening over time is that initially there were increases. So it was working well and it just sort of seemed to something we were all used to so that that seemed to be the way that budgets were presented and that was fine. What's happened over more recent years is that it always ends up appearing as cuts though the cuts have not always been in substantial cuts. Some have, some have not because we've also had declining enrollment during that period of time. But we've gotten into this thing every year where it's always presented as we're gonna have to cut this amount of money next year and it's always presented as a crisis. And I think that that's beginning to take an effect on the member towns. And I'm not sure that it's a helpful way of presenting the budget. And I felt that last night in particular because the size of the cut caused a public relations dynamic then led into this other discussion that we all talked about about what other cuts the town could make in order to supplement the budget. And I don't think that that really is a fair presentation of what I see as the problem in the budget. And I wanna, and I'll come back to that in a minute but I wanted to start with that observation and with that, Mandy, do you have anything that you'd like to take up now since you're now in part of the meeting? Yeah, thank you. I can follow up with that one and then the conversation beforehand actually brought forth a couple of other questions I have specific to the budget. And I'll just give some examples of what I'm experiencing and trying to read the budget as it's presented. Page two shows a budget which shows a payroll account expense line and an expense account expense line and then just lops off $1.2 million. And then the next 45 pages start with the, give me the numbers that add up to the budget line before the $1.2 million is lopped off. And then the last page, page 48 is then where it says, oh, but here's where we're gonna lop up off that money. The problem is when I try to do stuff and some comparisons is, for example, on page 23, the high school pair line shows 33.85 FTEs for both FY 21 and 22, but page 48 shows a decrease of three FTEs in pairs. And the pair line on page 23 shows an increase of 39,000 for pairs. And I don't know whether that includes or excludes the salaries for the three that are being lopped off on page 48. And so that's just one example of many on how this is presented that makes it really hard for me as a counselor to look at the budget, analyze it, really try and figure out what is actually being cut, what is not, what is these one-time things that don't affect programming, but the next year in FY 23, an increase might need to be substantial because we got a holiday the year before. So it would be really helpful to me if in the future we are not seeing a level services number. We are seeing an actual number in the line items that agrees with the number that I am asked to actually appropriate when the motion comes to the council because the line item budget does not agree with that number. And that's problematic for me in terms of all of this. So to get to some of my specific questions, I appreciate that Councillor Grisimer asked about the math issue and I have a follow-up to that. So it sounds like that 100,000 plus was added in into an expense line, the math department expenses, yet it's actually an income line. And so you've now propped up the expense line to then cut the expense line. I'm trying to figure out, I mean, the way it was explained, Dr. Slaughter, was that, oh, this is choice intuition that we're expensing to the math department, but it's tuition, which doesn't that mean it's a revenue source? So why is it added into the expense department of the math line? That's another one of these things where I'm just having a problem getting this because it seems like that would then prop up the expenses to then be able to, as Councillor Steinberg indicated, claim there's a lot of cuts to services. And so that's one of my follow-up questions. I'm happy to pause there to get an answer to that before I go to some of my other follow-up questions. I'll talk about the first one and then Doug can jump in on the second one and perhaps Sean, because I think Sean was there when we had to readjust where school choice started to put you on the spot, Sean, you can't get away from it, but where school choices represented was changed because of the legal advice we received. So on the first one on the line item piece, I mean, this is not going to be, I'm doing a good job of disappointing councillors last night and today, so I apologize for that, but the reality is the school committee voted the budget last week. So if there's going to be a desire to have that all updated after, and we didn't know that the school community was going to approve any specific budget, right? We had public comments to the very end where school committee was reconsidering certain cuts. I mean, I would frankly recommend to the council that you might want to push back the date by which you have hearings about the regional school budget. I think if we could push up the regional school budget, we would, but as we found out this year, even with the timeline we had, we continue to have changes. So a piece of feedback for the council is, I think I totally acknowledge and understand the concerns that are being expressed here. This timeline is way faster than most other towns, like if you look at Northampton and other places, when they're having their discussions is quite a bit later. When numbers become more firm, I think the challenge you have is there's three other towns that are going to have town meetings. And so I know, I understand why, but I want to point out the problem isn't that we're trying to disappoint the council or not give accurate information to the council. And the problem isn't that anyone's doing anything to try to confuse the counselors. It's simply a timing challenge. And so maybe for a conversation offline that you want to have with a school committee chair myself, I think if there was more time between when the school committee actually votes a budget and we know what the budget actually gets passed. And when the council's looking at it, that might be a better way. I know we talked about this with Doug, we talked about when Sean was here that this is a continual problem. Now that there's a town council, I would hope that we might be able to adjust things with timing that we weren't able to in the past. And that hasn't really happened. So I know there's an interest in getting it sort of out in front of town meetings of the other towns, but there's a downside to that as well. Doug or Sean, do you want to tackle the school choice math piece? I'll start, maybe Sean can chime in and get to that. So you're exactly right that school choice is a revenue source. And so when we apply it in an expense line, it shrinks it. So when we use less school choice, we are subtracting a smaller number than we would. So that means that the amount to be supported by the general fund would go up and therefore be the general fund monies that would be assessed ultimately or be a part of the budget supported by tax dollars from the four communities is a larger number. I don't disagree that it's not easy to sort of see it. And I've been thinking about this even just while we've been talking here about how to represent that more clearly when we apply it to a line like that or like I said earlier, maybe even pulling it out completely from a particular line within the budget and have it show as a revenue source on its own and then indicate where it will be applied once we do put it into the budget. And to that larger point, yeah, because the ads and cuts is a fluid thing until the budget's finalized, we don't formally put it into the line by line until that happens. When we publish our final budget, we definitely sort of put those adjustments to any of those categories into their specific locations at that time, but you're right that they don't. The other thing I would say just around the FTE question is, as we were trying to refine those numbers, we're internally in my office, having the conversation about what are we trying to represent here? What are we trying to do? How are we representing this relative to what was budgeted, especially this year because there was what was budgeted for FTE in a given department and what the needs have been and have arisen to be and is that change in those types of things reflective of this year only and not really what we'd planned for for next year? And so we had this ongoing debate about how to represent some of those FTEs that made some sense. It's like, should we be reflective of what we originally budgeted, thinking we might be in person much more than we've been or should we reflect more of what is currently kind of happening, which is also changing on a daily basis to be perfectly honest. And are we then also, when we're referencing FTE for 22, are we representing relative to what we project? We think we're going to need, which is generally the case. And so are we trying to base that off of what we thought we were gonna do if we were gonna be in person in 21? So there's this give and take around those a little bit that we tried to be consistent with, maybe we weren't perfectly, but trying to be consistent with as far as how we're representing the needs of a department, how we thought they would be and how they are in school this year and then how we expect them to be for next year. It's been a tricky task. It's always tricky, I think, in any given year, but in particular this year, we've held positions open, we've leveraged people in other kinds of roles and they traditionally are in, that sort of thing. So it's been a tricky process to try to represent that well. And I'm not saying we did, but we tried to. But I certainly understand the frustration of trying to interpret that a little bit and try to understand what's going on in this group of accounts versus that group of accounts. Thank you, Andy. Could I continue with some of the questions? Thank you. I have four main areas, more of questions. One's a follow-up to Councillor Grisimer's questions regarding the American Rescue Plan and anything that might be used to support the budget or hire additional staffing with those funds. And it goes back to, again, how the level services budget is presented or how your budget is presented in future years. It sounds like some of those funds may be used to hire additional staff to support some needs of students. And I don't want you to think I'm against that because I think that's absolutely necessary and inappropriate use of that. My question is if that hiring takes place for FY22 and maybe even FY23, how will when the money runs out and those needs are not needed anymore, how will that be presented in FY24 budget? Will it show up as another quote cut to services and all, even though it was entirely intended to be temporary and funded somewhere else? Or are we going to be told in FY24 that we're cutting so many hundreds of thousands dollars out of our school budget again? So grant funds are not represented in terms of our ads cuts. So I think to the concern I'm hearing that the district would try to, you know, portray cuts that aren't actually cuts as cuts. I think there's no need to be concerned about that because anything that's funded out of grants is not in an ads cuts because it's based on the, it's not coming from the appropriated budget. Thank you for that. I know Councillor Shane last night asked about payroll increases in this budget. And I know there's some things you can't talk about. So I have a question that I'm hoping you can talk about. In the FY21 budget, when COVID hit last year in FY20 and we had to readjust all of the budgets, did any negotiations happen or were any contractual COLA increases renegotiated between the FY20 and FY21 year such that the FY21 current budget has, that happened to account for that seven downturn and showed up in the FY21 budget. And if that was the case, how does that affect the budget in both, how did it affect the FY21 budget, but how would it affect the proposed FY22 budget in terms of what might be shown as increases in payroll lines? I hope that's understandable. I think so. So there were not any changes relative to negotiated COLA as far as that aspect of the contract. You know, we had a final year remaining and there was a negotiated COLA for that this final year, fiscal 21, memory service is 1%. But so there was no change there. So there would be no residual sort of harm or benefit relative to carrying into this year's negotiations on that front. So I think it's a fairly straightforward circumstance. Thank you. Two more questions and I'll actually, first one's quick between FY17 and FY22 enrollment decreased 5.85% at the region, 75 total students or so. In that same period, staffing levels increased 6% a total of 18.75 positions according to the budget you have presented to us as of yesterday from 311.73 staff members to 300, or FTEs, that's not necessarily staff members, to 330.48 FTEs. 87% of that increase came from SPED services from my reading of it and calculations of it. So my questions are as enrollment is declining by 5%, more than 5%, why is staffing increasing by over 5% and then could you speak specifically to what causes nearly all of that to be within the SPED categories? And for reference, given the presentation last night, the SPED population, at least the students with disabilities population, which is I believe where the SPED part of the SPED increased by approximately 14 students in that period. Right, so when we talk about staffing as it relates to special education, most of that increase was paraeducators working with students with more intensive special needs. Some of that's based on students returning from added district placements, which we think is good for the students and frankly is good for us financially. Some of that's increases in students who require paraeducators by law to receive, to have access to the curriculum. We happen to have a pretty large cohort a couple of years ago of students from actually all of our sending elementary schools who required an intensive paraeducator support. So if you look at our budgets back, I believe it's two years ago, you'll see a significant increase in paraeducators at the secondary level and a significant decrease at the elementary level as things shifted between students and districts. And that's one of the challenges of the split district is if we were one district, it wouldn't look as dramatic, but we had a sixth grade class go to seventh grade with a lot of students who required that level of support. So I think you're right to point out that there has been an increase in particularly in paraeducator staff, not in professional staff at the secondary level. And for us that prevents students from going out of district, which well, it would reduce our staffing. It would increase our costs significantly, much more significantly than increasing paraeducator staff. So I think it is an individual student need piece. We have seen an increasing number of students, not just come through our schools, but also move to our district from other areas. We have to both legally and ethically accommodate those needs. And in most situations, financially, as well as for the student's best interests, it's best to add staff and keep them within our district programs as opposed to sending them to out of district placements, which typically at the secondary level in particular, start in the six-digit range, which is much more than the paraeducator staff that we would add. So I think it is hard to see those numbers. We see declining enrollment. We are not seeing a decline in intensive special needs students. And as a result, we have had needed to add staff to accommodate for that. We've also added staff on the professional side and things like restorative practices. We have two positions for restorative practices. That wasn't in the budget five years ago. So I want to be really clear about that and transparent with you, Mandy Jo, that we have added staff based on the community feedback that we've received. We believe in that process. We believe that that's both beneficial for students and consistent with the educational debt we owe underserved communities within our school population. So you're right, even in tough budget times, we have made decisions to add staff, professional staff in certain areas that were not special ed related, that were consistent with what we were hearing from our school committee and our community. So it's not all special ed related. And I think it's important point that you made and I appreciate that. Thank you for that explanation. That helps me understand that increase while enrollments are decreasing a lot. One last question and it relates to the assessment method. Over the past few years, and I don't know, I think we're on year five, maybe I'm not sure the regional school committee at the urging of the towns and all has been gradually moving away from the regional agreement method towards a potential goal of statutory method five year average, which isn't the full statutory method. I'd like you to, I have a question, but more of in research I've been doing, isn't it true that the decision or compromise or however you wanna phrase that move from the statutory method, the regional agreement method to the state assessment method while trying that plan to move that way while still trying to abide by all four towns' various financial guidelines that are sometimes competitive with each other has actually been part of what has caused the strain on the bottom line of the budget. Cause my calculations seem to indicate it is. So I don't know more to add except I emphatically agree with that. It is the greatest long, in my opinion, I won't speak for Doug, I won't speak for the school committee in my opinion, it's the greatest long-term risk to education. We're able to provide secondary students. There are these other factors that are absolutely part of it, but the challenge we have year in, year out to try to negotiate a compromise, I think that's an appropriate term that you use that is a compromise between towns, not a compromise about the level of funding or the education we wanna have is a huge barrier to our district. And it is something that we go through on a yearly basis and we stop talking about students, we stop talking about needs and we start talking about percentages in 65 versus 35 versus 45. And I'm not complaining about that, that's part of my job, but the conversation is so different in municipal districts. It's not that it's always easy, it's not that everyone always gets what they think is fair in terms of the allotment, but it is an additional variable that absolutely contributes to some of the fiscal challenges and then educational challenges that we face. So I appreciate you raising that. Thank you for confirming that. But yeah, thank you, Mandy, for bringing it up because it sort of gets into the point that I was going to try and get to it sometime this afternoon, which is sort of the same thing. At the four towns meeting near the beginning of the four towns meeting, I brought up the topic of needing to have a four town conversation that would take place outside of the normal schedule that we have that would happen earlier. So the leadership of the all four towns could be in a single conversation about the budget and budget trends and how that fits in with assessment methods. And of course, we got lost in a long difficult morning as we try not to recall. But I do think that we need to get back to that conversation as to whether that would be healthy because what is happening for most of our towns is that as the state money has been stagnant and the costs have increased, the burden of paying for the increase has been falling on the towns continuously. And that's, I think, then gets into a lot of the tension. It plays out in the end in the tension that Hague's place in the assessment left the discussion. There are a bunch of steps in there in between, but that seems to be what's happening. And I think instead of hiding the ball that is a four town community that cares about our regional schools that we would be better off having a conversation about it than continuing to evade and avoid the discussion. So I'm curious as to whether you have several things, whether you've given any thought to having that kind of process and whether that should come from the leadership on the regional school level or whether one of the towns needs to take leadership to have that happen, if it were to happen. So I agree with you and all the principles you shared. I tend to be an optimistic person. I think those of you who know me know that about me. I am struggling to see the through line of how to get here where the clue is advocacy, not inquiry. I think people have done the inquiry piece for a number of different working groups that you've been on, Andy. And I wanna thank you and others for the tremendous amount of work you've put into that. And Sean, for how many times you facilitated meetings on this topic. So I do think we're getting to the place at which, and I felt this at the four town meetings this year, getting to the place at which I'm a little worried about the future of how the four towns work together. So I think past the budget season, I think summer might be a logical time. It's like the only time that's outside the budget process for us where we have a past budget and we're not yet thinking as much about the future year's budget. I do think it'd be good to get together. There has been some change in leadership of some of the other member towns. Some people who have a lot of history, some people who have less history and there's gotta be seats at the table for everyone, but it's not necessarily the same people who'd be there. I sort of have mixed feelings to be honest with you about where that comes from. I think when the district has been involved at the front end, it's bluntly we've been sort of positioned awkwardly by certain towns, not intentionally, not by design, but to try to negotiate this with the communities. And I'm not sure that's the best model. So I do wonder if there's a different model where towns sort of separate from the regions can have that conversation. And not that Alison or myself or Doug wouldn't be involved because I think you're gonna need some background data and information. But I think that we've tried a number of times with really good people, Sean, others, really good facilitators and communities who are fully invested in the process to come up with multiple alternatives. You know, and I do wonder if it's at a time where the district actually is fulfilling its role to provide data requests and to be partners in the work, but the towns say, you know, we've got a problem here and we need to work on it. It's not so much about the regional district trying to facilitate us. We need to come together and figure out what direction we wanna go in in the future because the year by year piece is really hard. You all experienced that the last two years. I think one of your first meetings as a new council was the Fortdown meeting, which was an unfortunate timing, I think today at least. If you wanna think about some of the more arcane conversations we have, it's about regional assessment methods and you all were pushed to jump right in. So long with the answer, Andy, I'm open to anything. I don't wanna speak for Alison, but I think she'd be happy to participate. Doug, I know would be happy to participate, but I do wonder if it would feel a little different if it wasn't the perception of the region trying to gather people and wrangle them into moving forward as a region, but really the town's recognizing that this is an ongoing longitudinal issue that the towns need to come up and try to help solve. We're happy to be partners in that work, but what we don't wanna get accused of, which invariably happens, is siding with one town or another. We're sort of neutral arbiters in this one. And I appreciate you need to be a neutral arbiter. You also are a very important participant because you're the one who's providing the education and running the school system. And the process that we've had in the past that Sean was involved with that you were referring to was really focusing on the assessment method. We never really touched on the budget or the connection between the assessment method and the budget during those conversations because it always started out with what we knew, what we knew the budget was gonna be for the year and then how we were gonna deal with the assessment method for the next year pretty much. So we've missed the ability to really focus on where that linkage is between the two and how the assessment method and the pressures in the towns flow through to affect the schools and how we need to make decisions on what we can afford in schools. So it's a tough topic and I appreciate you're giving some thought to that. Doug, do we know when the town meetings are for the three towns this year, have they set dates? They have. So, and now of course, do I remember them? I believe Palms May 8th, Leverett is May 1st and Shutsbury is June 12th. It's here, he's going pretty late. Yeah, they moved it from their normal time in late April, early May. Yeah, I think it was COVID related hoping for vaccinations to be done at that point so they were able to be a little more flexible after they did it later. Okay, now that that's helpful because we obviously one of the things that you were referring to a few minutes ago was how we got to the cycle we're in now with this discussion happening today as opposed to several weeks away and the time in the town meetings and so knowing the town meetings are as a part of it. I know that there are a couple of other people in the attendee group. I think one is a counselor and one is not so I'm gonna ask again whether if either wants to be recognized and brought in then please raise your hand so that I know and can manage the rest of this meeting. So either the counselor or the non-counselor if you want to join the meeting and ask questions or make comments please raise your hand so that I know. And while I'm looking for that I'm gonna pause and go back to other members of the committee and I know that Lynn has her hand up. So Lynn. So I wanna go back to this regional discussion besides urging that we have a budget discussion in the summer, not a formula discussion would be good but I wanna go to the more immediate question now that we know the times of the town meetings. We as a committee need to decide when we're going to complete our work and when you want to bring this to the council. And let me just point out that there is a council meeting on May 3rd not again to the 15th, I think I'm right on that. I'll check. So we need to decide. And I think some of that is related to a nuance of what signal do we wanna send? I think Theresa will question. Okay, so our meetings in May are the 3rd, 17th and the 24th. We should probably have that discussion at the next committee meeting in more detail but my thinking right now would be to recommend to the committee to go ahead and do it early. On May 3rd, it might be helpful for the other hounds if we are going to support the entire recommendation including the assessment method. Did we did other towns know that that's where we are? That's my thinking, but I wanted to, you know cap in the political thinking that you have brought to the table and to, you know, the superintendent. Well, I certainly would welcome any comments that might be offered by superintendent Morris or Dr. Slaughter, but I don't expect them to necessarily offer an opinion on the subject, because as noted, they need to be neutral to all four towns. Are there other questions about the budget from either attendees or panelists that we wanna bring up at this point? Because if not, then certainly we could let our guests go and with great appreciation, Dorothy, I'm sorry, Dorothy, you did have to hand up. I just wanted to pick up a conversation we had last night about cuts to the arts program and to ask a smaller group if there are thoughts that you have of being able to draw those cuts in any way as things move forward. Maybe my last unsatisfying answer to give to the council on the regional budget, that's really not at this funding level, just to be blunt about it, right? So if the funding level changes, absolutely, we could have that conversation, but at the funding level that we have, and that's not a complaint, that's just answering your question directly. You know, it seems to us like it's a prudent reduction to make. If there was no budget pressures, would we want more arts for our kids in all the ways that you said last night? Absolutely, but you know, it's not where we are at the moment and if that changes, we'll get back to you. Maybe I should ask one additional question. I had started by comment earlier about the difficulty with the budget being presented as level services and then cuts and additions and then causing these very large number of cuts, which is a public relations problem for the towns that make us look like we're squeezing the schools, which isn't where we start from, by any means. And is this a traditional method that's used across the board? Is it relating any way to desi expectations or is it really our district in its history? There's no... I'm gonna be able to better answer that question. Yeah, do you want me to take a crack at it, Doug? Sure, please. So, you know, a lot of it is for the school committee. You know, the school committee wants to know what it would cost to provide the same level of programming next year as it is this year. And then the reason why all the additions and reductions are in one spot is because we want it to be very easy to see what changes there are to that level services budget from the prior year. And then what happens is after the school committee votes it and the budget is voted, then that single line item in the budget gets allocated up above to the actual accounts. So the starting point for the next year's budget would have all those ads and cuts allocated up above. But I think the process that the region, you know, assuming it's still using the same process of rolling everything forward, my understanding is that's pretty standard among school districts is that you project the level, unless the town says, no, we don't want to see level services, we want to see something different. But most, I think school committees want to see what a level services would cost. And that level services can include the enrollment adjustments that Dr. Morris and Dr. Slaughter have spoken about, which is why those are shown a little bit differently those enrollment adjustments. I think I could add to that. I think the additional challenge and I think it was implied in your comment, Andy, is that, you know, for a town of Amherst and I'm not trying to fuel flames that exists whether or whatever I say is for the town of Amherst, there's a 2.1% increase in this budget, but for the assessments in general, it's below that. So I think that's where regional budgets get particularly complicated explaining to the public because for the town of Amherst, you know, the elementary schools and all the other departments are pretty constant, but the 2.1% increase from the town of Amherst, that's a 1.5 overall increase in assessments, which is really different from the other departments. And so I think that's what I was making my comments before and for Councilor Heneke's comments, that's where it gets both confusing and explaining that to the public and also really unsatisfying and explaining to the public that, you know, that it's a relative, whatever formula is used, it's relational, you know, it's not that all the towns go up the same amount each year. So, you know, for people to look at some of them, you could look at Pelham and say, oh my God, how are you making budget cuts when Pelham's contributing over 4% more? And then you can look at some of the other towns that are having, they're paying less next year than what they paid this year. And that's a really hard public relations communication challenge that we have. And, you know, any support we have or any ideas that now that has to be at this moment about how to accurately share that with the public, it gets very, very complicated. And I think you're right that it tends to have the perception that the towns or in your case, the town of Amherst is not supporting education or the regional schools in the same way or supporting other departments. The data is that you are exactly the same percentage as other departments, but the net, because there's other towns involved in a relational formula, doesn't really yield the same benefits. And that's a really hard thing. It's really hard thing for you all. I have a lot of empathy for you in managing comments of that effect. And it's a hard thing as me. And that's what I was really responding to. I thought, Councilor Hannity is a very precise concern that she was expressing that I agreed with. Okay, well, thank you, Mike. What I'm gonna do one last round of requests to either panelists, members of the Finance Committee or attendees, if anybody has any further comments or questions, because if not, we really appreciate Dr. Morris and Dr. Slaughter for having spent time with us this afternoon. And I think we need to bring it to a close side. That's why I'm making this one last offer to panelists and attendees to see if anybody wants to raise hand. I do see one hand. If there's no objection to Superintendent, I'll bring, ask that Athena bring Mandy back in to Mandy. Yeah, thank you for that. Given what Superintendent Morris just said, I actually just have a question or a clarification because I know he knows I have struggled with some of the facts in terms of the last five years of what the budget is versus how much the budget has gone up, how much the assessment has gone up and how much Amherst's assessment has gone up versus how much Pellum, Leverd and Schuetzberry's assessments have actually gone down. And so I guess one of the questions I have is, is there, and this isn't necessary for this year. So, but are there assessments, is there an ability to do an assessment method that doesn't relate to anything percentage wise? We have assessment agreements that are per student per this, but is there a possibility of doing assessment methods which is essentially, you couldn't figure out a formula, you could just say Amherst's assessment is XYZ, Pellum's is XYZ, Schuetzberry's is XYZ and Leverd's is XYZ and none of them, there's no formula that gets there, that's just a flat number, yeah. Oh, my sense is Desi doesn't like that, they like a formula. Mr. Mangano has had more conversations than most with the people at Desi in charge of regional budgets. And if you had anything, you don't have to, Sean, I don't wanna put you on the spot yet again, but if you wanna add anything, but in general they tend to like things that are relational more than things that we think this is fair. Sean, would you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, so they do give you pretty wide latitude in what you have as a formula. We've studied a lot of different things, I'd say probably over 30 or 40 different methods or variations of different methods, but I agree with Mike, I do think you need something in the regional agreement, that's one of the pieces, I believe that's required in the regional agreement and I don't think it could be just like, we're gonna come up with the amounts each year, I think it has to be something independent of that. And then they sort of want you to stick with something, that's one of the issues that Mike has been speaking to, we've been doing this a lot. And at the end of my time there, I was starting to get the sense from Desi that they were a little annoyed with us modifying the method every single year and without us knowing exactly where we were going. I think they're flexible, but they want stability just like we want stability. So I do think to Mike's point, it's important that the region figure something out soon about where it's going and that it can stick with for a while. Thank you. Yeah, I should add the assessment method even when you're using the statutory method, a part of it goes back to the regional agreement method, which is the five year rolling average of enrollment. So that even though we say that we're moving towards a statutory method, there's a piece of the statutory method that goes back to the regional agreement and uses the regional agreement. Sean can explain this a lot better than I can quite frankly, but one of the things that came up at last night's meeting and it might have been maybe your question and part is to when we're gonna finally get to amending the regional agreement to address the changes in our form of government and make them appear in an appropriate way in the regional agreement. And I think that one of the things about amending the regional agreement is once you open the process for one purpose, you may end up creating a four town discussion about wanting to open the regional agreement to talk about a number of different issues. And so it's a very politically difficult and delicate topic to get into the discussion of changing the regional agreement. So I think that we may need to just continue to be patient on the subject. Anything else into the entire group? So Superintendent Morris, Texas Lotter, thank you very much. We really appreciate it. I think that for us, it was a very helpful conversation. So thank you. Thank you for having us. Yeah, and thanks for all the questions. They're really helpful and they make us better in terms of thinking about what questions that you have that you're hearing from your constituents and how we can improve our process from budgeting. So we really appreciate last night and this afternoon. We also know that your meeting didn't end. I heard that your meeting didn't end when we left last night. So I know you're working on extra time. And so we really appreciate your support and comments, questions and critiques as we move forward. It's all very appreciated. Appreciate your service. Kathy, do you have the final comment? You're muted. You're muted though. In saying farewell to you when you come back with the elementary school budget, I'm also gonna be asking about enrollment trends and FTEs. So if that's already in it, great. But if you have to add a table, just to understand what lies underneath our school system. So thank you. Yeah, thank you. So I don't think that we need to do too much more today though we should spend a couple of minutes talking about scheduling for ourselves. And Shawn, one is when to take up the regional school issue again and try and push that to get it back to the council. And the other is, didn't we leave the question of getting to the back to the discussion hanging and trying to think about other issues we have hanging water sewer was the other one. Yeah, Andy, can I share the calendar, the latest calendar real quick and then we can talk about when those things might come up and that way I can update it too if we make any changes. Do you all see the calendar? Yes, we make it a little wider. Yeah, let me make it bigger. Yeah, please enlarge it. Is that still small? No, that's fine for me. Okay. So the last change we made was to move the discussion of the water and sewer rates at the town council level before it gets referred to the 12th. We did have a finance committee meeting on here for the 20th. I don't know if that's gonna continue but that's the one where theoretically we would have a space to add the OPEB report if we're gonna keep that meeting. Are you, Shawn, that's school vacation week. I'm just pointing out for you and your family. I don't know if that's... Yeah, we can't go anywhere. Thanks for bringing it up, Lynn. But you're right, if other people have conflicts, I'm available but it's up to the committee if you guys wanna meet. I would just assume we go ahead and meet and that we make the recommendation that day because then it would be in the packet before May 1st, which is Leverett's town meeting. And so it would do what I'm trying to do or suggesting we do and that's setting the signal. Okay. And should we add the OPEB? I can see if the actuary is available that day. Yeah, I think you could add the OPEB and then you are gonna have water and sewer rates by then too. Yeah, we've got those scheduled for the 4th. I mean, we could always move them up if we want to but we've got that on the agenda for the 4th. Oh, I see, okay, thank you. That's fine. I think we just do OPEB and the regional budget is fine. And we also tentatively had a JCPC report update. Again, I don't know, I was thinking about it this year and I'm not sure whether we need to do an update for the JCPC report at the finance committee level because finance committee is gonna review the actual capital improvement program. So it'd be a little bit sort of, it might get confusing to review one thing and then see something a little bit different but we can certainly give highlights of the JCPC process if the committee wants it. It's a community that recommends to the town manager. Yeah. It's clear that the finance committee wants to do with it. Okay. I mean, we have a lot to do with it when it comes back in the town manager's budget. Right. So it's in the right place coming after May 1st. Yep. I'm happy to say I think we're getting ready to raise your hand. I just had a question on the water and sewer. When Gilford comes, when he does the presentations at the council and then when it comes to us, my understanding is the centennial costs ended up being higher than what we last saw. So if that's in fact confirmed, could we be seeing now, not just next year's water and sewer rates but a trajectory out once those capital costs and it may be that it won't have any impact on water, the rates because more can be absorbed out of the reserve. So I just, it's a request not a change the schedule. Yeah. You'll definitely see that. The only thing I don't just, we haven't sort of finalized yet whether that'll be part of the water sewer rate, the out years, or if that'll be part of the enterprise fund discussion, but it'll definitely be part of one of those. But if there's a strong preference that it's part of the water sewer rate, I'm sure we can, I know they're related. So it's always a little discussion. I'm just wondering whether other had the feeling that at the point we're doing a public presentation on them to show just one year when we know they're going up in subsequent years and it's not the same as people saw last time, it feels to me like it's better to be showing that and not wait till we then see it later in the enterprise funds. Just it's like a, it's a forewarning. Sure. That may be just me, but I like a fuller picture the first time it comes up then, oh, I'm not gonna tell you about two years from now or a year and a half. I can work, I can connect with Gilford and the town manager on that. Okay. And just Sean, we had this, we have a standing request to meet Bernie and I just quickly on, we're not changing anything, I understand that, but just to talk about, should we ever wanna change the way we do the water rates? What might it look like? So he could come back and have that discussion with finance in the summer, in the fall, but just get some ideas of what he might come back to show. It would be good to, I know he's been very busy doing a lot of other things. Yeah, we can try to get that meeting scheduled, maybe this week that, I mean, get it scheduled this week so that we've got it on the calendar. Yeah. I think the other part of it, so you see Bernie's hand was up too, and I know he's been working on the issue too, is I wouldn't bring Bernie, I recognize Bernie just second, but there has to be a decision made on the 12th of April when this is a hearing before the council and the presentation made as a part of the hearing is to whether it is totally focusing on next year's rates or whether it's gonna have that long-term element to it that Kathy was describing. So it's another thing that's sort of hanging out there because there may be questions that come up about it regardless of whether you choose to bring it up or not. Bernie? I just wanted to reinforce what Kathy's point about bringing in the discussion on the centennial as part of the budget process and looking at what that impact that might have. Three to two to five years out. I think it's important for the public to know that and there's a lot of chatter and some of it is likely wrong. And if we get that information out early and not put it in as part of the enterprise fund, it's probably the enterprise fund discussion, but having it talked in the water and sewer budget gives it gets as information out there and gives people some assurances about what's going on. Okay, Ben? I also think that with it, it would be useful for Guilford to give us an update on the cost of centennial because my understanding is he is looking at how to bring the cost back down again. And it would be useful to know that and to understand the drivers on it because part of that issue is one that kept driving the concern about the library and any other capital projects, whether or not your estimates are solid. But in this case, my understanding is he was asked to see if he could figure out how to reduce it. Anything else? Anything other members of the committee about questions about the calendar as of now? Dorothy? I'm new. Okay, yeah. Any chance of federal infrastructure money going to Centennial? I think they're looking into that. So I think the answer is yes. That's something they're considering. In addition to state money? Yeah, we haven't gotten the, again, the specific rules on the stimulus funds yet, the American Rescue Plan on the town funds. I know the school funds came up earlier and I'm sure that'll be a topic that will include a future finance committee meeting. We have the general buckets, sort of, again, the same thing the school said, but we haven't got the specific rules and regulations from the Treasury yet that says what you kind of cannot do with it, with the actual detail we need to implement it. So yeah, once we have that information, that'll give us a lot more direction about what those funds can go be used for. Anything else? Any business not anticipated 48 hours in advance? Seeing none, I think that we can adjourn. So I thank you all for, I think it was a very productive meeting and we had 10 minutes before four. I'll consider us adjourned. Thanks, Sam. Bye, everyone. Bye.