 Did we get broadcast live on other counts? No. On tape, though, also? I don't know how the television works, actually, in some of the other member counts. I don't know why I'm asking, except for the census, the regional committee. I suddenly realized it was an extremely amorous, centric announcement. You have to stream it and lever it. Stream it and lever it, and then it might be broadcasting film? Yeah, my husband watched it one night in film, so I guess he was having fun. Oh, you can answer the question? That is totally awesome. Please introduce yourself. First time on Amherst Media Television. What was the question? Sorry. How is this meeting accessible to people outside of Amherst who can watch it live or stream it from Amherst Media? OK, so obviously local folks can watch it on cable, on channel 15. And then if you're not local, you can go to amherstmedia.org, click on the Watch tab, and then click on the live stream for channel 15. Do you know if it's streamed in Pellum? I mean, it's broadcast in Pellum, I mean. I'm not sure if they're on the same Comcast. I guess they are. Oh, you are. Is there a channel 15 there? Yeah. OK, so it's directly available in Pellum. Yeah, neat. Thanks. All right, my pleasure. I watched the Amherst School Committee meeting one day. I was fancy-looking. We aim to please. That other committee frequently is. All right, we're burning time. We can all get through this and go on to other things in our lives. Other than my digression, are there other committee announcements? Seeing none, are there any comments from the public? There are none. OK, so that closes public comment period. People should remember that you can always email us or write a snail mail, and we welcome all of your comments. Thank you very much. On to new and continuing business, which this meeting, as you may recall, is a special meeting called for the purpose of digging into our budget. And I'm going to turn this over to the superintendent and then Mr. Slaughter. And the assumption is that they're going to provide, I think, an overview to you of our budget and go over the different components of it. And ideally, I think, some of the major sort of known parts that encompass some of the budgetary changes year over year and what our different process is. And then a lot of time, hopefully, will be left for you to ask literally any question you may have about the budget to make sure you have a greater understanding of it. Is that right? Yes. So I hope it was all right. I invited Mr. Slaughter up, because I imagine he'll be doing a fair bit of talking tonight to the table. And so the goal of this, as we originally set it out, it was supposed to be in December. It got snow. Our meeting schedule got a little adjusted. Was before we have the budget presentation tomorrow night, so the timing worked out well that way. It'll be fresh in your mind. To be able to look at last year's budget and understand both the structure and to be able to ask questions about some of the details in the budget so that as you enter the budget process, which really kicks off in earnest tomorrow night at the region, it allows committee members to have a different lens with which to view it. And so the way we thought we'd structure that is we sent you all electronically last year's budget. And there's four sections, the introductory section, the organizational section, the financial section, and the informational section. And what we thought is that I'd asked Mr. Slaughter to go through those sections. Certainly, committee members can ask questions at any point. But we'll pause at the end of each section so that before we move on, any questions that might be more general and less specific to anything that's mentioned, the committee members have an opportunity to weigh in and ask. And again, the outcome goal is that committee members have a better idea of how the budget's constructed, where items are in a 201 page, I think, budget document, the receiving soon for the region. And that really, this flows right into tomorrow night's conversation on the FY21 budget. So again, just to be clear for both the committee but more for the community that what we're talking about tonight is the budget document for FY20 for last year's budget, because this year's we just got our health insurance information yesterday as it was. So that's being updated. But we want to take an existing budget and again, be able to go through and understand better where items are located, how the budget's funded, and how the budget's spent. Are you planning on throwing anything up on the screen? We were not. OK. Yeah. But we'll make sure to use. I'll imagine your handout when I add that. Mr. Domen. Yeah. So just so I know what document I should be following along with, there's a presentation with slides that says Amherst Poem Regional School District FY20 budget proposal. Is that not the one? Because it has FY20 and FY21 sort of mixed around in those slides. So no. So if you go on our website, and maybe I can show this visually, but it is under budget documents and it's the voted budget of the region from March of last year. So if you're on our ARPS.org, go to the budget office. And you go to documents, not presentations. You'll see there's about a 200-page document. It's the March voted region budget. And that's the one we're going to. And it's online, so if it'd be helpful, I'm happy to kind of set this up and get that going, both for the public, but also for committee members to be a part of. I kind of figured you were going to do that. Yeah, I'm happy to do it. Yeah. I mean, that way, when you're pointing to something you don't have to have the conversation of, no, no, I mean this other line, you can literally point to it. The other thing, Dr. Morris, that I think I said at the beginning we talked about earlier today is, and this may already be included in what you're saying, is that I think as you're going through the sections, it's helpful to inform the committee about the major components of the budget that affect what I would call are sort of structural in the sense that you have a certain component that are utilities. It's either in our control or not. Our control changes in a certain way. We have power purchase agreements, health care, as a certain percentage of our budget, collective bargaining agreements. And I think that's helpful too, because part of the conversation we typically have about the budget otherwise is, what are our thoughts and priorities? And I don't mean this in a bad way, but it's important to recognize that if 85% or 90% of the budget is effectively locked up every year, absent major, major, major changes, it's great to get into that kind of conversation where people really understand, and the committee certainly understands what are the components of change that are affecting the budget each year and that are available for influence, either by the educator professionals or the public. Make sense? Any other thoughts on the committee before we proceed? I realize any questions from the committee otherwise? We are on the Amherst Regional School. Is that document? So I'm going to walk all the people through it on the screen, both for the committee members and the public. It's also was emailed to committee members on Friday, I believe. So if that's easier to pull up, you can pull it up that way. Sorry for the delay. No, it's OK. It might have been too big to pull, so. I think the attachment was too large, so it didn't actually come through in our email, which is why. I was just searching for it. And so it will sometimes do that to you and not let you know that it's happening. Right, because it came up online in the paper that I checked today. So if you go to the business office and budget information, see these three folders, documents, presentations, or reports. So a bit of budget documents, FY21, FY20, rather. You'll see these are the voter budget for the three districts. So it comes up a little cleaner, and there we are. Cool. So Doug, you can just let me know where you want me to be. OK, mostly I'm going to work from the table of contents, but if anybody wants to see a particular page once we get in there, then as we ask questions, we may need to then go to a particular section and take that on. Just to start with the introductory section, which I think is probably the easiest one. There's a cover letter from the superintendent. There's a general broad budget overview of what's included, what's the process a little bit. It lists out, you folks, it has a little flowchart of the administration. And it just has some general information about the district. So this is largely the same. This budget overview is sort of an executive summary real quick about what the total dollars are that we are going to be asking to have approved. And it's different from the previous year. It has a snapshot of assessments. And then a little bit of information about the school itself. So again, a bit of a broad and quick executive summary of the larger document. It's the thing that if somebody wants to know just a tiny bit about the budget, how much are they spending this year? That's where they're going to find. It's not going to get into the details of what specific areas are being spent and which ways and that sort of thing. But it gives you the broad sense of what the district is about and what the broadest sense of the budget will look like financially. So I think that's mostly all I had to say about the introductory section unless someone has questions specifically about that. It's not terribly thrilling in that regard. The organizational section, on the other hand, we get into a little more detail, start to get into the detailed things. It goes through some, you know, a mission statement and a vision for the district, a little more detail on the various components of, yes. I know that you did a quick overview of the introductory section. I know it's probably the less media, but just wanted to pause and see if the committee members had any questions or thoughts about that. So anyway, that's quite all right. In the organizational section, we get into, it begins with, you know, the mission statement and the vision for the district, and then it gets into some more details of the organization. Who are our students? What kinds of numbers we have in the various grades? What breakdowns of a few categories that are generally noted by the state and by ourselves as far as, you know, areas of interest? Then we get into, you know, the organizational structure for the district, both at each of the schools and for the central office. And so that's each of those slides. Then we get into sort of how this works. You know, how do we begin to construct the budget? It's the broad process. We start with what we do at the school itself. We place the calendar here. We get into the guidance we get from you folks as far as some themes and ideas that you're interested in and the, you know, sort of broad financial constraints. And so, for example, we have a four-town meeting in the fall. That influences and is part and parcel of what that guidance from the school committee is partly driven by your conversations in the fall and that four-town meeting we have in the fall. Yes, Rick? I'll go up to Chairperson's question. What percentage of the overall budget from this year is set? Is not this questionnaire? Well, I think it depends on how you want to determine that. In other words, so for example, what we pay an individual and what that individual's insurance costs and that sort of thing is our fixed numbers based on where they are. But how many individuals we have is a determination we make, you know, based on the available resources we have. And so, largely, you know, we keep those numbers the same from, you know, we're close to the same and that's why we talk about level services budgets. And so, you know, we have a certain number of those folks and, you know, those numbers aren't going to go to zero. We're not going to suddenly not offer health insurance or something like that. So those are fairly rigidly defined. Something more specific would be, you know, like utilities, although those have some variability, we make an estimate of what we think those costs are going to be. The amount of usage we have is fairly fixed, you know, but many areas have some variability by virtue of the nature that we're predicting what we think they're going to be, both with cost increases and with the volume that we're dealing with of any given thing. But there's some flexibility in some areas. There's a lot more flexibility in other areas. And so, you know, as we get into this a little bit more and we get into some of the more details of the pieces, I'll get to that question a little bit more. I'm not sure we could go with a fixed, like, percentage in that regard. Mr. Manana? Why don't you say it's a level services budget? The entire budget is fixed, right? I mean, how much you're going to do cuts? Well, we start with that as a, you know, when we say level services, it is essentially we try to take what we're doing this year and say what would that cost to do next year. But then we have conversations administratively in the early part of the process. Is that what we want to do? What are our needs? And sometimes those needs change based on advice from you all or conversations with the administrators about what they want in their building, what their needs are as they perceive them. But also it's sometimes dependent upon who the students are. In other words, sometimes there are things by virtue of who's moved into the district, who's moved out of the district that change that demand on level services. And so that creates a sort of add. But you do an incremental budget and you don't do a zero-base review. That's correct. That's correct. Right, we don't start from zero and bill. We start with essentially what we had and then we tweak from there relative to that. And part of that is because, and some people do it that way. A few years ago we had a superintendent who wanted to do that style of budgeting. It was what he was familiar with. But a large percentage of what we do year over year is not going to change. In other words, for example, in this building we're going to offer ninth grade English. We're going to offer the science series, the math series, et cetera, et cetera. And we know roughly how many students that's going to take and therefore how many teachers that's going to take and to get the class sizes we want. So we're talking about level services. It's sort of matching with that. But then as we go through the process, we're looking at how we need to adjust from level services based on say changes in enrollment. If we have a class that's particularly large or particularly small coming into ninth grade or coming into seventh grade, that makes a big difference. We have different special education needs for students that has a significant profound impact on what we're doing. And we try to be, you know, as cognizant of those coming in to essentially our meetings more night as we can be. But obviously we don't capture every single thing. And that's why it's, you know, there's a lot of estimates to some of that. Just want to add briefly that I think I understand the point that has been made. I think the other thing, and you heard this a little bit other, they're relatively budget neutral. The course proposals is that we're also being very cognizant of what students are interested in trying to match our coursework with their interests. And sometimes that changes FTEs, right? And it may, even if it's a zero or some game, it may be adding some staffing in one area and reducing staffing in another based on the course selection that students are making, court selections that students are making. So I think particularly at the high school level, less so at the middle school, there has to be flexibility built in. So even if it's an adjustment of staffing instead of a budget add or budget reduction that we're connecting what our students should express interest in and also mandates that come from external agencies that there's no surprise anyone on this committee that we have unfunded mandates that go on routinely as other departments do in town and in other places. And we have to sometimes fund those from a budget. So even if we might not choose or want to do that, it still has to be done. And we have to make those adjustments throughout the year. Nicole? This is a really basic question. So and I feel like I know the answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Because you just referred to budget adjustments as opposed to reductions. And we just had this conversation at another committee meeting. But thinking about level services, is it correct to say or define that when you say budget adjustment, that puts and takes to the budget based on delivering level services? So using your example of enrollment as that fluctuates over time. Level services and adjustment might be a reduction in spending driven by enrollment. Is that a safe definition? I'll give a real tangible example. That's a good point. I'm glad you raised it was last year between multiple districts. There was a need-to-be adjustment based on the number of paraeducators needed. And there was a group of sixth graders going to seventh grade. So at one of the districts, this district in particular, we need to add significant numbers of staff and yet the correspondence, the corresponding districts that were educating those students last year had a reduction. So that wasn't because it was a student need piece. We called an adjustment because functionally, one could call it an ad, but it's based on student need, not based on programmatic decisions. That's helpful. So just to continue on the organizational section. And I wanted to spend a moment or two on this next piece, which talks about the local funding structure and fund types. And so one thing I want to point out about this is that you'll hear the term funds. The type of accounting structure we use utilizes what are called funds. So we have the general fund, which you hear a lot about. But we also have what they call special revenue funds, which are where all the grants are held, where the revolving funds are held. We have capital projects funds, and we have debt service funds. And so we're required to categorize our finances in that way. And so those areas, general funds, special revenue funds, capital project funds, debt service funds, those are categories of tracking that were required to have for accounting purposes and for state reporting purposes. But it's also there to move money between those areas is either not possible at all, or if it is possible, generally requires significant action. In other words, action by you or some other body in a similar way. So maybe you have a requirement. I'll tell you about that sort of thing. Yes? Marina? What if those funds are reserve funds? Or if you cut it, you don't cut the services delivered. Do you have many reserve funds? I'm not sure I follow what you mean. You sometimes add money to an account that's not going to be spent, but there's for insurance purposes to protect against cuts in another period. Oh, those would be called revolving funds. So yes, so in the general fund, the monies that are in the general fund are utilized within the fiscal year. Revolving funds can typically carry over from one year to the next, hence the term revolving. They revolve through fiscal years. And so they allow us to store money for a rainy day and allows us some flexibility to cover some of those unforeseen costs at times. We use it in special education. We use it in transportation. We use in athletics. We use it in food service. Sometimes, however, those funds are restricted. So sometimes with special education, you are allowed to carry it over, but only for one year. And so while it sits into one of those special funds like that, you then have to utilize it the following year. And so many of them carry over in perpetuity, as it were, but some do not. How does the funds and a revolving fund increase if they budgeted for? Is the increase in revolving fund budgeted for in that document? So let's say it's budgeted per se. The use of the funds are budgeted, and so you're trying to maintain a balance. So you have an expectation as we go through the fiscal year and we recognize revenues above expectation. That's oftentimes the source of funds to put into a revolving fund to build its balance. If you have something like athletics where you're collecting athletic fees or gate receipts or things of that sort, given you have an idea of what the income stream is going to look like for a revolving fund like that, but you may not know. So the only way of revolving fund increases is through feed revenue? Well, I mean, I just was. Yeah, it can be feed-based. It doesn't have to be. So if, for example, with transportation, so sometimes transportation aid comes in and they actually did this just the other day, they announce during the year what the reimbursement for transportation is going to be. So they make an estimate of it, then they readjust it during the year, and so you receive it periodically over the course of the year. Well, you budget it based on what you expected it to be from their projections the previous year. However, and you tend to do that conservatively. And so what really comes to fruition during the fiscal year may be higher or lower, but higher than expected. And so in that case, your revolving fund for that would grow a little bit. Obviously there are years when that doesn't happen and you tap into that revolving fund to cover some costs, and then the revolving fund balance would drop in that circumstance. So what you're trying to do in general with those revolving funds is not to build up too much of a balance because then you're not using the funds for their intended purpose, and so you're sort of hoarding money that's not getting used, and that's not beneficial. That's what I was getting at the time. But at the same time, so you're trying to keep that balance at a reasonable level for sort of a rainy day to anticipate unexpected significant increases, but at the same time not carry so much balance that you're prohibiting yourself from doing programming that you want to do and should do. Back in the day, there used to be an excess and deficiency fund. There still is. There still is. Yes. That's used for different purposes from the revolving fund? Yes. So the excess and deficiency is a measure. And if you deal with town finance, it's the same as a reserve fund or free cash, as it's sometimes called. And so there's limitations on how much of that you can carry from one year to the next in a regional school district. So for example, it's 5% of your operating revenue. And so if you go over that, so you certify that at the end of the year, just like you do free cash in a community, communities don't have an upper bound. So the town of Amherst can carry as much free cash as they want. There's a point where the citizens go, wait a minute. Why are you still taxing me at the highest rate possible when you're sitting on all this cash? And so school districts, like regional school districts, aren't allowed to do that. There's an upper limit. As a matter of fact, if you cross that upper limit, they make you give the money back to the towns. And so what we try to do around excess and deficiency in particular is to try to sort of carry enough balance if something really unusual happens during the year. And I have never experienced that all the time I've been in school or know of anybody that's ever experienced that. Try to carry in balance in case there's some catastrophic event. But you also want to utilize that funding to help support your budget. So we tend to budget conservatively. We get to the end of the year. We have a little remainder over that goes into excess and deficiency. But we also anticipate that. And we utilize that. And we actually budget that money for the next year. You'll see in our budget, as a matter of fact, tomorrow, you'll see a little bit of that. There'll be an amount we reserve for contingency that literally will get appropriated as available, but not specified. Then we'll have another chunk of excess and deficiency that we fully expect to expend during the course of the year as support for the budget. And so it's utilizing in a sense, in a very parallel sense to a revolving fund, but it has some other restrictions on it, it's serving that same purpose to help support your budget. And excess and deficiency isn't limited. Revolving funds tend to have specific use and specific requirements of them. Speniel? And disbursements from those funds need not be authorized. What authorization procedure is there for disbursements from those funds? Or do they go into the assessment to the towns? So E&D requires first and foremost authorization from you and then subsequently, through the budgeting process, approval of each of the towns. And so, for example, part of the reason we budget a certain amount of contingency every single year to contingency use of E&D, having no expectation to really need it, but it's there if we do. The reason we actually budget for that and put it in and get approval for that is so that it is, if we do have an emergency, we actually have that fund available to be spent. If we don't, then we actually have to go to each of the towns. And so in Leverpell and Munchusbury, they'd have to call a town meeting in order to actually. Sort of like an emergency declaration by the governor, you don't need that. Right, right. So in other words, we try to be proactive in thinking about that, fully hoping to never, ever spend that. Now, there's sort of two chunks we use from E&D. That's one chunk for contingency we hold for that extreme circumstance. There's another chunk that we'll use as budget support. In other words, it's a bit of a carryover from our previous year. It's a way to mitigate the need to assess more to the towns. So we're trying to budget conservatively, try to end the year with a little bit of surplus, use that to help keep our balance steady and to support our subsequent year's balance. Because that's known money as opposed to in advance. And so you can plan for that as far as your revenue side of things. Very briefly, just the other piece to add to what Doug said, and he alluded to this, is that 5% is the cap, and we want to keep it above 3% because it affects our bond rating and our credit piece when we do borrowing as a region. And so that's the sweet spot, is between 3% and 5%. And we're continually trying to make sure we're in that zone. You may remember several years ago that it went above 5% based on some unusual circumstances. And there was funds given back to each of the member towns. And that was fine. I think we'll appreciate it by the member towns that we're budgeting conservatively. But that's sort of the zone. If you go below 3%, there's some repercussions to bond ratings that we don't want to go down those roads. Can I ask a question for just for the committees in general? Is this kind of, I want to ask a question. Is this conversation useful to you? And is it more or less what you were expecting? Or is there, I'm just curious. Well, I'm finding out what's going into the budget. And that's useful. Yeah, that's nice. I'm just saying, because we could do this for another hour. And then I would hate to ask then and say in here that I was expecting a totally different meeting. Whereas this is an excellent moment where if anyone had something they wanted, we could redirect if that were necessary. Not seeing that, so go ahead. What are the funds for OPEB come from? So OPEB, just to do a quick backfill on that. So OPEB stands for Other Post-Employment Benefits. It's Essentially Health Insurance for Retirees. So the Accounting Standards Board a few years ago, several years ago now, requested that entities like us do the math basically on how much is the liability of owed benefit to your employees. In the mid-80s, the state recognized that pension plans weren't funded in a way to actually sustain them. And so they bound the communities in the Commonwealth to commit funds in an aggressive way to build a trust fund essentially to pay those pensions. OPEB does the same thing. So we have budgeted, you know, from our revenue, which is, you know, there's a number of sources of revenue, but primarily it's a, you know, and we'll talk about that in a minute about the sources of revenue. But from our revenue, we budgeted a certain amount of money to go into OPEB, and so we're trying to fill that trust and build up that balance so as to get to a place just like with the pension system in the state, we're trying to get to what they call a fully funded status. And then at that point, we can use the funds in the trust to pay retirees health benefits primarily but retirement. And so you need to make regular, continual contributions for your current employees, and then you can use your, if your OPEB trust is fully funded, then you can use essentially the money that's there to pay your retirees health insurance. Currently, what we do is what we call a pay-as-you-go system for retirees, and so it takes a certain chunk of our budget just like our active employees take a chunk of our budget. The thing is when health insurance costs go up steadily, that piece of the pie continues to get sort of eaten up by health insurance costs. And for your active employees, you sort of expect that for your retired employees, if you haven't created a trust that carries a sufficient balance, that's also taking away from monies that could be used for programming or whatever else. And that's true in every community in the common world that's in that circumstance. No one's, I think, there's maybe one community that's fully funded at this point. And so from a standpoint of our pension system, for those employees that are paying to Hampshire County Retirement, which would be our maintenance staff and some of those folks like that, and the town employees, that pension system won't be fully funded until 2030, I think, or 2033. So OPEB is probably not going to get fully funded until 2040, 2045, would be my guess. So communities will be able to more aggressively fund OPEB at that point. But the idea is that one of the reasons you want to get into the habit of building that is to start to build that aspect of the budget so that when you're actually fully funded, you're ready to fund it. But also by taking into account and putting money away to mitigate that long-term liability, that is also helpful as far as bond ratings are concerned. So when the places that loan us money for various things look at us, they're looking to see, do you have a plan of action relative to your retirement benefits? Because if you're not, if you're just sort of sticking your head in the sand on this and not funding it anyway, that liability just continues to grow because you retirees, you keep having new retirees, you've made promises about health insurance and what that's going to be, and it will continue to consume your regular operating budget in a way that is taking away from the rest of what you want to do with your operating budget. You could break the promises. You could, and some places have. That's happened more often, not in government, but it has happened. And there are times when communities have changed. We keep the same benefit package for our retirees as we have for our active employees. There are some communities that made a different choice and changed how that works for their retirees, but it's difficult when someone's made a plan financially over a course of a career to then subsequently have that change after a fact because their finances may not be set to tolerate that. It might be even easier to pass a universal single payer health care, because if you had a single payer universal health care system with generous benefits, that would also eliminate your entire OPEB liability. Or you could put all your retirees on a high-fat diet, and then the pension liability would go away. I'm offering a more hopeful alternative, in the sense I don't think it's a proposal before the committee, so I don't want anyone in our community to think that anyone is, I mean, unless you are, this is remaining out, I don't want anyone in our communities to think that we're actively talking about stripping health care benefits from our retirees. Anyone. Let's continue. All right. So just to sort of finish up on how we structure the accounting a bit and the funds, the idea behind setting those up is a couple of reasons why. The general fund is the part that you carry the most about. These other funds do impact the general fund to some extent. So the general fund is what you technically authorize, and then we ask the town beings to authorize. Capital project funds would be the other one that you guys authorize, and the towns also authorize. But the choices we make relative to what goes into those broad categories drive what we ask from our communities as far as their assessments and also how we are utilizing the money that the state gives us. But the key thing with these is they are a mechanism for keeping track of how we spend and receive monies. It's the long story short. And so what else did I want to mention in that section about organization? I think that kind of covers it pretty much. So I want to, is there anything else around organizational section that anybody wanted to ask about? And again, I didn't mean to go on too much, but you hear the word funds. And it is an accounting structure. Just to give you a quick example, the general fund. You cannot spend general fund monies to do, let's say, we are sending somebody to PD. We can buy dinner for them. They want to have a cocktail with dinner. That's not allowable under state law. You can't buy the cocktail with their dinner. If you have a colleague whose parent dies and you want to send them flowers, the general fund cannot be used for that purpose. However, other types of funds have more flexibility, not in those cases, but they have different kinds of restrictions, some of your revolving funds or GIF funds which would fall into revolving funds or have some allowable uses that are different than the general fund. But what fund it is does have constraints to it, even the general fund. I should know this, but are there specific fund line items for federally received funds? Yes. So those are typically grant funds. And so those fall into the special revenue funds is the broad category of them. But each, we tend to separate, so each of the grants has its own account structure that we follow. And the reason for that is a couple full, because the rules around grants are different. So a different grant like Title I has different rules than IDEA. But also just we want to track the total of the funds. That's actually why I was asking a question. I mean, since there are specific rules around how federal funds for different grants can be utilized and what the reporting requirements are and things like that, those are all kept separate and broken out so that you can follow them and track them and report them. And that's part and parcel of why that is. And those rules are different than generally more restrictive in a lot of ways than like the general fund. So that does dictate how we use them. But nonetheless, how those interact, in other words, choices we make about how to utilize those grant funds can impact how our general fund is shaped and structured. And generally, grants are not or to add some sort of service or programming and not to supplant. And so you have to be careful about that. And often, also, you have rules around if you call a continuation of effort. In other words, as you provide service in your general fund, if you can't essentially swap out grant funding and not provide that, that's not, you're not holding up your end of the bargain. It's basically the way the state sees that. You've made a commitment to this much effort in this area. You have to maintain that effort in that area. All right, so as we get into any other sort of broad organizational structure questions, I want to make sure to give people a chance to answer that. So then we get into the financial section of the report. And this is really the sort of heart and soul of the whole thing. And there's really, we start with the consolidated spending plan. What this does is it paints the whole picture of, here's all the money we're going to spend from all the sources that we know about. I mean, if people give just things, we don't know that in advance. And so we can't plan for that. But we have expectations around what our Title I funds are going to be, or IDA funds are going to be, what our use of other revolving funds are going to be like, and then what we have our expectations of what the general fund will hold. And so our consolidated spending plan sort of lays out the entirety of everything. The general fund, again, is the sort of area that you will actually technically take the vote on. But what this consolidated spending plan does is paint the picture of all of what is happening within the district and the money that's being spent and how we're achieving that. And then as we go into the general fund budget, which is, again, where you spend most of your time by the lion's share of the document as a whole, we first start talking about revenues. So where does the money come from? So we've talked a little bit about grants and those sort of things. But in the general fund, primarily comes from Chapter 78. There are some other supports in there. But Chapter 78 and assessments to the member towns, there's some other ones like transportation reimbursement, Medicaid reimbursements, charter things. Those are much smaller amounts. They're oftentimes more difficult to predict. But at the same time, we do try to get estimates of those as best we can and policy switches or changes or as the budget debate goes on between the governor put his budget out last Wednesday, wasn't it? Houseways and means started meeting, I think, today on it. They'll have their budget in a couple of months. And then the Senate will do theirs in a couple of months. As that goes along, some of these things like transportation reimbursements and those sorts of things change a little bit over the course of it. They don't generally change wildly. But sometimes, the state will say, oh, we're going to put $5 million more to this. Well, that might mean $50,000 to us. And that can be a significant change in a positive or negative way. How do you cope with overestimating what you're going to get with your effort? Where does the shortage come from? So that's, you want to take on that one, Mike? I'll let you jump in on that one. I'll be sure. The district has a longstanding practice of budgeting conservatively, because it's been too many years where exactly the concern you express happens, where the initial budget comes out and then with projections that look rosier than what actually happens when the sales receipts and tax receipts come in throughout the rest of the year. So you'll see even tomorrow, we have more updated information than we had when the packet went out on Friday for a tomorrow night's meeting and some of the numbers will shift. But we've taken a pretty consistent stand on budgeting conservatively so that we have the ability to adjust if things turn negative and if things turn positive, then we continue to have those conversations. But typically, it depends on the year, right? So typically, you'll take the previous years, Chapter 78, and just to be clear about something that was mentioned a moment ago, if you're looking at transportation reimbursement, charter reimbursement, some of the other things, those are state line items and the state funds that can get, depending on how they're funded, can flow back down to our school districts. So you'll usually benchmark it against the previous year's receipts as well as revenue as well as what you're sort of hearing in terms of what you think is likely to occur, right? That's exactly right. And then the governor's budget's announced usually the third week in January. House Ways and Means usually announces something like the second or third week in April. The Senate Ways and Means will announce something, I think that's so roughly that, right, mid-April? And then I think the Senate Ways and Means does it like mid-May, effectively. And one of the moving parts for that process is that between the governor, the house, and the Senate, they may or may not be essentially more or less in alignment about where they're gonna put those amounts. They're not typically, they're not in normal years, wildly different from one another, but they can be different, at least in meaningful enough ways where if, you know, $50,000 or $100,000 one way or another makes a difference to you, that can make, it can make that difference. And then the challenge is you don't actually know, in an absolute way, how those numbers are gonna come out until like July, right? Yeah, absolutely, and I think for our budget, very different than perhaps some urban districts that are more reliant on state aid or a higher percentage of their budgets come from state aid, I should say. When we're talking about Chapter 70, it's not that large an increase, even in a good budget year, so that the delta between what a good budget year from Chapter 78 and a bad year is actually not a significant variable in our budget. And some of the other ones, like Medicaid reimbursement, charter reimbursement, which, you know, over time, we're hoping increase with the Student Opportunity Act, those are more dependent on who our students are and where they attend school than anything the state does. So a lot of the variables that you see are less, the differences between the governor's budget, the House budget, and Senate budget, don't have a huge impact on us. If we were a district that was 80% reliant on state aid for our budget, that would be a very different situation, but we're less than 50% reliant on state aid and those don't have enormous variables, variability in our budget. Let's say you have a wonderful budget year and the fiscal year comes to an end and you'll under-spent your budget by a million dollars. Where does it go? So that sounds like a nice scenario. And, you know, I think on a scale that's more likely to occur, that's when Mr. Slaughter was talking about E&D. So that's where the reserve would go to support the following year's budget and to build that balance. So that's typically the way we would utilize the excess funds that would come from that. And in some years, like, you know, there's supplemental budgets and not to go too much in the weeks, but right now we got note that we've, there's a supplemental budget from the last fiscal year at the state level that ended positive and there may be, it's not million dollars, it's low five digits, but we may get a little more in some aid than we were anticipating, we will get a little more in aid than we're anticipating getting. And so those are the active conversations we have, but the scale you talk about is, you know, actually, I wouldn't say unfortunately. Fortunately, it's not our typical situation where the variability is seven digits. The other thing I would add to that is just, you know, if it really came in at that larger number, then, you know, it's not like we're suddenly buying, you know, brand new office furniture for everybody in the district, although some might be a reasonable and appropriate thing to do, but if it was something on that scale, it might be, you know, one of the appropriate things to do at that point is your E&D, in other words, the amount that would be going into reserve and being certified would be above the 5%, and we'd give it back to the communities because the support that they would have provided us through their assessments was greater than what we needed for that year by virtue of who knows what kind of circumstances. Generally, that happens in a much smaller scale and what we really try to do more often than not is to try to balance it out so that we're maintaining a good balance in our E&D and we're supporting our budget in an appropriate way and so if it starts to build up too much, we use more support for the following year and that lowers the assessment for the communities in a subsequent year which might be a tougher year. This may be a tough question, but sort of going to literally the opposite direction of that when we've had, we haven't had a recession in a while, so it's kind of an interesting topic to get into, but in the past when we've had recessions, state tax receipts anyways are deeply affected and state line items are significantly cut, I guess there's typically an effort to hold as harmless as possible, at least chapter 78, but do you know what the historical impact is on those kind of recessionary patterns are on mid-year adjustments to the budget? Yeah, we've had them. I think there was Governor Romney had his kind of pennies under dollar speech that people had different reactions to, I guess I'll leave it there, but that's really when the E&D, if you look at the history of E&D, which is in this, you'll see a little fluctuation and some of that comes from really positive years like Mr. Slaughter mentioned where we did give money back to the towns because exactly that scenario, not at the scale, but the same scenario that Mr. Manino stated occurred and then that's where you have different conversations about the use of E&D and how low is the community and the committee comfortable going because if you come over or rely on it, then you set up a structural imbalance, but if you think about the rainy day fund, that's what it's there for. So we do try to adjust that. We do, we have had in past years, including recently because of health insurance, not because of recession, had to freeze our budget at one point a couple of years ago, very early in the school year and that didn't mean there was no spending and there was spending for essential items only and so that did reduce spending as an organization pretty significantly and so we track that and that's why the quarterly budget reports and all that work goes into it so that we can make sure we are adjusting and something I meant to say at the beginning, you've heard me say before is the budget is an estimate. So when the budget passes when the committee votes a budget, whatever it is in March and then it goes to town council, town meetings, we don't know all the variables that are going to play out in the next fiscal year. We don't know if there's gonna be a capital need that's urgent that needs to be attended to immediately. We don't know exactly who our students are and how that'll play out either positively or negative in terms of cost to educate them and so we really try to keep abreast of how things are going throughout the year and make adjustments as we go. Let's go. So I'm getting really tactical but if you could go to page, it's 36 in the document but I think it's actually 37. It's the E&D history. Yep, that one. There you go. So my question is really more just explaining what's going on in that table. So if I'm looking like listening to what you said like if we end up we might use it to support the next fiscal year or the next school year so I'm looking at that top line. Do I read that to say that there was, maybe if you could just explain those top, the green highlighted in the next three lines, what's going on in there? Sure, so after it says E&D at 630 in 2018 or 630 at the top there, the 1,530,735 is the balance once we, well, that's the balance then we have the 650,000 is the amount we've budgeted to use this fiscal year to property. I think the, Can I? So the 800,000 that's shown there right below it says projected from fiscal year 19 operating budget close that was unspent expected money that's essentially left over at the end of the fiscal year that we would go into E&D. And so between what we have committed to spending or projected to spend or budgeting for with the 650, the 800,000 that's the 150 difference and that draws the balance from 1,500,000 and change to 1,380,000. And so the actual certified amount with the state will end up being the 1,380,000. So the ironic piece is that the 800 is for fiscal 19 in other words the actual, oh we came in under our budget by this chunk of money. The 650 is what we anticipate to, what we were planning on using from E&D and so it nets out as a plus 150, so actually, I'm sorry, yeah it's a plus one. Right, right. It grew the balance. I'm sorry, I have that upside down there for a second. So it actually the balance grew. So when we're using E&D to support the budget, we're trying to use enough to maintain or slightly grow the balance but at the same time we might put if we're concerned with getting above the 5%, then we would potentially make the use of E&D in the coming fiscal year a larger number. If we estimate too small and then we get in a circumstance where we get above 5% then we give it back to the town. So we either give it back to the town by writing them a check because we've let E&D get too high or we utilize more of a coming fiscal year and then their assessments all go down in that coming fiscal year. And so we're trying to strike that balance and sort of functionally it's better if we can do it this way and not cut checks just because it's extra step and there's a whole host of stuff that goes along there. So we're trying to strike that balance to keep our overall E&D balance at the right 3% to 5% range, appropriately support our coming budget, not overcharge or undercharge from an assessment standpoint that the community member towns. And part of that too would be that if you assessed a given town, let's say 40,000, let's say you have this 150 or 650, okay, you're gonna commit to the budget. If you didn't do that, then you might be then one of our member towns would have to like take 150,000 out of their operating budget that they could be spending on something else they really need to spend it on and they'd have to be giving it to us to be used for our budget. And at the end of the year, they'd find out that we really didn't need it. And... We turn and give it back. That would be a bad, that would develop bad relations with our member towns if we did that regularly every year. So the goal is to not have that unpredictability and that unevenness in that. I mean, there are circumstances that are predicted and we get above the 5% but we try to keep an eye on it in such a way and sort of target our use of E&D in a coming fiscal year, sort of modulate that a little bit and not be in that circumstance. But yeah, if we said, oh, we're gonna put zero in from E&D, your assessments just go up by, collectively go up by $650,000, so there's a lot more to come out of those sort of town's pockets right now. And then we say, oh, but we'll give it back to you next summer. That's not very helpful. From a budgeting for the town standpoint, it's much better to sort of know is it the beginning and go from there. But as I'm saying, it can't, or it doesn't happen. Yeah, so I mean, this is a really good detailed E&D discussion. I mean, for real, we should be able to explain, bump into people on the grocery store, what E&D is and school choice and all that good stuff. I mean, the thing I've always taken home from E&D is that if we look at this as our rainy day fund, we're capped at a pretty low level because we're a regional school district. 5% is pretty low, and recently we haven't had a nasty recession. And so the memory of what it's like to live through a nasty recession can fade. And so it behooves us to keep that as close to 5% as possible because a rainy day will come. There will be a really bad budget year sometime in the future, hopefully not for a while, but at some point it will happen and it will be much less painful to draw that down to 3% than it will be to cut all over the budget. So that's how it is, but it's tempting every year, and when you have a cut of a smaller moderate amount, you look at E&D and it's tempting to want to just transfer that over, but it's really the short term versus what the eventual long term pain might be. The other thing I would say is when you have a reserve like this, like E&D is a reserve fund, and this is true if you look at town budgeting as well when they talk about pre-cash and stabilization it's one time money. In other words, if you use it, it is gone. It's not a recurring revenue. It's not like your property tax base that will sustain itself year over year. This is money, once it goes there, you're only going to use those dollars one time. And so you want to be judicious with that use. Mr. Fox. Yeah, Matt has me concerned about pumping if I'm reading it right, 800,000 to support two budgets, is that correct? So in last year's budget, the 800,000 is the amount that we were under the budget. So at the time this was printed, that was what we expected to be or have available to put into E&D. In other words, we were an underspender budget by $800,000 roughly. But we also were then going to say for next year we're going to support our budget by $650,000. So the net into the E&D is only going to be the $150,000. And so the idea is that it's a recognition that we were maybe a bit too conservative with our revenue estimates. And so we actually asked for too much assessment. And so we're basically going to lower that assessment next year by putting that much support in from E&D. Because we already got that assessment from you. We don't need to ask for it again. Thank you. Now we're on one side. Oh, we talked about revenue. So where does the money come from? That's the thing. And then the other half of the equation that we talk and spend most of our time is on the expense budget. Where are we going to spend this money? And so there are, as Mr. Nack and Jim have pointed out, there are some things that are relatively essentially locked in in a way that's a sort of, that's got the picture of revenue there. You want to expense them, sir? Yeah, we're going to go to expense. I'm going to just roll up to this. There we go. We're going to expenses. So we, so the broad categories we have are payroll accounts. In other words, what are we paying people? And then everything else that we get charged for. And so everything else we get charged for include utilities, our transportation, our food services, our health insurance. That's costs that aren't people. People are in the top part, but not, but yet some of their benefits are in the bottom part. So you see health insurance right at the bottom there. It looks like a blank line. If you roll down just a little bit, you can see more. You're going to be employsing at retirees. And so you can see from last year, the estimate for those two categories was $4.5 million, am I doing the math right? 2.8, 1.7, yeah, $4.5 million. For health insurance? $4.5 million for health insurance. It is a big chunk of expense. Transportation's a million dollars. We drive around a lot. It's a long way to the far side of Leverage. She's right here. But you'll also see that as you look into the education pieces and other programs, special education, regular education, other programs, that's stuff that we spend for other things than our staff. And so those are areas in which you guys, as we think about and talk about specific programming kind of things. Oh, we want to add this course in addition to everything else. So it's truly an ad. It's going to sit in, say, regular education as an additional piece. There are times when you look at other programs and that sort of thing, it might be if we need to bring in someone as a specialist that has a skill set we don't have on staff. And so we need to contract with a specialist. Those are categorized in those kind of expense accounts there. What kind of expenditures go into regular education and special education, especially since special education is four times as large as regular education? Yeah, I'll let you wait on that because I don't want to. It's not payroll because payroll is up on the top. Right. The payroll, as you can see, is similar in cost. But I think there are a lot of other components that go into the special education. I can think of, because I came from an IT background, assisted technology. So if a kid needs some sort of device to help them, that would be in that special education expense line. But that's not the entirety of it, by any means. I'm actually wondering, and I apologize, and I'm not 100% confident if added district placements also sit in that line. They do. Yeah, so I believe that's the reason it's so much larger is for students who are not educated, that we're responsible for their education. But their needs are such where they attend added district placements. So they're not educated within our school district. That is listed as a special education expense line. The reason I ask this is that this is a useful discussion. But the real budgeting takes place in the day in and day out decisions that you make, putting money into pot A and pot B. That's all invisible to us, the decision making process, the evaluation of student needs. And I don't know how you could share that with us. But the real budgeting stuff, it's the stuff you do at your desk. Not in this report. Right, and then this? But it'd be interesting to go through it. I don't know if we're going to be able to do that tonight. But this is, I would phrase it differently, this is more to the point I was getting at earlier, that when you go into a year, there are some costs that you can apportion out what you think they're going to be. And they go to what, in some cases, what Mr. Slaughter talked about earlier, about the fact that you know you're going to have a math department, you're going to have an English department. There are different category groups that you know you're going to have, and you know you're likely to fund to a certain level. And so the variability is essentially marginal, as opposed to, as you said, ZBB, zero-based budgeting. And then there are other things that are useful to understand. Like, what is the process? I mean, first off, there's governing federal law and state law around how we service the needs of students with special needs. So, and you've had examples of districts that, because they, for whatever reason, I'm not going to characterize it. They choose to try to contest the level of services given to their students. On paper, it seems like it saves them a lot of money. Under some circumstances, parents then take those school districts to court, or some other adjudicatory process. It turns out that there's actually really good documented evidence that those students actually do need the services for which the parents were advocating. And then the district is required to pay it. And so there's sort of a, you can look at it negatively or positively. One, we have a mission to serve all the students, the needs of all the students in our district, all of them in our community. And there is both a diagnostic process that goes with that, as well as also then eventually price tag, essentially, effectively to ensure we can provide those services. But if a community is budgeting and the pressure that they put on their budget manager or their superintendent or the special needs director is to say, I want you to make this line item as cheap as possible, then, I mean, there's a lot of reasons why you should, in my view, personally is of value. There are many arguments I could make for why you shouldn't do that. But even if you try, you could only go so far because you'll get the hex suit out of you, you'll lose, and then you'll be forced to spend it. And the reason I'm going off on that is because I think it's useful for the community to understand the public, to understand where, without judging it, where, how are these costs structured? And how do you assess them and how do you know them year to year? Because those also clearly feed into an understanding of how the budget starts to stack up in ways that you could easily start to know. Forgive me for what I said, Mr. Foncher earlier. I'm not asking you to put a percentage on it. I'm just saying it's a practical matter and could easily start to add up to 80, 85% of the budget pretty rapidly. But it's because you can break out the components, and the only reason I'm going off on this is because it's actually not the same thing as this being literally a decision you sit at your desk and just make. It's framed in the context of a lot of best practice, educational, mission, as well as state federal law and your professional judgment of your entire team, not just either one of you. Yeah, if I could add to that very briefly. I'm conscious of time and wanted to get to the agenda. But to add to that, I think what we do organizationally is try as best we can to identify and develop programs that support the greatest number of students that can be educated within our district, because we feel like for every student we can, having a program or staff who have the skill set to work with students to stay in their home community is a value that we want to offer, right? And so there's acknowledgement, particularly at the secondary level, will differently in elementary, and that's not about the school committee, it's just in general, the needs of students emerge and the structure of courses make it more challenging at the secondary level than it is at elementary. We're also responsible for students with special needs who don't graduate with an MCAS or a diploma. Their education we're responsible for until they turn 22. And so there's a whole additional piece around that of what does that look like from 18 to 22? How do we support students around transitioning? Not only because it's legal, which is true, but it's ethical, right, and moral. How do we provide the education for them within the community? What happens at the school setting? What happens out of the school setting? And so it's not a decision, Mr. Slaughter, I make in our desks, actually. I don't attend IEP meetings. Anything to be really sort of inappropriate for me to do so, but- What's an IEP? Oh, I'm sorry. Individualized Education Plan, so it's a plan that goes along with a student, some students who have special needs, because there's also- I agree with everything Mr. Nakajima said, and what I said at your desk, that was the euphemism for, when we had this presentation a couple weeks ago by Special Ed, that was a budgeting discussion, because they told us what they did and why they did it. That's budgeting, not numbers. Right, so I think that was, I think you're referring to a Pellum School Committee? No, there was a year. It's a meeting here. Okay, I thought you were referring to this as an SSO Puzzle discussion. I think I was a year for that meeting. There was a woman who was the head of Special Ed, who was at the microphone. So, but I think all I wanted to say about that particular- I'm just saying, that's the interesting part. Yeah, absolutely, but I just, I want to say that we budget for what we know about students' needs. We do have a place hold in the budget, because we assume that something will change with some student at some point. Oh no, it was the Pellum Committee. Yeah, I didn't want to say it out loud again, but yes, it was a different committee had a conversation on this. Yeah. But to that point, I mean also, so these conversations started about, trying to predict and articulate the knowns, these conversations started in October in November to sort of identify and quantify the numbers, kinds and amounts of any of these kinds of services, whether it be regulatory or special education. So we start that process very early and continue that process all through the winter, essentially, to try to shape these numbers in a way that match with our obligations, but also with the guidance and feedback from you and the community at large about what they want to see and the programs that we offer and that sort of thing. So that's why it's important when you had the teachers here talking about the classes and trying to meet the needs of students, those happen to be such that they were budget neutral, but that isn't always the case. And so you're factoring those kinds of conversations in with the sort of financial piece at all times, I guess is the way to say that and shape that a little bit on the expense side. Could I actually stop and just maybe ask a process question if that's okay? So it's 741 and what I am concerned about is that if committee members have particular questions or areas of focus in the rest of the budget sections that they want us to focus on for the rest of our time here, it'd be really helpful. I mean, certainly we could talk about assessment methods. I think we'll do a whole lot of that tomorrow night. So we could certainly do it tonight, but since that'll be a question. In my mind, if we could conclude this meeting summer between 8 and 8.30, I think that would be ideal given the fact that we have another meeting tomorrow and more meetings in the future. If that's amenable to people or agreeable, that we'll try to close this conversation at some point, but essentially in the next 45 minutes, then what I'd love to do is just go around the table and if there's an area that people are interested just in immediate sense, that if you're interested and it doesn't have to be literally what we're just talking about, because I really can't even, you know, yes. I have a prior commitment that I need to leave for now, but thank you for that. Oh you do. It's been good. I learned more about E&D tonight than I have in two and a half years. You know what's funny? I thought you had like a question that was burning a hole in your brain or pocket and I was about to call on you out of order, saying like, Peter, if you've got a question you really want to ask, I want you to get an answer to that. I appreciate it, I appreciate it. All right, thanks. All right. Thank you. Well, I'm going to ask Ms. Bitzer. Do you have any questions? Um, I... Or topics. I guess what I was hoping to get at this meeting a little bit more is kind of the nuts and bolts not of individual spending ones necessarily. Like I think we could all read the document and walk away with that. I think it's more thinking about how communities of school committee can support the work you're doing and also how we can invite, I think this question about where there is weight to invite our input and also where we can invite the public's input because I think people should hopefully be paying attention to how we're spending our money because I think that it shows what we care about. And so one of the things that I can't answer necessarily with the detailed program that the document right here is kind of connecting, going back to Mr. Manino's points, like what we get for what we spend in certain places. So sometimes it's really hard to look and I get questions about this. I think all of us get questions about it. Like, why are we spending more than other districts? You know, and often, you know, I have some ideas and things I think about it, but it's hard to kind of point them to a specific line and be like, well, that's budget education, budget line is supporting this many students and this many people who are placed out of district. And I don't know how much detail we can go into, but there's something called program budgeting, which I'm sure, because I'm familiar with it, others may not, where you can kind of be able to connect a line item to kind of, or go the opposite way and be like, I wanna connect, you know, that budget presentation we just had on the gardens to the budget, you know, and how many full-time staff equivalent are supporting that. And I don't think we have the staff and the ability, like I don't want us to create a whole new budget line for program budgeting because I know that can happen. But I do think that if there's any low hanging fruit, if there's any way we can try to connect this document more back to specifics about how many students, you know, like sometimes just on the chart, adding like the number of, the enrollment numbers on top of the budget numbers or the special ed, like the number of kids we're serving with special education over time, along with that number of how much we're spending on special education over time, or even being able to kind of take that special education expense, and then, and it's tricky, because revenue and expenses don't always run up. I know this, but sometimes being able to, there's the general fund piece that's funding that, then the revenue we're getting from other sources that is also funding that, and it's also hard in the budget document to sometimes build those. So I'm not saying we do this for every single item, but I think that might, with some of the things that pop up, like right now we're dealing with questions, a lot of questions about transportation, right? So it might be useful to be able to, when we talk to constituents, be able to say, well, for transportation right now, we're funding this many bus routes that are transmitting this many students, and this many of the buses are funded through these contracts, or things like that, so. Yeah, do you mind if I take this one? So, yeah, so I don't think I can answer all of them. No, I'm not. A couple things that I'd like to say. So I think in terms of, it's a really good suggestion, I think, when we do talk about key programmatic areas that we do connect to the budget, so that's good feedback that I think if we are able to do it more routinely as a normal course of business, that's a more natural flow, and please call us when we don't, right? And that'll be really positive feedback. I mean, I'll be blunt that Mr. Mangano, and I talked all the time about having a return on investment officer in the budget office, and who could do that work, and it's really hard to justify, right? And it'd be really useful, and I think the community would feel really good about the data that would come from that, and that's where we really struggle, is how do you do that when it's, that's at the expense of something else? In terms of responsiveness, I think what Mr. Mangano and I know Mr. Slauda will uphold this is just, you know, meeting with CPAC, meeting with LPAC, meeting with some critical stakeholders. I know tomorrow night we'll have a presentation from another subcommittee of the School Committee who have some thoughts about budget, I imagine, from what I understand, specific information that they'd like to share. And then there's the budget hearing in February being responsive to the community, and I think the hard thing that, where this gets difficult, isn't so much that there's an incredible number of good ideas of how we could spend our funds. The challenges on the other end of the coin is, you know, what are the force choices that makes? And I think the last thing I wanna say is, and this one is that it also depends on the size of the pie, right? So I think one role that school can members can play is certainly if there's, and this has happened, you know, both in the past as well as at the last four town meeting. If there's committee members who feel like the budget amount that the four towns are offering is not gonna be sufficient to cover the needs of the community, people can be very active in communicating that if any committee member has specific things in the questions about any line in the budget, or would like to advocate for certain, you know, things, they can certainly, you know, connect with Mr. Slaughter myself, as well as talk at committee meetings, but if it's help me understand kind of things, you know, please feel free that, you know, that our role is to be able to communicate with you so you can communicate with constituents on any topic. So I know that's, it's hard to answer, there was a lot of parts of what you said that was all really helpful, but, you know. And none of this was meant as a criticism, I think it was. It wasn't taken, yeah. It's just kind of like trying to think strategically about how to, how to improve, and not that we're doing anything wrong, and that we're doing everything with the resources we have, so. Yeah. It may even be something where if, you know, we could, if there's a way we could help in terms of some of the, I should say, I'm thinking through some of this stuff, because I find it very interesting, I think it's important. So I did want to say that in the enrollment data section, which is 180 to 190, you'll find, you know, the out of district information, charter school enrollment, so a lot of the questions that we get around enrollment are all in those kind of 10 densely populated pages, so you're right, you do have to sometimes connect the expense accounts to those, but they are listed explicitly each year in the budget book. It would be, it'd be hard to do, I think, but. Well, one, I think when we, we've been doing now for a couple of years, these topical discussions, and like our budget overview, like our last meeting, you think it is a really good suggestion if there's a way more directly attaching budget to those presentations. Yeah, because they're not. Because they're not, and it, it's weird. I mean, that's not, again, I'm trying to be correct. I don't know. But in a certain sense, it's part of our budget process, but then we never actually talk about either money or sort of outputs and all that kind of stuff, productivity of it or whatever, and that it ends up being sort of a weirdly disconnected conversation, and I think because this is developmental, and we just started doing this a couple of years ago, we shouldn't look at it negatively. It should be more looked at of, okay, so now that we're doing this, what do we do next to improve? The only thing I'd add to that that I can imagine will be challenging is this goes further into what I've been trying to bring up while leaving in earlier today to you, is if you have a math department, there's probably a certain set of functions you're gonna be doing year to year based on enrollment. You can probably talk about what that is. I think the only, the reason I call it challenging is in my mind, I don't know how you talk about in a way that doesn't seem to feel threatening, is that if you had a department, let's say, in which you had six, I'm making this up, but just take an argument, you have six English and words literature teachers, they all roughly were hired in the same band back when they were 24, they're now all 50, 54. They're gonna be, that department is now gonna look much more expensive than if you had another department where let's say you had a bunch of boomers, they're all just retired and they've now been replaced with younger teachers who are just by their nature cheaper, frankly. And so, but the reason I'm bringing this up is because it is not directly related to what Ms. Pitzer said, but it's directly connected to it when you're talking about how do we describe a program area and what we're doing? So you have the number of students, you have the number of teachers, you have other inputs into what that function does, then you have whatever your ambitions are for that function and you're trying to accomplish what you describe and then there's other sort of semi-exogenous factors like how old are they and what are their advanced degrees and what are their steps look like, but the point is when you're starting to composite the entire budget, all these things actually start adding up to a really large percentage of the expenses you have and there's nothing wrong with that because you can flip it and describe and say maybe a lot of the things we're talking about academic achievement in the beginning, we're in really awesome school district, translate back to those exact professionals who are doing a wonderful job, right? So it's not necessarily a negative thing, but it illuminates what we're looking at when we're planning year to year on our budget. Anyways. Yeah, and just very briefly, Ms. Pitzer, I think I've remembered you raising the topic before around not as explicitly perhaps as tonight about budget development and program development having more sort of analysts in that area and so again, part of this process is supposed to be iterative and I'm not saying that you're suggesting that we do that above all else. No. That's not what you said, but I wanna use that as an example if there are things, particularly as it relates to information that school committee receives that you feel like we're not staffed to do, but it's critically important for the district and again, I'm not putting this on you, I'm using it just as a tangible, like that's feedback we really would look forward to having from committee members. So Donald. Not to go back and redo pages of presentations that are going to be done tomorrow evening, but something, thinking through this conversation about sort of how much are we spending and prioritization of the different expense accounts as well as where does most of our revenue come? There's a few helpful pie charts in here, but I'm wondering if even when we get to some of these details, it might be interesting to put some percentage of total expenses or percentage of total revenue for maybe not every single line item, but like the big sort of bucket one so that, because I find it really interesting, looking at the percentage of total salaries to total expenses, for example, right? Like how much, like when we have the conversation about are we spending on people? Are we spending on donuts? That's a really important metric to have sort of rather than just the dollar amount. And I'm not saying call out the number of donuts we're buying, but I think, it's easy to get lost in sort of the pile of numbers that are listed here and sometimes some of those, being able to see not just that it's going up or down by a hundred thousand dollars, but is that, are we increasing the rate at which we're spending in these accounts? Yeah, and just very briefly to be clear, other programs includes charter expenses and so that's another pretty significant, because I think going back to Cher's point, I'll finally get to it, right? You mentioned it a couple of times, that's not an expense that we have, one could argue we have control in terms of, what are we doing to enhance students to stay in our district, but it's not something, like we can't tell the charter school we're not going to pay our bill, right? And so that's another line that's pretty significant that in a very direct way we do not have control over. I'm fascinated by what goes on behind the budget numbers, okay? And in a sense, the entire year's worth of the school committee meetings is a discussion of developing priorities. I mean, the whole year's worth of meetings is developing priorities. I don't know how it could be done, except more presentations from faculty members, more presentation from staff of the particular area of expertise. And I'd be happy with more presentations. So then, huh, Sont? Yeah, I guess two things briefly. One is when we get the budget book is going to include a department by department breakdown, correct? I believe so. I mean, it's in the line by line. So if you are looking at this and I can scroll over that it's about 80 pages of the financial section is what you describe. It's line by line and it includes department by department at the secondary level. Okay, I can recall maybe things have changed. There's payroll for department, supplies, that kind of specific dig down deeply into the East Department. Second question, or second comment rather, is based upon my experience, I wonder if we can't do a better job of informing the general public about what SPED means in a broad sense and in a financial sense. What I've observed, and it's purely anecdotal is that we're servicing more youngsters in-house than we ever had before. And that we're doing that programmatically. There are specific programs for specific types of SPED needs, is that correct? So the only thing I wanna just hold because I don't feel 100% confident is that we're educating more students or I assume even higher percentage of students. Yeah, so I think that's likely true. I know we're significantly, if you compare our elementary schools and our secondary schools, which is what you have to do when you're comparing to state averages. Last time I took, which was last year, we were significantly below the state average in that regard. And you're right to say we've built out our programs like PIP, which pathways to independence. We did some work on that from a capital perspective a couple of years ago and with Summit Academy as well. So I think overall, that's an accurate statement that we've endeavored to do that and build programs to support that. We're below the state average on what? Oh, I'm sorry. Below the state average of out-of-district placements. If you look at our total population. You didn't finish the sentence. So you're implying the exact opposite. Thank you for asking. I'll put some clarity on that. Recently in the sort of listserv for business administrators across, some of the questions was like, what's your enrollment and how many out-of-district placements you have? And I was stunned at what the numbers look like. In other words, we have probably half what most districts have as far as if you consider the percentage of kids they're sending and placing out. And those placements can be modest to very, very expensive. So it's not to say they're all, but I think we keep a lot of kids here. And I think to my Dr. Morse's point earlier, we have that as a value. But I think it also financially has been official too. Because we're big enough to offer and higher enough expertise to keep some of these kids here. And there are a few communities that will send kids to us because we have that capacity. You shouldn't, that last point. I hope it's possible to speak both in terms of what our values are. A, what the outcomes are for kids and families. B, and then see what the fiscal impact is. So the reason I'm saying that is I don't feel like talking about dollars and cents has to come at the expense of saying, we're doing it because it saves us money versus we're doing it because it's the right thing to do. I'm hoping people can keep those, I know it's complex. And I'm hoping people keep more than one concept in their head at the same time. But the reason I'm saying that is because you almost whispered and leaned in and made a face when you said it actually is fiscally responsible and looks like it saves us money to actually do it in-house as opposed to have a significantly higher percentage of out-of-district placements. And that is what you just said, right? You shouldn't hide that under a bucket because it also means, what it's really saying, and it should be said loudly, is that you can actually provide a really supportive, productive, and humane environment for kids and families with needs in our community. And in fact, it's not only the most ethically and morally responsible thing to do and the most efficacious thing to do, it also is in fact the most fiscally responsible thing to do. Sorry, Mr. Frosch. Yeah, I just want to clarify what I said. I think we should do a better job. This has been going on for decades, I think. But when people, some people, look at the two figures of regular Ed Payroll and special, I'm sorry, regular Ed expenses and bed expenses, the two figures are very close. What's going on here? Why are they so close? And so what I mean by doing a better job, people need to have a better understanding if they choose to take advantage of it, of what the specifics of that number are without invading privacy. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, thank you. Okay, so are there other things that you think we should know? Let's see. Let me take a quick glance at this. Can I? It's a really good place. Yeah, so let me see. So the thing that, you know, the general fine line item budget and we show changes from year to year and just as an example, so you can see the proposed, this is again last year's budgets, to be clear what the change is from fiscal year 20, which is the current year to fiscal year 19, which is the prior year. So it sort of highlights if there are any changes where the changes are. Again, on a payroll side, that's just gonna be based on contractual obligated raises. On some of the other sides, you'll see some slight differences, but they're actually frankly few and far between as it looks at the budget. As we look at the budget, grant funds has its own section. That's about 20 pages long, more or less, and that goes over the different grants that we've received. Some are entitlement grants like IDA and what entitlement grant means is that because we're a district of Massachusetts and we have students with special needs, that we receive money based on those students and explains the calculation. Then there are competitive grants. So teacher, the diversification of the teacher workforce grant, which we've talked about here, that's one that we applied for and received. It means it's not necessarily gonna happen the year after we've happened to get it. The two years it's been out, but it's not, there's no guarantee it'll even be offered next year, let alone that we'll be a recipient. So those are the two major grant funding types. There's ones that are entitlement, title one's another entitlement grant, versus competitive grants. And we are actively, we look for grants, we try to supplement our budget, diversification of teacher workforce grants. A good example of a district goal, it's been part of my goals, school committee's talked about it. But those are the, I think it's just important to note that one of the grants, the application is a preforma application of that we're using the money accurately and consistent with the law and the regulations. The other ones are competitive grants. So diversification of teacher workforce sounds self-explanatory. Remind us what title one and title two do. Sure, so title one is a federal grant that goes to communities with a certain percentage of low income students. And it has to be the students who receive services from that grant. Most, sometimes it supplies, but most of the time it's based on staff. There needs to be a rank ordering of needs and cross-reference with income status for that. IDEA, which I referenced and thanks for the clarifiers, speaking in terms, is a special education grant that comes from the federal government to the state and the state to us. And title two A is a grant that's focused on professional development and coaching. Again, most of that, some of that goes to staff who are involved in coaching, have coaching roles in the district or instructional support roles. And some of that goes to professional development needs. And all of those are federal grants. All three of those are federal grants. Most of our entitlement grants actually are federal grants that go through the state. They're implemented through the state but the money comes from the federal government. Do you have a grant administrator to ensure compliance with the specifications with the grants? We do. Yes. Yeah, they have other roles. It's not a full, they're the only thing they do, but yeah. We talked about revolving funds already. I think capital, if the committee is okay, we'll talk about it in detail tomorrow night because we'll have a presentation on capital. If there are questions, we could talk about them but it's its own topic tomorrow night at school committee. So informational section is what it sounds like. It has some academic but also some enrollment pieces to it as well. We do capture all the gifts and donations that are given because we're deeply appreciative of those. And the last section which is always interesting to look at a staffing trend. So it does look at trends over time. And one of the things you'll notice and it goes to Mr. Fonche's point over time, you'll see an increase in special education staffing as relative, especially relative to other areas in the budget. And some of that's because of the exactly reasons you said. As we've looked to develop programs that maintain the ability for students to be educated within our district, that's required to increase in staffing over time. So that's just a quick summary but we can answer again any questions folks have but I wanted to. So what I'd love to do is I'd love to say we're gonna end at 815 and we're gonna run around and ask any other questions. A couple of weeks ago or maybe a month, we approved the addition of I think four new courses. The secondary level. We didn't talk about the budget implications of that. Should we have? So at the beginning of that presentation and perhaps I wasn't as clear as I should have been that these courses were budget neutral. Some of these courses were already offered as Alps, the alternative learning system. So Chinese as well as. Music, right? Yeah, music, yeah. And so some of those are making functional decisions as other ones and this is historically as well as this one. When a course has been created, computer science is a good example from two years ago. As courses are developed, it might say we've gotten a large swath of students in the first, let's say computer science one. We actually need to create a pathway that goes beyond that. So we've sort of filled the first need and this large group of students has had this course. So now we need actually a course one and a course two and we're able to build a sequence. So it's budget neutral because you've kind of forged the path and it's setting a pathway that can happen over time. Some of it's also based on what courses are offered in both semesters versus one semester. I know it's a little different from the trimester which you may be a little more familiar with. And that will be reflected in the book or the budget we get tomorrow night. It's the same staff teaching courses. So the only difference you'll see is you won't see a difference actually on staffing. What you will see, however, is in the program of studies which is already out for the next school year at the high school. That's where you'll see the difference in courses. The same teachers are teaching five courses just like they do this year. The courses they teach will be different. Dr. Morris. Is it possible to get a copy of the program of studies? Absolutely. Thank you. Probably be of interest to anyone on the committee. Did I just found it on the website? Yes. Dr. Morris, per what you're just saying, because you made reference earlier in the meeting and you have in pre-other meetings that student interest will drive sometimes where the direction we take or we pick up is that when you say, for example, budget neutral and you're adding the courses we discussed previously, what that also means is there may be other electives, not core courses, but other electives that maybe have less interest and less enrollment and so they're not going to be offered. They wouldn't be offered next year, for example, right? That's exactly right. So it's not like it's literally costless in the sense that there are no changes. But in fact, if we were to offer all of the electives we previously offered and add these four electives, then it wouldn't be budget neutral, right? Right. What's most typically more typically the case is that there are fewer sections of courses offered to get more sections of others. It doesn't happen that frequently, the electives eliminated, it may be going from offered two sections to one section, because the enrollment's such that we can make that change. Okay. Senator? Anyone else? An enrollment question, a workload. Total enrollment now in five years ago, is it up or down? It is down. So that's in our enrollment section and we've seen a steady decline in enrollment and that is projected to continue based on the elementary enrollments that feed into the region. And just to be very clear about it, because I think we've talked about it at one of the elementary districts, less so here, that's driven by a significant reduction in school age population of families living in our four communities, much more than any other factor. They're just frankly fewer kids with students, fewer families with students ages five to 18 and so at the elementary, they've already seen that decline and it's hit the region now and we've seen that continue. And actually, that goes, I mean, we'll nearly close on this, but it is an interesting point about the four time meeting in our regional assessments. That's one of the reasons why that becomes controversial is because in an overall environment which the enrollment may be declining, the share of current enrollment may go up in a town and so if you live in that town and you go to town meeting, you look at it and say, but the number of kids we have is going down, how is it we're being asked to pay more this year? And it's because the proportional share of the kids in that town relative to the overall enrollment is going up even though the overall enrollment's going down. Yeah. And then to add to that, and actually one thing that I omitted that I'd like to mention is the other trend that we've seen is that now that all four elementary districts are accepting school choice, which was historically not the case. And frankly, in rolling more, a higher number of school choice students than they did in each of our communities we've seen this increase, the region is now inheriting many more school choice students than we ever have. And when we get to our school choice hearing, I'll expand more on that, but that data is in here. But one of the things that is hard for the towns is they look at, oh, well, we're sending 18, six graders to middle school. It may be the case that only seven of those students are actually from the member town. And so it adds to the layers of complication because sometimes people look at class eyes, we don't think of, well, these are resident students, we think of them as kids. And that trend is something that we'll talk about when we get to the school choice hearing and have more detail, because if the region took no school choice students next year, I think we'd have an increase in school choice students just from students who are grandfathered in and gonna be coming. So that data is in here, but we'll go into much more detail on that in a couple of weeks. Great. Cass, please. Can I just clarify? So are you saying that if I'm a member town and I accept, say, five students into my district at the elementary level, and then I go into the region that those five additional students are factored in when we're doing those calculations for assessment? They are not factored in. They are not factored in. Yeah, which can be a surprise because it can feel like the elementary district's enrollment is going up or down based on that, but it doesn't necessarily have the same bearing on the region. So let me get more tangible. So let's say there's a class of 26 graders and they're going to seventh grade and 10 of them are school choice and 10 of them are resident students. Only 10 of those students are counted for the region calculation. And so that can be confusing to member towns because they say, oh, we have a big class coming to the region. Oh, we're gonna get sucked with enrollment because our enrollment's going up and that may or may not be the case. Likewise, you could have a relatively small class, few school choice students, and the share goes up. So I think that's what's often confusing is you can't look at the number of students because when they hit the region, if they're not from the member town, they don't contribute to the assessment percentage. And what if I were a student who had choice from, let's say, just if I was an Amherst kid who was a choice student at Palom, then it would be really confusing because that kid who chose from Amherst then we go back to being an Amherst student when we do the calculations for the assessment. And if you look at choice in our member towns, the number of students that happens to is not insignificant. Between all four member towns, I'm not just Amherst and Palom. Yeah, yeah, so that's exactly right. I have a request. Would you be willing to explain, to share, to repeat what you just said about that process Saturday? Sure, and I think all the friend who will kick me if I forget, right? Definitely. I think it's important for people to understand that. I wasn't aware of that. Yeah. I thought 20 is 20. No, no, and yeah, I'll say this, I know we're trying to close up, is when we talk about charter school costs as well. So I just got, we just received an update from one of our charter schools about the elementary enrollments as of December for all four member towns, which was very nice. I mean, we asked for it, but they're two of those districts I'm not connected to elementary districts, but when those students hit the region, that doesn't factor into the town assessment, but it does affect our overall charter enrollment if the students stay in charter schools. So that was actually a fascinating dataset. And the cost of the region. Yes, yeah, so just noticing those trends over time, so it's not only who's in the seats, it's who's in the, where they live that affects our budgets. I think people need to know what you said about the numbers. Yeah, yeah. What happened? I mean, this is, I feel really dumb asking this question. We got a legal opinion that said that we could not, in fact, mandate the acceptance of choice between school districts. Whatever happened to that? Shed, is okay for the Pella members if I communicate? So there, yeah. Well, I'm asking the question. Yeah, yeah, well, whether me or they respond. So this is, just for the public, this is the students who were school choice students as of last year grandfathered in. So this is only a, it only applies to students who have become a school choice student in the last seven or eight months. And so I would say the Pelham School Committee and Community have a very active campaign going right now to push this issue. I've personally have met with Representative Dom. I know Chair Hall has, and there's a working group in Pelham trying to advocate for that. And I think they're almost to the next step of reaching out to other school committees. And I imagine they will include this body in one of the groups they're looking to be tested. Can I ask you a question then? Yeah. This is a very odd question, but it's relevant for the evening. Is it actually in the best interest of the regional school district to keep the status quo that kids choosing into our elementary districts automatically get a seat in our secondary school district? Is that actually in our best interest? Or is it in our best interest that we don't have that? So I mean, and that's a really loaded way of asking the question. So answer it more appropriately than that. Sure. Well, for me, I think we try to maintain our school size and class size at reasonable levels. If we didn't have this grandfathering in mechanism, we'd likely be taking choice students to fill the same seats. So for me, I don't think it would be a negative thing for the region. And I think it's, personally, I think it's a positive thing that we're filling those choice seats, which we would likely want to fill one way or the other with students who have been part of our elementary district because I think the flow works better for teaching those students of the region as opposed to putting the same students back in a random lottery that they may or may not get in. Can I ask you a question then? Yeah. I mean, ask you to do something. Yeah. You said you were going to introduce this topic, for example, at the four-time meeting. If you do and simply drop a bomb on people that suggest this is fiscally potentially awful for our secondary district, if that's not what you mean to say, don't say that. Yeah. I mean, in other words, if you have countervealing evidence to suggest that the distribution of kids coming in from the elementary schools who are choosing in and maintaining the region are roughly comparable to what we'd need to do to fill out our seats anyway, then I think it should be presented that way. Yeah. So essentially, it's a math problem that it looks on paper like you have 20 kids for the sake of argument coming in from a district, but it's not 20 kids that are being apportioned to that town. So that's a challenge in apportioning our assessments. But if it's not actually a fiscal challenge, meaning you're having kids adding additional costs for which it is unduly complicated to find a revenue source, then we shouldn't leave people with that impression. No, absolutely. And I think it'll be a small point on Saturday, but I think the larger point at the budget hearing will be accepting new choice or maintaining the natural level that we're receiving. I would just comment that I think at the elementary level, it does have the possibility of an impact because I know I think there was at least one family who chose not to go school choice in Pellum because they could not be guaranteed that they could continue on in the middle school and the high school. So that potentially has an impact for Pellum, so. Sure. Back in the day, school choice, I know we're seen by folks in Leverett, including myself, as a way to create a cookie jar of money. That's no longer true. Now we depend on school choice funds to fund the structural budget, the operational budget. And so, whether we think school choice is morally correct or not, we really don't have a choice anymore. And I would argue the same thing exists in this district. Spitzer, I'd accept the motion. I move to adjourn. Is there a second? Second. Second, the best answer. All those in favor? So goodbye. We're adjourned. Thank you very much. Thank you.