 So, actually, like I said, a lot of this is for posterity. OrcaMedia's here. They've been awesome. They record most of the open forums and our school board meetings, and then it's played on cable news, and it can be accessed off their website. We usually get quite a few people that look at the videos later. I think last year, they said it was about 300 to 400 hits that they get. So a lot of this is for posterity. But like I said, as we're going along, if things aren't making sense, or I'm talking a little fast, slow me down and erupt. I can't really see you too well with the light on. So just speak out. I'll be able to hear you. So the discussion is about what we're recommending to the community for the March vote that is coming up next week in terms of the 2024-25 school district budget for the Orange Southwest School District. For financial landscape, what things are looking like in and around the state of Vermont, there are three basic things that are impacting budgets this year. And a lot of folks have heard about Act 127. The legislature last year did a lot of work with the waiting study that some folks have heard about. And what this was really about was recognizing that students from certain categories and certain backgrounds required a little bit extra resources to be able to get an equitable education to their peers. And so they realized that like with us, we have a lot of students that are impoverished. Takes a little bit of extra money, a little bit of extra resources to be able to educate them equally. And so the changes from Act 127 allowed those extra resources to flow to the students that needed it and actually shut it off a little bit in some of the districts for the students that didn't. And so there was a little bit of a rearrangement in terms of who was receiving a little bit of that extra funding. The other thing that's happened is the ESSER funds. The ESSER funds were federal grants that came in to help districts with surviving COVID when COVID had hit. And then we had a couple extra years of the ESSER funding afterwards to allow us to recover, right? We had students that lost learning along the way. There were a lot of mental health issues that we're dealing with that came out of the isolation from COVID. And so these funds have been there for quite a few years now to be able to help us, like I said, get through COVID and for the recovery effort. And they're drying up. This is the last year of them. We benefited, we had about 7 million in funds that came in from the federal government through ESSER. And this is the last year. A lot of districts across the state, they use the funding to provide additional staffing and additional program support for that recovery process. And so there's going to be an impact probably on the education fund as a lot of the districts try to actually preserve all those new hires that they did with the grant funding, moving them over into their regular budgets. So that's a part of the impact that we'll be taking a look at here in terms of the financial landscape. And then the last piece is just the overall increase in property values across the state of Vermont, right? It's wonderful when property values go up, you're getting a nice return on your investment. But when those values go up, the state expects you to pay taxes on those additional gains. And we'll talk a little bit about that when we talk about the common level of appraisal. In terms of our overall budget, here it is in a snapshot. There are two pieces to it. There's the mandated portion and the discretionary portion. So this is looking at the ads to expenses and in the red on the bottom, we'll talk about our additional revenues that came in. So mandated obligations are things that we don't have much control over. So that top line there, increase in salary and benefits, that has to do with the negotiated contracts with our union, right? The staff next year are getting an 8% increase, which is a pretty good increase. And health insurance or health insurance benefits are gonna cost 14.7% more. So the total to meet that obligation that we signed into a contract with them is about 1.2 million. In terms of special education, we actually have been having fewer students on IEPs as time has gone on, but the ones that we have have a little bit more need. And I think a lot of that is coming out of the mental health challenges that happened over COVID. So there's a little bit of an increase for special education services next year. One of the other things that the state has been talking about for a long time is the early education and daycare problems, right? Across the state, it's just, it's kind of non-existent in most places. And so it looks like they're experimenting a little bit with the funding mechanism for this. So this year, and it was kind of unbeknownst to most of us, they slipped in a payroll tax. They're calling it the early education childcare tax. And I think this is a way of trying to raise some money to be able to apply it towards early education across the state and get the preschool programs up and running. The last piece that affects us because we send about 60 or 70 students to the technical center every year, we actually pay tuition, just like all the other sending schools do for our students to attend the technical center. If the tuition at the technical center changes if it goes up, the district itself, Orange Southwest has to pay those additional tuition as well. And so what you're seeing is in this mandated category, things that we have to pay, we're at about a $1.4, $1.5 million increase. We also have things that are discretionary, things that we've chosen to add to the budget and ask for people's support on because it's gonna help us in our educational programming and help us meet the board's ends, their mission, the goals that they have for the district. The first thing that's on here is moving one of our preschools to the regular budget. We spent a lot of time over the last four or five years building a preschool program for all four-year-olds that's free to parents. Two of those preschools at two of our elementary has already been in the regular budget. One was still being funded under grants and those grants are drying up. And so to preserve that program, we need to move it over into the regular budget. Preschool has actually been having quite a dramatic impact in terms of our testing scores. The students just come in better prepared to be able to perform well when they hit kindergarten in the early grades and we've been seeing that in our testing results. So one of the reasons not at all to diminish the great work of the teachers but that Braintree hit the Newsweek rankings and is considered one of the best elementary schools in the state right now. We've never had a full-time nurse at each of our elementary schools before. Yeah, go ahead. Say that again. Oh, so this is the number of people we're talking about. So there's a teacher and then there's three paraprofessionals. And the number that's required in terms of staffing for the preschool is set by the state. There's certain ratios that we have to comply with. So good question. We've never had full-time nurses across all three of our elementary schools. This will allow us to do that next year. It's a little bit of a liability issue. We've got students with diabetes at the elementary level that need that support. We've got some students because of their disability that may need help with food or feeding tubes and things like that. And so we need those people there. The other reason to increase the nurses is because we are dealing with a lot of mental health issues that we haven't seen before. And finding mental health workers in the state of Vermont is incredibly difficult. But if we've got these nurses, especially at Braintree and Brookfield full-time, one of the things that they can provide, because they're a nice, comfortable person for the students to go to, is if the students get dysregulated, they can go, they can work with the nurses for a little while. They can de-escalate them and then they can get them back into class so that they can be successful in our academic programming for the day. So the other two pieces here, an additional worker at Braintree and Brookfield to help out with the mental health challenges. This means social-emotional learning. Human Resources Director for Central Office. There are 262 employees in the district and we've never had a human resources person. That's always been done by the superintendent. And so we're hoping that with our new superintendent coming in that this is gonna give him a really good grounds to get started and focus a little bit more on the leadership for the district. And then the last piece is a 6% increase to the custodial supplies just because of the impact of inflation over the last couple of years. So we've got 1.4, 1.5 million in mandated expenses and we're looking for another 614,000 in discretionary spending which brings us to an increase of 2.1 million, okay? So that's on the expense side. Now we've been doing our homework for a number of years and typically what happens is at the end of a fiscal year we have money that's left over. The money that's left over is our surplus money and we've been putting it into reserve accounts so that we can use it to reduce people's taxes. So next year we'll be putting a little over a million dollars towards reducing people's taxes and then in addition to that because we benefited from Act 127 because we have so many students that are impoverished we actually received an additional almost 1.6 million from the state that was not expected. So while our expenses are actually going up we're spending more to serve our students better it is more than covered by our revenues and this has been the case for the last three years. So we're actually gonna be asking for about a half a million dollars less from the taxpayers than we did last year. So questions on those parts and pieces at all? Great, yeah, grill me, make me think. I'm just trying to understand something. That's 4.0 is four people and each one of the ones is one person. Yeah. You're getting four people for 153,000? Yeah. So... If you're getting one person for 110,000. In some cases, so it's a really good question. So our benefits. So right, health insurance, dental insurance, long-term disability, life insurance costs about $40,000 per person per year. Those folks that are in preschool we already know who they are. They're already here, right? We're paying for them in grants. Next year we're just moving them into the regular budget and the majority of them are not taking health insurance or taking our benefits. So they're a lot cheaper. Whereas if you look at, you know, human resources director at 167, take 40,000, 45,000 off that because that's what the benefits cost is and then you get down to what the actual salary is for that person. So... That includes the health cost. That includes, yeah, that's the total projected cost. They may come in and they may decide that they're not taking our health benefits and then what would happen is because we planned for this, that additional 40, 45,000, that would end up as part of the surplus at the end of next year, right? Because we planned for it, they didn't take it. It's money that's there in the budget and that would be part of our surplus. So good question. And again, three of these people are paraprofessionals and the salaries are much different between the paraprofessionals and the teacher. Good questions. Good eyes too. Another question. Yeah. I'm curious to know how our running history has been as far as the impoverished figure. It tends to run a district wide. It depends on which town you're in but on average it runs anywhere from 35 to 40%. And has it been that way for an extended period of time? Yeah. Usually Brookfield is the lowest. Brookfield sometimes is 28, like 32 and the other two schools are usually around 40. And that's been pretty consistent. She was asking about the percentage of impoverished students in the district. Yeah. It's been a little harder to track the last couple of years because they've done the universal free meals. So before they did that, folks would have to fill out the free and reduced lunch forms. And so that was an easy way to track the percentages. But when you're giving the free meals to everyone without the requirement of those forms, that's kind of shifted our data a little bit. So it's a little bit harder to tell but typically we're in that close to that 40% range. So good question. Can I just say a positive comment? Sure. My child throughout on and off his career here has had a para and has done a special education because he's a twice exceptional student. So his para had to be able to like type fast and have a vocabulary to know what he's talking about. And he is thriving in college between his para's and the support staff, like Heidi and we lost the other. He was one of my tech kids, damn it. I can't remember saying it. Anyways, through the program and through their support, he's got college almost paid for with scholarships, merit scholarships, academic scholarships, and is thriving. So he, I'm just saying this program in high school was rough the first two years, but when it got smoothed out, it was beneficial, it was positive, and it made a great impact. And especially with KARA's mentorship for college students, huge impact, and I think that is going to play, it's a big success with him moving forward. So kudos to that program, kudos to your para educators and the special educators you have. No, they do a fantastic job. One of the things, even from my first year here, that I've always enjoyed about the district is the care that the teachers and the paraprofessionals have for the students. It's unlike any other district I've ever been in. A lot of places it's a lot more clinical, but here they really go out of their way, just in terms, especially the social, emotional and each side of things too. Well, on the technical side too, you need more, a lot of technical help, and that was perfect, it was great. Yeah, no, I appreciate it, and it's a good shout out to people that deserve it. So again, just to kind of summarize a few things here is that we're gonna look at your taxes, look at the potential tax rates based upon the best data that we've got right now, but I wanna point out that your taxes come from two different things. So you've got the school side of stuff, right? We've just talked about that, we've got our discretionary spending, that's within our control, and we've got the revenues that we generate is a lot of that is within our control. So that's pretty much the only things that we have levers that we can pull and shift to be able to adjust your tax rates, and as I said, we're cutting what we're asking for from the community by about a half a million dollars. The things that are out of our control this year that we don't have any control over is the first thing is this reset of what we're calling the tier one tax calculation. So what that is, is like we said, they recognize that students across the state come from different backgrounds and categories and some need more resources to be properly educated and they are providing those resources. So what that does is that actually is resetting the basic tax rate because they're gonna need more money to be able to supply the resources for the students. So that's done at a legislative and a state level. The biggest piece, and that's why it's in red up here, is the increase in people's property values, right? I think in this region of Vermont, new property values have probably gone up at least 60% probably over the last year. Assessed values have stayed stagnant, but their market value is increased. And so common level of appraisal is what they use, CLA. So you've got the assessed value here and the state goes out and does a survey every year and sees where the houses are actually selling in your town and if this is where you're assessed at but the houses are selling up here, they're gonna say, oh, you guys aren't paying enough in taxes and so we're gonna increase your tax rates. And in some cases like Braintree last year, they've assessed them here but the houses are selling here. So they actually got a reduction in their tax rates because of that. But what you're gonna see this year is that assessed are here and values are here. So the biggest impact on your taxes this year is right here. And then the other piece that we don't have a lot of control over and this comes from the school budget was right those mandated expenses. Things that we've agreed to via contract or we just need to run the school with. So on the district side, it will look back at the last two years and next year. So this is our current year, this is next year, this is the previous year. What we've been doing is we've been spending more in support of students but our revenues have grown faster than what we're spending. So in 2022, 23, we actually were asking for 7.5 cents less per $100 of assessed value than the year before. So on a $250,000 property, that meant a reduction of $188 in annual taxes. This year, we asked for 7.2 cents per $100 of assessed value less, which was a reduction of $180 on a $250,000 property and for next year, right? Because we got that huge increase due to Act 127, we're actually asking for about 15 cents less per $100 of assessed value, which is the savings of $374 on a home that's worth about $250,000. So over the last three years, if it was just what the school was doing, what was within the school's control, if you had a $250,000 home, that would be what would have happened to your taxes. It would have gone down by $742. Make a little bit of sense. So now we're gonna mess things up. We're gonna bring in the impact of Act 127 and also the impact of the CLA, the property values. And so again, we're basing this on a $250,000 property. So actually, let's look at the CLA first before we go into the details here. What this is telling us is that in Braintree, when the state did the survey, folks are, if they're looking at the assessed values in the town, they're only paying 79 point, paying taxes on 79.57% of their properties, right? So they need to pay more, right? And so what's happening when you bring in the CLA is these are the tax rates for the three towns. This is what the overall annual impact is going to be and this is what the monthly impact is gonna be. Braintree got kind of a double whammy and that's the reason that theirs is the worst. So Braintree or Brookfield? Take it back, it's Brookfield. Brookfield, last year, their CLA was over 100%. In other words, they were paying taxes on too much value. So they got a big discount last year. They lost that this year and now they're not paying enough. So they kind of got the double whammy, they lost their discount and they got to pay more because the houses have been selling more than the assessed value. I don't quite understand that. I thought if you had a CLA of 95, then your shortfall was very, not much. You weren't far from your 100%. Yeah. But this is comparing to last year. And so last year, I think Braintree was at like 110 or 108, 109. So they were actually paying more in one way of thinking than they should. So they actually got a reduction in their taxes to get them back down to 100%. So this year they lost that plus they're not paying enough because now they're under that 100% threshold so they got to pay more on that extra value. So they had two pieces that are taking into account for them this year. Okay, I hear what you're saying, but I don't understand why Braintree at a considerably bigger shortfall from 100%, isn't paying more. I see the rates are, their rate is higher too. It's just puzzling to me. I'm obviously not following the math here. And even though I understand your story about last year versus last year. And so I'd have to go back with you and take a look because remember we're comparing the last year's CLA's. This has changed from last year to this year. This is the new CLA's. This is this year's new CLA's. The column here is the new year's. This current year's CLA's. Yeah. But this is the change that you'll experience because of the difference between last year and this year. And so my guess is that Braintree, if it's a little bit smaller and especially Randolph, they probably were low last year too. Yeah, Randolph was at 80. But we'd have to compare it to what last year's were to be able to answer your question, which I don't have that data up here. But good questions and good thinking too. It's good to see that you're looking at that. So a couple of fair points here. The impact of the district's budget decisions, right? Over the last three years, have actually decreased the base tax rate. So the school has done what it can to kind of keep things low while still improving programming for students. The overall tax is however gonna go up due to the increase in the property values and the impact of Act 127. And those two things are not in our control. They did, see if I wanna go into the explanation of this or not, they did pass a law just a little while ago. Act 127 had some loopholes in it. One of the things that it did was to help out the districts that were gonna lose out when Act 127 went into place is they tried to give them five years to adjust to the loss. And they put in what was called the 5% tax rate increase cap. So you could actually ask for money from the state above that 5% but you'd only pay the 5% tax increase. So right, here's the 5% tax increase. I can ask for more money but I'm only gonna be paying for this here. The problem is is when a district does that is somebody's gotta pay for that money that they're asking for. And that comes from all the taxpayers across the state. And so they had a number of school districts that were trying to game the system a little bit. Oh yeah, we're only gonna have to pay 5% increase in our taxes but we can get a 10% increase and only have to pay the five. There were a number of districts that were trying to game the system that way and the overall impact would be that we all pay more because of it. The change in the law was designed to stop that from happening. And if it does its job, it means that a lot of those districts will probably suspend their budget votes and push them off, reduce what they're asking for from the state, which will mean that there's a little bit more money in the education fund for everybody else in our tax rates because of that may go down. So that's the hope. Is that what the governor, well I know there was some discussion about not making a decision on your budget in case they were going to change a formula. What formula were they changing? So they were changing that 5% tax rate that 5% cap formula. So that's still in the offing, right? No, they signed that like two days ago. So we might benefit a little bit more. So our taxes are likely to, if that bill impacts things the way that they intend it to and it looks like it might, our taxes will either be close to what I'm showing you here or a little bit lower than what I'm showing you. That's the hope. So what can you say about the increase in property values? What can you comment on? I know they've done reassessments, but we haven't heard much in the way of what that looks like. So they're in the, so Braintree, hold on. So Braintree, Brookfield. Brookfield did a reassessment two years ago. Braintree and Randolph are in the reassessment stage right now. They're gonna be another year before they've actually completed that process. And then what you hope to see if they do things well, let me flip back a page or two here. What you wanna see is a CLA of 100. So in other words, their assessments are exactly matching what the state is saying things are selling for. So I guess comment, which one was the one that you said they've already done their assessments? Was that Brookfield or Braintree? That was, I believe it was Brookfield, which is why they're close to the 100% in 95.21. And what happened to their property tax values? What kind of a change in percentage was that? So the year after they did the assessment, they had a huge jump in tax rates. And then the year following that, they had a huge decrease, which was last year. And now they're kind of normalized they're close to that 100%. What is, what kind of rates are we talking about? I'd have to actually go and research that for you. But I can tell you, you can see what their 2023, 24 tax rate was compared to Braintree and Brookfield. So this is our current year, right? They were at 127 per $100 of assessed value, whereas Randolph was at 164 and Braintree was at 157. So they were significantly lower, right? Cause if this is what you're assessed at. The reason I'm asking that question is if we're looking at a 4% increase in property tax here in Randolph, is that based on the current prices of housing? Or is it, will it be impacted by the increase in property values? In other words, is that 4% potentially 10%? It could be, right? Because if the property, if the property values have gone up, which they have when they reassess, you know, your house that was worth 400,000 is probably worth 600,000 now. And so the expectation is that you're gonna be paying, you know, on that extra 200,000, the taxes. You're already doing that this year though, right? So let's go back and see if this makes sense. The reason that you're doing that this year is because the state's already taken into account that if you're a Randolph resident, based upon its assessments, you're only paying on 78% of your property's value, so they are charging you for the additional 22% taxes already. So they're already equalizing it. That's why you've got this jump in tax rates over here, even though the school is trying to bring stuff down. So did that make a little bit of sense? So they're already doing that equalization process. It does, but I would like to get a sense of you used 400 and 600. Is that a potentially realistic arena? Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I think from the folks that are in Montpelier, because they were doing their reassessments, and from what I've seen in the houses on my street, I'm up on LaBounty Road, it looks like it's probably anywhere around a 60% increase in house value. Yeah, so that. Questions about Randolph's reassessment. You can make an appointment at my office, and I can talk to you. I'm me. I can't see who you are. I'm sorry, if that's worth it. I'm a university, I'm an assessor for Randolph, and you can always make an appointment, and we can talk about the property taxes, but we can't confuse the education tax rate with the town side, the two different sides. So what you see in your education tax rate is not reflective of your town municipal tax. It's two different things. We just have to share the same piece of paper. Yeah, yeah. And so I'm familiar with how they calculate the education tax more. Town's gonna be familiar with how they generate the property taxes for the town in the grand list. This come due next for the school. It will be based on the new assess value or on the current assess. In Randolph and. Well, this is my question is, as I know, I think that we'd have an equalized education tax rate for July, which wouldn't be based off of seven, eight. It would be based off of my equalized grand list versus what the re-assessed grand list is, and we don't know what that will be yet. Yeah, so they haven't finished the assessment process. That's still a year out. So we could count on it being the same this year, or for next year as it has been, am I right? If there's no major changes in the law, right? Because they seem to change the library like last year. There were changes due to universal meals. The year before that, they changed how special education was funded. This year they changed how the education fund, you know, determined what we call the yield. That's what the Act 127 was about. So as long as the legislature stopped messing with stuff, they do try to equalize things. Like I said, they're gonna reassess, but it's kind of already taking things into account. That's what that percentage is all about. Oh yeah, you're only paying on 79% of what your house is worth, we're gonna charge you that other 21%. So they're already doing that process. But that was the whole goal behind equalization was so that there weren't giant fluctuations from year to year. So good questions. The reason they're a little hard to answer is because they're like in the middle of the story. It's a lot easier if you start at the beginning. So a couple of things, just by comparison, where Orange Southwest is at, right? Act 127, the governor had actually put out a statement, I think it was in November. It was a couple of months back, and he said, oh, Act 127 is gonna increase tax rates by at least 18.5% statewide. And then some of the towns, the ones that are gonna lose out in terms of funding because of Act 127, their increases are gonna be more severe. So with us, if you start off with all students being equal, you get a certain amount of money called the yield per student. So like last year, we all got $15,000 per student. That's how they equalized education funding across the state. Then they said, okay, some students are a little bit more expensive to educate. So we're gonna weight the students. We're gonna say that if you're a student of poverty, instead of giving you 15,000, we're gonna give you the 15,000 plus 40% per student. So if you're in a district that has a lot of students that are getting additional funding, the money that you receive from the state is gonna go up. If you're in a district that does not have a lot of students in those categories, or has none, you're gonna lose. And so a lot of districts like, yeah, you're gonna get less money. And so a lot of districts like Stowe would be a perfect example. And probably Essex Junction and, wow. Do you know anything about what's stuck in that regard? What I've heard, and I'm just asking, was that their student numbers all of a sudden started to accelerate, to compensate for their lack? Yeah, so they did this in a really strange way. We have 857 students, not including preschool, within the districts. And so this year they're giving us $9,452 per student. That's the yield. When they do the waiting, how they do it is they say, oh, we're gonna change the student count. You've got 40% of this many, you've got this many students that should get an additional 40%. So when they got done doing all the calculations, instead of giving us credit for the 852 students, they said, oh, you guys actually, based upon this waiting study, have a need of 1,600 students. And so that's why we benefited, right? We still got the same $9,452 per student, but now they're saying, we're giving you credit for having 1,600 students. And that's what they meant by the waiting. And so they did it by adjusting the student numbers, even though you don't actually have that many students. So the towns that lost out, they, even though they may have had 1,000 students after the calculations, the state's saying, well, you only have 850. And so, right, if you're losing that, you know, if you're losing $9,000 per student and you just lost 150 students, that's a big hit. I would have picked Woodstock that I've had them. It all depends. There's Vermont Digger had a nice little, I think it's still up on the main page. They had a nice little picture of the state and the counties and you can click on it and it'll show you if they gained or lost. And that way you can kind of compare to the other counties. But a lot of the towns that actually lost money in this calculation, they're actually trying to maintain their current services they're needing to increase their taxes by 20 to 30%. So their tax rates are going up through the roof. Some of them lost two to four million, which is a huge amount of money, considering most of our budgets are in the 20 to 30 million dollar range. But given this is a comparison, this is where we're at in terms of our changes in the tax rates from this year to next year. So brain tree would be an increase of 8.7, Brookfield it's a 12.2 and Randolph it's a 4.8. So well under that 18.5. The other piece that I think it's important for folks to know is that in the state of Vermont they have this homestead declaration, tax credit claim form, that when you do your taxes, if your household income is under $128,000 a year, folks should fill out. You can actually download this right off the state website. Yeah. And so what it does is instead of having to pay the full tax based on your property, it switches your taxes over to being determined based upon your income. And I think it can save you up to $7,000 on your taxes a year. I think that's the limit. But if they've changed it recently, so this is definitely if your household income that means everybody that's an earner in your house is under $128,000, you should fill out this form because it'll reduce your property taxes. So it's important to know the last piece here. Yeah. So why not go to the state statute? And it's actually like state statute that residents have to. Yeah. To the farmstead. I came from Massachusetts, so that was a new one the first time I saw that form. I spent 20 years in mass before I came back to Vermont. The last piece to talk about is surplus. At the end of the fiscal year, if there is money that is left over, it is called surplus. And then there are a couple of things that a district can do when they have surplus funds. One of the things they can do is they can roll it over into the next year to bring people's taxes down. We can also, and we've done this in the past, we can ask voters to put that money into what are called reserve funds. So like we have a facilities reserve fund that the voters have allowed us to put money in over time. And that money can only be used to renovate or do work on our facilities. And that's great. That allows us to do things like when the roofs need to be replaced, they need to be replaced on each building every 20 years, we have the money, the million dollars right there to be able to do that work. And we don't have to go out to the town and take a loan and ask for a bond. We are doing really well in terms of the amount of money that's in our reserve funds. So we've been doing this for the last couple of years. So at the end of last year, we've got 1.4 million in reserve funds. We've taken 350,000 to subsidize next year's taxes. Remember, I said, you know, we've got that million dollars. Well, 350,000 of it is coming from the surplus. We want folks to help us put about 51,000 into what's called our operational reserve just for money that's there in case we need it, right? We're still coming out of COVID. And that would help us with operational things, you know, things that keep the school running from day to day. The remaining money, a little over a million dollars, what we want folks to do through their voting is to allow us to set this aside. And what'll happen with it is we'll split it up into three equal amounts. And that will be used to subsidize people's taxes, to bring people's taxes down for the next three years. And so what we do is we do that every year and we end up with a little, see if I can find my grid here. We end up with a little grid like this, right? This is what we've been doing with the surplus money is every year that we have surplus money, we split it up into three equal amounts and we set it aside to use it in future years to bring down people's taxes. We started this in COVID because we didn't know what the impacts of COVID were gonna be and if we were gonna have enough money to do what we needed to do. But right, 24, 25, you've got some surplus money from 2020, 2021, 21, 22 and 22, 23 that are helping us out. That's that million dollars that's helping bring down taxes. Next year, if people put it in again, you know, you'll always have about a million dollars to subsidize taxes with. This was set up very strategically so that if we ever don't have surplus money to be able to do this with, we've got three years to respond and to step things down before it runs out. So financially, the district is in incredible shape right now. Questions on that at all? So the last piece on the surplus, there's only one article about money on the ballot. It's article nine and it's asking to do this. If you vote yes on article nine, this is what it's gonna accomplish. It's gonna take that surplus funding and it's gonna split it up into those three equal amounts and allow us to use them to bring people's taxes down for the next three years. Unless there's other questions, that's all I've got to present. But yeah, I appreciate it. Okay. Martha, you sat? You got some questions? I probably do, but they aren't at the service. Yeah, other thing, and anybody who actually watches online if there's questions, especially between now and voting, they just email me. I'm happy to answer what they can. Hey, I don't know who you are, but. Yeah, Lane Millington. Nice to meet you. I wouldn't know if you got a card. Oh, no, right on the school website. Orange Southwest. All right, sounds good. So good. All right.