 So let's call this meeting to order it's, I can't even see that, 642 maybe? Yeah. Actually you want to come up and sit at the table? We can have more of a discussion. Whatever's comfortable for you because it gets you the info that you want. I'm pretty good right here with my chair. Okay. The other aspect too is that the folks on ORCA, there are a lot of folks that actually watch things on the video. Which is funny because it prevents them from coming in, which would be fun to have the more dialogue, but at least they get the information. Actually I may, so my eyesight's a little better, so a little closer to what I'm talking about here. So what we're looking at is the budget for next year, so 2019-2020. And a lot of the purpose of this presentation is for folks to be informed when they go to vote on March 5th, is making sure that folks know why we're asking what we're asking, what goals in the attempt to accomplish should the budget pass. And just to make sure also that people have a pretty solid idea of what the overall impact on their tax burden is going to be. Which we'll throw up here towards the end. To that, it's probably important to take a look at where we've been, what we did with last year's budget, and there's quite a bit. And this list is not exhaustive. So one of the big focuses last year was safety. We did a big climate survey, we talked with the community, especially after some of the tragedies that happened out in a greater world. So we spent a significant amount of time and money making sure that we hardened all the access points to the schools. We spent a lot of time and we're still in that process of training all the staff in Alice. Our chosen preferred method of responding to an emergency if and should one happen. The emergency processes and safety protocols that go along with that are being updated. They have a pretty good setup right now. But what is happening is that teachers are going through these drills. They have a feedback form that they fill out and provide back to the cabinet level team so that we can kind of adjust the protocols and the procedures based upon what they're experiencing themselves. And any concerns that they kind of bring up along the way. We created a full day preschool at Braintree. We improved the district's capacity to deliver effective mathematics instruction and that was K to 8. All the elementary teachers had the opportunity to and most did participate in two full graduate courses. The first one was on the eight standards for mathematical practice and that is about teaching the mathematical mindset to students. Which the research shows if you use these eight practices as part of the common core, the students learn better and they retain longer. So they were all engaged in that. They also did the first 20 days of math course. And that one really focused on working with the students in small groups on standard based lessons. Because there's a lot of good thinking and good learning that goes on when the students are working in small groups. And they're talking about how they approached a problem, how they solved it. And they get to work together to argue with each other and defend their points and it's very effective in terms of teaching math. The other thing that was added last year as part of the budget was Track My Progress. Making sure that the teachers had a tool that was very specific. That they could use with the students that would inform the teachers how well the students were doing on each of the standards and objectives that the teachers were trying to get across to them. And then use that information to go back and adjust what they're doing with the kids. So identify weaknesses and find better ways of connecting with the kids to improve those weaknesses. We did create a high school program last year to mitigate trauma based behaviors at the high school level. So we have an adjustment counselor and we have a behavioral interventionist there that worked together to work with the high school students that are kind of at the moderate level in term of trauma based behaviors. Digital literacy is a focus that's happening right now. That curriculum is in development. The librarians are meeting with me and we are putting together a K-12 curriculum. Once that document is complete, the next step will be sitting down with the different departments, the different disciplines across the district. And getting their input on where these pieces of this digital literacy curriculum fit in to what they do in their everyday classroom so that we can expand it. And so that we can make sure that what is being taught is actually being used in the daily work of the kids to reinforce it. Special Education Department right now, that's a lot of the focus for this year with the trauma based work, is developing the means to assess student progress. The goal of Special Education is not to permanently put accommodations on a student. The goal is to provide them with accommodations and teach them the skills so eventually, if possible, they are able to come off their IEPs. So to do that, it's kind of just like they do with teaching, they need a means to determine the impact that they are having on the students that they are working with. And so they are in that process right now, they've got a pretty good idea in terms of how they're pulling that together. We also moved in the last budget round, any of the critical personnel, we took them off the grant funded pieces because grant funds are not always assured, these folks are critical. These are our coaches, our technology director, and if those grants dry up, we're out those people. We need them especially now for the work that we're doing and trying to reach the ends, especially in terms of ELA and mathematics. So we wanted to assure that they would always be here for us. In terms of facilities, there is an extensive amount of work that's been done over the last year. Tremendous amount of work in terms of the plumbing systems across the schools. We also replaced quite a few of the water heaters and the storage tanks. We did extensive work on the HVAC systems across all the schools. We completed the fence at Brookfield. We did the well reclamation at Brookfield as well, which actually was effective until the lead problems cropped up so we're in the process of working on those. We've got a composting agreement in place and up and running across the schools so that we're meeting the requirements of state law as a producer in our cafeterias of compostable materials. And we are working. We've got pretty much phase one of the work done on the Raven building replacement project. And we've been talking a little bit about in the board piece that, you know, we're switching around a little bit because the cost ended up being twice what we were originally projecting it to be. So that work is underway right now as well. They will be in the warehouse that we've got that's set up that's got the office space in the back for next year. And then a lot of the work was done around ensuring compliance with asbestos as well as copper and lead water testing. Further, we have the creation of the maker space at RUHS, which is great for all students, but it really allows the critical thinking aspect of the more advanced students. We have an industrial laser cutter in there. I mean, they can make projects. Yeah, big that thing will cut glass and it will cut plexiglass and wood. A lot of a lot of learning goes on and in deciding how the projects are going to be created, especially because a lot of them are three dimensional projects. How do I make this piece so that it fits together with this piece so that it comes together and how do I program that into the system? And they've also got the 3D printers. So there's a lot of work that's happening down there right now. That program is still expanding. And a lot of it is strongly connected with Ken Kedow, the PBL work that he is doing has been fantastic with that. We had the creation of the advanced manufacturing program at RTCC. We had the addition of an athletic trainer to make sure that our students that are getting injured are getting the help and getting the services they need to get back out on the field as quickly as possible. We also created an athletic trainer's office with everything that that person needs to do their work. We relocated the agricultural program onto the RTCC grounds over by the soccer fields. A lot of that was to help out with the time on learning with those students. They were having to travel out to the field and brain tree each day so they'd lose time on learning due to the travel out and then the travel back each day. And then we purchased two buses to increase enrollment and accessibility for school choice students. A bus that goes over to Chelsea and the bus that does the rounds through Rockchester, Stockbridge and Bethel. Now, typically in terms of building a budget, we go to our data and we take a look at what stands out to us when we do that. And because it usually helps us identify the problems and things that we need to address in the coming years. And the data that we were looking at particularly over the course of this last year that's guiding our budget decisions for the coming year was academic, right? Our performance against the board's ends, our enrollment. So these are the changes in our student populations over time, our overall enrollment as well as our subgroups and then what our budget history has been. And so part of this presentation is to talk a little bit about what we were seeing in each of those areas and then kind of pulling it together with what the strategy is. What it is that we were trying to accomplish based upon what we've learned. Math proficiency, a little discussion of the numbers. 2016 met the proficiency threshold. So in 2016 here in this district, the grade three students, 67% of them met the proficiency threshold in mathematics. Grade four, 43% did, grade five, 40% did. It compares it each year with what the state of Vermont was doing. And then the number down here is giving you an average. So if you take these numbers and average them together and weight the average based upon how many students are in grade three and grade four, that's what this number is. So it gives you an idea of how we compare to the state of Vermont across each of those three years. So give a second for folks to look at that. Any questions on the data before I flip over to the graph and talk about why it's important? You guys have seen some of this before too, but if you've got other stuff that comes up. So I chose 2017 for the math because it's pretty indicative of what the other years look like. What this graph is showing you is in 2017 we took the third graders, the percent that hit proficiency, the fourth graders, the fifth graders, the sixth graders, that hit those proficiency thresholds and where they were, what level they were at when they hit it, and plotted them out and you see a pretty distinct pattern there. And the pattern is that as these students are going through their years, is they're advancing through the grades over time, fewer and fewer and fewer of them are meeting the proficiency threshold. So their ability in mathematics is decreasing over time. And it doesn't matter what year that we look at even when I went back to the years that we were using NECAP, this is the pattern. The slope of the line may be a little bit different, a little less steep, a little steeper, but this is the overall pattern. And the other thing that was interesting is it didn't matter if we've looked at the data in terms of same cohort or cross cohorts. So in this case this is a cross cohort graph. In other words, these are third graders, these are fourth graders, same year they're not the same kids. If I took the third graders and watched them over the course of time and plotted where they were in fourth grade and fifth grade and sixth grade, it's the same pattern. So there's some important info there that we'll get back to in just a minute. The other thing that's important to recognize in the data that was important when it popped up, is what is happening with our big subgroup, our big subgroup of students with disability students that are on IEPs. And you can see in mathematics you've got the same pattern and things are dropping, but they're dropping faster. So these guys over the course of time are struggling more and more than the regular population of students. Questions? So that's just third through sixth grade, huh? Third through sixth and the reason being is because on the grades beyond that, none of them are reaching proficiency. Typically it is what happens. So as they go up through the years, they're getting these dramatic drops and all of a sudden they're at zero, and each year after that they're pretty much at zero, or you might get one student out of that group that passes. So that's the reason the others weren't on there. English language proficiency, same setup. And when we throw the graph up there, there is a very big distinction between the two in terms of what it looks like. So we'll give folks a minute to take a look at the numbers that are there. And again, set up the same way that the math was. And here we're actually pretty close to, you know, what the state average is in ELA for the most part. A little low, sometimes a little out point above. Technically it takes three points to be statistically significant on most of these types of tests. Graph-wise, with ELA, something a little bit different is going on. These are the same third graders, same fourth graders, same fifth graders that we saw in mathematics, right? This is ELA 2017. In terms of the time that I spent in classrooms, especially at the beginning of the year, kind of watching what's going on, we have very talented teachers. Yes, ELA has spent a little bit more time developing the curriculum, especially at the elementary level than the math folks have. But I don't think that's what the real impact is that we're seeing here. So for some reason ELA is doing all right, you know, like to see it a little higher. But they're actually growing a little bit on the trend line year after year. And the question becomes, is why is there a difference between ELA and mathematics? And you can see that the same thing is kind of true with the students with disability and the English language arts. They're dropping a little bit. The line looks a lot steeper than it actually is, but nothing compared to how fast the mathematics is dropping. So in terms of kind of pulling the data together, in terms of all the discussions the cabinet has had, the principals have had, in terms of their discussions with the faculty, in terms of all of us seeing what's going on with the kids, we are contributing what we are seeing to the growth of trauma-based behaviors in our students over time. And I'll show you some data that shows that growth a little bit. Why? Why does this data kind of indicate that this is due to trauma-based behaviors? Well, if we think a little bit about trauma-based behaviors, what they are, right, autonomic behaviors that were created to protect the student from ongoing trauma, typically happening in the household and the world outside of school. These students have learned protective mechanisms. They've learned them at a level of the hippocampus in the brain, which means that it's an automatic response. They have no control and they cannot rationalize it away. It just happens. The hippocampus and the amygdala are in there. They screen the information, the sensory information that is coming in from the outside world. And if any of that sensory information matches something that was traumatic in the past, all of a sudden all the alarm bells in the body go off. The fight, flight, or freeze response kicks in, and then the students are going to be out of control in one way or another until somebody comes in and sues them and gets them to regulate again. Now, in terms of our school, typically what we see is students that fight, those are really obvious at the elementary level. They get angry, they get violent, they yell, they scream, they throw things. At the high school level, you don't see that because at those kids at that size, we can't keep them here. Those are students that end up in outplacement. In terms of the flight, I can't recall how many times two of the elementary principals were out looking for a student that ran last year, a significant amount of time almost on a daily basis to students. Something would happen. It could be just a simple change in a tone of voice. It could be a stranger in the classroom, a person they hadn't seen before. A person could drop a book. That's all it takes when that system kicks in, and those students would literally run. And then we also have the students that freeze, and those, at least to me, are the saddest. Most of them were put in situations when they were younger that they couldn't get out of. They couldn't run, they couldn't fight. And so what they do is they disassociate. And so on the extreme level, we don't have any of these that I've seen, which is good, is they can become catatonic. But in most cases, what they will do with that disassociation looks like is they're kind of dreamy and spaced out. And they're not really with it. You can't really connect with them about what's going on. Why is all this important? Well, for two reasons. One, if the kids are getting triggered that have these issues, they're not available for learning while they're triggered. Can't learn if your emergency system is in your body or on overdrive. And in the case of the fight-and-flight students, when those students act out when that trigger hits, it takes the whole classroom with them, at least for a short amount of time. It's a little bit more problematic up at Brookfield, which we'll talk about. But it may take, you know, five or ten minutes if the student is able to get removed from the room to get the rest of the class calmed down and kind of refocused. And then if you have other students that have trauma-based issues in the classroom, if one student gets triggered, those behaviors can trigger others. And so you get kind of a cascade effect. Now, not available to learning if they're triggered. And the other sad part of this is the fact that the students are aware, for the most part, that the behaviors aren't normal. And so they spend a tremendous amount of time in mental resources trying to make sure that they are in control when they can be. And if they are focusing that hard on making sure that they're in control, those mental resources are not available for learning. And so we go back to this idea of why does this data, why might this data kind of support this conclusion that it's trauma-based behaviors? Aside of the fact that we see them every day and we know the impact that they're having, well, mathematics is a foundational discipline. If you don't learn really well what happened in third grade, that's going to hinder you in fourth grade. And if you don't learn what you need to in fourth grade, that's going to hinder you even more in fifth grade because it builds on itself. ELA, while it does build on itself a bit, you can do quite well in tenth grade ELA if you fail ninth grade ELA. The foundational pieces, those building blocks that you have to build on, happen in a more generalized way in ELA than they do in mathematics. So the guess is it has not a lot to do with the curriculum or the teaching. There is some work that needs to be done there, but the reason that we're seeing this impact is because of these trauma-based behaviors. And it's significant. On average, by the time our students get to whatever the grade the terminal testing is in, used to be 11th grade, it's now nine, only 10% of them are hitting the proficiency level in math, and that's been historic for quite a while. They had one year where I think it got up to 25, but typically for whatever reason it sat at 10 or 11%. So there's some work there that needs to be done. Take a look at some other things that are going on in the district that help control the budget. Enrollment going up is always a good thing because the more students that come in, the more money that we get from the state. We'll talk a little bit about that when we get to the total cost of the budget towards the end of the presentation. But if you take a look at our three-year trend, this is district as a whole. On average, we're going up by 11.5 students per year, which is pretty good. And that trend should continue, at least for another year or two. We had a huge jump last year. We went from 800 to about 855. 55 student increase across the district, and that does not include the preschoolers that we got last year. If you take a look at the number of students that are on IEP, students with disability, as a percent of the total enrollment in the district, you can see that that is increasing as well. Now, this is not plotted the same way the other is. This is percent of the total student population that's on IEP. So in 2017, if you look at all the kids in the district, a little over 18% were on IEPs. You get to 2019 overall in the district, it's a little over 20%. So it is increasing. And the other thing, again, it's not definitive, but it gives you a pretty good idea of what's going to happen in the future when those data points are close together like that, falling right on the trend line. It usually means that things are going to continue at least for a little while in that direction so we can expect those to go up. Brookfield enrollment, just because this is about the district as a whole, Brookfield enrollment has jumped up and down. It's actually higher than this data. This data was pulled in October. It's going up. In fact, I expect this data point and this data point to line up with a data point that comes in next year based upon the students that are in kindergarten. So overall enrollment is expected to increase at least for one more year in Brookfield. Brookfield special education enrollment has been increasing. It's increasing across the district. It's probably increasing at most of the schools and it certainly is. And Brookfield has 26% of its students in that school or currently on IEPs. And that growth, the current growth that we're seeing in terms of the students on IEPs, a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them are students with trauma. And those students take up a tremendous amount of resources. Brain tree enrollments, brain trees going up like crazy. They're actually quite far and above this. They're over 90 at this point in time in brain tree. Their special education population is growing as well. They're at, again, a little over 21%. Randolph Elementary School, their enrollment, they're growing as well. They're getting about nine new kids a year. They have been for a couple of years now, which is good. But again, their special education, a number of students on IEPs is growing as well. So they're up around 20%. Now to kind of put things in perspective, in terms of special education, I actually pulled the data, I think it was from the Center of Disease Control, which was interesting. They plotted this type of data. On average, across the United States, 12% of a district's students are students with IEPs. So we're running close to twice the national average. On average, across the United States, of the IEP students in a district, 0.7% of them are students with emotional disturbances, these trauma-based students that we're talking about. I don't have an exact number to put on ours at this point in time, other than to say it is significantly greater than 0.7%. Are we over-identifying kids? And that's part of one of the reasons, you're going to see this as one of our goals for next year, is to take a look. There are some students that I'm concerned about that may be over-accommodated. I have to sit down and do some more detailed analysis with folks to take a look at it. But that may be a part of it. By the same token, what leads me to believe that while there may be some over-identification, it's not as great as we think it could be because of the results of the students with disabilities on those tests, right, to drop a micro rock. Typically, if you have students that are over-identified, those scores are higher. Because those are students that don't need it, they're going to perform well without those services, so you would expect them to be here. So it doesn't mean it's not happening. I've seen at least two or three cases where it has than the research that I've done this year. But it is something that we have to look at. Enrollment at the high school took a huge drop, but it's rebounded completely and it is expected again to go up on at least one more year. We've got Tundbridge. And what is the... Chelsea, we've got Tundbridge who's on this side. Washington. Washington. So we've had a lot of interest from Tundbridge students and Washington students. And because we already send the bus out to Chelsea, there's a good chance that we're going to get quite a few more students next year in terms of school choice. Now it's interesting here. Let's go back a little bit. RUHS enrollment. Their special education population is going down. I actually did delve a little bit deeper into these numbers. It's because those students are in out placements. The out placements are not part of their numbers. So there are some that are being remediated because we do have a lot of students that are on what I call an academic IEP. They just need help with the academics. That's the root of the problem. There's a process and problem in the academics. And some of them are moderate to minor. So over the course of time, they do learn the skills. They come off the IEPs. This is that the students are making it through the elementary years or getting up to high school and then they're too big to deal with those behaviors. So they're ending up getting some of that. How many kids do we place out at the high school and middle school level? I'd have to go and pull the numbers to be specific for you. But I can give you an indication of the cost. I can think of five right now of those five. The cost to educate them in out placement is probably close to a million bucks. But I mean, those are kids who can't educate anyway. So we have to place them out. Depends. Some of the students, and this is another piece that's part that's growing in our population right now that we may have to take a very serious look at. We have some students on the autism spectrum that are severe. Those you really need a specialized place to do that. If you get a lot of students who are up to about 15 that are on the spectrum right now, it may be more cost effective to build a program here. But that's a future discussion. But yeah. It's interesting to kind of watch and kind of see. But the biggest issue that we've got is the population of the really high need students with emotional disabilities is growing. And I wonder of the ones that we are sending out right now as severe as they are, we had the therapeutic program when they were little kids, when they were coming up through the elementary school, they may not have ended up where they did. That's really one of the goals here. Or the services that they need at this point in time, had they had that therapeutic program, which is much less severe than what they've got now? Because typically with trauma, especially if it's continuing, if you don't have resiliency, if you don't learn those skills, if you don't learn to manage it on the outside, if you don't have social connections with people because the behaviors that go with trauma often sever those, things just get worse over time. All right. So we talked a little bit about enrollment. We talked a little bit about academics, which is our main tool for addressing what we need to focus on in the coming year. It was also taking a look a little bit historically at what's happened with the budget itself. And this is an idealized picture. It's not quite exactly what's going on, but it represents the overall effect of the conservative budget that we've had for at least a decade, if not more. If you pretend for a moment that the overall district budget is $1 million, the majority of that budget goes to salaries and most districts, it's anywhere from 70 to 93, 94% of the total use of the budget goes to personnel salaries. If you take a look at this budget, $1 million for the budget total, $700,000 is going into salaries. That leaves us $300,000 and left over to do what it is that schools and districts do, which is maintain their facilities, which is supply the resources to run programs and make sure that the teachers have the supplies to do the work that they do. In a level-funded system, this number never changes, and I've actually worked in a level-funded system before. And what happens is because this number never changes, but salaries go up every year and the district is traditionally about 3% that they go up. The amount that you have left overall to do all the work that you need to do on behalf of the students decreases over time. In this model, you can see that after 10 years has gone by, we've got about a third of what we started with in terms of trying to maintain programs and working with students. Not only that, but the cost of living goes up every year. This $100,000 here is worth less significantly than $100,000 there. But I do have to say that because we were losing population, we did decrease the amount of staffing. And when you decrease the amount of staffing, obviously the salary levels go down. I understand what you're saying in general, but I do have to say that that's not quite accurate. But again, like I said, this is idealized. It would have been irresponsible if we had not decreased the size of our staff because we lost quite a few kids, like hundreds over those 10 years, just because that's what's happening throughout Vermont. And so that's one reason that we have been able to be fiscally responsible and not have the high student teacher ratio that many districts have, that they have too much staff. I mean, I understand what you're saying. I think some of that's definitely true, but I do think that we were being responsible in... Oh, this is not a criticism. I mean, level funding is a model in it. I'm not saying it's inappropriate. I'm not advocating for levels funding, but I am saying that it is important to see, put it in perspective, that we did need to lose some staffing, or that would have been also irresponsible. And the purpose of the exercise is really to kind of see the effect. And kind of when I was looking back, what was typically going on was the overall budget was increasing. It was increasing typically around between 1.3 and 1.5% per year. But again, with the exception of the few years when things were tight, staff salaries were increasing by 3%. And overall, that effect is that this went down. Now, enrollment does play a huge part, which is why I keep talking about the enrollment and trying to build it up. Every student that we get that moves into town is worth $10,666 to us. Every student that we get through school choice is worth almost $17,000 to us. So that piece, that building the enrollment, is important because the more that goes up, the more money that we have, the less we have to get from the towns as a whole. And typically, it allows you to begin building programs that more people want. So more people move in and you get this nice positive cycle going on. And that's a good part of the focus of this budget as well. We are working with the trauma-based parts and pieces, but it's also trying to make sure that we've got everything in place so that we are an attractive district for folks to move to. So, what we were looking at as the cabinet sat down, kind of analyzed this data, is decided on the things that we needed to do and hopefully were able to address with this next budget. We wanted to be able to mitigate the impact of the trauma-based behaviors. We've got to examine our special education practices. You know, are we over accommodating? Are we doing things the best way that we can? My guess is that we probably can do a little bit better. And the reason that I say that is that most special education systems are set up to deal with students that have academic disabilities, which is what we're geared for. And we are geared very well for that. The problem is that a lot of the behaviors and a lot of the issues that we're dealing with are not academic. Yeah, they've got academic problems, but it's because of the trauma-based behaviors. And so it's an examination of what we need to do to change those practices. We've got to focus resources on the core competencies of math and ELA. All the other disciplines rely on student competency in math and in ELA. You've got to be able to read and write. And in most cases, especially when you hit the sciences or you hit the higher levels of any of the other disciplines, you have to have some mathematical or statistical capabilities to be successful. We've got to keep expanding the programming because we want to keep our enrollment numbers going up if we can. And then just address the impact that conservative funding has had. And it has had an impact. Yes, you know, enrollments have gone down, but we kind of got a little bit into a negative cycle where we lose things and it's logical. You lose things, things are not as attractive. So fewer people come take advantage so you lose more and just trying to break that cycle a little bit. Major additions for 2019-2020, things that this budget is going to help us do is just getting a preschool offered in each town. That's key. That's part of impacting those trauma-based behaviors that we see in students. Students that come into preschool are better prepared socially and academically for success in the later grades. But they're also making the social connections and they're gaining resiliency skills that help them with the adversity that they may be facing in their lives outside of school. So even though the trauma, to some extent, may still be going on, they're better able to cope and to deal with it so it doesn't have as much of an impact on their lives. Time to take a look at science and getting a science and STEM program in at the elementary level. That work and kind of examining what that should be has already begun. We've got the pre-tech offering that's coming up, something that you guys are going to be asked to vote on at the next meeting. Allow the exploratory to begin happening for that. Putting in the therapeutic program that's serving the elementary level students across all three schools to help mitigate these problems, to help the students learn how to self-regulate, how to soothe themselves so that they don't have to have somebody else do it for them. One of the reasons right now that working with these students is so expensive is because the district has been relying on an old model. They have one-to-one paraprofessionals working directly with these students. We have 26 paraprofessionals in the district right now. And they're great people. They do absolutely amazing work with the students. But in some cases it can be almost detrimental because what that person is doing when they're sitting there with the student is when a trigger happens or is about to happen, the outside person does the soothing and what they call it, co-regulating with the student. And when that happens, the student is never learning those skills for themselves. And so over the course of time, the students, at least at the elementary level, are able to be sustained in the school for the most part. But in the end, they're not learning any skills. To be able to do any of this for themselves. And so by the time they get to the high school, when they don't have quite those supports in terms of the paraprofessionals, that's when we see them kind of burning out and going into out placements. Increased staffing for intervention. This is what I call fixing the gaps in knowledge. And this is for all students, not just students with disabilities. We're looking and bringing in some staff to actually sit down with these new programs that we have in place that will tell where the students are strong and where they're weak. And will tailor programs for them to fill in those gaps to make sure that the students and the pipelines are getting what they need. Increasing staffing, in some cases, just because the enrollments are going up. Brookfield needs another regular education teacher. Brookfield should have its own principal as well. So these are things that we're trying to address with the budget. We have a regular education teacher next year. And some major discussions with the cabinet. What they're looking at is instead of another administrator is bringing in a behavioral specialist. Because really what they need that principal there, the full time for is when those kids blow out. If there's not an administrator there, the kid has to be contained in the classroom and it takes the whole classroom off line until the student is regulated. If we've got the behavioral interventionists, they can come down. Kindly remove the student from the classroom, sit down, process with the students, start building some of the skills they need to be able to regulate for themselves. Focusing resources on mathematics, especially at the high school. And that kind of goes along with our budget process change. When things were fairly conservative through the budget process, one thing didn't happen as much. And that was actually communicating directly with the departments, you know, math department, English department, about what their needs were. That happened this year. And we are able to start addressing some of them. The mathematics folks are looking at bringing in a coaching group that's been incredibly successful in larger districts to come in and work with them on practices that will help this specific population of students here that they're working with. So there's a lot that's going on in terms of the academics as well. In terms of the OSSD, where we're at and what we're looking for, we usually talk in terms of per student spending. And there's a couple of thresholds that folks need to be aware of. This number may be adjusted with some of the wrangling that's going on in the legislative process right now and with wrangling that's going on with around Act 46. That's going on right now for every student next year. From that education fund, which every town in the state pays money into, the first $10,666 comes from that fund. So everybody across the state is subsidizing that first 1066 for a student. Between this line and this line, the towns themselves that own the district pay a larger portion, but not all. 33% of the cost between these two lines actually come from all the towns around us. For us it's about $4.4 million or so. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to increase the budget enough to address these issues. It's a one-time deal. The intent is to go into what we call a level service budget planning process afterwards. But to take our students, right now we're spending $15,600 per student on them, and get that spending up to $17,183, which is actually pretty close to a lot of the districts around us. And to avoid and leave a big buffer between this mark right here, this $18,311, above that line the towns pay for everything. So we're trying to move things up, take advantage of the fact that we're getting a significant subsidy for the other towns in and around the state, while still not pushing it so high that we cross that net upper threshold. So budget increase from $16.6 million to $18.5 million is what we're looking at. It's an 11.2% increase. It'll make a little bit more sense in a couple of slides when I show what the actual impact will be the taxpayers and the towns. This keeps us below that critical spending threshold, and it still provides a buffer, $10,028 per student buffer, so that we're nowhere close to it. We can still increase the budget a couple of more percent each year as we need to without having to worry about crossing that. Our student spending of our $15.6K would go to $17.1K per student. And again, the big part is is that in this range where we're doing the increase, the other towns across the state are subsidizing 33% of that increase. Questions? A lot in the long run. There is also an income sensitivity threshold folks should be aware of. Basically, if your house is worth less than $400,000 and your household income is less than $90,000, you will not be getting hit for the full increase. You do have to fill out a form for this. It's available on the tax website for the state of Vermont. But it can adjust your property tax downwards up to $8,000 this year. So again, if you're in that income sensitivity threshold range, you will be paying something less. Bottom line for Brookfields, and we've got some assumptions here. We're assuming in these numbers that the average home value in Vermont, which I pulled off the Vermont Realtors website, is $201,400. If that's the case, that means the average tax increase for the year would be $274 and $2279 a month is what it would be. Again, if you're in that income sensitivity threshold range, this will be less than that if you apply for it. In terms of brain tree, average tax increase would be $215. And in Randolph, average tax increase would be $221. Again, important to kind of point a few things out. The intent of this, it's a one-time correction. People have done an awesome job here of being very conservative in the budgeting process over time. We're at a point where we've got some needs. We want to be able to address those needs, but the goal is to have that correction. And then after this, we move into what we call a level service funding model. So a level service funding model, what that means is that we increase the budget each year just enough to not lose ground. We've talked about that. Salaries are going up. What we're trying to supply to programs and whatnot to keep those up and running and to supply it for the kids is here. We want to make sure that this doesn't change that piece always stays the same. So that's the idea of the level service funding model. And it is a very successful model in other states. If the budget does not pass, that therapeutic program is critical. We will have to ship resources to do that. Brookfield, it needs its staff. They probably should have had at least one of those staff members this year. They will get their staff one way or another. And then in terms of facilities, there are some things that have to happen in terms of facilities. We will be shifting things around to make sure that those happen. There was a lot of maintenance work for whatever reason over the course of time that didn't get done. And some of it has become critical, which means that if we don't fix it, we're going to have some huge costs to have to replace stuff. So we're trying to accelerate that maintenance process, get things back up on the regular cycle, but it should be. And then these costs, what we're putting into the facilities will decrease. So that's a year or two, get stuff up where it should be, and we can kind of pull off on it again. In terms of the resources that are going to the therapeutic program, one of the things to recognize is that there is money being spent right now maintaining the current program, the paraprofessionals. We've got to get the therapeutic program in place, and then once this starts doing its work, we can start to pull back on the number of paraprofessionals that we have. We'll be able to ship those costs to other places that's needed with the district. So the therapeutic programs in each of the elementary schools, you'll have three. I'd love to. We have one. It's going to be one, but it's open to students from all. And so what they'll do is they'll take a peek at the students that they'll see what the needs are. They'll triage them. Highest priority goes first. Okay. Yeah. And they won't be forced. Part of the agreement with the parents is this, if you're in Brookfield or your brain tree and your student could benefit from this and is at that point on the triage list, if the parents agree for the student to attend Randolph to take advantage of the program, they're at this part of it. Again, the only reason not to do it at the three is it's a very expensive program. Same thing with the preschool. Preschool is hugely expensive. A couple of words on the preschool is there is the therapeutic piece to it. But another piece of it is that's developed over the last couple of months in talking with the R3 group in town. The reinvigorate Randolph is they have been for years trying to get childcare into the town. They're working on the zero to two age group. They actually have a site that they're looking at. They're trying to get seed funding for that to get that up and running. And then hopefully the schools as part of its work with the students of trauma will be taking care of ages three to four. So how do you currently with what you offer for preschool and brain tree, how are you able to identify those kids that are most in need and then can you say that you've captured 90 to 95% of those kids in brain tree that are really in need trauma based and they are actually going to preschool right now. We have in terms of brain tree we head the capacity with what was built that we have students there from other towns as well. A lot of Brookfield students are going. So in other words we have the capacity to take all the students that needed preschool. All students in the district from all three towns that wanted So I'm asking not just those that wanted or maybe those that are employed by the district that have children that are going there but those that are trauma based that we're saying that are in need are you able to recognize those and capture them and bring them in and there's capacity for them and then the overflow from the other areas as well. And the hope for Brookfield is to get there. We started off at brain tree where we have the part day that's public. The full day piece there's a cost associated with it now we actually cobbled that together without having the budget to do it. I was able to pull some from title grants and whatnot to get it into place this year. The goal is over the course of time is to make all of those programs to build them to the point where it's full public preschool for all kids. So the hope is if the therapeutic program starts doing its job if we can start see some savings because of that with this money that we're asking for is to start shifting it to other places and the biggest place right now is to try to fund that preschool. Brookfield next year will be part day and hopefully we can build on it and build on it because they are extremely expensive that preschools to build. There's a limited number of students you can have you have to have the two adults in there there's a lot of complexity to it and then location, location, location accessibility after the half day those parents that are actually able to pick up a child part way through the day and it's probably pretty likely that those that are trauma based don't have that same accessibility or the privilege of that. So I guess what I'm trying to get down to is do we have everyone are we capturing the whole population really those parents that have the accessibility the relatives to rely on the transportation etc that are able to take advantage of that currently are we really getting those that we are most wanting to getting them access to preschool. Right here and now I would say a combination of both they have prioritized that brain tree for students that were in severe need and were able to go out and help them find their own cities so that the parents could afford the other piece that comes up and again as the program grows we see what problems we encounter and we adjust to them it is possible to use title funding for transportation so that is a possibility you can apply for it it's something that they can agree to and that would be a possibility if the need is there once we get stuff up and on it what is the status of the one at Randolph at this point is that Randolph is morning and afternoon in what's what's interesting about them and it actually has to do a little bit with the grades as well talk on the grade piece first this is for three and four year olds the four year olds the goal is to have full day public for all four year olds the three year olds are still kind of young you can put them in a full day but they're probably going to benefit a little bit more for the partial day but the other piece that goes along with this to make it open to as many parents as possible and why it was fairly successful at Braintree was because of the after school program because like you say there's a difficulty in dropping off and picking up if they're able to pick up their children along the same lines that coincide with their work hours it's better it works better so the after school program is a big big piece to it building a kind of patchwork as we can with the money that we've got it's definitely a challenge for the smaller schools to be able to do that and picking up and part of it what's nice about the Brookfield is that we've got it up and running it seems like there's a huge need for it I mean we've got people on the waiting list at Randolph for the partial day but it'll give us kind of a litmus test on how many people are actually going to access it we put it in full bore the first year and only you're filling up a third of it so it's probably we didn't do it that way by design we'd like to go full bore if we could but we're patching it together with the finances and hoping over the course of time if the need is there is that we can start to shift I expect the therapeutic therapeutic will take you shouldn't see an impact in a year but a big financial impact that the program is in there and is successful probably two to three years down the road you're going to see some money large money that we can shift over to questions couple of final notes here that are important one of the things and it's a shame that it actually happened this year when we're asking for a large increase is that all the schools get federal grant monies this is the first year that they are requiring the schools to actually put that in their budgets to show people what the federal government is giving us and so it's going to make it look like what we're asking for from the towns in the state of Vermont is much bigger than it is this is money that comes from the federal government that comes from your federal taxes but it comes from the federal government it does not have a local impact so that 18.5 million budget that we're looking for is actually going to be looking like 19.4 because we have to include those grant tools in there as well couple of other things that are kind of important is surplus funds people were asking questions about that we have a fairly consistent turnover rate in terms of staff so a lot of this is since we're budgeting a year in advance we're budgeting for who our current staff are now so if we get a number that retire and we hire folks that are lower on the pay scale there's a surplus so the majority of the surpluses that have happened over the course of time have happened because of that mechanism the other mechanism that's in there that's a little bit smaller is how we get reimbursements from the state in some cases we have to plan for costs up front they come from the taxpayers in our budgets and then at the end of the year we reimbursed from the state a lot of those have to do a special education cost so questions or and I'll get the first thing in the morning we'll get the freshest numbers up there in terms of the line item line item piece and that way folks can take a look and I'll try to get it to do it with a three year comparison so is this a wrap for the presentation? unless you've got questions so then I guess a question would be in terms of you've got this kind of all mapped with the trauma based and the increase that you're seeking are there things next year that you're projecting as cuts? Is there something that will be cut? Do we have programs at the high school or any of that that's been cut or that's all the same? The intent was not to cut anything and part of it was to accommodate the fact that we've got 50-55 new students that we didn't have before when the current budget that we're in was planned and the hopes that again we want to make this as attractive as possible. The hopes that we're going to capture more of the school choice students are there you'll have a variety of electives so unaffected matter of fact high school the one big target from this is what we call a tier two coordinator the high school has a lot of programs here to help students that maybe struggle a little bit all students struggle the top ones to the middle ones and what not and they all need help from time to time so they've got like project achieves they've got the learning labs they've got the call back periods they've got the IEST process what they really need especially in terms of the IEST process is somebody to come in and oversee it and keep real close track of the students making sure that they'll be getting into those services or getting the pressure to get into everybody uses different names for it it's part of what I call RTI response to intervention it was a law that came out probably a decade and a half ago relative to special education that said districts have a responsibility to child find to look out at their student populations find who is struggling and help them with these programs and not put them on an IEP help them but provide them with basic good best practice services so that they can see it and the goal was kind of two fold one was it was to try to prevent over accommodation students from getting mislabeled as students with disabilities who really didn't have disabilities was the first piece and losing it here a long night what was the second piece talk about this all the time it'll come back it'll come back to me but that's the purpose of the RTI it's to provide services for the regular education students as well get them what they need so hopefully they don't end up on an IEP sometime in the future and there was the budget savings portion to it to accommodate students not only is it a violation of their civil rights it's also costly I'm trying to get the cost to come down to that that's a good question you're making me think too I think that's it for my questions tonight yeah so high school no cuts the one addition individual is that tier two coordinator that they're looking for for next year they are working with the tech center on that pre-tech program yeah I was interested to hear more on the pre-tech and that actually reminds me the curriculum the curriculum coordinator someone who oversees curriculum do you have that as a component or a basis of one of the current admins I mean that was talked about last year so the structure that's in place right now and that's why those those coaches we talked about a little bit earlier they are actually kind of playing the role of what you would call a curriculum director along with Katie Sutton at the high school so they are doing a lot of work with the departments and the teachers to improve practice a significant amount of work this year has been around examining student data taking a look okay so what information can we collect to tell us where the students are weak and where they're strong how can we capitalize on that yeah and then in terms of the director piece I've been serving a little bit of that role with the digital literacy piece as well as the work that's going on in special education so instead of having one embodiment of it there's a group of us that are all acting out that function but that's a part of it I don't know if you guys ever had a curriculum director in the past who's the superintendent but that's you know when I look across what typically is in the district that's one of the pieces that's usually there but they are expensive it's a tough position if you have them because it's usually the first position that's cut if budgets go south well so then what do you do in the event that something like that you have that and it's cut you've got to fill the gap somewhere else and so we've got the instructional coaches in there we've pulled them out of title and put them on to the into the regular budget so that we know they're secure they're here they can continue to do the work regardless of what happens questions feel like I'm putting you on the spot no I've had I've asked some questions in prior years around technology related courses computer science I think I'd asked Brent Kay about a couple of years ago I don't see it at the high school which has been offering Josh is actually working on developing a coding class that might eventually evolve into like an AP computer science so that's in the works right now as well as the statistics courses or two pieces that are missing so he's very excited about that even just exposing students to that so it's not a glaring gap as they approach college the goal is to have two classes next year that's part of what I was talking about on the instructional piece is really having those discussions on the budget come up from the department level because typically costs for departments if they're looking to build a new program or they need some professional development that they've identified when they're looking through their student data that's cheap compared to bringing in new staff it's incredibly cost effective and incredibly effective so having those conversations in the mix this year has been really helpful what I saw not so much here but when you get a level funded district what will happen in those districts is that because it's level funded nobody talks about the budget because you know what you're getting so there's no real it's unfortunate because there's no real planning that goes on they don't get into those deep discussions about where are we doing well or are we struggling where should our focus be so you've got the balance of those folks who really want to keep things because that's what they can afford to do is pay that the folks who are like hey I've got it and I'll fund what's necessary so it's the balance between those two but it's also looking at whether it's a curriculum director whomever what's relevant right now and so I have been out of college for a lot of years but I know computer science was that was my freshman year first class no exposure so it's very shocking to me to be here at RU and that hasn't been brought on or introduced for 20 plus years since then so that's one example I'm sure there's a lot of other technology related or other courses that could be a benefit to students exposure and the like department heads are looking at that and reaching out I guess at this point that's part of the building piece that's going on right now I mean they were kind of addressing it a little bit in the space that was a good one of the reasons that that came because that is pretty high tech if you're ever around and you go to and see the spot where Ken's here it's beautiful the work that they do in there yeah it's kind of funny they the 3D printers the seventh and eighth grade team has actually learned how to do the coding for that so they're integrating it but it's nice that Josh has been talking and it's really passionate about putting in those two classes next year and we talked about that it came down because again we were trying to as unreasonable as it seems we were trying to get what we needed out of the budget without being excessive and one of the questions that came up on the coding and the statistics was hey you know we'd really like to run this class but do we need another staff member to do it and then we talked and it's like well you've got these you've got these labs up here when you look at the data to be really effective with the seventh and eighth graders but not so much with the older students instead of having teachers man those labs pull the teachers back work with them on developing and putting those courses into place that's kind of where they settled other questions or that's what I've got thanks for coming June at 750