 Welcome to the ongoing Town Meeting Day election coverage by Town Meeting Television. And I am your moderator tonight. My name is Kerubo Webster. And this is one of a series forums. We are bringing you in advance of Town Meeting Day here on Tuesday. That's going to happen on the Tuesday, March 7th, 2023. In Town Meeting TV hosts forums with all candidates and covers all ballot items you will see on your ballot. Town Meeting TV election forums introduce you to community decision makers and connect you with issues that shape your local community. If you are tuning in, we welcome you to question with your questions at 802-862-399-3966. And it's 802-862-3966. Watch Town Meeting TV on Comcast Channel 1087 or Ballington Telecom Channels 17 and 217 as well as online at youtube.com slash town meeting TV. And without further ado, I am going to introduce you to our participants tonight. And I will begin on my father's right. And please let us know who you are and go on to what you've prepared for your presentation tonight. Sure. Thank you so much, Kerubo, for having us here. And thank you to CCTV. My name is Violet Nichols. I'm the superintendent of the South Burlington School District. We're excited to have the opportunity this evening to continue engaging with the community about the budget and the bond that will be brought forward to voters on March 7. The details that we'll describe to you tonight really outline how we plan to support our students in our district. So that is the central focus here. Of course, affordability and providing essential facility supports for our students are huge factors as well, and you'll see that in our bond information that we'll share. We've prepared a slide deck and we'll start running through that, sharing a little bit more about some of the factors impacting our budget this evening. So at the school district, as I said, our primary objective is to support our students and student learning is what that means for us. We have to abide by agency of education standards. This year, major factors relative to the agency of education are Act 173 and Vermont MTSS, which is an abbreviation for multi-tiered systems of supports. So what this means is a recognition of how we can support all of our students. We know that academic and social-emotional learning are tied closely together and that all of our students learn in different ways. These requirements, academic and social-emotional learning, allow us to educate students in ways that meet all of their needs. We know that the social-emotional and academic impacts of the pandemic have not been remediated and they certainly haven't been remediated in this short time that the pandemic relief funding has been available. So social-emotional learning and academic needs are persisting and this budget is reflective of positions that will support students' ongoing needs given the high inflation and great facilities' needs. We have, in fact, been able to introduce a budget that's a tax rate that's lower than five, 10, and even 15-year averages for voters with a bond. So we're going to share more about some of the priorities and our approach to crafting this budget, which, again, is below average tax rates of the last 15 years. So some of the main factors here is affordability. We want to ensure that our community can stand behind this budget, that they can afford it, and that we're really supporting students. That's the goal. We have chronic capacity issues within all of our, within two of our elementary schools and facilities issues, really district-wide. We have been working with a demographer and the district has for about a decade and a half. And so we've been able to track over time these capacity issues. Now we're in the situation where we no longer have the luxury of waiting for a planful bond at the elementary level. We did have thick community engagement last year in the form of an enrollment committee, and that team made up of educators, community members, and school administrators, just to name a few, brought forward this idea of zero energy modulars, otherwise known as ZEMS. You'll see these in the bond. These are meant to provide space alleviation at our elementary schools as we're over-enrolled at Rick Marca Central School and Orchard School. This budget is reflective as well of some of the facilities stewardship items that are overdue. We have a significant amount of deferred maintenance district-wide. The Agency of Education's 2019 report states that South Burlington School District, and I was surprised to learn this, is ranked 11th of 54 districts for greatest needs. Another way of saying that is that there are 44 facilities in the state out of the 54 tract who have higher facilities quality than South Burlington. We knew that with the loss of pandemic-related funding, this ESSER funding, we would have to return student-to-staff ratios to more closely align those that we've seen in the past. And so you'll see these priorities throughout the budget that need to reduce staffing by 23.75 positions district-wide. In order to accomplish this, we've closed eight positions. So this number is closer to 15 if you look at that way. And through attrition, every year we're able to maintain valuable staff. It's important that we acknowledge the hard work and the vital support that each staff member brings to our organization every single day. The positions that we're proposing moving forward, and some of these are, you'll see here, shifted from ESSER funding, we're prioritizing these positions that support our student learning. So student engagement, math interventionist, special education. We have looked at overall operating efficiencies and made overall 5% reductions exclusive of staffing, which is a fixed cost. Board negotiates unionized contracts. We, again, took deeper facilities cuts here. And we examined cost neutral and cost savings positions, really looking at the model of staffing to try to do more with less. And then finally, as I said, we closed open requisitions. We too are facing what many in the state and the country are, and that we're not able to fully staff. So we made a decision here to rather than have placeholders for positions of folks who aren't, we aren't receiving applications for why not prioritize the staff that we have. Ultimately, this has produced a 7.17 increase with a 3.93% on residential homestead tax. You will see compared to many districts within the state, this is below the anticipated 8.5% average. We worked very hard to get to this number, prioritizing a bond this year. We know that we have significant deferred maintenance and we needed these zero energy modulars eminently for space as we're over-enrolled significantly at two of our elementary schools. So rather than putting bond items in this budget, the bond allows us to spread these payments over time over a larger portion of residents and alleviating this initial tax burden. So this is where the 7.17% comes from. I should note when I talk about ZEMS and the bond that it's estimated that about 91% of the cost of ZEMS will be recouped by the district from impact fees. Which we've worked with the city to develop and those will begin being seen as revenue on July 1st. So that's been a huge partnership and we'd like to thank the city for that. About 80% of our staffing, our costs is staffing related. This is standard and those costs are fixed. You're also going to see costs such as health insurance which is statewide negotiated. So a lot of these costs we don't actually have control over. And when we were discussing what does this mean for our budget? We have to take into account state factors as well. So we know that if we had a do nothing budget that we would have been in the state will over 12%, maybe 14%. Just given that the sheer cost of consumables, say the salt used to sand our sidewalks today is up significantly. We have all three unions negotiating this year. The health insurance at about 12.3%, again, a cost that the district is taking on. Ongoing labor shortages of course impacting us as well. Significant deferred maintenance within the district. And in the past years we've benefited from surpluses and federal funding that is nearly exhausted this year. State factors impacting the budget, common level of appraisal being a big one. There is a change this year of about 8% negatively impacting the budget. So when that number came in, we had to go back to the drawing board. And reduce the budget even more. An important piece to budget development has been studying enrollment trends. We have worked with Mr. Jerome McKibbin. This year as we have in the past to provide enrollment projections. And this allows us to track what students are coming into our district and where are they coming in. And it's really important for the community to understand that not only are we over-enrolled now, we will be furthermore next year. These ZEMs and this bond is absolutely critical for student learning. And I'd like the community to really also be aware that we have a massive cohort hitting middle school next year with an increase of 40 students. These students, of course, will matriculate through our system requiring facilities needs at the middle and high school down the road. This slide here looks at some of our staffing trends. You see in 2023 this huge spike when staff was hired. Pandemic relief efforts. And now we must return to a place where we are more reflective of this best fit line you see. This was a stunning fact to me when I first came to the district. South Burlington is of course a populous community compared to many of our neighbors. In fact, we've been discussing, in fact, increasing enrollment, right? Instead of the decline that many of our neighbors are seeing. With this stunning fact, we ranked 216th lowest for education spending. So out of 259 districts in the state, there are 215 that spend more than we do here with smaller tax bases. This is just a visual depiction of how we shake out compared to some of our neighbors. It's important as we share tech centers and students that we always collaborate as a region. So it's a consideration of ours. I'm now going to turn it over to Tim Jarvis, our Senior Director of Operations and Finance to share some budget details. Thank you so much for your summary and your approach, and we welcome you. Thank you. Thank you. If we go to the next slide, thank you for inviting me here this evening. This is a depiction of our tax rates not compared to other communities, which we had just shown you, but within South Burlington itself. So when we constructed this budget and it ended up having a tax rate of 1.3462, we wanted to know, how does that fit into the historic trends in South Burlington? Is it egregious? Is it normal? Is it better or worse than normal? So here we've mapped out the last 19 years of the residential education tax rate for South Burlington. And what you see is that although South Burlington residents enjoyed a tax decrease in this regard the last two years, the increase this year, the 3.93% increase, is still well within our historic trends. And Violet indicated this earlier, but you see at the bottom of this slide that on all the five-year average tax rate, the 10-year average tax rate and the 15-year average tax rate, our 1.3462, which represents the budget that we have proposed, is actually well within these historic trends. And in fact, it would be the fifth lowest tax rate in the last 20 years. What does that mean for the average taxpayer? The way that we try to portray this is with this chart. The value on the far left of $100,000 is the basis upon which the tax rate is actually positioned. The one in the middle represents the average value of a condominium in South Burlington, which according to the city is $293,152. In our budget and at this tax rate, the owner of that average condominium, as you see, would pay $3,946. The owner of that condominium at last year's tax rate would pay $3,797. So that's an annual change of $149 or a monthly change of $12. That's what we're talking about by approving this budget. The column on the far right is the value of the average home, primary residence in South Burlington, which is $437,384. Similarly, I won't go through all the math again, but the owner of that average residence would pay a tax with this budget of $223 higher than last year or $19 a month higher than last year. So that's the impact. When you see the large numbers and you try to figure out, what does that mean for me, this is the result. And I should have indicated earlier that not only am I the senior director of operations and finance for the school district, but I also am a resident of South Burlington, a parent of two children who attend the Frederick H. Tuttle Middle School. So I approached this budget as an employee, a parent, and a residential taxpayer. So it's all kind of personal for me. And consequently, it's important for me to believe in this budget as much as I want you to believe in it. The next slide is the bond that Violet alluded to. So on the ballot in March, the voters will see a bond request for $14,550,000. That is split into two pieces. The first is the $6 million for the classroom zero energy modulars. Again, I would just reiterate what Violet said before, that we expect that 91% of the principal cost of those EMS, excluding financing, will be covered by the impact fees that will be paid for new development in South Burlington over the coming years. The remaining $8.55 million is for a variety of capital improvement items in what we call the facility stewardship plan. And all of this information is available on our website. These are items that you would expect an aging infrastructure that we have in our five campuses to require. Roofing, air conditioning, windows, bathrooms, parking lots, et cetera. These are all represented by individual projects, by school and by category. And we're more than happy to go into more details on that should you have additional questions. This is just a depiction of the two schools where we are going to be constructing the ZEM modular classrooms. This is Orchard School. This just gives you a little bit of information about the classroom size. And there's also Project Room. You'll see that it's connected to the main building by a corridor such that these students will not be going inside and outside of the school to access these new classrooms. And we intend those four classrooms to be allocated to the fifth grade, freeing up space in the rest of the core building for other educational needs. So that's the floor plan. And then the same thing at Central School, Rick Marcot Central School. That's where the ZEMs are going to be located. Those are a little bit bigger than the Orchard School one simply because we had more space to work with. But all of these classrooms are going to be very suitable for the enrollment numbers that we're projecting. And then that's just a floor plan of the Central School as well to show you how it's connected to the main building. This is an illustration of how much the bond will cost over time. Similar to your home mortgage, the principal amount that's being borrowed is allowed to be amortized over a period of years. In the case of the ZEMs, it's amortized over eight years. So every year we'll be paying down a little bit of the principal and then the associated interest. The stewardship principal, the 8.55 million, we are allowed to amortize that over a longer period of time, over 20 years. And this is also showing you the numbers associated with this. So for the current budget, for fiscal year 24, there's going to be a modest interest charge for each piece of the bond. And then in the fiscal year 2025 budget, next year we will then start including the principal pay down as well. And this is simply what the voter is going to see when they go to the ballot box. So we wanted to make sure that when they go in to the poll they'll be able to understand what they're voting on, what is it for, to show this for capital improvements and additions to all of our buildings. While the ZEMs are only affiliated with the two of the three elementary schools, the other projects that I referred to are actually going to be applied to all of the schools. So each of the five schools is going to get a significant facelift. And these are simply some of the events. We're very happy to be with you tonight. We've been meeting with a lot of community groups, PTOs, we've met with the employees of the schools. And between now and March 7th, we're going to continue with discussions like this and always invite voter engagement and questions. Thank you, Tim. We would love to take questions if there are any from the community. We're always happy to engage in discourse and I realize that the time is limited today but anyone from the community can email Tim or I at any time or members of support for more information. Yeah, if you're tuning in live, we will welcome your questions at 802-862-3966-802-862-3966. And as we wait for the callers to come in, did you have anything that you wanted to present for us tonight? No, I'm leaving that to the experts. Okay. Yes, we do support the Board is in full support. Right. It's a very thoughtful and responsible budget. Right. Yeah. It was important for us to bring forward a responsible budget that we felt the community could really back. Given that we have these great facilities needs, the bond was an important piece of this. So keeping tax rates at this lower rate, lower than average and offering up this bond so that we can address the over-enrollment at the elementary schools and also provide infrastructure needs, badly needed infrastructure needs in the rest of our facilities. You know, we know that these are larger conversations we'll have to have as a community and we hope to be in a place where it's not reactive like we are with the need for these ZEMs right now at the elementary level. The Board has been pivotal in continuing conversations on how to engage the community with a fifth grade transition committee, ultimately will make a recommendation to an infrastructure committee. You know, these decisions on fifth grade and ultimately middle and high school renovations or new builds or years down the road. And when we get to the point where these decisions need to be made, we want there to have been thick community engagement throughout the process. Absolutely. And that is why this is so important for the community to meet their decision makers and to connect with all the issues that shape their community. So I'm waiting for those telephones to buzz, but since there's nothing coming in, perhaps there's anything else that you have thought might the community need to know from you? I think it's very important for the community to understand that our campus is the three elementary schools, the middle school and the high school are all over 60 years old. And they've served their purpose very well. Again, I went to one of those schools, I won't say how many years ago, but more than a couple. And in my role as head of facilities and operations and finance, I've had the opportunity to do very detailed walkthroughs of these buildings and can see firsthand why a community that is based upon such a high quality school district, and that's what brings people to South Burlington and why it's such an attractive place to live. I think that we need to have the facilities keep pace with the modern way of providing educational services. And these buildings that were constructed so many decades ago are lacking in that regard. And it's not an overnight fix by any stretch, but with some of the delays that have been introduced over the past few years as the community was debating whether to combine the three elementary schools or combine the middle school and high school, which would have been very large projects, the delay in making that kind of a strategic decision has led us simply not to invest in the continued day-to-day maintenance of our existing buildings. And we've reached the point where we felt it was imperative this year to issue the bond, to address overcrowding in the elementary schools, and of course to have a safe and healthy work environment for our students and our staff. Thank you. Okay, thank you so much for coming here tonight. And I'm sure whoever was tuning in tonight has had some of their questions answered. And thank you also for tuning in to Town Meeting TV's ongoing coverage for local candidates, local budgets, and ballot items. You can find this and more forums at www.ch17.tv. And don't forget to vote on or before March 7th. Ballots are not mailed automatically, so please check with your local clerk to request a ballot or make sure to get to the polls on March 7th. Thank you so much for watching and sharing Town Meeting TV. If you are not already, please prescribe to our Town Meeting TV YouTube channel. Thank you so much for coming in tonight. And good evening.