 election coverage by town meeting television. This is one of many forums we are bringing you in advance of local elections and town meeting on the first Tuesday in March, March 1st, 2022. Town meeting is traditionally where voters weigh in on local government representation, municipal budgets, school budgets, and local ballot items. All candidates on the ballot are invited to participate in town meeting television election forums. Town meeting television election forums introduce you to community decision makers and connect you with the issues that shape your local community. If you're watching this live, we welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. Watch town meeting television on Comcast channel 1087, Burlington telecom channel 17 and 217, as well as online at town meeting television's YouTube page. My name is Elaine Haney and I am joined today by Tom Flanagan, the superintendent of the Burlington School District, and Russ Ellick, the communications and public relations specialist. And they're going to review the Burlington School District budget for 2023. Please go ahead, Tom and Russ. Great. Elaine, thank you very much. We appreciate you having us on and we appreciate the opportunity to talk to the people of Burlington and anyone watching the budget, the fiscal year 23 Burlington School District budget. So thank you for that opportunity. Russ, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit and then? Yeah, I'm really excited to be here. I work for Tom and Burlington School District and we're just really happy to have this opportunity to present to taxpayers our proposed budget for next year. Ballots should be in your mailbox maybe right now. So don't run out and grab them just yet. We can see here what we have to say and then don't forget to cast your vote either in the mail or on town meeting day. Tom, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and you can take it away. All right. Sounds good, Russ. Thank you. So one of the major strategies we used when developing our budget for fiscal year 23 is to reduce cost to taxpayers this fiscal year in particular because we know that in future months we are going to be headed out to ask for support for a new building. Our high school due to chemicals that are in the materials of the building from when it was built had to be closed and we are currently at downtown BHS which is at the old Macy's building downtown and we know we need a long-term solution for our high school. So we're working, number one, to be fiscally conservative in our planning as we move forward and number two, to be very diligent and have strong fiscal management of the funds that are approved. And then number three, we are in receipt of federal funds to support our district because of the pandemic. And so the federal government through the American Rescue Plan distributed funds out to district to the state who distributed them out to districts. And those federal funds allow us to work on the deep work of recovery, what the state is calling recovery. We're focusing on social emotional well-being and academic success as two hallmarks of that plan and those are pieces of the requirement for utilizing these funds from the state. So we're fortunate to have those funds to be able to do new programs and focus our efforts around social emotional well-being and academic success. We're also really fortunate to have the funds at this time because we're able to put 10 million of those funds toward the Burlington High School and Burlington Technical Center, BHS, BTC 2025 campaign for a new building. In addition to that, we've been able to use those funds to put in new resources into our buildings to allow us to feed folks during the pandemic when we were closed down to offer childcare, to have masks, to purchase masks and tests, to update the filters in our ventilation systems and to upgrade ventilation where possible. So we're really fortunate to be able to have those funds, but those are separate from the funds, from the budget that we are presenting to the public shortly. And so that budget that we will be presenting includes a $3.1 million increase to our fiscal year 22 budget. And that's really just in operating the cost of operating the district year over year in wages, benefits, utilities, etc. In addition, we've put funding forward for the Burlington High School up for upgrades to the current downtown Burlington High School building. We knew moving into that building we had to get in there quickly. And we knew there would need to be upgrades. We didn't know exactly what they were. And so we had planned all along to be able to do some level of upgrade to that facility as we moved along. So those are the core assumptions of the budget. Yeah, and I think it's great to remind voters that this is, like you said, it's not programmatic ads that we're doing that are increasing the budget. These are things that typically go up year after year. So we're really trying to be smart about the impact that this is having on taxpayers so that when November comes, voters can can remain reassured that we are doing our best to keep tax impacts down so that they can go to the ballot in November with a real understanding of what our taxes are, how we're trying to keep them down when they're making a decision on building a future Burlington High School and technical center. All right, so we're going to go through some of the some of the detail. We'll move through this relatively quickly. We do have a one pager that is out and we have presented this to the school board and to the city council. And these materials are on our website and Russ can tell people a little bit about where where they are. But when we develop the budget, we look at these these overall items, education spending, and there's an increase in education spending, the equalized pupil count, which I'll talk a little bit more in in future slides, that decrease of 4.9% is going to impact our budget in ways that we'll be able to explain in a future slide. And you can see the Homestead dollar yield, the common level appraisal for an overall budget of $98.2 million for the district. And that $98.2 million, the difference between the 74 and 98 is that we receive significant federal funding state state and federal grants to be able to operate the district. And so that's the that's the difference in there. Those aren't that's not money that we we go and ask for. It's it's those are grants that we receive year over year to support our our community and our students. Right. And our and taxes are based upon the education spending amount. So that's the that's the big thing that we often talk about when you see an overall budget increase of 3.29 that that's not always all education spending. Sometimes it is sometimes it isn't so but what voters needed to know is what we'll get to that on the next on the future slide after this one will voters will be looking for what does this mean for my taxes but can we talk a little bit about spending per equalized pupil because we just started to touch on that a little bit as well. Sure. And this is a this is a really, really big one. Our overall spending is increasing by about 3.1% about 3.1 million dollars about 3.3%. Again, that's related to the what it costs to run the district year over year. And the the the big thing that's that's playing into this is that this the number of equalized pupils in our in our district has decreased over the past three years. And so this is a number that that we look at over multiple years. And so if our student population decreases, then our equalized pupil increases the the cost for educating each individual. So this is a this is a place where enrollment really matters for us. Just our district and districts across the country have lost enrollment during the pandemic. And so one of our goals is going to be to make sure that we are proving to our community that our schools are great places. I have three kids in our schools. I think they're great places. I know they're great places for for for kids to be for adults to work. And so that's that'll be a goal for us. And so the way that you you increase by over 13% by per equalized pupil is is primarily driven by the equalized pupils decrease. And then the other is this non tax revenue to pay for spending. That is decreasing by more than $2 million. And what we've done is we we've had strong fiscal management over a number of years here in Burlington in the Burlington school district, which has allowed us to carry a bit of a surplus that we've been able to put toward our the budgets to reduce tax the tax burden. But what that has done is also driven up the equalized pupil. And the good news to this story is that overall that you're going to see a decrease in the average taxpayer is projected to see a decrease in taxes as a result of the strategy. So that's the next that's the next slide. You got to call spoiler alert. Yeah, talking through the really good news about this surplus. It sounds funny to say it's good news, but we are using less surplus to support the budget this year. And that's good because you don't always want to build budgets that rely on large surpluses. So last year, we actually attribute about $4 million of surplus to help take the load off of taxpayers. And now we're looking at using substantially less, I think it's about a million and a half. And so that's really good for a budget our size you want to be using a surplus number that is lower than $4 million for sure. So it's actually good news for taxpayers that we're able to bring that surplus number down to a number that's more in line with where our budget should be. And we're able to do that in a way that actually still drumroll please is going to lower people's taxes. And so this is the big slide. This is a slide everybody wants to see what everything Superintendent Flanagan just said. Sounds good. I get it. Budget's going to go up a little bit. Wages always have to increase. Utilities always have to increase. We're coming out of a pandemic. But what is this going to mean for our bottom line? So I'm not going to steal your thunder, Tom. What is this going to mean for our taxpayers? Oh, Russ, I think you should probably take it away after I after I let people know that the you know what we are projecting is a property tax is a decrease in property taxes. So 6.89% decrease in property taxes is what we are projecting now. It is important to note that Governor Phil Scott and the General Assembly can choose to divert money from the Education Fund for other purposes. And if they did that would increase local taxes so it may not be that negative 6.89 if that happens. And so current but the current estimate with all the information that we have is that the property taxes will will end up going down next next year. That's right. And even if you don't pay on the full value of your home, if you're someone who pays based on your income, the good news there is that your payments are also projected to go down. So our income payers are projected to go down about 8%, which if you're paying on a $50,000 household income is a reduction of about $102 a year. So again, really trying because of strong fiscal management, the last couple of years, we are able to try to keep our taxes down even though we know that the budget is going up slightly. So this is, I think, great news for taxpayers. We've received a few emails the day that we sort of released these numbers on Front Porch Forum. We had a number of emails saying thank you. A tax decrease is the best news that I could receive right now. So thank you, Russ. And Russ, if you could actually go back a slide, I know there was a drumroll to get to that slide, but I want to point out to people that this equalized pupil number is a really important number for us and is also currently in the Senate Education Committee, they are taking up the question of equalized pupils and the funding formula. And so one of the things that we need to do as I mentioned earlier, make sure that we keep enrollment up and growing. The other thing that we need to do is make sure that the funding formula that the legislature is taking up now is equitable. Right now the funding formula is inequitable. Everybody knows it's inequitable. And what it's doing is causing us to need to pay more per equalized pupil because we're not getting the appropriate amount of funding for some of our students. And this inequitable funding formula that we currently use impacts districts like Burlington and Winooski in other districts with students who are learning English or multilingual students. And so we need to be, I'm encouraging folks to pay attention to that and to advocate for Burlington and for an equitable funding formula across the state. It's a really important part of the puzzle moving forward to make sure that our education system can do everything that it needs to do, that we want it to do for our community and respects the fact that taxes need to be manageable for the community. So we are balancing that. Our school board has taken up with a number of other school boards the fight for equitable funding at the state house. They've done an amazing job. We have traction. And so if you're so motivated, I would encourage you to get out and push for an equitable funding formula as well. Thanks, Tom. I think that's really important. I mean, one of the key ways that we fund our schools is by receiving money from the state based on not only our enrollment, but like you said, if students are learning English or if we have students who qualify for free and reduced lunches, the state tries to factor that in. But the formulas have just not been equitable. They're not accurate. And they don't provide schools with the funding that they really need to make sure that we can provide all the resources that students need. So I do encourage you to go to our website, search for equalized pupil or weighted pupil, and you can find more and you can find out ways to get involved. So we'll skip ahead to let's talk a little bit about how this budget was created, Tom. This is different, right? Absolutely. Yes, we have a new process for budget development, which is the way that we develop the budget within the funding that we have. So again, we are not adding programmatically to our budget, but we have changed the way that we've done it. And the goal has been to drive resources to schools and drive decisions to schools, while also creating coherence across schools and prioritizing students and communities who need specific supports. And we did some work with surveying our community. And one of the things, one of the responses that we received, one of the questions that we asked and the responses we got from our community shows that there's commitment to this equitable budgeting process. And you can see that at the top band, which is that 72% of stakeholders strongly agreed or agreed that resources should be allocated in a way that supports the students who need them most, even if this means reducing the resources at their schools. And so that is a process that that we are taking seriously. And it matches with the process with the fight that we are the advocacy that we are we are doing at the state house for equitable funding across the across the state. So this equitable budgeting model was first about making sure that we have appropriate and correct roster staffing rosters and enrollment projections at individual schools. So we did work with schools leaders to make sure in our HR department to make sure that we have the most accurate rosters and enrollment projections. And as we work to improve our systems as a district, this is a key area for us that we highlighted to improve so that we can make sure that our budgeting and our systems are more streamlined and more efficient. Then principals worked with their school advisory groups once we knew the base for each school. Principles then developed school advisory groups who directly advised the principal on how to develop the school budget. And one of the ways the the core way that these school advisory groups advised and and and co created the parts of the budget was on the rise allocation. So we developed a specific allocation called recognizing injustice and seeking equity and gave each school a specific allocation that was based on the their the ironically the funding formula that was that has been proposed to the state to implement. We use that funding formula to make an allocation to each school that allowed schools with their school advisory groups to make specific decisions about about resources and initiatives and and programs that they felt would best meet the needs of their students. And so as I mentioned earlier principals worked with their school communities and and the advisory groups to create these rise allocations. And it's important to note these rise allocations were allocated using existing funding through our current budget, not by adding. We also included some of the American Rescue Plan or ESSER funding in that rise allocation. But we we made sure that these were not this did not include additional funding to the budget. So it's not an add to the overall budget. We're excited about this process. We know we have work to do to continue to engage at the school level. It was the first year we did it. Our principals and school leadership teams did an amazing job and we know that as a whole as a group we want to continue to work to build the strength of the co-creation around this rise allocation with our with our communities. So we're excited about this process. And I think one of the really cool things that that has come out of this process is what we learned during our stakeholder sort of input period was that people don't necessarily they understand the district-wide budget but they don't necessarily understand how that trickles down to their own individual schools. So these these action groups that principals have been able to pull together is it's really a way for us to be much more transparent at the school level. Like I said we're doing really well at the district level. Here's how your budget is increasing. This is how it impacts taxes. These are the ads and subtracts. But now people who are involved are involved from the community are involved in helping schools figure out their budget which means they understand how much money schools are receiving and how schools are using that money. What does that mean in terms of teacher ratios? What does that mean in terms of things like this rise allocation where we're really committed to making improvements for equity and inclusion? So that's been a really awesome outcome of this new budgeting model. There's really more transparency even down at that school level. So what are people using these funds for Tom? School-based equity oriented investments. And so these are some examples of those and there are there are many more examples but these are some of the highlights that we really that we wanted to pull out for you. So interventionists you can see at the elementary and middle school our schools continued to prioritize the the need for interventionists through this through this process. Our schools in a school in elementary in elementary school decided to add special educator capacity. And another school decided to invest in tutoring. There's a lot of evidence out there about the the impact of one-on-one tutoring for students and so that's a good investment. Academic paraeducators so there's a need across our district for more individualized supports and more kind of specific supports for small groups and individual students. And so you see that at one of our schools classroom libraries and other materials. We have we have from Edmunds Middle School a request for additional support for guidance. We have an exciting position a parent ambassador position at Hunt Middle School and student leadership funds at Edmunds Middle School. And at the high school adding mental health support adding interventionists STEM it's actually math and science and reading and restorative justice staff to add to the restorative justice staff that we provided this year already and some and some additional instructional support from a guided study teacher. Again there are more more investments that were in each of the plans that came from each school and each school did have a plan but there this is these are the highlights of those allocations. And what I love about this is just what you were saying you know you're kind of going through like one school's doing this one school's doing this again it gets back to having a group at your school being able to weigh in on decisions of how these monies were spent and what are what do they think are the best ways to really serve all students. And then I think one thing that we forgot to touch on is that with these rise allocations one of the sort of charges to these groups is to also bring to the table metrics so we can see are these allocations working the way that we hope that we thought they were and that might not be next year or the year after but it is revisiting these things to make to make sure that these dollars are spent and they're having the impact that we were hoping that they would have. So one of the ways we're keeping your tax dollars down is through strong fiscal management which I think you've heard us say three or four or five times so you know strong fiscal management we'll just say it one more time. So what does that mean Tom what does that mean when we say we're going to use a surplus to help taxpayers? Yeah so for a number of different reasons we do have a surplus or a fund balance of approximately $3.6 million. I think it's important for taxpayers to know that some of this is related to the pandemic where we do have some positions that have that have been unfilled throughout the year and we and those are positions that you know we are still working hard to to fill and we are seeing some progress there as we've moved into 2022 and then we also are just being very cautious and very very thoughtful in our approach to spending. We know that we ask a lot of our community we know that our community supports us and supports supports the work that we are doing and we want to make sure that we are really being thoughtful about how we're spending every single dollar that that we have and so what we've done is we've carried a surplus again we're making sure that we're not carrying too much of a surplus because that's also not good but making sure that we are we are carrying a surplus so that we can plan for any plan for the the unknown too and so we we do have a surplus that we are able to utilize toward covering the rent costs $1.5 million of that surplus we'll go toward covering the rent costs at downtown BHS again the idea is to minimize the impact on taxpayers with that with that $1.5 million we're using $600 $600 000 toward enhancing downtown BHS this still is going toward this will be a part of of the FY 23 budget but it's coming out of the of the surplus you've seen this 600 000 in two different places it's not two different 600 000s and one point and our hope there is that this is a one-time cost I mean we may have to continue to invest in that property but we're hoping that that number is lower and lower each year which again is going to support taxpayers by you know not having this big chunk every year so one-time spending is a great way to use surplus funds and we're really trying to figure out how to do that for taxpayers as well yeah and then the last is the is we're continuing to find ways to put funds toward the BHS BTC 2025 project to make sure that we are um really being thoughtful about the impact of a new skill school building so with this 1.5 million with the 10 million we're able to use from the Esser American Rescue Plan funds we're up to 11.5 million dollars out of the cost of the future BHS BTC so we're going to continue to do that and think that way as we as we move forward so this is running out of time so this this is what people will actually see on the ballot and I don't think we have enough time to go through and read this as it is but this will be the ballot language that covers everything that we have just gone over including that spending at this level could produce a property tax decrease of 6.98 percent and that's required language the language that we use in that top paragraph we have used the we mirrored the language from three or four years ago in that last line because we really wanted to be clear that there is a projection of a tax decrease despite what the what the the overall language looks like as it relates to the per pupil and we talked a little bit earlier about um this decrease is based on that large surplus in the Vermont education fund so you can learn more about this you can learn more about all of our budget at www.bsdvt.org slash budget all right this is uh as a reminder ballots are probably in your mailbox right now so now that you've heard from Superintendent Flanagan you can you can run out there and begin thinking about your vote you can cast those now and you can also vote in person on town meeting day the last day to drop off your ballot if you're voting um with what is in your mailbox is on town meeting day there are boxes set up around the city elaine that's all we have prepared okay well thank you very much tom and russ and we don't have any callers on the line so we'll sign off now thank you for tuning into one quick thing if you don't mind elaine since we have a little bit of airtime left 30 seconds um you've heard us talk a lot today about how we are trying to be really um cognizant of the fact that we'll be asking for a bond vote in november so if you want to learn more about bhs btc 2025 we encourage you to attend our online virtual forum on february 17th this will be um over zoom and you can learn more at www.bsdvt.org you'll hear all about our new design team our programmatic needs and what is that updated timeline as we gear up for that vote you know people are going to want to know when are we going to know how much this uh this building is going to cost right and so that's going to be hopefully presented on february 17th so encourage everyone to get involved and to stay in the loop on this process as we look to build a brand new 21st century learning facility in vermont's queen city thanks for the extra details for us thank you for tuning in to town meeting television's ongoing coverage of local community candidates budget and ballot items you can find this and more forums at www.ch17.tv don't forget to vote on honor before the first tuesday in march town meeting day march 1st 2002 early voting by mail is available by contacting your town clerk's office and polls will be open from 7 a.m to 7 p.m thank you for watching