 Any adjustments to the agenda? So, is there any board comments? All right, then we'll just move into our budget informational presentation. Do you have the slide, Joda? There we go, all right. So we're just gonna start with some introductions. Andrew Jones, I'm the chair of the White River Unified District Board. Can we go around and introduce ourselves? I'm sorry, but you're gonna have to speak up. I can't hear you. Okay. I have your name on it. I'm Andrew Jones. I'm the chair of the White River Unified District Board. We're gonna go around and introduce ourselves. Chris Chervis, representative from Bepple, on the board. Peggy Ainsworth from Royalton. Nancy Pageley from Bepple. Andrew Bowen, elementary principal. Jeff Thomas, high school principal. Thanks for coming. Tara Weatherill, the business manager. I'm Carol LaFlamme. I'm the middle school principal over in the back of campus. And Jamie Kanone is joining us. Yeah, my apologies. I'm virtual this evening. It's great to be with everyone tonight. It's Sullivan and Rodney Vainville, our office board members who are joining us virtually. Okay, so just before we get into this year's budget, we're just gonna quickly go over what happened in FY23. That was last year's budget. That's complete. We got the audit at this point. And we did really well that year financially. We wound up basically with a $759,000 surplus over the previous budget versus expenses, or revenue versus expenses for the year. Part of the reason that it's different than what we budgeted for was we were receiving COVID relief funds that we're able to supplement our offset some of the expenses that we're budgeted for. And when we were doing using the COVID relief funds, we made kind of a conscious decision not to add positions that would be ongoing positions that would increase the budget once the money for them was gone and tried to use them for short-term expenses that we could use that wouldn't add to the budget long-term. And it also was able to offset some of the expenses that were in the budget. So that's one of the reasons why we had a fair amount of surplus at the end of the year. We have an audit at surplus of $997,000. And so we then need to decide with surplus funds, you can either use them to lower taxes in the current or the upcoming budget or put them aside to the capital improvement fund. And what we're going to be asking is that we put those aside for the capital improvement fund since we have some building expenses coming up that we'll talk about a little bit later. The other thing on this slide is just that the capital improvement fund balance coming into this year is 1.2 million. We've been able to put aside pretty substantial amounts the previous couple of years. So it's a pretty healthy place right now which is a good thing to be at. So kind of our current financial status going into this budget season is pretty good. So looking at this upcoming budget, the changes to the current budget, we're maintaining the current staffing and adding a few positions that'll help serve our students going forward. So one is one FTE, which is full-time equivalent staff for middle and high school tech education. There's a 0.4 increase to reading a math interventionist to allow us to have a full-time math interventionist at the middle school. We would like to add a social worker to provide wraparound support services to students and families. There's a student support coordinator for the elementary campus and an administrative assistance support the guidance services. This is the guidance counselor and college readiness services for our students. And we feel like we could better support those students by adding an extra position there. There's some one-time money in this budget for purchasing elementary math materials to transition to a new math program for the elementary student schools. And there's also some money for transportation services provided by Tri Valley Transit to supplement our existing busing services for students accessing after-school programming and also for transportation for tuitioning students that aren't normally served by our normal buses. And if I could, just one thing I just wanted to just interject so you kind of understand the whole picture of why we, you know. So most of the positions that we have added are really because the school is growing. Could you speak up a little bit more for you? A majority of these services that we have added to the budget this year is not just because we want to add them, but it's because our campuses are growing in population-wise. So, you know, three or four years ago when we first started White River Valley because we had a few bumps in the road along the way as we all know that it wasn't really the place to be but it has over the last couple of years started to be the place to be. I mean, we literally have a bunch of students that come from Randolph this year that are here at the school. So, we're starting to add services that to be able to build that population that we have as well as during the COVID years when we were remote teaching, we had identified there was a group of students that were challenged by some of the test scores and it was more in the middle school area. So, that's where we're trying to get that extra help for the middle school with those extra positions that we have there as well as I think we all know that there's a lot of mental health challenges that are out there right now and that definitely impacts our student population. So, you know, getting that extra support in school is something that we added so. Yeah, so talking about some of those positions more specifically the tech education position, the current staff splits time between the high school and the middle school and it felt like we needed more support on both campuses. There's a new middle school makerspace that was one of the one time expenses that we used the COVID money for was to produce like a great state of the art makerspace for the middle school and having a staff member there who can learn how all that works and be able to support our students with it. We'll really help with that. And there's an increased demand for tech education as we have been expanding the flexible pathways program. This allows students to get school credit for things in non-traditional classroom settings where they can do project work and receive very great learning experiences and receive credit for it. And the tech education is a good part of that. So we're increasing staffing on that to support those programs. The student support coordinator, we're adding one extra, the student support coordinators provide behavioral support and interventions for students that have trouble regulating behaviors or things like that. So providing more support there allows there to be a more consistent presence and availability of both elementary campuses and will help maintain positive learning environments for our students in the classrooms. And the final one I wanna talk about is the social worker. The goal of the social workers to buy wraparound supports for families. There's a lot of families that are eligible for services that they aren't currently accessing and having staff that can help support families in accessing the services and resources that they're eligible for. We'll hopefully lead to stronger home situations that can help children or students come to school prepared to learn. So we're hoping that providing that that support will help in that regard. So to look at the budget on the whole, the spending we're proposing is a total of $14,382,000 or $382,992. So it's an increase of $1,413. The revenue is basically the same as what we projected last year. We like to be conservative on the revenue projections for tuition students and things like that. So that if we do receive more than what we've projected, it's better than receiving fewer and then winding up in a deficit situation. So the net spending, the Act 68 education spending is up $1,4 million. The student number, the long-term weighted average, this is something that's changed this year, previously was the equalized pupil number, but because of a law that was passed Act 127, they changed the calculation for that. We'll look at that more specifically in upcoming slides, but from what it would have been last year that they were using the current calculation to what it is this year, we've gained 64 long-term weighted average pupils, which is good. Having an increased student population helps with with the tax rate every day. So the per pupil spending that we're proposing is $11,950, that's an increase of $629. Looking at the change in spending, that $1.4 million is a big number. And it's kind of shocking to look at it, but when we break it down, we have those new positions that we're proposing and we feel like they're important things that will really help us provide positive learning environment for our students. And that comes out to about $434,000 for those positions. And then the one time spending that we have in there is $51,000. The remaining almost a million dollars is just based on cost increases. So I forget the exact percentage of the healthcare is up. 16.7. Yes, healthcare costs are up 16%. It includes just contracted staff raises and everybody knows how inflation has been the last couple of years. So these are kind of costs that are outside of anything that we're kind of offering. They're just the way budgets go these days. So that's how we get to the 1.4 million dollars. All right, so Act 127 was a bill that was passed a couple of years ago and its goal was to improve equity across Vermont schools by adjusting the school funding formula. It also provides some educational quality of funding oversight, but what's kind of relevant to this budget discussion is how they changed the equalized pupil calculation into the long-term weighted daily membership calculation. So on the left, I realize it's a little small, but you can see the previous weights for students. And on the right, you can see what they have for new weights. And essentially what they did was they provide more support for schools that are serving middle and high school level so it costs more to educate those students. They provide a big bonus for districts that have high poverty levels or students that are below the poverty level and for multilingual learners. And then they also provide extra support for districts that are sparsely populated, so rural districts or small schools. And looking at how that came out for us, we wound up benefiting from this. In the previous calculation, our equalized pupils of 566.94 was 0.67% of the state total equalized pupils. With the new calculation, our long-term weighted average daily membership is 0.77% of the state total. So that's an increase in our percent of the state share of 14%. And that basically is lowering our taxes or giving us more resources to invest in our schools. So this was a good bill for us. Now there were some kind of growing pains with this bill in that when they first passed it, they didn't want to have towns that were adversely impacted by the changes in the calculations have to bear the full brunts all in one year. There are some districts that were getting 30 or 40% change in what they were having to their tax rate calculations and they didn't wanna have all come in just one year. They were trying to phase it in over a five-year period and the way that they did it initially was that they gave districts a 5% tax rate cap where their increase in taxes couldn't be more than 5% as long as their spending was less than 10%. The downside to this was if a district was above that 5% tax rate cap, then there wasn't any downside to increasing their spending up to that 10% cap. So it led to districts adding extra spending into their budgets because they could with no financial penalty, but that money had to come from somewhere and it comes from the Education Fund and in order to raise that money, they were needing to increase taxes on all the districts that were below the cap. Of course, that pushed more districts above the 5% cap and kind of led to an unsustainable cycle. So over the last couple of weeks and month or so, they quickly have worked on a fix for that. That's House Bill 850 and that was just passed, was it just signed last week by the governor? And so that removes the 5% tax cap and provides a fixed rate discount for the towns that are adversely affected and that'll slowly phase out over the five years. But the fact that now the tax, the towns that are over the tax, don't receive an event, can if they added spending, they're probably gonna remove it so they don't have the adverse tax effect. And also the towns that were at that 5% or above 5% before didn't have any incentive to lower their tax spending because lowering the spending wouldn't have done anything either. So we expect that this result will result in reduced spending across the state, which will hopefully lower our taxes as a result. So this was another benefit for our district. So just as a quick review, the final tax rate that we wind up seeing on our property tax bills, to get that we take the spending and subtract out the revenue and divide that by our long-term weighted average pupils to get the per pupil spending. That per pupil spending is divided by the state yield to get the equalized tax rate. And then our final rate is the equalized tax rate divided by the common level of appraisal. We'll talk about a couple of those steps in a little more detail in these next couple of slides. So the yield is that state factor that the state changes to to determine how much money they're raising from the towns. So an increased yield decreases our taxes, a decreased yield increases our tax. And it's the factor to convert between per pupil spending and the equalized tax rate. So in normal years, they provide us a projection for the projected yield on December 1st and we got one of those this year. But because of the uncertainty with Act 127 and all this kind of budget, the unanticipated extra spending people were doing, in January, they gave us a different projected yield that was lower than what it had been. So that was going to result in higher taxes. And then as this H850 was coming about, they put out another projected yield with the anticipated changes, what they were expecting that to do with the yield. So we wound up with this kind of shifting yield and it was a difficult budget season this year because we kind of had these shifting goal posts as far as what our spending would result in as far as the final tax rate. And of course, we still don't really know since the final tax rate will depend on the yield that's passed by the legislature prior to the close of the session. So until they finalize that yield, we don't know for sure what our final tax rate will be, but at this point, I think we have more certainly about it than we did going through the process. So just to look at the impact of what those different projections were, with the December 1st letter with the spending that we're proposing our equalized tax rate was going to be 1.2643, which was a 7.43 cent reduction compared to last year's equalized tax rate. The January revised projection wound up increasing that by four cents. And then the February one wound up is projected to be at a 11 cent reduction compared to last year. So I mean, I think at this point, we're kind of expecting it to be around that February number, but we're gonna have to wait and see what winds up, how different towns react to the changes and what it does to their spending and how it winds up working out statewide. The final thing that wound up coming in towards the end of our budget process was the common level of appraisal. And this is a factor that the town compares the town appraised values to recent actual sale prices of properties. And it's what converts the equalized tax rate to a final tax rate. The state uses this because the town, each town can have different appraised values and do appraisals at different times. They try and use this factor to kind of get a real property value that they assess us on as opposed to this assessed value. So the fact that property values have been increasing over the last couple of years has led to the yield dropping pretty significantly in the metal. So, as we're reaching the end of our budget process, the CLA came out and we learned up seeing that there's a 10% decrease in metal, which really impacts the tax rate there and 7.5% decrease in taxes. Royal Tim, which also, we're feeling pretty good about the equalized tax rate decrease as we were seeing. And this kind of the change in the CLA really kind of wiped those out for the most part. And this is just a graph of what's been happening with the common level appraisal. So it's been going down. We expect that there'll be a reappraisal over the next couple of years and that'll have the common level appraisal go back up, which will lower our tax rates, but will be taxed on higher property values. So the overall value doesn't, well, our overall tax payments won't ever change. So here's just a quick summary of how that all works out. Mostly gonna be just looking at that February yield side, the green numbers. So our per pupil spending was up $629. And with the February projected yield, that's an 11 cent decrease in our equalized tax rate. And again, the equalized tax rate is what we, like if property values all stayed the same, then we would be looking at an 11 cent tax decrease. But because of the CLA change, the taxes are increased by 2.4 cents or 2.5 cents. In Bethel and decreased in Royalton by 2.1 cents. And at the bottom, it shows for different value houses, what that translates into for actual dollars on the final tax bills. So for like $100,000 house, that'd be $24.63 in Bethel or $21.30 decrease in Royalton. This is just looking at how we compare it to some of our surrounding districts. So as I said, most of the increase in our budget is fixed costs and not really cost increases. And all the other districts around us are dealing with those cost increases too. So that's why pretty much all the districts are in that 10% range for increase in spending. But we were one of the beneficiary areas of this Act 127. So our 10% increase results in an 8.29% decrease in our equalized tax rate. Whereas Hartford is really looking at a pretty difficult situation where they have a 10% change in their budget and it's a 37% increase in their equalized tax rate. So we're benefiting from this bill and in a relatively good position compared to a lot of our surrounding districts. So this last slide was just looking at what is under kind of our local control versus what isn't. And generally what we as a school board can control is the budget that we're setting. And that includes the general budget, which 80% of which is salaries and benefits for employees. So there's not kind of a lot other than positions to cut or modify. And then there's whatever capital spending you do. And that's the total budget. And that winds up getting offset by non-tax revenues, which are things like tuition students and grants. And we have some control over those. We can make our school more attractive for these students and try and attract more of them, but we don't quite have direct control over that. So we do the best we can to make it an appealing place. But all the other factors that we've been talking about like the long-term weighted average daily membership and that's more demographic factors, which are somewhat outside our control and the property dollar yield is set at the state level. We have very little control of that. And the common level of appraisal is housing property level trends. So it just shows that what we try in and I think we've done a pretty good job this year and partially hated by that act one 27, we try and keep tax rates level and do what we can to make things reasonable budgets. A lot of it is outside what we have under our purview. All right, to look at what the articles are on the at the annual meeting. These first seven articles which are on the morning are kind of the boilerplate articles that we do every year. We elect a moderator, we elect the school district clerk, we elect the school district treasurer. Article four is to hear the school district officer reports, so that'll be a presentation similar to this one, probably with some more informational about slides about kind of what things are happening in the schools as opposed to just the budget. And then the article five is setting the school district offer salaries. That's how much money we get for being on the school board. Article six is the school district treasury salary and article seven is to allow the district to borrow money in advance of revenue since a lot of the payments that we get are in November but we need to start paying salaries in July or August and so we need to be able to pay those salaries before we get revenue in. And this allows us to do that. Article eight is the article that we vote on the budget amount. So you vote yes for this, if you approve the budget, no if you want to vote it down. And that can be amended that night, right? Yes, that can be amended that night. Article nine is where the voters approve an amount to put into the capital improvements and maintenance of facilities fund. As I said at the beginning, we have a $997,000 audited surplus from FY23 and we either use that money to lower the tax rate this year or to put it aside for future building needs. And we're asking that we put as much as we can into the building reserve fund. And what we currently have for building reserve funds is the audited balance from FY23 is the $1,441,000. In FY24, we did some building work. These were projects that were using, there were projects that provided energy savings. So this was lighting on both campuses, the replace the Bethel boiler with the wood pellet system. And there's also some heating and ventilation improvements. And these all provided cost savings for energy savings. And so there was a bond that was put out using that cost savings to fund these projects. So it was about $2 million worth of work. And we wound up having to contribute some from the capital reserve fund because the bond rates wound up going up higher than was anticipated at the beginning, but for $2 million worth of work, we wound up doing up just $181,000 out of the capital projects reserve fund. Just to clarify, lease, not bond. Lease, not bond, sorry, yes, lease. Sorry, yes, no vote required. Each year we transfer, we have a standing budget item to transfer some money into the capital reserve fund. So even when we don't have surpluses, we're still putting aside money for building maintenance needs. So that's what that $40,000 is. And then if we approve this article, that would add $900,000 to it, leaving us with $2 million, $200,000. Now, the first batch of projects that we did were all the projects that basically paid for themselves from the energy savings. We have a next batch of projects which don't have the savings associated with them. So this is where we actually need to spend money to have things happen. And the main highlight of that would be a Performing Arts Center expansion project. This would be adding space next to the old gym, old elementary gym in this campus to provide a practice space for our burgeoning music and arts programs, like the drama and music programs. We're really kind of pushing the space that we currently have down in the basement here. And there's a need for expansion of that or the need for new space for that program. And the music boosters have done a really great job of working with, they're putting together this proposed projects and raising money for it. And so that would be the kind of big chunk of money for this would be adding that expansion and the other projects that are important and we would like to do at the same time, one is to renovate our entrances in Bethel and Royalton to be up to modern standards as far as security and mostly security. And the main one on this campus would be the high school entrance, which is around back and currently is just a single door where you're walking directly into the building. And so this would be making it so that it has double doors that can be where you can let people in, have them see them and then allow them access to the rest of the building through that back entrance. There's also this library currently doesn't have adequate ventilation or really any ventilation. So, and over the last couple of years, we really found that or learned the benefits of proper ventilation for health and wellness. So adding ventilation upgrades to this room. Wasn't there a cafeteria ventilation upgrade included in that too? So it'd also be for the cafeteria in here. And great to the gymnasium performance space to make that a better performance space. Jamie, you had something you wanted to add? Yeah, I apologize. I worked on the slide. What's also missing is there's some drainage issues that we need to take care of as well from the original gymnasium. That's part of that 5.2 million figure. And that got left off this chart. So I apologize for that. If you're adding up the math at home, that's why it's not quite accurate. We'll get that fixed for next Monday. Yeah, so that would be drainage out in the back parking lot. So that's a fairly big project. This is some renderings of what it might look like. I don't, it's certainly not finalized yet as far as what the actual plans would be. With that $5 million total, the music boosters have been working on getting additional kind of private donations and funding to do a chunk of that. We have a lot of that money from the building reserve fund. We like to use a chunk of that. And we are hoping to go out for a bond this fall to do the remainder looking in the $2 million range for that. The way like we're, our current bond that we have for this South Royal Gym is going to be expiring in I think it's five years. And so this bond will really start, would really start kicking in once that one expires. So we really wouldn't be impacting our budgets significantly with this proposed addition and donations. So the final article is for the election of members for the board of directors. There are two seats up for election. There's one seat in Royalton for a three-year term expiring in 2027. Peggy is running for that, is on the ballot for that seat and in Bethel there's a three-year term as well. And there currently is nobody on the ballot for that. The vote for the school director positions is via Australia ballot on Tuesday, March 5th beginning 8 a.m. and ending at 7 p.m. at both the Bethel and Royalton campuses. And if you have absentee ballots they need to be turned into the polling places by 7 p.m. on March 5th. So that's all we have as far as our presentation at this point. We welcome any questions people have. Everybody should have received a budget mailer in the house all the line-by-line things in the mail. I just talked to someone who didn't. Oh really? Kevin Bonney said they didn't get to hear. Okay, well if you haven't received one, let us know and we can certainly get you one either digital or print out a copy. We checked in with the town clerk to make sure the updated voter registry has the right addresses. I actually have two, so if you want this one you can have this one. So are there any questions anybody has? Yeah, I heard you say that there was some students when you were being added and a bunch of students and all this stuff, but you haven't been sending real numbers as far as what the actual student count is not being enhanced. Yeah. Could be right on the top of the principle report actually that the total student numbers. In the mailer, I'm gonna talk to the principal for it. And I have in 2021-22 we had 173 students, nine through 12. 2022 to 23 we had 193 and this year as of today we have 216 students, so it's an increase of 43 students in two years in the high school. Yeah, so you can see the enrollment numbers for all the different schools on page seven of the mailer. It doesn't have for previous years, but it has this year's numbers. What page was that? Page seven. So it sounds like we're getting some students from rental. And so do we pay transportation for that? Is that what I'm asking from the beginning of the? No, the Tri-Valley Transit would be for sending, why don't we have Jamie talk about this? He knows better about those groups. Yeah, thanks Andrew. So just so folks know, we're estimating an increase of tuition paying students just at the high school level of additional 19. We did not budget fully for all 19 in the revenue in the event that some changed their mind. So that's good news. And those are coming from school choice districts primarily within our supervisory union. In regards to Randolph, they're able to attend our school through something called Wanooski Valley School Choice. There's actually statewide school choice at the secondary level. And the board every year provides the amount of students they allow to come in to a district and how many they're allowed to go out. And so the students that are attending our school right now via Randolph are coming to us via Wanooski Valley School Choice. No money switches hands and we do not provide transportation for those students to come. They have to find that transportation on their own. Great, thank you. Andrew, I have a question. Okay Bob. Actually, the state projected an 18% increase in property taxes and they asked the schools to help them to reduce that. So have we done anything to help reduce that? No, I mean, you can see that our property taxes aren't going up by that much. And certainly part of the reason that they passed the law was to provide support for districts like ours. And so I don't think that they were, the purpose or the goal was to have us cut funding for positions in order to save property taxes around the state. Like I think, our goal as the board is to provide reasonable tax rates for our taxpayers but also provide support for our students. And the budget that we're proposing is what we think is most appropriate to provide the education our students need. So, I don't think we had a goal of lowering taxes elsewhere as part of our curriculum. So, and I share on the two boards so sometimes that will more information but so what, so the governor had obviously a snap, he got his information before all of us, right? So this was several months ago, he started talking about 15 to 20% increases in taxes and those were divided up into three things. One, they had kind of surveyed the towns on what the towns were thinking that their budget increases might be. The second piece was the governor was taken into account the effects on the new waiting at the school that we just talked about, the Act 127. And then the third piece was the governor talking with the tax department about how the common level of appraisals across the state of Vermont were going down which would affect, in this case, it affects mostly the schools' budgets because they're most impacted by common level appraisal. So that was kind of where those, what we'll call averages came from. And as you can see, some districts or some towns are, you know, that is there. You know, I mean, an example of that was the town of Hartford, you know, they have a 37% increase in their potential increase at the school level. And I'm sure they have a town level increase as well, right? I will say that, I don't know as much in the world to an end, but on the bevel end, I mean, we are looking at at this point, you know, a two cent increase in school potentially and then a about a three cent increase on the town. So it's five cents. So it's, you know, much less than the 15, 18% that we'll say the average Vermont are maybe looking at. And then it looks like Royalton, you're at two cent reduction at the school level. I don't know what the town is looking at at this point, but we. The other thing I would say is the other thing that's contributing to that increase was the COVID funds going away. And a lot of districts put positions into their, they use that money to hire people that then they have to keep paying from their budgets. We didn't do that. So, you know, I think we didn't do anything this year to lower taxes, but I think that we proactively works to avoid being in the situation where we would have to like increase our budget this year because we wouldn't have those federal funds coming in. So, you know, I think we have, looking at a longer term view, I think that we've been trying to budget responsibly and, you know. No, I don't say you haven't budgeted responsibly. I don't think you have that, but I think the whole state's in trouble. I think each individual school should do what they can. Well, I mean, if you look at the drivers of the cost increases, though, again, looking at that other slide, it's mostly not things that we're like, we're not adding like, I mean, I guess you could say that the tech position or something is like surplus or, you know, like not essential, but like most of it is healthcare increases and things that aren't something that the schools should be solving. It should be solved at a state or federal level. And it's not really, you know, like, I don't think because healthcare costs are going up, we should cut teachers and educate our students less. I don't think you should cut teachers either. Yeah. But I've made a lot of high school budgets in my life and I noticed that there's places in this budget that there's extra money. And the only people that didn't know it are probably the business management superintendent. But I go along with your budget and everything that you've asked for. I'm just asking if you've done anything to help reduce the cost of our budget and helping the state to meet their goals. 18% tax, property tax is going to be tough on everybody. I just want to, I don't know how many of you looked at the town report, but this really shocked me. In 2023, there were $311,483 of delinquent taxes. That figure is usually sits right around $20,000 or $30,000. And when it's finally collected, it's gone down to 12 to 1,400. That's an unbelievable figure to me. And that just tells me that the people in this town are having a hard time paying their taxes. It isn't that they don't want to. I think they're just having a hard time doing that. And when this town report was printed, the tax collector collected 151,000, there's still 192,000 outstanding. Now she probably collected some of that since then. But when you think about the difference between 20 and 30,000 and 300,000 or 200,000, that people aren't able to pay because they're probably trying to put food on the kids plate and eat in their homes. And yet, if they don't pay those taxes in a year, their properties go up for a tax sale. So if you are a property that's worth 300,000 and it's worth 8,000 or you pay 8,000 in taxes, let's say, it goes up for a tax sale and you still can't pay the 8,000, you lose your $300,000 home for $8,000. And I think some of that is getting out of control for people. So I just hope that if I were in your position, I would do my best to lower the taxes for the people in this town because they're obviously having a hard time paying. Yeah, they are. And you're not feeling, I mean the town tax and the school tax, but some attention has to be paid to those people that are having a hard time paying their taxes. And it's obvious that it's, but that number of people has increased tenfold. So, I mean, I mean, not the new politics, but I mean, I would say that based on the numbers you saw this evening, that we have been responsible. You're looking at, in your town, you're looking at a two cent reduction on your tax rate at the school level that you did last year, right? Yeah, but what I'm seeing is, it doesn't matter that we're getting that because the number of people who can't pay their taxes has gone up 10 times in this town. But what I'm saying is, how would that be the school's responsibility for that? You're school-hearted. But we're seeing a reduction on the school tax. The taxes go through the school, right? Right, but if the taxes haven't changed, that the tax rate hasn't changed, basically people are less able to afford it. And that's more of a society-wide issue than a school-specific issue. And if we're looking long-term, the goal should be to provide a good education so that this is, I think that this is kind of a bigger issue than what we can deal with at the school level. I agree. We definitely take tax rates into consideration and that's part of why we're taking this long-term view of not adding extra spending when there was the COVID relief money. We specifically looked at that and said we don't wanna have positions so that we're not dealing with the tax rate increase later. And when we did have that extra money coming in, we put it into the building reserve fund so that when there was expenses, like needing to have ventilation in this library, which is something that's really needed or securing our building entrances, which again is kind of like something that's pretty important these days. We'd be able to do that without having a sudden increase in tax rate. So we're trying to maintain a consistent and predictable tax rate rather than, like we had $700,000 that we put into the building reserve fund last year. We could have just taken that out of a, we could have used that to lower taxes, eight cents last year. And then it would have just gone right back up this year. So you wind up with these C-Song tax rates and I think that that is a harder thing to deal with than just providing kind of temporary relief. And you're not being critical. No, I understand that. I spent 30 years in education and I've served on the board, you know, probably six years in my life and I've served as a select man three years in my life in this town. But I have a genuine feeling for the people who have lived here and have raised their kids here and now are trying to just survive. And I'd like to see, I'd like to think that when we make these budgets and we ask for money that we're doing them, you know, that we're thinking about them. Yes. And I don't mean to sound like reflexively defensive or something like that. I'm just trying to explain that we do take into consideration, you know, try and serve all the constituents, you know, taking the law of view is kind of our way to do it. This is an exceptional time. $300,000 worth of unpaid taxes. 10 times what it usually is. And that's, you know, and I'm just saying that these people are having a hard time paying their taxes. It isn't that they don't like education and they love it here. And, you know, they've always supported it. Yeah. I mean, you know, and I think now, you know, for some people it's very, very hard. Yeah. No, we definitely hear that and are aware. One thing I would point out is it's been an exceptional time also for the students and, you know, like remote learning and the COVID disruptions really did put a strain on the system. And so that's partially why, like, you know, we did add some spending, add some positions and partly it is to support the students that are having a hard time with these, you know. So, yeah. I mean, our job here is to kind of weigh all these different things that come out to the best thing that we can come up with. And that's what we try and do. And, you know, we definitely do hear that people are hurting out there and do a try and avoid it. And as one of the things I would ask is- Hey, Bob, why don't you hold your question just because what other people- I think Jamie has to stand up too. Yeah, you might have, Jamie. No. I just wanted to speak to you. I think one of the things that governor was calling on Bob was a lot of districts were spending up to a 10% ceiling within Act 127 because their tax rates were capped. And so the way that law worked is as long as your per pupil spending was under 10%, you could benefit from a tax rate cap and it allowed some districts in the state, I know of one, that budgeted three bond payments ahead of time. That was excess spending. So I think when the governor was saying to look at budgets, he was looking at folks that were utilizing that cap in a way that it wasn't designed to be used. And that's why they quickly came out with HH 50, which removed the cap and provided a transitional decrease in taxes for those districts that lost tax capacity. But he's asking district boards to amend their budgets. And I think he was asking those district boards that were not utilizing that cap the way that it was meant to be used. So my question is not understanding like most of what you're presenting, just skimming the surface. What would happen if, how would it be if you split that 900,000 that you're asking if you put into capital reserve? I totally understand that that makes sense to put money in there. But what happens if you split that money and return some to the taxpayers and some to the capital reserve? I don't know how that would, if it would make much of a difference or... Yeah, so at a current budget level, you can kind of think of $100,000 is about a penny for our tax rate. So if you took 400,000 or 450,000 and basically what we'd be doing is just using that to lower the tax rate or the lower the tax rate this year by 4.5 cents. And then we'd have $450,000 going into the capital reserve. And that's certainly something we can do. That's something that the taxpayers really want to do that at the annual meeting. We can amend it out of forevote and we can amend the budget amount and amend the amount that's going into the capital reserve funds. But at the same time, we have a purpose for that money kind of at this point. So if we did that in the fall, we'd wind up with a $450,000 larger bond that we're asking for. And so that would basically be taking our money and spreading it out over future years. And whether which approach is kind of better a judgment call, so. Can I add to that? Yeah. And also if you use surplus as offsetting revenue and you do not have that kind of surplus in the next fiscal year, you automatically need to take 450,000 off of your offsetting revenue which will then increase the tax rate in the following year. Okay. That's helpful, I understand that. Absolutely. I wanted to go back to what Bob was talking about with the people that were not able to pay their taxes. Just yesterday I was talking with a woman in Bethel, an older woman who had never done the Homestead Declaration and didn't understand how that all works. And so I printed out the stuff for her today and we're gonna meet on Friday and I'm gonna help her fill that out. I'm wondering if maybe you've got some people in Royalton that haven't taken advantage of that. I don't know. Do you know if anybody's offering that? The tax collector collector, yeah. Okay. But if there are people in Royalton who haven't done it either. Yeah, because I mean, that makes a big difference. I'm sure it does. But that's not saying that it's, that there isn't $311,000 worth of taxes that haven't been paid for them. Whether they fill that out or whether they don't. I mean, I can't make them and hopefully somebody can explain to them what it does. But I haven't seen that kind of a figure in all the time I've lived here. So that tells me if you're looking at that figure that there's a lot of people in trouble and they're rightfully so. I don't know about, again, Royalton, but I do know that when I was living in a previous town before I moved to Bethel, there were some people that purposely wanted to get on that list as a kind of a protest thing. And then they go in and pay their taxes afterwards. It was kind of a political thing that they did. And they were usually people that were kind of wealthy. And it was just, they wanted that figure to be in there. So I don't know if anybody in Royalton does that, but Woodstock, they did. And I'll just throw it out there, just for being on the board in Bethel that we haven't seen any significant change in the length of taxes in Bethel or water into a year over year. Now ours typically does flow in the two or $300,000 a year that we're constantly trying to keep up with, but I don't think I've ever seen it below $100,000. So it's. Hours is usually 20 to 30,000. When I look at that figure, it's just shocking. Jamie explained that no money exchanges hands for the, I mean, that's the answer. Renuski Valley, school choice. Yes. Okay. It's just the way that it was written. Like you, the districts set a cap on how many they're willing to let go out and how many they're willing to let come in. So they wind up being relatively even usually. I mean, at this point, I think we have three out and how many we're in this year? More in than out. Yeah, more in than out, but. So what you could choose to go there or rent off and it wouldn't cost us? No. Well, there's a limit of kids, they apply and it's a lottery. So you can't, it's not guaranteed. So if there's already a line of head of you, it's just only so many spots. Yeah, but tuition students, you know, that sending town lines of sending the tuition amount to our district. But there's been that Wuduski Valley school choice between towns that don't have school choice and it just, the first, the student can attend, but it doesn't shift people count or any money. So, but, you know, like if we have capacity, we appreciate having students come in and kind of contribute what they contribute to the school, life of the school and the sports teams and the arts department and whatever else. So you really connect to it kind of a lot. Yeah, you know, unless we are over, have classes that have too many students in them and stuff and so having a student would be a burden, like having somebody come in isn't a bad thing. And it's a good sign for our school that students are choosing this. You know, we really appreciate that we have more students coming into our school because it's a, you know, telling us that we're doing things right and that it's an appealing place to come. So. Thank you. Yes. I read in the paper that we're number two and cost per student. New York is number one on funding. Are we shooting for number one? Just for rotten total? Yeah. And we're number 26, I think it is on our education standard. My son lives in Lebanon, Tennessee. He's got a $350,000 house. This tax is a $1,300. He's got 16 acres up behind me and this tax is a $15,000 on that on raw land. And we wonder why our kids leave in town. My next question. What happens by 2030, the state of Vermont wants to own or control 30% of the land? By 2050, 50% of the land. Who is gonna pay the taxes? What? I mean, I think that these are questions statewide and I'm not sure I have much insight on them. You know, like we look at our budget and do the best we can here locally to provide the education that we feel our students need while also taking no consideration. We're 26 on our scholastic record and we're number two on cost per student. This equation doesn't fight the name. I mean, I think that there's a- Is it something money enjoy? That's not the answer, apparently. Well, I mean, I think that when you are a low population state like Vermont, there are a lot of challenges to rural education. And that's a lot of what the state has. And yeah, I'm not sure I have a lot of insight globally to how our state compares to other states and everything, but- I can't hear what you're saying. Yeah, sorry. I don't know that I have a good answer for you. Again, we do the best with what we see in our budget, but I can't speak. Can somebody better be thinking about it because 2030 isn't very far away. And these are all great questions that you should call up when you get home. You're a representative that serves your area. Or you should talk to your state senators. I mean, you have three. Those are the people that are making these decisions on us. And as you see, I mean, 80% of our budget is already fixed by those people. So we're not driving the bus. We're kind of riding shotgun, you know? And the other part to keep in mind is that the board really is trying to do what's best for our kids so that we can exceed the state average and do our part to make sure our kids are doing the best that they can. And the recent testing, you have thought there's a proficiency of our kids? Well, you know, the BCAP was new this year. And so the record wasn't really accurate, I think, Bob. So I think we'll get a better understanding this year when we take the test. We're preparing that. We just met today with our staff to prepare for the march. And the elementaries we exceeded the state expectation. So the test results have just came out. That's what I wanted to hear. That'll be fair. The report will be at the next board meeting. We have our meeting yet. Yeah. I'm sorry to hear you. The report will come out at the next board meeting. We haven't reviewed it yet, because they just came out. Oh, just looked at it? Yeah. You're kidding me? You're top dog. We did look at the very recently released BCAP data in our data team today in the middle school. And one thing that was very obvious is trying to compare BT-CAP data to what we've taken in the past as the norm to test the ESPAC. They don't line up exactly. So finding an interpretation takes a little bit of a day. In other words, if you look at BT-CAP scores just on the surface, you would see a much, much higher percentage of middle school students. According to that test, we're reaching proficiency. There is a very glaring difference, however, when we try to compare the two years. So we've had two days to dig into what was recently released. We're not putting you off by saying we don't have that prepared for the next board meeting. We have to dig further down than the simply beautiful graphs we were presented by the state. We need to ask questions such as, where are we seeing specific student growth? How is student A measuring against themselves over time? Because we're looking at not necessarily apples and oranges, but kumquat and cantaloupe. They seem very different. So it's going to take a little bit of time. I'd like to look at those scores of which I can open. I think a lot of brain jams involved in looking at tests to make sense of a state and orbit test is a good thing. I'm sure you've heard many expressions about how numbers can be used. We're trying to make sure that what we present to the public is an accurate representation of the growth of our students or anything. That's not the company line. That's what we try to do every time we have these sets of state data that are now more than a year old and we're looking at a cohort that has already advanced more than a year. And I'm not sure what mechanism we have for inviting that kind of input. I'm curious about that myself. We did receive a kind of winter data report at the last board meeting. So you can look at those. If you want, you can look in the website to get the reports from the last board meeting and it has, this is our internal testing, the track my progress. Fasting is for the middle school and elementary school and then there's a new test for the high school that we're using. So it has those results. And I will say, looking at those, we are trending in the right direction. I don't think we're where we want to be exactly but we're seeing positive trends and that's what we're looking for is continuous improvement. That's the goal. Are there any more questions? Anybody online have a question? What happens if they vote it down? What would be the next move? If the budget is voted down, then we would need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new budget. One of the benefits of voting in March is that we don't have to have budgets approved until June. So we'd have time to do a warning and revise the budget and come back with another proposal for people to vote on it and new meeting. What could be the alternative? I mean... How much could you have cut the thing if you had to? I couldn't give you an exact number. How long can last? We can't always have... Right, sure. I mean, I can't give you an exact number. I mean, we did add some positions so certainly we could take those positions back out. But I mean, I don't think I could give you an exact number. I mean, you can cut down to bare bones if you want, but I don't think that's a good idea. I mean, if you've got a half, no. No, absolutely not. You know, 80% of it is staff salaries. And you need to have a certain number of teachers in order to teach a certain number of kids. And so... What's the student-teacher ratio? Do you have those matters? We try to keep within the education quality standard. So it depends on the age. So kindergarten through second grade, they recommend to keep it between, I think it's 17 and 20. Above third grade, you can go up to 25 in a class. In small towns like Vermont, where we have some funky cohorts of kids that the classes just tend to be either really large or really small. So we just do our best to try to keep them, I would say around the 18, in elementary, 18 per class is the average. But, you know, that's classroom teachers. We then have support staff that supports those teachers. And, you know, like we can't completely get rid of guidance counselors and other stuff like that. So, you know. I drive around some of these just grade schools. And I see all the cars are parked in the yard. And you think you're going to a college and I don't think grade schools drive cars. No, but high schoolers park in our parking lots. They're gonna keep them in the right parking lot. High schoolers park in the staff parking lot. They're leaving all on around. Go ahead, Jimmy. I just wanted folks to know that also, if folks want to dig into this budget deeper and look at, you know, line items that folks have questions about, our population trends over the last few years, I'm more than happy to schedule a time to sit down with anybody individually to do so. What I want the public to know too is is that we have a district that is now becoming a place where folks want to come. We're estimating that Rochester is gonna send 80% of their sixth graders over to our middle school next year. That's increased revenue for your district and money that's staying within the supervisor unit and not leaving like we've seen in the past. So what I would say to folks is I hear that it's challenging times right now. I also want folks to know that one of the things in Vermont we have is a statewide ed fund. So what is spent up at U32 in East Montpelier, everyone is also paying for. And what contributes to that is that yield figure that you saw earlier tonight. And so when ed spending across the state is higher, that yield number drops. And we showed you based on ed spending across the state, it could fluctuate eight cents on your tax rate. Eight cents for you to make a difference is $800,000. So I just want folks to remember that yes, we could cut and we could decrease the growth of our district and not be a destination district in school, but just know what we do locally. What happens statewide often contributes increases to your taxes much more often than what local spending actually does. So if you look at these yield changes, from January to February, they're projecting spending across the state is going to go down. That result in an eight cent reduction for you locally. For us to have made that change, we would have had to cut $800,000 out of the budget. So just remember that the ed fund is absolutely statewide and what's spent in Killington or Rutland or Burlington or Montpelier, you also help pay for. How long is this report been out? This one? Yeah. I think I received mine in the mail three or four weeks ago. How many? Three or four weeks ago. I'm not exactly sure. My wife had to go get one at the post update out of rubbish. We didn't get one. I mean, we tried. We get the voters list from your town clerks. We get the voter list from the town clerk. So whatever your address is whatever your voter registry is at your town clerk is what we're given to mail these mailers from. I've been here 50 years. I've heard a lot about my name. What's your name? What? What's your name? Ken. Ken you? Yeah. I'm going to look and see if you're on my list. It should be. If it isn't. If it isn't. If it isn't. If it isn't. If it isn't. If it isn't. If it isn't. If it isn't. If it isn't. I have a question about the administrative assistance to the guidance. Is that a second administrative assistance person or did you guys get rid of one in the last, I don't know, eight years? Yeah, I think they got rid of one for a few years. There was one here, I think. I think we suffered since we haven't really done a great job and there's so many needs in that department that this person could fill. Oh, yeah, and you know and we're increasing our size lies and my student population. So I Don't know what you could do without one. Yeah, you know, well, we haven't done a good job. I don't think It's pouring out there all of us You are on my list Everybody I do not know why you didn't get one it went out to all households on the voters list So I do promise you were on the list Are there any other questions or comments people want to make Um Yes, we that wouldn't so this is Judith are the oh so saying if you put off building improvements and don't keep the surplus You would only increase budget about 3% That is true that if you take the $900,000 and put it directly into the budget then it wouldn't Increase the budget as much But the problem is that then the next year you wind up With that basically you're wind up with a $900,000 budget increase because you don't have a way of Doing that multiple years in a row So if it would help just with this one time of decreasing taxes, but then we wind up seeing the tax to go way back up and you know our judgment call is that these building improvements are important and that's why we are asking people to To put that money towards these building improvements. So, you know, if if the voters have a different opinion then you know, that's You can talk about that at the annual meeting. What's happening with the Rochester school. I Will defer to Jamie on that because that is the Rochester district All right was the question about the high school Well, the Rochester district is part of Rochester Stockbridge So White River Unified District doesn't have access to that and Rochester Rochester pays tuition to White River Unified District when their kids come and at the at a 19,900 so if that original merger had happened Probably we could be looking to access that high school building But right now Rochester Stockbridge is actually looking to sell that building to the town for a dollar in Rochester and the town's looking to Building build some more community-centered type opportunities in that Valley and we expected that votes gonna happen sometime prior to June of this spring. So That that's where Rochester is going with that high school building the actual school district would be selling it to the town of Rochester and Just to clarify the performance art space is primarily for practice spaces for the Band and chorus programs So, you know, even if there is a nice auditorium in Rochester, which as Jamie said, we don't have access to if you did have access to it It still wouldn't be appropriate for daily practice and Needs So that's what this one is looking at in addition to the other other improvements that Renovations need to have oh and I should have had just so folks know that the actual district The Rochester Stockbridge district had committed not to access that building since 2021 so we've had no educational programming in that high school since then We've essentially mothballed it and turned the heat down as much as we can To try to save costs for that district and that's why we're looking to sell it to the town of Rochester Yes, I think there will be more information about that hopefully that like Get that organized but yes I would also like to say that there is going to be a dinner before the annual meeting in Bethel So I hope people show up early so that you can come and enjoy a dinner and meet your neighbors and And there's also childcare provided. So if anybody needs childcare Available and we hope as many people can come out in person as as are able to that meeting I'm a lot to say that where Where is Pretty much for all students Jamie The state I couldn't hear I couldn't hear what that question was. I'm sorry. Can someone just repeat it Universal meals Jamie. Oh, thanks. So, um, the state of Vermont They passed a law last year to provide universal meals and that will be in effect unless that law has changed And so what pays for that is money out of the Ed fund The estimate is it's costing the state about 40 million a year But universal meals will remain in place unless the legislature changed that law changes that law But that was enacted last year and just to remind folks the way we pay for that is out of the Ed fund and The way they generate taxes of that by that is by lowering the yield So that that's one of the things that contributed to a lower yield this year So that does bring up like schools are asked to be do a lot more than they used to you know, like providing meals breakfast lunch for all students when they come in the door and a lot of the social sports and other other services that you know schools weren't asked to do in the past and you know, whether that's appropriate or not is kind of a broader discussion, but it's I think Important to acknowledge that it's not you know It's schools are no longer just the classroom and that's it. So are there any other questions or comments? well, I like thank everybody for coming out really appreciate you guys coming out to I Learn about the budget and provide your feedback And Thanks everybody