 And was that this unit. The charge of the board, the, the charge that the board gives to the superintendent around the district ends. So the district ends are we're set by the community during a very long process before I came on the board. And there are details, but I don't know how many of you have heard about the district ends, but they break down into four categories, a disposition for lifelong learning, academic proficiency, personal development and citizenship. And these really describe the things that we are hoping that our students possess by the time they leave our doors at the end of high school and are ready for their next steps. The 2022 budget for this school year was well supported by the community, despite the fact that there was a reappraisal in town, which changed property values quite significantly. And despite pandemic concerns. This budget really focuses on the needs that our students have to recover both social emotionally and academically from the effects of the pandemic, which is unfortunately still ongoing. It also supports administration's focus on preparing and being more resilient to pandemic challenges and other challenges that we might face over the next year, while we are still meeting these district ends. Thanks Bridget. Yeah. Hey, so I'll cover some of the factors that that impact impacted the development of the FY 23 budget. But on the expenditure side, some of the things that we considered when we were developing the recommended budget for the board was the significant increase, a little over 6% over a 12 month period. That's number 21 and the consumer price index and inflation and in short, that put a lot of upward pressure on everything that we do as a district all the consumables professional professional services supplies equipment that that we require to operate our schools. We also have a required response to the enrollment situations the increased enrollment at both Rick Marcott central school and orchard school. It's also good to note that the high school has has been slightly above capacity for for quite a long time now as well. We have to consider negotiating all three collective bargaining agreements teachers administrators and our union support staff. Those contracts are all expiring in fiscal year 2022, and they're in negotiations now for fiscal year 23 and beyond. And finally on the expenditure side. Like most of the most of the country and all of Vermont really there's a critical labor shortage. And you know it's kind of forced us to do some assessment and make some market adjustments to attract and retain our high quality employees. So we can continue to operate like we normally do. So as of November 1 our full time equivalent the number of people the board approves in the budget. For hiring during any fiscal year. For this year, the board adopted last, you know town meeting day it was approved of 498.18 full time equivalent employees. So far this year and I'll refer back to that labor shortage we've only been able to fill 485.75 of those authorized positions. And this budget as you'll see in a few slides, we propose to increase the local fiscal year 23 budget by three positions for 501.18 total full time equivalents on the revenue side. You know we, we, in this budget, we have an undesignated fund balance from fiscal year 2021. We had a strong financial management year and 21 unfortunately a lot of it was because there were a lot of things that we couldn't do because of the pandemic. So we are able to carry forward as revenue to offset expenses into fiscal year 23 $2 million. That was surplus. That's the general term but undesignated funds from FY fiscal year 21. We also are in the planning process of of how to how to apply and administer about $3.1 million and elementary and secondary school emergency relief funding from from the federal government. And the acronym is ESSER. In this case it's the American Rescue Plan SR three funding. And it's designed to offset pandemic related expenditures and support our recovery efforts. So we, we have been communicating with our stakeholders with the community with teachers and students on how best to apply and administer those funds, and they run through fiscal year 23 and 24. So that we have a close to two years to left to expend those funds. Our state factors, and we can kind of disregard the new because they're, they're almost a week old now. The common level of appraisal came in. The second reduction over fiscal year 22 is common level of appraisal. It dropped 11.04% down to 100.99. So that that's a measure that you know it tries to based on the appraisal cycle that you're in. And the high number that we had last year. So fiscal year 22 was really a direct result of the of the citywide reappraisal in South Burlington that was completed and went into effect in this fiscal year. So that's just a, it's a measurement that that takes actual home sales data and compares it to, to assess value. And that applies applies a factor to try to equal that out statewide are equalized pupils we. It's not quite finalized yet, but our initial projection is that we are going to go down 1.64 equalized pupils from last year it's an important factor in budgeting. It doesn't directly correlate to the number of students we have. So it's in effect level from FY 22 to FY 23. The property yield another major driver of property tax rates in Vermont that had a significant increase from 22 to fiscal year 23. These are projected numbers there the tax commissioners best guess they have not yet been approved by the legislature that will happen usually happens in April May timeframe somewhere in there. The property yields for both property and income yield increased quite a bit up to 12937 which is a conservative estimate and 15484 for fiscal year 23. And you'll kind of see some of the impacts of those a little later in the presentation. Can you, can you just sum up what those state factors mean I wish that I was. Yeah, so first in all of that but it's a little I'd like to say, I'd like to say yes I could do it in one sentence really easily but but not really. They're really the main budget drivers that determine property tax rates in all Vermont towns. So they are set other places but in your in your local, not in your local. In the local level they're set at the state level. And when you combine those with what a school board authorizes or adopts and proposes to spend, along with the, the revenue that's generated from various reasons those are the main factors that determine property tax rates. So last interrupt and learn Glenn when I get to my part of the presentation. I'll refer to the state factors again as we walk through how we get from our expense budget to a tax rate. So we'll touch on them again a little bit later in the presentation as well. Okay, so we have till 605 so we'll move on to the next screen very complex but here we go. So I'm going to talk us through some of the enrollment projections that we have right now. Enrollment has a significant impact on future planning as well as current budget implications. Right now we're seeing increases in enrollment at all five South Burlington schools with our elementary schools experiencing the highest enrollment increases. That puts a further strain on space constraints on Rick Marcott central school and orchard elementary school in particular, which are already at capacity. The board is currently evaluating options for space solutions for the future and is seeking some community output input on those options as well. So, is that 30 students overall total enrollment pre kid at 12. Total enrollment pre K to 12. Our current is 2,536 and projected for the fiscal year of 2023 is 2,566. So that's looking like increases. Let's see we have about seven at Chamberlain seven at Rick Marcott 13 at orchard. And then they drop down at two two and one as we move up into the other levels here. So, you know, really, the concern is that Rick Marcott central school and orchard school are already at capacity. And so we're looking at some options, whether that is redistricting trailers, potential construction for the future. And the school board is charged with working with the community to weigh the options based on some information we've received from a demographer which is where these projections are coming from. Thank you. My pleasure. So the question is now, you know, so what are our budget priorities and facilities mean needs really mean for proposed increases in the board approved fiscal year south Burlington school district budget. The approved budget proposes a 4.8 per 989% increase for the district budget with a 3.64% increase for net education spending. And to talk a little bit about, you know, what that actually means for our citizens in dollars and cents. So we're going to look here to two comparisons we've got on the left some information from fiscal year 2022 on the right for the proposed fiscal year 2023 budget. And at residential tax rates, we see this proposed increase of the 4.89% in budget, equating to a pretty modest $8 per appraised $100,000 of value on average for residential properties. And to note that that's off the back of a $309 reduction per appraised $100,000 of tax assessed value from the fiscal year 2022 budget. So a pretty, you know, significant dip with the approved FY 22 budget. And $8 would be the proposed change from the fiscal year of 2022 per every $100,000 of tax assessed value that taxpayers will see. And you know, what is that money, what is that money getting us in our district walk us through some of the proposed local additions to the fiscal year 2023 budget here. At the district level, we have one position being added. It's the executive director of equity. This is a position that has been in the works for a long time. There's been incredible board and community support, as well as support from students and staff at the same time in this position. This person will round out the executive team with myself as executive director of learning and our executive director of educational support systems. And of course our leader, our superintendent. This position will work together with our team to ensure that our educational systems and all of our programming is more equitable for our students, our staff and our community. So two other district expenses here recently the central office for the South Burlington School District moved out of the middle school building where it had been housed for some time, and has moved to 577 Dorset, which is of course right from the high school. There are some associated costs with that electricity heating for the district offices cleaning contracts being two of those expenses that one will find in the proposed FY23 budget. As for staffing, we have two final positions here. You'll see them on the slide listed as three. We have a proposed solution for adding some administrative support to our elementary schools which are, as we discussed really experiencing significant enrollment increases and have been continuing to do so over time for quite some time now. So there's a proposal for two positions for assistant principals will be shared among the three elementary schools, Chamberlain Orchard and Rick Marcott with a point four of one of those positions being at Gertrude Chamberlain, due to the smaller size of that facility. One final proposed cost is the playground upgrade. This is a long overdue at Gertrude Chamberlain. And the goal here is to improve the playground and you know really the safety and the structures to bring it to a comparable level with the other two elementary schools. I'm just going to remind people they could call us at 862-3966 if they have any questions about the South Burlington FY23 school budget. Thank you. Go ahead Violet. Thank you. I'm going to turn it over to Bridget here to talk to us about some master planning and visioning. In South Burlington when we talk about master planning and visioning we are talking about our facilities. The district is a leader in the state in terms of having a long term capital plan and making sure that we are doing stewardship as we need to on our buildings. But the fact is that all of our buildings are aging and have various problems amongst them. So we know that there are projects for unaddressed needs at all five schools but critically at four buildings at Rick Markott at Orchard at the middle school and at the high school. So Rick Markott and Orchard as we've discussed previously tonight have significant capacity challenges so they're not just at capacity they are way over capacity so the theoretical capacity of Rick Markott is about 350 students. We are up at 415 this year which means that special educators who need breakout spaces don't have those spaces to provide services to students in the way that they should be able to do. It means that we can't add teachers at those schools to address increasing enrollment in terms of classroom sizes and the classrooms are small enough that we can't just add students to a particular class. So we're really up against it at the elementary schools. There is an enrollment committee that includes folks from the community, it includes two current board members Brian Minier and myself, and Dave Hyatt at the middle school, Superintendent Young, and some teachers from across the district to really work out different options for how to address that capacity challenge, both in the short term and in the long term. Administration has earmarked some of the ESSER funding to allow trailers to be brought in at Rick Markott and Orchard. Those trailers would be used primarily to move offices out of the main school building and allow the students to expand into the spaces that are currently taken up by some of those offices. There may be services here or there that need to be provided in those trailers, but for now that is the short term solution to basically give us more time to really think through all the options and the pros and cons of them, and the potential costs and to communicate those to the community and have an even broader community discussion about those. The community will also remember the significant issues that were identified with regard to infrastructure at the middle and high schools during the master planning and vision efforts that culminated in the bond that was unsuccessful. Two years ago, none of those challenges have gone away. The middle school this year will get a new roof. And that was actually approved in a bond that was approved by voters last year. It was the main expense that we asked voters to approve last year. The work was delayed by COVID. There were just a lot of challenges around getting that work done. So that will happen in the coming school year, likely over the summer of this this coming summer. And then the middle school also over the long term we need to be still thinking about all the challenges outlined previously, as well as one of the ideas for potentially addressing the capacity challenges at the elementary schools is whether to bring the fifth graders to the middle school. That's just one of a number of ideas. If we were to do that, there would be a number of spaces that would need renovations or changes or additions at the middle school to make that possible. So the middle school is definitely on the docket for additional work in the coming years. The high school still has infrastructure problems and is over capacity so capacity at the high school is estimated at about 880 students were at 920 years. COVID flow, the growth that had been projected in terms of enrollment, but we are expecting to see an additional 100 or more students over the next few years, and we simply don't have the cafeteria spaces, the congregate spaces, and the classroom space to to meet the students at the high school. So we will need to talk to the community about that again. So to be clear with the community this year there is no bond on the ballot. We don't expect one for it. Well, we're we didn't put one on the ballot for this year. We do expect that there will be a smaller bond, much smaller than the one we were talking about previously on the ballot for next year to address the long term stewardship plan and then master planning will continue to be happening and we will be continuing to communicate with the community about it. Phase one, as we already mentioned will be elementary enrollment, what we're doing in the short term, what that long term solution is, followed by the high school, which is really labeled as the most critical next need, and then the middle school, and then over the long term the city has plans for much more development and we're seeing a lot of increasing enrollment driven by additional housing being opened in South Burlington and being built in South Burlington. And so we continue to talk to the city about making sure that there's space long term carved out in the city, in case there needs to be a site for a new school somewhere down the road, but that would be many years out so that sort of covers master planning and visioning. Gary, if you want to move to the next slide. I think Violet will talk about Esther and then I will go back to talk about tax impact. Thank you Bridget. So, it's important for us to discuss some of the other funding that we have available. You know, as, as the team here we've been really intentional in thinking about master planning and supporting current needs of students imposed by the pandemic. So I'd like to share with the community some of the ways that we're doing this at this time. Our recovery plan can be viewed on the South Burlington website. There is a there is a link here. And if you'd like to, you know, browse more resources we've got plenty of them. I'm going to hit the highlights of some of the spending, what resources are available, and a little bit about our priorities for spending. We know them as the educational and it's the elementary and secondary education relief spending so we, we have an acronym for everything of course in education so we lovingly call these grants the answer grants, and the allocation for the South Burlington school district is about $4.8 million in total. If you add up all three of these grants that will be awarded to us. Right now we're in the process of collecting feedback from the community regarding needs. We've got some proposed plans and we'd really love to hear from you all via the link here or you know, hit the South Burlington website under the tab. COVID and recovery you can find more information. I'll tell you the main pillars that we're trying to support in line with our district ends policy, and our educational recovery plan, our continuous improvement plans, the work that the district has been doing for years are focusing on the social emotional improvement planning for students on the continuation of learning so keeping our buildings up and running operational pieces, and finally academic proficiency, and no particular order is that is the executive director of learning I would never intentionally put academic proficiency at the end of that list were prioritized. Of course they all are linked together. So we'd love to hear from you. Please go ahead and submit feedback as a survey, or shoot us an email if you'd like to weigh in on any of the proposed plans. And with that I'm going to turn it over to Bridget to talk to us about protected tax impacts. So as Gary implied before one of the challenges of school funding in Vermont is that school districts can really only tell their voters on town meeting day what their estimated tax rate will be because two of the key pieces, at least, typically don't get completely nailed down until April or May, well after voters have voted. So I'll walk you through our calculation and our best estimates of what we expect this budget to produce in terms of a tax rate. So you start in this calculation with your expense budget this year, we are putting on the ballot, the board is asking for a 58.344 million dollar budget for fiscal 23. The difference of $2.7 million and an increase of 4.89% from fiscal 22. Then you subtract out offsetting revenue offsetting revenue includes that $2 million carry forward that Gary talked about the four. It includes in our district, a decent number I think we have in our budget right now an estimate of about 50 tuition students who come from other districts and those school districts pay for those students to come to South Burlington. Their tax dollars come to us to fund those students taking advantage of the education in South Burlington. And then there are other grant funds title one and title two there's a whole list of different grant funds for different programs and different types of education. And that makes up 13 about 13.6 million dollars this year, which is about $1.1 million from last year or an increase of 9.25%. And again that increases mostly driven from financial management and COVID impacts that allowed us to have that carry forward that gets you to your net educational spending and not educational spending is what the district is asking for from the Ed fund and the state Ed fund includes property taxes. It includes sales and use taxes. It includes lottery funding. It includes a number of different sources of revenue but this 44.7 million is what we're asking for from that Ed fund. That's up 1.57 million from last year or an increase of 3.64% and Gary if you want to move to the next slide. Thank you. And so you start with net Ed funding as you're trying to get to your property tax rate, because this is what local taxpayers are responsible for paying in property taxes as our portion of what goes into the state Ed fund. So we divide that net Ed spending by an equalized pupil number equalized pupil number is a number that is provided by the state based on data that we provide to them about how many seated resident pupils we have about what their needs are in terms of their poverty level as defined by nutrition benefits and who qualifies for them. They also give a heavier weight to students who have English as a second language. They give a heavier weight to high school students. They give a lower weight to preschool students. All of those numbers factor into this equalized pupil number that they send to us. So you divide net Ed spending by that equalized pupil number. And you divide that number by the state calculated yield number. And so that yield number sort of drives property tax significantly and that number is set by the legislature. There's a yield bill every year that gets approved along with the state budget. And that really depends on how much is in the state education fund, how many one time funds are put into the Ed fund. For example, this year there's about 90 million dollars in federal funding. And there's a big debate about whether that's going to be put into the Ed fund and you and that could potentially impact yield. In fact, we were given two different yield estimates normally we get one from the state in December we got to we use the more conservative the lower number. This one assumes that that 90 million is not applied to the Ed fund. So you divide Ed spending per equalized pupil by your yield to get a non CLA impacted tax rate. We left the CLA the common level of appraisal that Gary talked about before we left that off of this slide. Once you apply that CLA you divide that number by the CLA to get your homestead tax rate. We are expecting that our homestead tax rate will increase in South Burlington based on this budget by less than a penny so about 0.84 of a cent from 1.3249 to 1.3333 so an increase of 0.63%. The non homestead rate is set by the state and then the CLA for a given community as applied to it. So we estimate that the impact of this budget on our non homestead taxpayers. So businesses and owners of second homes and that kind of thing in South Burlington would be a 1.99% increase. And then we can go to the next slide please. And Gary I'll hand it over to Gary to talk about the income, the impact on folks who pay property tax based on income. Yeah, so the, I know we don't have much time but pretty complex system for income sensitized property tax payment. So let's just simplify and say that if you pay solely on income, that means, like, you don't pay partially on your home value and partially on your income, but if your home value meets the, the requirements to be fully income sensitized. The tax rate went down pretty significantly to 2.25% of your household income if you pay solely on income. That's a pretty significant. That's a lot of about 6568% of all Vermonters pay based on income. Very, very important. And the reduction here is very impactful to our community. This slide, this slide covers the homestead tax rate history. These are, these are just averages five and 10 year averages. The percentage of increase in spending over five years is 3.46% over 10 years is 3.33% that's on expenditures, the change in tax rate over five years is a negative almost 3% reduction in tax rate. And over 10 years it's a 0.31% negative reduction in tax rate over the last 10 years. Districts comparative districts that are, you know, in, in Northern Vermont, these are all districts with over 2,500 equalized pupils and this is kind of one of the gauges we use to see like, how responsible are we being are we, are we on target with with our budgeting process. We are we're, we're the third lowest for people spending among districts with 2,500 or more students, like districts are our closest peer districts by size. And we have just a couple more minutes but if you go back to that slide. Based on what you said, aren't those numbers affected, for example, by the number of children in poverty the number of people that need federal support. They are possibly the number of school buses that have to be paid for in a rural community I mean they're different factors that go into those numbers is that right. There are in the equalized people number themselves there. It's a weighted calculation. I think that the point that we are, we are trying to make with this slide is that we, when we look at at large districts in general we look at our closest contemporaries. You can see that they're all fairly close there's only. It looks like maybe about a $600 disparity in per pupil spending among all those districts, the larger districts that are kind of the ones we compare ourselves against. But we are, you know, we are kind of right in the middle of that equalized for people spending. Yeah, thanks Kerry. You're welcome. This is South Burlington for FY 23 compared to the statewide estimates. The state was projecting a 4.28% increase in in educational spending. South Burlington is proposing 3.64% increase. The state was expecting equalized pupils across the state to reduce by four tenths of 1%. We are projected to go down 6 100 7% in equalized people count and growth and spending per equalized people the state's estimating 4.74% growth and per people spending and we are projecting 3.7% increase in. The average equalized per people spending in the state is $18,023 and we are proposing with this budget to spend $17,419 and 41 cents. And just to recap and remind people this is looking like about $8 on every $100,000 of taxable property, assuming you don't get any. Yeah, property tax. Subsidies. So, and this follows FY 22 that had a pretty significant drop in your school budget expenses. Yeah, there's a lot of numbers. And I think it's kind of really important that I think demonstrate that that the South Burlington school district is being very responsible and careful in how you spend the money. And despite the constraints of the population growth that you have which is going to require some longer term investments. But I think when people go to the ballot box, they are really driven by what it means for their pocketbook. They are reflected in the numbers that you're presenting. So just to wrap up. Yeah, yeah, I guess, I guess we would wrap it up and I'll turn it over to Bridget but this is what would appear on the ballot, the three items as far as budget that would appear on the ballot. And this is what we want to make sure people know because there's often a confusion in the community about what the increase in expenses is versus what appears on the ballot, the increase in the expense budget that 4.89% does not appear on the ballot. What we ask people to approve is the total overall budget, the spend for equalized people, and the change in per pupil education funding. So our per pupil spend is going up by 3.68% rounded up to 3.7 here. So this is what people should expect to see when they, they either mail in their ballot or when they go to the voting booth on March 1. And when are ballots, do you know when ballots will first be available? Yes, so my understanding and Gary correct me if you have any newer information my understanding from the city clerk was that ballots should be available starting on February 9 at 180 Market Street which is where the new city hall is located. Folks can vote early at the new city hall. They can also of course request mail in ballots through the Secretary of State website. I don't believe there's any, any efforts on to mail ballots to everyone like we did last year during COVID. So if people want mail in ballots they don't need to have any special need or anything they can just go to Secretary of State website and request it. Those ballots need to be in the hands of the city clerk though, before March 1 so that they can be included in the full count. And of course polls will be open from 7am to 7pm on March 1 at the middle school for two of our districts at Chamberlain School and at Orchard School for folks to come and vote in person. Well, I want to thank you all very much for presenting the FY 23 Seth Brilinkan School District budget. Gary Makrez who works hard on operations and finances Violet Nichols who assures a high level of educational quality and Bridget Burkhardt who has to keep everybody together as the chair of the board and I know David Young the superintendent isn't here this evening but he has is working with a great team. Thank you so much for your time. And don't forget to vote on March 1 or before you can get your ballot to the South Brilinkan City Hall or request them from the Secretary of State. Thanks for watching and stay tuned to continuing coverage of town meeting 2022 here at town meeting TV.