 I'd like to call the meeting to order at 6.01 p.m. Welcome, as I said just a moment ago, the main purpose of this meeting tonight is to set our FY22 announced tuition for elementary and high school level students. And hopefully everybody received your packet from Tara earlier this week. So we can offer a little bit of guidance about the budget and what we might hope to see next week at our regular meeting on the 19th. So without further ado, our first agenda item is adjustments to the agenda. Is there anything that anyone feels like we need to add, move around, et cetera? If I don't happen to see you, please feel free to just speak up. Okay. So that brings us to our first discussion item, which is the fiscal year 2022 announced tuition rate. Tara, would you like to just share a little bit of information about that? I don't know if we can project that sheet that you shared previously, but that's the breakdown of it. Thank you. Good evening, everybody. So yes, this is, we have to set each year by January 15th, the announced tuition rate that I then send to each of the schools in the state of Vermont that you receive tuition students from. We also have to submit it to the agency of education, which they then release a notification to all school districts of what everybody's announced tuition rate is. So again, this is what you would receive from a student coming to your district from another district in the state of Vermont, non-resident student. So last year, your current year, your announced tuition rate is $17,137, and the recommendation for FY 22 would be based on the current budget that we have projected of $12,026,099, less your offsetting revenue of $1,108,899, less the transportation assessment that you receive of $416,652. For a total of $10,500,548 divided by your equalized pupil of $596 gives an announce, sorry, that should say announce not allowable, tuition of $17,618.37. So I had just recommended increasing that, rounding it up to $17,650. Thank you. Does anyone have questions about that, or does anyone want to make a motion and then we can discuss? So I'll make a motion that we set the allowable tuition or the announced tuition for elementary and secondary to be $17,650. I'll second that. We have any discussion about this announced tuition rate of $17,650? What is the offsetting, what's the offsetting revenue? That's what you receive locally. So we take that out of the calculation to set your tuition rate. We receive that from Bethel and Royaltons. Yeah, so that minus your offsetting revenue, that's what's in your budget that you receive from your taxpayers and Royalton and Bethel and what you receive from the state education fund. So that comes out of the formula to what you would charge sending schools. Is it pretty standard to remove the transportation costs? I mean, it does seem strange charging so much less than we have for people costs. You can set your announced tuition rate where you want to. This is the recommendation based on the formula that the agency of education gives us. The challenge that you run into is if you overcharge your tuition and when the allowable tuition is actually set by the state and if you charge too much, there is a potential that you have to pay back those sending districts, those funds. What is our allowable tuition? Do we know what it was last year? It has not been released yet from the agency of education. What was it last year compared to what we charged? We still don't even know last year's annual. Your allowable tuition hasn't been released from the AOE. The AOE has not released last year's allowable tuition yet. What's the last year's allowable tuition we know? What have been 19? I think that was in, was it on the packet that we had? I thought I remembered the previous year. So we have the announced tuition for the previous years are announced, but not our allowable yet. All right, so in FY 19, the elementary allowable tuition was $21,600. The secondary was $13,394. So the state breaks it up. So if we average that. And you can go 3% above or below it. Is there? Brings you to 17,497. Is there any inclination or sense that in the past we may have gone too low and that might have been one of our fiscal challenges? Well, I mean, added revenues, added revenue. I mean, any secondary student you're getting in middle and high school, I mean, Reed can correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think we're necessarily adding full-time staff for it, right? Like it's really offsetting revenue. So it's good. So the question is, do you wanna get received more offsetting revenue than not? One of the things to think about is is I looked for us to continue to market, Rud, to your sister districts is that the SU and Rud can kind of help try to control costs across the SU. What I don't wanna do is put us at a price point where we're charging significantly more than potentially local schools. Right now you're pretty competitive, right? The Sharon Academy can only charge the state average. And you're less than Thefford Academy and you're less than Harford now. You're also less than Woodstock and you're less than Randolph. Yep. Payne Mountains, I don't know. Do you know where Payne Mountain announced? Yeah, Tara? I don't have theirs yet. Williamstown? Because we do compete for Chelsea students. Right. I received today Orange Southwest, which was 18630. Thatford is 19965. Berry is 1682. Hartford is 189. They went up significantly. Yeah, from 172. Woodstock or Windsor Central is 185. Rutland is 167. And I don't think we have any risk of Mill River, but theirs was 166. And Montpelier was 17,000. So those are the ones that I've received so far. We don't have Middlebury yet, because I know Rochester sometimes kids go that way. No, I don't have theirs yet. Okay. It sounds like we're competitive. Having said that, I know that families look less at this than some of the programming. So I think it's really important to think about striking a balance between what we can offer in terms of programming and keeping our costs in line with what communities can afford. All right. Any other discussion or questions related to our announced tuition? Andrew, I don't think that was a satisfying answer necessarily to what you were looking for. No, I think that we have no tuition. I do think us raising it isn't going to cost us tuition students per se. I would be happy to have a conversation with our sister districts about setting us as a spending school and us giving them a lower rate as some sort of deal there where we get more if we charge less. But right now it doesn't seem like we get, it affects our student population one way or the other. So, yeah. Sister districts. We do have a new committee together to try to increase our approach to recruitment of students across the SU. Reed's been organizing that with Owen and Andrew and actually your sister school principals are on that to better support us in regards to how could we better infiltrate and a market, run high school across our sister districts. And so that is a bit of a new approach because I've been talking to other district boards about, you know, tuition's driving them, their budgets. They don't have control of it. So it would make sense for us to try to as much as possible, keep our students within the SU because that's something we can control. So do know in other district meetings, I am having those conversations. I'll just, you wouldn't know, you're not there necessarily. So you wouldn't know that, but. Okay. Jamie, do you recognize yourself? Thank you. Go ahead. Jamie, are you recommending this tuition rate? I think it's a fair tuition rate. And I think the more that I can say that we offer a high quality program at a more reasonable cost, I think that we're gonna get more and more buy-in from our other communities when the SU, the other eight, in regards to partnering us with us to make certain that students in those other buildings that the first thing that they're thinking about is RUD because it aligns with the work we're doing, either K6 or K8. And there actually is, I mean, there are other districts who are, you know, they're learning more as we talk about this that secondary tuitions are out of their control completely and it's driving their budget and their tax base. So, you know, I think that they're really starting to wrestle with how can they try to have more control over that. So I think that this is generally a fine tuition. I might increase it a little bit because we do provide some transportation. So taking all the transportation costs out things a little over. So I might make a motion to modify it to 17.8 or something like that, if anybody has thoughts on that. Is there any downside to modifying it to 17.8? No, I mean, I think we'll come in within that allowable tuition. I mean, if you wanted to go 19, I'd caution you because I think we might have to pay back, right? So I wouldn't want you to get to a place where we collect revenue and have to pay back other districts because that does have to happen sometimes. But, you know, I don't think there's anything to modify it at that regard. Okay, so that would involve amending the motion. So yeah, I would accept your friendly amendment to my motion. Okay, to change the announced tuition to 17.8. Yeah, 17,800. Do we still have a second for that? I'll second. Okay, right. That was just a random number I pulled out. So, you know, if anybody has a different number. Well, if we're talking about how transportation, you know, we're gonna be responsible for transportation for these students. How much do we anticipate or what do we usually spend for that transportation? And would that $300 additional really cover it? So what's in this formula is your home-to-school contract amount from Butler? Yeah, so as part of that, we're doing a bus, or at least we were doing a bus from Randall, or Rochester, the Rudd and from Chelsea to Rudd. And I think we wanna do that regardless because we're trying to attract those students. So, but, you know, I don't think it's unfair to include some of that cost of tuition rate. Yeah, and other districts are also sending buses there within their tuition too. Just, I mean, that's part of what you battle is multiple districts are sending buses to those locations. It's not like we're the only ones doing it. Right, so it comes down to convenience and programming for families, I think. How many tuition students are we currently projecting for next year just to know what the ballpark is for at least $1,000 additional, what are we? I'm like 40 something. Give me one second, Andrew, I just gotta open that tab up. Sure, assuming it is around 40, that would be $40,000 for every thousand. So something like one, one and a half, 1,500 would be one cent on our time. I have 35 students built in their revenue budget at the $17,650 in that budget I emailed you that we're looking at tonight. Okay. But I think that that's generally the ballpark. So to lower our taxes at one cent, if we've got the same number of tuition students around about, I don't know that we need to be looking at it. But for some reason, I lost the last part of what you said, Andrew, I'm sorry. I'm not necessarily saying we should be looking at it like that, I just was curious for the tax, like the impact on our part. It won't have any impact on your tax rate. It's only a $5,000 increase. For the 200, Tara, he was talking about a thousand bucks a piece. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. No big deal. Okay. Anyway, I'm happy with the 1780. Anybody have other ideas? Okay. And so that's the motion we currently have on the floor after the friendly amendment. Any other questions or thoughts about that, setting that as our announced tuition rate? Okay. None. All in favor of approving $17,800 as our FY22 announced tuition rate, say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay. So we have said our announced tuition rate for 2022 at $17,800 per pupil. Right. Thank you. That brings us to the next part of our agenda and Tara emailed us all on the 12th, the FY21-22 budget proposal. And so hopefully you all have that copy from a couple of days ago in your email. Tara, is there anything you wanna say about that before we jump in to that discussion? So again, this is a preliminary conversation knowing that we're hoping to be able to approve the budget at next week's meeting. And so I think Jamie and Tara are looking for feedback on how to prepare a budget for us for next week that most reflects what we want to see and want to bring forward to the voters of our community. And I can just highlight again what this budget does have in it and doesn't, just so we can recap it. And then if I miss anything, Andrew and Reed or Tara can speak to that. So I'll start by, if the board had time to look at your tax sheet, this budget, even though it is down $72,019.48, it's still represent a 9 cent increase in Bethel and a 13 cent increase in Royalton. And that's really the bad news. Your administrators have worked hard on this. They worked hard to prepare a budget that went down without having any detriment to a program. There's some reductions in programming, but there hasn't been an elimination of a program. And I'll talk to you about what adjustments we've made to programming is. We feel like we can still provide a high quality world class education for our students and recruit and attract students with this budget going down. But what we didn't have in our control was the fact that there was a significant drop in CLA in both towns, especially in Royalton. And if you look at that, that impact on the Royalton tax rate is about just seven cents in change alone. My sense is we must be coming up to a point where reappraisal should be happening in Royalton soon because when you see the CLA start to get down in this figure, it usually speaks to the fact that we better reappraise here in the next couple of years. So that's been a huge impact on your tax rate. The yield is about what we said last time in Royalton's close to four cents. And in Beffle, it's three and a half cents. And then the actual budget itself is about a one to two cents, depending on the town. So what else drove it? Well, we did lose some equalized pupils, not a ton this year, thank goodness, just a couple. But of course that, even though we reduced the budget, that is our divisor. So that's your tax sheet, that's where we're at. So if folks are wondering, why are we coming in with a budget under this current year? Well, we felt like it was really critical due to the pandemic and the current financial times to come to you with a budget that's fiscally responsible that didn't eliminate a program and try to keep taxes down as much as possible. And that's what this budget represents. So what you should know though, is that we did increase our outdoor education slightly for the middle and high school as we look to increase pathways programming. I wanna remind you that this does have a full pathways coordinator within the high school budget. That's a new position to help facilitate more personalized learning and get us up to speed and in a more competitive place around other high schools in that regard. We didn't eliminate any of your AP courses at the high school level. Those remained in place and intact. We did choose not to replace the foreign language teacher that left last spring in this budget, but that means that that's not impacting programming from this year to next. We also chose still not to replace a music teacher in this budget, but that still keeps you with three music teachers of which the administration is confident we can meet the needs of your students at. In addition to, we did budget an additional $10,000. I believe it's 10 read. I'm looking for you to shake your head for music lessons. Is that about right? Yeah, 12,000. 12, all right, thank you, Reed. So about $12,000 for music lessons. There is also, you have folks that have provided lessons all along. We've also been contacted by Trey Fisk, who was a graduate of Sharon Elementary and went to Sharon Academy who has an upstart business where he has world-class musicians. He went to school at, was it Berkeley? I think so, I've checked out his website. Yeah, it's B Sharp, it's pretty cool. And so we're already in certain districts and I don't know, I can't speak for Rod. I know at least in Sharon and Tumbridge we already have students connected with lessons with his music teachers. They're virtual, but they expand all different vocal and instrumental opportunities for kids. And so that's an exciting partnership that we're looking to add to the music program. We did slightly reduce foreign language in the sense of at the elementary level. And what that means is we're looking to approach, I've mentioned this before culturally and trying to embed more cultural, world culture at the elementary level, but students will still have full access at the middle and high school level for foreign language. We restructured P and Drivers Ed a bit. It won't reduce opportunities for kids to access. We're just using staff different, but that did result in some reduction in FTE in that area. But it will not change anything about how students access Drivers Ed. It's more about scheduling and being more efficient with the staff we have and the personnel and licensures we have. The other reduction that occurred was elementary health. There is a reduction of FTE there in this budget. And you may have noticed that if you went through the budget lines. And then there's one, we went from five secretaries across the two campuses down to four. Secretaries across the two campuses. And finally, there is a reduction of two support staff across the two campuses. So two regular ed support staff down. This budget represents. And then we had someone leave this year and it was a management decision not to replace them. And that was at the elementary level and they haven't been in place all year. And so Andrew feels confident that we don't have to replace that position. So that position was not replaced in this budget either. So in general, we try to approach this based on what have we already had for attrition. We've known we've been able to do business this year in a COVID-19 year, which is as hard as ever. And staff have been incredibly flexible and strong and done an amazing job. And then we looked at how could we strengthen your experiential learning at the middle and high school, but also invest in what we said that we're trying to do in regards to back when the board talked about personalized learning and PLPs in the fall and the investment in trying to, how do we recruit students through pathways where they have the ability to create individualized plans and really pursue them out in the community. You have a really strong community-based learning program and the idea is that with pathways coupled with that, that students can really engage more in internships, mentoring and demonstrate proficiency in core academics if they choose through that more personalized approach to learning without having to take away with what you should be proud of of all the different AP courses and things that you offer. And then finally, we do, one of the reasons I think you notice at the SU level, the assessment for special ed did drop and that's because we're continuing to strengthen our system of supports, but we also do plan to how do we keep our students home and that could result in potential increased tuition dollars for you. If students across the SU, the best learning environment for them is our Wildcat Institute in grades nine through 12, they will be Rud students and they would access our most intensive supports at Rud instead of potentially accessing it in other providers like East Valley Academy, Raven and some other different programs that happen in the Hartford School District. The idea is that they would access them here. So that's what this budget supports. And so what we're looking really from the board is to see, is this budget at a place that you feel comfortable based on the tax increase laid out or are you looking for us to try to find additional efficiencies? So that's kind of to set the tone for you tonight to give us feedback. So then on Tuesday, we're coming in with you with a final draft. So a couple of questions. One, the deficit, we're not doing anything about that this year. We're gonna see how much comes off and then address it next year. Yeah, so the approach that we talked about the finance committee, Andrew, and I'm still recommending to the board and I talked to Bob about it a little bit too and I have Lisa individually was that, I do believe we're gonna have, again, a general fund surplus this year. I think that we're working really hard. Teachers have been administration to hopefully pay down some of that debt. We'll have a better sense of what that debt would be, that then we would go and get a note or if the debt's at a place where we could just budget it, we could do that, but that we hold off based on the yield this year and the CLA. And I think that makes sense. We pay it off and we budgeted accordingly in next year's budget. So it would be the 22, 23 budget. And if we did have to take a note, we could structure it with the bank that the payment wouldn't come due until July 1 of 2022. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And my other question was with the potential tuition students for the new program, would those be just regular tuition students or do they have like a special rate like Raven? Well, the SU, they could have excess cost. That is a thing. And so once we build the program, we'll have to figure out whether or not there's any excess costs that are aligned to that, but just a reminder that all special ed costs are at the SU. So there's not necessarily a benefit for Rudd even on that because it was excess costs would be then be billed back to this special ed. It's a special ed cost. It's not necessarily a district cost. But I would eventually trickle down to us as a benefit. Okay. Well, yeah, because if there are excess costs, the state then contributes. Yeah. My overall feedback is that I think holding the, our controllable part of the budget level is the way to go. I mean, it seems like, yeah, we're getting hammered with the CLA and the yield. And those are the parts of the budget that we have no control over. So hopefully the voters will see that we've made a good faith effort to keep costs down and we're kind of doing what we can do about it. So. Jamie, I want to ask a question about transportation. Is the vocational school transportation part of the contract and our transportation for athletics and field trips part of the contract? It's included in your contract with Butler Bob, but it's a separate section of the contract. So the transportation that's in your assessment from the supervisory union is the home to school transportation. And that's what you see on your monthly warrants that you're paying the supervisory union for because we pay that on your behalf to Butler. And then that's also on the revenue side of your budget. That's the transportation aid that we get back from the agency of education. We get a portion of your contracted home to school back in as revenue, as an offsetting revenue. The vocational transportation, that's a separate bill that's billed directly to run for how many kids you transport to Randolph and how many kids you're currently transporting to Hartford. And then we also submit and we get some reimbursement for that cost as well. And then your athletics and any extracurricular or any type of field trip transportation is billed separately after the service is provided and it's based on the per mile rate that's outlined in the Butler contract. Are we bound by Butler to transport a vocational kids and do our athletic trips and do our field trips? Are we obligated under that contract to use Butler to do those programs? Well, unless they can't furbish the bus. Yes, right now you're in a contract with Butler. So we can't go and say all of a sudden now we've decided we wanna go with a different company for transportation for like tech. So yes. And typically they give us a better price. So if we were to have a contract with butlers but then try to contract with a separate service for field trips, et cetera, we wouldn't have the benefit of the larger contract, right? I mean, I think like if we went out- Well, I mean, you know, when we go out to bid again those are all things we should be looking at but right now our contract's not up. And so yes, if we do any transportation that we do right now, they are supposed to be furnishing for our contract unless they can't meet the need. And then we're allowed to go seek out other transportation. So Butler had situations this past year, last year, where they didn't pick up kids for field trips. So they didn't pick up kids for athletic events. They didn't have a driver or they didn't have a bus. They just didn't pick them up. What do we do? What do we do about that? What have we done about it? Well, we get grumpy and Reed will probably smile on Andrew and I'm pretty demanding when they say that they don't have a driver, they can't do it. And they've been pretty responsive to me this year. I gotta say they've- Are they breaking their contract when they don't furnish that bus? I'd have to read the contract to know if that actually breaks it or not, Bob. By the way- I don't like the fact that they don't show up. We have a group of kids waiting and just coaches there and no parents. And they don't seem to have any kind of obligation to do it. Do we have a penalty? Do we- Right, I think that we do pay those things based on the trip. It's based on the trip. So they don't provide the trip, we don't pay them, but- Right. I know, but- It does leave us in a terrible situation. I had thought they were doing better this year. I haven't been hearing as much about it as I have in the past. So I guess I didn't realize it was an ongoing issue. Or is it more of a historical thing? I think it's historical, but there hasn't been a lot of sporting trips this year. Or field trips. Or field trips. I do think it's something worth thinking about when it's time to renegotiate that contract because we pay them a lot of money and we deserve to be well taken care of as a result of that. Yeah, part of the bigger issue is that statewide and nationally there's a shortage of supply of bus drivers. So first, which is the other big bus company in Vermont, is constantly advertising in their districts for local bus drivers because they just don't have enough. That's usually where we run into trouble. Most of our drivers are folks who've retired quite some time ago. And so when one of them gets sick, there often isn't somebody there to just step in for them. Fortunately, this year, the transportation needs have been less because many of the neighboring school districts are not in session full time. And so we've gotten a driver out of the Hartford School District pool of drivers because they've got excess capacity. Nice. I don't have any empathy for them at all because they make a lot of money. I think that when they agree to take our kids someplace, they do it. If they're having a tired time getting drivers, increase their pay. You know, it's hold those guys accountable for not doing their job. And they're leaving our kids at a school. I don't know about you, but if I had young kids and they weren't being picked up by a bus, I'd be upset with them. I think the district, I think when I was at Fairhaven, we had three buses. But if we had two buses, take care of athletic trips, take care of the vocational trips, take care of the field trips for our own kids. And don't worry about Butler. That's my feeling. You know, we're thinking that we're saving a lot of money. I'd like to do analysis and find out if we are saving any money. And it wouldn't hurt to lease a couple of buses for the school district and take care of those things ourselves. And when there's only one bus company out there to negotiate with, we're hurting. But if we start telling that bus company, we'll take care of our own. If it's going to come to that, then maybe we'll get a little better service. Are we saving any money this year? We don't have, like Andrea said, we're not transporting that many athletic trips. We're not doing field trips. Are we saving any money? Is Butler giving us any money back? Yeah, I mean, yeah. So that budget line, you won't touch Bob. Like for field trip transportation and sports, we're not being built on those. So when we do your projections for savings, that's part of what we'll project. Are we making any savings when our kids are being taught virtually? What do you mean? Oh, if they're not running their bus for like that week. Yeah, I mean, there's a part of the fee we have to pay still, but then there's a part of the fee they reimburse us. Same as like when we closed. Yeah. I mean, one of the... Who keeps track of that? What's that? Who keeps track of that? We do. When they come in the invoices, I signed the bus invoices and then we review them. Tara and I were just talking to the bus company about invoices, Bob, last week. Are we saving some money? Yeah, no, there's savings, yeah. Are they reflected in the budget? Well, no, next year we budgeted full tilt. I can't project that we're gonna be virtual. And this year's budget. In your budget projections, when you see your projections, yeah, you'll see savings. I mean, one of the things that we had to decide when we had to consolidate busing at the SU level was whether we wanted our administrators focused on hiring bus drivers and doing the things that they had to do before we were working with a service like Butler's, in addition to the fact that there was some savings because Bethel used to run their own buses, Bob. And that was how we did things previous to the merger. So that was a shift for us. And I think that Jamie's been doing a good job of advocating strongly for us. You said get grumpy. I think it's strong advocation. When we are having problems with them, and I'm grateful that, and I know there are less field trips and less sporting events, but I'm grateful that it seems like we are having less problems this school year. That's not to say they won't crop up again in a more normal school year, but hopefully we have more bids to look at the next time we negotiate that contract. When I worked at Rochester, we had three buses. I didn't have a problem with bus drivers or hiring bus drivers or taking care of the buses. I don't think that's a major issue. I think it's, I think what's problem here is there's no competition. That may be. Well, I must hear suggesting that we add something with a budget. Why don't we put this as a future agenda item and we can look up on the next contracts up. Well, I'd like to add something to the budget, but I don't think we should. But if I had my choice, I'd go after it. Well, why don't we do it as a future agenda item to look at that next year itself? Okay, that's how we would comment. That sounds good. All right. Any other questions or comments about the budget that's been prepared? Thoughts about whether we wanna bring this budget forward to the taxpayers with the cuts that are in it. It's reduced from this year by about $72,000, even though we know that based on the CLA, et cetera, the tax rate overall will go up. So what are people's thoughts? I'd like, there are a few of you I haven't heard from yet in terms of board members and I just, I think it would be useful for Tara and Jamie to have your feedback. This is Lisa, wondering if there is enough in the budget for the virtual learning end of things since we're not really sure. Maybe we'll all be meeting in person again by next year, but if we're not, is there adequate funding to support the virtual working? I would expect if we're not in a place to return to in-person, Lisa, that there is gonna be funding coming that covers it like this year and we would approach it from the SU level again and offset what we needed that way. Okay. Other thoughts, questions from board members before we move into public comment? Yeah, I think, looking at it, there's some different areas where things, moved up and down a little bit, but there's no big swings or I don't think there's a lot of anything to really cut in my view. I think one thing we did say that we were gonna try to do on the budget layout was try to put in some sort of comment column because I know under the general education, there's some reduction in salary but then in other places, we might see some increases and it may not necessarily be in that exact spot but I know that there's some stuff where things got moved from one place to another for recoding and stuff and for the public knowledge, that we said we were gonna have some sort of comment column over to the right that would maybe give some just basic info as to what were the core changes that caused whatever the differential is between the previous year and the proposed value, you know, what's the core pieces to that, you know, is it just- I think that's critical why we do our own book, Chris. I agree, because we gotta explain that folks, that stuff to folks. Yeah, so I know we mentioned that last time but it's not there right now, but- I didn't realize, I was thinking, I'm sorry, I thought you meant for the book which it will have it. I didn't realize you wanted- Okay. Yourself's too. I try not to- I understand also I had that written down to do for the town books. Okay, yeah. I think that's, yeah, I didn't know if it was gonna be here too or if what we see here then goes into the book. So I wanted to- No, we'll clean it up a lot and pretty it up and inset. I think it would be useful for a future, you know, when you presented us to have those notes because, you know, otherwise we're going by our memories of what we heard you guys say and some previous thing. Much easier to cut through it when it's not made of time. That's good info, thank you. And it doesn't have to be on everything, it's just the ones that, you know, if it's, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and change, not a $50 change. The other thing I'd be curious to see would be if we basically kept the current staffing levels and contract and stop and just had the, you know, like health insurance increased and step ups and standard raises, like what, how much do we cut from that level? You know, like right now we're saying how much we cut, but like we just hold held everything standard, we would have gone up, you know, two or 3%. So- Way more than two or 3%. Right, so I'd be curious to know, you know, when we're presenting this budget and saying there's a 13%, or 13 cent tax increase in route, then being able to say we, compared to what we would have if we use this year's budget, you know, we cut this much, not just saying like. Right, to be able to show people that comparison just so that they understand how fiscally responsible this budget is, I think is a really useful comparison. I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, yeah, we can definitely show that because if we had kept everything status quo within anticipated wage increases and health insurance, I mean, you guys, it would have been up, you know, significantly. Yeah, pretty staggering in this particular year. All right, any other board questions or comments before I open things up to public comment? I wanna say something. I talked to Theresa Herrington, a tax collector, and in Royalton, she started the year with $400,000 of collectible taxes. And I must have talked to her a week ago and I think she was between 350 and 300,000, that's still delinquent in the town of Royalton. And I think that's significant. And I think that's, and I'm not sure what that goes. I'm not sure how, you know, I haven't talked to anybody there. But I think we probably should be prepared that maybe this budget is not gonna pass. Yeah, I mean, I think it's worse. I think it's worth bringing forward a budget that starts us at a place that cuts programming as little as possible with the knowledge that it may not pass and we may have to do some different things to bring a budget back. I'd hate to make significant cuts that affected programming and potentially impacted our ability to attract students as the very first round of things, though. That makes me feel like we're getting to a more worrisome place in terms of providing what our students need. That's just my opinion as one board member. I agree with you, Lisa. I think that we should present it in this shape and if it gets turned down or if there's a, I mean, we're obviously gonna have hopefully at least one or more informational sessions for people to present this budget. And if the taxpayers aren't happy, then we'll make cuts from there and they'll see what the ramifications are. But they can see that we've done our best to keep things as they are and have the offerings as robust as they are before we start taking things away. I think that both communities support education and I think if the budget goes down, it'll be because they can't afford it. It's not that they don't support education because I think these both communities have shown in the past that they do, but it may just be in the times that we're in and the number of unemployed people in the area may be just a difficult, difficult thing. Yeah, I agree with you. It's been heartening to see the way that our communities have supported our schools and I appreciate that this budget has trimmed quite a bit to reflect the way that we're, the way that society is right now, the unemployment and the way that families are struggling. I just would hate to take more away than we need to. It's a really challenging situation. I agree. When we're discussing it and with the public, I mean, it might be worth pointing out that if there is somebody who has lost their job or whatever and has not earning the same that they did in previous years that there are income sensitivity options for people, they're not necessarily gonna have to pay the full tax rate if their income is disappeared and they're going to file their taxes and whatnot. Anyway, I don't know if it makes sense to do that or not. Yeah, right, yeah, Andrew. Just regarding the overall budget, I think I've made my concerns, like I'm still a little worried about the music, eliminating the music position and stuff. I think we can see how it goes this year. So those sorts of concerns, I feel like I've made over that when you've been rolling out the budget previously. But on the whole, I support the budget as it is. Other feedback so they can bring us this budget next week on the 19th when we meet for our regular monthly meeting. Just a general question. I sat in on that webinar that was what, yesterday or the day before and then Jamie forwarded out the stuff to us too. Are we gonna discuss that type of stuff at the next, at the meeting next week? Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's my homework for the weekend to watch the webinar. So if anybody hasn't watched it yet and you've received it, I think that's good preparation for our meeting next week. Thinking about the logistical pieces of what's coming up. Yeah, it's interesting. I think one thing we maybe wanna go ahead and do now is do a little bit of legwork and just confirm with the people like Allison Fulcher and Pam Brown and those people to make sure that they wanna continue on doing what they're doing in terms of being a moderator and other positions. Because I guess one of the things that came in that webinar was that those people have to fill out one of those candidate consent forms because they'll have to be on the ballot and be voted on as part of the Australian ballot. So because we would normally elect those people from the floor, but all of that business is gonna have to be on the ballot. So they don't have to collect signatures this year. So all they have to do is fill out the piece of paper. So I guess whoever's up for board positions too, you don't have to get any signatures this year either. You just have to fill out the form to get your name on the ballot. But I think we just need to check with those people and just get them to fill out those forms and make sure that they're still good with continuing on doing what they've been doing. Anybody who feels like they have the time to reach out to those people and make sure that they are aware of what needs to be done to be on the ballot. I was gonna sit down with Tara and work on that. Okay. Because I need to do it for all the districts. All right. Thank you, Jamie. I appreciate that. All right. So that brings us to public comment as part of our meeting. We do have some public here. Feel free to unmute or there's a raise hand option on the bottom of the screen. And I think if you're on a phone line, I think you hit star six to unmute yourself so you can talk. Thank you. I usually make that reminder. I forgot, I'm sorry. Okay. So hearing no public comment, I would entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. We have a second. I'll second. All right. And I will see you all next Tuesday evening. Thank you so much.