 We are in some finance committee to order four seconds. Okay, it's the minutes. Anybody have any corrections or additions? Christine and David. The end of the first page on natural resources, the second to last seconds. The DPW is not asked for holiday lights for Uncle Sam Plaza, but there is funding that could be spent for it. So what? It's funding. It's funding. It's funding. Okay, so Uncle Sam Plaza whites can be covered in the government? Yeah, we have enough money in the holiday lighting line. Thank you. You can just redo the sentence or put out not asked for, but just say the DPW budget has sufficient monies to cover the Uncle Sam Plaza or something like that. All right. And on the next page, the top of the next page, there's a sentence that's repeated. DPW recommended budget support. Is there two different budgets? Okay. I want to make sure they got that straight. Okay. Just a minor adjustment, article 34 of the Minuteman School in the second line, budget increases that driven by a new, that could be adjusted by a new one. Thank you. Okay, I'll stop it there. Okay, I'll speak to you about a new one. Okay. Chuck? I just have a little confusion in the Minuteman section here. It says the design enrollment decision is scheduled for August. I thought that the permanent, not the permanent, but the Minuteman School building committee voted for an 800 person school. Who's made, who is the design decision that's scheduled for August? You mean since our meeting? No, before. You said they were caring for it, several of us. Chuck, I think he said ultimately the school committee will have a vote on that. I'm not sure if it is to tell you. This is by the school committee? The Minuteman School Committee. Okay, so the design enrollment decision by the Minuteman School Committee is scheduled for August. Okay. Okay. I'm sort of confused by the next sentence. He estimates the cost to a medium Arlington, oh, household at under $100. I'm just not sure if people, HH, household. I can spell it. Okay, spell it out. Should be $100 per year for 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. So annual cost, yeah. $100 per year over, it was 30 years, I think. 30? Yeah. Okay, are there any other changes? Okay, so have a motion as corrected? So moved. Second. Okay, all those in favor of accepting the minutes as corrected, can we say aye? Aye. Opposed? Okay, come in. Okay, the sheet that's being handed out now was handed out at the budget revenue task force. And it basically explains the logic and the numbers for the recommendation that the long range planning committee of the budget revenue task force made on the school budget. If there's a couple extra, we've got four more members back there, so you can call us in the budget. That's a big task to ask. Okay, so you could just see the 3.5% increase in the general education, the 7% on the special, the kindergarten fee offset, which continues, and then the growth factor on the school, just so you can see how the numbers work together. Okay, the school people, ready? Okay, I think they could speak from back there. Okay, the room is a little small for everybody as far as this is concerned. So, who's ever speaking could sort of stand up in that corner and I think that'll be okay. So the hearing today is on the Orange and Public Schools budget, we have a hand out here that so who's ever going to open up the speakers for the school? Dr. Bode? Right there. So the camera's on you. I know you're not used to that. The presentation's actually going to have three people, Laura Chesson, who is the assistant superintendent. She's going to talk tonight on technology and technology and district. You do have a hand out this evening and I wish we could have a PowerPoint but I know that you're constraining this room to actually have it for people who are watching this evening but I will say that tomorrow we'll have the PowerPoint online if anybody would like to see any of the graphs. Well, first of all, let me introduce some of the people that are here from the school department. My name is Lisa Judpiers and some of the people who wanted to come and were unable to do that. The process in the school department starts actually last year. It really starts in the spring and has very robust discussions about the budget in the summertime. You can see the outline, this is not something that's new to the committee, I know that. We had a vote of the school committee on March 17th, I'm sorry, that's you, March 13th for the school committee last week in terms of moving the budget from the proposed superintendent budget to the school committee budget. And in the next slide that you have you can see the all different participants in the development of this budget which includes all of our principals, curriculum leaders, the school committee and the school committee, the budget subcommittee which is very much involved in the process throughout the fall, and you will know. And in the next couple of slides, for those of you that may not know some of the names of our principals at each elementary school, as well as members of central office, as well as curriculum leaders, you'll find those names on the next couple of slides. Okay, I'm now on page eight. So giving you a very broad stroke look at the FY 14 year today, I think one of the big highlights of course this year is that we were able to open the Thompson Elementary School this year on time, and very importantly to all of you under budget, and it's beautiful. And I think everyone agrees that was one of our great accomplishments in the last couple of years as a community. Another important thing that you should be aware of is that the special education budget is going to be in about $1.2 million over budget. But that amount will be covered by reserves. One of the sources of the reserves is going to be the $500,000 stabilization account that was set up a couple of years ago by John Weedy that we have a warrant article asking for the use of those funds this year. Another important implementation this year was the new teacher evaluation system which has involved a considerable amount of our professional development. It's a very much of a change in how we have been doing the practice of evaluations in much more time intensive process than it has been in the past. And then the other important part with respect to our budget is that the other parts of the budget are remaining within these expected parameters. I want to talk a little bit about special education because that seems to be, that is the area of our budget which is now over budget. And looking at year to date results and looking at where the sources of the overage are lie. So the education, special education service budget is approximately 6.8% above budget or 13.1% above the FY13 actual expenses. And the source of the overage is primarily about two thirds of that amount is due to out of district placements. We've had a number of students that have had hospitalizations and 47% of these out placements that we've had this year have been due to prior hospitalizations. At the beginning of the school year, we had 102 students that were out of district. Presently we have 112. And many of those are we call 45 day placements which is not an uncommon type of placement after a hospitalization. What needs, not everyone that's hospitalized comes back and has a out of district placement. I don't wanna say that. But what I am saying is that in terms of the seven or $800,000 that we are over budget roughly half of that is due to placements as a result of hospitalizations. We've also seen a major jump in contracted services in a couple of areas. One is envisioned services at the preschool level. What we're starting to see in our preschool and certainly as well as our kindergarten are the results of a lot of medical interventions that have had very small weight children, children that are under three pounds being able to survive and thrive. But often these children require additional services in areas of vision and hearing. And we have had more use of contracted services in that area than we have in the past years. We're also seeing a need for behavioral interventions for a growing number of students that require plans to help them learn to be self-regulated in school. We see a lot more at younger ages, children manifesting anxiety disorders. And so we've had more contracted services in that area. And as our out of district placements increase, not only do the tuition require our overage, but as well as the transportation costs for the students. At this point, I'd like to have Diane come up and talk a little bit about these next two graphs. Because one of the questions I know that is on almost all of your minds is part of our agreement with respect to the budget is that we have a 7% increase in special education costs as part of our plan. And I know that many of you are wondering whether that number is really true to the true costs that we're seeing every year. And these two next graphs probably will help you understand that in fact, that is the case. And I saw there's a question coming. Could we finish the whole presentation and would you prefer to have questions? Well, I was thinking that we should probably take questions as we go through sort of each section. And so as long as we're on special education, I have a question just on the hospitalization as far as why that happens. In other words, you're not paying for the hospitalization. No. So what is happening in that process? Somebody goes into a hospital and then comes out and all of a sudden their special education costs increase? They may or may not be on an IEP. They may need to be on an individual education plan following that. It could be that they have extended time evaluation to see what kind of services they might need in returning to the school or what kind of services they might need in order to be able to access the curriculum. So I would say that a fair number of these are auto districts placements for term placements. So some are not and they vary. We have had, we have 10 students in residential placements right now and the 10 that we have right now are not the same 10 that we had last year. So there is a little bit of fluidity in terms of those placements. Okay, does anybody have just on this issue, Carol? So we end up paying for the residency rather than their health insurance that resident placement? We pay for the educational component of it. But let me just say this, are you talking about residential or are you talking about residential? Like you said, there are 10 students last year and 10 students this year. I would say that in various, in various directions. Some of the students may be DCM children. In which case DCF would pay the housing portion and pay the educational portion. In other cases, you'd pay the entire cost of the residential placement. Who's talking? So we're on a topic special that you had mentioned. So you're talking about being over budget this year and using money from a reserve fund cost at this point. So there's always goodness and badness to a reserve spot, right? You're happy they're there, right? She said, wow, they're here. We're going to get through our flight 14. You're happy they're there. But then they're gone. And then they're gone. Right. But it's on the way you started shaking your head. You knew where I was going when I started, so it kind of made me laugh. So what do you think? I mean, I think- Well, as Diane knows, I've said all year, as we've been seeing these increases growing, that I mean, I would like not to be able, not to touch all of the money in that stabilization account, but the issue is that we need to be able to cover all of these costs. We have other- But you, let me ask you this question, this really gets to the heart of the matter is, you're saying you're going to spend about $500,000, I think you said from the stabilization fund. How much, is that the whole balance? It's the whole balance of that stabilization account. We also have a tuition in account and we've been fortunate enough to be able to carry the balance in that. It's a revolving account. And that's just over $500,000 now. We'll probably use all of that. We also have $150,000 credit with the lab collaborative that we'll be able to use. And we have other funds available in reserves based on our foreign visa students who pay tuition to come to Arlington. And we would plug the difference with that. Those funds aren't specific to special education, all the other sources I've visited are specific to special education. Right, but I guess I'm getting at, and I'm just trying to wrap my head around it, is sort of, and we talked about some prior years, right? The large challenge with schools is that your budget is fixed, determinable, and set on September 1. There's really no way out of it, right? It's not like you can lay teachers away, you guess you could lay teachers off a million, but we're not gonna go that way, right? So your budget is what it is in September 1, you're very little broke. If you get to sit, and you have these reserves, you kind of hope at the end of the day you can partially drain them down. But when you're saying that we're in a situation where we're just gonna pull it, we have to work. We're in a situation where you've got to go all the time. Well, that's all the specific special ed reserves, that's correct, but there remains one other reserve. If I could go on to the next slide, I think I can make this day more clear. Okay. This slide here, the funds at the bottom in dark green are the amount of grant funds that are spending on special education, showing three years back to old, the FY14 projections that's in January, so they're a little lower than they are now, and the FY15 budget. The light green is circuit breaker. If you look at FY11, our circuit breaker is very small. In FY11, we only spent half of our circuit breaker that we received in FY11. We pushed the other half of it to FY12. And in FY12, that was a very good year relative to spend expenditures, and we were able to subsist on only the other half of the FY11 circuit breaker, and to put the $500,000 into the town stabilization. That allowed us to push an entire year, FY12's entire year of circuit breaker to FY13. And so now we're in a very advantageous situation where the money we spend in giving near for circuit breaker is fine to be collected in the prior year. So, as we go into FY15, although we will not have the town stabilization for special ed, the tuition in revolving account for special ed, nor the lab credit because they'll all have been expended, if we needed to, we will have all of the amount we counted on for circuit breaker, and we will be collecting more circuit breaker that year. Now that would really be eating our seed money for the next year, which would be very bad, but we do have it, so we're not completely without reserves. I would just prefer not to see that happen. That would be the last reserve I would wanna get, but I want you to know that you're not completely to the bottom in that respect. Now on that issue, Article 7 of the special town meeting has a transfer from the Education Stabilization Fund. How much are you requesting? We're gonna request all of them $500,000. Okay, so it's $500,000 in there now? Okay, so $500,000 from the Stabilization Fund under Article 7. Any other questions on this? Charlie? I look at this chart, there's no page on here, one that says special education expense by funding source. Yes. Okay, so that's your total special education expense, right? Correct. So I've calculated this a couple of times in different ways. It looks to me like it's a seven, you know the compound appropriate is seven and a half. Okay, so if we go to the next slide. Yeah. This slide is all special ed funding from all funding sources. The flip side is just the special ed funding that comes from the town appropriation. The dark green is the amount the school department has expended or plans to expend. It's appropriation from the town appropriation. The light green starting in FY 12 is the amount of money that the town has appropriated specifically for special education. And you see in the first year, FY 12, we expended more out of appropriation money than we received. In the second year, the opposite was true. In FY 14, we expended more than we received and in 15, we're projecting it for it to reverse again. If you look at the very bottom line of the numbers, the four year over under is the 27,872. So this shows what our actual expenditures are out of town appropriation funding relative to the 7% growth that we get from the town appropriation. And as you see, it's very close on. And what this does, what this graph does is it neutralizes any shifting effects of circuit breaker. I mean, it's basically backed out circuit breaker, it's backed out grants funding. So we need that 7% because the grants in the circuit breaker don't make up the difference in all of our costs. Thank you. Anybody else, Trump? In years past, I got increasingly frustrated with the costs of transporting kids out of the town. And it seemed to me that after a while, the school system got that under control and you were doing very well and I was quite pleased about that. But it seems like it's returning somehow here. And the question I have, I guess with, and I want to say this is kind of if I can, did that go awry or what's happened to the process by which you were able to control it before and maybe it's gotten out of hand now? We're still using the lab and co-collaborative for our out of district transportation costs and that's a very good plan because some of the districts collaborate and so vans can travel full instead of half empty. And so we have realized good cost savings. The cost of transportation does go up over time and we're still part of that collaborative. But what happens is we start the beginning of the year, we give them all our runs, we give them all of our students, you know, the prices are all allocated but if you add a student mid-year and there aren't available vehicles in the collaborative, you have to add a vehicle. And so that's why this year is very particularly rough because we've had more students rolling in later and very often placed differently. The other pressure on transportation is homeless over which we have little to no control. I have to praise our transportation director, Rick Ainelli. He does a tremendous job. He makes competitive calls but there are so few vendors out there anymore that want to do homeless or specialized transportation other than the big concerns that are going for things like the collaborative knit that when you have one or two kids going from here to Chelsea or Boston to here and you have to put them on a van and you have no choice, the costs really start to escalate. So insofar as possible, we're continuing to cooperate with this collaborative. It's a great effort. It's become a model for other parts of the state but homeless is a really tough one and Rick does a heck of a job but these are mandated things. So the impression I'm getting in the illustration in this graph here is that this sort of goes up and down for you. This is not a long-term trend and you think you'll be able to go to the 7th or 7th or 7th grade. I have to say greatly the number of people that rise in number of homeless is surprising. The economy is better now. I wouldn't expect them to see that level off. This year is not. We have to date them more thoroughly to have a better understanding of why that's so. Thank you. Well, not all students that are designated as homeless are requiring a ban to some other community. We have homeless students that live right here in Ellington because they may be living with a relative or a friend and they're still designated as homeless. So the numbers may belie the actual number of children traveling out of town. So the kids who qualify as homeless are kids who were in our school system at one point and become homeless, which is why they're commuting to say Chelsea. Well, they may originally come from Chelsea, be placed at a group home shelter in Ellington but being transported back to Chelsea to continue school so their education is disrupted. Or they might be an Ellington student who is now become homeless for some reason and is living in some other place and is being transported back to Ellington to continue their school in Ellington. The whole point of the homeless is to help a homeless child be as least disrupted as possible. But it's very expensive and it's a, it's supposed to be a 50-50 cost share between the two districts involved. And the management of this is, as you can imagine, quite nightmare. And Rick, I know he does a great job of really staying on top of it. Okay, and Dick? She stands in that question. Half and half reimbursement? Well, we half and half and any reimbursements come through the state funding and come to the, the long range. The state funding, you get state funding on this? Yeah, but it comes to the town and like chapter seven, it goes to the bottom line. If that half comes from the receiving town? Yeah, it's supposed to. Can you collect it? Rick tries to set it up so that the vendor builds directly half the amount. I mean, you know, we try to keep us a few checks while we're on as possible. Okay, Charlie? So, I'm a little confused by numbers. These charts, we just saw it tonight for the first time. And, you know, you sent us a table last week. And thank you for doing that. And I looked at, I assume those numbers are the same. I mean, I haven't, I can't. They're gonna look a little different because of the way they're configured. That table I said it last week and I had trepidation about the same. I think my question, okay. Thank you. I think that, you know, I looked at these numbers in the individual categories and I looked at them in the total expenses. In, when I did a 10-year compounded growth analysis on this, it generally came out, you know, around 7%. When I looked at a five-year growth rate, it came out almost 2 percentage points lower. Somewhere, you know, around four or 5% compounded growth. But your chart is only four years. So I'm trying to understand, are, you know, what are we looking at and why here and are we comparing consistent set of numbers with consistent set of numbers? There is one discrepancy right off the bat. This five years starts in FY 11. And so if you use the other chart, ended the final year and the other chart was 14, not 15. And so that's part of the anomaly right there. I'm looking in this chart from 11 to 15. In the other chart, it was from 05 to 14. So that's one of the differences. The other differences in the chart that you're holding in your hand right now, this is only appropriation dollars. I've backed out grant funding and I have backed out certain breakers. Whereas in the other chart, they are in. So if I looked at the chart that you gave us on the weekend, or before the weekend, you have expenses of internal instruction services which I believe is the SPED program that's locally administered, right, in the school system. And then you have payments to other districts. To other districts, I assume that's out, you know, all of this residential and out of district costs, et cetera, right? No, it is not. Because those numbers do not reflect grant funding that could have funded either of those desserts. The purpose of that chart was back. Wait, let me ask the question then. Aren't expenses, expenses, I mean, independent of where the money comes from, there should be expenses that are expenses. And then you have another basket that's revenue. The difference here is that when I came to Arlington, I was asked to reconstruct a long-range view of expenditures that had had. I had, because there had been multiple changes in the chart of accounts, I had no way with Arlington's internal records to do that year-over-year comparison. So I went back to the state and I got the numbers from the state that had been submitted on the end of the year report and reconstructed it using those numbers. The state does not collect information on special education expenditures when they're funded by grants or circuit breaker. And so the numbers you're looking at are basically just what the state considers general fund. And so that is not a good graph to use for the kind of analysis you're trying to do. I wanted to phase it out, but I felt it still had value because it talks about the change of population over time and it talks about the bottom line number over time. And I think it is a valuable view. But when you start looking at categories, it is not a valuable view. This afternoon, I sent you a different segment. Let me go back to the total. Then let me ask the question. I'm still trying to understand this. If he's looking at the bottom line number over time, I think I can read this. The total of FY14 on that should match perfectly the FY14 number here. Right, but the 10-year compound growth rate is 7.4%, which argues in favor of your 7% growth number. But the five-year growth rate is 5.5%. And that's FY10 through FY14. Right. Okay. I'm looking at it, FY14. And FY15 is a smaller jump than the normal 7%. So the conclusion that I came to was that the administration is doing a good job in controlling costs. Try to avoid it. So my question in taking a long-term view, trying to take a long-term view, are we really with a 7% growth rate? Are we dealing with lower growth rate? Because if you take one year, one year you have a 13% jump or whatever it is. But if you take all the years, and in fact, I think it was either last year or the year before, I have a question about this, when the school department had a big savings in special education and put the money into normal academic channels. So what are we dealing with here in terms of growth rate of the special education class? I believe this is a really good way to look at it because it gets the clouding factors and brands and a circuit breaker out of the equation. It looks at how much appropriation money from the town of Marlington is being spent on special education, up against how much money from the appropriation dedicated to special education is being allocated. So we're comparing the revenue stream for spend to the expenditures of the same source for spend. And I would argue that 7% is the right number because the over-under over time over the four years that I can do this data is very close to even. Obviously, if you pick different points in time, you're gonna get slightly different results. But I only have, we only started this in FY 12 where we had a specific revenue stream dedicated to special education. Let me ask you the question about the aggregate expenses. And while there are sub-category expenses you said here in this chart that you sent us are not correct, believe that the totals are correct. So the total says that the last five years are 40% lower than the previous ones. I think your assessment that we're trying to reduce costs which because back 10 years ago we were seeing increases and maybe we have made a concerted effort to do this. But even doing that, you're going to have years where they spike and down. And this year we're gonna, that's gonna happen. I understand, I'm just trying to establish whether I believe what I read or I don't believe what I read. And what I've read and what I can count is that the last five, according to this chart through fiscal year 14, yep, this is. Yes, it's the 14th. The second five years are a lower growth rate than the prior five years. I think that's, that makes sense. I'm not saying anything about the variability. I totally agree that the variability is $2 million or more, but the trend line is going in the right direction. Correct, I think so too, we know something. Well, please. I, now I guess I'm lost. I thought I wasn't lost. Because if I look at this chart, I believe what this is, what you're saying is sort of an incomplete chart. Because this is a measure of special education cost funded by the general fund. Because, let me just tell you what I did. I took your ton of appropriation for special ed, 15, two, eight, six, four, four, eight. Okay, and that's why 14. I took out my budget book and there's tied it to the number in the budget. So that works, right? And then it shows a deficit of 276,000. But we started off this discussion talking about a much larger special education deficit than 276,000. And so the remainder of the deficit is caused by expenditures that are not here because they're not funded by the general fund, they're funded by other sources. Correct. And that's where I think the challenge of becoming looking at this because my head started to spin at that point as well. That's very true. And that's where the other chart, which while confusing its specificities, has a bottom line over the capture revenue from all sources. It dispenses from related to those sources. Correct. So I mean, it's a very complex thing. And to get a good read on it is there's no one right way to, or there's no one best way that I've discovered yet to capture it in its entirety. I thought this was an important analysis to look at to see what was the relationship of funds, general funds expended for special education concerns versus what was special, which was general fund funds allocated for special education experience. And I think this tells us that 7% is right on. Stephen, just a question, given the numbers that are going around, then on page nine, could you tell us where the numbers, the 6.8% and the 13.1% increases are taken from? And that's the special ed projected above budget by 6.8% in fiscal 14 or 13.1% above fiscal 13 actual expenses. What numbers for the 13.1, for example, because when I add up the total, like I get a higher number, so I must be pulling along numbers. Right here, I'm going to sit my chair and let me know when you come back for that answer. Okay. Okay. Thank you. It's just a follow-up question. I think it was last year that we had a situation where the special education expenditures came in under the forecast by some amount. You can't remember because I ended the lesson. But the money was spent, at the time I was told that the money was spent in the normal academic curriculum, quote unquote, in intervention areas that would eventually benefit the special education. And I think it was three or four percent under substantial difference. So my question is, in this chart where you show these circumstances and negative amounts here at the bottom of the difference, are you counting the money that you spent already in a different category? I mean, how could you have this positive balance if you spent it in a different category? Because all that differential is the difference between what the town allocated for spend and what we expended on the general fund for spend. Okay, but you don't still have that money? No. Because it was spent somewhere else. Yes. So, okay, so this is sort of a theoretical number based on one. It's the difference between those two things, between the revenue screen, dedicated to spend, and the expenditures out of the general fund. So, in that case, in practice you're $800,000 under, right? Yeah, because the $500,000 is gone, so you're really looking at $560,000 and $276,000. It's going in different directions. Thank you. He's adding up on FY12 and FY14. I know, I know, I know, I know, I understand. If I remember correctly, the issue that was raised last year was Special Ed was pretty much the level of funding going into this with funds and intervention, but that was for this fiscal year. So now I think what they discovered is that all of a sudden in fiscal 14, instead of having almost a level of expenditures, the expenditures have skyrocketed to the point where they need to scramble to get more money. So, they budgeted at a level, but the expenditures on it here and there was an after-the-crack issue. Last year my memory was of like 0.2% under the 7%, it was a very small number. And yes, we did, I do recall that discussion talking about interventions. In fact, there's a chart in here that will show you what part of the budget is spent on interventions, which you might want to talk a little bit about in terms of what the categories are that the state uses because while the money that we invest in math and dimensions, reading, literacy, and interventions certainly keeps down the referrals and by the way, even though this is actually a very interesting thing relative to this issue, our actual percent of referrals has been level or slightly going down, yet we're seeing an increase in the actual costs of student out of district. So, the interventions actually are having a very positive effect in our total expenditures of special education because we are not seeing the referrals we may have seen in the growth 10 years ago in terms of percentage, it's come down considerably. And those numbers are not captured other than in the separate category, they're not part of what the state considered special education costs, and that's more about that. Yeah, reading it, I mean for example, Dr. Chesley gave me the numbers just today that most of our reading specialists who we do not count as a special education cost, five full-time FTEs, so no one would specialize this. And so it would be entirely valid to say that those five FTEs in reading are legitimate special ed costs. What I didn't want to do about those in origin, I didn't want to change, I wanted to stick with a consistent definition of spend so we can see trends over time and not muddy the waters with those kinds of events. Okay, Paul. So on this chart of the first target, special education expense by funding source, is the extra $5,000 that you're taking out of reserves, one of these included in one of these numbers? I'm projecting that this is what our expenses are. So then on the- And in fact, I think these projections are based on the projections I did when I did the budget book in January. So I think the deficit is projected lower at this time because more information is unfolded in the subsequent two months. So these numbers tie in to the budget book. And so- So these projections are short of the 1.2 that we're talking about today. Because at the time these numbers were put together, it was a different picture. So both of me, well, the total expenditure is short. And that difference is not included in what's listed as the time- Well, because it won't be coming out of the time location. So the $500,000 that you're going to get out of the stabilization fund is not included here as a funding source? It is not yet because we don't have it yet. Okay, Al? So one of my questions, the second chart, the town appropriated special fund, does that include the money appropriated to the stabilization fund? No. No, so perhaps I should have put that in order. Okay. And the request will drain down the stabilization fund. What's the mechanism to replenish the stabilization fund? That's a good idea because of your fluctuation. What's the mechanism to replenish the stabilization fund? Well, I'm hoping, you know, if you have a budget that does that, you have to budget for worst case scenario. And I'm hoping that the tide will turn and that'll be the point where we can replenish. That we'll be at the end of the year when this will plus and that would be the point to move the stabilization, move money back into the stabilization and tell me. I think what Charlie said was that there was money, not spent in special education, it was reallocated into other educational programs. But if that happens again, that there's a circle of special education instead of going back and go back to the same way. Yeah, yes. Okay, Brian. Getting back to your point where we thought it was pretty much flat last year. This is the budget book from last year and it's almost flat. And the numbers changed slightly this year. The problem I'm having is the numbers are moving. And I'm sure they are on a regular basis. I'm just looking to lay out as Charlie had it, the revenues are the revenues, the expenses are the expenses. We don't necessarily care if this dollar paid for this expense because we can track it. But if we're trying to track that dollar to this dollar, it can't be done, at least it can. I don't think it'd be done, but it certainly can't be done by us. Is there anywhere that just has the budget straightforward? Because I've gone through, I have the last three budget years here and none of these things tie out. If you look at section, if you look at section, I believe it is 10. That's the bottom line of 10. And here's this year. This is FY14. You're right, this is FY15. But FY14 is almost flat. But expenditure, expenditure, budget, projection. Right. You see where I scratched off the budget and what was there. So the proposal. That's the expense projection. Right. That's different than the budget. Okay, what's the budget amount there? I don't have it in front of me. 17, 040, 801. And what's the proposed budget the following year? It's comparing the years, the two years. That's what we're trying to do. At least, I think we're trying to do. So you're trying to look, you're trying to look at the 13 budget versus the 14 budget and what you can do. Honestly, we're just trying to compare apples and apples. That's all that we're really trying to do. So then, you know, what I'm trying to give you is the best picture I can of what's going on. And so where I have actuals, I will give them to you. So you have in this budget two years of expenditures, one year of budget, next to my projected expenditures, moving into level service, which picks up the step in lanes, changes to the budget and the proposed budget. I understand what the columns are. What I'm saying is the numbers between years didn't change significantly on that budget book. And there was a 7% increase that was given. That's the first thing. Then when I would look at this year's budget book, I would expect to see the same numbers that are there in this year's budget book as it rolls forward and they're not the same. Well, because it's now actuals. 13 and so on. Well, no, not just the one year. We're talking about all the years. There are, everything's changing a little bit. And what I'm saying, what I'm trying to get is I'm trying to see on one spot where I can look and see the numbers that are historical without them changing and or, like I said, I got three years worth of books here and none of them agree. But you're comparing budgets to actuals. No, I'm not. Historical. But if you check the historical, what do you have for the historical on 2011 expenditures on that one? 14199. Here you have 14256. That's five years later, the numbers are changing. I just don't understand. Well, I can explain it to you. Okay. You know, there are great big pivot tables with thousands of lines. And small anomalies will prevent. Okay. I mean, do you use that? Well, no, I was just trying to find it. So again, to compare apples and apples, and the things are, they're a moving target in the current year, but they shouldn't be moving targets historically. I agree. I mean, you know, but I do my best. Well, it may get, in some categories, it may seem that though the numbers have changed, it actually will be budget, we actually do it from after, particularly for out of district. And we're able to have next year's budget that's going to come up to the new actuals. When we get to it, I have more questions on this stuff, but it's not pertaining to this particular point. So when we get to it. Okay. So let me come back to it. So in section 10, you have, this is all expenditures, right? No revenue. Correct. So do you have, is this, so what I'm trying to understand is what, how does the internal curriculum, the internal special education curriculum costs change? And how does the out of district, or let's say the out of the school curriculum costs change? Is that? The detail is there, but it's very difficult to see. Late this afternoon, I've sent you two other views, I also sent them to the other members that were on the email that show special ed expenditures over that same period of time. So actuals from 11, 12, 13, projections for 14, budget for 15, and it's summarized by program category. Because that's the piece of the coding that distinguishes special ed from general ed and the general ed. And so you can see it summarized by preschool, OTPT, speech, residential day, all the in-district special ed transportation out of district transportation. I also sent you a different view that shows that by object category, for example, administrative salary, teacher salary, tuition costs, and it shows you the object, subtotal, broken out by program. So you can see tuition spent for preschool versus tuition spent for, you know, you'd be able to see it two ways. I think if you have all the detail in that section, but it's very difficult to see because like the rest of the budget, it's broken out by cost. So the two views I sent you, I think will make it easier to look at those expenditures over time. What is the actual, do you have anywhere in this report the only dispute that's termed out of district special education costs over years as a number? If you go to the object summary, which I think is section six, five or six, and you see it by object, if you look for tuition, it is called, and it is called within the right section for you. Sorry, section seven, I mean it's called this, we need A3201 tuition to other schools. So that shows the progression of out of district tuition both day and residential by the object code A3201 tuition to other schools. You can see it for 11, 12, 13. You can see the FY14 budget, the FY14 projected expenses as of January when I did this. The level service budget where I corrected what I knew to be happening later in the budget process. Carrying forward into the 15 proposed budget. Okay, so now if I speak, let's see if I understand that. So if I look at these numbers, Diane, I don't see the huge fluctuations that you're talking about in, and you know, we have these variances in the budget that I've seen in other numbers that are a billion and a half, two and a half million dollars in a year. These numbers, this is just to which it is, it was fairly flat in 12 and 13, about the 14 that took off. It's five, six, six, three, six, two, six, three, six, six. Well, six, six is too low because that was a projection done two months earlier. So it goes up, it goes up six, three. Okay, let's skip that call. It's gone, it's still. It's gone from six, two, an actual FY13 to the 14 budget of six, three to the six, six, mid-year projection to the seven, oh, which I believe to be a more accurate projection because it has been evolving. So we've added four amount of different placements in the last week. And that's just one of these in special education. I think the two reports I sent you by email will illustrate the variances in other areas in special education. Thank you. Okay, John, did you have a question? No, I don't. Okay, Alan? Is the average for a beautiful cost and it's got a lot of education programs. How fast is that increase? I haven't looked at it that way because, you know, I don't believe that to be a very valuable metric. Well, really, I thought the idea is that for a beautiful cost, you have a steady population, which one number would want one number of years. And then sort of baseline increase of the image, you know, for a beautiful cost, increase. And there's some determining factor in the number of people's decreases, but, again, I don't know the number of people's and their needs change over time, but sort of levels out. It's not that I'm wrong, but I don't expect a beautiful cost when we're on the subject of inflation. That's why I like to see them call it a fixed cost. Could you calculate the average for a beautiful cost for a beautiful cost? I mean, if you take that really long spreadsheet, you have the numbers of students, especially on students, and if you can provide the total by this point. I think you said that I was a flyer. That was one of the funds. Right there, in the Excel file. Yeah, that was one of those files. But, you know, when you think about SPED, there really are different categories. There are children in a general ed class who are receiving interventions. There are children in a substantially separate classroom, which your staff are very careful about. Well, the long run of those ratios changed a lot, and then they... Well, I haven't done that kind of analysis on them, but I mean, you know, if you look at the cost of a residential student, I think the cost of a included student would receive some modest services. I mean, the cost of regency is gargantuan. And so to average those two students doesn't seem to me to be a valuable measure. Well, it doesn't seem to happen that, again, we're sort of a base-region increase, versus one that's related to fluctuation of other students who are coming out. But the student fluctuations haven't been that drastic. I mean, we've been going steadily up over the last seven years in out-of-district placements. But the total number of students has been sort of batting back and forth. Can you describe what programs you have in place, either with the state or locally or with outside advisors, to control the out-of-district costs? The state sets the rates for the out-of-district schools. The school placements are decided through the IUP committee process, and we pay what they tell us to. So let me just ask you that. We belong to a collaborative, a lab collaborative. There are five districts, I think that you're aware of all of the towns, but for those listening, we have Arlington, Lexington, Belmont, Burlington and Bedford. Each one of these towns has one of the programs housed in their district. By doing that, is able to bring down the cost of each of the lab programs that we made through an out-of-district placement. So one of the ways that you reduce out-of-district costs is to be able to participate in these kind of collaborative programs. In fact, EDCO is going to begin next year some out-of-district programs as well, including the 45-day secondary program, which again will be below, which might get in a private school. So going through a collaborative programs is one way to bring the cost of out-of-districts down. But of course, the other one is to invest in in-district programs so that the students can receive the services they need in district, and we have done that. And not to mention, which is also important is the kind of intervention programs that we do so the students do not have to be referred for additional services because they can get the services as part of the Gen Ed program. And by doing that, I think we've seen success in that a number of referrals has been made for our plan after some of them dropped in the last few years. And so you have to look at it in terms of an investment as well in terms of what is going to provide the needed services before a student has to receive more attention. Do we have any way of any metrics on the value we see from these outside services? Well, one of the things that happens is part of an IEP meeting that they certainly have annual and perhaps even more often reviews of student's progress and that is something that's evaluated in a team meeting. But do we know that, for example, one school does better than another school for a given amount of money? We have some thoughts around that issue, yes. But I would say that what we're looking for is student progress. We like objective measures of student progress and that's something that you look at in an IEP meeting. So one of the issues is if a student is not making effective progress, then we would perhaps suggest another study which is coming back into the district in order to receive services here. So there are a number of students that come back into district. In some ways, not only because it may not make effective progress, but also because they have made effective progress and they are ready for a more inclusive environment for education. The federal mandate and certainly how we look at this is we want students to have education in the most least restrictive environment and that's how it's defined. So the most least restrictive is to be in a general education classroom and the goal is toward that goal. And to the extent that we can do that or keep students in those classrooms and in making progress, it has to be both. We have to be able to have students do that. So there is a lot of in and out that goes on within a district this size in terms of students and programs. And but the goal is to make sure that the students get what they need because our former goal is to make sure that happens and have it in the most least restrictive. After a district program, the least restrictive would be lab because that is part of our district. And then that goes out from there. I make a comment. So Dr. Bode, I'd just like to say first of all, I, in my look at these numbers, as I said earlier, I do believe that the trend line on these costs come down. And I think that's the credit of the school department. I don't know, I don't have my arms around the numbers enough and not clear enough to me, but I think maybe that some sort of evaluation or audit on the outside expenses might be helpful to sort of continue to drive these in the right direction if it's possible. I also think that it might be a good idea if the school department could think about a lower growth rate on a special education over the long run, but a higher input to the reserve fund. So in other words, even if the growth rate is trending down because of the management that you're doing, the variability is still there based on the incidental severity of cases or the population bouncing around. So that would mean that you'd need a larger reserve fund that we should try to build up over time, but you don't necessarily have to have as high a anticipated growth rate in the long run. And that's just my observation from Dr. Bode. It may well be in a couple years that we would feel more comfortable given our actual expenses and what we see happening right now. I don't believe that I feel comfortable changing the 7% given what I've seen here. When you look at five years and you're over under on this, it's such a small number now, it's more than one TA. It's getting pretty close to that number. I totally agree with you that we need to build up our reserves and that's a concern that going to the stabilization account this year. So our goal like sure as to whatever we can, we want to be able to build some of those back up again with the hope that next year it will be different. And actually there is a precedent when we look at long range in terms of special education costs over 10 years. I've shown you that chart before as we've never really seen a really large number followed by another year. I know, I know. So we're hoping that next year won't be quite, but we don't know. It's one of the things that we're also seeing which is a trend we're trying to understand a little bit better too is that many more of our out of district are happening at the secondary level not necessarily at the elementary. So we were looking at our programs at the secondary level in terms of what we might need to do in shoring them up or changing some programs as we go forward. Our elementary programs seem to be doing quite well. And addressing some of these issues. There are going to be some students that it's just simply not cost effective as much as we would like to be able to have them in district as much as your parents would like to have them in district. It may not be cost effective in terms of the services that we can offer. And so there's going to be a certain number that are going to go up. What is the ideal for a district like this? I don't know what the answer is. I can tell you that what I've looked at out of district in districts, comfortable sizes, we're like right in there. I mean, they're basically the same thing. A little bit up and down the work. We're not exorbitant by any means. We're really right in there with a lot of other districts. There's two charts in the beginning of the budget book that speak to that. You can see where our, and this is using the state match on special education. So they're only interested in general fund special ed expenditures and they don't include transportation in these numbers. So looking at the state comparison, you can see that we're about even with our fiscal cost and while there's greater variation in our academic cost, we're right in sort of the middle of the path there. Those are in section one or two of the pages. Okay, two things. Gloria, could you open the back door now that the noise out there seems to have gone away? And so. It's not being cold. It's not so much anymore. Yeah, well we're an open meeting. We should have a door open. Second thing is I assume we're taking advantage of where appropriate you're born since at least it cuts out transportation costs. Absolutely, yes. Is there any other questions on the special ed issue? Peter. What's probably an easy one. What's ABA? It's a certification of behavior. It's a behavior of service. Okay, anybody else? Good job. Are you satisfied with the way that your reserve is, I find when Kay was talking about that, that has to be yours and I mean, are you satisfied with that method of having a reserve? As opposed to, for example, coming here to this meeting and saying to us, you know, we need something similar to your plan. As much as I enjoy your company, I would prefer not to come back to it more. We love to see you guys. Don't push John, we can't carry it over. Okay, is there any other, Joe? Talking about the reserves, you know, it's very hot at town meeting to find that there is a huge reserve fund being held and not being spent when the town is incurring a tremendous financial burden. And when you tell people that you're holding this in reserve and they're gonna blink their eye and say, if you don't spend it, you're gonna lose it. And that's the whole problem with reserves funds. It's there, you're not spending it, but you have an expense that's gonna occur anyway. So why not give in to the reserve fund? Because people are gonna say, you know, it's there, let's use it and not keep in, you got three plus million coming in this year. So, you know, let's use the reserve fund. That's what they're there for when needed. One thing I think some people listening need to know is the reserve fund that we're talking about was money that was created by a surplus in the school department budget a couple of years ago. And so rather than just to make sure that there was some money for a situation like this, that's what it's about. And I would like to see money in there, but would you like to cover the costs this year? Okay, so let's move on from a special education, and I'm sure if any questions pop up later or in the middle of the night, I call to Diane to talk to us later today. Dr. Bowdy. So the next case, moving on there, what's the next topic that we're gonna talk about with respect to the FY15 budget? And I think it's important to understand what the overarching rules of the school department are. The specifics of how we implement the trade or she these goals change this year a year in terms of district goals. But it is important everybody understand that what we want is that every Allen Public School graduate will be ready for college, career and active citizenship. That the Allen Public Schools will build staff capacity, fostering continuous improvements. We will provide a cost effective education supporting optimal teaching and learning and in partnership with all town departments, the Allen Public Schools will engage in effective collaboration and communication with all stakeholders. As we look at this next slide, this is actually a testament to the type of collaboration that has existed this past year with town officials, with the school committee, finance committee, as we looked at a problem that we were encountering. We've had steady growth since 2000 in the school district, but what has been remarkable is the growth that we've had in the last two years. I will say that that's not unique to our lives, and why didn't this 128 felt the scene these kinds of increases? But we've had an increase of 281 students. When we designed this plan for 3.5% growth on the operating budget, 7% on special education. The assumption was that we would be having, there would be some growth, but it wasn't going to be precipitous as we experienced. So we presented the problem to town. We worked together as a team to figure out what would be a way that we could address these needs. In the last two years, we've had to add, at the elementary level, six new classrooms and at the secondary level, lots of different sections to accommodate these. We've seen, because of this growth, over the, it's not even the last two years, many years, we see an increasing pressure every year on class sizes, you know, at one point back in 2000, which we see class sizes down in 2022, that's not the case anymore. Particularly at the secondary level, we're seeing much larger class sizes. So what we worked out as a formula for how we're going to go forward, both for increases and potentially if you had any decreases, is that we would have a growth factor of 25% of the per pupil cost of the previous year. So we'd always be working on actual numbers for the next budget year. And I do want to say, again, how grateful we are from the cooperation and working on a solution to this problem, because it has been a significant problem going forward. So another issue we see in the FY15 budget, which we'll try to address to some extent, is that we have those growing demands on our administrators in the district. And actually since 2010, we really haven't seen much of a growth in administrator positions other than a year ago we had an increase of one system principal in the middle school as their enrollment increases and half of the system principal in the high school. So what we're finding is that the principal, the more and more need to be in classrooms for two reasons. One is to support teachers in the types of changes that need to occur in curriculum and pedagogy with respect to the implementation of course state standards. As well as the new teacher evaluation system, which requires many more visitations, many more meetings with teachers in a supervisory role. So we're finding that our administrators are, it's not hard to say that easily, it has twofold increase in the amount of time that they actually are spending in a classroom, probably pushing close to 60% of the days. So this has been a growing demand for our administrators. We've also had, as I'm sure you know, this is QQ and cry all across the country about the common core and whether or not it's a good idea and also to protest. My guess is the process is gonna slow down some until those kinds of things are resolved. The question I have for you is, might you slow up a bit on this particular given the uncertainty that there is in across the country? Well, first of all. He's up, I feel like, on the administrators. Well, I have two, a couple ways to look at that question. It's a great question. First of all, our assessments in MCAS and as we go into the park are going to test our students on the common core state standards. This year, all of the MCAS will be focused on the new state standards. But I personally really support this trend in education. I think that it is something that we really need to be moving forward on. Let me just take, for example, literacy. It used to be even on the MCAS years ago that most of the questions that would be reading questions tends to be much more of a literature-based. But the reality in our very complex technological world, we need to educate our students to be able to read very complex, did you know what you meant in all this? No, no, it's not that, I know we should move on. Okay, and my question is holding itself a little bit. All I'm saying is maybe think about easing up on how fast you might go in this direction. That's all I'm suggesting. There's no way to ease up because they're gonna be tested on it and therefore we need to have to prepare them. It's our responsibility. Okay. In fact, this year we're going to be piloting a number of our schools in Grays, some of the park assessments. And in fact, this probably leads very nicely into the next part, but I'd like to have one of you, Laura Chesson, who has been really leading a lot of our technology changes over the last year and certainly has been the person who's been helping to organize all of the park assessments. So we have five schools that will be piloting the park this spring. We had no choice in which schools they would be, what subjects they would do, what grades they would do and whether they would take the test on paper or computer. It would have been nice, since Thompson is one of the schools that is taking the test, if they could have done it on computers, but they were selected at random to take it by paper. So we'll be doing it by computers at Dallin and at, for one grade at Dallin and three grades at Audison, and then we'll be doing it on paper at Bishop and at Thompson. But talking about the park test and talking about the connection between the Common Core State Standards and Technology, there are about 272 standards in the English Language Arts section of the Common Core State Standards and 78 of those, almost one third, specifically call for the use of technology and another 112 also infer the use of technology. This test is meant to be totally computerized and that is so that the data can come back very quickly so that we have time to plan for interventions for students. Right now the MCAS data really doesn't come back until late August, beginning of September and at that point we're getting ready to go into the fall and we're, we do try to make interventions for students. If we have that data and park is set so that we would have that data probably two to three weeks after the assessment's given, which would be in the sometime in the early June timeframe, we would be able to have all summer to plan on the interventions for those students. So as you look at your slides, you'll see that we need sufficient testing equipment in order for the students to be tested. We have already tested our roads and we will be able to test 2000 of the students in the district at the same time based on the current web access that we have. We'll actually be pulling the test down and putting it on a server here at the district so that we don't have to keep pulling up and down because if we did that we'd only be able to test 200 kids at a time. So since we have to test every student grades three to 11 and it all has to be computerized, we will be using the fashion service. We also have to have our students be very comfortable with technology. They need to be able to drag and drop. They need to be able to score bars. They need to be able to use a split screen as early as third grade. So we've been doing practice with the principals and we'll be training teachers and then we'll be training the students on how to use the technology. So they need to be very fluent in technology so they don't spend more time trying to figure out how to work the technology than answering the questions. We've had seen a great explosion in teacher evaluations Dr. Brady alluded to. I have principals and curriculum coordinators who have 25 or 30 people to evaluate and each one of those people has to be visited and have an observation written up and have to have a meeting with them four to six times a year. So literally principals and curriculum directors have to do an observation at least one a day for the entire school year and that means each one of those observations has all that meeting. We're required by state to collect evidence and to keep that evidence for some time so to put that online is the best way to deal with it. The teachers also have a part of their teacher evaluation. 30% of a teacher's evaluation is based on their impact to student achievement. So they need to be able to collect the data that's surrounding student achievement and analyze it and respond to it extraordinarily quickly. And so to that end this year we have purchased and are implementing a student data analysis system. Unfortunately, 280 teachers of the district can't access that currently because the machine that they have is not quick enough or powerful enough to analyze that data. And since 30% of their evaluation is writing on this we have to make upgrades to our teachers' machines. If you go on to the next slide and we talk about meeting the needs of all students as you heard the special education district. Just a quick question, it's not to you it's actually to Mr. Foskett. These computers that they're mentioning these were the ones in the capital budget. Got it. Thank you. One to $52,000. How much? Yeah, that's right. $152,000. I'm just making sure of what I was referencing, sorry. Our capital budget was presented, the town's capital budget, how my capital budget was presented in a prior meeting is Johnson was actually at the meeting. We talked about these computers at the meeting. So I was just trying to make sure of my own head that you weren't paying for these computers out of the school budget. We talked about the increasing needs in special education and one of the ways for teachers to handle the diversification of students in their classroom is to use assistive technology, both visual and auditory. Many times we do what's called a flip classroom when we make little videos for students so that students that need additional remediation can go back and watch the video of the teacher explaining over and over again. We also make those videos available to parents so that they won't help with their students at home. We need to have, as we talked about before, monitoring the student achievement is highly critical because so much of the teacher evaluation system is based on that. So we have a number of technology-based formative assessments, which means that assessment that informs instruction not the summative assessment that comes at the end of the instruction. And we need to provide ways for our students to demonstrate what they know and are able to do. The last thing, as you would imagine, from adding all this technology is technology staffing. And just to sort of give you an idea, 18 months ago we had two 50 meg pipes, not seeing a lot of internet that comes into the school buildings. Today we have 225 meg pipes. Two years ago we had 50 iPads in the district and 18 months later we now have 1700 and that number is going to increase by 300 in the next upcoming school year. We have 3,500 total devices across the district. We've put in 250 access points and 300 laptops over the last 18 months. As a result, we're needing extra specialists. Network management is critically important. Teacher gets up in front of a class, the last thing that's going to really make that class go is that that technology's not working and then that goes down. Even though we are using caching service for PARP, it does need to send them up and back and if that data is not able to be transferred because the network's down, then we're going to need a lot of travel. I'm not sure if you're going to get to this, but I thought I'd just throw out the question. Why are you still buying books? Is the system looking at some point to getting all the books automatically, electronically? Actually, this year, past year, we adopted new textbooks for grades six and seven mathematics and we only purchased classroom sets and then purchased digital copies for the students to use at home. Textbook manufacturers are not unaware of what's going on. And so right now, the cost of a digital textbook is cheaper than a regular textbook, but it's not as cheap as one might think. However, we are also looking at multiple open source textbooks. There are many consortiums. One is actually sponsored by Burlington Public Schools where teachers are actually coming together and they're using the technology that we have available to work together to put the resources in digitally and I would say yes, over time, there will be less and less reliance on textbooks. We're already seeing that. That would be great. I'm also worried about the shoulders, neck, and back of our students carrying these things around. I mean, just for myself, I mean, I know that everything that I have is on my iPad, the journals, the books, everything that, all the documents that I need to be around there, so yes, we are very much working with students to try to relieve some of that stress. It will be sometime before we totally get rid of books. Stephen, just a question on the iPad, you said that 1700 iPads in the district and that's for student use? Primarily. I mean, many, many staff members have them as well so that they can use them to create curriculum and show them in the classroom but the vast majority of those are for students, yes. And if you know, what percentage of the students have access to iPads presently and what would be the goal the next five years? It varies from building to building. Certainly Thompson is one to one. So those students have iPads all day long. That's not to say that they use an iPad all day long but they have access to those iPads all day long. At the other elementary schools, they have anywhere from three cards for the entire elementary school to a card per grade which is what we're looking for for if that's one of the capital reasons for next year is to get equity among the elementary schools, Thompson aside. At the middle school, we have one cluster that has iPads, that's a pilot cluster to see what that would work out as a middle school. And so it really varies. I would say probably more access at the elementary and the middle schools and less access at the high school becomes much more expensive at the high school and currently Dr. Janger has a group of teachers that are going around looking at different communities to look at what their students are. Okay, thank you. Okay. And that's the end of the talk now. Yes. Good question, John. I asked this question at the night that we had the level plan coming in the front and asked you as well. Do you have any idea about the security of the sensitive data that's going to go back and forth through this very elaborate? For the testing? Yes. Testing data? Yeah. We test our network all the time for whether it's secure or not, whether it can be hacked and we'll be continuing to do that as we go back and forth. The DOE sends a lot of almost every piece of data that we get now comes from student data, it's very sensitive data, goes up and down and we'll be sending it through that pipeline. So I would feel that that data, no, I can't say forever because two kids in the garage can figure out how to do anything at enough motivation as Mr. Gates has proved. But it's as secure as it can be and that's something that we watch all the time. Thank you. John. Dr. Cheskin, can you just make a comment on that? One of the capital planning committee meetings, you mentioned that with this new, with these computers and with the, I don't know if it was a park or a common core, whatever, almost all the students will have an individual education plan or not exactly the same as in the SPED, but there'll be much more closely tracked. We can increase the amount of personalization but also we're collecting the amount of data that we're collecting on student achievement is far in advance to what we did before in the sense that it's all in the same place. So a teacher can actually sit down and say show me all the students that didn't do well in this math exam, show me their reading levels, how many of these students are special education students, how many of these students are ELL students so that they can really design interventions that can be tailored for the individual student. One of the things that teachers are doing along those lines also is, and this is growing, it's not totally universal, you have to go to grade school, elementary, you can take the students after a math exam and make flexible groups. So the three teachers, they might divide, or maybe they might divide with four or five teachers based on the data that they have that they check in baseline edge just so that the students that really need extra challenge will get that and the students that need some repetition at certain levels can get that as well. So I think that we're going to be seeing not only the effects of the data and the access to the data in terms of these plans but also just the way we teach. And that is changing already and more and more of the work that the teachers do together in the planning is all about looking at data analysis. I might also add that I want to thank the channel committee for giving this this one because it really is going to make a big difference thanks to you, so thank you. I'm starting. I have a few more to thank you for. Yeah. Okay, you talked a little bit about this, but we do, when we're looking at next year's budget, we want to look at what we're looking at, there are some areas in general that fall under just education of all students and they fall into the category of special types of support in the form of math or reading interventions, behavioral support, we have more children at younger ages that are leading more support in terms of being able to regulate themselves to be in school. Latest services for special education we constantly look at the staffing of our programs, it can vary depending on the number of students in the program and of course the big thing is we're going to adjust to the FY 15 to account for this increase in special education. But in addition to that, we're going to have monies available for additional teaching staff at the high school, how that will work out, whether it's a, how many more FTEs in science and math or language, even if we have a projection right now, it will be finalized once we actually have the students pick the courses for next year. In fact, I met with curriculum leaders today to talk about this very topic. So that part is all moving forward, but we do know that in mathematics at the high school we're going to at least add one more FTE because more and more students really have to take a fourth year math and we, in past years have had maybe only 80% to 85% taking a fourth year math and that needs to change. So that will be one of the FTEs we have there. At the middle school, the larger enrollments that we're seeing are hitting the middle school and some of the funds for this budget will go toward creating another cluster. The school has not decided yet whether that will be a split cluster between grades or whether it will be all sixth grade. But then in addition to this, we'll have five reserve positions for the entire district. One of the things that was, something that was a little risky last year and it turned out we did not work out as well as we thought. We put in two reserve positions and we ended up having to put in five elementary classrooms in this, over the course of summer. We didn't even know we needed to buy. We knew we might need one back in May but that all evolved as we went into the summer. So this way we know that the line will be there for those positions. Are they on the five reserve teaching? Are they there instead of having substitutes or are they there just in case of enrollment? They're in the case of enrollment. Let me just give you information I just have since Friday. We found the last couple of weeks doing kindergarten enrollment. We have enrolled in these two weeks, 436 students. Our projection for next year is 442. We already have nine people coming in this week for registration. So this is March. We are going to be well past that 436 by the time we get to September. So I mean I already, it's very likely that we're already seeing with some of these reserve positions are gonna go because as these larger classes move up to the schools the teachers, the number of teachers will stay the same in a certain grade but then we still have then classrooms that are gonna be increased now. Where we will end up in September with these numbers, I don't know, but we were not at that number last year this time. Stephen? Yeah, just a question and then you make a stick to the odyssey for a second. If there is a new cluster in the amounts that are allocated here just for staff, are there additional costs to find rooms or to, we get to a point especially up at the odyssey that there's gonna be additional costs just beyond labor to either reconfigure areas or even have temporary classrooms up there because I actually don't know where you fit another cluster right now and is it special rooms that need to be reconfigured for regular classroom use and if that's the case, how does that get funded? Well, fortunately next year the answer we know we're gonna take one program that's at the middle school so special a program and move it to the high school. But do we get identified by moving some other programs around forward beyond that, we're going to be needing to look at probably some division of rooms and reconfigurations. Yes, but for next year, no, we'll be fine. Okay, so give me just beyond the odyssey though, right? So, and I won't forget the number but you had an increase in enrollment this year that we're in right now. I think you had an increased above expectation of that. You talked about the trend growing. You have the 436 kindergartners of which one is mine, another one is my brother's. So, there's her stuff, there's my stuff, there's her stuff. Yes. So what about the overall space needs of the district? I mean we talked about the odyssey but now you get to the elementary schools, do we get the middle school, the high school, I mean, we're gonna start running into issues at some point? Short answers, yes. Yes, I think at the elementary we will be fine for a number of years. Though I will say we have two schools where continuing to get four classes at a particularly grade level is going to be very difficult. When I looked at the 436, we do have roughly a fourth of those students in buffer zone. So, to the extent possible, try to be able to even classrooms out over the next couple months. The issue is really, well, the elementary should be fine though having said that, you know, we can sustain year after year of this over the next decade because it puts in pressures on. We did not see this increase because if you look at the number of children that are born here and you project them up, didn't see all the movements and there's no way to see that, there really isn't. But anyway, going to the middle school, that is certainly going to be an area of concern as we move forward and yes, maybe two years out we'll be able to do some reconstruction. It would be, there are different ways if you could look at this issue. One is, we could do short term, it may need to have some portables at the middle school. It, you know, down the road we may need, if this trend continues to have addition there. It can also be that when we're looking at the high school we think about that a little bit differently too in terms of the possibility of having the eighth grade class there and then a certain part of the building. And then I was going to actually get to that. So we are going to have to think about that very carefully because as you know, the Board of Selects and the School Committee have both endorsed submitting a statement of interest to the MSBA in the end of this month. The MSBA is going to see all of our moments and they're going to ask us what is going to be the solution. So that would be some of the conversations. Should we be accepted into the next stage of this? But yes, it is a concern. Now we've seen two years of this growth. Will we see the same thing next year? I don't know, but I do know that as I see these elementary class sizes coming in which are in the mid-400s, our retention rate between grades, and you have that in your chart. I think they have the chart at enrollment. You will see that the number is very high. In fact, and some of them is over one, they de-indicate that there has been an increase beyond 100% into grades. And those are all the states that move in. So yes, as we see these grades come through, can Audison handle a school of 1300? Squeezed, you probably can. But can, you know, 13, 1350, we're seeing full 50s in there. But beyond that, we're going to be needing to look at something different as an alternative. Hey, Jared. In discussing the Audison, we had a presentation last week by the superintendent of Minuteman. And he was, his interview was, they interview people who want to come to Minuteman. And some of the respondents said they want to come to Minuteman because their student is enrolled in the Audison. And it's too crowded, so they're going to have their student go to the Minuteman. And I almost fell off my chair because here's a student that wants to go to school in Amlington. And because of the crowding of the Audison, his parents have decided that's not a good place for him to be. So I was just, I was a final guess when I heard that. And that's now, that's not when we get to see. It's been a substantial pickup of Minuteman this last year. So it'll be interesting to see if that continues. Charlie. So this pressure on the capacity leads me to one of my favorite subjects, which is getting the MECCO program to pay for their students. And there's also, as I understand it, there's a program now where teachers can bring their children to the district without the sending district paying the full cost of educating the students. And I've also learned from this is Johnson, that the, let me call it some of the private, special environments in town that take care of kids with special needs also wind up getting being educated in the system. And in some cases neither the state nor the sending towns are paying for those students. And I'm wondering what steps the school committee and the school administration are taking to address this funding shortfall. In other words, where we're absorbing costs of this education for basically out of district users. Let's take each one individually because they are different. With respect to the MECCO program discussion at this table and past years as well. The decision of Arlington to have the MECCO program was not a decision made on the finances of it back close to 40 years ago. It was based on issues of social justice, of values of wanting to have a more diverse student population to have our students be able to look outside their own world. And I think that that historically has been a very successful program. In terms of the actual number of students that we've had in the MECCO program in the years that since I've been in this role they've actually come down. And the reason why with MECCO we look at space available. And I look very carefully at different schools to have the MECCO program at them and what the particular folder or application comes in. I look at the grade to see if that needs the number with some possibility that number could go up, which we've seen happens. So there have been, we've gone from about 100 to 71 over the last few years just because there hasn't been the available classroom space. I think that the issue, we certainly discussed this over the years. I've read your article. There is certainly an argument to be made about the role of the state funding MECCO better. And there's been lobbying efforts to do that. So I think the issue isn't, I think it's a town of Arlington. It was a decision by the town of Arlington to have this program here. I think that it has been a successful program. I think it's continued to be successful. And whether it's evaluated on its fiscal pieces of it, that is something that's a greater group of people are going to have to look at more carefully. So I think you want to add a MECCO piece. I would like to suggest it's very difficult for a greater group of people to evaluate this question if it's not led by the school committee. It's a school department issue. The school is asking for an additional $885,000 this year to accommodate growth. And we have in between those two classes, students and MECCO and the feature program, 76 I think students that are essentially paying only $2,000 through chapter 70 out of a $12,000 per student educational expense. And to me, it's not, I mean, I'm not making any comment about the social or academic or other values of a MECCO. My problem with MECCO is that we're subsidizing the city of Boston. They have an educational cost per student of $17,000 a year. So they're sending students here for $2,000 a year. We're feeding 10,000 of our own expenses and they're saving, even if they paid the full hope, they'd be saving $5,000 a year. So that's the subject that has to be led by the school department and the school committee. And it's not a question of social values or any of the vast subjective issues that have been 50 years ago associated with the MECCO program. It's a question of what are we can afford now? That $750,000 a year would go a long way to fill up your special education gap, variability for your reserve funds. Or it would more than pay for the Thompson School. So it's not chump change. It's a big number. And the school committee and the school administration has to take the leadership role to get this problem solved. It's not, it can't come from the finance committee or the capital planning committee or some other group. It's your responsibility. It's your bag. The, during the, up until this really these last two years where we've had this increase, the situation with the number of students we've had to the MECCO program is that if we were to have the entire program leave the district, would there be any substantial changes in the number of classroom teachers that we would have for any of our fixed costs? We have about 35 students at the elementary, a model that's actually at six schools now, but primarily four. And that puts maybe one or two students for great. So if you take those students out. That's not the issue, Dr. Howard. The issue is $12,000 a year in educating students. This is a city down the road is, I don't know, there's $990 billion of assessed value. We have set a billion dollars of assessed value, but 99 billion, we have seven books. They have tremendous industrial tax place. They're closing schools because they have extra capacity. And we're, they should be paying us to educate those children, it's just simple. And somehow this problem has to get solved because it's eating, you know, you're looking at all of this increase in stress on the school system. And that's an avenue where the stress would be relieved. I'm not saying that the students shouldn't come here. I'm saying the city of Boston should pay for it. Well, how is that going to happen? I'm asking you to solve that problem, right? It's been the school committee to solve that problem because it's your school district that you're running. It's the only, there is no way that we have lobbied for increased funding from the state. There have been lobbying days, there have been letters, there's been discussions. One, what has to happen is that is the case, that they're really done is a political issue because the funding comes from the state. The only way that, is Arlington going to be able to force Boston, the finance committee could do that? What would be, what I think you're asking us to do, if I'm interpreting this correctly, is to eliminate the medical program. No, I never said it, I never said it. Okay, that's not true. Boston is not paying it's fair share and we're subsidizing the city of Boston and we're crazy to do that. Absolutely crazy. And how are we going to get the city of Boston? I don't know, you've got the staff there, you've got a $50,000 dollar bill, figure it out. I'll give you a job, boom. I'll give you a job. Okay, hopefully the board is, and maybe the school committee could look into taking some action, maybe we'll collect some of yours, but we're getting crowded, looking and crowding at the oddest and even the high school, it's an issue that we need to look at. As I said also in the numbers, I really look very carefully, so if we don't have capacity at a particular grade, a particular school, we don't accept students at that grade or that school. So there's really a fine level of thinking that goes into the schools. And it may be that our numbers will continue to drop as we have less available space. But I think that we have a responsibility and that's actually was part of the mental agreement that the students that we currently have are considered Arlington students. That's how the original program was set up. To your second point, the issue of the number of students that come here through a negotiated contract, there's a pilot this year, it is a pilot and in which we have five students. You're correct, so that was the number at 76. We have five students that were, our students, teachers in the district, this is not an uncommon practice in other districts, it was argued to be an issue of retention of really good teachers. But many, but we only have that number of students. With respect to how the district students that come through our group homes, that's the one you're referring to primarily. That's a very tough one because we have group homes and we have right now I believe 10 group homes that at different points have had students come through the Arlington programs. And there are different types of bedroom designations. So in a particular program, you could be residential in that program and the only real support the Arlington Schools gives is help monitor, not monitor, but manage your type of one life. But then there are students that are in a group home bet who by the way the law is designed right now, the LEA, the public school in which the group home exists, assumes the educational costs of educating that student. Now, we have a number of students, there's a lot of churn in that, the number of students that we have, but we do have a significant number, it's primarily at the high school but the middle school also. But the greatest number by a margin of like three to one is more at the high school level. And we have been doing a good job. Here's again the dilemma you get into. We want to do a good job. We want these students to be successful. It's our responsibility to help them be successful. But in doing that, we also have caught the eye of DCF and other groups saying that they do any good job. And so there is more of a sense of trying to place students in this area. So it's a dilemma. But that's the way the law is structured. And that's something that the public school can do to change, that is legislative action, if that is going to change at all. We do want to do some more analysis on this. This is a really complicated area. And we need more time to look at. I mean, one of the things that's really disadvantageous is that unless the students are in Arlington in our schools on October one, we receive no chapter 74. If they come on October 7th, too bad. And because the educational funding was predicated on the idea that a student comes and stays all year, because that's the way it used to be. And these students that are so highly fluid, they challenge all of our administrative systems. They challenge everything. Now the tuition and money that you see in our funding source came from the fact that we would rebuild for these group home students who were on IEPs who received special education services. The law does allow us to build for the special ed portion, not their general ed portion. That we're responsible for. But we can build our own district for special ed costs. However, the department of elementary and secondary education decided that the methodology that we use to rebuild their districts needed to follow a different prototype, which grandly trokates our ability to rebuild for special education services. What furlough challenges our ability to rebuild for special education services is that very often these students arrive without an IEP. So they have to go through testing. They have to get on an IEP. The IEP has to be written. And that can be a factor of weeks. And then if they're gone in three months, you might have done all this work only to build for a week before they're gone somewhere else. It's enormously frustrating. And we need to give it more attention. I think this is an area where the state really needs to, I think the state needs to do more for us here. I mean, we're not even getting Chapter 70 on the majority of these kids, they're not here on October 1st now. Okay, why don't we move along, John? Just one more question. We are not the only school system we're meant for, for sure. No. Right? Are all the districts in the same situation we are relatives to cost? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. But how come it's not possible, and I'm really asking the school committee, whether you guys, because I personally don't think it's your problem, I think it's the school committee's problem. How come it is that we don't have an aggregate effort on the part of ourselves and other MedCo programs to go and lobby strongly with our, what do we do? MedCo does organize lobbying efforts. Yes, they do. They just had one quite recently. The, it's how receptive the state legislature later is our, with respect to this request. They're looking at all the different things that they want to fund. Do all our reps in Senator, are they fighting for this? Have they attended this? One of the strongest voices on this is Jay Kaufman, who no longer has. But he's been very strong voice and trying to get additional MedCo funding. But when they go into their decisions about what they're going to fund, other things get funded or they keep it a little funding in which basically we've been at for a while. And what we receive in terms of MedCo grant pays for the transportation, which is about $133,000 a year. And then additional costs for administration for the people of Minnesota program in. As well as other professional development and services for the students as well. So relatively speaking, the, as all other costs go up and that stays flat, you have a difference right there as well. Okay, Paul? Yeah, I just want to address the issue of students moving from one district to another. Be it through MedCo, school choice, charter schools. There are tremendous inequities in the funding as students are moving. If we send a kid to a charter school, we've got a, what, $12,000, $13,000 garnishment on our local aid account. If we accept a kid under school choice, it's $5,000. None of this works out. So that there's a tremendous need for the state to address all the different ways the kids move district to district. Whether a kid is leaving Boston going to a charter school or coming out to a MedCo program. Now we have a political problem in that the number of districts who are receiving MedCo districts are limited to suburban districts around Boston and somewhere on Springfield. It is not a politically potent region in that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction, say the Boston delegation who would not want to pay Arlington at a charter rate to send a kid out on a MedCo program. There's also a lot of resistance to look at performing the way we pay for charter schools. So it's a vexing political problem. I think that we as a school committee can advance to MASC this year a resolution calling for a look at all funding for students crossing town lines or leaving school districts and finding a more equitable way to pay for it. It's been very consistent lobbying effort of MASC since I was president of the organization before that but there is a lot of reason for legislative inertia on changing any of the funding schemes because if we're advantaged somebody else is disadvantaged like changing the underlying chapter 74 loop. So there's not gonna be great aha on Beacon Hill to right this wrong because it's going to go and move money from one set of communities to another. So it's a vexing problem and there's no easy answer and we have to continue to advocate for that on a reliable basis and that's all we can say. Thank you. Okay, shall we see if we can? Well, the next graph is one that you've seen in the past is some pages 20 which looks at the budget by major categories and I think that the one that, there's a lot of interesting information but the one I do want to call your attention to is the one that's on the right hand side of the graph interventions that we have been doing investments in that category. That portion of the pie has increased but that is also one of the reasons why our referrals have gone down and remained by the static in the last couple of years. So going on, here's sort of a summary of where we are with what the cost will be next year. We have, as per our agreement for the long range of planning is we have a 3.5% growth in the general education budget seven, especially S. We continue to get the kindergarten key officer who has been a great success story now who's going to get the full-time kindergarten but the town receives anywhere from four to six and a thousand additional revenue to the funds. And then of course the enrollment factor this year which would give the operating budget an additional 885,000. So you can see the key drivers in all of this and that is summarized in the chart of the circle graph following us which shows that the, I particularly like this graph and once we've done in the past because while we have town appropriation I think it's good to see how town appropriation itself is divided up in terms of the estimated capital 70 amount and then the town appropriation of other resources. So basically we're looking at a very rough 20% of the revenue that comes to the town comes through chapter 70 money. And grants remain an important part of the budget as well as do the revolving accounts and reimbursements. So looking at that, what are we looking at in terms of this stuff? Can I just ask one question on looking at the revenues and since the revenues are such an important part of your total package for fiscal 14, this fiscal year, are the revenues coming in as projected? In other words, do you anticipate any significant shortfall in revenues coming in that you can't make up for? I do anticipate that the tuition and money will be short of expectation. We just have short issuance here just yet. But we expect to perform strongly in four visas. We'll see that money, another piece of that money from rolling in is about May. And we seem to be right on with athletic fees and kindergarten fees, music fees, I'm sorry, not kindergarten fees. We're not doing well in that kind of ticket sales. So I think overall we'll be fine. I have factored in, even though I know maybe it's short in the tuition and we have balances that we use for prior years that will make up $500,000 in the bank. Okay. So you already have $5,000 in the bank. So you anticipate that you will have a balanced budget paid your end for this year? Yes. Okay, thank you. We've got $500,000 in the stable state. So as we go into the future and we've talked a little bit, quite a bit about this, there are the main factors that we're going to be dealing with going forward, the role of technology, the pressures that come for all professional development for teachers, the enrollment growth, and also, I'm not a small part of this, the increasing student mental health and the favorites and concerns that we have seen and in this case one of the things our contracted service budget has gone over is for one of those reasons. In fact, just last year we hired, we hired at least two behavior specialists in the elementary principal, all the unices have asked for another behavior specialist for next year because of what we're seeing in the interest. So I'm moving on to the last. Grant, excuse me, Dr. Rodee, get on, Grant, do you have a question? I have a question on the increasing student mental health. Is that a special ed or is it just that? It is, it talks more, but we're seeing it, even much younger ages, and of course one of the things we like to find out is not a special ed or a special ed. Yes, not a special ed, yes, not a special ed. Younger and younger ages that we've seen. And I'm talking with those superintendents and our director of special ed talking as well as one of the assistants, superintendents. This is not just Arlington, this is everywhere. Everyone is seeing the same kind of friends that we're seeing, and there's a lot of speculation to why. And I can't give you any reasons why it's just that we're seeing it and we're responding as effectively as we can. Is one of the responses to perhaps will lead to the evaluation where you're in the research education program? Or here in the United States? Well, that's a possibility. That's one of the reasons why in having a behavior as a staff, one of the things they do is they work with the teacher and the principal and all the other support people in the building in the classroom to create behavior plans so that the student can be able to learn in the classroom because what happens is if you can't learn and you get so far behind what that does is create a number of problems. Now, they may have thought by special ed that they would call but they would potentially have a lot of learning. Well, when does the behavior, especially the behavior come across to you in terms of individual education? It can, it can be an individual education plan. Yes, absolutely. It goes. How much has it been? How much has it been increasing? I don't know how to quantify that. A few years ago we didn't even have a behavior as a staff. It really has been something that has been noticeable in the last few years. And the teachers will talk about it. I'm not quite sure how to quantify it other than in terms of the number of behavior plans you might have put in place earlier. Jim. Jim. AYCC has turned itself around significantly in terms of finances. And I'm just wondering if you're taking enough advantage, if I may just pose a question, do you think you're taking up advantage of AYCC and your relationship with them? Yes, we'd love to do it even more. We have a six counseling grant for the elementary and part of that action money we put toward AYCC and they work with us very closely at all levels. And a model that works quite well is that when we have a student that perhaps can benefit from counseling services, that that may start in a connection in schools but then move over into independent type of counseling that can go through third party payments. I think one of the most important things AYCC did a couple years ago was to be able to do third party payments out of health insurance policies. So as we just close up here, it's just talking about the high school. As I mentioned earlier, we have work. We're planning to submit a statement of interest to the MSBA to look at what we need to do for the high school. We've done over the last year a number of studies to just try to help identify what those needs are. Outside experts wanted which was the on-site inside group that came in and did a mechanical and infrastructure evaluation. That's reports online. We've had of course the enrollment, which is what MSDA also likes to know about. And then also the programmatic analysis by the architecture firm of HMFH to look at what are the issues in that in the current high school. That report has also been given to you as well. We have been trying to educate people about this more. In fact, we had a tour this last Saturday. We had close to 100 people come. We're gonna have a tour tomorrow and Thursday, both from four to 5.30. I don't think as many people have signed up at that time. But given the feedback we've had, that we'll probably do at least another tour on a Saturday and in the next month or so. But I think it's helpful for people to be educated about this in terms of the timeline once we get to reporting. I think that we'll probably know by early summer whether we invite it to the next stage or not. So that concludes my main points that I wanted to give you as a sort of overview of where we're going, where we haven't, where we're going next year, next year's budget. Any other questions? Okay, okay. I'll move it directly to the budget, but what's on the plans on the schools for the STRAT school? The school committee can make a promise to the town about that they renovate all seven schools. But obviously nothing has been said about the STRAT because that's the bulldog of money. I'm glad you brought it up because actually a lot's been going on with STRAT. We have a building committee and we have representation on it, not unlike what we do for MSBA. We have a member from the Capital Committee and we've done the charge from the Capital Committee has been to decide, to look at what is going to be needed at STRAT in order to have parity with the other elementary schools. And I think we're getting very close to what that will look like. In addition to that, we also need to do some infrastructure work at STRAT. We did, in the last phase in the project, you know the usual windows, boilers, heating, and then we had to do the same thing to get other parts of the building. So that's really important. We are moving also forward in getting an architect to help us with taking some of these ideas and being able to cost them out as to what we'll be looking at in order for that to happen. That will go to Capital in the cycle next year and then it will be up to Capital to help us figure out how we're gonna pay for this. It's going forward. But the goal is to have STRAT and be on par with all the other elementary schools. One of the things that's very interesting, we have a couple engineers on the building committee, one of which is a member of the Capital committee. And they did an analysis of all the buildings in terms of sizes, spaces. And what we found is what we sort of expected is that in terms of some common areas, such as the media, the library, the kitchen area, and the medical service area, they're much smaller than the other schools. But the classrooms are much larger, in fact substantially larger. The kindergartens are almost twice as big as the other schools. So we're working with that in terms of how to get parity and what it's gonna cost. And as I said, our goal is to get it to Capital and not have STRAT. So a safe statement to say that the STRAT in some way, shape, or manner will be improved but will definitely not be renovated as to the extent of the other schools. Is that a fierce statement? It has already had some renovation. The thing is, when MSBA started in this latest iteration on itself, they went through the whole commonwealth and rated all the schools as to whether they would be eligible to come into a veneration program. STRAT never was. We submitted an SOI on STRAT. It's not going anywhere because it's not on the, by their designation. On the other hand, we were able to go to MSBA on major repairs. And that actually was able to give us more money to do a little bit more in the last phases that we did. Thank you very much. Okay, Dave. Three questions, I'll try to do it quick. Sort of a general governance question. Short-term, medium-term, long-term. What keeps you up at night? What bothers you? Short-term, medium-term, and long-term. What keeps you up at night? Yeah? Well, recently it's been our special education increases in terms of what we need to do because snow, snow always hits me up, yes. Yes, those are, those are our fortnights. And I spend a lot of time thinking about space issues, particularly moving with the high school. You know, I think that we have a lot of issues going with facilities, certain STRAT and pressures that addison, and how does that all fit into the long-range plan of the town in terms of balancing, trying to keep the operating budgets and balance, and as well be able to build these fiscal projects. And of course, we're also looking at minivan. So there's a lot of things that are going on right now in terms of how do you figure out how to move in which direction and in what pace? So before I ask my second question, but I find to be, the reason I was smiling as you were responding is, when the town manager comes before us, I ask him the exact same question every time he's before us. So in our opening finance committee meeting, I asked him the question and he gave the exact same response you gave. So it was, well it was interesting, which leads to my second question though with a nice little segway, is, and just to preface it, this goes back five or six years ago, I was very, I'll use a whole like word, I was very angry at what I felt was the unfair treatment that you were, you are, as being representing the superintendent of the school, we're getting sort of through our finance committee process and through interactions with the town because I used to hear this term, this verbage would be, we talk about the town in the school, like the school was this separate weird thing off on its own and it wasn't a problem for the town, but I don't know whose town was the school of the long tail, right? It appears to have gotten better, right? It appears when you look at the additional money that went into the budget, if you listen to the town manager talking about, can't really care in deeply about our like in high school and men and things like that, it feels like it's gotten better, but it doesn't mean anything, if I feel like it's gotten better, it matters if you can't think it's gotten better. So in terms of your, I'm gonna say treatment, how you feel you're part of, do you feel you're part of the team, do you feel you're isolated, do you, how's it going? I'm not the isolated at all, I feel very much part of the team and I think the town manager as well is the preceding town manager. It does a lot to bring departments together. I feel that I have a very good collaborative working relationship with the town manager and certainly with all the department heads as well. I think that, I think with even when we have discussions in the school department, certainly at the school committee, but we're thinking about all of these pieces, it's not, we're not, when our school system over here that's separate and apart from the town, it's all one community and essentially it's all the same money, it's just how it gets divvied up in terms of what we want to achieve. And we have a lot of things we have to achieve, we have to certainly keep these priorities. In fact, the enrollment growth factor that we have, one of the first long feelings on this was that we did not want to make sure this was gonna work in terms of a long range plan. Because stable budgets, predictable budgets are very good on the product schools. Just as a simple fiscal piece. So when you don't have that, that's not a good place to be. So we all talk about this quite a bit and try to plan together and I don't think that, that I know I don't and I never am speaking for Adam but I think that he would feel the same. We really do have a lot of communication about common issues and common goals. Well I asked him the same question actually because I care deeply about how you are, you know, fit into the greater town scheme and he actually said the same thing. So my last thing, it gets to not a question, more of a comment, thank you for coming tonight. I know you guys have some long days, you have some meetings, you have lots of meetings with the school committee, you come here and then I actually, my wife went to a event a few weeks back about kindergarten curriculum or something where you, you're the Thompson principal and some other people were standing in there and I have to say my wife did comment that. She was amazed at how you sort of stood in there and you know, you actually, you know, sometimes you have to go home superintendents that are isolated and you were not, you sort of come out there. So thank you for coming and thank you for everything. If there's time and words, are there any other, are there any other questions, one? Sure, so I appreciate your collaborative effort and just the growth factor but the way it, not at the end of that, I'm wondering if over the long term she has really enough to cover all of the cost of being a student and coming in here. Do you really feel that they made that for all of us? Well, we're going to work to make a, she's got a work-care combination work. She's working out a lot, but I do, I don't look at this as an exhalation of a much bigger plan. And it's really made this a stable political budget plan while for years it's been an interest to have a school department here. Okay, is there any other questions for the superintendent? Dr. Vody, Mr. Johnson, thank you very much. Thank you for the school committee for attending. We appreciate your answer. Okay, just to finish this up, we have, not going to get through as much as I told you in the email, we've got two issues. Before us, one is Article 7 of the special town meeting requesting a transfer of $500,000 from the stabilization fund. Now, this is the educational stabilization fund for special ed. It was established by a transfer from the school department, I think either last year or the year before, they're requesting the $500,000 back into the fiscal 14 budget to help take into account special ed. Do I have a motion on that? Second. Second. Any discussion? Any questions? Paul. I have my fingers crossed, they won't be here next year. I have my fingers crossed that they won't need a similar thing next year when that account is open. Yes, okay. Okay, all those in favor of the transfer of $500,000 back to the school department, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, yes. Any other action? Okay, now the appropriation of the request from the town meeting, from the town is $50,000,729,968. Is there a motion? No. Second? Second. Okay, any discussion? No. Yes, I am motivated to make a recommendation even though I strongly support the growth factor increase of $880,000, $5,000. I noticed that the aggregate amount of money that the, what I'll call the unfunded tuition amount to is according to the calculation that I worked out is $796,588, $7. And I'm strongly motivated to make a motion to reduce the budget by that amount. But I am going to pass on the hope that we can save some money in the school department this year and use it for the special education reserve fund before the end of this year. But I have to say that I'm continuously and extremely distressed by the lack of progress that the school department has made over addressing this huge amount of money that we are basically subsidizing other communities for while we're asking the only tax payer to pay more. So this comment is not a motion. Is there any other discussion? Mark? Yeah, has anybody read the budget line by line and looked at it? Because I went through this and just looking at the budget items, when we analyzed the other budgets, we pound them over $500, $400, and we're looking at $56 million. I went through and highlighted items tolding somewhere between $1.4 and $1.6 million where there's items that haven't been spent in the last three years, four years where there's amounts listed here. Now I'm going to say I also understand that the school committee can spend it wherever they want. But there's items listed here and I just don't understand it. Any other discussion? Okay, all those in favor, all the appropriation for $50 million, seven, two, nine, nine, six, eight. Please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, so unanimous. And Dr. Bodie, I want to give you a call tomorrow over the next couple of days about some of the enrollment discrepancies that I see between those two reporting mechanisms. But I'll give you a call later on that. Okay. Okay, it is a couple minutes of 10. I had a talk with the manager on the three budget issues that we had mentioned, the Snow and Ice, the streets and street repairs, and the cost benefit analysis of the recycling coordinator. They are in the process of preparing that and they are hoping to come in on Wednesday. So I said he's going to get back to me tomorrow if that's the case, then that'll be the first order of business to go through those three issues. One issue I found is that when he calculates out to 3.5% for his budgets, he includes all the non-school budgets. So for example, on the Snow budget, since about $20,000 was reduced and the treasurer's request, then that money, for example, could be shifted into Snow and Ice, because it's all within the same 3.5, so just to let you know on that. And the other numbers he's going to be working on. So we'll do that. The next order of business is Minuteman. There's two things there, the Minuteman appropriation. You heard the budget presentation. Also at the end of the hand that I was sheet, so we want to re-discuss or re-vote the Minuteman agreement. And you saw the sheet there with the four years of enrollment and doing it instead totally on enrollment, in other words, the weighted vote. It's going to be half unweighted vote and half equal. So that will discuss that and re-vote it. And then after that, we'll work on the budgets. And so please, everybody have all the rest of the budgets and we'll see how much we can get done. And maybe we don't need to meet both of the fall of the days next week. Is there any questions or any other business before the committee? Almost the first thing on your list of three. Snow and Ice, Recycling and. And the streets. All streets. Okay, any other questions? Any adjourned? Just want to be a good question. I'm sorry. That budget, that special education kind of that Diane mentioned in the object session. I did a four year compound growth analysis on that budget line, which was supposedly all the costs outside of this special education. And the compound growth rate was 5.3%. But I'm still totally confused on that question. It could be that maybe what we need to do before this is have another meeting with the, maybe the school subcommittee on budgets could come in and we could just more have a more informal discussion just on going through the budgets. So we have a chance to have our budgets open and maybe like I said, do a little bit more informal next year. In other words, that basically an additional session on that. Okay, any other questions? Okay, thank you.