 Hello and welcome to Town Meeting TV coverage of Town Meeting Day 2024. This program is part of a series of forums. We're bringing you in advance of Town Meeting Day on Tuesday, March 5th. Town Meeting Day hosts forums with all candidates and covers questions you will see on the ballot, introducing you to the community decision makers and connecting you with issues that shape your local community. You will find all forums at cctv.org slash 2024 for our Town Meeting TV YouTube channel, where older-generated couches are available. Tonight's program we will be hearing from Tom Panigan, the superintendent for the Broughton School District, as well as Russell Elk, communication specialist for the Broughton School District. Gentlemen, take it away. Okay, great. Thank you Romeo. It's great to be on tonight and we appreciate you having us here to be able to have the opportunity to talk to the people of Burlington about the budget that we're proposing for the Burlington School District. And so we're going to jump into some presentation here of the budgeting process and how we landed on this budget recommendation and what the citizens of Burlington and beyond should know about the budget. So the first thing is we've worked closely with our school district leadership team and our school board, and our school board gives us guidance every year on how we should be making decisions as we plan our budget that we end up then presenting to the school board for their vote. The school board gave us guidance. Much of this guidance is similar to the guidance they gave us last year, but there are some added pieces because there are some new things that have happened in the education, finance landscape over the past few months. So the first is that we recognize that our staffing levels need to be responsive to enrollment changes that happen. We have a core staffing model that aligns our staffing to ratios and those ratios are aligned to the number of students in our schools. The second is that we limit budget growth in this school year, in this next fiscal year, because of the overall increase in wages and benefits so that we can make sure that our employees and our staff are well-paid and compensated for the great work that they do. And then we also have a big cost in BHS and BTC, the new high school that's being built and you're starting to see come to life slowly, but in March we will start to see it really rise up on Institute Road out on North Ave. The third piece of board guidance is that we ensure funding to meet our strategic plan objectives. So we have a five-year strategic plan, we're in the second year of that strategic plan, and we need to make sure that we are funding our priority areas in that strategic plan, and so we've set aside some funding for that. We need to continue to offer robust programmatic offerings. We know how important art and music and the arts and also intervention and support for individual students and sports and chorus and plays and all the offerings that make students really want to be at school. We want to make sure that we can still offer those and so that was a big part of the guidance this year and last year. We also need to make sure that over the years we're making decisions based on the changes that happen each year so that we're not making disruptive changes in any given year but looking at the impact of our budget over multiple years. And I think, sorry to interrupt you, but I think that's going to come into play as we talk a little bit about some of the changes that might happen with Act 127 that we talk about. When we get into the budget a little bit deeper, it's important to remember that particular piece about remembering the impact this will have year over year. Yeah, yeah. And I forgot to urge that something very important is that if you are tuning live, we also welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. If you're calling in, we'll do our best to prioritize your questions through, through we will screen calls to ensure questions are not repeated and that you are willing to ask this question, mention your name and the town you live in, and that your questions will be directed at the school district directors. Great. And the last bit of guidance that our school board gave us in developing our strategic plan was to make sure that we are identifying investments that serve our students who are most vulnerable students, our students who need our support the most. And we are, in this past year, the state passed an act called Act 127 and that act gives our district and other districts that have higher numbers of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch and are living and students who are multilingual learners and students who are in small schools and in secondary schools, higher weights. The idea is that it costs more to educate some students than other students and our weighting system in the state of Vermont has not been equitable and that's been well documented. This year the legislature picked that up and created a solution to that which is in Act 127 and that gives us more taxing capacity. So it allows us to do more for our money essentially and that's really important. So part of that is to make sure that some of the investments that we make in our budget are specifically allocated for the students for whom that was designed. So those are the big areas of guidance that we use to make our budget decisions. As we go into how we actually develop the budget, some of the factors that we played into, we do an audit of our financials every year and so we just received our FY23 financial audit. We don't audit FY24 because that's what we're in right now. So it's always a little bit delayed but what we learned is that in FY23 there was about two and a half million dollars of surplus. So that's really us making sure that we are not overspending that any decisions that we make about spending that wasn't in the budget we're really careful to make sure that we're taking care of that. So that's about 2% of the budget and that's an average, it's a little bit lower than average surplus for us actually but it's a good amount. If you are creating a budget of our size, you don't necessarily want to spend every single penny because the district is so big and there are so many things. What we learned is that this will help us because it will help us to buy down a little bit of the tax rate for Burlington citizens. And then there are some assumptions that we make when we build the budget and this plays into our budget. And so these are some of the high level assumptions in our budget or now realities in our budget. The first is wages and benefits. Those bargaining agreements that we settled this past year were in the range or around a 5% increase and that kept us competitive with our neighbors and also in the region and so that was pretty typical across the region. And then health insurance premiums are estimated to increase or will increase about 16.4%. We moved to statewide bargaining for health insurance and so you see the impact of that which is pretty significant. I think what residents should understand there is that we are in control of the wages. We do bargaining with all of our units and we were actually really excited. We had a three-year agreement with our teachers union this year after going sort of multiple back-to-back one-year agreement so we were able to come together and we have a really strong partnership right now with them. But those are the things that Superintendent Plannigan was saying and we control that portion of our spending. We agree on those wages and we're trying to stay competitive so that we can have awesome teachers in Burlington. What we don't control as a school district is the health insurance premiums and as you can see those are really high this year and so that was something that we knew was going to be concerning going into the budgeting season. So that's one of the big areas of impact to our budget this year. The second is the BHS and BTC bonding. So this is the first year of our big borrowing and actually the big year of borrowing. We borrowed $130 million of the $165 million that we are... I feel like I want to cheer. Can I cheer? Thank you Burlington for 76% of voters approved our ask to borrow money to build this school. It's a big number but I'm also really excited. I do remember it was a town meeting day. Yes, we're really grateful to the citizens of Burlington for voting to build a new high school. It's something that we've really needed for a long time. We did have a plan to renovate the old high school and then that plan was scrapped because we found PCBs that ended up essentially totaling the old high school and so we're building a new high school and we're excited about that. I think it brings energy to our district and will bring people to our city and is something that we can be proud of and also there's a cost to that and so that we're feeling this year and again this is the big year for that tax increase. When is it scheduled to complete? We will be in school in full in the fall of 2026. But in the spring of 2026 we'll be able to spend some time in there and start moving in and get some summer programming in and then be fully open in the summer of 2026. So $9.5 million increase in debt service this upcoming fiscal year 25 because of the BHS and BTC bond. So those are the two big increases to our overall budget. One thing that's happening in budgeting is that we had American Rescue Plan funding as a result of the pandemic so federal funds that came to us to the tune of $26 million over three years to help us get through the pandemic. They came to all districts across the country and those funds go away so they expire this year and so all the districts in the state are experiencing those ESSER funds going away and so are we and so we planned for that up front but there's an impact to our service, our ability and our amount of services that we can provide because those dollars are going away. And then we'll move to the bond. Sure. Yeah. So as Tom said, I don't think we'll spend too much time on this but this is the majority of the borrowing for the bond this year and this is going to be the biggest tax impact here that you're going to see for the project. This is going to, it has more than a 10% impact on our taxes overall this year so if the remaining $35 million is borrowed again as we led up to the bond we promised voters that we would try to find every pot of money that we could to help pay for this so that we don't necessarily have to borrow all of the money that we're allowed to borrow for but if that $35 million is borrowed it will increase tax rates by an additional 2.8% but again this is the big year so that remaining borrowing is likely to occur over two years and impact the FY26 and 27 budget so not factored into this year but as you can see here on the screen work is being done we're pouring concrete. There's now a wall here that you can't see on this picture it was taken a few weeks ago but the building is going up and we are really excited about this project. Alright so in our process of developing our budget we developed an initial budget that included some where you can see the operational investments those are wages and benefits, the operating costs, the bond some leasing that we've had to do as a result of coming out of the old BHS and some school safety work we had to do as a result of moving into Macy's having our high school downtown and so those are the operational investments where there really is no choice and then we added some programmatic investments but you'll see that the programmatic investments are offset by reductions that we made so the reductions that we made are related really specifically to our core staffing model so when I said earlier that we are aligning our staffing to our enrollment and we're also trying to create a consistent staffing model across all of our schools based on enrollment and based on best practices in staffing schools those reductions get us aligned to that core staffing model and so you'll see in places where like Flynn is going to reduce one homeroom because they have three fifth grade classrooms and they only have two fourth grade classrooms so that one classroom goes away so that's kind of an example of what we're doing there and then in terms of programmatic investments you see areas where we've made decisions about how to create more student facing support for students particularly students who are multilingual students some investments around restorative practices around recruitment and our strategic plan restorative practices and recruitment are two pillars of our strategic plan literacy materials we invested in a new literacy curriculum that's aligned to the science of reading and best practices and evidence in reading that we are in our second full year of implementing now we need to continue to build that in and that was in our American Rescue Plan funding and so you can see in those programmatic investments that they're really modest but they do support our strategic plan they do provide more resources toward the intent of Act 127 of the weighted pupil changes in Act 127 and they balance with the reduction so we're really intentional about making sure that we created what's essentially a level service budget here in this budget Is the school having any difficulty with recruitment per se based on the budget? No our recruitment efforts have been pretty strong Burlington tends to be a place where people want to come and work Burlington schools in particular and so we are in a good place there are some hard to fill positions that can be challenging and also we've had over the past three or four years challenges filling our paraeducator positions we've had vacancies there but we're in a much better place in terms of our ability to attract and retain paraeducators as well so we're in a much better place than we were two years ago but that's definitely an area of focus for us and specifically though it's not just recruitment in general as part of our strategic plan we're really focused on making sure that our students in our school system have educators that look like them so we've been trying hard to make sure that we are able to have a school district that hires supports and retains teachers and educators of the global majority so what we have learned over the last two years is we keep saying this is a priority for us and we keep trying to do it on our own and we're really not increasing numbers of the global majority who work for us so we need help this is us saying we want to do this as Tom was saying earlier on we wanted to make sure in this budget we had some money to support our strategic plan so that's really what those recruitment efforts are going to be centered around prioritizing equity as part of the recruitment process absolutely yes and we are working with an organization that has done this work in other places and then they're going to help us build a plan and then this will help us implement that plan with recruiting materials with building some, grow your own model here we know we need to do both in-state recruitment and we also need to do some out-of-state recruitment so this isn't a huge amount of money to support those efforts but it will get us a jump start on being able to do that I was wondering based on Act 127 if the cap does not get left out would the school reconsider doing some action again? That's a great question I don't think that we would redo our budget because we're not planning to change our budget because of a change in the cap We'll show you why in the next couple of slides here it's actually right here I think what we did because we had a level service budget where we didn't make, almost all of our additions were balanced by reductions and I'll go back actually a couple slides just to show that in the original budget that we presented to the school board we included those three lines the instructional coach, the special educator and the dean of students in two schools we pulled those out after we learned about the impact of the common level of appraisal and we had a debate the board debated this a bit whether or not we should keep those in or take them out and they decided to take them out because of the common level of appraisal or the CLA and the impact that was having on our budget which we'll talk about in a minute but also because we know that right now we would be eligible for the cap which is that 5% cap built into Act 127 where your tax increases don't go up after 5% in your long-term weighted ADM but we're hearing that the legislature may be taking that up and taking the cap away and so the school board when they were deliberating they knew that the cap would only last for 5 years and there was some question like how will the state be able to maintain that over 5 years and maybe the cap goes away even sooner so let's be prepared and let's pull out the things that we don't absolutely need right now so we've already sort of done that work in creating this level service budget so our plan would be to continue and if you remember the first slide when we talked about board priorities one of those things was making sure that we recognized the impact our budget would have year over year so these are three things that came out after we learned of the CLA we actually had a lot more ideas of things that we could do and as a leadership team we sort of decided you know what eventually we are going to have to pay for these things even if that cap goes away so we tried really hard to pull out any extra spending and so we have one slide that just sort of illustrates the budget that we are putting forth and that shows the level the percent of the pie that is bonding in the red there the percent of the pie that is wages and benefits in the green and so what this shows is that the tax increase without the bond in addition to the pie would be 3.97% and the tax increase without the common level of appraisal is around 5% so we talk a little bit more about that in the next slide and this talks about this shows the impact of Act 127 so Russ, why don't you talk a little bit about this I think essentially I know we are running out of time here so I think what we want taxpayers to understand Burlington residents to understand is you know initially they said they would cap 5% the increase of equalized tax rate before the CLA but they are moving they are trying to repeal that cap right now I think the good news that Burlington taxpayers should know is that even if they repeal that 5% cap our rate for that is only 6.51% so it goes back to making sure we weren't just throwing everything in the kitchen sink into the budget because we thought we would get a break down the line somewhere we knew we were going to have to pay for that eventually when that cap went away we were really deliberate about not throwing everything in there so if the cap goes away that portion of our spending only accounts for 6.51 tax impact and so for us the budget that we put forward we feel makes a lot of sense responds to tax pressures and it's not worth us going back through that entire budgeting process and getting to a point where we are stripping even more out especially when you look at how much of that increased spending is due to the bond for the high school that we know voters overwhelming support what I wanted to say if you don't mind is that one of the biggest that I've heard is that a lot of folks are seeing school budgets kind of go a little bit higher than they would like to and that's affecting their property tax which accounts for the majority of education funding so I was wondering how that would affect or anything within that line that how you guys think about creating budgets with respect to the taxes associated with it because at the end of the day it comes from proper taxes throughout our budgeting process we are thinking about the impact to tax payers that is sort of the bottom line and this year we came in with this level service budget knowing that we were going to need to do the bond so we were coming into the budget cycle with about a 6% tax increase with the budget that we proposed however we got the common level of appraisal which added another 10% to that and that has been that is the reality of the budgeting model here in the state but what the challenge for us as a school district is it adds on a part of our budgeting process and our explanation of the budget is that we have to explain that the difference between the fair market value of a house and the appraisal of a house how far away those are impacts our overall school budget and so that has been part of the challenge so the CLA this year and this is unprecedented and it is happening here and everywhere else in the region right now because of a number of different factors in the budget cycle this year is going to be really hard across the region and across the state but the CLA drives our total tax impact from 5% to 13.97% with that cap if the cap goes away it turns the tax impact from 6.51% to 15.6% so those are the bottom line numbers there and again we propose a level service budget and we are and we did not think that the CLA was going to drop that much we had appraisal two years ago we were expecting a little bit so we tried really hard you know this 6.51% number if the CLA drops by 1% or 2% we're still at a tax rate well under 10% which we were kind of celebrating because we told everybody at the impact of the bond itself when we were selling it we were asking people to support it we told them it was going to have a 10% tax impact so we're doing this work and we're saying wow we're going to come in under 10% and then we got hit with the CLA numbers which we're unheard of so what does this all mean we have a couple minutes left and this is the slide that I think everybody is looking to see right? right so here's the overall recommended budget summary that the school board voted in favor of we discussed it again with the school board last night and it's a total budget this includes federal funds that are not you know part of the tax taxing of $119 million it shows the tax rate impact with the 5% cap at 13.97 which I just discussed and the 15.6 without the cap interestingly our spending per long term weighted ADM is down because our school board did a huge amount of work with other districts mostly rural districts but some other city districts that have higher levels of poverty and higher levels and more students who are learning English and so that would have been $19,000 in prior years and we would be in a really hard situation if that didn't change this year but it did and we're grateful for the work of our school board and the legislature of picking that up but essentially this is the bottom line so we have a couple slides here so what would that mean for taxes after they reappraisal two years ago the average value of a home in Burlington was at $370,000 so what that would mean with a cap you'd be looking at your taxes increasing about $750 over the course of the year and without the cap you're looking at your taxes increasing at about $836 over the course of the year and then of course if you make if your house is worth a lot more or worth more but there's also if you pay based on the value of your house based on how much money you make those numbers are lower and that percentage is a little bit lower as well but that's the number that people want to know is if I have an average house what am I paying for this year and so that's the number that we have on the slide all right perfect thank you both of you and I don't think we have a whole lot of time but in 30 seconds what would you say to Burlingtonians about the school discipline? Oh I would say that we've got a wonderful school district and we've really appreciated and enjoyed the support of our community throughout my four years here I'm grateful to be the superintendent of schools here this is a hard budget year we know that we worked really hard to try to get the budget as tight as possible being really responsive to the taxpayers of Burlington and we understand as in that this is really the big year of impact for us because of the bond and so we're just wanting to make sure people have the information they need to make the best decision that they can on town meeting day and you know we're grateful for the opportunity to be here thank you I think if there's any questions Superintendent Plannigan is really approachable so we have a coffee with Tom coming up at at Nunyan's Bakery later this month but go to the website www.bsdbt.org slash budget and you will really see we make all of our documents public about the work that went in you'll see multiple presentations tax letters from the state and memos and you'll see the work that really went in and you'll have the opportunity to contact us for questions. Perfect. Thank you gentlemen appreciate it and thank you everybody for watching the show. Thank you for tuning into town TV meeting on going coverage of local elections and candidates and budgets and ballot items. You can find this and many more like it on cctv.org slash 2024 or town TV YouTube channel and thank you for watching and tuning to the election on March 5th and don't forget to vote. Thank you.