 So, a couple of other announcements before we talk about school budgets in the time of COVID here, next week on the 7th is the annual meeting that will happen in this auditorium at 6.30 p.m. and that's where, you know, we get votes from the floor to kind of approve what we're asking for in terms of surplus funds, which we'll talk about tonight and what to do with the surplus funds in terms of going into the reserve funds as well as what the overall budget is. This year, in terms of the overall district budget, the primary goal has been minimizing as much as possible the tax increases that have happened across the state due to the fact that real estate prices have gone up astronomically. During the COVID pandemic, Vermont was seen as a good place for people to come and get out of the big city, and so there was a lot of competition for real estate and for housing here, and what it has done is it's driven up the value of people's properties quite a bit, and when the property values go up, people are expected to pay more taxes because of that extra value, so we'll talk a little bit about that. But in terms of the creation of this budget, the real goal here was to make sure that we're continuing the good works that we've started, but also trying to take into account the impact that that change in property values will have on the taxpayers this year. And again, this is not just Randolph Braintree and Brookfield. This is across the state that this has happened. In terms of the overall OSS budget proposal that we're putting in front of the voters next week is a bit of an increase in terms of expenses, which we'll talk about, but an even bigger increase in terms of revenue. So we will actually be asking for less from the taxpayers overall than we did in the previous year. This year's budget, the year that we are currently living in, is $22,165,000. What we are looking for to run everything across the district next year is $23,534,000. That's a total change of about $1.31.4 million, but with that $1.31.4 million increase, we've also generated additional revenue of $2.3 million. So we're bringing in more money than the additional that we plan on spending, so we will actually be asking for about a million dollars less from the taxpayers than we did last year. Now in terms of that $1.3 million increase, we kind of break it up into two big categories. We've got what's called discretionary and then we've got what's called contractual and obligatory. Discretionary money are things that we are choosing to do because we believe that they are good for kids. Things like putting in next year or attempting to put in next year a late bus so students can stay after school, get some extra help with homework. They can participate more in the extracurricular activities that we offer and it's not a burden on parents to have to pick them up kind of at an odd hour to see them safely home. And so in terms of that $1.3 million, $365,000 of its discretionary, the other million of it is contractual. In other words, these are things that we simply have to pay for. Salaries go up every year, that's agreed to by a contract with the staff. There was a considerable amount of inflation this past year, so we had to budget for between a 16-20% increase in terms of supplies and fuel oil and fuel for the buses and things like that. And so that's what that line is all about. It's important to remember as we kind of enter into this discussion a little deeper that your local taxes that you pay really come from two different sources and in terms of the school taxes. You have a portion of it that is controlled directly by the district and that's in terms of how much we're spending versus the revenues that we're bringing in. And then we have this gigantic portion of it that's out of our control and that has to do with the common level of appraisal. That goes back to the idea that property values across the state have increased considerably this year and so with the values of people's homes and properties going up, the state is going to expect people to pay more in taxes. That is out of our control. What is within our control, how we're managing our own budget, our own expenses and our own revenues, we've actually done a very good job in terms of what we're looking for next year. The school controlled piece would cause people's taxes to go down by 7.5 cents per $100 of assessed value which is about a $290 annual savings on the average priced home in our area. Average priced home right now is $385,000. Last year it was similar. The district did its part. We actually, if it were just due to the district, people would have seen a 6.8 cent per $100 of assessed value decrease in their taxes or about $192 annually. So again, the district has a certain amount of control and we've been doing our parts. What we are asking for from the community has actually been going down for the last two years. To do a comparison about the school's impact, what we have control over in the CLA impact, what's happening because of the change in real estate values, you can kind of see on this screen here. If it were up to the district, just the changes that the district are making in the budget for next year, everyone would see a $290 decrease for an average priced home. Average priced home $385,000 this year. If your home is worth twice that, you would see twice that decrease. So it expands and it changes linearly if your value of your house is different from the $385. On the other side, the CLA, common level of appraisal impact, what you see are some pretty dramatic changes here and that's because, again, people's, the value of their properties have changed dramatically. In Braintree, when the state went out and did its equity study, it found that Braintree is only paying 88.7, paying on 88.7% of the value of their properties. So people would expect to see a $777 increase in their annual taxes if it were just due to the CLA. Brookfield, because that town reassessed last year, they're actually going to see a decrease because of how property values changed over the last year of $659 on the average priced home and in Randolph, if it were just due to the change in property values, folks would see a $669 increase in their annual property taxes, school property taxes for next year. So what we have to do to figure out what your actual taxes are going to be is we have to put the two together. The decrease that people would see because of what the school has done, together with the increase that is occurring because of the change in property values, and so this is what folks can expect if they vote yes on this year's school budget. In Braintree, on an average priced home of $385,000, you would expect to see about a $488 increase annually. In Brookfield, again, because folks reassessed last year, the town reassessed last year, on the average priced home, you would see a $948 decrease in your tax bill, and in Randolph, we would see a $379 increase on the average priced home in our town. So these are some pretty significant changes, and again, I cannot stress enough that this is just due to the change in people's property values because of the demand on property in Vermont over the last year or two during the end of the COVID pandemic. A couple of important pieces to point out to folks is that you may be eligible for a property tax or a homesteaders credit, it's called. Basically, if your household income is under $134,000, you could qualify for up to an $8,000 property tax credit. So if you use a tax preparer, it's important to talk with them about this and make sure that that paperwork gets filled out. If you are doing your own taxes, you're looking for form HS-22 called the Homestead Declaration and Property Tax Credit Claim, and I put the link up there, which I'll leave for just a moment for folks that are interested. There used to be a limit if the value of your property was over $400,000. That was kind of a cutoff in terms of benefit from the property tax credit, but the legislature recognizing that property values have gone up so much this year, I believe are working on actually adjusting that limit, but I don't know where they're settling at at this point in time. So this is the basic budget overview. If you go and you vote yes on our budget, these are the expected changes that you would see in your school property taxes, depending upon the town that you live in, fair increases in Braintree and in Randolph, and a pretty sizable decrease if you are a Brookfield resident. Again, I want to stress it 100 times, the district is asking less from the taxpayers than it did last year. It's done this two years in a row. These changes are due to things out of our control. They're due to the changes in the value of people's real estate. We've got to talk a little bit about surplus and reserve funds, because these are articles that folks will also be voting on come voting day next week, and it's important to kind of understand a little bit about the difference between the two, because the word sometimes is used interchangeably, they do not mean the same thing. There are surplus funds and there are reserve funds. Surplus funds are any monies that remain at the end of the fiscal year for the school district, and we typically, especially the last couple of years with all the grants and things that we've been receiving, we've typically had a very large surplus. As part of the voting process next week, we will be asking the voters to vote to allow us to use this surplus money in certain ways. Some of the money will be rolled over based upon this plan to help subsidize taxes for next year to help bring your tax rates a little bit lower, and some of the money is designed to go into what we call reserve funds. If you vote for money to go into a reserve fund, the reserve fund typically has a name like the operations fund or the transportation fund, and the money once it gets in there can only be used for that purpose. The board has oversight on that. I as the superintendent nor anyone in the district can access those reserve funds without bringing it in front of the board and having them vote so that they have their oversight and are making sure that we're using it for what the voters intended. At the end of last year, due to the federal reimbursement grants that we received that were related to the American Recovery Act and to a lot of the COVID money that we received, we have a significant surplus. We have a significant amount of money that was left over at the end of last budget year, and that's 1.3 million. If folks are voting yes when they go to the polls next week, what we are proposing in those votes is to use $1,050,000 of that surplus money to subsidize your taxes. So in other words, that is money that you will not have to pay. It will not have to come from the taxpayers because we already have it. What I am proposing is that we take that $1,050,000 and we split it up equally over the next three years so that folks feel that tax benefit, that tax reduction for at least three years. Then the remainder of that money would go into various reserve accounts to support what foreseeable needs that we have. We will talk a little bit about that in a slide or two. What we have been doing since the start of COVID because taxes and the budgetary needs were unpredictable, things were changing quite rapidly at the time, is that we wanted to make sure that we built up a buffer to help the taxpayers in our three towns. What we have been doing is that each year that we have surplus money, we use it to subsidize future taxes. If you look at the little chart here, you see 2019-2020, we had a significant surplus that year. What did we use it for? We took 826,000 of it and used it to reduce people's taxes in the 2021-22 school year. There was 413,000 of it that was used this year to subsidize this current budget to reduce people's taxes. There's 413,000 still left over that will be used next year to subsidize folks' taxes to bring taxes down. The end of the 2020-21 school year, we did the same thing. We split it up equally over three years and we're proposing to do the same thing with this year's surplus. We've always got a significant amount of money that we are able to use to subsidize to reduce folks' taxes with. We've also built this this way because if you take a look at it, it took three years to build it up so that folks were getting the maximum benefit from it. If at some point in time we're not having these large surpluses, it will also take three years in time to wean ourselves off those subsidies, which gives us time to adjust other aspects of our budget to compensate. There was a tremendous amount of planning that went into how this was set up. Again, 1.3 million in reserve funds are there. We're proposing that 1,050,000 of it is split up equally over the next three budget years to help reduce people's taxes. That leaves a little bit left over. This is what we will be asking people to vote on next week. We have a transportation vehicle bus reserve fund. What that fund is used for is just that. Every year we try to replace two buses so that no bus in our fleet gets to be more than six or seven years old. We actually have a significant amount of money in that reserve fund right now so we are not asking the taxpayers to send any surplus money that way. In our building and maintenance fund, this one was settled aside originally before my time to make sure that when the roofs needed to be replaced on the buildings, which happens about every 20 years, there was enough money to do that work without having to go out to the taxpayers and go to bond. We have a significant amount of money in that reserve fund. I am recommending that we put an additional 100,000 into it from surplus because we did spend quite a bit on the heating repairs at the high school this year. That was a $300,000, $400,000 project by the time everything is done and complete. The idea is to keep this fund at a good level so that when big projects come up, we don't have to go out and take a loan and we don't have to go out and have people's taxes increased to cover these expenses when they happen. We have put money aside in the legal fund. We've never had to touch it. But with the COVID pandemic, there was an exodus from the teaching profession and as folks have probably read in the papers over the last couple of years, I think hopefully folks realize how difficult sometimes it is to get the best people to come in because the candidate pool just isn't there anymore. Typically in a situation like this where you're getting good people, you're trying to train them, there are typically a lot more human resources issues that we have to deal with and have to manage and oftentimes that requires legal counsel to do that. This is just there to help us out in case that becomes necessary. We put in a few years back a reserve fund for special education and the reason that we did that was because the state is changing how they fund special education for schools. In the old days, it used to be what was called a reimbursement method. So in other words, if we had students that were moving into the district over the course of the year, we knew that the state would reimburse us for those unanticipated costs. They have moved to a block grant system where they give us a chunk of money at the beginning of the year and that's pretty much it unless we have some gigantic unusual cost that comes in and then they do reimburse a little bit. But pretty much we get that chunk of money at the beginning of the year. So if we have some major changes, we have a bunch of students that move in or a couple of the very high need students that move in that are very high cost, that could have a dramatic impact on us being able to continue to deliver the services that we plan for that year. So it is nice to have this reserve fund in place so that we can tap from it should we get into a circumstance where we've got students that are moving into the district which we often do that have high needs to make sure that we can fulfill their needs while still fulfilling the needs of the students that the block grant covers. And so we're recommending that 50,000 is added to that special education fund. And then the last piece is the operations fund. Really what this is is, you know, we talked about taking the surplus money and spreading it out over three years so that we can use it to subsidize people's taxes. The money in this operational fund, it's just the resting place for that money, right? We've already said how much we're going to spend and what year we're going to spend it in, but we need a place for that money to sit until that year comes up so that we can draw from it. And so I am recommending we move $1,110,438 over into that operations fund, right? A million, 50,000 of it is to subsidize the next three years for people's taxes. The little bit that is a remainder has no specific purpose to it at this point in time. It is there just to build up a little bit of a cushion in case we have an operational issue. Maybe we come across a really fantastic software program that's going to help the students with math. Maybe there is an operational need that we have and this way we have the money available at that point in time to use it for. So there's a little bit in there above and beyond that $1,050,000, excuse me, to cover a situation like that. And that, unless there are specific questions, is the totality of the presentation. Pretty much everybody is online. So if there are questions about anything that I've talked about, or if you want me to go into further detail on anything, please ask. And so with no questions, just a couple of other reminders. At the school offices, as well as at the town offices, there are copies of our annual report to the voters. That has also been emailed out to the community and I will email it out again to everyone at the beginning of the week. There is a lot of discussion on all the good works that have happened at each of the schools. My discussion that is in that annual report focuses in on the budget and specifically the things that we've talked about. And so if you're trying to go to the polls informed, that is a good resource to have in hand. And so please do look for that. It's also posted up on the school district website. So unless there are questions, I will bid everyone a good night and my best hopes and wishes go out to our boys basketball team as they compete in the semifinals tonight at Chester. Good luck. Thank you.