 One caveat or one thing was we discussed then was the parking and just Brian came to around a more detailed parking thing so you can analyze that at your at your leisure. I've got another of the conflict of interest so we now have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, still left off, let's wait. When do you start naming names, Alan? Seven, I'm sorry. How about, well, soon. Okay, is there any corrections in the minutes? Any comments, Bill? I'm sorry about that. Okay, it's the old expression. I don't hear what they say as long as it's my name right. Okay, anybody else? Okay, do I have a motion? So moved. Second. Okay, motion is made and seconded. Any further discussion? Okay, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, those are accepted. Okay, everybody bring out your Arlington Public Schools book. And Dr. Bodie and Bill and Diane, you want to come up here? I've got three, I can even give you four seats if you'd like. Okay, we were expecting a big crowd, so we put out a lot of seats, but I guess we're, must be a game going on. Okay, did you shut off there? Okay, if you could. Okay, we're having a hearing on the Arlington Public Schools budget book, which we've had for several weeks now. We appreciate you getting that to us so soon. So we have a chance to go through it. And I'll just turn the mic over to Dr. Bodie. Well, it's nice to see everyone again. It doesn't seem like it's been a whole year, but it has. This evening, we're going to give you an overview of our budget. I know that you have the books and I imagine that you have a list of questions you want to ask us. But before we begin, I just want to introduce, I think you met Laura Chesson last week, who is the assistant superintendent. And of course, you know Bill, chair of the school committee, and Diane, you know as well. So for the most part, I'm going to give the presentation. And Laura Chesson is going to talk a little bit about technology. I know she's talked to the capital committee over the past year about the allocation for technology for the schools. And Diane will be here for any questions as well as Bill. You have our PowerPoint tonight. And this is a quick overview of the different things that we're going to be talking about. Basically, some of this you already know, and you've seen some of these slides before, which is identification of the process, the timeline, the people who are involved in the development of the budget. I want to talk a little bit about the FY15 year-to-date and 9C cuts that we've had this year, major points around the FY16 budget, and also our technology plan, intervention, special education, and the maintenance consolidation plan, which I know that you're aware of. So you have a slide on the members of the Allington School Committee. The budget development and timeline. And I think one of the things that we did last year, which seems to be working pretty well, is giving you the budget book that we give the school committee and then give you any updates and changes that happen through the budget discussions that we have. We have a slide here on the APS budget development. Our budget comes from a lot of discussion among curriculum leaders, principals, and they in turn have discussions with their department or school in terms of what are some of the important things that we need to be able to continue in our budget, as well as additions that we need to consider for the following year. And then, of course, it goes through the school committee and the budget subcommittee of the school committee and through the process until we are here tonight. And at town meeting in another month or so. So for those of you who aren't familiar with all of the principals and cabinet of the school department, you have a couple slides which give names. Two people that are new this year are principals at both Dallin, Fat Digman, and at Thompson, Karen D'Notto. But otherwise it's the same principals as last year. So let me talk a little bit right now about the FY15 year-to-date results. As you, as certainly members of the capital committee are here know, we have completed a feasibility study for Stratton last year. And in that plan developed several options for actually how to phase it and fund it. It was the decision of the capital committee which the school department completely supports and that is to try to contain the project to 14 months so that, one, we minimize the disruption but also probably can get a better contractor who would not want to be able to bid on something that would go off for many years. So the plan right now is to begin the project in June 16 with relocating to the renovated building in the fall of 17. So roughly a 14-month project. And we can talk more about that if people are interested later on. As you know, last year the high school was not accepted into the eligibility period for MSBA. We have rewritten portions of the SOI including an update of the enrollment numbers which we are going to present to the school committee on Thursday evening. The board of selectmen will have a copy of this and certainly will make copies available to any of you as well. This proposal needs to be submitted to the MSBA by April 10 and it goes in through a security portal. In order to submit it we have to have signatures and approval from both the school committee and the board of selectmen. Very much the same process as last year. One of the things that I know that you're also aware about is our enrollment growth over this last year. In our projections we thought we would have about 80 new students last year and we actually had more than twice that number of students. What was challenging last year with this enrollment growth is when it happened. For example, the kindergarten back in March-April we were looking at a number of registrants in the right 420-430 students and our entering class was 502 students. A lot of the enrollment growth took place over the summer and so as we were experiencing that we were also reacting to the types of support teachers classrooms that were going to be needed in order to meet this enrollment growth. So we had additional expenditures that went above our budgeted number for new teachers last summer. This year we have experienced nine seat cuts since we've actually put this budget together and also there has been a vote of the school committee on this proposed budget. One of the cuts that has affected us not only this year but could affect us significantly next year is Governor Baker's proposal to eliminate the kindergarten grant. This grant provides roughly $225,000 of revenue, most of which has gone toward salaries. Salaries for our half-time teaching assistants and for one kindergarten teacher. There's been some additional money for professional development but the proposal is to eliminate it completely. So while it's not reflected in your budgets we've had to look at how we're going to be able to actually fund teaching assistants next year if in fact the final analysis of the legislature is to eliminate that money. Another cut that we had this year was to MEDCO in the amount of about $26,000. Our understanding for next year is that the MEDCO budget will be level funded at the pre-FY15-9C cut level. However, as you know only too well when you have a level funded budget in effect that is a budget reduction. Currently our special education out of district tuition is running under budget, which is terrific. And as we talked about last year one of our goals was to be able to put money back into the stabilization account which last year as you remember we had to withdraw to cover our special education costs last year. So right now we're thinking that we might be able to put back into that stabilization account for special education between $2,000 and $300,000. And we will have certainly a number for town meeting because we have right now a warrant article that's sort of there for that change. We're pretty sure back in January that we would at least be able to put some money in. Overall our enrollment has been increasing nearly 3% every year. And over the last three years this has translated into about 450 students. And we have now over 5,300 students in our district. Our enrollment will probably continue to grow. We have projections that indicate that we're going to have another large kindergarten class coming up. So as I mentioned a few minutes ago our additional summer hiring in order to meet all the needs of our students reasonable class sizes and providing specials for the students that at both the elementary and secondary level required us to actually exceed our number of reserve positions that we had put into the budget. If our enrollment trends continue as projected the Arlington Public Schools will probably reach 6,000 in FY20. One of the things that is daunting about this is how are we going to as a school system accommodate these projected numbers. So it's a fairly complex question to answer because each year any possible extra classrooms are being used to put in additional classrooms that we need particularly kindergarten classrooms. So what we decided to do this year was to solicit the services of an architectural firm to help us do an analysis of space. We sent out bids for quotes. We have those proposals and are very, very close to making a decision on which firm to work with on this. The timeline for that space study is from now until August. And what we're hoping to find out is if our enrollment continues at this rate first of all, we first want to have a corroboration of whether that's actually the case. So part of the proposal was to have another demographer look at our enrollment growth and just to see if it corresponds to the way that we have done it which is sort of a best practice in terms of projecting enrollment growth. But then once we know that is what is our capacity and at what point are we going to need extra capacity and where are we going to see the greatest enrollment growth? One of the issues we have right now, for example, is that Thompson, we now have two classes, two grades that have four classrooms, neither of which can be reduced into three. When the school was built, it was built for three classrooms at each grade and then with one exception and that was kindergarten. So there was 19 classrooms. It is not sustainable at Thompson to have four classrooms at every grade. This last year we had four at Hardy as well. So we have a lot of challenges here and we're hoping to get some answers which of course we will share the report with you once we have it. But I wanted you to be aware that we are doing this. The next page, this graph, I think is very telling as to what we may be seeing as a challenge. What this graph represents are for each year we have entering kindergarten class and what were the number of births at five years prior that entered into kindergarten. So if you take, for example, 2014-15, you see that this particular group, this particular class, roughly about 510 births corresponded to this kindergarten. Now what is sort of unique about this is this is the first time that we had roughly 100% a one-to-one correspondence between birth numbers and entering kindergarteners. Our entering kindergarten class is 502 and it's actually gone up a little bit since then but that was the entering. Prior to this, we started at about an 83% rate. So in other words, if you had 100 children that were born, we would see about 83 of them when they entered kindergarten. It may not be the same students, but I'm just talking about numbers. That 83% started to creep up to 90% and this year we had 100% in terms of numbers. Now, if you look at next year, 2015-16, you'll see that that number is up to 560. And even if we get 90%, we're going to have a very large kindergarten class next year. How it's distributed in town is something that we don't quite know. I will tell you this, we just gone through registrations and it's pretty much mimicking what we saw last year across the different schools. But I know that also last year we also had a lot of people coming in in April, May, June, July, so right now I can't tell you where that distribution is going to end up. But looking out to 18-19, you see a very, very steeper. These are children that have already been born in Arlington. When we get to 19-20, then we're in a different... We don't have all the data yet because that would have been this year. If you look at the next graph, this is, again, another historical and projected enrollment. And what you can see is that while the orange is the high school, the high school has remained fairly constant and it will for a couple of years. Which is starting to see, beginning in really the next couple of years, you're going to start seeing an increase at Audison. And in terms of space for Audison, I think the next two years will be fine but after that we're going to need some additional classroom space. But all the enrollment growth, the actual increases are happening at the elementary level. So we have classes at the high school now that are in the 300 range and our entering kindergarten this year was 500. So that gives you sort of an idea of the magnitude of the change we're seeing in town. So I want to reiterate our gratitude that we were able to work with you and our town manager and the Board of Selects to have an enrollment growth factor for the Allington Public Schools that's based on the previous year's enrollment. And in order to get that growth factor, we all agreed on a 25% per pupil cost for the student abstentions. So this year there were I think 169 which would be that number 25% of the per pupil this year. The next slide you've also seen before. These are the overarching goals, the vision of the Allington Public Schools. Every year we have other goals, other projects that we have a particular focus on with the idea that accomplishing those goals leads us closer to the realization, not closer, but what it does is further realize the vision of the Allington Public Schools. So what are our priorities for FY16 going forward? Well the first is that we successfully conclude negotiations with our teachers and our other unions. Virtually all of our contracts are under negotiation this year. We reduce class sizes in specials at Odyssey Middle School. While we have been able to maintain fairly good core averages despite enrollment growth, roughly 23 per class. And that doesn't mean that every class is 23. What it means is that we have, that's the average and we do have ranges from low 20s and I think we have maybe this year a class of 27 and a poor class of Odyssey. But what are large are a number of our specials. Music, art, some of our teachers have 30, 31 in the class, our phys ed classes. Every phys ed teacher has a class of 36 or 37. So we have some pretty large specials and in fact that also has created scheduling issues so we need to do next year is increase those. We also need to add a high school teacher some of the same issues and that is we can, if you can be boxed in in terms of two larger classes of a lot of students select a particular course and either they're going to not get the course or they're going to have class sizes that are very large. So we don't know exactly how that 1.0 will be distributed, it depends upon the registration process that will be going on later this month. This year, given our experience last year, we, the school committee agreed that was important that we have eight reserve positions going into the summer. It doesn't mean they're just sitting there. We know we're going to use them. In fact, at this point, what are concerned is that we already have too many of them identified as needs for next year, which I'll talk about in a minute. So one of the ways that we are able to achieve creating more reserve positions is to actually look very closely at our legal budget and reduce some of the money from there. Another way that we were able to identify these positions was initially we were going to have a half cluster, an additional half cluster at Otteson, but we went back and re-looked at all of our numbers and re-analyzed it. And what we've decided to do instead for next year is to have a split cluster between sixth and seventh grade. And with that, we'll be able to still maintain our core classrooms at around between 22 and 23. Again, there'll be a range when you schedule, but that's where the average will fall. Another need for next year, and this was probably everybody's highest priority, we had a grant for the last three years called Project Success, and in that grant we were able to afford to have a social worker in every one of our elementary schools. That grant sunsets this year, and unless we were to move two and a half social workers in the operating budget, we would no longer be able to make that commitment of a social worker in every elementary school. So that will be funded. We need to increase one psychologist position to full-time next year in order to meet the analysis needs when students are evaluated for special education services. Another area that we have been focused on the last couple of years are salaries for teaching assistants. We are increasingly not competitive with our neighboring communities. And as a result, we're finding it harder every year to find qualified teaching assistants. And this is particularly true for our special education classes. So we wanted to increase teaching assistant salaries to a higher number than 17,000. They had been in the 16,000, around 16, 8, but honestly being able to meet all of the other needs, it wasn't possible to do that. So it's a modest increase. It sounds better telling somebody 17 than it does telling them 16 as the first number when we go to hire them. The other priority was to continue to implement the technology plan and Laura Cheson is going to talk a little bit about that in a minute. We also are going to be contributing to the maintenance department consolidation plan. Next year the school department will contribute 90,000 for the salary of the director and admin. And then the following year, the monies that we have for facilities will move into the consolidated department. So, as I said a minute ago or so, that new information we had since the proposed budget is the fact we're going to lose the kindergarten grant and how that could affect our budget for next year. How it affects it is that represents about three teaching positions if we were just to maintain what we have. So remember we had eight reserve positions? Three would now go for that. We already know, having worked with the building principal at Addison, that we're probably looking in the neighborhood of 1.2 to 1.6 additional FTEs for specials there. And another development is that we are going to need to fund an additional three to four ELL positions Let me talk a little bit about that so you understand what is happening. It's not just happening in Arlington. It's happening in other districts. Just like special education, we go through a coordinated program review with the department of education and then they point out some things that they think we need to change and we go through a planning process with them. Well, what has emerged over the last two years that we've done this with they have always considered recommended amount of minutes for pull out for English language learners students is now really not recommended they're mandating it. We have done I think a very good job in Arlington of matching services to achievement. So we look at how our students are doing in mathematics and reading to see how much services they need and our students have been doing very well but the department of education has said honestly not that we don't care that your students are doing well we are very glad your students are doing well but you still have to meet the number of required minutes for students and so if a student tests we call level one or level two in terms of language development pulled out of their classroom for two and a half hours every day for special instruction in language. If they're at a level three, four, or five they need to pull out anywhere from an hour to two hours. So we're working on the schedule right now in order to be able to accommodate that but right now our projection is about three to four. When you add to these all up we're already now at the point where we don't really realistically have reserved positions going into next year. So that's where we stand with in that respect I guess I messed them all up here when I talk about GLL situation I think. Okay, here we go. So this graph here we have the five year comparison by budget transfer categories as you can see this and you see with the different color coordinates here you can see that there has been an increase over these last fiscal years from FY12 actuals up to the projected FY16 what I really just want to call your attention to is under administration and you see the purple there for FY16 I don't want you to think that all of a sudden we've got a bloated administration that's not the case that's not the case at all which we'll see in another graph what that why that is higher is that all of the money for contract settlements has been put into a pool into the administration when the contracts are settled then what we're going to do is disperse them to all of the salary line items. Alright so here are the summary of the FY16 proposed budget changes so our net increase in revenue is just under 3 million 2.9 million dollars we've had but of that represented about 2.6 mandatory changes so in other words the contractual obligations or the natural inflation or costs of running a program so if we were to take a look at the proposed increases that I had gone over they would total a little over a million dollars but that would exceed what our revenue would be so we did we took a look at our budget from this year to see where we could do some restructuring and reductions in order to meet the priorities for the FY16 so when we apply the reductions we go into proof of what our revenue is alright and so all of the detail of that is in this book and I'm sure you'll have some questions about that you've seen this type of graph before the circle graph in this particular graph this is based on the current budget allotments the administration is higher than it will be once we complete contract negotiations alright so the revenues the FY revenues will be higher than as you know the counter appropriation and it's just a little over 59 million which is up in total about 5.2% or roughly the 2.9 million so the revenues represent a 3.5% growth in the operating budget, the general education the 7% growth in special education the level fund for the kindergarten fee offset as you recall when we went to a full day kindergarten without tuition we had been counting our revenue of $970,000 in our budget and that has remained as a line item in fact it's actually cost benefit to the town because I think that through the Chapter 70 money we now the town receives about 1.4 or 1.5 million dollars in Chapter 70 and then of course the enrollment growth factor which is based on that 25% per pupil times our enrollment growth so we have here what the key drivers are and we have a town appropriation increase of 2.8 million we're expecting grants to decline a little bit but this number now has doubled because of the Governor Baker's proposal so it'll be probably over 400,000 we'll see a slight well not slight but we'll see an increase in fees and reimbursements to 325,000 and then as you know one of the where we are scheduling circuit breaker is that we're always a year out so we know what our circuit breaker for next year will be which has taken a lot of that guessing out of what to put in as a projection now one of the cautions over FY17 is Governor Baker is suggesting a reduction in the percent for a circuit breaker and while it won't affect us next year it certainly potentially affect us the following year and so again the graph shows the how what the revenue sources are in terms of the whole and now come to the technology part of our presentation tonight and I'm going to ask Laura to talk about this because she has been very much the leader in the district in moving this forward and we're very appreciative of this the vision of the Allington public schools with respect to technology is that it is a tool to help us move forward with how children should learn and need to learn in the 21st century it is not just something that we're adding as an augmentation so Laura do you want to talk a little bit more about that and then talk about the plan I'm going to just actually go briefly over it because you undertook this for consideration last week a large part of this capital budget presentation but you'll see the four items there that we really think about when we look at what technology should help us, our students be able to know and be able to do and these four items come almost directly from the common core state standards Massachusetts adopted the common core about three or years ago I think some people are unaware of is that they didn't just take it whole clock they added additional standards that they felt were important from Massachusetts students they're not part of the common core state standards in addition there were some minor modifications so when a state adopts the common core state standards they can take them on whole clock the federal recommendations or they can make some minor modifications and that's what Massachusetts has done we are lucky that we live in a state that added standards as opposed to just taking them away so the context for our plan is that we've had a number of investments in technology thank you to the generosity of the town and the capital committee and we continue to use a pilot evaluate expand model so we don't just go out and spend money without first piloting a choice that we might make we do an evaluation of that choice as a matter of fact this week at the school committee meeting one of the sixth grade clusters is going to talk about the pilot that they're running and the evaluation that they've done on that and we look based on favorable data whether we should expand that model or not there's a great need of professional development many school districts across the country have put millions and millions of dollars into technology but without the corresponding necessary professional development we're really throwing good money after bad so we also feel that we have a strong need for technical support and we have a fairly good technical staff are they stretched as thin as they possibly can be and we agree that they are but they are able to keep the equipment and the software and the networks up to date and we not only need technology as part of instruction but also in sport of instruction teachers are being required to do a large amount of data analysis in order to make decisions that's the way Dr. Bode talked about what we do with ELL students we really look at student success data and student achievement data and that's how we make decisions about changes finally the security is paramount in our for students utilizing the software but also for student data and also with our hardware and we meet or exceed industry standards in terms of that should you ever want to know more about the model that we base the research that we base our model on there's a website here that you can go and take a look at that talks about the fact that we move from just using technology as a substitution for something that we might have done manually for example typing on a typewriter and then going to a word processor all the way up to redefinition when we look at what a task that a student might do and how that changes with the use of technology and I'll just take just a couple brief moments to just give you an example so we have a first grade class at Thompson elementary school that read a book written by an author and then those students wrote a similar book on the style of the author they then read those books aloud to the author via Skype the author was so impressed by the students that she scheduled a visit to the Thompson elementary school the next time she went to a book signing in Boston and additionally the students then recorded themselves reading the books using a QR code which is one of those things that you see when you scan things and then younger students are able to come to the library and using their iPads they're able to scan the QR code and read the book that the student has written and listen to the student's voice so it really has changed how a task that might have been students just making a book on paper that they might have shared with mom and dad and now it becomes shared with a larger audience teachers tell us that when students share those kinds of things with a larger audience they are more motivated to do a better job they are also more motivated to write more and are more excited about the process that they do so that's just an example of one of the many things that we have done with technology so if you look on the next slide and Miss Johnson did an outstanding job just sort of summarizing these for your last week I just want to talk about a couple of these items Assistive technology is how we're going to continue our efforts to hold special education passed down as much as possible we use assistive technology for students who are autistic students who have language disabilities students who have visual disabilities it allows special education students greater access to the general education curriculum unfortunately at this point about 90% of our assistive technology is 5 years old or older and the changes in technology as you're aware are very rapid and we will be able to do a better job meeting the needs of our special education students by upgrading this technology and additionally we have spent a vast majority of our monies over the last two years at the elementary school level and so as a result there's a significant age to our student devices at the high school and we've had a great increase in the number of students that are looking to take courses in CAD which is computer aided design and computer science at the high school several years ago there was no program and it had kind of gone to the wayside we've now revitalized that and next year we will have two classes in AP computer science but in order to have students to be able to populate that class they need to start getting experiences in a very very deep way of an earlier age so we need to upgrade the technology at and in addition if you read the common force 8th standard you will find out that it specifically says in about 82 places students will use technology too so in order to meet those standards and we want to continue students to continue to achieve at a high level as they are across the state compared to the rest of the state we need to do that as Dr. Bote talked about the growth that we've had and in Dallin and Brackett there are so much larger than our other elementary schools but the access to technology is currently inequitable and we need to increase the amount of technology in those buildings and finally Ms. Johnson told you last week that we made thanks to the MSVA a considerable investment in technology at Thompson and we need to start to begin a replacement cycle that will be for your process I'm going to wrap up presentation talking a little bit about special education first of all I want to define special education because sometimes I think there's a perception that any of our intervention programs really qualify as being a special education and maybe not redefine it it's just as the state defined it and that includes costs that are funded by special education grants, legal and transportation costs when directly supporting special education basically these special education costs are in support of students that have an individual education plan intervention is a general education program they certainly can support students that have an IED but they are designed for all students all students who might be struggling with math or reading for students that have this kind of support it can make a difference for them not only in their own learning but also I think in some instances may be able to prevent students from having to go to them to having an evaluation for special education when we look at our chart here and you can look at the actual for general education intervention special education what you can see is that we have been able to maintain roughly a ratio for general ed to special education costs that has fairly stable even though both an increase what you can also see is that for intervention we have fairly stable we have increased in the last couple of years and projected increased next year a little bit more in our intervention program in order to support all of the learners in our school district and we also are going to be and part of that is also funding increased support for our ELL students as well one of the things to notice though is that as we're looking at professional development here it is remaining fairly stable and a smaller part of our budget than what we would like having good professional development is key for the vitality and the strength of any school district we have infrastructure cost and administration that has changed but again the increase in 16 is related to contracts not to any major technology at all so the special education expenses by funding source if you look at this the orange part here is the amount that we receive from town appropriation which has been increasing over the years circuit breaker while it was low for 11 and 12 has increased but remain fairly stable and the special education grant has not changed at all in fact it's gone down since 11 to where we are today so looking at that to the town appropriation for special ed compared to the actual allocation for special education one of the things that you will see here in this is that the relationship between the portions of special ed funded by the town and the the town appropriation for special education has sort of a changing a changing relationship over the years and in some situations we've had deficits and in other situations we've had a positive change in fact in FY 13 there was a positive change there was a positive delta and we were able to put some money into a special education stabilization account we went down again and up again and this year in where we have a positive differential we expect that at the end of the year we'll probably have between two and three hundred thousand that we would put into that stabilization account for the year where we don't have that and so you get a sense of what those changes have been over time and the last thing to say is that as you know we're going to have the ongoing maintenance committee that in the town has recommended the restructuring of how we organize all custodial and maintenance for our facilities at the town we've invested a lot of money in our buildings particularly our school buildings and the one we're sitting in now and it's important that we give the kind of attention to maintaining these buildings so that they last a long time and I think that the way it has been organized over the years in just different parts of different budgets and different departments has completed that a little bit in terms of being able to do long range planning so this department will I'm assuming the approval of all the people necessary in this process be able to have the consolidated department next year the school department will support that and then the following year we will work our facilities money into that consolidated budget so that's our overview and we're going to be open to any questions. What we need tonight is that the Allington school committee respectfully requests that you give approval to the FY of 16 for the Allington school Thank you very much for your presentation and John I'll open it up to the four of the finance community with any questions they may have John? I'm afraid I didn't understand this graph. Would you feel a little more specific about those red and what does that green mark mean? Let me take a shot. Alright so the green represents the amount of expenditures from special education that were funded by the town appropriation so these are the special expenses that weren't covered by circuit breaker that weren't covered by grants that's the green in FY 12 the town and the long range planning decided to give us a particular amount so instead of just giving us one appropriation they broke the appropriation into two pieces general ed and special ed realizing that special ed grows at a much higher rate than general ed and so in 12 we see that's the first year and that year the amount of money that the town allocated for Sped was less than the amount that was spent out of the appropriation and so that over under represents it and the reason 16 is so mutated is in large part because we don't have the contract settlement showing up here so when they come in they're going to change it but my hope is you know you see the 290 to the good in FY 15 I hope that we're going to be able to transfer that to stabilization in town meeting this spring and assuming everything stays the way it is I'm also hoping that at 16 we may be able to transfer again I mean you know if we're able to hold the line the problem with special ed as we've seen over and over is that it just doesn't behave itself it's up it's down it's all over the place by creating a deeper stabilization account that hopefully we can get to the point where we can budget more tightly without always living here for those wild swings that are really devastated to the budget thank you okay are we done? so on the slide number 18 you have a 3.5% in terms of education and 7.4% on these specializations for the FY 16 and if you my question is like do you expect to like wait for the future years in our 19 do you expect to have more growth for these special educations because it's almost double compared to general education that's part of the long range plan if you'll remember I'm sure Andrew Flanagan presented that to you that's part of the long term planning and as we looked backwards in time at special ed expenditures year over year it worked out to about 7 12 some years 3 others but 7 was about how it went now could we get to a point as a district where we didn't go at 7 anymore I hope so I really do I hope we get to the point where we created stabilization and our budget is growing at a lower rate but history has taught us that 7% tends to be the right number I have a question can you remember it's very difficult to make those kind of comparisons I've tried one of the things that's very different is the percentage of special ed kids in the district Belmont has many fewer kids on IEPs than does Arlington Lexington has more but Lexington's a bigger district the state defines special ed differently than the way we're defining it here they don't include grant money when they think about it and they narrow it down to a very specific category of town appropriation expenditures which makes it really hard to get your hands around I would say that in general high performing high expectation communities with parents who don't want anything less than above average children tend to have very high special ed costs on the other hand very disadvantaged communities can have very high special ed costs as well okay on your projected enrollment question how many how many students what the rate for elementary to go on to the and then let's say from the others to go on to one to one the same amount of students if you go to our website there's a go ahead actually Diane's not a president because she actually has done all the enrollment projections out on our website there's a calculation that we've done and we use a five year weighted continuity rate so we look at what's happened from kindergarten to first grade over the past five years the most recent year being five times more important than the most distant year and we create a rated cost and so we take the incoming numbers we multiply it by that rate and that gives us the projection for the next year and so we do tend to see a dip between fifth and sixth grade and ninth grade people that are going to peel off to go to private school those are jumping off points if they're going to go middle school privately and also if they're going to go vocational they're going to jump off between eighth and ninth grade but what we see interestingly enough is that the numbers tend to rebound at seventh and eighth grade and then 10th, 11th and 12th grade that we are not you know it's not a one way shoot and they peel off or a new ones movement you know that it's not as simple as that we seem to be a very attractive community and we're not all front loading kindergarten even though on this graph you look at the birth rates of kindergarten and this kind of scares me we definitely got more babies what we're seeing is that people are moving in we have above 100% retention in like first grade, second grade, third grade so people are coming with pre-made babies and then having more they're moving forward to school and so you know the growth isn't confined at the bottom end of the spectrum and then a steady number goes up through the shoot they're coming in at all levels growth isn't one but it seems consistent so where does it go it wasn't just kindergarten last year it was across the board our retention percentages are usually in the 90% some of grades are 100% and then some that may be 90 but they're very high in Kelvin Manor where I live two families moved out my age, no kids two families moved in five new kids hit Harding in one year different grades I'm familiar with the trend professionally speaking but notice the green bars seem to be growing at a greater rate and that's the elementary, not just one grade that just seems to say well perhaps they did peel off but they come back but okay so it's the bigger classes are beginning to age up into the middle school we have classes of 300 at the high school roughly speaking we have classes of mid fours to 500 now in kindergarten the classes at the oddison as they're aging up they're not going away as they age up through elementary so we're going to end up with an awful lot of kids at the oddison if these trends continue does it seem to be depicted in here but that's kind of where when is that going to happen you can't kind of see it the pink is getting fatter wider so to speak but so it's later in the future we're going to see the effects of the growth we are starting to see them in oddison we had a really big cohort of six graders but we have not as big a cohort of incoming sixth graders we have 392 sixth graders and there could have been 420 coming from fifth so there's always a drop off and next year we're expecting somewhere around 400 as well but the classes that are coming up behind are in the 460s, 480s 500s so that's a couple of years away but if these students all stay in our lesson which all of our numbers predict oddison will grow and the high school will probably be what do we say 1600 by FY20 I think that's what we're projecting for me the scary one is the 1819 school year it's above 600 births if we pull 100% on that we're going to have a ginormous kindergarten class I mean even if we pull 90% it's going to be a really big class and that's not that many years away that's what we're doing I have a question back from page 8 can you tell me if you took this point before the high school accepted the MSPA construction tool so we're going to try again this year any thoughts on why what might be doing differently what might be the differences around a lot of it has to do with which district put in statements of interest last year they had a lot of districts put them in something like 229 38 projects half between core and half between accelerated repair what I did learn from the director was that last year they had more projects presented that came from cities in the Commonwealth what that means for an Arlington or suburban is that when they fund that school it's at a higher percentage rate there's a certain amount of money they have every year and depending on the percentages that can also affect how much money is available period I don't know what our competition will be this year in that respect but certainly we'll put it back in our project moved along a little bit in the process we didn't make the final cut or two but we're certainly going to resubmit it now in terms of what we're resubmitting but another issue we've really taken a look at some of our some other issues too one has to do with security really getting a little bit tighter in our description another is our building envelope we have we're seeing more penetration of water into the high school as the mortar of the building becomes more porous and I think in fact we were even talking about the possibility of having a hydrostatic test where we stand on that so we've emphasized some more of these issues that have become even more apparent as we've gone through this winter in fact we were just finishing touches on it today and Ms. Johnson would you want to say anything more about some of the other key issues we also looked at ADA while we had that in our report last year we brought it more to the center so that people would notice it because one of the issues we have at the high schools is one elevator and this year it's not been very reliable for those of you who know the high school it's over in the Fusco building well if you're disabled and you need to use that elevator whether you're in broken leg or something more serious than that it's an ordeal to get from class to class if you have to the entire length of the building so emphasizing more of the impact of that one elevator on students if I just might add one of the other factors in selection if a school all of a sudden similar to the one in Summable had a collapsed roof out in the western part of the state a tornado ripped a brand new building apart that building automatically gets put right at the top and everybody gets pushed down there was one in Lexington my daughter teaches there within three years from identifying PCB in the foundation they have a brand new school because safety is the number one thing so even if you meet all the criteria and you're just about there and a couple of disasters happen everybody gets pushed down I think from my perspective the biggest thing that we have is our student growth we're exploding major systems we need a major overhaul I just want to emphasize on the knee ask the only negative part of that report was the facility they gave us high marks on the education and the teachers and everything else it was the facility we got the negative marks Charlie you have a couple questions mostly about the special education final time page five year comparison by budget transfer category it looks to me like the objective 15 years 15 expenses is up about 3.2% over the priority year 19.5 over 18.5 19.1 over 18.5 but I don't know the one page one that says five year comparison what section Charlie what page is it after Charlie 15 I think what's reflective of that is that if you look over three years you can see that the growth it took a major bump up in 14 and so from 13 to 14 was a huge step and from 14 to 15 is a small one and that's very typical of the way special education costs yes that is that is the bugaboo of spec I'm just trying to understand so the increase was 3.5% in fiscal year 15 over fiscal year 14 and what was the percentage from 13 to 14 it's 12% the actual amount of growth rate over the four years is 6% but my question is what didn't increase in fiscal 15 well not with you 4% we saw special we saw special take off out of district tuition take off in 14 and then we saw it stabilize in 15 that was the major swing as a question what did not increase it was the outside cost didn't go up or you controlled the budget cost the out of district tuition that we saw our out of district placements go up very heavily in 14 and we did not see a comparable increase in 15 so it's stabilized we lost a number of students to out of district placement in 14 and did not lose an equal number in 15 we stabilized and so your in district cost went up by 7% I'm sorry your in district cost in fiscal year 15 over 14 they went up by 7% I mean it's not obvious there I'm asking you the question out of this what caused the increase in your 3.5% increase contract increases on staff changes to staffing and any kind of changes to transportation or tuition I mean you don't see a steady 7% growth year over year I'm just trying to understand the drivers the number of students in the special education program increase no it's been relatively stable no that's been relatively stable what was the reason for that increase I have to go back and look specifically I can't do that I'm on the fly I don't know what you're driving at unless you're trying to bust me on the fact that it's not 7% don't be wise I'm trying to understand it what the driving costs are in the special education out of district tuition, staffing transportation I could come up with that list and ask you what it was the answer you don't know off the top of my head I don't I can't answer that question right now certainly one thing that you're right there are certain drivers that get special education and one of them that is coming up we hope will not be significant but we don't know for sure is the bust contract we work with lab to try to keep the cost down but they're going to be undergoing contract negotiations this year is being it's gone up but it hasn't gone up specifically we don't know what to do another thing that does is the driver in special education costs which I think Jesse has done not just a great job of controlling is the positions that are able to be charged um schools will go into Desi and say we have these capital expenses we have these increasing costs for personnel and therefore you know we want our tuition to go from 55 to 65 and I saw one like that that's just tuition one advantage we have in trying to control that is having the lab collaborative but there are some drivers that are out of our control in some respect the students present themselves this year it's been a year where we haven't had a lot of students that had to go to out of district and that's actually a good thing I think it's desirable to be able to have students that are going to stay in district and be avail themselves of our educational program so you know you're absolutely correct is that there are certain drivers that really can push special education and I don't think any one of those was particularly out of ordinary they're just they increase faster than certainly general inflation but they increase faster than a lot of other parts of our budget the point is that there's no information here about the budget that's growing 7% a year and it's going to soon be equal to a greater than our general education budget and there's no analysis and no understanding of why this is continuing to increase I have a second part to my question which is in this same set of numbers here you're forecasting of 19.15 to 19.31 is the growth of the budget in physical year 15 to physical year 16 that's roughly a 1.6% increase thank you I heard that at 5 times my question is are you going to absorb 6% in the contract increases I hope not so where is the 7% growth I think that we are not going to have a 7% growth I think that's pretty clear because we're going to be putting some money back into the stabilization account but earlier in your budget one of the assumptions that you made if I believe I saw this earlier part of the presentation is that the budget was based on a 7% growth in the special education budget you know it's a 7% growth in the town revenues on the town portion that's the revenue from the long range plan you're absolutely right that in a particularly year there's not necessarily but this number came from our joint looking at the budget that's the revenue from the long range plan you're absolutely right that in a particularly year our joint looking at what the vigorities of the special education cost were over a 10 year or 7 year what we're hoping is that that will decrease that has been a goal of ours to be able to contain special education costs because you're absolutely right that when those costs get out of sync with expenditures you can't hurt your general S program we're very aware of that let me go to the next question there was not a 7% growth between 14 and 15 there's not a 7% growth projected between 15 and 16 yet your aggregate budget number is based on a 7% growth so where is let's assume that there's a 3% increase in the contracts or 2% or 3% whatever gets to be negotiated yet that to the 1.5% that you've got in growth from 15 to 16 you're still 2 to 3% shy of 7% but that 7% number is driving the overall school budget number where are you putting that money that you've said is going to go into special education we're hoping to put it into stabilization in fiscal this year the thing that's always wish we had a crystal ball because I roll this back you have to get back and connect the dots to what your previous experience has been with this as we're sitting here in March 2015 I don't know what is going to appear next year I don't all I can tell you is that when we look at this historically we see that the average growth over a decade is going to hit that middle let me just remind you of a year not too long ago which was actually so the extra in my memory was the year that in August we had two students moving to the district each with cost to shy $400,000 in special education cost we had no way of knowing just like we have no way of knowing here today that we don't my question is you have a budget you've worked months on the budget it's based on a number of factors including 7% growth in the special education but you don't show 7% growth in special education but you show at most 3.5% or something like that in this one year so I'm asking in fiscal 16 in this one year what have you done with the difference in that money we're planning to put it into stabilization if we don't need it well right now it's sitting in settlement I think the 7% number was an average over 10 years so it's a it goes into the bottom line I'm not denying it I'm asking in the budget that you presented to us here you're not showing 7% growth in the special education budget but in some place else the difference 2 or 3% of the special education budget where is it going that's my question it's a very simple question settlement it's sitting in the settlement right now it's Charlie I had the same I had the same question you had and I was working on it over the weekend I think what's going on in student enrollment growth what I think what I see what's going on is the general enrollment growth funding is actually one year in a few years so what looks like what's happening partly is so the example I would give is the incremental you got for fiscal 15 was based on not 169 kids it was based on 13 or 14 it was based on a lower number so they got caught with a higher number this year and they got caught in the school and fitting classes and stuff like that so the amount that's under 7% this year it's really going back into general it's partly being used to fund that gap that they have with the enrollment growth so then then I think we have a problem because this is a misrepresentation of what our plan is if we take this is not the first year what we do is special education and put it into general education and it's just obvious at the beginning at the start of the year last time it was after the fact but now it's obvious before the fact that money you're not growing at 7% in special education and the money is going into general education would you feel better if the budget grew at 7% I feel better if we knew what we were doing I think we do know exactly what we're doing I'm trying to be completely transparent here what it's going to look like but we've been beat before with special ed okay what's the balance in the stabilization that you have set up zero we drained it last year because of the 12% growth yeah so I mean yes in the proposed budget the money is going into regular ed in some years part of the 7% special education goes into regular ed and by 14 we end up with a 12% special ed so money comes out of regular ed into special ed so if you look at over the years there should be a 7% increase on average in special ed and a 3.5 or lower increase but it's the effect of dividing the growth factor so it's not even going to be 3.5% but there will be more than that but Diane has given you the 10 year average that shows the trend being 7% and so the budget is the funding is based on that 10 year average the actual spending plan looks at and this year they're thinking it's not going to go up 7% it's only going to go up 4% so we get to the extra 3% we're going to spend it in other areas where we have needs but next year the opposite it's going to be a 10% growth in special ed so our regular eds are going to have to grow 4% and they'll absorb that that's the agreement that they've had with the Long Range Planning Committee and that's how it's worked it might not be the best way to go I'm not saying we can use this concept but I think, you know, arguing right tonight is probably not the best way but that was sort of the understanding was that some years yes, regular eds are going to be funded 100% some years special eds are going to be funded more than 7% because it's always on average I think that if you, Diane, could get some of the drivers, say, for this 3.5% if you go in section 10 in your budget book, it has all the detail out of the things that's been spent from 12 through 14 in actuals and then this year's project, 15 projections in the 16 budget so the data is all there you don't want to be helpful there actually I don't know if it would actually be possible because I actually end up having to do it on this random separate sheet here if there's any way to consolidate that under the object descriptions because, you know, from a management perspective, when you talk about like Stratton and Dahlin and you go around and tell us, it's great, right but from our perspective, we're just sort of similar. Thank you. Well actually, if you look one of the ways that that aggregate almost exists for you, program summaries, because the program summaries are what I use to distinguish special ed costs from general ed costs so if you look at program summaries 68,000 which is 3K special ed through 6866 I'm sorry, tab 6 sorry, you know it too well it's program code 6800 6866 it's actually on page 2 of 3 in section 6 in section 6 and then there's more but wait, there's more it would be also 6975 and 690 and 6990 so there's 3 transportation codes that are also in special education so that would be your aggregate so that's where you'll see it and it's broken out like that rather than by cost center it tells you how much we're spending on OT, how much we're spending on behavioral support I mean one of the things that we saw a real uptick in for medical expenses was for hearing and visual services which show up under medical expenses and this is the best place to see the out of district costs as well, it's under 6848 for a date out of district tuition and 6851 for residential out of district tuition it runs just under just over 100 typically it fluctuates I just want to emphasize that's not a number you can divide into a cost because some may be very high, some may be very very okay, is this on the special ed dean or? No, I just have my old question it's too quick you're getting a cut from on the MET code it's not the 70 money for that code it comes into the general fund to the Allenton and go back to the English language the child is pulled out of the regular class for two and a half hours correct that's half the day with the school I know, I know and they won't even allow us to do a pushing model where we would have the ELL teacher come into the classroom and support them how long does that child stay in that role? until it has to what they call level three five level language acquisition what's that average first second student a year, two years I don't know if anybody's got three in Allenton we generally don't have students that go through but there are students that are not making progress we look at their growth there's actually an assessment that looks at what their growth is and if their growth is not 0.5 is considered an average growth what we were doing is if they were below that we're providing them with more services if they were at that we continue at the service level they were at if they were exceeding that for a large extent we would cut back on the services unfortunately the state is no longer allowing us to make that decision sorry I got caught up guard so thank you for coming in I appreciate it, thank you the books I do like consistency I don't know how I feel about the new tabs the tabs allow it to be mechanized rather than hand correlated some days I liked it some days they were odd so I'm just going to go right down my list on enrollment growth and I guess I just want to reaffirm this question about the additional funding of 25% of the per pupil cost is that going to the budget for the year it's projected so if you're projecting it goes into the following year what we actually get are the actual numbers from the prior year so this year we added 169 so it's going to drive next year's number FY16's number is based on FY15's enrollment and so in the long range plan for years in the out years when we no longer have actual numbers they become the projection numbers so you get 100% of the promise number just a year later got it so with the following so this year's enrollment we had one projection like he said it came in much higher so what is the plan for going forward on those so if you do have larger class sizes and you get the money you're going to try to tru it up in the out years this is my one question as a parent I promise I'll skip to the finance questions we want to maintain reasonable class sizes when we add a section when we add a class it's not just a class a teacher a piece of chalk we don't even have chalk anymore but it is all the ancillaries it's phys ed all those other pieces so adding one student means that we're adding more than one classroom doesn't equal one teacher it has a ripple effect and it's not always such a clear relationship you know one of the things that we've implemented is the buffer zones and Dr. Brody spends an awful lot of time trying to balance class sizes using the buffer zones you know if we look like we kind of have a half a class here and a half a class here try to make sure there's a kindergarten class in one place and not tiny class, tiny class try to keep them all balanced if you do have a situation where kindergarten class is larger than you would have targeted in a certain school whether it was this year or the upcoming year is there a plan to sort of try to even it out in the other years because I would guess well not guess I would get hurt the large parental concern is you say okay you have your kid in this large parent class but if your biggest concern is it sticks like that through their whole way or gets bigger as kids move in I mean what is the thought there of trying to confront that okay well that's the bucket well it's a great question because it's a very challenging one it's uh what the challenge is is that if you were to break it apart if you were to break it apart so that they would have smaller classes we did that in one school and the classes went below 20 well that was great but on the other hand it's expensive when you look at the whole and but I do think to the extent that when a particularly large class goes through a school if we can have some years of where there would be smaller that would be the ideal but one of the things that we're going to be pushing against increasingly is that we may not have the space to do that putting another additional classroom in but that decision about actually that came up with a particular school this last year it's like balancing should we have a class size that's so much lower than the average of all the other grade level and there and becomes the dilemma of trying to balance equity so I I can't give you we're always going to do this because it's very situational to the particular class we look very closely at the data in terms of how the students are performing and in fact we've had much more of a focus on that in the last year and the last two years we have teachers that work in data teams really looking at the progress of every student so it's not a hard and fast but I know I've had a principal talk to me about doing exactly that it's just making it a year to get the kids having smaller a smaller group but right now our we went through this the average class size in the elementary is about 22.8 so it's between 22 and 23 which it's good it's just that we do have some outlier classes that are 28 and that's a problem and so when we have class sizes like that which we did this year in one school fourth and the fifth grade we have what we call large classroom TA a large class TA in there so that it's possible for another adult to be helping the teacher address the needs of a larger group okay so on the FY16 special ed budget so every year I think the big concern is that we have the school budget, we set the appropriation and then we have a budget busting event in special ed and I think we came into this year well I at least stopped when we sat here last year pretty nervous in the fact that we had drawn the reserve down to zero but you know there wasn't a lot of room so now we have somewhat of hopefully a cushion in the two to three hundred thousand dollar range in the account but the growth of special ed is not going to be up at that seven percent level which what would we do if we did have a budget busting event if we did have something that came through that took out the two three hundred thousand and then a little more after the year started well that's a good argument for building up the reserve so that's been a high priority to get that money back when I knew we had to take it out all last year so you have to look at your budget we also have a lab credit to the sitting out there that we could use but ever since the budget of two thousand ten we don't use that in our budget calculations but I know it's sitting there as a possibility it's not a lot of money but it's a little bit to help and make sure the credit may grow as part of that so I think by having at least sitting where we are right now knowing we're going to have some money in the stabilization account knowing there's a lab credit I think that if we had a residential placement and that's all it would take to wipe it out at least we have some cushion but you have two students like that which was our experience not too long ago it's very challenging to make it up in the in the rest of the budget because it's to I think this sense of what I Mr. Foster was getting at is that we don't want a situation where we are taking away from general aid too because we already are having challenges there in terms of class sizes and so the long and short of your answer is there's going to be pockets of money to pull from we're looking at next year we'd be having not at the great of the 7% growth hopefully that remains the case so we can put more money in the stabilization account that would be our ideal but should it happen next year we would have to look very carefully at revolving accounts and also our budget and see what we could trim in the year on the facilities department I'm going to agree that you consent to it that was always one of our questions because we never presented it but you know you're part of your people but you have spoken to it so I'm going to assume that's correct the only question I do have on that is when you were talking about the maintenance department you kept talking about a new facilities director and administrator support that was the first time we I sat right here just so you know because they'll be very transparent and went over additional personnel with the town manager a new facilities director at the end and then you kept saying and administrative support isn't it in the it's on this side little bubble but when I asked him about new positions he never talked about new administrative positions is it a transfer or is it a new position well we're funding it as a new position I know you are that's why because you said a path of a hundred thousand I did the math on that it's basically for purchase orders it's a secretarial position it's not that's what so your understanding is that there's a new facilities director and a new administrative position whether that would be a transfer I don't know but we want to make the success of this department besides the leadership and the additional administrator that will come with this you need to be able to have somebody who's going to be able to do that kind of a role now whether there is a movement within departments I couldn't tell you that but in terms of thinking it through in terms of how it needs to be organized we need to have somebody who can do the building and follow up on all of that that's going to be absolutely essential okay and then as a comment I'm sure you've thought about this you were talking about it FY 17 moving your building with the budget pre-building over to the facilities department but next year you're going to have an odd situation where you're going to have a facilities department but you also have to retain budgetary authority over it so you'll have to have some kind of stop gap well it's business as usual we've had that budget for a long time because the people aren't going correct in next year well we're adding the director position we're adding the admin position and we're paying for half of it on the school side everybody else is in our budget as it's always been and I think when we're ready to move the budget to the maintenance department we're going to be looking at their expenditures over several years and saying here's their run rate year over year because they have good years and bad years as we all know from the snow this year so to do something fair and equitable so they have the best chance for success in the long run we want to give them a fair budget last two quick questions the first one is really out of date until someone throws me off the finance committee relationship with the talent manager in the office go ahead, everything working well I heard they shoveled your reefs we're hoping we can give them a little bit of money we don't have to go through all our snow and ice budget no we have a terrific working relationship and to this issue of the facilities department we've met many times about this in terms of how we could work it out we have regular and frequent communication on a whole variety of issues well good I've said this every year, I think that my biggest pet peeve will always be it's probably a long gone issue but I think I'll ask every year because I think it is important that you guys both have a relationship and that since the talent manager does come to us more on an equal footing as him and then my last question is what keeps you up at night I asked that every year too it's a broken record it depends on the week I think this particular week there was just a lot of things that are just in the plans and just thinking about the details that go with it to make sure you've covered all of the details and we're moving forward with Alice training and having that on place we have the SOI that's going out to the school committee thinking about, could we mention that strong enough I mean you wake up thinking about these kinds of things so it really depends on what is really in front of us last year at this time I was concerned about what we were going to face this year in special education to be honest I was very concerned about totally draining that but we didn't have really much choice on it but the goal was to see if we could fill that back up again I think one of the worst things for all of us more so for the people that have to do are the state and federal unfunded mandates that they come down without realizing what has to do an example is the ELL thing I think I heard from retrograde education pulling kids out of classrooms past 20 years putting kids into the classrooms and making them work not realizing or not caring the financial impact of these things as a former educator I think the worst thing in the world to drive education is money it should be the kids first and these unfunded mandates just when you think you get your head above water they throw another one we thought we had the budget together 9C cut and the kindergarten and the ELL thing two at an array then these poor people have to turn around and find a way to balance it again and I mean it's how they do it okay Jane you finished? I'm all set, yes thank you this growth in students is this Arlington is it Arlington Lexington Belmont what is it is not statewide when you get past the 128th belt you're seeing decreasing enrollments what you're seeing inside and maybe along the perimeter of it is increasing enrollments I think the community might be growing the most in the state is Brooklyn but Chelsea Arlington Lexington Winchester Belmont Newton everybody's growing and I think the proximity to Boston we have the next generation of young people who really do like urban life and want sort of that balance between the two and don't want to commute a whole lot of reasons why I think it's happening so as we go forward are you expecting the growth in all the grades as you're going up to like 600 in the births do you really expect you said that there was growth in all grades not just in kindergarten so would you expect this really to balloon out of control based upon what you're seeing my projections for what they were it is crystal ball they show alarming things I'm really excited about having an alternative methodology to approach this and hopefully come up with something that won't keep me up at night but we're all guessing I think Arlington is an extremely desirable community the community is great I think people are increasingly willing to trade the three-car garage for not sitting in the car half every night I think we may be seeing an overall demographic trend that people are just shifting in to the inner suburbs also I don't remember last year I went ballistic as I start reading the budget book and I started going through it you're moving away and I just I was beside myself $750,000 worth of expenses that just had no prior year expenses and in the budget book there was no current year expenses expected well and looking at the new book there was a column that's been filled in that wasn't filled in last year so I want to say thank you I aim to please and I'm going through this I'm a CPA I'm going through all sorts of budgets and everything I've never seen anything just it's amorphous the way you've moved it and all these different things I'm like what am I looking at I do not understand it but it's the same bottom line all the way across I just want to compliment you that you do a really good job with that speaking of which another thing I don't understand not trying to beat Sped to death 27 you have listed the town expenditures so this is the town this is the part of the town appropriation that's being spent and spent I understand where's the other 3 million I'm looking at just fiscal year 15 where's the other 3 million come from because the budget is close to 19 million oh circuit breaker and grants so we get about a million dollars from a grant from the Fed and circuit breaker is we're up to what 19 is that in the funding it is if you look on the previous slide of the funding just flip it over to the other side you can see in 11 when the green is really fat that was the ARA funding years we had extra federal money and we were using it predominantly on Sped and that allowed us to save up our circuit breaker money so that now we spend the circuit breaker year after we receive it so in 11 and 12 circuit breaker is half of what it would have otherwise been going to the budget book section 3 which line item is that in it again I'm just going back and forth I didn't have this chart when I was looking at it sure so special ed the special ed grant is Sped 94-142 that is the massive grant that we get about two thirds of the way down under grants under academic support of teaching American history I'm sorry Sped 94-142 there's no account for some of the grants it's in here under grants I was looking too low thank you so that's the big one in special ed grants there's also a special ed early childhood that's up a couple rows from that and there is a special ed program improvement one that's down near the bottom of grants okay you understand why I'm confused then sorry somebody is reading this book I'm glad to hear that the funding summary is basically in the order it is because that's the way I inherited it and that's fine I'm not questioning the order it's perfectly fine but circuit breaker, if you look at circuit breaker while we're here it's the first line under revolving fees and reimbursements you can see that it's really climbed up over the years the 1961 that we're proposing to spend at 16 is what we're collecting this year and that's based on the 72% reimbursement rate so our out of district tuition our expenses are growing we get more circuit breakers, we spend more if Governor Baker and his folks decide to lower that percentage significantly that could really hurt us in 17 because that special ed expenditure has really gone up and up I mean it's good overall it's good support but you get dependent and then but in a good thing that it comes a year later so we get the money in one year and we spend it in the next so we don't have to gas so there's a little bit of savings there one last question on that, what's form visas okay we have students who come from overseas to come to Arlington High to experience American high school to perfect their English and in order to do so their parents pay a tuition fee this tuition, okay so I'm not sure how I got that name but that name preceded me I'm just a little odd it is very odd but we work with a company called Education and virtually all the students come through that program and they're required by federal law to pay tuition, we grant the visa okay Steven, thank you yeah I have a few questions first starting on the the cost center summary section 5 for this year on facilities the projected expenses looks like about $840,000 less than what was being budgeted I took a look in the detail and it looked like natural gas was budgeted for $996,000 and your projected expenses are a lot less what happened with that the envelope of the wing the new roof the windows, the containment and the increased efficiency boiler, the unit events and it went from steam to hydronic so the stratum is saving us a bunch of money of gas and the chocolate Thompson is now fully online and has gone through a year and I was holding on I didn't want to reduce budgets there until I saw what the Thompson really cost me through a whole cycle of seasons but was there something that you were expecting in fiscal 15 because the actuals for 12 through 14 were about a half million dollars each year it was the Thompson money that I was kind of hoarding on while Thompson was offline I'm not knowing what it would be like when it came back online okay and then on facilities we had the presentation last week and one of the things that was discussed is while the labor will be moved into the facilities department if you have an outside service coming in or materials that's going to stay within your budget that wasn't my understanding my understanding was it's all going to them okay well I think that's something that's going to have to be discussed because one of the concerns is the facilities director believes some work needs to be done and it's let's say at the odyssey for example and it's not just labor salaries and wages I thought the manager said that's going to come out of the the individual school so hopefully and what I was concerned about is facilities thinks that work needs to be done school says no we don't have the money for it who wins the argument my understanding is that the money to fix things will go to the maintenance department and they will fix this that they're not going to be billing back we're going to get away from that whole hateful gray billing thing that's a discussion point because I brought it up in the context and I'll make the pitch for it here and just the floors at the odyssey and the high school for example they should be resealed every year and that's I promise to ask of all people I said I'd say that and so in the example I gave they said well if it's an outside service that cost will remain in the school so please work it out but please realize that it's something that that should be done the other area I had a couple of questions on were on funding summaries and that's back in section 3 on the revolving fees and reimbursements and I've had this question for several years we received the budgeted numbers for 12 through 14 and a budgeted number for 15 but we never have actuals and I know in years past we've had back and forth on it but I really think we should know what's actually being collected and if it's not something that's being accounted for within the school department then maybe we can get it from Ruth Lewis or something but for ticket sales and I know it's a small number but when you add these all up it would be nice to know what we're receiving every year you're not the first person on this committee to ask me this question tonight okay so it's fine and just so you know we report to the school committee every month about where our revenues stand so you can go back to our website under budget and there's tabs for each fiscal year and if you go to the June report you can see the revenues we've collected as of June it's not a full picture of the fiscal year but that's available all the time so each month we tell the school committee where we stand in terms of our revenues coming in and I think that's great and I went there from March and other than the Bishop bus being $2,200 over what you're projecting everything else seemed to be coming in on budget and that's great for your monthly reporting imagine every year did you go back in time? well your most current report is the March one but you can go back to prior fiscal years and look at the June reports and see what you have would it be possible to get that added to this budget report in future years because I just think revenue is part of the picture that we need to look at and we get it in expenses and if there isn't a way for you to get it we should help you either working with other departments that are recording the receipts so that we know because I think we're missing part of the picture here do you think that's something that we can do in the future? certainly I think it's it will help us understand where things are how we're doing because I know what you're spending against grants and I know what you're spending against the revolving phase further question on the rentals on the building rentals and again this goes to cooperation between town and school if the recreation department is using the autism of the high school do they pay the same rental as if I went in with let's say I had my own group and I wanted to go on a weekend and rent the autism is there a different rate? do you have a tiered rental system a non-profit venture a non-profit venture or a school-based venture and that's how it's tiered depending on you going in there if you're making money off your kids we'll charge you one thing if you're a non-profit just cobbling it together to do things for the kids that's another thing and if you are a coach the autism has hired you to do something then that's a different situation and if the recreation department is using this rate is there a rate for the right generally no generally no okay the reason I think that's great I think that's good my concern is within your budget and up the street at the rink if Ellington High is using the rink they pay the same hourly rate as any other group and it seems like if we're doing it here this should be a discussion because you've got people paying fees to play on the hockey teams and it really shouldn't be the same and so I don't know if there's been a dialogue about that but it grosses up your expense because when you go to the hockey programs your fees or your services, which is ice time is inflated and it should be some sort of cost figure some sort of reduced number both to reduce the burden on the players reduce your budget and recognize it's if we're in this era of cooperation between town and schools and we're going one way with the buildings that should go that way with the rink and maybe that creates opportunities to provide more ice time to the public school as well Ice time is certainly an issue you're probably aware of that as far as fees go I know that when there's this physical relationship between the rink and the responsibilities of the town on this and there's the department is an enterprise system so there are costs associated with that they're trying to cover and I think that all of the fees represent their desire to be able to stay in the black in terms of the running of that facility but we do talk about Mr. Connolly's and communication on a regular basis with our AG and I certainly talked to him a number of times there's one thing I will say is there's a lot of cooperation among all the departments in the town this has been true for a number of years we meet on a monthly basis and there's an ease of communication and so there's no friction let's put that there's just no friction about this we're always trying to there's an issue with trying to figure out how we can problem solve it to have it work out just one last comment just on the cost centers we got into the discussion earlier with Charlie had on special ed and special ed has its own cost center but it's also included in other cost centers is there a way to maybe better define what that special ed cost center is because it's not all inclusive the special ed cost center is kind of the if you think about the central admin thing so psychologists could either be charged off to each of the schools they do have time in each building so you could put half their salary to one school and half the other or you could consolidate all their salaries under the code 45 if you want to see the expenses the program is the way to see them that gets them all consolidated but what this does is if you didn't include special ed expenses in the elementary school cost centers you'd have a really skewed look at what it costs to run your school you know we've got to have the special ed interventionist the teaching assistants the speech therapist we need these things at every school the social workers and if we budgeted them all centrally in sped I mean it would give you a quick and easy place to see sped costs but it wouldn't really give you a sense of the school it also wouldn't give you a sense of the community and when we're budgeting about you know the cost center is a community so the special ed cost center is upper level admin people that really float like the BCBAs the behavioral specialists who consult all over the district people who do that kind of stuff out of district tuition things like that sit in 45 a regular special ed teacher would sit in the school to which they're assigned which are 85, 86 and 87 for cost centers reside actually each of them in three different buildings but the expenses for that special concentrated learning program are kept together because you know a child who needs those services is likely to progress through the whole program so you know you can slice and dice this way dozens of ways and the struggle is always to find a way that makes the most sense but does allow you to see things from different vantage points and does make for a confusing document but on the other hand you can look at the cost centers and see the cost pretty fairly of a school and also the cost centers capture any repairs we've done to that building but we budget the expense under the facilities you know I don't run around and throw plumbing expense in each of the buildings but when I have a plumbing expense I book it to the building where they did the repairs so I can see over time the actual expenditures where they happen so you can have a sense of what's the run rate of repairs on this building MSBA is really into that they want to see how much you're spending on maintenance on a given building but trying to budget that way would drive me to madness I think it's fine to put it in the buildings there's a little bit more of a descriptor on 45 so that someone doesn't look at it thinking that's an all inclusive situation that's all right thank you Steve John did you have a question that day man I'm going to drag you back to special education it's clear that the two largest expenses of course are general education and special education and it would seem to me you have a reasonable handle on projecting what general education is going to be and I think uncertainty in the area of special education so my impression up until this meeting having heard the manager talk about how he had helped to increase your budget in order to handle the increased population was that that was going to sort of handle the increased population issues and in addition then your stabilization fund was going to help to handle that you always have with special education so when I look down this column here on this page okay sort of where Charlie was earlier okay when you go from 12 to 13 12 to 13 on special education there was a quarter of a 3% 3% jump right there then maybe the big jump was 13 to 14 with the 12% now you have kind of a projection of about a 3% or so into this year and I'm guessing that's a fairly solid number to up spring once it warms up out of district tuition can really take off kids can go out of district very quickly when the weather gets warm so that itself is uncertain so you can go up to 4% absolutely can I comment on that in between the trimesters yeah it's allocated in the FY15 line okay so somehow between now and July what you're telling me is there's even uncertainty in that short period of time that's correct okay alright and then your projection for 16 is a 1% well it doesn't include the normal contract increases all the contract increases are consolidated under admin that's why it looks so mutated because we haven't settled the contracts yet we don't know how much we're going to give the teachers we don't know how much they're going to go and so rather than basically throw out misleading numbers which could interfere with negotiations we've consolidated what we think we can afford all under admin as a pool to be settled as we settle the contracts and once that happens we will show everybody's contract increases we will show the changes in the appropriate budgets and you'll have a very different picture of what's going on can I have a comment on that cut just maybe when we're at this point in the year with special ed and projections all we can do is take where we are now as a base our audit district the number of staff we have all of that and say okay if we were to roll this forward next year what would be the increases and the increases would be contractual in some cases it's what we know about tuition increases we've gotten letters from these different schools it's not going to be a big projection we don't know really what the actual spike is until we're living the year if you look I think at any of our budgets in the past I would say this with a little bit of confidence the projections aren't going to be great I understand but your nominal estimated number is the order is 7% you said that three or four times that is our revenue number we get 7% in revenue increase on a portion of our town appropriation that helps to defray the cost of special ed growth which we've seen grow on average 7% but I thought you had said that you had gone back and looked over you know last five or seven years something like that and the average increase year by year by year but you never did over the entire period it was order of 7% that is correct so I would have expected to see a 7% jump here from 15 to 60 that's your nominal number and that's what the devil mean in all this conversation here why don't I see something like 7% which is your nominal number for that jump between 15 and 60 we're really hoping based on the best information we have now that we're not going to see 7% growth but your nominal number is 7% so why don't you put that in the budget wouldn't you want me to be as honest as possible about what I truly expect to see well it's sort of hard if you're trying to budget from where your base is it's true your stabilization fund is to try to handle that that's true but right now there's zero in the stabilization okay I mean I think that long range planning committee when putting all this thing together usually gets a 10 year hook back on the special education and that goes into that goes into their bottom line appropriation just like the 3.5% for general and just like the 25% for for growth and how that money gets allocated is up to the school committee if they don't think they need to go up 7% they can go up higher in their general education there's no use allowing a large pot of cash to be sitting there when they don't think they're going to use it at that point now with the last couple of years hasn't gone up 7% gradually when you look back 10 that 7% number might start coming down it's just you know it goes like that I think it was last year they had to transfer a large amount of money from their stabilization fund because of that but I don't want to answer for you but it would seem silly to put pick a number of $500,000 into the special edge account which they don't think they're going to spend when they need all these other services maybe it's just this graph so maybe that's what and it is particularly confusing because of the non-settlement of the contracts but one more statement that I think I should make is that you have to worry about re-fundishing your stabilization fund now yes we do and how is that going to happen in other words you think that you're going to put money in from this year which has been a good year how much would you hope to have we're hoping to put between $300,000 and this year if you look at this slide this slide here okay thank you very much okay is there anybody else who has not asked a question yet Ken and then Paul and Alan in the last year during the during the budget we got into the medical program and there was talk that perhaps it was costing the town hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the medical program so my question right now is that what do you expect the income to be for this fiscal year for the medical program and what do you expect your expenses to be well if the budget holds as Governor Baker has projected we will stay level funded from this year and I think our total number was about $350 what was that $15 was originally $388,095 so whatever money we have this year will be available to us next year for the program in addition to that all of the students count for Chapter 70 so that money comes into the general coffer so as far as John can see the program is paying for itself well it depends on which way you analyze it Mr. Foskett and I have a very different view of it if you look at it in terms of your pupil costs and we're saying say roughly speaking 13,000 is our per pupil cost for each student should that be the amount of money that we receive for a student if you combine the allocation, grant allocation and Chapter 70 but we looked at even to some enrollment growth factor and the number that we came up with for an additional student because there are some costs that aren't going to change whether we have an additional student or five students or ten students was 25% of per pupil if we're looking at 25% of per pupil then I would say that we are definitely within that range of income with a medical student it really depends on how you want to analyze it the monies we get from the grant pays for any of the personnel associated with the program the bus monitors and transportation so all of the expenses relative to the administration will come out of that clearly the town supports the students in terms of the cost of being educated in the classroom thank you Terry Paul so going back again to this slide on page 27 where you said that 290,000 is what you hope to move into the stabilization fund can I then conclude that 5 million is what you hope to put into the stabilization fund next year would that it were so a big portion of that would be the contract settlements so the teachers get their increases I thought the contract settlement was all in the administration the salaries are sitting here and the expenses and as they move from 15 to 16 they got no increase the cost of the increase is sitting in administration but the actual expenses of special education are going artificially flat going into 16 because there's no normal step up for another year of contract increases so I'm hoping there will be a savings in 16 but it will not be that large I still don't understand I thought all the money raises is in the administration it is but what you're looking at here are special education expenses and if you look at the special education expenses in 15 and in 16 they're practically identical and we know that if we had exactly the same number of staff for one year to the next and we gave them typical increases it would not be flat it would go up by whatever the contract let's call it 3% and that increase is absent right now because the money isn't here where it will be spent it's sitting in admin waiting for a settlement it would be transferred in when they actually settle everything the green line will go up but the red line will stay the same but won't that then be added to the town appropriation for special ed? so the number will go down the differential will go down no no what I'm saying is the green line is the expense for FYS for the last column that will go up by contract and won't the red line also go up by that contract? no the red line is the red line that's the appropriation from the town that's static okay Al sorry for dragging this on we didn't always talk about the special education and the stabilization fund I hope it on its own when I can't stop thinking about snow and ice we had 100 inches of snow and the town manager came in at a million point two because of a lot of snow on the ground that wasn't predicted wasn't budgeted for if two students moved in the town with very expensive needs and the stabilization fund wasn't sufficient going back to Dean's question at what point do you come to the finance committee and say is there money available from the reserve fund? for this year? not this year I'm speculating the way Dean was I'm trying to get the right balance between stabilization fund dealing with the uncertainty and the fact there's an overall emergency funds available through the town that's a fair question I think I would do all within my humanly powers to not come to you guys for money but obviously there's a limit ten kids fall out of the sky you all need residential treatment to sort of impact to really handle an emergency you need a million dollars in stabilization fund but then a million dollars is sitting there sort of doing nothing or being appropriated to other for other reasons maybe charlie was implying whereas you sort of hope that two students will come to town and we get 100 inches of snow at the same time there's an overall averaging of expenses try to figure out what's the right balance between sequestered stabilization funds versus overall stabilization funds I'd like to see that I know the stabilization fund for special education was set up to have a limit of $800,000 I'd like to see that be higher I think at least a million would be a safer margin for special ed because we've saved a million dollars in any given year and I hope that we can build it up to that point I can't speak to the snow that's out of my pager and I'm sorry and you can't speak for when there's going to be a few students coming in with very expensive leads we do do projections from the students we have within who is at risk for going out of district who has a potential volatile and or expensive situation that could blow up at any time we're keeping an eye on that the Joker is the kids that moved from Utah or some other place that we have no way of knowing are coming we have them we kind of have a picture but if they just drop out of the sky a colleague of mine in Pittsfield had exactly that she had three drop out of the sky and she had to go to her city council and explain that she had three drop out of the sky it happens it's the thing that keeps all school business managers awake at night I'd like to see schools out of the sky or students fall out of the sky hopefully not going to happen well we did have it happen and I think that we have a strong memory of and to that to that point our motivation for having a stabilization account be as high as you can is strong in addition to that we also have some revolving accounts it's certainly a position that we did not have at that particular time so it's never one thing it's a combination in terms of how you manage these uncertainties and their expensive uncertainties now in line with that my understanding is that if a student transfers mid-year from another town within Massachusetts that they have to cover the rest of that year do you aggressively go after those okay it's not the in-state transfers that kill us it's the one that are coming from the state now you also I assume keep track of those that age out okay anybody else who has not answered asked a question yet David I just want to say thank you for your presentation and Mr. Chairman could you introduce your colleagues over there Ms. Stocks who chairs our budget Mr. Pierce and Dr. Seuss in the corner there thank you okay Peter I look for AYCC in your budget I don't see it anywhere but I see plenty of it's under cost center 36 it's not specifically identified but the money to pay the AYCC contract is under health and wellness health and wellness health and wellness I'm sorry I'm losing my voice it's cost center number 36 okay you said here yes thank you okay anybody else who hasn't asked a question yet okay anybody any other questions any other questions no a question back on the cost center summary between the projected and the budgeted for fiscal 15 looks like presently there's a deficit of over roughly 400,000 how first of all is that still what it is and second of all how is that going to be the closed or how are you going to address that at this point in the year I am not yet picking up savings that I'm pretty sure I'm going to have we get the last of our purchase orders in pretty soon right before the equal vacation and once we book all of those five expenditures from all of the departments and we get those all on the books and then we usually have savings there we also have things that we haven't spent so far like settlements and legal and all of that and so we can pick up savings there but at this point I don't want to be premature and say oh yeah we got savings here and you think we're going to have some savings I think we're going to close that gap significantly but I'm not ready to commit to it yet until we reach those milestones also it's been a very cold winter and utility billing falls many months behind I don't understand that how they can't build a school and they'd build me on plenty on time at home but it's a chronic problem so you know given those things I want to be conservative in my projections but even should these projections hold which I do not believe they will we do have sufficient balances in revolving accounts to cover that should it end that way I do not expect it to end though thank you okay are there any other questions yes I'd just like to go back to my earlier comment about the 7% versus the 3.5% my clear recollection of the low-range planning community was that the 7% and 3.5% separate tracks and on this chart 27 that 1.5 million as you discussed a few months ago after your settlement is going to go down somewhere approaching a million that money should be going into the reserve stabilization fund for special education and instead what I discern here is that money is being spent somewhere somewhere else in general education and I think that you're putting yourself in a lot of risk making this budget not conservative as opposed to conservative I would not be surprised if you do have your unforeseen event and you can't cover but it's a comment not a question okay are there any other any other questions John another comment I just want to reinforce what Alan Jones said which is it's much better in my opinion for there to be a large large stabilization fund in order to handle contingencies because you get snow for special education all kinds of other things as opposed to a large amount of money sitting in your single stabilization fund a reasonable size stabilization fund sort of for you seems appropriate but I haven't been thinking a million that in those instances when you go above five or six hundred thousand wouldn't you come and get us because that's the right place for the money to be not to be stashed in a large number like a million bucks in your budget here and not being you in my opinion so I'm reinforcing if you like what Alan would say and I think we've been saying this for a long time now the stabilization fund the reserve fund that the reserve fund finance committee had is for contingency use it because you shouldn't be you shouldn't have a large money large amounts of money sitting in a fund in your budget went the best place for that one reserve fund but anyway I would also say thank you very much for coming we really appreciate maybe I we weren't clear the stabilization account we're referring to is the one that's under town meeting control so you have to vote the money into it and vote it back out so what we're hoping is town meeting will vote what the number is in and they had to vote the five hundred out I would I'd like to see a strong stabilization account myself that is something that's very important to us and I also another comment is that the number that we had with respect to the seven percent coming out of the analysis of a decade was something that we all agreed at now we can be shifting what that decade looks like as we go forward and seeing how that number shifts I think that that's a very reasonable thing to do but to look at special ed within the range of numbers is not a good perspective on really what the uncertainty is in that area okay two questions during the DPW budget I noticed there's a large amount of money to help on DPW to shovel schools groups do you agree with that? well this year we needed it very much yes we are going to put it back in the DPW school is going to be a first well we've had some great building we've just paid the overtime at one point we had 70 people over the February break shoveling some of those people were in our budget some were in DPW and some were hired contractors how that broke out we paid for the overtime for our school personnel I could be imagining this but I thought it was going to be paid out it's a protection I don't know if you were looking to get that for school well I think that's some sort of negotiations between the town manager and the superintendent but there is something coming back we do have a line for someone I don't know where we stand quite on that right now whether we'd be able to contribute some money back if we still have if we want to meet our obligation to building the special ed stabilization account we want to meet our obligation to just know what ice if we want to end they're all competing factors no I think there's been discussions on that on that issue okay on the other one hasn't asked questions okay so I understand under 3 that next year Diane there'll be actuals for the prior fiscal year just for that page okay and I had a couple of questions on individual ones because they did go to the website that you checked on but it's a little wait for that news to say you feel comfortable with what you're taking out of the revolving fund fees for building rental and all that I do but I was feeling a lot better with the funding in general before the governor started to cut the kindergarten rate so if that stands we're going to have to do some shifting over the summer to compensate for that and it sounds like you're confident doctor that you'll end the fiscal year in a surplus situation not a deficit so your budget is balanced we would not be coming to finance committee for reserve fund transfer that's good and as far as the enrollment concerns advice I gave one of your predecessors the job is to build the finance school system and the commonwealth and keep it a secret if you want to have all these people who will be there Dr. Bode and all the rest of you thank you very much for coming we really appreciate your time and all the effort that went into the into the budget thank you very much okay I think it's a little wait to start a new subject for this so Thursday our Wednesday is going to be a very I think a full time so please be here at 7.30 you've got a couple of budgets left to present if you can be ready with that and media turn