 The first order of business is public comment. What about the agenda? Oh, yeah. So we need to add an executive session. We're going to add, yes, a short executive session. Central litigation. Yeah, it's got a special litigation. Thanks for the reminder. Any other agenda items? I don't know if I should say that. Public comment? OK, great. Consent agenda? Motion to approve the consent agenda. I'll second it. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Great. And now on to the December phone of the budget. So, Grant? All right. Good evening. So this is the very first draft of the FY21 budget. There's about 33 slides. It could take me up to an hour. So if possible, maybe you can jot down questions that we can circle back to at the end just to make sure I get through the whole thing. Yep. And then also some of the questions might get answered through the course of the presentation. So. Did we note it, everyone? Yep. Just a quick. Except Grant, I have a question for you. So this is just a quick outline of what we're going to cover pretty similar to previous years. Some context. So our themes for budget, obviously we want to focus on staffing because that's where most of the money is. We want to focus on student needs because that's why we're here. We want to be sensitive to the burden on taxpayers. But we also wanted to make sure that we have some links to our multi-year plan to improve instruction and support students. Some state factors. I think you all know that there's a statewide health negotiation going on. We'll talk a little more about that in a bit. Health premiums are going up 12.9% for the Gold CDHP, which is what pretty much all of the employees are in. But we have reduced the health reimbursement arrangement utilization assumption. This year in FY20 we assumed people would use about 90% of their money. So we've backed that off to about 80%. We think that's fair judging by history. Local factors, the merger incentive as you all know started at 8 cents. This year at 6, in FY21 it drops to 4. We are planning to use some fund balance revenue as a revenue source to absorb the impact of that 2 cents. And that impact is about $240,000. There are unknowns locally related to contract negotiations. Actually that's probably every school district in the state because with health care negotiations coming up, pretty much all collective bargaining agreements are expiring 6.30, 2020. So all of our negotiations have to happen next year, which means you have to make some assumptions there. We do have increased enrollment, and we do have some staffing increases that we're proposing. And then just the last bullet, the majority of the increase that you're going to see in our total budget really relates to the health premiums going up, which is about $320,000 just based on that. And then just your typical annual increases in salary. So some links to the multi-year plan for instruction. We have math consultation going on, which is funded by title funds, so there's no impact for education spending. Most of that focuses at Ryan School at UES. We do have instructional leadership training that we're planning on. I believe we're thinking probably University of Michigan, Washington, 5D training. A lot of effort in the social-emotional learning area, including a behavior position for Main Street, which is one of our schools that doesn't have that kind of a position right now. We're looking at developing an alternative program for the high school. We have professional learning going on focused on social workers' guidance, behavior positions, and assistant principals. We have some money set aside for consultation for students in crisis. In other words, if we have a student in crisis, we can bring somebody in to help us develop a plan to deal with that. Tier 1 and Tier 2 coaching, MTSS, Tier 1 and Tier 2 coaching. That's our current staffing. Mary Bechtel, our SEL coordinator, will be helping out there. Remediating gaps in universal skills. We'll be defining universal skills, K-12, in grade level and content area. Professional learning for interventionists. And then we have a small increase for English language learner teachers. Just a .2 there. Also, I wrote on old school chart paper just so these priorities are in front of us all the time. So they're kind of tough to read with my chicken scratch, but you can see the links here. So number one, our priority is to increase our capacity to provide high quality instruction in every classroom for every student. Two, build the system's capacity to support the social-emotional learning of all students. Three, significantly decrease gaps in universal skill knowledge for students when more time is needed for learning these skills by increasing our tier 3 capacity. And four, decrease... This is not on this side, but it's also a priority to decrease deferred maintenance needs so that future projects can be accomplished through our capital funding. So I put that on chart paper just so it's in front of us all the time throughout budget season. That's really helpful. Are we holding questions for the end? Yes. Some unknowns that this list came along at the beginning of the budget process and hopefully gets winnowed down pretty quickly. Tax factors are the big ones our equalized pupil count. We didn't get that until, I think, December 20th last year because of problems with the statewide data management system. Well, guess what? There are still problems with the statewide data management system, so I'm not sure when we're going to get an equalized pupil count. The dollar yield and non-residential rate, there's a recommendation from the tax commissioner on December 1st that comes out, and then it also has to be set by law, though. At the time I sent out your slides, we didn't have that letter. I actually got it an hour after I sent the slides out, of course. And we'll talk more about the recommendations in that letter a little bit later. Common level of appraisal, huge tax implications, tax rate implications for the CLA, and it's one of those things we have no control over. It's based on property values in each municipality. We got that, I think, on Christmas Eve last year, so that's something to look forward to as a Christmas gift. Montpelier tax rates could change significantly because all of these things will impact Montpelier's tax rate. For Roxbury, the only thing that's going to impact the tax rate is the CLA because there's a statutory limit on the decrease for Roxbury. So Roxbury's tax rate before CLA is factored in can only go down by 5%. And I played around with some numbers. I could increase the budget by a million dollars. I could decrease it by a million dollars. Won't change Roxbury's tax rate. The only thing that will change Roxbury's tax rate is the CLA. Revenues are unknown. We have some estimates for special education revenues, but we'll see something from the AOE to tell us whether it looks like we're close there. Transportation aid. We may or may not get a number from the AOE, but I've got what I think is a pretty good guess in there. Tech Center's six semester average. We don't know that yet, but we do know that our six semester average is going to go up pretty significantly because we have two semesters of very low student participation in Tech Centers that's dropping off and two very high semesters coming in. So I think our Tech Center tuition cost is going to go up by about 30% or so. We already talked about the HRA utilization. I'll probably just take that off the slide. And we already talked about statewide health negotiations. I will tell you that for the statewide health negotiations I'm more concerned from the perspective of being able to execute whatever gets settled. I'm not so much concerned about the impacts, because we're already at an 80-20 premium share which I think is what's going to be proposed. Maybe both the proposals are in that area. Our HRA contribution amount is pretty similar to what's being proposed. So I don't think there's going to be a big impact to the budget. It's just going to be whether we can keep our third party administrator, whether we can change our health plan documents quick enough, that kind of thing. This just shows you 1920 and 21 to compare against. The highlighted areas are unknowns like the non-tax revenues that includes 240,000 in fund balance as a revenue source, but it includes special ed revenue which is estimated right now. Equalized pupils is obviously still an unknown. You'll see I bumped it up by about five kids. Our enrollment is going up. You would think we would gain at least five equalized pupils, but I'm not sure. So as always, as Libby will tell you, I tend to be a little conservative maybe. Forgive me. But I think 1245 is probably a conservative number. And in the capital fund last year we had that separate article. We proposed that we continue with a separate article to establish a capital fund. It has been already factored in above. You can see that 270 here. So anytime we talk about tax rate calculations, that's already part of it. It's not going to be in addition to. So enrollment projections. I love this colorful slide. You can see for FY 20 we've got actuals plugged in and then of course we have projections going out to the right. I will tell you that K through 4 does not include Roxbury village school. And the reason for that is it would skew our class size analysis because the small number of kids here. But 5 through 12 does include Roxbury to the extent that they are at Montpelier schools. So for example, in FY 21, 11th and 12th graders, we still have grandparented students who are tuitioned out perhaps to U32 and Northfield. But for those Roxbury students in 5 through 12 who are at Main Street or at the high school, they are all included in here. And what you'll see down here, I've circled for the high school numbers, you'll see that going from 21 to 22 and then to 23, pretty significant jumps. So I do anticipate that we will need some FTE increases at the high school in the next few years. You'll also see that I've circled here, our total K-12 has gone up from all, every year has gone all the way up and is still going up through FY 23. But in FY 24 you see it starts to level off and maybe drop. Class size analysis, the top part of this chart is our students and the FTE of teachers, classroom teachers, the bottom part is what the average class sizes are. Some color coding issues, if it's yellow, that means we're getting close to max class size. If it's red, it means we're over max class size. The green over here is where we think we can reduce. So up in FY 24 we might be able to reduce the classroom teacher. The blue is where we're proposing an increase in order to stay below the maximum class size. This four is, that's that sixth grade teacher that we asked for approval to hire. It's still showing up as more because we haven't hired that person yet. But if we do hire that position then that would change obviously. This is just Roxbury since we were missing K-4, here's your K-4. This year is perhaps going to be the high water mark for Roxbury because we have a high cohort of fourth graders that we're going to be losing. The numbers are so small, I can't really do any kind of fancy algorithms so all you'll see is basically the assumption if you have six kindergarteners next year, we'll have six first graders. And then this one is the whole picture for the entire district. So to the left of the dashed line are actuals, the history. To the right of the dashed line is the projections. What you'll see here, this top call out box shows you that in FY 3 that's where we will no longer have any grandparented Roxbury school choice kids. And it's also probably our high water mark. From there we'll probably start drifting down. But you'll see this yellow line which represents the high school is still going up through FY 24. It may even go up in FY 25 before it starts dropping off. So bearing the enrollment in mind, some staffing proposals at the district level we're proposing an increase of .2 for English language learner teachers that's based on student needs and caseload. We are proposing a weekend custodian basically a two day a week job, Friday, Saturday or Saturday Sunday to manage facility use issues, mainly at the high school on the weekends. It's really, I have retention up here it's really a retention issue for us Andrew can correct me that there were times this past year where we had custodians working 20 or more days in a row without a day off because of facility use. After school enrichment it's a status quo because that position already exists this year but it wasn't budgeted that way. Because we were, at the time we had kind of assumed we were going to have some other kind of contracted support to after school enrichment. And then what we ended up doing is taking that on in-house and so we have that one FTE in place now but it wasn't budgeted that way so it kind of appears as it's an increase of one FTE. At the library we have a .2 increase going from .2 to .4 it's kind of an equity issue between schools and it allows for some time for tech integration by the librarian. At union another status quo issue you remember you gave us approval to increase the pre-K teacher from .5 to 1.0 but it wasn't budgeted so in the budget we're adding that .5 at Main Street because of class sizes we need to bring on another 7-8 teacher I mentioned earlier for social emotional learning that we were going to add a behavior position for Main Street this would be a teacher position that would probably fall under the principal's budget. In athletics there's a correction here I think I had did I have field hockey but we're not actually going field hockey we're going to add Nordic Scheme and Track as some new athletic advisors at Main Street and then we have Spelling Team and Fall Musical just adding some more options for kiddos. At the high school we're looking at developing an alternative program at a .75 FTE the majority of that position will be offset though because we will fund most of it from Medicaid so it doesn't impact that part of it doesn't impact education spending at all another piece of it will probably come from special education so approximately 56% of that would be offset Fine Arts we have an increase of about a .4 to add more choice for kiddos the fact is if you're not musically inclined or you can't draw or paint there's really nothing in the area of Fine Arts so we'd like to add a .4 Fine Arts the guidance assistant kind of is associated with the statewide data management system that I talked about the person that we have running that program really needs to focus 100% on that and so we really could use some help at the high school to be able to get information for student information data testing data those kinds of things the library assistant a .5 would allow Sumamini a bunch of extra time to do some tech integration work and then some minor changes there for athletics and co-curricular that kind of wash each other out expenses we'll go through them by program and by category after this briefing I'll probably just do it by program because it's the same number it's just sliced different ways so this slide just shows you what number we're tracking to it's the 25.3 million if we look at it by program then you'll see that basically about 60% of the budget is tied to direct instruction between general ed, special ed tech tuition and if you were to add in speech maybe so about 60% direct instruction so these percentages are the percentage of the total budget so 41% of the total budget is for general education most of these probably make sense to you if I were to point out a few I would say like buildings and grounds that includes our capital fund principal office special services administration I think you all know what the principal's office piece of that is but special services administration kind of think of Mary as another principal same kind of bucket what else will I talk about safety includes our school resource officer students crossing guards fund transfers is the amount of money that we transfer to food service to cover any kind of potential deficit this chart just shows by those same program areas the changes from year to year I know the scale makes it a little hard to read this but the big increases are in general ed there's something here in student support and also staff support but we will talk about those specifics next slide so for general education you know you would maybe think that as a rule of thumb maybe you'd see increases of about 3% just to stay with inflation so general ed you can see is higher than that that's because a lot of the staffing increases that I talked about are in this line as well as about $160,000 worth of that health premium increase so those two things kind of make up the difference between what you might assume as a normal increase and where we are special ed you'll see is actually a decrease and that's largely associated with our anticipated outside placement requirements career center tuition I mentioned we think the six semester average is going to go up of course tuition costs are going to go up so that's a fairly significant increase co-curricular a lot of that is tied to the after school enrichment that we are doing this year and then some of the other things like I talked about some of the co-curriculars at main street that we brought in under student support this is where we have the alternative program that we're planning for the high school the data management position the .5 that I spoke of OT is occupational therapy we're seeing a big increase in occupational therapy needs staff support that's where we have library and tech so this is the library increases that I talked about the .2 here the .5 at the high school and it is also where you see a fairly significant increase in hardware and software Mike Barry gave you a presentation not that long ago so this is in line with what he had told you was coming let's see principal's office that's a little higher but that's because that's where we plugged in that behavior position for main street buildings and grounds is actually a little bit of a decrease and that's anticipated as you know we plugged in some big numbers at the beginning of this merger to handle some of the deferred maintenance number 4 up here to try to tackle some of the deferred maintenance and get back into good shape and it also helped us kind of absorb that 8 cent so that we didn't have to worry about a big spike in tax rates so we took care of some issues and managed tax rates safety looks like a huge increase but you can see by the dollar amount it's not really big money and this is because we are going to try to buy some things other than just vests for our crossing guards and safety traffic cones we're talking about buying some things for crisis planning in the schools like maybe go bags for classrooms whenever we evacuate those kinds of things that's something we could maybe back off on a little later if we need to but we do want to actually show some investment there for crisis planning debt service is actually a decrease we have no new long-term debt and interest goes down every year fund transfers we have an increase there as you know we're trying to get to a point the wages for our food service folks and we are also basically allowing for some of these food service people to be able to get benefits which only two people were able to get benefits before we structured it so that the number of hours made them ineligible for benefits so it seems only fair that we look at restructuring this so that our food service employees get a fair salary and those that need to get benefits are actually qualified to get benefits so now this is just looking at the same expenses but in different buckets so now we're looking at it instead of by program we're looking at it by category meaning salaries, benefits professional services it'll jump out pretty quick if you do the math salaries and benefits make up 73% of our budget and that's where the majority of our funding goes to salaries and benefits as you would expect some of the things that you may not know intuitively what they mean so for professional services that's for things like occupational therapy physical therapy autism program support psychological evaluations professional development audits legal services flexible pathway services at the high school union elementary school we have the eco eco for purchase services that's mostly repair and maintenance having to do with facilities contracted services is where we bucket things like busing contracts traveling conference, phone, internet those kinds of costs tuition a lot of times in the past tuition really meant outside placements for special ed but now it means more than that it means private preschool tuition it means Roxbury school choice kids that are still grandparented it means tech tuition which is going to be a fairly big chunk of that I think everything else makes sense intuitively and then once again a comparison from year to year but in this case mostly it's an increase in salaries and benefits a lot of the same things just show up in different categories here so I'm not going to go through them all salaries this is now where all of those staffing adjustments are showing up in salaries instead of by different program areas health insurance the whole health insurance increase is showing up right there in that line benefits less health would be things like unemployment compensation workers compensation those kinds of things for professional services occupational therapy shows up again here one thing that we didn't talk about before is behavior support and planning this is that social emotional learning thing when we have kids in crisis to be able to bring in a consultant to help us do some crisis planning purchase services is a decrease that's related to the decrease that we were talking about with facilities tuition it's a decrease even though we're going to see an increase in tech tuition and a little bit of an increase in pre-cave but that decrease is driven by less outside placements and by the fact that we have one less year of grandparented Roxbury kids that we're paying tuition for supplies technology and books that's mostly driven by the hardware and software that we mentioned earlier equipment is a decrease a big chunk of that is that in the high school we had a pretty big requirement FY20 for equipment PE equipment and that was kind of loosely associated with the bond project we did this new fitness area and we wanted to make sure that we had things to put into the fitness area so they had a requirement FY20 that isn't continuing let's see dues and fees it's a pretty big 8% increase because this is where some of those after school enrichment costs are for example if we take a bunch of kids skiing then those lift passes and stuff would be considered a fee or a park would be a fee so that's why there's an increase there but that increase will be offset because like the skiing program we charge we would charge for that so you'll see later when we get into revenues that there's an after school enrichment revenue line that offsets some of this and here we are, revenues so for revenues you'll see the highlight is those special education revenues that we get from the state those are all highlighted because I haven't gotten a good estimate yet from AOE you will notice that if you add up the numbers it's about 160 or so less than FY20 which makes sense because our special education expenses are lower as we've just discussed my hope is that I'm conservative here and that these numbers might actually come up a little bit but we will have to wait and see the top line education spending is just the balancer that's the amount of revenues we need to balance against expenses tech on behalf is the portion of tech tuition that the state pays so we show it as an expense and a revenue if you skip down about a third of the way you see transportation aid we're thinking that's going to be about a $20,000 increase because our FY19 actuals were a little higher than FY18 and the way this works is they there's like a two-year delay FY20 is based on FY18 actuals FY21 is based on FY19 actuals in FY22 we'll see a much bigger increase because we added bussin this year and that will come into play for FY22 transportation aid a couple of lines down you'll see the one that starts with best act 230 if you look at that all the way down to the last one that has a CFP for consolidated federal program all of those lines there's like maybe five or six lines those are grants that the revenue amount matches exactly what we budgeted for expenses so those lines have no impact on education spending they just offset expenses that we anticipate if we spend more money and get more money then they will balance out if we get less money we will certainly spend less money and those will level out so there's no impact from an education spending perspective IEP Medicaid is the same thing that offsets exactly what we forecasted for expenses you'll see there's a pretty big increase here that's because I mentioned earlier this program that we're looking at for the high school for an alternative program most of that position will be funded by Medicaid let's see tuition so that's tuition revenue now and you'll see we forecasted an increase of about $32,000 I think that's reasonable it basically assumes that we're going to keep all the same kids that we've got and maybe pick up two more high school kids which is reasonable last this year we budgeted $72,800 we're looking right now at a revenue we think of $89,000 interest we have pretty big interest numbers in the past because we've had a very, very healthy fund balance I bumped up what we think we're going to get for interest in FY21 as we use fund balance then maybe we might have to start dropping that interest revenue down a little bit but I think we're safe for years to come after school in Richmond I just mentioned that for things like ski trips we're going to charge to offset our expenses and balance forward is use of fund balance that we have as a revenue source and that's the $240 that I talked about previously so the capital plan as I mentioned that's already factored into our expenses we know that in FY20 we did bathroom renovations at Main Street in FY21 there's still a few of these I don't mean to say smaller because they're still significant money but smaller in comparison to like a $260,000 project we have some smaller projects that we want to kind of check off the list to handle the deferred issues that we've got looking at trying to bucket large money for large projects like those window replacements at the middle school and the elementary school that we keep looking at every year and knowing that we need to do something about them that we just don't have the money this capital plan allows us to keep money put money in there and keep it let it roll over from year to year until we have enough money that it makes good sense from an economy of scale position to do a chunk of windows so it may not be in FY22 that we replace a bunch of windows maybe in FY23 we might do it as part of a capital plan this money doesn't expire it just rolls over some of these projects like the auditorium renovation that would include things like painting, lighting flooring integration of some equipment that we took out of the high school to do the elementary school because of the bond project that we did it also encompasses things like infrastructure improvements like some of the rigging that we've got going on some of the curtains that we've got back there and I think to go over the rest I'll just show you pictures so the auditorium you can see by all these wires hanging out everywhere that's what we're talking about you know trying to handle integration of that it's not as obvious here but even on this picture this small picture you can see these stair-treads at Union are in bad shape it looks like somebody took a jackhammer to them stair-towers you know this is one of the ones that the public sees a lot at Main Street you get on the hall you see these beautiful classes beautiful hallways and then you go into the stair-tower it's atrocious so what we'd like to do is work on some finishes do some painting work on some flooring to make those stair-towers decent looking as you walk into them and then the play area this is obviously after we had a little bit of a sprinkle you can see the standing water in the play area we need to repave that take care of some of the the drainage issues so that we can actually allow kids to play out there whenever there's a little bit of rain right afterwards tax rates so I would just warn you once again there's so many unknowns that I was actually tempted not to even have tax rate charts because they could change so dramatically but it's not a budget presentation with tax rates so here we go in highlight are those areas that I talked about before revenues that still might change equalized pupil counts that could change property dollar yield and as some of you know that 11,000 isn't what was in the tax commissioner's recommendation the tax commissioner's recommendation was 10,083 I believe I kept my number at 11,000 and the reason for that is that the tax commissioner made that number based on the estimate that statewide education spending was going to go up 5% I'm hopeful that it's not going to go up by that much and that's not the tax commissioner's fault that's what he was told by AOE it's not even AOE's fault because that was what AOE was told by business managers like me who sometimes are a little pessimistic so I'm hoping that 11,000 is more like the number that we're going to see at the end of this process and there's nothing worse than having an artificially low number here doing budget presentations that have a tax rate that's artificially high because of it so I think that number is probably reasonable that we'll see as time goes on the big one is CLA common level of appraisal I don't know what that's going to be I think the numbers that I've plugged in here are reasonable it's about a 2.5% decrease in Montpelier about a 5% decrease in Roxbury to give you a point of reference Montpelier dropped 2.64% last year and Roxbury dropped 5.86% but as the percentages go down the amount they drop each year should be less of a drop so I think these numbers should be pretty good but we'll wait and see but you can see the drastic change so in Roxbury the finalized number is 1.571 when you factor in the CLA it jumps all the way up to 1.706 and that's purely based on CLA and this number 1.571 cannot go any lower than that it's a statutory limit as long as we are getting a merger incentive it's a 5% limit for Roxbury so next year we're still going to have that merger incentive and there's not going to be a limit on how much Roxbury could drop so maybe we'll see a more significant decrease in the future what else can I talk about on this probably good enough residential tax impacts once again this just assumes that those tax rates are solid numbers which I know they're not because there's some uncertainty there if you have $100,000 in property how much your estimated tax bill would be and how much it would be increased from last year the bottom line in that box is critical this assumes that everybody is paying 100% based on property values when we know that 2 thirds of the people in Vermont get some kind of income sensitivity adjustment so this is really like a worst case scenario this chart I hope it's as fun for you as it was for me I just I had heard before that especially in Roxbury there's been this concern our tax rate hasn't gone down it's going up and we were promised it was going to go down well you can see this dark blue line that's the Roxbury tax rate from FY18 to FY21 before the common level of appraisal 5% decrease every year since the merger the problem is that light blue line is the Roxbury tax rate once CLA is factored in so you can see it makes a big difference and you can see there's a very minor increase in that light blue line from 19 to 20 to 21 but if you go back and look at history Roxbury without CLA and FY18 the tax rate was 1.833 this year 1.571 that's 26 cents lower than FY18 now whenever you factor in but the property values have gone way up so when you factor in CLA it's still a decrease but it's only one set instead of 22 cents or 26 cents for Montpelier it's this dark kind of orange line you can see where we were where we are now because even in Montpelier before CLA where we were in FY18 we're actually lower in FY21 before CLA adjustment now after CLA obviously there is an increase of about 11 cents because of the CLA and you can see that dramatic up turn here whenever you factor in CLA from our perspective we look at the equalized rate because that's what we can control CLA I can't do anything about and it has a huge impact non-residential I'll be changing this because I'll probably go ahead and use the tax commissioner's recommendation which I think is $1.65 but in all honesty whenever we present this most people don't care too much about the non-residential tax rate and another piece of it is that the budget has absolutely no impact to non-residential it's simply the base rate divided by the CLA neither one of which we control it all so we're winding down the outlook we still have a two cent tax rate basically increase because there's two cents less than incentive every year for two or years we can continue to use fund balance as we've planned for FY21 to offset that enrollment is going to keep going up as we showed through FY23 and then it will start dropping off the high school it's going to continue until FY25 or FY26 probably class sizes you saw the class size analysis the high school we're probably going to be looking at increases in FTE next year definitely the year after but at Main Street the increase we're seeing this year we may be able to take it back out in FY24 9 through 12 tuition is going to continue to drop we're thinking maybe 75,000 next year FY22 and then 85 the following year and then it will be gone transportation aid as I mentioned should go up a significant amount next year and long term debt now that we don't have any new bonds that we're dealing with should be pretty stable maybe decrease in a bit in the summary right now we're sitting at 4.76 for education spending I know the board had said as a target we should try to hit about 4% so we're obviously not there yet as we get more revenue numbers in like special ed revenue that could drop some because it's not just about decreasing expenses it's about increasing revenues to give you an idea if we wanted to get down to like 4.5 we'd have to either cut 53,000 in expenses or increase 53,000 in revenues if we wanted to get down to 4% the target would have to reduce by $154,000 residential tax rates as I mentioned there's so many unknowns we know Montpelier could change dramatically it's going to be an increase but I just don't know how much until some more of these things shake out in Roxbury we know that before CLA it's going to be a decrease with CLA hopefully it's still going to be a decrease not much but a little bit of an increase and I am done talking questions if you want to talk about specific goals for the spending increase and just a reminder of the upcoming meetings that are scheduled so I will turn it back over to you yeah, no thank you Grant it was very thorough and very helpful questions Michelle questions I'm really glad that you did the slide that you did about the tax increases versus decreases with the CLA without the CLA because that's really helpful and also I don't know how good a job we do but we should try to remember to do this because you are as you say very conservative in all your assumptions so often the tax rate increase that people see in these public presentations is higher than the ultimate actual tax rate increase that they experience and I think we could probably do a better job maybe when we come back in the fall of saying here's what the reality turned out to be yeah, to make that more clear that is part of that's part of we kind of talked about that many meeting having some of that kind of information because there's a lot of these types of discussions that come up this time of year when looking at this also around the December 1 letter like in FY17 they were forecasting a 9% on average increase and it wasn't anywhere near that so I think it's important the reality of the situation yeah, because those initial estimates really get well publicized and then the later reality I feel like doesn't necessarily convict people's attention the other thing is the food service I'm really glad that progress is being made but I thought that we went three years ago to having higher quality positions in food service what's our we have made that adjustment what's going on is we didn't just go from whatever the hourly rate was up to $15 right, I meant in terms of the eligibility for benefits because we were using that sneaky system of like people working it was intentionally sneaky 39.25 hours a week or something just under eligibility yeah and so we have talked about that but I think this is the first year where we actually are going to have I think there's two more people that are qualified this year and then I think there will be three in the fall over there now some of those people may not choose to go on benefits but that's one piece of it the other piece is that increase to get to a livable wage we're still doing a ramp on that but so instead of like two and a half to three percent increase each year food service is looking at like a six percent each year to get them there and so we're going to see a while that we're going to see kind of increases like that but we are seeing a significant increase in the revenues that we're pulling in that Jim Birmingham is being able to pull in for catering and such so we're hoping that this is the last time that we have to actually increase that transfer amount and hopefully with the additional revenues this will be enough and he'll be able to absorb those annual increases after this and hopefully we'll have better attention and we can do training and have more skill especially for the lead food service person in each school so that was not so much a question as a statement but another thing I wanted to point out on the slide was you had on the salary category it showed a six percent increase and I just think it's important to note for the public because that doesn't mean a six percent raise in salaries it means an increase of six percent in the salary portion of the budget and that's partly attributed to a bunch of new staff the MHS alternative program we used to have an alternative program it was called SOAR and then when we got flexible pathways SOAR was fantastic SOAR is so great we wish all the kids could do SOAR and then we got flexible pathways and we're like hey this is just like if all the kids were doing SOAR so we don't need SOAR anymore because everybody has a flexible pathway and personalized learning so if we have personalization and flexible pathways what is an alternative program an alternative to a completely personalized and flexible the alternative program is really those kiddos that we're having challenges with for behavior that we just can't seem to be able to manage that don't do well in a traditional school setting but we need to get them out get them some support and hopefully bring them back into first instruction at some point that was going to be my question so it's not an in-house question we're thinking that it would be that it would be getting the kids out of the building out of the building to be able to alleviate some of that and be able to manage the behavior better so I think that you're right that flexible pathways I think is an awesome opportunity for a lot of our students we do have a group of students who either aren't coming to school at all or have significant behavioral challenges because of emotional trauma we really need a more therapeutic environment in addition to the academic piece so what we're proposing is to really there's a gap between what we offer at the high school and yes there's the opportunity for flexible pathways that give students different options and opportunities but there's a real gap between what we offer and the resources that we have available to us to support that particular population of students between that and what the next step is which is looking at out placement and an alternative program and we really want to keep these students within our own environment we believe that so yes they're going to be out for part of the day as an outdoor experiential program but also we want them to be back within the high school being able to access other classes with their peers as well and part of that part of that program is the therapeutic piece in which they can learn to self-regulate they can connect more socially there's a lot of pieces to that but that's the difference I think between I don't know what SOAR was before but creating a different way of approaching curriculum and academics but really with that therapeutic element which I think is completely different than what we offer the flexible pathways so physically where would they be? not in the woods in the winter and you said out of the building yeah so it's Vermont these are not the kids I went in the woods all by themselves so currently we are planning on a farm-based program so students would be using I have it here I forget what it's called resilient systems therapy and currently we're doing this to some degree not so therapeutically with our wild program but we offer as a co-curricular after school so students do go to a farm where there's animals and they really do a lot of different outdoor experiential things that bring a lot of different areas of the social-emotional piece into focus with somebody who is trained in that therapeutic element and then the goal would be for them to come back so yes that may be in the winter our students now who are in wild do go and do that in the wintertime so the extra money is for to have them in this program which already exists or for our staff it's a staffing increase it's to be able to pay for somebody to blend this program so it's our I'm just trying to figure out the program so it's our program owned by my pillar we don't own a farm I mean are we going to some place that already exists yes the plan is yes and we don't have to pay them to go there now so again our co-curricular there's supplies and whatnot that we would fund through the co-curricular that we fund for that space we obviously don't have the program spelled out completely because we don't even know if we're going to get money for it but we do know that we need some resources to make this happen so we're in that planning stage we think we have some good ideas about where we're going to go with this but it's a little premature to be able to say exactly how we're going to roll this out because we're just now asking for the resources to make it happen but that is what we're considering is a farm based program it would be our staff member that would be treating these kids and helping these kids but we'll see it's under development right now okay thanks Rene yes that sounds very different from SWAR which was more of an independent study but it's still an academic program my hesitation just had sorry had to do with the fact that most programs with certified and specialized staff are more expensive I think we were talking about this it's offset by Medicaid mostly Medicaid I believe yeah the position itself I mean we may as we dig into this we may find out that there might be other costs that we're going to have to try to figure out how to absorb but the big thing is we didn't want to not have anything in here we wanted to have something as a resource to be able to to really nail down exactly what we're going to do and at least this would get us I think close enough that we would be able to execute something for the kids as a therapeutic new year what is the fine arts increase for so it would be a point 4 to have somebody come in and offer a couple of courses in a fine art that's not musical or drawing or art it could be a drama it could be improv I mean some kind of a fine arts offering that is different than what we're offering now so if you have an interest in creating art or playing an instrument or singing there's no kind of fine arts option for you which is a requirement and I have better options I currently a art teacher teaches 6 classes whereas the norm is 5 we have a waiting list of students trying to get into art it's a hot topic in the summer when we pass out schedules and kids don't get into art thankfully I was new but I hear from the guidance counselors who did field those calls and so it is creating more opportunity for students outside of the visual art piece and then the fine art piece and we're still working out what that might look like for our population of students oh I also had a question about can we go back to the enrollment slide for sure I need to reduce the number of slides that's always your oh no the one with this so I was wondering because I saw your note about the kindergarten projections seeming low out a couple of years how good was the kindergarten projection for this year it was 7 wasn't it it was higher than it turned out to be no no we had more students than the projection was so we our actual is 71 kindergarteners so the question is what was that as a projection last year yeah I'm just wondering how these projections have been playing out if you go on a website and take a look at last year I'm looking into this right now let me find out because I have the numbers as a matter of fact I think there's like a fourth tab on my cell file that shows a comparison of how we did versus that because these projections just come from births five years earlier right yeah it wouldn't reflect people moving in or moving out there is a formula there's an algorithm that looks at the birth rate and then factors in how many kids actually have shown up over a period of years and factors so does it also factor in things like you know students who may choose other schools like Waldorf yeah it would factor that in because what it looks at is it looks at the actual number of kindergarteners five years later and compares the birth rate to that over a period of like five years and it shows a factor and so now whenever you have a new birth data number plugged in it multiplies it by this factor to project five years later on the kindergarteners so it's like a several year average looking at the margins between birth rates and what in-migration, out-migration and historically we gain kids maybe in first grade because people choose to go somewhere else in kindergarten to a private kindergarten in a place they were for preschool yeah we might lose a couple too yeah we're really sick kids like crazy in ninth grade or middle school but it's easy enough but I can pull together to show how the actuals have compared to projections just to give you an idea of how good or bad the tool is I will tell you that the merger is playing a little bit of havoc with this because of the influx of students now that are students that whole dynamic is kind of new so but I will go back and pull something together and give you a slide next time come on question is Montpelier due for reappraisal given the CLA level I would say that I think it's kind of the rule of thumb whenever he gets around 70, 75 80 is required 80 is required yeah usually try to do it they try to get it started when it's headed toward 80 because it takes a while or headed towards 80 87 maybe and that like I said as the years go on once you start at 100 and then you drop the first year it's usually more significant than the next year than the next year so it may not be 87 grade but it could be a couple years depending on what the market is looking like or it could be it could be next year but yeah I knew there was a threshold but I didn't remember it was 80% first of all thanks so much Grant you're champion among champions so general question for the board to start off so this 4.76% increase in education spending total education spending correct in education spending not total budget and per pupil education spending is like 4.36% so obviously per pupil spending that's generally our average amount spent per student and that has a direct correlation to our tax rate so just wanted to put that in perspective looking at total education spending and our education spending goes up like 1% but we also gain 100 more students in a year and we know our average our per pupil spending could go down so I just think that's important for us to keep in mind as we go through this is that per pupil number any thoughts on that no I would agree the problem is early on when we start talking about like a target number to come in at it's hard to say anything about per pupil because we don't have any idea what the per pupil is going to be but we can do something more generic with education spending but now that as we get an account you're right the big thing is the spending per pupil because that's the factor that gets compared to the dollar yield so I mean like for example you could maybe tap the brakes a little bit on trying to get us to hit 4% on education spending you know if you for example ask us to hit 4.5% for the next presentation and then we get an equalized pupil account that's a little higher you could end up with 4% spending per pupil which I would be happy with but anyway you're correct the key number is really the spending per pupil it's just tough right now because we don't know the pupil count I was going to ask what we want to rely on everyone to rely on one more than another but it sounds like for now it might be better to rely on that spending and then as we head into January shift per pupil I would we get an equalized at least the first guess we get like seven different versions of an equalized pupil account as things change but we typically get it early December and last year we didn't get it until I think December 20th this year I know that districts are having a challenge trying to get data in through the statewide system so I wouldn't be surprised if we're waiting until close to the end of the month before we get a good number so it may not be in time for the next meeting which is December 18th but I would certainly hope that we get at least a pretty good guess before the first one in January so I don't know if anyone has any thoughts on that but that was just something that we got to the summary section that was the question that I had is ELL do we have an increase in second English as a second language students or is it just that we feel like we can do a better job or we have a significant increase in the K2 level particularly am I right on that grade levels K2 yeah we have one grade specifically that has a really high number I think it's second grade so we currently have 40 English language students just at UES or south of the district 40 EL students just at UES and no one from under WEDA standards are receiving the number of minutes of support that they should be receiving based on the needs that they're presenting are these ELL students from a range of backgrounds or very interesting primarily from India with the insurance company they must have made some sort of drive to bring in families from that area because we have a significant increase in our population from India okay cool pre-K would it be possible at some point in the next several months to get an overview of the situation current number of students trends capacity, bonding presentation on pre-K I get a lot of questions about it because I have a number of neighbors who have really little kids some of whom are in our pre-K program some of whom are in nearby pre-K program some of whom are just asking about the pre-K program so in terms of general being a representative for the community and I'm hearing a lot from constituents in my community about what's up with pre-K we really wish there were more spots for pre-K that kind of thing and I have no idea what the situation is I will tell you that from a numbers perspective the private pre-K is pretty much level off now because we're at about 100 kids that go to private pre-K and that's above what we handle in-house and so that equalized pupil count some of the reason why we were seeing that increase in pupil count was because we were ramping up on private pre-school kids and we were getting 0.46 for every one of those kids but we're pretty stable now at 100 so that impact is kind of already in for equalized pupils so from my perspective of pre-K that's what I'm seeing that you're asking for something a little different what do we provide and what do we have to provide and those numbers would be helpful too I'm sure we can find the in-house number very quickly and we can find the number of private pre-K pretty quickly too Tracy can pull that it's about 100 I would say and last question the capital plan figures those are incorporated in all of the total budget figures that you showed including the ed spending and spending for pupil so some places they won't do that and then they will have the articles showing what the tax rate would be and then if you add this article it will be this much but historically capital plans get approved usually at a higher rate than the actual budget article so I think it's just more transparent to just put it in at the beginning those will be two separate both separate for usual Tina could you explain the adjective for the librarian the librarian increase at Roxbury equity between schools Roxbury is the only school that doesn't have any kind of tech integration happening and so it's inequitable in terms of tech integration so that increase to the librarian position is not an increase to books per se it's an increase to the library media specialist position so we're adding that media specialist piece which didn't exist currently does not exist I have one other quick question it's because it's not like Barry over there and it reminded me of last year at this time talking about the foreign language work any idea how that's coming along I don't know smoothly I'm currently working on a feasibility study and getting things together and we put together a potential three year plan that would allow time for the board to really absorb the information in the feasibility study and make some decisions based on budget and projection a three year plan for the presentation or a three year plan for the so year one is creating the feasibility study year two is the board taking a look at that and also planning for implementation potentially and then year three whatever point that third year happens would be implementation if the feasibility study determines that it's something that we want to pursue okay and we're wearing that process so year one I'm working on a feasibility study I'm on the committee we have met we have we could expand a little bit on the social emotional learning piece so Mary's presentation last meeting I think at some point she had highlighted that she's hoping to maybe get more coordination with outside agencies and some of the things that are happening in the school do you see the staff that we're going to be hiring over the next year kind of being a high watermark or is it going to kind of level off or is the social emotional learning piece going to kind of be dynamic for a while and how it's going to impact the budgets that's really a good question right I'd say if I want to answer it the staffing that we're hiring this particular we would like to hire this particular school year I believe will help us create a more well one more equitable situations between our schools MSMS is currently with the exception of Roxbury that doesn't necessarily need a position the school in the three month failure school that doesn't have any behavior support as an FTE has to have that you mean has it so there's an equity need to there and just because there's an equity need doesn't necessarily mean we have to hire that position unlike the media specialist it's in the EQS we have to hire that however there's a significant need there and from Mary's presentation last week we want to get this piece of learning for our district and our staff under control now having said that when we do that when we do that we may find that we do I don't want to answer that we won't need any more staff because I don't know I don't know I don't anticipate that the consulting services were originally put in that you saw like what's 56 or 52 or something like that was originally a staff a district-wide staff member in collaboration with our principal group back here we decided to make it more of a consultation because we didn't want to be pinpointed into that position we know that once you hire a position it's hard to not have that position later so we wanted it more of a non-demand based on the need but we're as you saw last week last board meeting we have a lot of needs in this area we're using who we have on staff right now to figure it out with Mary's help that makes it much more specific than targeted because she has an expertise that I mostly know the rest of us have so I can't answer it with any specificity I can't totally project with the future but it was just trying to understand what the landscape might be going forward if we're going to be we want to get ahead of it so we're intentionally working with students who have more challenges rather than constantly reacting to students who have 10 challenges and that's where we are right now we want to get out of the reaction mode once we're out of that mode and we can take a breath and be able to see the landscape a little bit more clear and ideally we would be able to at some point use the staff that we have and just increase the capacity and their knowledge so that they are able to handle behavior better based on professional development that we provide as well as our teachers with the first instruction working in a different way with students to engage them more which has to do with those consultants available here we think so it may not be through Washington County Mental Health it may be through more private agencies so we might use those consultants for PDs for staff or there it would just be a consultant it'd be more for the the crisis team and I wouldn't call it professional learning necessarily be meeting with the crisis team when a student is really dysregulated and say okay let's do this first let's get this in place first for this kid to see if we can regulate them so it would be in a consultation mode so our educational support team or crisis teams aren't looking at each other kind of saying what do we do we don't know what to do next and we're hoping to have the ability to have somebody on call to say hey we've got a kid can you help us out right now that's the hope no it's a hope I'm not going to lie it's a hope that's what I wondered pretty much not kicking not kicking the video show show I just have a question about our meeting schedule for January because the first is on a Wednesday is the 8th a regular board meeting plus public forum or just a public forum I think the 8th was showing up as a regular board meeting on a budget calendar it was showing up as a public forum so you may have to nail that down our proposed work plan for the year we had that as the public I remember our two meetings in January were back to back so then we wouldn't be having one on the 22nd those were the only two meetings for January right yeah because we would be having one on the first on a Wednesday we're not going to do just making sure I understand no party dance no party dance typically we've shown that 2nd January meeting is if needed but I didn't want to be too presumptuous it's not a regular meeting as far as budget if by the 8th you're good with the budget then you don't have to have another budget presentation at your meeting on the 15th but it is definitely a meeting date so we could just leave it like that so far I've only got a couple action items to look at the FY20 actual rate versus what it was projected to look at enrolling actuals versus projections anything else do you want to talk about a target for its spending or do you want to just let it ride for another meeting yeah I think we leave it I think we leave it too if during the next week or so some items become obvious that we could make adjustments then I will make those but I will tell you what we do between now and then I'm thinking if we find something that we could reduce it's not going to impact kids then I'll go ahead and make that reduction and tell you what it was that we changed if we find anything to get us a little closer I would want to comment that for the last couple of years the board has been saying please tell us what you need please tell us what you need we're happy to support increases that are we know that the schools have needs especially in the social and emotional learning area please tell us what we need and the administration has been very conservative in response to that and we have had almost no budget increases partly because we've had a change in administration and we've had the merger and there's been a need to assess before adding but I'm very glad to see that you're asking for what seems like very well justified additions that are almost delayed in coming so I'm really happy with where the budget is and would not encourage you to reduce yeah project first I'll echo Michelle's comment and then actually where I was going is for a nice transition my question is still living which is what's not in the budget that's high on the list what were the things that didn't make the final cut are still pretty serious needs that's a loaded question I think it's important for us to know the context of what your administration is dealing with what needs your I know you're sitting around the table and you're having to make hard decisions before you what are you putting on until next year we had significant our conversations with the leadership team behind me I can't say anything but amazingly positive things about the team that we have we had incredibly hard conversations not just the team of course I'm in of course I'm in of course I'm in because we came in with a significantly higher increase in our original conversation and we had some hard so I pulled up the document so you can see the slashes maybe a kind of run down of some of the things that we talked about our weekend custodian we initially had as a full-time position of Thursday through Monday position so we decreased that a bit we originally had in our plan a high school transition specialist for kids with special needs where you can speak more exactly what that role does than I can so transition planning is required for kids who have IEPs and that goes into effect when students are at the age of 16 and so for some students it could be 16 to 22 for others it's 16 until 18 when they may graduate with their cohort so what we have just been really talking about at the high school level is the high school special educators right now they provide instruction and case management and so they're pulled in a lot of different directions and transition requires a lot of planning work with interagency partners you really have to understand tech programs you have to understand adult services so there's all these different pieces and they aren't able to be really good at transition because they're doing all of the other parts of the school special educators job and so a lot of high schools and of course they're bigger than Montpelier high school have what's called a transition specialist their job is specifically to focus on the transition plan which has four domains so it's got job training post-secondary education it's got independent living and then it's got community connections and so they become really connected to all of the agencies that a student may work with as an adult so I said if this isn't the year then we can wait one more year and I'll continue to just provide some training to special educators and we'll try and do the best that we can so we need it do we you mentioned that a number of the larger schools have this might this be an opportunity where we can share a resource with like U32 or a nearby school the tricky part about that and so I'm actually working with Kelly Bushy at U32 to try and do some collaboration around a life skills program the problem that we're running into is whose employee is it so who and who is the fiscal agent for some of the costs that would be associated so we're actually going to be meeting with Secretary French to talk about some of this stuff to see if we can figure that out so that as a region we can do more collaboration and share more resources great is this I mean it sounds like sounds like the work that they do is quite specialized but is the person at bigger schools where they have this position is that person a person who's typically able to provide other dining services or are they really specialized in the special ed that we could do both because our high school guidance department is incredibly minimal and our high school enrollment rates are going up and up and I don't think our two guidance people can serve 100 more kids than they're currently serving so I would if the person can do both well that's what I was asking that's a big time licensure challenge because you'd have to find somebody with a SPED license as well as a guidance license and those I think some of the things that they could probably take off the plate of a guidance counselor might be more around some of the assessments so just around interest inventories that students take or helping kids get ready for PSATs or things like that that might be something that could be moved I don't think we help kids get ready for PSATs do we well if it's a student on an IEP that might be something that the IEP team decides that that student may need help with that's a good thought Michelle I think we can share some other things we talked about a district-wide math coach we decided that we could continue with consultancies and professional development funding that we already have in our budget so we decided we could go another route this year as you well know that I've been working a lot on developing my skills to develop their skills as principal kind of coaches so we're going to be working through that and if we can alleviate some of the discipline and behavior needs that are on the backs of our principals then perhaps we can get them moving into the classrooms more so we just shifted our focus there a little bit BCBA we already talked about there's some co-curricular pieces in that we're asked for sports and additional coaches and some yeah some theater positions and things like that and we we decided we looked at what were the things that we heard most about adding Nordic we don't have a whole lot of winter sports options at the middle school so Nordic was that's why we chose that one we had some conversations around adding a full-time theater teacher at the high school and we decided to go with .4 fine arts instead and then there's also some FTE concerns at the high school that we have not added in the budget right now which could mean some challenges next year for scheduling scheduling is such a bear at the high school and as Grant and I were talking about that today the FTE increases are relatively small and so if we find that we do need those FTE increases then we can come to the board and say discuss would you rather increase by this amount or decrease or selection by this amount but that's a challenge because we don't know until kids fill out their forms and it's in the spring and right now based on the data around class size averages the data doesn't suggest there's a need based on scheduling conflicts that does suggest there's a need it's a problem with a small high school so it's a conundrum there so you may hear from us again around FTE at the high school level you can see that we have a huge bump in 9th grade this year that we come 10th graders next year and we all know that there's mandatory classes that kids take in 9th and 10th grade in particular and we have an equally large 8th grade coming up I think on the enrollment it's like we had 300 kids in the high school last year and 2 years from now we're going to have 400 kids and we know 2 years from now we will be asking for FTE we know that the question is do we increase the FTE particularly in some core content areas next year and we decided to hold off on that and come back to you because the FTE increases are relatively small that we could we could figure out because our magic man over there could figure that out if the board gives permission for that once we have our student choices in and those were really the biggies for this fiscal year we have some plans down the line in terms of intervention but again in terms of academic intervention we have a lot of work still to do in our systems around curriculum what do we do in tier 3 and tier 2 and our instructional cycles that we don't want to add people yet until we get that down so and I would say Andrew could if you give Andrew 10 million dollars he can spend it he can spend it believe me but we think we've got in the budget those things that we absolutely have to do I mean we did talk about a few other projects that we consider putting in there but we've been saying forever that after we had done the bond and we had put a bunch of one time costs in there in FY19 that we were going to scale that down and so we tried to just put in there things that we absolutely have to have but there were some things in the facility side that we struck off the list just because we think we can manage and do them later and as if I can chime in just giving the custodial staff and all the buildings a break next summer to kind of get the feet under them and catch up on some fundamental things and then so Daniels well thanks in grant we look forward to the next presentation on the 18th and hopefully give you some some numbers from the state and the public comment earlier was public comment accept for budget issues yeah so I forgot that was on the agenda but David you're the only one that's here that's from the public do you have a question go for it I'm not brave enough so if you have a question we're friendly great so thanks all we have to do an exception I do also want to make a quick acknowledgement we had a resignation from the board we thank Becky Bowen decided it was time for her to step down so we wanted to thank her for her great service she did a lot of great work on the board we do have a vacancy we will be I think word is seeping out I know a couple of people who are interested and I've already gotten one letter of interest so please spread the word and then I will work with Libby to get some sort of out I would like if we get a point maybe on the 8th of January because that's not reasonable and I'll work with Libby to get something out of it would people therefore come on me I haven't been in the past I think we would invite them to come and speak we can just set aside a few minutes at the beginning so now do we need we can just go directly to the session for this right Becky we don't need to keep thinking about I was thinking about there's the whole B thing I apologize for that that's good we actually have to make a finding I'm just going to have to find it pretty much your general knowledge about a potential disadvantage regarding any or probable civil litigation I move to find that discussing potential litigation with the board are the disadvantages I move that we go into exactly the session for the purpose of discussion from litigation with Becky that's so sad all those in favor are you both so are we going to do it in here what are we going to do I think am I supposed to be