 632, so I'm going to call the meeting to order. We'll see that the focus of the meeting, we have to have a budget update and some executive presentations reports. However, we're going to start the meeting, even before we have a time for public comment, we're going to start the meeting with a presentation by our elementary principals as part of our end monitoring work. So welcome, thanks. So we had access to talk about making important instructional decisions, so we have just a few slides to explain that process a little bit. So we used to, I guess, well, last year and before, we've been invited to talk about, like, the literacy wall. And we've, over the years, been really proud of the work that we've done with that on keeping track of our students and how their readings are progressing. But it turns out there's so much that we're just doing, like, two or three time a year snapshots. And so we've expanded that work a lot. We recognize that if we looked at all of the common core standards, we'd be in school until some of your ages. We'd be in school forever, and so there's a time to do that. So we spent a lot of time over the last couple of years looking at the standards and picking out the essential standards. And with the help of our literacy and math coaches, really bring them into the units of study. And now this year we're finally in the place where we're creating common formative assessments, and you'll see them up there, CFAs listed that way. And we use those as a check-in. We've taught you this, but can we do it? And Dennis, kind of like, what do we do if they fail? All those student-related assessments go on those essential and most essential standards. Some of the assessments that we use with elementary students, you know, they don't mean a lot to you, but just to let you know, funds is middle. All kids are testing that. Check my progress is new this year. It can be done in literacy. And math is on the computer, which is really interesting for first grade and up. Kids love to be on the computer, as you probably know, so they liked it from the start. It's really pretty quick, less than a half an hour. And the test does adjust a little bit for whether they're getting it wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, or right, and it will go a little bit higher or lower. The DSA, which is a spelling test, the PNOA is a kindergarten through second grade math assessment. It's a little labor-intensive, but every student does get that a couple times a year. Mid-year, just the students who are remedial or below standard get it, but everybody else beginning and end. ESGI is more like kindergarten first grade. It's letter ID sounds with a little bit of math in there, too, that we can do. There's the CFA that we've already talked about. T.S. Gold is preschool. You may or may not know that we have to do a fairly comprehensive preschool assessment beginning and end of the year, it's twice a year. It's required for public preschools to do that. If we printed that report out, it's probably about 30 pages each child. A lot of it is through observation, and so teachers set up that activity. You know, if they want to see fine motor, they purposely set out scissors or some kind of activity, and then they can assess. So it's not like they're sitting down testing the kids. It's mostly through observation that they do that. And adding track my progress this year, we're a little bit overwhelmed our teachers. They're like, really, another test. But it was kind of on the promise that with the goal that if this really works, it will actually be a place. So it gives us the ability to screen and potentially not do the PNOA, which is really labor-intensive. It gives us the same information in a nice, tidy package. Then it'll save us a lot of testing time. So ultimately they win this year. They're working really hard. One of the important things is that what they're doing this year, there are too many assessments at this point without having that, but one of the nice things is they're comparing the results of all of them to make sure track my progress is where we think it is. And so that is one of the nice things of having several assessments, is, all right, how do the kids do on the PNOA? How do they do on track my progress? What are their ESPEC scores for third grade and up? And making sure that they're all pretty similar, and that way, if we reduce those assessments, it won't be wildly different. I just have a quick question. So the CFA's, are those something that the teachers themselves created, or okay. Yeah, they did. We'll talk in a minute about where we are in that process, but they, after they identified the essential standards, so we started with CFA's last year, and we're continuing this year. So we're a multi-tiered system to support school, which means basically we have a lot of different ways of meeting our kids' needs. And at any given time, in a school, you might see these things all going on, but not all in the same classroom all at the same time. Co-teaching is specifically a special educator working in a classroom that teachers are working collaboratively. So they're like six different models that they can use to meet students' needs. Traditional is small group instruction. They can be done by our special educators or interventionists, one-on-one support, often sped, but sometimes with our interventionists when kids have intensive needs that we need to meet. Wind blocks, wind stands for what I need. The best example we have of that now is the third and fourth graders in Randolph have set aside a block where all they do is deal with math, and it's after looking at CFA's, as they reorganize the kids in small groups and say, this is what they need to do right now since they need to work on. And so they deal with that, and then those groups aren't static at all. They're just like, next time there's CFA, what they need to work on, that's what they're doing. And then, of course, of our traditional students with other IEPs getting specialized instruction, some of which gets dealt with back in co-teaching, some of it in a separate place. And if we find something, you know, we have a couple kids on an IEP and a classroom that's co-taught with a special educator in there, if they're not making progress, we'll try one of the other approaches. Then we might do a pull-out model or a little extra of something. It's a co-teaching that's not working, so that's constantly what they're looking at when they look at the data, is if they need to adjust which approach is being used. And what happens for the kids who are ahead? Similar to that. Actually, the three or four teams are a good example in Randolph because when they do that wind block, in fact, last week, I think when you were there, there was one teacher only had a few kids because whatever it was on the CFA, there was only a few kids that missed that and a couple other rooms had bigger groups and there was one group doing enrichment. And so it actually enables us to challenge those kids that are ahead a little bit more because we're really giving that remedial instruction as part of that wind block. I know in Braintree, K through third grade, teachers are teaching, we separate them out by grade for math and then they're just keeping those math classes for that kind of that wind block. We don't call it wind, but it's extra time on learning and staying with their math teacher for that. And we'll show you in a minute. Next slide. Oh, you're still on the screen. Yes, so the student data that we've looked at has forced us to change our programs a little bit. We started this last year. We used to have literacy blocks that were 75 to 90 minutes guaranteed. And this last year, when we did the same with math and some teachers were like, well, it can't be done, but it turns out it can. And those turning into a challenge where they're only so many hours in the day, but they're getting a little literacy. We had about 15 minutes last year when you talked to teachers that it was roughly 45 to 60 in some cases for math and that wasn't long enough. So teachers came up with a plan to change it. Even the groups who don't have a wind block, they're reteaching the essential standards to reach mastery. And they're doing that within the classrooms. They're making sure that the kids are doing the best that they can on the standards before moving on. And we've got all highly qualified teachers, of course, to do the best first instruction and that remediation within the regular math and literacy blocks. So the data review is done at several different times. One of the times it's doing is the half days that the board approved last year for us to do. That's really crucial. There's a half day tomorrow. Teachers are working in both literacy and math groups to look at data tomorrow. So we do that on the half days. We also do that, we call them PLCs, Professional Learning Communities on Tuesdays for elementary school after school. Three out of the four Tuesdays are those PLC meetings. And that's where we also look at the data. Sometimes teams do it together. You know, in brain tree, it might just be Betsy and Janie out there doing it. We ran out, they have great teams and a release meeting during the school day for teachers to look at some of that data. And then the MTSS leadership team, we meet this Thursday. We meet about once a month and we'll look at data. We've looked at literacy and math data. This week it's our time to look at behavior data. And so we'll be looking at all that from all three schools and we combine that to look at that and to look for patterns and see what's going on in the school and what do we need to adjust anything. So there's a lot of opportunities to look at that and teachers are really, I said in a discussion a couple weeks ago for a group of teachers and it was amazing in one year I felt like there had been such learning for teachers for analyzing the data and what they were going to do with their instruction as a result of that data. So, and like with everything else, you're never really finished. We want to be able to do the same work that we've done now with math and literacy. We want to be able to expand that work into science and social studies. We want to be able to take the work, the curriculum stuff in math and literacy and put some model lessons in place for teachers because while the curriculum's in place, teachers have some ability to be flexible on exactly how they share that with children. So children that we want to be able to kind of put something uniform in their thing. So when it comes in fresh, this is what you can do. You can modify it later if you need to. We still struggle a lot with students who've had trauma in their lives and we're starting to spend a fair amount of time learning how to be trauma-informed adults and to school. And we want to expand preschool as an early intervention. So these are our goals. Some of them are already started, some of them are in the works, but we can't say, yep, they're all finished. There's always more to do. I think it's very commendable because what you're seeing is they've hit all three tiers of what leads to effective instruction. They've got the structure in place. Ensuring the time on learning is where it should be. They've got an aligned curriculum that they've worked on over the course of a number of years and now they're doing the pivotal piece which is being informed about the delivery of instruction, taking a look at how effective it is with the students and kind of adjusting things to match when needed. So they've done a, it's an exceptional job. And once children don't meet that, you know, during the CFA's, then it's a retaught and then there's another, you know, CFA again to test it again. So teachers have, they have that down now and they're doing it consistently. Are there any comments or questions? Thanks very much. Does anyone, either of the public have any comment or question? If you want to ask please. Thank you very much. I was curious about the budget update. I know it hasn't, it's not a topic yet in the meeting, but I think there's one public comment section. So I really like some of the material that I read from Lane in this meeting's materials about the potential impact where it seems like there's some wiggle room between our average pupil spending now compared to the state average. So one question is, how that's going to be communicated to taxpayers to make sure they understand the lack of impact it might have. And the second question is, if this budget does pass, how much room would there be for the next year? I'm not sure how the formula works. Is there like, is based on percentage increase from the previous year, so there'd be room if needed in the next year, or would it just be more based on our average for people? Yeah, so we're going to, I'm going to do actually a PowerPoint that'll actually touch on all those pieces and like you were talking about, the whittling down that we did from the last budget session that these guys worked on over the course of the last month or so. They don't know this yet, but what you whittled it down to gets us under the threshold and preserves the buffer. And so that's a little bit of what we'll talk about tonight when we get to that point. So good stuff. So you can let Erica and I know she'll be happy. I will. I've never been waiting to hear that. Now we just figured it out today because we're still waiting for some of the state data to come in to, you know, for how the formulas are calculated. The last of it will be on December 15th or at least it's supposed to be. But it looks good right now. Another commoner question. All right. Thank you very much. That's bad. Yeah, thank you very much. We do need to assign an evaluator for this meeting. Do I have someone who would be willing to volunteer? Thank you. Okay. I guess next on our agenda is to discuss the potential solar project at Braintree School. Yeah. So we actually give, Adam, we got a lot of credit, had done some kind of the background research for us in terms of the school and what potentially, you know, might be possible in terms of bringing, you know, the solar panels in, on Braintree School. Obviously it would have to go out to bid at that time, but at least he's given us some kind of groundwork information to work with. Right now the building in Braintree spends about $1,700 a month on electricity. The solar project is projected to cost on the low end of $200,000. So he predicted about $194,000. If we add some of the other changes that are going to need to go along with it and some of the other survey work, it's probably to punish, give or take. The solar project as it's kind of envisioned would supply all the electrical needs of the building for the next 20 years. And over the course of time, the solar panels do degrade. They have pretty much a 20-year lifespan. After that, they're still going to be producing electricity just not at 100%. And so, you know, they're probably good for a good 30 to 40 years, but it may not be covering the full cost of the electricity that the building needs. Full payback for this would be in the 10 to 11-year range. But the nice part is, if it's paid up front, that's a reduction of 20,000 or so from the budget that we don't have to worry about in terms of electrical costs. And taking a look at the building, it does have a metal roof, which is great because they last a long time. So there wouldn't be any damage done to it. It's actually a clip system that they use on the seams to connect the solar panels to. There would be a few holes that are drilled through for wiring, but they could remain as it is. Typically, the metal roofs are good anywhere from 50 to 100 years. So it should outlast and outlive, you know, the solar panels that are out there. And how old is that roof now? I think probably, yeah, I was going to say about 10 to 15. No, it's more like 13, I think. Because it was put on the year before I came on the board and I went on the board for 12 years. And so if folks decided to move forward with this, and the reason to be talking with the board about it under policy governance is because, you know, it would be taking a look at pulling the money from facilities, the facility surplus line. The next step would be to work with Bob and Wes to connect with Green Mountain Power to have them do a survey, just to see if the grid out there can handle the generation of the electricity. I think as Adam said, that survey would be about $1,000 to get done. He said sometimes Green Mountain Power will do it for free if they've done other surveys in the area. Like if they've already done one, they have an idea of whether or not their infrastructure can support the additional electricity that's generated, just to let us know if it's possible. Their infrastructure may not support it. That would be the first step. The step after that, if that came through, would be get a structural engineer out there just to take a look, make sure that the roof can support the weight. And make sure that the roof is in good enough shape to last the amount of time that we need it to, which I'm sure it is. Do people feel like we're ready? Do we have enough information to proceed? I mean, you're going to do that research, and then you're going to present it to us, and then we get to make a decision. Do we have to vote on the $1,000 for the survey? No, that I've got. But if there was no interest, I wouldn't want to spend the $1,000. Well, that's what I'm asking, really, is that do we want to move forward on seeing whether this is even a possibility? So do we want to allocate the $1,000, and then perhaps the $10,000, did you say, for the surveyor? Probably in that range. And to do the planning, they would have to pull together a set of plans, blueprints and what it would look like so that when it goes out to bed, people know what they're building on. So in that money, would you pull it out of surplus, or would you need to approve you pulling that money out? At some point in time. The $11,000. Or do you have the $11,000? That one may, I think we can probably cover. The reason I'm saying that is because we've got the structural engineers taking a look at the Raven Building. It's not going to cost too much to send them over for a day. But of course, you're investigating grants and things like that. Because it would be great to get some costs. It's funny, there's still a big tax break for private folks. Significantly, it's like 30%. You get to save on your taxes relative to the cost, which you put in, but since we don't pay taxes, I've got to figure out how that plays into the whole scenario. So do we need a motion to authorize you to proceed? I think just general, thumbs up, thumbs down, so I can get a read of the board. If it looks like the majority is at least interested in the investigation, then I'll definitely spend the money to move forward. Like I said, I've got the money to be able to do it. So is everyone on board with moving it forward? Definitely. So I'll check, see how quick we can turn around on the Green Mountain Power Survey. And then get back to you as soon as we know. Okay, sounds good. Okay, the next is the annual report to voters. I guess that's my report. So this is what is going on to the website under our OSSD pull-down, and then it will also be published in the annual town report, which goes out in the Herald and what have you. So if there's any inputs, I wrote it. I ran it by Ben Merrill, who is the editor. He was putting it in on the, it's the very first page after the, you're welcome to send me edits or comments or suggestions if you want something added or changed. When I was reading through it, I found a little typo. Yeah, the enrollment one. Yeah, yeah, I will bring that to his attention. I was surprised it wasn't underlined. I think I did it correctly and he didn't, but who knows? Because I went through, but who knows? Yes, I don't know. So, but if there's anything substantive, feel free to let me know. I don't think we have to vote to approve that. I think that's... But I'll need to find a version for January. I'll send it next week or this week. One thing I did want to wonder if you might want to put the actual student numbers in. That's what the principals do. Okay, I just was like thinking, you know, that's something that people are actually very interested in. Right. Yeah, it is. It's a challenge, you know, because Lane will have a report and the principals will all have reports. And so we really need to, I need to fill our niche and not step on anyone else's sort of... I was like reading from a journal. In what way? In what way? Yeah. You know what I mean. Right. I could see whether I should add just, you know, sort of general numbers. Most of the town reports have an enrollment chart. Yeah, they do. Not everyone. I've always poured over that. Okay. I don't know why. I actually have the enrollment numbers too if he needs them. I shipped a lot of that information over to him based on he's working helping me out with mine as well. So he should add it. Yeah, well, it's nice. It's always a good thing to look like. People will like to see that. We're up 50 kids. All right. Next is the budget update. And there's both a report in our agenda and then an updated report which Lane has provided here with some new information. So if you want the updated version. And if there's a couple extra copies, at least folks want... Because what I'm going to do is a PowerPoint just as kind of an overview summary and then kind of get into the big picture of what the final costs and things are. But this kind of breaks it down in a little bit more detail. One of the reasons that, you know, you kind of got a tentative one and then we updated it was because we were waiting on some state figures to come in so that we could do the calculations and make sure we knew where we were at relative to student spending threshold. Let me sit because I can see the... Alright, a couple things to recognize. You do have three separate budgets that are there. Reason being is because the district budget which encompasses the high school and the elementaries is separate from the technical center budget which is separate from the Raven budget. They all have different kind of funding sources where the money comes in from so we keep them separate in the reporting. And so I'll show you some information on each of those as we go through. Overall strategy that we're looking at in creating this budget, because it's one of the tools that we use to kind of address meeting the ends and achieving what it is that our organization has set forth is important, kind of falls into this idea of building structures that are going to help us save costs down the line. We talked a little bit about that with the trauma-based behaviors that we're seeing. But two pieces here. We've got the academic. A lot of the effort is being spent right now to support the students that are in the pipeline until the curriculum changes that we're working on fully into effect. So we've got a lot of interventionists. There's some parrots there that are working with students and what they are doing is they're filling in the gaps of knowledge that they've got because the curriculum wasn't up to speed. As we get the curriculum up to speed, we get the delivery up to where it should be, eventually this need for those additional supports will go away. Won't be completely eliminated but should be much reduced over what it is now. This piece is the idea of the behavioral component. Trying to get this way of the students that we've got that's growing every year that are exhibiting trauma-based behaviors that are really negatively impacting the schools in terms of teaching and learning. Trying to find ways to work with them so that they learn how to self-regulate themselves. And that was some of the discussion earlier with the preschool program and the therapeutic program which we'll touch on again today. But those students can end up being very expensive down the line. A lot of them will make it through the elementary school and then when they get to the high school they end up actually being sent out for services because by that time the behaviors have gotten so bad that you just can't accommodate them within the regular school setting. If we can remediate them here, right, the cost is nothing in the end. If we have to send them out, the cost is anywhere from 60 to in one case we have a student that's $279,000. $60,000, $279,000. So every one of these that we can address has a significant impact down the road in terms of future costs. In general, again, you guys have the specifics there so I'm not going to try to beat this up too much but if you have specific questions along the way make sure that you ask. In terms of looking at brain tree elementary the additions that we're looking at is 1.35 teacher. For those of you in the audience, if you're seeing FTE, that means full-time equivalent. So a 1.0 is one teacher, one full-time teacher. So we're looking for 1.35 of a teacher. Those supports are going to go into the preschool program and then math and behavior intervention. So we have some interventionists that come in and work in small groups along with kids to help give them the skills that they need. In terms of Brookfield, we're looking at 2.6 teachers and a half-time para. A lot of this is to support the creation of the preschool at Brookfield next year is to provide behavioral support. One of the things that we talked about was the need to try to get a full-time administrator up at Brookfield. Population's growing. That administrator there, because of the co-principal model that we've got, spends a lot of time out of the building assisting down here at Randolph Elementary. We had originally been talking about, okay, what we'll do is we'll get an assistant principal for Randolph Elementary. That will allow David to spend all his time up at Brookfield. In further discussions, which were very good, what they decided on was, hey, what we really need and why David is needed there is for behavioral support. What happens if there's not an administrator there is if one of our trauma-based students blows up in the classroom, and I mean, they can blow up. Because the kid cannot be removed from the classroom to be kind of calmed down, be co-regulated with, what ends up happening all learning stops in the classroom may take a significant amount of time to get things back to normal. If we have a behavioral person who's up there, what they can do is they can remove the student from the classroom, co-regulate with them, and they are specifically trained to start teaching those self-regulatory skills to the students. And so this person will provide that support when David is not there. So that's the idea, kind of, as it sits right now. And we also need a full-time teacher. One of those 2.6 is a full-time teacher to support the increased enrollment that's going on. It's going to continue to increase next year if all the numbers look the way that they do. In terms of Randolph Elementary, in terms of ads, we're looking at two teachers. One of them is going to be supporting the therapeutic program. We'll talk a little bit more about that when we get to the special education increases, because some of those teachers fall into the special education department. But a teacher that's in there in that therapeutic program that is specifically designed to work with students that have these trauma-based behaviors and start to teach them how to self-regulate, somebody who can spend time with them, make sure they're keeping up on their academics, while also teaching them how to kind of bring it down and learn the skills to do that for themselves. And also for mathematics intervention. The numbers are actually going up in terms of the elementary schools for ELA. So there's been some good news on that front with the work that they've done. The mathematics work has lagged a little bit behind the English language arts work. They're about a year or so behind. So they're still going to need the interventionists for a while to fill in those gaps and learning all these curricular changes that they just talked about a little while ago with the full effect. If we hire all these new people that you hope we will eventually not necessarily need, how does that work as far as the teacher's contract and stuff goes, right? We're obligated to keep people, you know, without, you know, unless there's cause. Well, if there's a budgetary, you can riff them for budgetary purposes. We won't need to. And one of the reasons is we've got enough staff at this point in time and we're kind of right-sized that we should be able to do it through attrition. So in other words, what you do is, as the need for a program declines or the need for an interventionist or the para's declines, there's a lot of turnover every year. So what you do is you just don't hire back when they go. And attrition is usually a pretty good way of doing it. We'll talk a little bit, we'll talk about the spending threshold, you know, times that the budgetary piece might come into play. And you would feel comfortable plugging these people into a regular Gen Ed job rather than a support, or, you know, behavioral support sort of position. Part of that discussion is that you need a highly trained person to be able to come in and to work with these students if we're talking on the therapeutic side. On the academic side, you want a highly trained person to be working with them in the content area as they fill in those learning gaps. And that was one of the models that the state was very concerned about a few years ago and they still put pressure on folks, is this idea that we're trying to move away from para's. Para's are great people, but they can't really remediate. You know, they keep things kind of going from day to day, which is great and they do a wonderful job. But at the end of the day, they're not really adding a lot of value into the needs that the students have. And so it's this idea of trying to transition from the para's onto the licensed professionals. It's a good question. Go back. Randolph Elementary. RUHS is actually looking for three teachers. The first one is actually a position that they had a little while ago. And this is a Tier 2 coordinator. Tier 2 is part of that multi-tiered intervention that they were speaking about, that Pat and David were speaking about a little while ago. It's the next step up from classroom instruction. It's an individual, talented individual, capable individual teacher who's working with small groups of students to help kind of fill in the gaps in knowledge that they have. So the high school has this huge diversity of intervention programs for students to help them out at the Tier 2 and the Tier 1 level. The problem is there's nobody to kind of coordinate at all. And typically what you do with these programs is the students should kind of move into one of these supports, get the support for the amount of time they need to get up to speed, and then they should be moved back out. So there's some data analysis that goes along with this, which they would need a coordinator for you. What students should be going in and receiving services right now? Which students have gotten to the point where they no longer need it so that we can move them out and put other students in that may be struggling a little bit? And they've got, I think they, at last count when I was going through doing the observations, they've got five different sets of programs for supports for students, which is actually pretty amazing, but they really feel this need to get somebody in there who can really focus directly on this and coordinate the whole shebang for them. They have a behavioral interventionist now that will be moved out of title. Again, and this is part of their work with trying to remediate the students of trauma. And also what they're looking to do is expand the World Language Program. They had cut a teacher last year because they were thinking and kind of experimenting with switching over to a single language. They've rethought that and they would like to bring a teacher back, hopefully one that's dual-certified French and Spanish. And with this additional teacher, it will also allow them to expand the foreign language offerings down to the middle school. Get some exploratory work done down there with the middle school students to help get the students interested. The other thing that it will do is it will allow them to accept RTCC students over who need the World Languages to be able to meet their graduation requirements at their home school. Usually what happens is that the RTCC students will pay a tuition for those courses. So there is a need for that that we can't quite meet right now. Special education. These guys actually are supporting in the other schools. I've just kind of separated them out from the other schools so that they're falling under the category that they're in. And the other reason that I've separated them out is at least for another year, special education teachers, about half of their salary, a little bit more, it fluctuates between 50 and 55 percent, we get reimbursed from the state for that. So they are not as expensive as bringing in a regular education teacher currently. So we've got a special education teacher that's going to support the therapeutic program for the elementary schools. We have, and we discussed this at a meeting when we looked at enrollments, a school board meeting or so back, a significant increase in the enrollment of students with disabilities. So the caseloads have gone up on the current special education teachers so we need a few more to do with that enrollment. And caseload-wise, as the enrollment goes up, we need more special education teachers. The special education teachers aren't just working with the students in the classroom. They're also managing things behind the scenes with all the paperwork and the IEP meetings and everything else that goes along. And we've got some pretty heavy hitters in terms of students. Students that need some pretty intensive work. And so we want to be very sure that we're not overloading these teachers in terms of the caseloads, what they can manage effectively. Questions on special education? I'm just wondering if those numbers were included in the schools, or is this additional 3.5? So everything in this presentation is additional. So the same thing with this report here. No, what I meant, you said 3.5 special ed. Oh, no, this is an addition to what was presented in the other. So these teachers are literally going into the schools, but I kept them on a separate side because they followed this category where you got that 50% savings. So like one of them will be over in the Henry and Delth Elementary for the therapeutic program. And then there'll be a couple split up amongst the other schools to help out with the caseloads and the aromas that have been going on. So, bottom line, it looks scary. And again, I'll always still adjust, but in terms of regular education teachers, we're looking at 8.95 FTEs across the district. Special education teachers, 3.5 and paraprofessionals, 1.0. And again, the idea is that the work that these individuals will be doing for the most part, hopefully three years or so down the line, will have a significant impact and will be able to kind of pull back these additional supports. The culture, the climate, the work that's ongoing will help kind of reduce the need for some of these folks. Especially the paras that we've got right now. Right now, we have 26 paraprofessionals. I've worked in districts with 4,000 students. Probably the average for that is probably 4 to 6. So it gives you an idea of the magnitude of the trauma-based behavior issues that come with it. You know, it's a significant chunk of those 26 that could eventually go away. Thank you. Can you just clarify the para? Say that again? So if I understand it correctly, it seems like what you've been sharing is from moving away from paras and trying to understand where that para fits within the district. So the para professional is actually supporting the preschool program. So what they're trying to do, again, we've got to be cost-conscious but we want the preschool program to go in. The Brookfield preschool is going to be modeled on what happened at Braintree this year. So there's a public morning and afternoon. Middle of the day, if folks want it, that would be a private cost. What they will do is they will take the preschool teacher from Braintree. She'll spend half her time up at Brookfield, but we've got to replace that missing body because that is a full-day program this coming year and the para is going to step in her place while she's up there. And then half the time of that para will also be to support. So that's geared for the preschool program. Thank you for clarifying. A lot of moving parts. All right. Talk on the threshold and then we'll get over to the big details here. Right now what we're spending and everything is based on this threshold that we don't want to cross because it'll create an absorbent increase in taxes locally. The threshold that we don't want to cross for next year is $18,300 per student and it's based on a per student count, right, expenditures per student. Where we are right now is $15,600 which is $300 under the state average and we've always been under the state average so we've done our part. What we're looking for in terms of these increases would get us up to $17,600 per student. So we're still under that threshold and we've got a pretty significant buffer, right? We're pushing 900 kids and we've got a $700 per student buffer that's built in if we hit this number. So we have space for the budget to grow if it needs to in future years and one of the places that it has to grow is because of the step increases for the faculty. Now, hope is a couple years down the road some of the programs that we're putting into place is going to reduce the cost of remediating students that aren't getting the best education right now because the curriculum hasn't been up to speed and remediating the students that have the trauma-based behaviors. That should bring cost down. The second piece that's going on that's very helpful is we've got an increase in enrollment that's going on. People are more attracted to the school right now which was also buoyed up by the fact that a lot of the high schools around us at the smaller districts have closed down so we're up 50 students. That 50 students translate to a little over $300,000 an increased revenue that we didn't have before. The hope is that we continue to get our students and we should at least for another year. Some of them have gone off to their first choices after the schools have closed down and some of them are rethinking where they're at and hopefully we're able to draw them in here. What we're looking at in terms of what's on the paper right now is increasing from our current $16.6 million to $17.4 million. That's going to be a 12.8% increase. It keeps us below the spending threshold, gives us a buffer and it gives you an idea of what the cost per student would be. Now, it seems like a big increase but remember, you guys have been fairly level funded for a decade and so part of the discussion that we had earlier was this idea that when you do that you're losing ground and eventually you've got to make it up. We've had some of the programming gone into place especially with these students of trauma. It might have mitigated some of that. It might not have. It's hard to tell. But it's something that we really got to get a handle on because the special education budget which relates to its control by leaps and downs is like 15% per year. Questions on OSSD? I have a question. Do you see any contract negotiations as you're well aware? If we were to give them what they've asked for... That alone would blow us over the threshold. Are we even close if we gave them what they asked for? Would we even be close today? So again, this is all public and we can talk about it too. The negotiation piece does not need to be an executive session. I checked because everybody's agreed to have it open. They're asking for an 8% increase. Which is huge. If we were at the 17.6, where would it go? So if we took all this stuff to support programming and students and to make life better for the teachers because this will help significantly in terms of what they experience every day, it would put us probably somewhere between here and here just at 8% increase. That's without the program. Without any of this stuff. So from 15.6 at risk closer to 19 or above 18.3 would just... So be right around that line. And the big concern is you want that buffer because you don't know what changes. You also have the other impact that's going to be coming down the line is what the state decides with the teachers association because they're going to a statewide agreement in terms of health insurance. Odds are it's not going to save us any money but we're not going to lose any either because it's probably going to come in when they get their negotiations done at what we're giving them right now. So for us, it's probably going to be no change but nothing's guaranteed. If they go to 80-20, that's going to save us money. So theoretically, what could we afford to give them... Do you know that? Have you got those numbers? So this budget right now builds in a 3% new money. So that's included in those numbers. So that's 76 is built in 3%. 3% of the 3% new money. And... And that would be including all these new teachers, everything. That's everything. That also includes the 11% increase for the health insurance and everything else. I mean this is the total shebang. I'm just talking about what's new and different especially in terms of what's directly impacting teaching and learning in the schools and what their stuff has worked into here as well. So that's a good question. My question is about... We know that the funding formulas for special education is changing after this year, right? So how is that going to affect a budget like this with so many special education kids and so many special education costs? We're going to talk a little bit about that when we review the warrant. Part of the pressure that I'm going to keep putting on is we do have surplus money at the end of most years, right? We've got... But that's not a long-term fix. I'm just wondering what is this funding... How is this going to affect us? Not say we're going to dig into... The sped piece or how does this... Yeah, the projected changes. So what happens in special education is over the course of the next three years we move to a block rail system. So what that means is that at the beginning of the year, the formula, it will look at the number of students in your district, not the number of special education students, but the total number of enrolled students in your district will come up with a dollar amount and that's what they're going to give you. So you have that lump sum and that's got to carry you through the remainder of the year. The scary part is, you know, there are some reimbursements, there are some... what we call circuit breakers. So in other words, if you get a student that's going to be really high, they're going to come in and reimburse a little bit, not like they used to do. So if we get a kid that moves in that costs us $200,000 like we just had a week ago, we had another one, what do you do? You had to block some of money up front and now all of a sudden you've got this $200,000 that you're looking at or if you get two kids that move in that are in that ballpark like we had last year, now we're in a crisis we may not have money in that block fund and what do you do if you're a superintendent and that happens, you freeze the budget and you start cutting things that are not mandatory, like athletics. Because that you can do on the fly. So one of the things that I've proposed before and I'm going to propose when we talk about the warrant is putting in a surplus line for special education. Putting some money in there that's aside so that if in a special education line so that if a couple of these students come in after we get the block grant and then it's blowing everything up I can come to the board and say, hey this is going to be the impact if you guys don't approve this this is something that you want to consider and we have that money there to use if we need to. I guess my question, you said that when you had 3.5 new special education teachers coming in and you said they're 50 or 55% funded by the state. That goes away? Right. That would seem to add quite a bit to next year's budget. They haven't worked out the exact formula in terms of how that block grant is going to be determined. They have a general idea but one of the things that they are saying is that the larger your special education budget is now, the more money you will get. Part of that formula as each year goes by they look back at the spending of the previous year and they will kind of adjust it to match. So it more or less adjusts your population of students taking into account that you may have some high needs kids. But kicking this off the way that we're doing with that additional 3.5, what that means is what we get in terms of the block grant when that year comes will be larger the way that they are planning Unless they change. But they I think things are kind of pretty set Legislature can do whatever it wants when it does. I mean this whole to get on the philosophical piece of this they did it backwards and we've talked about this before the way that they are going about changing special education and funding of it is actually really good if it's for academic problems. The problem is the jumps in special education spending that we're seeing has nothing to do with academics it has to do with the behavior. And this program will not support that because those kids are extremely expensive and like you said you get two or three that move into the district in the middle of the year after you've got your allotment and put you in a tough bind. They should have fixed the system first and then adjusted the financing to match as opposed to using the financing to try to force changes. That's what it is. So what we're looking at potentially is an 11 cent increase for $100 of assessed home value if this goes through this is locally we did the calculations and it's between 10 and 12 cents between the three towns given that the average home value in Vermont is $201,000 the average tax increase would be $222 $15.50 Now that 11 cents may be a little bit lower or higher depending upon the common level of appraisal so the state goes out and does this big averaging and to figure out what houses should be appraised at in some cases the towns actually are charging a little bit more as they're generating their tax base in some cases they charge a little bit less in towns that charge a little bit more you guys are going to be paying less than the 11 cents because the state says you're already doing more than you should if you're paying a little bit less the state's going to charge you a little bit more than the 11 cents because it's saying you're not carrying your weight as much as you should traditionally looking back what I can see is that Brookfield is usually higher than that average Randolph is usually about even Braintree is usually a little bit lower so if you look at last year Braintree got impacted a lot because their average assessment was below what the state said it should be assessed at so other two towns were paying like a 3 or 4 4 cent increase they were paying close to 10 so again that piece matters the other piece to take into account is that if you're hitting those income sensitivity thresholds they do take care of people whose incomes are a little bit lower they're going to be impacted as much by this change there are stock gaps the other thing just to be aware of is traditionally the monies that we receive in federal grants is not included in the town budget it's money that comes in and is spent for specific purposes like the title funding what they want is the rules have changed is they want us to report the federal dollars that come in as well so even though the town we're looking at what 17.4 million it's probably going to look closer to 19 million because of the additional reporting of those federal funds the thing is the town is only responsible and the state is only responsible for the 17.4 the rest is just being reported so that there's transparency in terms of how much money is coming in from the feds and how much respect questions on any is there additional federal money coming in for the title position the title funding is kind of like a block grant it might go up a thousand or two or down a thousand or two but it's pretty stable it's sitting it did the calculations of the day because we're talking about it the strategic planning session it sits around five hundred and two thousand so that money pretty much just rolls in and then our job is since it's a block grant we go through this assessment process we do a lot of paperwork to justify to the department about what we're spending on and if they're in agreement then they want to spend it on that but we're going to get rid of that title funding is that correct no that five hundred and two thousand will come in should come in continue to come in every year we might be able to so when you say you're going to move that teacher out of title funding yeah you're not going to pay their salary through that money it'll be in the regular budget and one of the reasons for doing that is you go through there's a couple of critical positions that we're not going to be able to function without they were entitled last year with all the change over at the AOE and with the change over in terms of the paperwork that's required to get the investments approved things were delayed we actually didn't get the money until about two or three weeks ago so we spent almost a quarter of the year without being able to supply provide services to students because they didn't have their act together but if we know that we're getting that money why couldn't we just you know front the wages for that person it's one of the grant rules it's called supplanting if you do that if we're able to front it then they will come back and say you can do this on your own you don't need our grant money so you've got to be very careful with that but yeah we wanted to what we're hoping we put a lot back into into title that we were trying to take out we kept out what was absolutely crucial what we're hoping is that as the state goes through the changes with the new secretary who's trying to put in a lot of efficiencies is that next year we'll at least get a substantive approval you know in early September what that means is you don't have your money yet you're not officially approved but you're going to be approved so you can start paying these folks and then you may have to make some wording changes or what not to your applications but as long as you do that then everything's assured so that's the hope for next year alright so RTCC tuition based upon what Jason's looking at he's looking at adding another half a position to the math teacher there's a half-time math teacher in there now wants to bring them in full time because those are the skills that are weak for those students and it's limiting their future prospects he also has a couple of folks that are in the Perkins grant that never should have been in there so he's slowly trying to pull them out and that's what the .25 is about he's got some increases in terms of transportation costs there's a lot of students that are going off to national competitions and doing very well a lot of that has been paid out of pocket and donations up till now so it's appropriate for us to supply that transportation and he's got some facilities needs he's got his mechanical labs that are getting to the point where they need to start being refitted the biggest problem is that because the state pays for a lot of this when the state determines how much it's going to give to the tech center it takes a look at student enrollments and it looks at student enrollments for the past six semesters or the past three years the problem was until this past year the enrollment was low the enrollment at the tech center for the last three or more years was down around 116 students right now it's pushing so it's gone up significantly but the problem is is we don't get the benefit of that increased enrollment until a little bit down the line so that increased enrollment is not going to impact us for another year or so so we've got to swing through a year or two and then our tuition will go back down it's probably sitting around 17,000 this current year so we're looking at it going up to about 18.2 for the next fiscal year one of the things that Jason and I talked with him about this is going to need to do to sell this a little bit is making sure that people understand that our tech center is much different than the other regional tech centers ours is a full day program the other tech centers that are averaging about 16, 17,000 a year are half day programs we also allow the students to take math and social studies and health and PE and hopefully world language next year so that they can meet their graduation requirements from their setting schools so there's a significant amount more that we provide to the technical center students for that $1,500 or whatever it is that the others do not so it's making sure that people are aware of that Does this one have a per pupil cost like the other one that you showed us over there over the per pupil in that state so these students pay tuition to come here so that's kind of the per pupil cost so they're paying when a school sends them to us they're paying 18,000 they will be paying 18,273 next year so how does that impact their towns though they end up paying a little bit more for the students to come the reality is which town is most students to the tech center it's us we recoup some of that because when the students take the academic courses at the high school the tech center actually pays the OSSD tuition for the students a little bit for those classes so do get to recoup a little bit of that so what's the per pupil cost state cost again that red line that you didn't want to go over there isn't one not for tech and it's actually it's against the regulations for sending districts to try to top kids out of going to the tech the kids want to go to get to go and again this is a temporary it has to do with the low enrollments that are going into the calculations we're up around 150 looks like that's going to continue do we know what has contributed to the increase in enrollment we had an increase across the board it wasn't just the tech center I couldn't tell you other than the fact that we've got a very good program like I said it offers a heck of a lot more than the other regional tech centers do given that these students are all coming from the same what used to be seven sending schools before the consolidation a lot of them are just choosing the tech center over a more traditional education I just have a clarifying question so you mentioned that these students can use the high school for their math English but you're adding a math teacher to this so what's the math they have enough students that need to take math that it's actually cheaper for them to have their own teacher at the tech center than to pay the tuition to send them to so what level math are you going to be that would be just a pretty basic math no we've been talking on and off the goal if and when we get there and it's kind of the standard in the industry as well as if the students decide they want to go to college the goal is to get them through the equivalent of Algebra 2 that's kind of the gold standard across the country right now matter of fact a lot of state colleges won't even consider you if you don't have Algebra 2 on your transcript but also in terms of the technical trades there's a significant mathematical component to what they do so they need the skills and one of the things that's been limiting our ability to get them into internships at like GW plastics and to get them jobs is because they need the Algebra 2 and so the kids will hear what that requirement is because they don't have the math confidence they just they pull back so you know again so is this more embedded math or is it like a math class both both in one of your reports that you emailed us you mentioned RTCC the carrying on of the deficit that we've had for the past yeah that's when we get to the financials we can talk about it now if you want so is that going to be addressed in this or in our current so it's in our current budget no in terms of addressing that we'll talk about it it can't be addressed the issue there is carry over money that the tech center has kind of like surplus for OSSD if we want to get rid of that deficit the only way to do it is to have the board approved to take the money from and so that would be of current money so it's not in this budget that you're talking about and it can't be because technically it kind of is tuition money we're pulling it from if it's carry over but technically you can't pay for that adult debt from tuition money because this is meant to serve the kids adult debt is for adults so they try to keep them separate which is what's causing the problem questions on tech then the last of the the separate budgets is the Raven program has been it's self-sufficient tuition will be $22,308 up from $21,581 the cheapest of the folks that they compete with to serve these students is probably $37,000 most of these students would be in an outplacement of about $60,000 not including transportation if they weren't in Raven so it's a very inexpensive program that has a much better track record than a lot of what's out there changes for them they currently have a 1.5 teachers there and a pair of professional again we're getting to this making sure that we've got the most qualified for working with the kids is increasing that to two teachers an additional 0.5 and then eliminating the pair of professionals this will also, if we get to the point where we've got a new building allow us to grow the program a little bit, take it from 14 students closer to 18 which would be good some questions on Raven saves us about a million dollars just in tuitioning out every seven years and saves us about 40,000 transportation costs every year so we don't have to pay the money so it's kind of hidden but it's a significant savings that it provides for the district overall so budget on here you've got facilities HVAC did I miss that up there I didn't put a lot in on the facilities pieces here there are, in terms of the facilities piece and we can talk about that now when we get to the financials they are doing some additions we kind of talked about that a little bit last time they're looking at bringing on a full-time HVAC heating and air conditioning person because there was a significant amount of maintenance that was not done over the last 10 years and there's a significant amount of work that needs to be done it's actually cheaper for us to bring in our own person than it is to keep paying these contracted fees out to folks to have them come in and do it and because we're a district with a lot of buildings it's just cheaper to keep them on staff so that one's kind of a cost neutral change there are increases in a couple of lines just to make sure that we've got enough money to match what historically has been spent out of those lines one of them is like snow removal getting that up to where it should be they've been having trouble getting and keeping a full custodial staff just part of the nature of the work and so what they're looking to do is to contract out for the lawn mowing services because they haven't had enough folks to really cover the lawn mowing the way that they should it's cheaper to contract it out than it is to pay our own staff any way to do it and that money that they're looking for the 42,000 I believe that it is all schools it's not just Randolph so it's a pretty good deal those numbers that 42,000 is pretty accurate because they've already gone out to bid to get an idea of what it would be and then they've added I think about 70,000 to the overall facilities budget because again there was a lot of work and maintenance that didn't get done that needs to be addressed some of these costs that they're adding in are limited the work done and then we can pull back a little bit there's some major repairs some replacements at this point in time that have to be done and then once that happens as long as they're maintaining the proper maintenance shouldn't be a problem anymore I think selling the budget is going to be difficult 11 cent increase is substantial and I think that's going to be a real challenge and one of the discussions to with the cabinet between now when we come back in January is there are folks that more folks we can move back into the type and bring things down a little bit I guess a lot of it too is the forum that we've got to actually get set up for the next week or two is to get a feel for the folks that come in and that are talking just to get a little witness test see what they're thinking if they think it's extreme or not then we can adjust from there I think it really behooves us you to advertise well for that just so that we get a good turnout because if it's better to do much advanced preparation than to go down and be scrambling so I really think it behooves us to really be proactive so a good chunk of what's happened in the couple of forums I've had so far has been talking about this the folks that are there seem supportive and they're usually the ones that get the word out I had been sending out I've got to get another one out I've been sending out the broadband emails under a new communication system that have been keeping people in the loop and kind of what we're looking at and focused on in terms of our annual report really focuses on this making sure that people know that yeah it's a significant increase in the local budget but it's spread out across the taxpayers because we're under the threshold that we've been level funded for 10 years at some point in time when you do that it's great because it gets you through but you've got to pay the piper I don't need any convincing but I do happen to know at some point in time you were holding a community forum I had no idea and I I was there for the principal's forum and I couldn't stay but I had no idea you were holding a forum that night you get the broadband emails I don't know I don't think any of us do and they're only going out to parents and what you need to think about is the towns more than just parents and parents are going to be really excited about this parents are probably already on board with you it's the non-parents that we're going to have to worry about and there are owners of our district just as much we have far more non-parents than we have parents and so I really think this has to be a community wide way to publicize this information and to get out in front of it and now just to prepare people these are the problems and this is the way we're proposing to address them and really just and we'll model through and do a pretty good job if we can't but I think, like I said, it's important and I appreciate the comments and the support it's important that the community understand those needs so you're right, we've got to get it out I have a question and a statement the first question is this other line item the $30,000 to pay for a mentoring program can you tell me what that is? so there was a lot of money that was being pulled out of title that never should have been that is one of them and the reason that it never should have been coming from the title funds, the government the federal title funds is because having a mentor program for a teacher, so this is to mentor new teachers is a mandate by the state and anything that's mandated we have to provide so how the heck they ever let us use title funding for this I don't know that's a program that is going to have to be examined a bit it's not in the contract anywhere how much folks are getting paid but we're paying six times what the going rate is for this program and again we've got some fabulous people so I don't want to damage the morale there but there's some significant costs associated with that I mean we have some local funds that we're covering part of it and that was an additional 30,000 to cover it probably because it was such an expensive program and feedback as we package the budget for votes of approval I actually didn't ever hear any discussion about a student that's on an academic fast track students that are doing well what are we doing to incentivize and to make sure that we're responsive to all the students and not focusing all of the budget increases on those students who are struggling in the classroom I think that the idea of wanting to attract more students to the school I think we may lose ground if we can't prove that there is motivation for students to excel and I don't see any of that in the budget that's been presented which is a little disappointing and we can it's a very good point a little bit off the cuff the personalized learning that is a part of Vermont so a lot of these students we've got a pretty robust AP program here a lot of them like my son is taking a look at the VAS program taking an early year of college so there is quite a bit out there so you're right, that needs to be put in to make sure that folks are aware of that but it is not just about the high needs folks okay do we have any questions or comments general questions to the board at large maybe it kind of suits the competition that would be how does the board connect with the community at large taxpayers in general beyond just parents how does the board do that meaning that connection which is something that is referenced on the website of the government where does the board do it and then what are you doing as individuals to reach out to the board it's something we're always working on but does anyone else want to answer Nancy so I did I saw in the last meeting there was mention again board members here there were things going on over the course of the last few years under the previous chair they didn't know about so if you're not reaching out as individuals or at large you're not necessarily informed so how do you step out of your comfort zone and reach out across the aisle and connect with people that you wouldn't ordinarily speak with I think that's a huge huge understanding and huge ask it's going to be hard