 be respectful of Grant and others' times. So, let's start the meeting of the Montpey-Roxbury Board of School Directors at 6.34 p.m. on December 1st. I sent out a detailed email to try to move this meeting along, so did that all make sense to folks? Any questions about that? I'm thinking we can do a report on outreach after the budget presentation, or maybe as part of it, if we just want to kind of weave it in. But it does definitely make time for that. And are people OK with having Kristen, Rhett, and Amanda kind of work with Nathan to get to a point and then try to find a spot for a special meeting to discuss that? Sounds good. Thank you for doing that, all three of you. Yes, yes, thank you. I also just want to say we are apparently, right now, let's say the internet is good to go, but apparently it has not been super dependable. So we may use the feed in case we do that is what happened. And I think that's it with initial announcements. So it's open with public comment. I see one. So please come up, please. We've allotted 10 minutes for public comment. How many people want to speak? Is it just Tina or are there others? Is there anyone on Zoom? So I cannot see the Zoom screen super well. If there's anyone there, could you just unmute yourself and announce that you want to speak? OK, great. So Tina. Hi, I'm Tina Muncie. And I just have a quick thought about procedure. And that is, after the budget is presented, I have questions about the budget, but it would be inappropriate for me to ask them now because the budget hasn't even been presented. So is it all right if, after the budget is presented and the board gets asked questions, could you put another place in for the community to ask a question? Yes. Thank you very much. Don't give that away. Does any of our board member need a budget presentation just in case the internet goes out? Yeah, we're fine. I wasn't rely on the internet, so thank you. I have your comment. I already do. Yeah, you'll need to hog too. That's my battery in the middle. Thank you. Oh, thank you. So I'll pass you my coffee. Thank you. Anybody else? OK. So take away granted, I assume that your preference is to have us hold off on. Oh, because of consent agenda? Oh, yeah, sorry. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? I move to approve, including the letter of resignation that we received, because it's not on the list, I'm adding it. And then I just want to pull the superintendent's report and draft agenda 1215 for two quick things. OK. So I'll move. Do I have a second? Actually, I should say I second that. Yeah, I moved it, yeah. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Great, so Mia, you pulled the superintendent's report. Yeah. 1215 agenda. On the superintendent's report, I realized this isn't in this meeting. It was in last meetings. But the second vaccine clinics at each of the schools have all wrapped up. And I just wanted to say thank you again. We were the first, I don't know if everybody knows, we were the first schools to host clinics with the DOH. And I'm guessing that's no accident. And I just wanted to say thank you so much for really getting on top of that and being as persistent as you needed to be to make that happen. Because the gratitude and the relief and the comfort that was felt by our families cannot be overstated. It was huge. And I know you felt it yesterday and three weeks ago, but I just wanted to say it for, and then thank you also, especially to the administrators of those schools for getting the schedules lined up. Just huge, really. I was happy to be there and really played a very small role, very small role. But saw just what effort went into it. So I just really wanted to say thank you. And then I also wanted to say thank you in this superintendent's report and how you're sharing with us just how hard things are. It's important for us to hear, even though it feels like there's very little that we can do, I want to know if there is anything that we can do to support you, our administrators, and our educators. Don't hesitate to tell us. If you can't tell us right now, that's OK. But please don't hesitate to tell us anything we can do to support. Yes, so amen to all that. And definitely thank you for one of the things I wanted to say about getting our students back to me. I think that hopefully we are as well on our way to 80%. Yes. We'll be at 80% in MS-MS in two weeks. And we're almost there, UES. I'm not sure we're at Roxbury, but we'll be close. So great. Yes, thank you to everyone who's made that happen. And it's super important to the health of our kids and the functioning of our schools. So now I need to approve those two items. Well, I just want, and then for the December 15 agenda, I just wanted to offer that the equity committee can give an update. So just we'll volunteer for that. So those two notes, can we have a motion to approve with some more times report on the draft agenda? So moved. Second? Not seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Great. Now I know it's premature, but now it is actually your time. And I'm assuming you want to proceed as you usually do. Would you go through the presentations? We ask questions afterwards. I'm kind of waiting down the hall for you to go. If you're OK with that, I think that would be best. There's 42 slides, so if my chances are I might answer something in slide one on slide 10. And then I'll try to get through it as quickly as possible without too much speed talking. And if I'm going too fast, though, please tell me to slow down. And again, I'm circling back as you go. And folks, take your notes, because this is, you know, Grant oftentimes answers the questions you have, because the presentation is thorough, and even if it's not explicitly in the slide, it's oral presentation, I'll oftentimes get to it. So yeah, it's fine to do that. And then you can, depending on where we are at, and the members of the public want to speak, we can bunch it some time to that, too. We will bunch it some time, it's just a matter of time. Before you start, Anna, can you share the budget presentation in Zoom? And can you speak up, because I'm running a hard time hearing. We're just asking Anna to post it in Zoom before Grant gets started, so the budget presentation can be seen in Zoom. Was that more clear, Amanda? Sorry, we should have had that pulled up. I just wanted to think about it. Mm-hmm. What is to have Anna back in action? I know. There's two beautiful babies. All right. So we'll go to the budget, we'll go over tax rates, I'll go to summary. And we're going to start with some district overview of information. We have obviously four schools. Rocksbury Village School is pre-K through 4. We've got 47 students there. Union Elementary, pre-K through 4 as well. 373 students. Main Street, although there are a lot of uncertainties right now, so it's kind of hard to gauge that yet. State factors, speaking of unknowns, the dollar yield, we did, thanks to Andrew forwarding it, we did just receive the tax commissioner's recommendation for dollar yield, which is good news. It would lower the tax rates from what are on here, but we don't have CLA, which I'm going to talk about in a second, which could have the opposite impact. The new special ed funding formula took effect this year for FY23's budget, I should say. We probably lost about $130,000 or $140,000 in revenues. Not good, but could have been worse. Health premium increases. It seems odd to say the premium increase of 5.2% is excellent news, because it still seems pretty high, but it's been literally years since we've seen an increase that low. So that was good news. Local factors, I mentioned the common level of appraisal. As you all know, sales prices for homes are going up and up and up, which means the CLA is gonna drop, which if you follow all my arrows here, CLA drops, tax rates go up. We don't know what the CLA is yet for Montpelier or Roxbury. Probably won't know until near the end of the month, I'm guessing. The merger incentives. So if you remember back in 2019, we got eight cents merger incentive on the tax rate. Every year that dropped two cents. So really, since the initial year, it's been a two cent increase. This year, FY22, it was a two cent incentive. And in FY23, it's zero, it goes away. So this is the last budget that we'll be looking at how we're gonna absorb that kind of two cent increase. It is about a $250,000 impact if you wanted to kind of limit that. Student enrollment has plateaued. Last year, it looks like it was our high watermark. So we are pretty stable, but maybe decreasing slightly over time. If you look at it though in closer detail, which we will in a minute, it's the lower grades that are really dropping and the high school is still actually increasing for the next few years. So next, we're going to do some budget slides. We'll talk about some unknowns. So equalized pupils is one of those unknowns. We'll probably get that right around the middle of the month. I'm hoping before the next budget presentation, but it may be after that. We're assuming right now that we're gonna have a level equalized pupil count. Just for reference, kind of to give you some context, for every seven students about, it's about one cent on the tax rate. So if we go up seven students, the tax rate will drop a penny. If we get down seven, it'll go up a penny. Right now we're assuming it's level, but our data this year that we submitted to the AOE is the cleanest data since I've been here. So I'm hoping with clean data that might actually result in better equalized pupil numbers, but we will see. The dollar yield, we just mentioned that we did just get the tax commissioner's recommendation. It's significantly higher than what you see in this presentation, which is a good thing. For every 60 or $70 on the dollar yield, if it goes up 60 or $70, the tax rate goes down one penny just for context. The CLA, I'm assuming a drop of about 2.4% in Montpelier and 4.2% in Roxbury. I really don't know. It could be more dramatic than that. We'll have to see. Every half percent is about a penny on the tax rate. Then the other unknown is the tech centers. We get charged tuition based on a rolling six semester average and we didn't get that number yet from the AOE. It'll probably be around the middle of the month. I'm assuming right now that we're gonna increase a couple kids, it may be more than that. So we'll see. Next. So we start with a kind of an attic glance to give you an idea. The total budget is going up about 4.4%. That's fairly high considering where we've been in the past few years, but we're proposing that some of these costs could be covered by ESSER money, which means our non-tax revenues would go up and it means our ed spending instead of a 4.4% increase might only be 3.5. Then our spending for pupil, which is the key factor for tax rate calculations. Right now I'm showing that's also 3.5 because right now I'm assuming equalized pupils will be level. If the equalized pupil count goes up, then it could go, the numbers on the side could be 4.4, 3.5, and then could be like 3.0 or 2.9 depending on equalized pupils. The bottom bullet just talks about the fact as a reminder, capital fund is something that we've budgeted. It's a separate article, been three or four years now that we've done that. It is a separate article, but you can see in the chart above it that capital fund is added to this budget. So it's already factored into any kind of tax rate calculations. So if people look at this and they think, oh, well, maybe you should do something about the capital plan to reduce the tax rates. It's already in here, it's already factored in. We wouldn't be adding that later. Next. So every year we have a model that we do some enrollment projections. This chart shows if you go a little more than halfway across, you'll see 2021, 22 actual numbers. That's an October one count, a snapshot of the number of kids per grade. This does not include Roxbury kids K through four, but it does include Roxbury kiddos that are at Main Street or the high school. And what you're gonna see here, and you can see the ovals kind of circled there. K through four is dropping rather dramatically. I mean, from last year to this year, it's about 30 kids down. Next year it's another 20. It goes down pretty dramatically until 25, then it kind of levels off. The middle school dropped pretty dramatically this year, but then it stays pretty stable. The high school has a big increase this year, a big increase next year as well. The total K-12, you can see last year at 1146 was the high watermark, we're at 1113. Then we're pretty stable after that. Next. This is another piece of the enrollment projection. This is like a class size analysis. So the top chart shows the number of students, number of classroom teachers, and the bottom chart calculates an average class size. If you look at, you'll see some color coding here. The green means that we are under optimal, under minimum class size, sorry, under minimum class size. Yellow is that we're getting close to a maximum. Red would be if we were over the maximum class size, which luckily we're not. Could you go back one please? There we go. Forward one. Somehow, there we go. So luckily you don't see in that bottom chart, you don't see any reds, because we're not over the maximum at all. You do see some yellow, and that's all on that bottom line for the high school, because as I mentioned, there's a big increase coming. We did. Before high school was, you know, for elementary, it's pretty easy. A classroom teacher is a classroom teacher. At the high school, you've got a lot of different subjects. Before, it was just counting math, science, social studies, and English. Now we've kind of factored in other teachers, and we've weighted it. So like for example, an English teacher, we counted as one teacher, because you need five, you need five English credits for graduation. What's that? Four? Four English credits. Okay. And then, so what I did was I just used factors based on that. So for example, a flexible pathways teacher, there's not really a graduation requirement, but obviously they teach classes, so I might have factored that by like a 0.25. So whenever I recalculated looking at a lot more teachers instead of just four core content areas, it basically added a 0.7 to the model. So that's why there's a little bit of a change that you might see going from 16.7 up to 17.6. But even with that little adjustment, we are still in the yellow, and you will see in some future slides where we are proposing some FTE increases for the high school to get them back into the right zone. You do however see a lot of green, and that's the lower grades. Like for example, next year, grade one is showing an average class size of 12.6. Optimal class size for that grade would be 17. And so optimal obviously means in order to have education the best possible way, the best size is calculated by somebody smarter than me, is 17 kids in a class. And so we would be well below that. And it just kind of goes on and the green zone gets bigger and bigger across the years. Next. So Roxbury, there's no fancy algorithm here. I just look at the total number of kids and assume we keep the same number of kids from year to year. But you will notice that this year is kind of a big number for Roxbury, 40 kids. It's been a long time since we've seen 40. We assume that it's gonna stay close to there, maybe drop a little bit, but pretty stable. Next. So this is just a graphical depiction that shows the district totals, and then also shows separate lines for each school. So looking at the bottom, you'll see Roxbury, and then like yellow is the high school, and you also have obviously the middle school, UES. But then the top line, that red line is our K12. So that's where you see that last year seems to be our high watermark, and then we've dropped a little bit this year. We should stay pretty stable next year, and then we might start dropping off a little bit into future years. And I'm gonna pick this. So this is just to remind the board and the community you've seen this before, our theory of growth. And when we're thinking about our budget and building our budget, the way that the administration does that work is we have this theory of growth up on the walls, and we're talking about what financial needs do we have to support this theory of growth. So you've all seen this before. Of course, it's collective responsibility and collaborative practices, meaning that teaching is really hard. Teaching and learning is really hard and very complicated, and there is no one person who can do it themselves. So we've really been working at collaboration, particularly the last two and a half years, that we need formalized essential learning, and Mike's been working really hard with curriculum teams, and grade level teams around what are the necessities that all kids, we're gonna guarantee all kids will learn and be able to do. The timely system to enrich, intervene, and remediate, you're gonna see in the next slide that this is a place where we're putting a lot of effort in right now to make sure that we have the human resources and the knowledge, because this is our next true focus area as a district. And as people have been on the board for a while, we'll know that we've put a lot of time into collective responsibility and essential learning, the first kind of three years of my tenure as superintendent, because you can't build a system to support until you have the knowledge base behind it, until you have some things in place. Otherwise, you're just adding people to do work that they're not sure of. So this year, we feel like we have the human knowledge at our buildings in order to really get this going in a stronger way. It's also some community feedback we've heard. This is the area where community really wants to see us pushing and focusing on. So that's definitely, you'll see this as part of the budget. Then high quality instruction in every classroom. We've been working very hard in math and math and writing this year, math across several years. We started writing this year. There's some very strategic reasons why we chose writing, overeating, and literacy. And I'm happy to go into probably at a later time, but we are still working on high quality instruction as well. And you'll see some of that, that's mainly broken out in how we spend our professional development money, however, which is not necessarily listed in this budget because it's getting into the detail, but Mike's here, and you can talk about that a little bit too. So, and if you keep going. So what the board will really see in this budget that I wanted to highlight is these two parts of our theory of growth, the timely system to enrich, intervene, and remediate. We've added last year through ESSER funding, the community liaison, Nick Connor, who is worth every penny we are spending on him. Like the minister is like, yes, he's amazing. We're suggesting another behavior support person and another BCBA, because the caseloads in our current BCBA are getting quite high. This is an area of need, intensive needs for behavior is something that this panic, this pandemic has definitely thrown at us. And so we're in need of, you'll see a lot of behavior supports in this budget. Board certified behavior. I was like, I looked at him earlier, I was like, I've had a day guys, if I miss that, then you gotta shout out. We're our EL, our English language population. Our caseloads are getting larger in that area as well. So you'll see an increase in that. Academic interventionists, you'll see how we're working through that using federal dollars. And a potential new guidance counselor for kids for social emotional needs. Not necessarily that remediation need of like intensive needs, but the guidance counselor really works in that intervention zone. So providing more resources, particularly at UES. And then some alternative programming at UES and MSMS, much like we've developed in previous budgets with MSMS through what we call Thrive, for kids who are having a really hard time in a traditional classroom and need a smaller, more contained environment to build up confidence, support executive functioning skills throughout the day. So you'll see some additions there. Again, more in the remediation piece of the timely system. And then the high quality instruction in every classroom. Also looking at that, and a lot has to do with the amount of kids, but also what kids have asked for. So we're looking at an increase in world language. One of our goals is that when kids graduate, they have any choice they want is available to them. And if a choice is a four year college, most four year colleges want world language on the kids transcript. And so we have high demand for world language with our population of students here at MHS. So we're suggesting increasing our world language FTE. In addition, our kids have said they want more fine arts offerings here. And so that fine arts, we're really thinking after surveying the kids around digital photography, animation, that kind of thing. And then the district wide professional development line always supports high quality instruction. So that's of course in this budget as well as it is every year. So those are our real focus for our theories of growth and how this budget ties to that theory of growth. Go ahead, Anna. And a lot of those positions that Libby just mentioned, you're gonna see here. So this slide is district wide positions. So some positions are related to schools, some are district wide. So the community liaison is a district wide position. Libby mentioned that person is already here working, but it shows up here in the budget as a factor because it was not budgeted in FY22. So from the FY22 budget to the FY23 budget, it's a reason for an increase. So we are using S or two for that. We projected to use S or two for that again in 23. The board certified behavior analyst, we're suggesting that we could use S or three funding for that so there's not an impact to taxpayers. The English language teacher increase is a 0.4. So I think basically, I think that gets us up to 4.0. So four full-time, oh it was 2.6, those three EL teachers, three full-time EL teachers. Also the athletic trainer shows up here because they support both the middle school and the high school. So it's a 0.5 increase in the local budget. This is due to increased sports offerings, increased student participation, and something that was actually brought forward as a concern by students. The athletic trainer's safety because Matlin can only be in one place at one time. And with COVID, with people who are coming to cheer on our athletes, we need a person there. So that's another reason for it. And our athletes are split in Montpelier all over dog river fields in here and middle school, so it gets difficult. All right, and then moving on to UES, an academic interventionist, which is once again a position that is filled right now but wasn't part of the FY22 budget, so it shows up here as an increase. Moving this one from S or two, we're proposing to move it into local funds. That way it's a sustainable position that we don't have to worry about that cliff dropping and then having to eliminate positions. Guidance counselor is being added. Also local money. Oh, we'll have to double check that, I think so. That was a request from students as well. Right. It's a request from community because the guidance comes from UES. And with some of these increases, we're looking at ways to basically offset or basically reallocate. So we would look at decreasing a K6 teacher position based on that low enrollment and that green that you saw on that chart. Also a Thrive teacher, like an alternative programming type teacher. This one we're planning, we're not planning but proposing we could use S or three just so that there isn't a huge tax implication. And with any of these that we're saying S or three, it's we're proposing. There still has to be community engagement so we're not making any definitive decisions here but it's part of this budget proposed. The middle school, academic interventionist, basically the same kind of scenarios UES. A Thrive teacher like UES and like we have now at the high school. 1.5 FTE and Fine Arts, which will be locally funded. It will help with a lot of these positions or well, the Fine Arts positions are shared between the high school and the middle school and that gets really complicated and tough to work with master schedules. So this would really help out with that sharing, that staff sharing and would allow the middle school to have specials in the afternoons. And I believe it was another thing that this is another topic that came up as feedback is additional Fine Arts. To help with, we're adding a lot here. So to help with that, we're also looking at decreasing a PE teacher. This would not be eliminating a, there's a vacancy right now so we just would not fill it. And then on co-curriculars, we were adding an affinity alliance advisor to work in line with equity, racial justice alliance. Next one, high school, academic interventionist. Same thing as we talked about at Union and at middle school. And then Libby mentioned some of these partial FTEs that we need to add to make sure that we have coverage and maintain that optimal class size. And there were a lot of yellows for the high school. So world language, 0.6, Fine Arts, 0.5, Social Studies, 0.3. Some of these would just be making partial FTEs full-time. And then for co-curriculars and athletics, racial justice alliance, math team would be added. You may remember that we had also talked about restorative practices and healthy masculinity as potential co-curriculars. We are gonna support those activities but not as co-curriculars. Those are gonna be part of the actual student day. So you won't see them as co-curriculars but they are still addressed. And then JV Volleyball for boys because right now we offer girls but there's interest for boys. So that's all the staffing. Now we'll go into the expenses. This chart you've seen before but I'm just trying to point to the number that we're gonna track to to some next. There's not really a clear place to put this but from time to time I've been asked what the spending per pupil is. And so this is looking at the budget per pupil by school. And so obviously because of the low count of students at Roxbury it makes it challenging that that's why you see a higher cost per pupil there. The significant cost is also district wide positions and it's just so you know the way I allocated those costs was based on a percentage of students. So Roxbury had 5% of the students they got 5% of the district wide costs. Next. So this is just a pie chart showing where the expenses fall by program. Obviously most of this is in general education, special education, career center tuition. So direct instruction is where most of this goes. Most of these topics kind of would make sense to you. Some things to maybe point out are like principal's office, special services administration. So obviously it's principal's budgets but it's also the district's special ed office budget. Buildings and grounds includes the capital plan is part of that and all other obviously facility projects would be there, utilities that type of thing. Safety would include bus aids, crossing guards and some other pieces. Fund transfers is where we count on shifting some money from the general fund to food service because there's typically a deficit in food service. Not just ours but basically every food service operation. Okay, next is kind of a bar chart that shows year to year. There you go. I apologize. You can't really do much because of the scale. Most of the expenses are general education. So when you put it on a chart the other numbers look very small. But this just shows 21 or 22 compared to 23. And since you can't really glean too much from this we go into more detail on the next couple of slides. So general education is up about 5.3%. A lot of that is based on the staffing that we just talked about. There's five potentially ESSER funded positions that we talked about. Some of those partial FTEs like English language, teachers, fine arts is actually 1.5 at the middle school another 0.5 at the high school. World language, social studies. We did offset that sum though by offering up the reduction in realignment of two positions. In addition, Roxbury tuition is down 53,000. For those of you that have been around for a while you know that when we merged Roxbury had high school school choice. And so we had to pay tuition for high school students. This is the final year. This year right now FY22 is the final year the seniors are the only ones that still have a choice. FY23 there will be no more choice. So we have no tuition to pay. So you see a drop of 53,000 there. Pre-K tuition, we're showing a drop of about 15,000 based on a lower number of kids. I mean at some point I think this is maybe COVID related. So at some point we might see a rebound but for now it makes sense to be where we are. We're assuming about 70 kids that we would be paying for private preschools. I think the highest we were ever at was probably around 90. So we'll probably end up eventually getting back there. Special education, one of the Thrive teachers that we added was actually in the category of special ed. One was general ed, one was special ed. Because the funding formula is different and we don't get reimbursed by expense it really doesn't matter whether we call them special ed teacher or regular ed teacher we know that this is gonna support all students. So we plugged one in as special ed, one as general ed. We also, special ed is up about 5% partially because of that but also because we have a pretty sizable increase in outside placements for next year that we're forecasting based on the needs that we saw when we did the service plan. Career center tuition is up 9.2% which seems like a huge increase. We don't have that six semester average number yet though and I'm actually thinking it might go higher than this to tell you the truth because we have had a lot of participation these past few years. So luckily it's a six semester average so we don't see all that impact in one year but we still might see a bigger jump than what I'm showing, we'll see. Co-curriculars and athletics, I talked about some of those co-curriculars we added and the JV Volleyball that we added which drove some of this increase. We also have some equipment that is plugged in here, covered benches which in a way it's kinda like a 21st century dugout that you might see for a baseball field instead of cement blocks. It can be moved around too so we could use it for other things and a high jump mat. I would say that anything like this that pops up that's equipment, these are things that if we get down to it in round two or three of the budget process and we're trying to make some cuts, little cuts here and there, these are things that we could shave off without major impacts. Students support up 6.4%. We talked about the guidance counselor at UES. We also increased graduation or what's the correct term to use for the middle school living? Just moving up. Moving up. Yeah, graduating. So at the middle school we basically doubled the budget for that and at the high school we have budgeted so that seniors won't have to pay, what's it called, a senior fee? Senior fee. So paying for their own caps and gowns and diplomas, that's now part of the budget for next year. There is a healthy number in here for psych evaluations and risk assessments so as those needs pop up we have money set aside to be able to accomplish those that work. It does look like occupational therapy and physical therapy costs are gonna be a little lower so that's a little bit of an offset to go the other direction. Staff support. Oh, I should also say General Ed, you know, with a budget this big it's hard to really drill down but General Ed, just so you know, there's some programs that are pretty cool that because of the dollar amount you wouldn't see and I'm thinking like at the high school for flexible pathways. We have money in here for the Montpelier Youth Conservation Corps as a new requirement for I think it's called Face the River. At Union there's the Eco program that we pay for and actually that went up by about $5,000 this year. So there's a lot of stuff that you wouldn't know that if I tried to go into all that we'd be here all night but there are some cool things that are in this budget. I left off at staff support, you see that's a big increase, 11.3%. A lot of that is based on hardware. As you know, we're doing one to one for computers. What that means is every year of course you have a new group of kindergarten students who all need new devices. Kindergarten students four years ago that are going into fifth grade their devices are beyond their useful life so we have to buy replacement computers for all of them in fifth grade and then do it again in ninth grade. So there's three years where we have to buy all new computers. So this should get us to that level where we are kind of stabilized and you shouldn't see a big increase again because we now will have funded completely to get to one to one unless of course hardware prices go up. And speaking of prices going up software is up about 31,000. There's some new programs. There's some that we had to increase the number of licenses but a lot of this is just price increase. I think it's pandemic related and it was an opportunity people saw to be able to raise their prices without people noticing or because everybody relied on software so much but there was a big increase in software price and so those two things together is most of that increase. All right, next. So the next slide we start out with school board and superintendent budget. That's up 5.5%. The total dollar amount's not big, $25,000. Honestly, the biggest driver right there is in the comments you see cost to mail ballots. That's a new thing for us. There was a new law that basically says the school districts have to pay to have ballots sent out. We're still kind of working through what that might look like for us because both municipalities have to do it the same way. One can't mail and the other not mail. They either both have to mail or neither one mails. So we're still working through what the logistics of that might look like. Is I think somebody needs to go on mute. It's the most. I'm checking with Anna. So the cost to mail ballots could be as much as $10,000 but the more troubling thing is trying to figure out how we're gonna address it, not necessarily the money. And obviously it wasn't budgeted in FY22 so we'd have to cover that. The next line, principal's office is actually a little bit of a decrease. There's a little bit of new hire savings in there for an employee but most of that is changes in health coverage which seems kind of silly but if somebody goes from family coverage to declining coverage that's over $20,000 right there. So business services. We're thinking there might be a small savings there. We're anticipating new hire savings. Things that we don't talk about. I'm not gonna say anything else about that. Buildings and grounds. We're pretty much level funding that and what we're doing is we're planning to scale back a little bit on projects but I don't want you to think that, oh we're gonna defer maintenance, that kind of stuff. We've had a lot of projects these past few years and COVID has really been kicking our butts. So it's not necessarily a bad thing to scale back a little bit on projects. There's still over $400,000 worth of projects in here so it's not a 3% increase, it's more level but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think it might be good to take a breather for this summer. Safety, about a $7,000 increase just bumping up some annual inspections and repairs for some of the routine stuff that we need to focus on. Transportation is pretty much at an inflationary increase but maybe a little bit higher because we have some higher special ed requirements. Debt service goes down every year that we don't have a new bond because the interest goes down each year and fund transfers is level. We're hoping that the amount that we have budgeted is enough to cover the deficit and I will tell you some good news. This year food service is looking great because of the new model where we are providing free food for all. Our federal reimbursements are really high so it's looking good for this year for food service. All right, next, actually you can skip two because we're gonna go in revenues. Here we go, one more slide. There's a lot here. I'm not gonna go through everything but I will call out at least some of the fancy colors I have on here. The tech on behalf is yellow because it's not a final number until I get the six semester average. The pink numbers, that's the special ed reimbursement formula and if you do the math, we're down about 130 to $140,000 from last year based on a change in model and obviously a change in requirements too. Special ed, triple E, early essential education, that grant is in yellow because we haven't gotten a number from the AOE. Should be close to that though. About halfway down you see some acronyms that I just wanna make sure you know. Idea B, that's actually, basically that's federal special ed money and so that as well as CFP which is Consolidating Federal Program, your title money, those federal programs and federal revenues, those just match exactly what we have in the budget as expenses. So if we spend 100,000 in title one, we have 100,000 in revenues so that as far as education spending, there's no increase, there's no impact to taxpayers. S or two and S or three are on here, they're in green because those are fairly new and you can see we went from zero in the budget to a proposed of 434,000. The total allocation also for S or three if you didn't remember is like $2.2 million. So obviously all we have in here is just looking at some of the key positions that we were thinking made sense to fund with S or three. There's still a lot of engagement that we need to do with regards to this and with regards to any kind of projects. I'm gonna skip down cause a lot of these are pretty routine. Tuition has been down a little bit, hopefully that'll work its way back up. Interest has been high because we have a high fund balance. The fund balance carry forward near the bottom, that's where we have surplus money from years ago that we have just included as a revenue source. So in FY22, we budgeted 400,000 as a revenue source to help with the tax rates. In FY23, we're proposing to keep it at 400,000. Obviously as we go through the process and build this budget and some of the factors come in and we know what the tax rate is, that's obviously a lever that we can adjust. We could put more fund balance in to lower tax rates or if we're looking good, we could take a little less out of there but we are looking very good on fund balance. So Lydia. This is just to put in as revenues. So I think I've mentioned to some of the board members there's so many, this year in particular, there's so many revenue sources coming into the district from the federal government. It makes building a budget and explaining said budget as to what's actually local taxpayer dollars versus the federal money coming in. So one of the things that we've been asked to do from the agency of education is put up a public plan document and this is a living breathing document on our website. It's been up for quite a while now. I think I put it up at the end of September and it changes. So in this document, you can see links to how we've spent S or two money, how we spent S or one money, how we've spent or are planning to spend ARP IDEA money, which is another funding source that we've gotten. You're actually kind of surprised by that we got but that, you know, the IDEA acronym is special education. So there's the plan for how we're planning on spending that piece, which is a lot of literacy, professional development, social, emotional learning, psychiatric or psychology reports and that kind of thing, right Bill? In addition. So that plan is on this document as well as the opportunities that we've had for community engagement as things happen or I talk to families or I talk to teachers or staff. I update this list on there. So all of that information is on there. It's on our website and open to the public so that you can see the work that's happening around all the newer federal money that's coming into us this year and next year. So I just wanted to link that into the budget presentation because it kind of is part of the budget but it's kind of not part of the budget and to just link that all together. And I will tell you, it's none of my work so I don't mind bragging. Every week there's a Zoom call for recovery plan with the agency and just to make Libby uncomfortable. Every week they, almost every week, they mention our district as the example of community engagement and doing the right things and they show our website. So I mean, no amount of community engagement is enough but I just want you to feel good about the fact that our district is being used as an example for others during some of these meetings. So congratulations to Libby. So moving on, capital plan, which as I mentioned, the capital plan has been factored into all those slides you saw is already factored into the tax rate so it's not above and beyond. It's about 1% of the overall budget. We established it a few years ago to try to make sure that we have money in there for projects. It can roll over from year to year so it's an opportunity to put a big project out there and collect money over time without having to maybe get a bond. FY23, you can see in the green column there, we really are working away from individual smaller projects to just the big ones. So we only have two projects other than the windows which you've seen for years. One is the UES Auditorium, which is a beautiful facility but it obviously needs a lot of work. It's been kind of, just has basically sat there for a while and needs some work. The MSMS Sustainability Lab renovation, obviously that was initially designed as one of the old family and consumer science spaces and we're working with that teacher to figure out what would be the best layout for the ideal space to do some of the sustainability, some of the sustainability work and instruction. Then obviously you have UES window replacement and Main Street window replacement and next year is the first kind of significant chunk of money that we can start putting into that and we still have to figure out whether that's, you know, X number of windows each year that we're gonna do or whether we're gonna save money across several years and then do a higher level of replacements. The next two slides are actually just pictures and hopefully we get- Grand, I'm gonna hold off. It looks like we may have just lost the internet, so. Right, and it doesn't have us anymore, so you're on for note-taking. Oh, thank you. I'd say keep going. Of course, huh? Yeah. So we had the pictures of UES Auditorium and windows. The next one is just MSMS windows and it's the Sustainability Lab to show you what it looks like, which it's only actually half of the classroom, I believe. And just in time, we're gonna go into the tax rate calculations. I will caveat this, though. There are so many unknowns and they're pretty significant factors, so I would not get too excited about any of these tax rates yet until we know something, but I just wanted to go through what those calculations are. The next slide goes into terminology, which we added this slide last year just so people kind of weren't confronted by the tax rate calculation with all these strange words. So education spending is our total budget minus non-tax revenues, and non-tax revenues are basically everything on that revenue chart other than education spending in Tech Center on behalf. So everything else on there is considered a non-tax revenue. Equalized pupils is two-year average ADM, adjusted by factors such as a pre-K student is counted as 0.46, not one. A high school student is 1.93, that kind of thing. I will say the equalized pupil calculation is going to change, we know is gonna change, not for FY23, but beginning, I think, in FY24. And what's gonna happen is some of these factors are gonna change like the poverty factor might be 3.0 instead of 1.25. And since our district isn't real high with poverty, with free and reduced population, and others are, we could see a swing and we could see a pretty dramatic drop in equalized pupils in the future. So that's something to remember as we build budgets. Property dollar yield, let me see if I can explain this. So the property dollar yield, the number that you get there, if our spending equaled per pupil what the dollar yield was, then our tax rate would be $1. That's how the dollar yield is kind of calculated. It is the amount that you would have to get your spending per pupil to be in order for your tax rate to be $1, which nobody does. But that's what the number is supposed to represent. If there's a good economy, the yield will go up. If the education fund is healthy, the yield will go up and the tax rates go down. As we've talked about before, it's set by law. We had the tax commissioner's recommendation today, but it won't be set by law until after town meeting day. So we always go into a vote with a number, a tax rate estimation that's always gonna be wrong because it gets set by law after it's voted on. Common level of appraisal. We've talked about this before. It's the appraised value of your property versus the market value. And as we've talked about the higher the market value, then the CLA will start dropping way down below 100%. And then your tax rates go way up. Because what's happening is they're saying your tax rate should be higher because your property value should be higher. And if they don't do that, then you're not paying a fair amount of taxes. Sales prices over these past couple of years have been crazy. So I'm hoping that what I've plugged in is reasonable, but the CLA might actually be lower than what we're showing. The other thing to remember about CLA is both Montpelier and Roxbury are reappraising this year. It won't have a big impact in Roxbury because the CLA is pretty high right now. But in Montpelier, the CLA is like, I'm projecting 82%. If that swings up to a dollar with a reappraisal, the tax rates will drop significantly, like 30 cents potentially. But always remember you got that equalized pupil thing that could go the other direction. So just several things. Those are some of the terms that you're gonna see on the next slide right here. And you'll see the, actually the back one please. You'll see the actual mathematical signs. So you start with a general budget, you add the capital plan, you get the total. Subtract out your non-tax revenues, you get your education spending. Divide your equalized pupils, which hopefully will go up. And you get your spending for pupil, which is compared to your statewide property yield. That property yield 11.617 is what I estimated. It's based on the tax commissioner, that number could go up dramatically, which would be great. But then you divide your tax rate by the CLA. And if those percentages drop even more, then that could be a very bad thing. So I'm hoping that between the increased yield and maybe the potential lower CLA, that we're still close to what I'm estimating here. And honestly what I'm hoping is that these are maybe worst case numbers. But if you compare 22 to 23, Montpelier right now is going up 9.3 cents, which is 5.3%. Roxbury 9.7 cents, which is 6.6%. That's pretty high for us. And like I said, I wouldn't get too excited yet because some of these factors are gonna come in soon. And right now, the only piece of information we have is that the dollar yield is up. So that's good news. So that should drop this. The other thing to point out is, as an example, Montpelier going up 9.3 cents. Two and a half cents of that is because of the merger incentive, the two cents in incentive we lost. And five and a half cents almost is because of the CLA. So right there, 7.9 out of the 9.3 cents are CLA and incentive. So a lot of these things are kind of beyond our control, but we may need to do some things that are within our control to help manage this as we get some better factors. The next slide just shows the impact. So if you have $100,000 of property in Montpelier, your tax bill would go up $93. As I said, this is still really early to get too excited about. Some things will dramatically change. And the other thing to always point out is that two thirds of the people pay based on income sensitivity. So this is if you paid 100% based on property values. And I think your household income would have to be like $130,000 or something in order for that to happen. Next slide. So I like showing this, I know it's one of those what have you done for me lately slides, but if you look way back to FY18 before we merged, Montpelier without the CLA, which we can't control, the year before we merged and the proposed FY23 tax rate are basically level. That's not bad for over five years. In Roxbury, even with the CLA factored in, it's 15 cents lower than before we merged. So I know there's increases that we're seeing from 22 to 23, but if you step back and look at where we were before the merger, we're looking pretty good. Remember that before the merger, Roxbury was actually getting hit with excess spending threshold, but they were getting double taxed. So they're in very good shape now compared to before the merger. Next, we're just gonna have a couple up outlook and summary slides, and I think I can zip through some of this because we already talked about it. For outlook, thinking about what's coming, reappraisals, we already talked about that. They're happening now. There'll be an impact in FY24, probably a significant impact for Montpelier. Equalized pupil, we could see a decrease, which has the opposite effect obviously. For enrollment and staffing, we're pretty stable compared to other districts. The trend though is lower grades are dropping, upper grades are increasing, and then we should level off. The merger incentive in FY24, you don't have to worry about that two cents increase because we're at zero and 23, so it's just gonna stay zero and 24. Next. So right now we stand at 4.4% increase in total budget, three and a half in ed spending, three and a half in spending for pupil because we don't have a new equalized pupil count yet. I talked about what the tax rates look like right now, but once again, way early. And then the next slide is just, if you were looking at making adjustments, which quite frankly I would recommend you don't yet because there's so many things that are gonna happen that I wouldn't get too excited to make any big changes yet. But for some context, if you looked at ed spending and you say you lowered education spending by 110,000, that would take your ed spending increase from three and a half percent to three, and it would drop the tax rate by about a penny. And realize that means you could either lower your expenses or increase your revenues, like add a 110,000 of fund balance instead of cutting anything. If you're looking at trying to impact the tax rates, $260,000 is what it would cost to get you from I think it's like 5.6 I said, or 5.7 down to 4.0 percent increase. If you were trying to get the tax rate increase down to 3%, it's a huge number. It's unrealistic actually, 475,000. And the slide says this is Montpelier's impact. I just had to pick one. I mean, I could have picked Roxbury or Montpelier, but it just seemed logical to do the Montpelier one for now. And I think that's it. The next slide is just if you have any questions and I know the plan might be to go through the board first and then in public. So I will turn it back over to you, Jim. Okay, that was excellent. Very thorough and informative as usual. Let's just turn it over to questions. I'm sure there are many. So just a few of your hands and I'll call and I'll leave you in rank and answer what? And I'm on a few questions, just raise your hand on the screen or a shout out. Maybe we should let her go first while we still have the internet. Sounds good. Yep. We should let her go first while we still have the internet. Sounds good. Yep. Yep. It's okay, thank you. I will wait. Actually, it'd be great if you could quickly go over what was being said around slide 30. We were back into the window and the ventilation and how the budget would be used to potentially cover that one of the funding ideas. So that's just a little gap that happened when the internet cut out. You don't mind just giving us a little refresher. Please and thank you. UES and Main Street window replacements has been on our radar for a long time. It is something that we were gonna address in the capital plan over several years. So FY23 represents the first year of any kind of significant dollar not being thrown in there. So we hope to actually get moving on that. And our facilities director has done some work with some vendors to look at different options whether it's a full replacement or repairs. So I think we're in a good place to make a decision and start doing this. But I think we need this first infusion of money in FY23. And what I've probably said a few times was this capital plan, this $260,000 I just wanna make sure everybody knows that it's already included in any of the tax rate calculations. And what you probably missed or what folks might have missed was actually just a couple of slides that showed some pictures to give examples of what we were talking about on the capital plan. Great, and also just process it of a promised public comment. Let's go till, let's have a board discussion till eight and then give the public some time then the board discussion can pick back up unless the board's interested in that. I'm okay, I'm okay. Grant, thank you so much for walking us through all this, this was extremely helpful and really nicely organized. When I started looking at it, I had a whole bunch of questions and as you walk through and as I went through, you answered a lot of them. So thank you for the way you've organized it and explained all these things. As far as the questions, I have a few. So I'll start asking them and maybe you'll answer some of the ones that I have here wrong. Out of curiosity, what's the dollar yield that Andrew sent you or what's the number? There's two potential numbers and actually the recommendation seems to infer that there's a third or imply, I don't know, is it imply or infer? Scenario A is 13846, which is a significant increase in the tax. 13,846 would be total. Right, is the dollar yield that's in this tax recommendation? Our number was 11617, so it's significantly higher. That's assuming that all of the money that's like all the reserve money, $90 million in reserves is all applied. So that's like the best case scenario. The other number that just came out was 12,937 and that's if that 90 million is not used. The third option is there seems to be a recommendation that maybe they should use half. So now that means the number will be halfway in between. But Andrew knows more about this than I do, sadly for me but there's probably gonna be another revenue projection coming out in January. Which affects the other sources that go into the fund like sales and use tax, meals and rooms tax, which also have an impact on the amount of money that needs to be raised through property tax. It's based on this estimate. So for the next briefing, I mean, if I get the equalized pupil count and I get a few more things, then I'll pick a number and plug it in for the next time. It'll be higher than what it shows now. But I've never seen a dollar yield go up this high in one year. So this makes me twitch a little to plug this in. You might want, Jill, would you mind giving people just a little? I don't think people on the internet can hear you when you talk that quiet. Okay, Jill, do you feel comfortable providing just a little update on the counterbalance to this? This DLA? Yeah. It's very preliminary right now. So if you don't. Yeah, I don't mean to derail things. So as Grant pointed out, the yield, the December one letter that the tax commissioner published today and Andrew and I work at the tax department. So that's how we know this kind of stuff. Reflects a combination of factors. Basically the education fund had a carryover which Grant just referenced, which is money that basically the legislature can appropriate to put towards reducing the tax rate. It also reflects the increase on the statewide grand list, which is the value of all of our homes sort of combined into one lump. So that is a good thing. And as Andrew pointed out, there's other revenue sources that go into the education fund because we are part of a statewide education funding system, which, so those are all good things. What we're seeing obviously is the huge demand in residential property and the increase in what has been spent on residential property in the last year and a half since COVID first hit has basically led to a lot of our homes being undervalued. A lot of them were already listed pretty low on the grand lists in each town. Certainly Montpelier is one of those. I think our last reappraisal was like 2011 or something like that. So the CLA is a factor that my team calculates at the tax department that reviews three years worth of real estate sales to sort of see what the market is doing in each town. It's also reviewed by categories. So commercial is reviewed differently than residential or seasonal, for example. But what it's reflecting is this huge boom. I think we figured out there was something like a 79% increase in what has literally been spent in dollars on Vermont real estate. So what that means is a house that might have been appraised at already a little bit below for their taxation purposes. That town is now seeing their CLA get even lower. So Montpelier is an example of that. We had a really hot real estate market that hasn't slowed down. So this is all the system doing what it's designed to do. I think it's important to remember is that it's designed to make sure that everybody is paying a fair amount of their property tax based on the real estate, the fair market value of their property. So it's a bit of the sort of bulky way of doing it. Ideally, we'd have all of our homes reappraised 100% every year and we'd have that number and it would be the tax rate we want and everything would be great. That's not how it works. So the CLA makes a lot of towns and a lot of business managers nervous because it is this significant factor that's applied to the tax rate by town. So some towns have not seen that level of shift in their real estate market but you can probably guess that some of the places that have seen that shift. It's also important as I mentioned that our houses in Montpelier, for example, that haven't been reappraised since 2011, our CLA in Montpelier has been dropping for a while now because we know that they're not listed at fair market value. So the CLA is applied to our local tax rate and that's actually the tax rate that we see on our property tax bills. So while the statewide tax rate might be going down, which is great because of these factors, and education spending is not jumping at the same rate that the real estate market is fluctuating, the statewide tax rate will go down and then the CLA, depending on your town, will sort of bring it back to level. So the actual literal dollar on your property tax bill may or may not be different and may or may not be higher or lower, but those are the major factors that are impacting it. And I also do think it is really important to remember that about 70% of Vermonters actually have a property tax adjustment applied to their property tax bill based on income and it is a pretty high dollar for your household income. So not everyone is gonna be paying that same piece that you were mentioning. So is that helpful? Okay. You're so smart, Jill. Thank you, I got a question from the manager opening next year, so long. So to answer your question, I think the next budget presentation, I will probably be bumping up the dollar yield significantly in line with this, but I may get more conservative with the CLA and assume that the CLA is gonna be even lower than what I have on here. Because I don't wanna be optimistic with the dollar yield and not be a little pessimistic with the CLA because I don't want the tax rate to look better than it's gonna be. But my guess is that the next time I present, the tax rate will be lower than what you see here. I just don't know how much yet. And Jill, you mentioned that on the 70% of people have a adjustment. So I wanna point out clarification. If we're projecting that there's gonna be a tax rate increase, or if we're projecting that the CLA will come up and come down, but there's gonna be an adjustment. And there's a difference that we have, I think on one of the slides we're saying $200 increase or whatever. So there's 70% of people, there are previous years, they had that adjustment, this year they're gonna have that adjustment, but they will have that increase regardless, right? Whether it may not be exactly $230, but there will be an increase, is that right? The way that it essentially works is if a household is above $47,000, what's called the circuit breaker. If household income is above that, the percentage increase in taxes is essentially the same for those who pay based on income or pay based on property. So these are modeled based on property without income sensitivity, but somebody who paid based on income if the property, the say an individual, say a household on, I don't know, Main Street was paying based on property and their taxes went up 3%. The family that paid based on income, if their household income is above $47,000, it would, their tax rate would also go up 3%. Of course their income isn't gonna be exactly the same year over year and so that calculation is gonna fluctuate, but if all else remained equal, that's essentially how we work. Yeah, so it's not the dollar number that would go up, but it's a percentage the same. So if you paid $1,000 in taxes and we're projecting a 5% increase. Yes, it would be percentage, same percentage, right? Right, right. Just wanted to make sure. Yup, so last year when we were looking at the 10% increases early on based on this December 1st letter, that could have impacted some lower, middle and middle income households pretty hard because they would have been looking at a 10% increase. So even though they wouldn't have been paying the, based on property, if they had income sensitivity, which lowered their tax bill, a 10% increase would have still been a lot for a number of families. Yeah, so they wouldn't have paid $2,000, they were paying $1,000, so instead of $200 increase, it would be a $100 increase because it's a 10%. Right. Right, yeah, so if they paid $1,000 the year before, they're looking at a 10% increase, that's $1,000, $100 the next year. That was the big scary thing last year, which didn't come to fruition. Yeah, yeah, what did? And one of the main reasons why that did not come to fruition is because sales and use tax and got upgraded so significantly. Which goes into the Ed Fund. All sales and use tax goes into the Education Fund and that alleviated the burden on property taxes. Yeah, I think early on it was projected that the sales and use tax is gonna fall short by a drastic amount, but it didn't happen, yeah. Extraordinary economic uncertainty. Yeah, yeah. Grant, I don't know the slight number, but it's the budget overview where you have the year broken down in general budget and plus capital plans equal the total budget. So the capital plan, you're adding it, but then it's also considered in the non-tax revenue, right? No, it is not non-tax revenue. It is just part of the total budget. So it's added to the just the general budget to give you your total budget. And then we subtract non-tax revenues, which on that revenue slide, I think that slide, the slide is the busiest slide. If I can find it, yeah. It's yes, the heading is revenues, it's this one. If you see that slide, the top two lines are education spending and tech on behalf. Those are two revenue sources. Everything from there down is considered a non-tax revenue, meaning there's revenues assigned to it that are not part of the education fund. So, yeah, all those things like tuition that we bring in, interest that we bring in, the fund balance that we use, these federal grants that we get, the special ed state grants that we get. Those are all non-tax revenues that get subtracted out of the general fund budget plus the capital. Okay, so the fund balance carry forward is considered a revenue, but not the capital fund. It shouldn't be considered a non-tax revenue. Right. Okay. When they're on the, on a few positions, you guys had mentioned that those, the funding source is SR3 on some positions. A couple of questions I had. SR3 is, how does the SR3 work? Do we get reimbursed or do we submit it and then we do, like, I guess the question is, do we know beforehand at going in that, hey, this is a amount that we're gonna get. That's why we are putting it. Yeah, I think the federal grant amount before we put it, we request it. So we have to know what the grant requirements are. So this is either Title I or Title II or IDEA. There's guidelines on what we can spend on and what we can't spend on. And we know what those guidelines are and Mike Bill, myself, Grant, are very good at writing investments. And so we will write those in the IDEA. We have to approve them. So there's allowable expenses that you have and they have to approve it, but we get reimbursed for that. So we're pretty confident that if we put this in there, that's gonna come to you. These positions, especially, because they're aligned with the purpose of SR3. So I don't think there'd be any problem, once we go through all the process, we get all the community engagement, we get the grant done and submitted and it gets approved, then, yes, as we incur these expenses each month, I request the money that we've spent and they send me a check. So that's why it doesn't impact the tax rate because the expense is on the revenue that comes in. Not these years, but once the SR3 goes away and we wanna continue those positions, that's when they will get hit. That's why we were looking and saw the opportunity maybe to at least take one of those intervention positions and convert it to local so that we wouldn't have to worry about that. But yeah, the ideal thing would be to find, to be able to have positions that are positions that can kind of work themselves out of the job. So that you get the funding for it, they do some work, things get better, they improve some processes and then whenever they go away, the funding goes away and you're okay. Or projects, those kinds of things. Or we find a way as opportunities pop to realign a resource and make those intervention positions or whatever positions community liaison. If we find a place where we can make a reduction to reallocate to this and then make it a local fund, that way we can hold on to that position. Okay. I don't wanna take too much of the time so anybody wants to do a chance to come on. Thanks. And just to remind her, A, we're gonna take her about it, we're gonna vote to give her public. So we've got two more minutes. You can go a little longer, George, but if you're gonna be much longer. Okay, yeah, I mean, I just wanna thank you all for putting together what I think is a really solid and sort of inspired budget. And it seems like it's been, I'm seeing a lot of what we've heard over the past year and a half from the community incorporated into this budget. So the whole admin team and Grant and Libby, it's like, you know, it's really nice to see the final product be so thoughtful and incorporating all of this feedback that we've been hearing over the course of a year and a half. And I think it really reflects the values of our town and the feedback that we've been getting. So thank you. And then I just have a couple of like quick because we have been conducting these listening sessions. I've been hearing a lot of feedback from the community and I just wanted to like, I think they're very quick questions. So on page from the student listening session that we had here at the high school on page 24 and 25, there's a section, co-curriculars and athletics on page 24. And I'm just wondering if there's going to be room in that we had heard some requests for new uniforms and I just don't see it specifically listed. There was some dysfunctional uniforms being complained about the student listening session. So is there room for that in that line item? That's a different line item. Yeah, it would be under the athletics budget. And this year, actually last year we started, the athletic director is actually one of the folks that is filling out a budget worksheet. And they, he went through and looked at each sport. And so there's increases that you would never see in supplies, say for instance field hockey supplies could be up $500 and you would just never know it in here. So if something pops up like that, it's something we could definitely work out during execution too, because if we get feedback that this certain uniform item is inappropriate or not working, then we can work with the coach and the athletic director to make sure it's addressed. Yeah, I am interested in following back up with the students and letting them know sort of like how this budget reflects their concerns that they brought to the table. So that would be a point of concern. I know it's a small thing, but not small in the lived experience. Emma, could you, because this is too high level for that level specifics, can you send me an email so I don't forget? Yes. Send me an email around that so I can follow up with Matt. We'll do it. Okay, and then same sort of question on page 25, it looked like it could fit into maybe building new grounds, but it was that sort of low hanging fruit of additional bike racks. Oh yeah, that also would not be in this, but you wouldn't see it at this level. Yeah, too granular. But yeah. And then from the parents, from the middle school parents listening session, we heard a lot of feedback around special education. And so on page 24, you talk about the Thrive program. Can you just explain how that will support students with special needs? That is one of the things that we're seeing as we've come back from whatever last year was, is a significant increase in very intensive behavior challenges at both MSMS and UES. I'd say both schools are experiencing that right now. I don't know how unique it is to MSMS. I believe we've had this type of situation for a couple of years now. And what we've learned over the last few years is that the mental health supports outside of our system and other options for kids that might be a better fit than our public school, they're just not there. There are no spaces. There's a lack of mental health supports outside of school and there's a lack of expertise within our school system and outside of the school system, quite honestly, around how to really work with so that they thrive, so that kids with really intensive behavior challenges thrive. This has come at us pretty strong this year. And so the Thrive program, we started, well, we put in the budget two years ago at MHS. It did not happen last year for multiple reasons, but it's meant as a place for kids to come to regulate themselves or get support regulating themselves. Kind of as Bill nicely puts it, and Bill should probably be saying this, but I can't because he can talk way more eloquently than I can about it, but it's a space where it's smaller. So oftentimes kids with very intensive needs need their world smaller for a little while. And so we've tried to build it here at the high school. We're going through a revision and learning a lot about what works and what doesn't for kids at the high school level, but we really believe that we need this programming at the middle school, which is why you see it in your local budget because we know that that's gonna continue for a while. And we're suggesting it for S3 for UES for two years because we're wondering if it's a blip at UES because of a pandemic related piece. So we're wondering at UES if we can build system and capacity to not need necessarily this position further out, whereas at MSMS we're predicting that we're going to need this position. So that's why you see the different funding sources suggested in the thrive position, but that's what we're looking at. We're looking at students with significant intensive behaviors that are occurring at school. It may be a kid with a special need, it may not be. So we're not basing it on an IEP, but what's the need of a child? So we're not basing it on an IEP, but what's the need of a child? Can I ask a question related to that, Libby? So there is, I heard this really great feedback from the group of therapists thinking about specific rooms for therapy for kids. So one of the challenges with mental health is some of the parents cannot be driving their kids to therapy sessions afterwards or maybe they... So being able to have a space for kids to telehealth now, therapy sessions, so that they can have that and also they don't have to be at home having a therapy session with the parent right there. So is that, with that fit in there, is that a consideration? Do we have space for that? So just in line with this conversation. I'm from Sweet at UES that we're redesigning and I know Andrew LaRosa is taking mental notes right now around let's ensure that we have that piece as we're redesigning that space because that's totally doable and necessary piece for us. MSMS is a little trickier because space is a major commodity at MSMS, but it's something that I know the brilliance of Andrew LaRosa can figure out with his colleagues. He's looking behind right now. He doesn't like conflict. So thank you for bringing that to our attention, but that would be in a different, if we're talking budget, right? That would be in a different line item because it would be more infrastructure needs, but can totally fit into the plans that we have. Thank you so much. I have one more. I know, do you want, does somebody else want to go before? Because I already asked to come. Partially, why don't you go and let the public speak for a little bit before we can come out before? Okay, so on page 16 and 17 in staffing, there are two decreases that I think will raise eyebrows in the community and people will want to know more about. So decreasing a K through six teacher, I understand because of lower enrollment, that won't bring our class sizes even towards the, it won't bring it close to the maximum, right? I mean, if you were to do like a what if and take like grade one or grade two and subtract one teacher, the new class, average class size would still be below optimal, but it would be closer. It would still be below 16, but it would be more like 15 and a half or so. And on that class size slide, which I'm gonna try to find quickly, it didn't show a decrease in teachers. The class size analysis, thank you for bringing that up. The class size analysis chart that I did shows the current staffing. So if we made, I didn't wanna presuppose any decisions. So if we do make staffing adjustments like some of those partial high school FTEs, so I would then after we make those decisions, I could go back in and plug in the new additions and subtractions and recalculate it. So that was just status quo as if staffing did not change at all. It was just a snapshot of right now. And just on that note, I was interested to see that our total number of students isn't really like changing that much. You said Tato, but when you look through, it's like 1,000 to 1,100 over the many years that you have listed. And so it's not changing that much. So would like in this budget, it's a suggested decrease in one and then increase in another to support the class sizes moving through and getting bigger, is that right? Yeah, in the lower grades right now, it looks like we're trending down. So we know that in the high school, we're having increases. So it's a way to kind of reallocate resources in a way. And we'll see, I mean, at the high school eventually, as those numbers go from year to year to year, I would assume we will continue to trend down, but it'll take a while for it to go that far. And then can you speak to the decrease of the PE teacher? How is that being sort of, how are we compensating for the loss of those FTEs? So currently we don't have three PE teachers at MSMS, because this is an MSMS piece, because of a resignation that we have. And Mike has been able to, Mike, do you want to speak to that specifically of what's happening, how we can compensate for it now? We've been able to cover it with two people perfectly fine. So you have three physical ed teachers and so class sizes were just smaller or something was happening. And then it was more of a complication of the map. And then is the new health FTEs factored into that equation at all? Is that helping to offset because there's somebody else coming in to teach some health classes? Okay. Yeah, we had three FTEs because we didn't have a dedicated health teacher at MSMS. We got that last year in the budget or we increased health across the district because that's a district position between MHS and MSMS, which would take away some of the responsibilities of some of that health PE. But we left the PE in because we just didn't know the impact of schedule because of shared staffing. There is no wiggle room whatsoever. So now that we know that a little bit more with the, if we were to increase the fine arts, the music, then that we're not losing FTE in the specials area. Does that make sense? Yes, yes. For scheduling purposes. Okay. And on that note, a quick question about the high school FTEs, are most of those currently part-time positions and they're just being increased? Okay. Except for the .5 fine arts. That would be new. Okay. I believe everything else is increasing a part-time position. World language could be. The world language might be the other, probably the point. We're discussing still as to which world language. Okay. Thank you. Gotcha. Thank you. Is that an old hand? Is that a land or? I think it's an old hand on your screen. Is that an older, new hand? Old hand. Old hand. I can read lips. This is an old hand. Old hand. So let's give anyone from the public some time to the speaker ask questions. Like 10 minutes and Dina, Sui, you might. Looks like Nancy might be ready to go as well. And do we have anyone on? And Jim, is this the same format as the public comment where we don't, we are simply here to hear the public comment. It's a dialogue. Good question. I think clarifying, I think Grant can answer clarifying questions. But not a dialogue in order to back forth, but there's further explanation. Yeah. And please go to the. Sorry. Why don't you come up? Yeah. And also restate your name as well, please. So though, we'll just let you know. And I just have a question about this school comparison, particularly the elementary school RBS and UES. And Grant, can you just tell me kind of how this has trended over time? Like in the past two years maybe and predict, is there a goal to sort of bring that down? I would say that if you did this same slide the past few years, it would look very similar. It was actually the same order probably. Roxbury would be higher, UES and the high school would be similar and then Main Street is a little lower. Roxbury is, I don't know how you can get Roxbury lower because the problem is you have 35 to 40 kids across five grade levels, not counting pre-k. And you can do as much as you can to try to like cluster grade levels. But even if you cluster grade levels, you're still not gonna get the same kind of class size that you're gonna get at the other schools, the Montpelier schools. And as long as you're challenged by low class sizes, then your cost per student is always gonna be higher. And a lot of the infrastructure costs are gonna be fixed like your utilities costs. So... In addition Nancy, special education is a law and we need to provide those services. So there are things that we by law have to provide. I understand that. This is a static point in time and I'm just wondering how it's trending backwards and forwards. And you're saying this is gonna probably never change significantly. It would not, I can't imagine that it will change. It's similar to what it's been in the past. I can't imagine it will change unless there is a restructuring of how we do education or how we use Roxbury Village School. In a big way, in a profound way. Thank you, go ahead. Sorry, I wish I had a better answer. That was good. Any other questions from the public? Sita? Tina Muncie again. And I just have clarifying questions. Maybe, for Libby, could you explain so everyone will know what ESSER stands for and what grant specifically that is? What ESSER? ESSER stands for elementary and secondary school emergency relief. It's federal funds, part of what you may have also heard of. They call it ARP or there's a bunch of different acronyms but it is. It's a pandemic relief. It's COVID related funds like the Corona Relief Fund was before ESSER. So it's federal funding that is pushed toward us. And so ESSER, there's ESSER one, ESSER two, ESSER three. It's just different acts, legislative acts that provided that money. So ESSER three is also referred to as, I think ARP ESSER is what they're calling it too. So that's what it stands for. It's federal money that was basically provided to help with pandemic relief issues. So a grant that, so we're clear, a grant that will probably not continue like Title I. Correct. Thank you. Now can you tell me what the certification for, I don't understand what a thrive person is, but thanks to Emma, I got an explanation. What's the certification for that person? I think ideally we'd want a special educator. You mean licensure? Right. Yeah. I think ideally we've talked about this a bit. We'd want licensure and special education mainly because most of the kids we would imagine, we assume are gonna be supported by this program would have an IEP or qualify for an IEP, although not all of them. We're also looking at how we can real allocate some social work support there to help with mental health needs and some instructional assistance. Should we be able to hire instructional assistance, which is always a big question mark right now. But I think ideally if I were queen of the world and I could hire anybody, it would be a special educator with a real background and focus and intensive needs behaviors. And with the new special ed regs that that person could see non-special ed. Through the grant reimbursement, through 173, Act 173, yes. Thank you. Okay, so then am I clear that in actuality, sort of Emma and I had more telepathy thinking. In, you've got a reduction of one teacher at the elementary school. Am I correct in assuming that you could actually reduce a teacher at first grade and a teacher at second grade and still be within the optimum range for each of those grades? Yes, keeping in mind that if we're talking about reductions of teachers, we're talking about a reduction in a seniority category and the seniority category that the reduction would be in is kindergarten through sixth grade licensure. Right, I understand that if it was not a retirement that the teacher that actually would have to leave might not be those, but I'm just talking about the adult standing in front of the classroom. You could eliminate one in first, one in second and still have both set of classes be in the optimum range. Yes, you are accurate in that, yeah. They would be below the optimum range, both of those grade levels. And you decided not to do that, why? We did. We did not believe that it would be easily stomached by the board and the community. But you added, considering the downturn of population, you really added two people to the elementary staff. I'm not debating the reason why, but you added two people, but you only took away one. Because you feel that the board could not stomach that, is that right? We didn't know if the board wanted to take that on for this year. Okay. The board is welcome to have a discussion about that, but that would be the board's decision. And another thought would be that, through this budget as proposed, we've converted an ESSER funded position into local. My hope would be that that would give us the flexibility to do that again next year if that position was still there, but valid points. As I know you love Tina, the long-term thinking, how these things all connect. I love a plan. I know you do, my friends. The long-term thinking of how we can sustain positions as we're building up our systems of supports for kids, which is needed, which is a priority for us. How do we build that up in a way that is good for our taxpayers, slowly over time, is using all the revenue sources that are coming in and slowly moving into local funding so that it doesn't happen all at once. Well, that's why I wasn't, I understand the need and the need created by the pandemic for extra kind of beyond classroom capacity people. So that wasn't it, it was just, why not classroom? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Is there anyone on Zoom? No, okay, great. Thank you for those great questions. I have a question that kind of seems wrong. Okay, what are you gonna answer? Some of those questions. Well, actually, first of all, Grant, this is your last budget, is it not? No. No, it's not, yeah, it's true. I'm the last Grant. I don't wanna answer that because I'm afraid Libby might have a sharp object in there. It's fine at all, it happens. Well, this team has done an extraordinary job, I think, of putting together a thoughtful budget that really does reflect a lot of the input and concerns and just the general vision that's been articulated from leadership as well as from the community over the course of the past year plus. So thank you so much for all the hard work that went into this. I have one main question and it just pertains to the combination of ESSER federal funds versus local budget. It seems to me that, and I've heard from the community the input about using ESSER funds for providing for various educational, special education, various support needs. My general, well, let me tell you my general concern and then I'll ask my question. My concern is that I don't know that, I don't think we know right now from everything that we've heard that these are going to be one-time resources and one-time costs, that there's probably going to, we're probably gonna have ongoing needs related to this episode. I mean, the pandemic's not over. It's still wearing on us all. It's still wearing on kids. It's still wearing on our schools, educators, administrators. And I see ESSER money here being used for what seems to me like ongoing structural costs and ongoing structural needs. And I guess my question is, and maybe this is for next time, I think it might be helpful for us to quantify the extent to which ESSER dollars might be used for some of those ongoing needs so that we have an idea in the out years what would be absorbing into the local budget and whether maybe we might wanna absorb that into the local budget sooner and maybe use those ESSER dollars for more one-time expenses. That's general question, concern, consideration I wanted to raise. I had a similar one as Andrew. Just to be able to see, it's helpful to know on these staffing charts what you're thinking is this gonna be, or are we thinking it's ESSER two to local budget or whatever, but it's hard to put it all together if we don't know what those amounts are. So if there was a ballpark figure that we could have to say we're thinking of these staffing because this is the biggest piece, you know, this amount is what we're thinking for ESSER versus local budget versus... Yeah, that revenue slide, the revenue slide talks about how much is ESSER two versus ESSER three. Everything that's in this budget is that relates to ESSER two or ESSER three was just for positions. There's nothing in here that was like facility projects because quite honestly, if we decide to spend $100,000 on a project and we ask for ESSER money, then it's really a wash. It doesn't matter if it's in there or not. I didn't wanna presuppose any of those projects because I mean, those are a little more controversial maybe as far as priorities go, whereas these positions are pretty strong positions that line up with what we all think we need to do. So what's in the budget for ESSER two and ESSER three relates to these five positions. And I can give you a ballpark of maybe like $74,000 per position but every position is gonna be different depending on placement, you know. Health insurance, of course. Okay. Yeah, and know that we don't as I think this board has heard from Grant and myself multiple times when we're talking about one time funding, we don't take that lightly with positions, right? Yeah. And so we have thought like, okay, so if we use one time funding to pay for a position for these two years, we've thought about long term, so we'll do it this way. The class size that Tina was bringing up significantly influences what we're thinking because if the numbers continue at UES, it makes sense to continue to decrease K6 FTE but we do need the supports position that we don't have in our schools and it's been a focus for us for a while. And so can just like you see with like, if we decrease the K6 position because of class size this year and increase the guidance counselor, right? That's a locally funded piece, right? So that may continue if we need this academic interventionist that we're paying for ESSER, can we decrease the K6 and still have optimal class sizes and make it move the interventionist into the local front, right? So we've had those thoughts and those considerations and it's good for the board to see those years out because you'll continue to be on the board and when we have these budget conversations yearly, you can say, yes, this was part of the plan. Tina was on the board when I first started and she's heard me talk about systems of support and how we don't have the pieces in place, right? So now we're moving into this piece now because it's long term planning but we do not take putting positions to one time funding lightly. And Jim, we've talked about it multiple times in our meeting too of how we're planning and it's revised and all kinds of things. But yeah, it's something we're considering is as we move down the line for a budget, when we plan a budget, we're not just thinking this year, we're also thinking years on the road. So everything that's in here that's ESSER money, do we think that all of that the following year would be absorbed into the local budget? I don't know if it would be in one year. I mean, well, it might have to be but it might be difficult to do in one year. No, one of those, Greg, because ESSER, when we say one, yeah, when we say one year or one time funding, it may not be one year. Like we can spend ESSER two, for instance, through FY 23, right? And we can spend ESSER three through FY 24. So if we say we have five right now, if next year we can convert a couple of those to local, then we would only have three in ESSER three and then maybe the following year, then we could convert those to local. Or I mean, it very well could be that, I mean, like we talk about behavior being a huge issue and a lot of that is, we think, related to pandemic and issues that are going on right now. In a few years, maybe that need isn't as strong. But I do think that a good target would be to convert a couple of those positions to local next year. So then we're only talking about three positions to deal with the following year. And then that's whenever we either convert those or figure out something else. We lost them again, so I'm on that speaker. I'm just gonna speak up, everybody. Yeah, I don't know. So I just had it really quick because I think I just talked about CLA, which I talk about all day. And I just, I understand the focus of it. This is fantastic. I'm gonna put this on my wall because this is actually gonna help me talk to towns. But I think the focus on what an optimal class size in a typical school year is not the typical school year that we're in and probably not will be next year either. So I just, I still feel very acutely that we're all still in a crisis. I feel like we hemorrhaged staff, we continue to hemorrhage staff because human beings are only capable of handling so much stress and responsibility in the system. Some of us are still helping clean because there's not enough custodial staff. So I just, I understand in the perfect scenario of what optimal class size would be or what we're looking at positions, but I feel really strongly we need to keep everyone who's willing to continue to come into the building and do their job, which a lot of people have been doing through incredibly challenging circumstances. And I would argue that I, you know, some of these class sizes seem small, but I don't know that the 15 kids who are experiencing school this year are what might have been experienced five years ago or will be experienced five years from now. So I just think it's important to sort of be sensitive to. So I think you read the room right that I would not be interested in talking about cutting positions in core curriculum roles in this or next year. I think we're still very much in a crisis and we need our teachers to be there for the kids. We'll just second that and send in that. And also I made some notes about the predictions too, are really hard to nail down right now because there was a flux and a drop with people deciding to homeschool or deciding to go to alternative schools. So it's, I did make, I did write a question and we don't need to get into it, it's just, you know, you mentioned birth rate being used to predict, but I wondered what other factors were. But so I would be nervous to look at these predictions and say that they're set in stone today. And I can say just from my personal experience with children in the middle school too, that and at the elementary school, I've heard stories that it's really challenging. Teaching is really challenging right now. Kids are having a really hard time. And if anything, it would be within their best interest, I think, and the teacher's best interest to reduce classes for a little while and looking at, you know, the data supports that too, that it's test scores are not looking super great right now. And so, you know, I think we have a lot of work to do to get ourselves out of and even to understand what just happened to our community and the world over the past couple of years. So I would be very nervous to make those decisions this year too. To talk about their enrollment, those are just models, right? So that's a model grant uses and they will change. And the number probably that will change the most is kindergarten, because kindergarten's not a mandatory grade level. And so, we don't know if they, if that dropped, that dropped very well to be, I'm just not gonna send my kid to school this year, right? Because we wouldn't get home study information on that. We wouldn't have that information if they just decided not to enroll their five year old because it's not mandatory. Right, so that is a, that's a major question mark that is next year is our first grade gonna rise because it is mandatory in first grade. So we don't know that yet. So you're absolutely right. None of this is set in stone for all the levels. I will say that the enrollment projection was something I was very impressed with when I got here. I inherited this model and it's a very complicated model and it does factor in a lot. In migration, out migration, eight years of trends, four years of trends in some areas. You're right. Kindergarten is the most unknown because you're looking at birth data from five years ago and assuming those kids are gonna stay and you don't know what's gonna happen there. But once you get to like first grade in this model, I'm pretty confident of the model being fairly accurate going forward. So while I might be a little nervous about, well maybe that first grade class size is a little iffy but the second grade class size should be pretty solid. And then we'll see every year, I would feel more comfortable looking at grades two through 12. So that might be an argument towards, well maybe just one K6 position instead of both this year just because of the uncertainty. But because of all the additional FTEs that we're adding to try to address student needs, I just think you gotta look at somehow trying to reallocate to some extent. Not to get too aggressive, but at least something like the PE position and maybe one of these K6, but we did just go to those two because we thought we're pretty confident with that. And then that does allow us next year to that would be one place where we could absorb one pretty easily if the projections play out. Grant, I want you to know that I went back and I listened to podcast number one last night for a medial budget education. So it does have staying power, so thank you. It's a classic. So I was wondering, this has to do with slide 15 and 21. And I was wondering if we've ever taken the approach to look at the actual district-wide staff spread across the schools in a more specific way. I don't know how many district staff that we have. You had made the comment that, you know how you kind of spread the cost of the district staff cost is equally across the schools. And I'm curious if we've ever looked at which district staff kind of serve at the specific schools. I think I'm specifically curious about, I know that the RVS per pupil is very glaring. And I'm curious if we were more specific about it, if that would bring that number down. Unfortunately, and I don't mean to be a wet blanket, I think honestly the way that we've allocated the cost is probably in the favor of Roxbury because I don't have the numbers in front of me, but there's 40 kids at Roxbury. So that's a very low percentage of 1180. So if say 5% of the district-wide cost is being added to Roxbury, that would be like 5% of my cost. I can tell you I spend more than 5% of my time related to Roxbury. I mean, a lot of times it's almost like an equal amount of time, even though it's less students. But the way it's allocated is it's only 5% or whatever the percentage is of the number of kids. Same for Libby. So those are district-wide positions that we allocated the costs across the school. So obviously the high school, middle school, and union elementary school get the highest percentage because they're the highest percentage of kids. So most of my cost is allocated to those three schools. Very little is allocated to Roxbury. So yeah, we could look literally at every position and try to figure out like the three ELL positions, how much time does each one of them spend at Roxbury and then come up with more precise? It would take a long time to do it. But I don't think it's going to change this dramatically. As a matter of fact, I think it might actually make it go higher. Yeah, I mean, just as a comment too, I'd love for us to be sensitive about how we talk about it. In the conversation that happened, I don't know if there's a better way to address that problem or if that problem will ever change. And I would love if we could think about how we talk about Roxbury's not necessarily as that problem. I know that we're kind of continuing to try to figure out how to best meet the needs of the students collectively. And that's part of what the visioning process is about. But I really would appreciate if we just didn't use language like problem when we applied to how we're really working hard to educate students in a community that is part of this district. Thanks for that feedback, Kristen, for your feedback. Yeah, thank you. And honestly, I think we showed it the one time so people are aware of it. I think it's a board issue now because you do have that study that you're gonna be doing. I am fine with removing it from this presentation because it's not something that we're gonna be weighing any decisions on in this budget. So unless there's some kind of strong feeling otherwise, it's hard to kind of find a right spot for it anyway. So I'd probably take it out for the next round of. Which is what we did last year. Yeah, okay, great. And just what are we on the time? We had, I just wanna kind of follow up on some community feedback that we did get in Roxbury and see where it's showing up, if at all, in the budget. I know this was on slide 25 in the local budget was gonna cover an art room and a resilience room, which sound extremely worthy. And I also just wanna add that Roxbury, specifically RDS families were interested in an outdoor structure that could facilitate outdoor learning and provide shade on the playground. And I think specifically just a lot of families really interested in having more outdoor education opportunities available during the school day. And I don't know if that's also part of infrastructure. Do you remember, we talked about that in the infrastructure presentation. And there's a funding source for that. Okay. Yeah, I don't remember which funding source we were against that, but there was. That's right, Brad's got it. It was the bill, which just passed. Have you heard anything about? Oh, the infrastructure bill. The infrastructure bill. I have not. Which nothing has come through to anyone. There's been no, but it was passed. Right, they did something. So we might see that come in via one of the other mini streams. That's our list for that. All of those projects and different funding sources for them. Okay. And also connected to that, and it was mentioned that there is an echo program, that echo that's available at UES. And is there an RVS equivalent or? So right now, we work, I'm looking at that so she can correct me. They don't use eco because that's significantly far away for Roxbury. Being at North Branch primarily in Hubbard Park. Right. They do work with the local farm. Yep. Right now, the kids go there. Enough. They go three times in the fall and three times in the spring. Yeah. And I can learn a lot about my guiding coalition as we're discussing with me as well. So the guiding coalition is the school leadership team, which in Roxbury pretty much is the school team. And us. But they've been talking about this work quite a bit and how the teachers want to design it. And I know Beth and Grant have talked about in her principal, I believe it's in her principal line, work for outside education that the teachers are designing. Okay. So it looks a little different. It's in a different way. Yeah. But similar ideas. Okay. And at some point, it's probably too much to talk about right now, but I would love to get a little more educated about the food service deficit, which sounds like it's a perennial challenge. And I know that we've heard some community feedback about an interest, could that be permanent? The fact that we're able to feed kids breakfast and lunch. I know that's a federal reimbursement bonus at the moment. How long do we expect that to continue? And I don't know if I'm dredging up old. No, it's a good question because it's been beneficial this year. Yeah. But it's not influencing our budget except in a positive way for food service. Right. We've done, Grant's done some modeling on numbers when the conversation was coming up because the original, the law that was trying to be passed last year that did not make it through was that they were going to put that cost on school districts and it would be a mandated cost. So, and I believe it was something like $600,000 or it was a large number for Monterey Rocksburg that Grant was modeling. I can't remember the exact number. I think the total expense for the food service is like 600,000. So if you, it could be as much as maybe three, I would hope a little less. So somewhere between 100 that we're currently paying already and 300 I would hope would be the worst case. Without any federal reimbursement, you did that number. That's what they were talking about. Getting rid of the federal reimbursement or making it much smaller and having school districts as a mandated cost, pick up the cost and mandate the free meals. Then the total expense is 600. If that should happen, then you're talking about a $600,000 part of your budget that you can't touch. You can't change it in any way. So it's an automatic increase of $600,000 which we would be having to have very hard conversations about how do you make that doable for our taxpayers? And so they didn't pass that last year. It's the board's prerogative if you wanna do that beyond the law, right? You tell us you wanna do that then we're gonna have to make some really hard choices. The board is gonna have to help us make some really hard choices because that's a significant increase in the budget. And so what we told the legislature when superintendents were testifying around this is that we are all for the free meals. We think it's good. We think it's a great piece for all of our kids. We've certainly seen the benefit this year. More kids are eating the school lunch than ever before. However, do not make a mandated cost to figure out different funnings or of course there's a funding formula for it. Okay, thank you. That's it in a small much. Yeah, I got her. Thanks. Thank you, Grant. And I mean, free, kids who qualify for free lunch obviously get it for free. Kids who qualify for reduced price meals are also getting it for free because of a state kick in. But it's the full, kids who don't qualify for free or reduced normally would have to pay the full price this year. And I don't know if it'll go into the following year or not, which because of the uncertainty for FY23, I wouldn't want to build any of the budget for it yet because there's so much uncertainty with it. But I would say it would be a good thing to think about next year and to do early on to do some modeling because we could still get some federal reimbursements but there's hoops you have to jump through. Like you have to still get free and reduced applications in and it's hard to do if everybody knows you're going to get free lunches anyway. And why would I fill out the application? So there's some challenges that we would have to overcome and I would want Jim Birmingham who is our incredible food service director to be a part of trying to figure it out. Right now he just doesn't have the bandwidth. I'm going to pause this for a second. Grant and I are happy to stay. Can I send my administrators home? Well, I also want to do a topic. I think, I think Red is the only person that's focused on my thought is we do have the opportunity to talk about this budget. Multiple times. Multiple times. So I would like to give Rat a chance to go. I have one quick question. I then I'm going to find out. Can we maybe give the admin team a round of applause? Thank you. Thanks everyone. See you tomorrow. Thanks everyone. Thank you. I have a good question regarding the food. I didn't think half of the compensation could be in here but is there a bull farm number that we have to be just going to go on as it will cost to be able to go away? Yeah, we believe that it. We're modeling it to be around $600,000. Uh-oh. Thank you. What's your phone? I'm just going to tell her. I know she's not on here or your phone. Yeah, she hung up. I think we can... Do you want to just follow up on this? Do I just text her? I just didn't. It's about $600,000. Yeah. You could maybe type it into the chat, zoom chat. I'm not a fan of zoom chat. Did you get it Amanda? I did, thank you. So let's do Rhett a quick question then we can spend a couple of seconds about outreach and then we'll see if we can get out of here one at night. Are there BCBAs out there? That's a good question. Rhett, are there? People are going to ask me a little bit of a question. I mean, I wonder in this process as you're talking about your long-term plan are you also talking about the possibility that the human resources will continue to not exist? And then how do unfilled positions affect the budget? So to your first question, I don't know. We have a BCBA now. We hope to hold on to her because she's good. And she made a major difference which is one of the reasons why. I can imagine that that right now is exactly what's just hidden in the sweet spot. And she's gonna have... Yeah, that's the thing is that so many people have just essentially re-evaluated what matters and that type of work is so incredibly demanding. If you have other options, they look sweeter every day. Yeah, and you can get paid potentially more for a position like that, not all positions but for a position like that. So yeah, that may be wishful thinking. It depends as to what happens if there's a vacancy. It depends on the funding mechanism, right? So right now we're suggesting, because it still needs to go through public engagement, that the BCBA would be funded for S3, with S3 money for two years because we do think that this is a blip, right? And so if we got two BCBAs, could they help us get programming up and going and help us develop our human capacity that we currently have in the local budget? So that potentially, maybe we don't need it, right? That's one of the parts of thinking around that. But if it's paid out of through a grant fund, and we can't find somebody, then we can reallocate those dollars to something else, okay, that's pretty easy just done through an amendment. If it's paid through local dollars, then it's a position, and I'm gonna say this beautifully, but it's a position that the union owns, okay? So then we go out there, like we'll take the PE for an instance. So we are- Or the individual assistants, which have been empty for the whole year. Right, so we go out and put it on school screen and advertise it all over the place. And if it continues to be a vacancy, then it's just a vacancy. And that money for that goes into the fund balance if it's a full year, right? And so then we make a decision, do we rip it or not? Or do we want it? So for instance, the private position for FY 2021 was funded, but never filled. Well, it was filled and then the person resigned pretty quickly. So we had a full year where we didn't have that position, but we knew we wanted that position, so we didn't rip it. We kept it for the next budget. And so that's how it depends how it's funded largely. So is that where like the $400,000 came from? Is eventually- The fund balance. Your fund, because you had empty positions for a long period of time, it gets rolled over. It's part of it, yeah. It's so class if you don't have, if you don't have, well, it all shakes out in the bottom line, right? So if you have some unexpected expenses, it might offset that. Right, exactly. And like a perfect example right now is we have unfilled custodial positions, but we're also incurring a lot of custodial overtime. So, I mean, those are kind of balancing each other out. We're not just gonna see a big surplus because we had vacancies because we're having expenses that are unfortunate. And I believe we just hired another one. Yeah. That's a good one. That's a good one. Especially when we're rock stars. Good boy. Here. Talk to about? No, that's in the infrastructure. In the infrastructure? Okay, I didn't explicitly see it so long ago. Yeah, no. So, I guess that's one of the reasons why we did such a preamble with the infrastructure piece. Probably not, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say we planned it this way, but I don't know if we did. Because that was so much influencing with lots of different revenue sources and many different projects over many different years. It's in here through capital fund or potential asset three money, or it's in there, it's just not broken down that way. Oh yeah, perfect. I just wanted to make sure because I didn't see a big surplus in the infrastructure. So, yes. Oh, thank you. Could you, I also wanted to just echo thanks not only for the preparation and the presentation, which is fabulous, but also that I also see a lot of staffing positions reflecting the community input that we've been getting. So, I just wanted to echo what Emma said more eloquently than I have. I would also love to just hear because we filled the position and you also mentioned the groundwork that you've been laying around what the high quality education looks like and what the standards need to be. Could you just help paint a picture for, if and when we fill the positions like epidemic interventionists, for example, what are the outcomes that we would expect to see at the end of maybe one year that we're not seeing right now? The one thing for the timely systems of support is an excellent question. For the timely systems of support, the pieces that we'd see and Jim's gonna stomp on my foot because I can walk on this for a while. Yeah, I know. Like it's my jam. So, when I start going into wonky land coming up, the major thing we're gonna see once we have those positions filled or those positions are filled, it's more of a systemic thing right now. They are filled right now. We have the capacity we want right now. It's just, we're talking about the different funding sources, right? Right, that's right, okay. So, those positions when it says academic interventions, we got them right now. That's right, thank you. So, what we're gonna see when that system is working on all cylinders is that when a kid doesn't reach proficiency in our priority standards, teachers know that they are reteaching within their high quality instruction, within their first and second instruction attempts, right? And then when we see kids who have universal gaps in skills, so I'll give you just an example, right? I was a former second grade teacher and a kid who's struggling with multi-syllabic words, right, as a second grade skill. So, the teacher is working on that consistently. A kid who doesn't have their short vowel sounds, universal skill, they should have that by second grade, right? So, that's when we immediately notice that, we immediately have it and we have people who have expertise in how to get the E in the I short vowel sound, right? And so, it's not just what we have right now or what we have had is a limited support and it's little Jimmy doesn't have his short E in short I, so he's gonna get 30 minutes of intervention time five days a week and we don't know what the teacher's doing with Jim, right? We don't know what the goal is. It might be to increase decoding. That's a huge goal, right? So, these interventions will be so expert in naming very specific small tiny chunks to get that kid fluent in that and then say, is there another universal skill that this kid needs to work on? Yes or no? We'll continue to work on that with another tiny chunk that should only take one to two weeks to nail and then move, you know? So, it's like, it's a response immediately. So, this idea that we're hearing from the community, which we have heard since I've gotten here, is it's like you're waiting for my kid to fail. That's accurate. I'm totally, right? It's happened to a lot of kids of yours who are in this room, right? It's happened to my kid, quite honestly, in math. So, what we're trying to do is make it so we have the experts. So, we've got the human resources. Now, our job is to make them experts and to ensure that they get funded, right? To make sure our systems work so our teachers are reteaching the priority standards and our interventionists are noticing immediately where the gaps are with the universal skills and working with very small goals to get the confidence in the kids, get them working in the skills and getting them going. So, they're not forever an intervention. Does that make sense? Yeah, and I just think it's really helpful. I know we don't have a robust audience here, but helpful for us to understand it, especially when we get feedback from the community because we've gotten emails, and of course you're here again, to just say we understand where you're at right now and there is a plan. Yeah, the challenge is this is not fixable like this. Right, right, but as you just said, once intervention happens, it could happen, the shift could happen within one or two weeks. It's just that we have to put these building blocks in place. So, I appreciate the explanation. Thank you. Great question. All right, so do we want to? Is that on there? Yes, oh, we can hear you. Yes, do we want to talk briefly about outreach or do we want to just push that to the 15th and wrap up? Well, I guess one question I had about that, Libby, is just a timing one because as you've told us, you have a process that you're following I think most of us understand that process, but that the process includes community engagement mostly once you have a plan in place. I think what the board is gonna discuss is does it make sense for us to ask you to shift that process a little bit, and stay with me now for a second, because I also would expect us to support you on that, to include the community engagement in the while you are establishing the plan. And so my question is just timing wise, if you were to hold off until the 15th, are we getting too late to help you actually by making a decision whether or not we want to ask you to include community engagement earlier on? I think some of the questions I would have is when you saw suggested us or three use in this particular budget, are those pieces not responding to what you've heard in the community? That's a question I have, because what we were asked to do way back in July when we sat down was wait until the kids get here and assess what your needs are based on what the kids' needs are. So from our administrative perspective, our needs are largely around social emotional behavior, some getting the timely systems, and what we've heard from the community, what I've heard from the community is that those are also the wishes and desires of the community. So I'm wondering where the disconnect is. Yeah, I don't think it's a disconnect necessarily, and this is really just me speaking, so I know that this needs to be a board decision if we're gonna ask you to do this, but I don't think it's a disconnect necessarily. It's more that what I don't know, and maybe others know this, is whether or not we've heard from some of those communities that don't always raise their voice as lovely as, well I'll just be frank, parents who look like me, or caregivers who look like me. And that's the piece that I really would love for, again, just speaking for myself, would really love to have included in the process early on, our folks like our BIPOC families, our English language learning families, our families with special needs, kids. And that's maybe just I don't know, because I haven't been a part of every single one of the conversations, and maybe someone can tell me, no, actually we have heard and incorporated feedback from those folks, and then maybe this is a moot point, but that's the one piece that I'm most wondering. Take a look at the public page, the answer, the link that's in here. Did, yeah, I did. Did you look at the graph of all the people? Maybe not. So if you go all the way, it's a long document. If you go down. If you go down. If you go down. Is it, are those graphs, maybe, the people that respond it, or just the demographics that we have? The list that's on there? Oh, we lost her again. Yeah. The list that's on there is the list that the agency of education is requiring of us. I didn't know. We're talking about the demographics for our district, but this. Oh, are you talking about the slide? In the S and R time document. I'm trying to understand, sorry, sorry to interrupt this, but it's hard to be in the online world. I understand if the feedback that we've gotten in those that have like components, have we heard from our BIPOC family? Have we heard exclusively from our multi-legal family? Have we heard exclusively from families, which is very, like explicitly have we actually gathered folks that they hate? You are part of or identify with this community. Have we heard from the LGBTQI folks community? Exclusively about what are the things that? So what we've done so far, this process is not finished, right? So what we've done so far is we've sent individual invitations, like actual mailed to houses, not to, we didn't send it to Jim's house, but we sent it to families with IEPs, and we sent it to BIPOC families specifically. That was over the summer for the initial kind of conversation. We have in the thought exchange that was sent out around infrastructure, there was demographic questions in there, so I have the responses from that. I have the percentages of the people who responded for the thought exchange. I just tried to pull it up, but the internet's not wonky right now, so I can't give you the exact percentage. I actually am working on a public report from that thought exchange tomorrow. It's on my calendar to do tomorrow, so all of that information will be in there. So those are the things that we've done so far explicitly. I've had one-on-one conversations with families, and if I've had one-on-one conversations, it's listed in that public plan. I've had conversations with kids here at school, kind of on a one-on-one basis or in group basis, or I'm thinking of, I talked with Renee, who says this group is looking, you know, like Renee's had those conversations with kids. So we take a lot of those factors into play. So that's what we've done so far. To answer your question of timing, so I believe the application is due in March. I think so. The final application is due in March. So when we say that though, we're not writing the application in March. Of course. We're writing the application in January. And just because the deadline is in March, there's plans that need to be made and it needs to be fit in. So the things that we're suggesting are not what, we get significant feedback from the community that says, this is not what we want and we should react to that, then we have to change a lot of planning. And that's just the name of the game, but it's also really tricky. What's really tricky about community engagement, this kind of my own soapbox as an educational administrator that I've had for a while, what's really tricky about community engagement is that the perspective of etiquette is etiquette's experience with DIA in school, right? It's not DIA's experience with lots of other, it's DIA's experience in maybe her friendship group, right? So it gets really tricky, you know? So we're trying to get a lot of different ways that's one reason why I love the thought exchange so much. Because you really get some good information off of that. So it's tricky, community engagement is tricky, because everybody's perspective is very different, right? Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, I will just support you in saying that I think, from the community input that we did receive, which like Grant said, no community input is ever enough, community input, and you want better participation at these events that you're hosting, but you know, there's only, it's like we're putting it out, they're putting it out there, and people aren't coming in droves to give feedback. And I've tried to initiate conversations with community members around ESR funding, and it's sort of like a little over their heads, and they're not super connected and interested in providing feedback. That's my anecdotal experience of trying to engage my neighbors and community members. But I will say that I was really happy to see how much of the input that was provided was immediately reflected in planned, substantive plans, sorry I did not speak incorrectly, change of plans for ESR3 spending. Yeah, yeah. It's very different now from what it was before Libby had her several things over the summer. Yeah. So I think that's great. I mean, I also think whatever we can do to get more and more, and especially from voices who aren't always heard, I think we should do. And whatever I can do. Yeah, I think we should definitely. And I was social media. I mean, we can always get better at these things. This is a perennial problem, this is a popular Roxbury problem. This is a problem everywhere. Yeah. So, and I think we probably get more community engagement than most. And I don't see why we wouldn't be able to, like you said, really support it. Like almost we could just do it as listening sessions. I mean, Amanda basically has a listening session with BIPOC families and families with kids who special needs to teed up almost. Yeah. So that's what I'm saying is we could definitely help make this happen. Yes. And I have that community engagement doc. Things are put in there. Yep, right. And just a heads up, maybe we made some, I put in some ideas in there for me to look at, right? And us to discuss as leadership teams and stuff. Yeah. Anyway, it sounds like it's important. And I think it's about the community engagement that can lead to more conversations. It doesn't even get, you know, the different positionality that is what's important. But that this is not a one-on-field that these conversations help us. And we might be able to say, hey. Oh, yeah. I have a question. Well, just Jim was asking us, do we want to push this to December 15? I think it sounds like it would be okay if we continue this conversation in two weeks. We're not going to miss the boat. Anyway. Can I just ask a quick question? So I feel like in terms of soliciting this, I would input that equity committee is really well suited to this. You know, on the 15th, we were planning to talk about that survey, but I think I could assist with engaging with the teachers. And my guess is they're not going to really want to like pick this survey up in December anyways. Right before the holiday break. So instead of using, I'm just proposing this because I know what's on that agenda because you invited me to that meeting. You guys could use that time to like make some progress on this while I begin to engage with the teachers on this and then in January we can loop back together. I think that sounds great. I was just raising this as a process point because it feels important that if we're going to ask the administration to essentially shift their process a little because you already have a plan in place for writing a plan that the board be on the same page that yes, this is something we want to ask the administration to prioritize and to the extent that to because we think it's that important you would give support. So before we went too far down the road of you know, acting on listening sessions, et cetera, it seemed like what we needed was consensus on the board that that was something we were gonna ask the administration to shift but not significantly their process but a little bit. What I guess I'm not hearing what would ask the administration to do but I am seeing an opportunity for the board to step up and solicit this input. Correct, we wouldn't, yes, I think you and I are essentially saying the same thing. The part that I think is a slight adjustment is that it's a place where we would be working we'd be holding our own responsibilities but we would be essentially handing off information to the administration and saying, okay, we've gleaned this for you to use right now and that is different. That's the board doing a little bit differently than we normally do and I just think it's good for all of us to all be on the same page about it. And there's feedback that you're talking about S or related and there's feedback related to the budget and some of it is similar but one thing I think that Libby kind of alluded to quickly was there's a lot more S or three that we're gonna spend than what's in here. Way more. Great. So as long as what's in here that we proposed for S or three, which is not much as long as what's in here for S or three sounds reasonable then I think we can move on with the budget and then we can talk about the other things that we need to put into the application, the grant application. So I'm just, I just want to make one. It influences the budget. Yeah. It influences the numbers, the percentage to all of those things that you saw tonight. Yeah. That portion of the S or three. Yeah. So if what you've got in here for S or three looks good then I think we're postured to move forward with the budget process which has to be baked by the middle of January I think. So that's good. And then obviously pressing on with the bigger S or three. Right. So I'll be teeing up because we need some feedback on the pieces in this budget for particularly S or three. So I'll be teeing up probably another thought exchange soon around that piece. So that may just follow a question on that is if let's just say hypothetically we learn from multilingual families that they, that really there's a bigger need than we thought. I don't know. Like I said, I'm making this up. And in fact for the next two years we think we actually need a whole nother English language learner teacher with that but that we cover it with S or three it would go in the budget but then the S or three money would also increase as a revenue in the budget. So if we don't know about that in time for the budget then it might not be in the budget. Yeah. If it's in the grant then we would get the money and we could execute it afterwards. Right. So yeah, that's like with any grant. We can get some grant that we don't even know about and that's why 23 was certainly not in here. And if we get the money and we can spend it that's one of the things you also provide authority for the superintendent to do for other grants is if you get the money you can spend it. So S or three would be the same. There's some stuff in here. If we decide there's more stuff that we need to do it doesn't have to be in the budget it's not going to be in the budget. Is there any truth? Oh, oh. I can't believe it. It's okay. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Is it also true with the S or fund in that you can change. Yes. Like next year and read the rep money if you feel that you need this. Yeah, you can make what's called amendments to the grant you can do that with any grant. You can make amendments to the grant. The difference with S or three than other federal grants is that every time you make an amendment it has to go through an engagement process. And just keep in mind the engagement process it's very clearly that explained to us from the agency of education that the engagement process is not a thumbs up or thumbs down from the community. It's gathering feedback, right? So we could get feedback that the administration feels really strongly about the VCBA position and that would be paid for out of S or three. The community says, uh-uh, we don't think you need that. Well, then we have a conversation talk to you about what we do need and that may show up somewhere else, right? It doesn't mean that it's never go that that feedback goes gets thrown into a trash can, right? That feedback gets put into our mindset and our thinking as we continue to plan and we do this budget process every year, right? And every year we have federal grant money whether or not it's us or not. So just keep in mind that we're playing long games here. It's not, you know, it's not just short and done. I think that the essential nature of what Mia was talking about is if we have a couple of listening sessions between now and January 15th, is it possible that that feedback could be, could influence your plan? For S or three? Yeah. Right, so there's time. I mean, like, I think it doesn't need to be totally formalized by the board. I think we can just move forward on listening sessions and provide feedback. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, the avenues that are already established and as long as you're keeping an open mind to that feedback, influencing your actual planning for S or three. Absolutely. Yeah. Sounds like a plan. Hey, Richard, if I can add that we might be able to also access a notice change. Is there, does that way that can also use it? Yep, Jim has complete access to it. So Jim has a thought exchange. We had to put three, we could put three, four users on the account. So myself, Renee, Mike, Barry, and Jim, okay? And I'm happy to design it, design it too. But Jim went through some training with me around it. So, yeah, he was the board's representative for it. So can you just export data? I think, yeah. You just take data out, put it in a document, put it in a PDF and share it with us or no? From the reports from that exchange to me? Yeah, kind of. So just do wait with that exchange too. Yeah, you can do that. The reports are very significant. Yes, because I've struggled a little bit, like I've looked at it a little bit and I struggle a little bit, like you were saying, have you seen the demographic data yet from that exchange, like, I... You can't say I can do that. But when I write the public report, when I write the public report, that will obviously... Okay, neat. Cool. Just do wait. We're excited. When are we gonna see that? I'm gonna start working on it tomorrow. Oh. Is the next one... For this first round. For the infrastructure one. For the infrastructure one that they just closed. Is the next round gonna be academic, social, emotional? Yeah. It's 9.15. Yeah. I'm gonna move. I think he's moving to adjourn. Thank you, Grant. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Grant. Appreciate the attention. Bye, second. All those in favor? Bye. Be right in the middle.