 I'm opening the School Board of Directors again this time not all by myself at 632 and let's do roll. Emma? Here. Ryan? Here. Jerry? Here. I think we have the little Remick family. Oh sorry, I'll fix that. Here. Jill? Here. Anniket? Here. Mia? Here. And Andrew? Here. Great. Did I miss anyone? No. Public comments. Again, we'll do this via the raise hand function and if you can't raise hand after the raise hand people speak assuming there are any you can either raise your hand physically or just give a shout out which might be just as easy because I don't see everyone on one screen. The raise hand function is if you click on participants the bottom right there's a little raise hand button. Okay, so I see Beth. Beth, you want to go and if there's others they can speak if not they can move on to the consent agenda but Beth please and also please please use yourself or. Great, happy to thank you. So for the record my name is Shabnam Beth Nolan. Most of you know me as Beth Nolan but this does not give you a full sense of who I am. I was actually born with the name Shabnam Hubsida. I spoke Farsi before I spoke English and I'm the first generation born in the United States after my parents had to seek political asylum in the country in this country at age 17. Excuse me. And we're never allowed to step foot back in their home country. Beth became a part of my identity at the age of five because it was by that age that I had figured out that I wasn't white enough. My name was not normal enough and my identity not good enough for my white country. I know many of you have seen me at these meetings and out in the community trying to talk with people about why the school resource officer does not match our values as a community. To some they're probably wondering what is this white woman doing talking about how people of color are impacted by police and schools. I get it and I don't blame you. I've performed whiteness for most of my life. My proximity to whiteness and the privileges I carry have ensnared every aspect of my life for as long as I can remember. I've used it to my advantage many times. I've watched as people in this community and on this board have listened to me and heard what I said right after they listened to a person of color in front of mine say the same thing but they didn't hear what they said. In my experience and behavior is not unique. It's actually quite common for Middle Easterners and we can all imagine why that is. But now I have kids and I'm done pushing that part of my identity down. I grew up with cops in my school. I've had interactions with cops as a child and young adult and in July I sat in this virtual room with you as several people of color in this community shared their experience with police or as people of color in our community. At that meeting those who were brave enough to speak were then immediately responded to by being gaslighted by the city manager of our town and superintendent of our school. Essentially we were told that doesn't happen here. It's a national problem and not a Montpelier problem. So then we tried to show you that it's not just people of color in this community who believe having an armed cop in our school is not necessary and we gather signatures from 350 of our fellow Montpelier community members, the people who voted some of you into office. We provided letters and recommendations and gave you unbiased research to help you see why having an armed cop in our school was not safe. Hold on I lost my spot here. We talked about the impact it has on not just people of color because has that ever been recent enough but also the impact it has on LGBTQ kids, kids and mixed immigration status families, kids who've been a part of the foster care system and so on. We heard the cops respond that those are other communities not ours. Your response was to create a study committee to learn more because the people of color who showed up to share their experience and the 350 signatures and the research was not enough. This board needed to study the meaning of safety and justice because we live in a culture of white supremacy that has shaped systems and structures to constantly and continuously challenge what's true when it's people of color who say it. I saw other people of color in this community stop being engaged because they didn't feel safe doing it or they had been shut down by elected or hired leaders in our community. This board has made major decisions about policies and budgets with almost no community engagement and certainly not by study committee. The community comes out in a major way to show you what they think and you say let's study this somewhere. So fine I understand this is the structure systems and culture playing itself out probably with you not even seeing it or intending to let it happen. So then you sought out community members and had an admirable goal of getting marginalized voices to the table and I know what a hard task that is. I stepped away at this point because the weight of this realization of all it takes to get people to believe people who don't fit the white cultural norms because of the backlash I got from people and the white fragility they let take over. I saw the committee get stacked with administrators who are pro-SRO because safety looks different for some of our leaders in many communities than in other communities and I took a breath but this is the work and it's always heavier for people like me. I've done policy advocacy work for marginalized communities for my entire career more than a decade so I know how it goes and I went to the first committee meeting where we were asked what makes us feel safe and unsafe and I shared that this work actually has made me feel unsafe. You know what followed that remark the assistant principal of one of our schools the one who has been there and in charge of school discipline for decades who one has to assume had some role in the severe disproportionate impact school suspension on people with disabilities and black kids in our community who I had previously had conversation with where I felt uncomfortable who I heard as a hard ass with kids this person says that they have family who are police and border patrol and that they are good kind people and that they are glad they are in those roles that was the person's response following the words that came out of the mouth of a child of immigrants to the question of what makes you feel safe there are good people on both sides not to say anything of the real and grotesque abuses currently happening by border patrol raping women separating families and shooting people first sport it disgusted me so I pulled back again into the background and stayed plugged in through others involved in this effort you know what I then heard that a member of the committee who is in every way living the experience of a white person whose skin gives them privilege questioned why these just school initiative people are involved and maybe we don't really understand the role of the SRO and suddenly there is this narrative that there is controversy or mixed support for an SRO in the school and that the conversation is about whether or not kids are safer with a cop in the school you've gotten lost in the fog of white supremacy culture this conversation was never about physical safety of kids or the false sense of safety of the school administration or staff which is supported by research and there is no controversy their community has been clear if you want this quiet this conversation to be about safety sure but broaden the scope and do not simplify it or put it under the scope of the topic of SRO what about the more than 40 households with children who are currently homeless in our county how do they play into the safety safety you seek to define whatever you do don't say it's about safety and then use it as a cloak so what would you do in my shoes I find myself outraged and angry and then reminded that I should be pulled together and reserved that I need to be strategic and thoughtful that I should not call out the very real ways I've seen racist ideas play out in this issue I've tried that and I'm not sure it helped I continue to ask myself what more information could you possibly need to take that money and reallocate it of course there is more work to do to figure out what to reallocate that money to and I'm not suggesting the conversation or work stops at an answer to the SRO question like I said policy advocacy has been my career I get it and look my kids are halfway and will never experience the racism or discrimination people like me have so I could walk away from this and my family would be okay you know how many people I've heard say oh if I were of age in the 60s to march with MLK or if I were alive during slavery I would have never been able to take it I would have fought it have you ever found yourself saying that I have and that is why I cannot walk away why I get so mad about the way that this has played out it's not the time for small calculated steps that continue to uphold white supremacy culture it's the time for bold action for big bold steps that affirm our values and show people their lives their definitions of safety matter too so here's my question for you and I do mean for you to answer it's not rhetorical during everything I've said what else do you need to make the first decision about whether or not there should be an SRO in our school buildings I've done this work long enough to know that with this committee situated the way it is you are not likely to get a uniformed answer about whether the school budget should include an SRO or what the definition of safety should be and I'm worried that this lack of clear guidance from a committee structured the way it is is going to make you forget that you already have all the information you need to make a decision ultimately it is you the board that needs to decide you set the vision and the policies does having an armed cop in the school match our values does it align with our district equity policy does it even align with your own personal values and what else do you really need here let's just get to the real work of actually figuring out what does match our values and stop worrying about the exact definition of safety for months now this school board has committed itself to working out this question of the SRO and ultimately I wanted to share these thoughts and feelings with you tonight because as I've watched this play out it is felt as if there is no full glass that no matter how much we pour into the empty cup it never quite feels full enough for you to feel good about making a decision and I wanted to remind you that so often this board makes decisions on very important topics with far less community support with far less engagement and that sometimes it is easy to get lost in the cloud of the type of culture we live in that is rooted in white supremacy it's the systems and the and the structures not necessarily the individuals and sometimes we just need to pull out of that fog and remember what our values are and whether or not we're meeting them and that can be a simple answer when you step back thank you great thanks Beth um I don't see any other public comment we'll definitely those are very very well put together comments and we'll obviously consider them when we're talking about the budget tonight um let's move on to the consent agenda and also Emma wanted to add an agenda item just about restructuring the timetable for the safety committee which we can get to with the board discussion um do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda I move to approve the consent agenda um java second um any discussion um Emma hi ryan jerry hi jill etiquette hi Mia Andrew great uh consent agenda is approved um and now we're moving on to what seems to be a a regular item on our agenda which is appointed a new board member um so this and fortunately we've had an embarrassment of riches uh the last couple go around um we have four board members um and I'd love to give each of them a minute or two to speak um if they wish to I see I think I see Amanda and josh here I don't know if I see Chloe and I know that Adrian was unable to make it but she provided a recording that I think Libby has Tita to share um do you have that ready to go Libby otherwise we can why don't we go with that first um and then um Amanda and Josh if they wish to speak and Chloe if she pops on all right let me see if I can get this going thank you and I'm really excited to have the opportunity to um talked with you all tonight I'm sorry I'm not there live in person um I had a former commitment that I was just unable to reschedule for um to be there for tonight's board meeting I did submit my letter of interest to the Montpelier Roxbury Public School Board first I wanted to thank you all for your service your dedication to supporting our community our families our students and the staff of our school district it would be an honor to serve on the school board to continue to build on the successes that you have already accomplished over the years I'm I'm gonna just talk to you a little bit about why I'm interested in becoming a member of your school board and the skills and expertise that I could bring to the table first and foremost I am a mom of two daughters um they are now in fifth and seventh grade my daughter Abby started at UES when she was in kindergarten and so we have gone through the elementary school and now we are um 100 at the middle school and since that time I have been 100 dedicated to supporting the schools through the parents groups I was a founding member of MRPS PI which is Partners in Education a 501c3 nonprofit that um convenes all four parents groups from the schools I was also um founded the Montpelier Fall Festival which was one of our largest fundraisers for all four schools we were going to have our fifth year in 2020 but um we have extended that to 2021 let's keep our fingers crossed we can have a big community um gathering in September I was also the wellness coordinator for a couple years and worked with the schools to help assess their school nutrition department um to find out how that organization is structured and opportunities to continue to grow and be sustainable within the school district I also worked with each of the schools to update their wellness policies so in addition to working locally I am a national school health expert I've worked in the field of public health and school health for the past 20 years I currently um not necessarily travel due to COVID but I work with cities around the country to help assess their wellness policies and try to figure out what is working really well for them in terms of health and wellness what are their strongest programs and make recommendations to improve areas based on you know their community their support their partnerships the budgets um I look at school nutrition physical activity staff wellness social emotional learning is a huge topic right now health education um staff wellness really looking at the the whole school um and making those assessments for those cities um in addition to that um I own my own business and I would bring to the school board and to our community my expertise and continuous improvement strategic planning I have a full toolbox that I could utilize and support the school board um in terms of appreciative inquiry design thinking strategic planning lean methodologies results based accountability leadership training management social emotional learning and really organizational development this is my passion and this is what I love this is what I do every day and I would love to really bring my skills and expertise to the school board and just really continuing to to see the vision as to where we want to go and help support those programs those activities the policies that support that work and I hope that you know in closing um you consider my application you consider my skills and hopefully I'll be a good fit for the school board if not I will continue 110 percent to support the work of the schools and the programs the policies and being active community member and and positively moving forward just continuing the work that you will do so that is it for me um thank you so much for your time tonight um I look forward to hearing your decision and have a wonderful evening thank you Libby for making that work and thank you Adrienne if you watch this um um Amanda do you want to say anything you don't have to um but uh we'd love to hear from you if you do sure sure thank you thank you so much for having me um and for this opportunity to speak I will be so honored to be part of the school board if you guys choose me my name is Amanda Garces um yeah and I just want to support our kids our families our communities I see myself as an agent of change where I believe that we do not have to do the work alone but together that we can accomplish great things um I know how it feels to be in a place where English was not my first language I know how it feels to be bullied because of my language my food my mom's old get-up car because within I know uh the long jumps existed and I was extremely cold for most of my high school years um I know how it feels to be ignored by teachers and administrators to be putting classes lower than my level to fill out the forms for free and reduced lunch for my mom applications for apartments after only a few years I became a translator for friends and family I know what it's like to live paycheck to paycheck to have to work while in high school to be able to eat while other kids were worrying about the shoes they were going to wear I also know there were great teachers and administrators out there doing their best job but they just did not have the necessary tools to support the little baby the system fell them too I know I have been fortunate to be surrounded by people who believe in collective liberation and who like me are a part of the bigger work of change that does not center the self because this is all for our kids so the work that the board is coming to do for the past few years with the Black Lives Matter flag I hope to join this team to move that work forward not take one step back I did not have a problem because I didn't speak English the system had problems because they could not explain to my mom what she needed to do or where to go she just found an elaborate map that I had to draw for her to get to the classroom for the parent class and I had to write the words that she needed to say before she made it to the classroom you might be thinking that I know this happened in here but you'll be surprised sometimes I hear the students saying stories that I think maybe they stole my diary and then I remember I don't have a diary so I know it's their stories still being reflected in some of mine and I do what I do because not just because of me because of all the kids that are growing up in this world I want to see a world where the children are supported as their home holds themselves with disabilities the queer kids the kids from our BIPOC community where indigenous peoples they celebrate it and not forgotten where we look at Thanksgiving with the whole context not just one piece of it well every single kid in our classroom is giving the tools to be loved this is why I founded the Vermont College for Ethnic and Social Equity in Schools which is the leader of Act One a bill that will hopefully change some of the educational standards where I co-founded the UES equity committee to look at these things and where I am now very active in the UES caregivers alliance so I hope to join you and if not I will still be here working towards equity so that is not just a buzzword but it is actionable that we actually see and walk the talk so thank you for the time. Okay thank you Amanda and Josh. Thank you Jim and thank you for the invite back it's good to see all of you back on again a little surprise that a month later you're we're back at it but I was very excited at the opportunity to reapply to be on the school board I will admit I don't have some of the experiences that Adrienne and Amanda can bring to the table and I applaud them for for what they've done so far that's it's amazing to hear those stories. I have three kids in the Montpelier school district ranging from the elementary school up to the high school and I will say that that is the driving force to want to join you and to work with this board it's to see the Montpelier school district continue to grow with the changes that are coming with the change that need to be made and to see the school district successful for not just my own kids but every kid who comes after them. I hope that bringing to the I can bring to the table is some of my professional experiences both as a teacher beforehand and then currently as a firefighter and a rescue personnel on that on a USAR team is just the ability to truly step back look at data coming in and make an informed decision and rapidly I think that there are times that we get caught up in the weeds we get caught up in trying to make everything perfect and it slows things down and I think one thing I can bring to the table is leadership experience and that ability to really process things really make a informed decision and then make that action plan and execute it so I won't take too much more of your time I want to thank you for letting me log on letting me see everyone and say hi and put my application forward and I'm confident that if not me that you're going to end up with an amazing school board member just hearing the voices that have spoken before the video and Amanda's so I'm confident that no matter who you choose the school board is going to get an asset moving forward so good luck great thank you Josh and thank you everyone for applying it's it's really important work and we appreciate everyone's willingness to apply and we'll be making a decision in executive session and the toughest part is turning away great people who wanted to do want to do great work for for the school so we really appreciate everyone's application and we'll be getting back to you all on our decision when we meet in the executive session so moving on to the initial budget presentation I will turn it over to Libby and Grant and no Libby you have a powerpoint or slideshow for this so um and screen share that and uh get off the popcorn thank you yes I am going to uh share my screen um this will become part of the public documentation after the board meeting board members you did get it but sometimes it can be a little small so I want to make sure you had it for your own screen if you wanted it Grant and I are going to tag team this we also have all of the principals and central office administrators here so that if the board has any questions whatsoever we also included a community another public comment period I believe on the agenda so so the community members who are here could also comment on the budget just a reminder that when we go through these budgets it's the big level picture it's not broken down into very specific pieces I'm so Grant and I are going to be going through very big pieces but we do have principals here again to answer any questions as well as Grant and myself so I will share my screen here Grant we can get started let me get rid of this so I can get to the present button okay so Grant I now can't see you so um you're just direct me to move the slides if you want me to but I'll get us started so um this is a very similar you Grant even used the same template for the PowerPoint um that several board members who've been on the board before have seen um this is our first go around and Grant and I were talking earlier today to make sure that we go nice and slow because I know we have lots of new board members so new board members if you have questions um for the terms uh for anything budget is not easy the way Vermont chooses to do it so um please ask those questions as I said in an email earlier if you have the question then probably a community member has the same question so we'll go slow Grant knows this like the back of his hand um so he can answer any of those term questions you might have or any other questions actually um so we're going to do the overview some district information some contacts for the budget Grant's going to go into what he knows and what he doesn't know and then go into a little bit more of the detail of the actual financials um we'll talk about enrollment staffing the general fund and the capital fund um the tax rates that we just are hot off the press and the outlook going forward so just a little overview for more of the community than the board members because we know you're all very well aware of this we have four schools we have Roxbury Village School that currently has 32 students that's inclusive of our in-person numbers and our um virtual numbers there's no pre-k rvs this year because we couldn't find a teacher to replace our retired teacher so just keep that in mind Union Elementary School is 399 students we're pre-k through four there Main Street has 382 in grades five through eight Montpelier High School has 382 as well in grades nine through 12 we have 243 employees um and 147 teachers some of those are part time in our themes that you're going to see today we're going to support our theory of growth our four pillars which you'll see in just a second to strengthen our instruction and our students for support we want to focus on staffing which of course is the majority of our budget that's where most of the taxpayer money goes to it's in salary and benefits and student needs is grant so greatly put why we're here we also want to be very sensitive to our tax implications this is a unique year where the ed fund is in severe deficit but the legislature is not holding schools accountable this year but it looks like they are finding other creative ways to bring back some of that money that we'll talk about there's a state factor the dollar yield dollar yield and health rates are increasing we already know this percentage by 9.6 percent which i believe is a little bit lower than last year but not by much our local factors are merger that when we merged with brought when Montpelier merged with Roxbury we had that big tax incentive to do so but it really is a tax increase each year if you think about it that way so this year we dropped from a four four cent um tax break to a two cent and we're using fund balance to offset that tax rate and impacted about 250 thousand dollars we do have increasing student enrollment we're one of very few districts in the state who does have increasing enrollment and we are projecting that enrollment i believe we saw today on grant slide until 2024 so we have a few more years yet where we are pretty positive that our enrollment will continue to increase particularly at the middle school in the high school um we're assuming for all intensive purposes for this budget that we are back in person all completely next year that's a big assumption um but we have our fingers crossed that that's how it will be and so we will make it so uh with our budget um so i got a question can i ask now or should i read to the end uh why don't you write it down indicate and then write it and then we can uh ask the end does that sound okay yeah yeah let's go to the end so we can get the flow just thank you and some of the questions might be answered as let me and grant go through yeah yeah um so i wanted to just ground um the board and what we know from research around what at what works in growth and achieving our goal that all students will learn at high levels this is from michael fulens work um in his book coherence which i think believe came out in 2014 um and he talks a lot about what schools should and should not do and how they should spend their resources or where they should spend the resources and where they should spend their time which of course is one of our most significant resources so he talks about focusing the direction uh creating those uh collaborative cultures securing accountability but not in the way of a finger wag way but securing the cultural accountability that we are all in this together and it's all of our responsibilities so that's directly tied to our collaborative cultures and truly deepening learning through high quality pedagogy uh and that we use when we're thinking particularly this year when we kept in our forefront what are the right drivers for for growth and what are the wrong drivers so fulens work uh shows quite clearly that the right drivers are when we invest in capacity building of our staff and our system that when we collect when we truly put a focus on collaborative work particularly amongst our teaching staff when we dive into high quality pedagogical uh strategies that truly have meaning in terms of student learning and when we look at systemness not individualism but systemness the wrong drivers sorry i'm just admitting people in here the wrong drivers are accountability with no meaning um so things like no child left behind and the more top-down efforts from our federal government those have all been accountability with no meaning behind them and they've been a significant they've had significant negative impacts on our school system we the wrong drivers are looking at individual teacher and individual leadership quality we want to be looking at leaders as a group we want to be looking at teachers as a group and how we can build their collective efficacy together a wrong driver would be investing in technology for the sake of technology um just to get it into our classrooms with no real plan or purpose behind it and a bunch of fragmented strategies that don't truly connect to one another so our leadership team has these drivers of growth the the right drivers in front of us they're actually on my whiteboard in my office constantly they've been there for the past i don't know eight months now um so that we're always have that in the forefront of our thinking some board members have seen this before these are our four pillars of growth this is our theory of growth and we kind of call them what are four pillars pillars of course what we stand on in the middle is that all kids will learn at high levels it's not all all learners or all kids can learn it's all kids will learn at high levels because of what we do every single day and we believe that if we have a collective responsibility and true collaborative practices within our staff that that will help achieve that goal we cannot do this as individuals we have to do it together we believe that we have if we have guaranteed and viable curriculum in our formalized essential learning and that is what we're truly saying all kids will learn that if we have that nailed down and clarified then we can move faster with smaller amount of content we believe that if we have a timely system to enrich intervene and remediate in the moment based on feedback teachers are getting from kids that we can truly move kids in a in a better way and that we have to have high quality instruction in every classroom and we have to clearly define what that high quality is the term best practice has been thrown around in education now for years and has lost its meaning everybody on this call would have a different meaning and so what best practice is so it's up to our leaders to define what high quality instruction is and then go in and coach our teachers on how to achieve that so I've broken this next part of the presentation out by those four pillars and tied it to our budget in this way so we're thinking about high quality instruction what you'll see in this first proposal of a budget in terms of staffing we need to increase our PE staffing at MHS you'll see that our highest increase in enrollment is happening in MHS PE of course is a mandated class particularly for ninth graders and so we need to increase our PE staffing there so that we can have last we had two big of class sizes last year we need to decrease those class sizes to make a difference we've heard from our community over and over and over we heard this from Adrienne earlier and she's an impetus with this is that we have to increase our health education staffing at MHS and MSMS so that we can provide kids with a better understanding of health and a more multifaceted understanding of their health and how to create a healthy lifestyle and we're looking at a system of technology integration across the district so it's not different in each schools but we have one system of how we integrate technology and how we can better access the global community through staffing that we already have in professional development we already know that we are in collaboration with partnerships for literacy and learning otherwise known as the PLL they're actually currently involved with an audit of our literacy practices and all four of our buildings we just got the first result from MHS last last week or this week actually and I'll be sharing that with the board soon they're diving into a huge amount of data about our literacy practices so that we can truly target where we need to target to get the high quality instruction in every classroom we're getting an amazing amount of data from them it's pretty impressive so I'm excited for that work. Liz Mira was the national teacher of the year national science teacher of the year a few years back she's now a consultant for high school and middle school science education our teachers in science at the high school in the middle school and at the elementary have not had a huge amount of professional learning unless they dove into it themselves around next-gen science standards and high quality instruction in the sciences so Liz we have Liz on board to to tap into that a bit we've been working with Christian Cordemont for a couple years now as well as the teacher's development group in math teacher's development group is working with our middle school and high school math teachers and Christian is working with our grades k through six math teachers on differentiated math practices and how to get the habits of learning in math more a part of what we do every single day with kids Christian's been quite successful TDG had to do a huge revamp because we're now in virtual but that that work is going strong as well and then of course we're working with our equity team across the the district on educational equity development and how do we increase our capacity as a staff so that we can truly bring the values of equity diversity and inclusion into our schools in a different way and leadership we're coaching instructional leaders I'm working with this to lead pedagogical change we've had to do some side stepping this year which I'll talk about later when I talk about my mid-year evaluation goals but we're we're trying to get back on track there as well in terms of our pillar of collective responsibility and collaborative practices we're redesigning our staffing for student information and data systems this is a slight increase in our budget it's a different way to staff that position it has more requirements and responsibilities now because the AOE has changed their expectations so we need to redesign that staffing a bit we want to increase our transition students for students with special needs these are students who are older they're in their 20s and they're transitioning from MHS into the real world if you will and that transition service helps do that in a seamless way and helps truly prep children for a more independent living situation or prep adults actually at that point in terms of professional development we're going to continue coaching and professional learning communities etc actually isn't a budget expense it's a time expense which is another resource particularly from our principals and assistant principals and how do we move toward that because collaborative practices are so important and how do we truly define what we mean when we say plc that professional learning community and looking at team assessments and goal settings for effective action that's connected to our high quality instruction and in leaders we're leadership we're still coaching instructional leaders to lead that plc growth from our central office leadership team and in terms of formalized essential learning this isn't a huge amount of budgetary impact but it is something the board has put money in our instructional coaches in the past few years in terms of our sb sebl coach as well as our academic instructional coach which is paid for out of title two but it's still par is still influences our budget a bit so this is a lot of their work in formalizing the essential learning so that we can get to timely intervention systems and high quality instruction professional development we really want next year focusing on our literacy work and that core content work at mhs with uh math and sciences and then leadership we really want to continue time devoted to naming those prior standards to make sure we have what we want in place so that we can make a difference for high levels of learning and then finally timely intervention remediation and enrichment in terms of staffing here we're looking at increasing our special educators by adding an intensive needs special educator at us this has to do with a large proportion of students who have very low functioning autism we're truly not servicing them well right now in our eyes and we're relying heavily on outside consultancy this actually may may look like a decrease in our our finances because we're spending so much money on outside a consultant so what we're trying to we would like to do is build a program for these kiddos to keep them in house and keep them with our people so that will be an increase we're looking continued with alternative programming we we lost our um hire for our alternative program at mhs beginning at this school year at the last moment so that didn't happen this year but we would like to continue that effort at mhs for next year that's actually a medicaid fund that grant will speak of later so it doesn't impact the the educational spending too much and then again this is another thing that's coming out of a different funding source but part of our overall budget is a title one math intervention interventionist at mhs we currently don't have interventionists at mhs and that's a significant gap in what we need in order to achieve our goals for high levels of learning for all students our data suggests that math is a place to start at mhs with our intervention in terms of professional development our interventionist across the district truly need to be capable and knowledgeable and targeted intervention and remediation efforts we need to increase their capacity quite a bit there and then in terms of leadership we have this amazing opportunity right now because our system was so out of the norm that we can truly look at what our schedules look like as we move into next school year again we're assuming we're in person so we can look at what our schedules look like to ensure that we have this time for intervention remediation and enrichment which again is more of a time resource than money resource but that's an enormous opportunity that we have ahead of us for this spring all right so go into the budget i'm going to turn you all over to grant well good evening um there are still about 30 slides so i'm going to have to go a little bit fast on some of these but when we get to the like the tax rate calculations that's where i'll slow down to make sure that that everybody's getting all that all the nuances of that so we'll start with unknowns some statewide tax factors or not statewide but just overall tax factors equalize people count we don't have a final number on that we don't even have a preliminary number yet the dollar yield we got today as far as the recommendation but that has to be set by law common level of appraisal i'll talk a little bit more about that later but that's based on three years of sales data and so if home homes are worth more than they're praised then that cla drops and when that drops tax rates go up so that's something that you'll see later on on the revenue side the aoe will give us some numbers for special ed reimbursements we don't have those yet but i think we got a pretty good guess transportation aid i may or may not get but once again i think i have a good guess on the expense side not too many unknowns um tech center tuition is a bit of an unknown i'm hoping i'm maybe conservative in that area our six semester average is what really plays a big factor in tuition costs for tech centers we used to be more around 15 or so i think last year we were at 16 and a half kids i'm assuming we're going to go up to 19.75 because we have really seen an increase in participation at tech centers contract negotiations all three of our bargaining units are up and so they're all under negotiations so we have to use an assumption for salaries there so at a glance uh you can see the total general fund budget plus the capital plan gives us a total budget of 25 962 597 that's a two and a half percent increase which is very reasonable i believe especially with an increasing enrollment we subtract from that non-tax revenues and i'll explain what non-tax revenues are in a bit that is highlighted because it's still an estimate that gives you education spending whenever you subtract that out that's a three and a half percent increase because our non-tax revenues are down a bit three and a half is the same percentage increase we were last year the board gave us a target of about three percent so you know we're not quite there yet but maybe if we have some higher tax or non-tax revenues that will help equalize pupils we left level for now but with an increasing enrollment you would hope that that's conservative and that the number will be higher our education spending for pupils was about 17 500 the excess spending threshold for the state is 18 800 so we're under by about 1300 per kid the capital fund we are proposing to continue with that this is i think our third year of having a capital fund it's a separate article whenever it comes time for the town meeting but as you can see the capital plan number is factored into our tax rate calculations and we're going to talk a little bit a little bit about enrollment projections this is for the high school middle school and union some things to consider kindergarten is is a is probably the most uncertain data point because it's linked to birth rate from several years ago so that kindergarten line is always kind of iffy but from there then we look at history trends for in migration out migration and this model has been pretty accurate grades five through 12 include rocksbury students who are at the middle school and high school what you're going to see is what's highlighted or circled there we do project decreases coming up at the elementary school middle school is pretty stable we have large increases at least in the near term at the high school and we're still projecting overall enrollment increases through 23 fy 23 back one so this is an enrollment projection that looks at class sizes and this is class sizes once again at the high school middle school and union so what you're going to see is some highlights i should explain those first if it's green if it's highlighted green that means we're actually under optimal class size assuming the model is correct yellow means we're near the maximum class size red means we're over in fy 21 22 you'll see that in k and one we're actually under optimal class sizes you might think that we should be looking at maybe reducing there not to save money but just to get the optimal class sizes because there's a reason why we have optimal class sizes that's the best for learning but we have not proposed any kind of change in staffing because i think covet right now is making the data a little uncertain especially kindergarten because you never know what's going to happen from birth to the age of kindergarten but also for first grade because our kindergarten numbers aren't necessarily solid right now um in fy well actually i should also talk about the fact that in the high school you can see that's yellow because we're real close to the maximum class size we've been talking internally about the fact that we probably need to revisit how we do class size um for the high school because right now it's just math science social studies in english um we're actually pretty good in those core content areas but as liby mentioned we're looking at adding pe because that's where a need is with increasing enrollment right now so we may need to look at how we measure class size for the high school in fy 22 23 looking forward to that year um that may be a time when we have a little more stability in the model to understand what we need to do for union um in fy 24 you'll see there's more more reds um so we need to continue to monitor future years but overall the trend is lower class sizes at union higher at uh at the high school go ahead so roxbury not nearly as complicated of a model um basically all we do is assume that if we have seven kindergarten kids we're going to have seven first graders next year um so you'll see that looks like we're going to plateau out around 30 which is not much different than where we are now this is a nice graphical slide of where each school is and what the trends look like so the bottom dark blue line is roxbury you can see fairly stable you'll see the lighter blue line is union you can see how the trend is showing that that's declining the middle school is in like that pink or purple color that's pretty stable the high school is yellow and you can see that's increasing all the way through the end of the projection the top line is the accumulate accumulative um enrollment and you can see there in fy 23 that's whenever we don't have any more grandparented high school roxbury students and it also marks what we're probably going to see is like the plateau of our enrollment so staffing liby's already mentioned some of these staffing adjustments so district wide we're looking at increasing uh in in grounds maintenance to actually hire a grounds maintenance person right now we contract with the rec department for this um by having our own person that would allow us to control and scope uh and supervise the scope of work at roxbury we're looking to increase the nurse from a point two to a point five i mean right now that's only a one day per week um currently we have already increased that because of covid we're looking at actually kind of keeping it that same level it's also a very difficult position to fill at just a point two um for pre-k we're looking at reducing that from a point six to a point five it's really because we have a turnover in that position so it's really a perfect time to make an adjustment and it would align preschool with ues basically the same number of hours per week at union liby talked about the intensive needs teacher that would create basically an in-house autism program the hope is in future years that'll have a savings for outside placements and also obviously the hope is it serves our kids better um also at union we're going to change the tech integration model that's actually a savings um instead of a teacher only doing tech integration we're going to do like the other schools the librarian is going to do part-time tech integration part-time library and then we'll bring in a part-time library aid for the middle school and high school kind of combined liby talked about the health um having a dedicated health teacher um that's not showing up as an increase but it is made up possible because of the fact that we're increasing p e at the high school um also at the high school we mentioned math intervention you'll see that that's doesn't show up as an increase for a couple of reasons one it's funded by title one so it doesn't cost us any local money and two that position already exists but we just haven't gotten it filled so we need to fill that the alternative program we had budgeted for something like that for this year at a point seven five we're going to increase that to a full-time position it is fully funded by medicaid which is a non-tax revenue so it doesn't increase our education spending or have any impact to taxes um transition services is something will be referenced it's a shift it's not an increase uh we're going to have a special education teacher basically do half of their time working on transition services the other half focused on special education and then systems information we're going to increase that from a part time to a full-time position that person will be very beneficial to things like master scheduling monitoring proficiency tracking post grad data there's a lot more that we could do with this position that would help improve instruction so now we're going to get into the expenses both by program and by category and i'll explain that in a bit you've seen this chart i'm just reminding you basically here that the number we're tracking to is that 25,962,597 before we look at costs broken out by different categories i wanted to just show a quick graphic of our spending per pupil for the budget by building so you'll see main street is just under 20,000 per student the high school is at 23,000 and you got to realize they're they have more course offerings at the high school which that makes more sense typically high school spend more um rocksbury is obviously the outlier at 33,000 um and that's you know because we have a small number of kids um so class sizes are not like they are in other schools at union we're at about 22,000 so it's just something to kind of bear in mind in the future and now we're going to look at expenses by program and i think most of the the titles there are going to make sense to you um maybe a little extra help for things like uh buildings and grounds that includes the capital fund and other projects it includes utilities that kind of thing um safety includes bus aids and crossing guards um fund transfer is where we transfer some funds from our general budget to food service because they typically have a deficit each year and if you look at the numbers you'll see that about 60 of the budget relates to direct instruction general ed special ed um this slide is a nice one to look at it's a bar chart but because the the scale is so out of whack with general ed being so high it's really kind of hard to see much detail so if we'll just go to the next slide which is not as pleasant to look at it has more of the details um i'm going to discuss most of these and give you kind of the main drivers um and we can circle back at the end if you have other questions um the general ed increase is lower than usual mostly because of tuition savings because we have less grandparented um rocksbury kiddos pre-k tuition is lower um it's slightly offset by the fact that we're adding a pe teacher um special ed is about where you'd expect tech tuition is increasing significantly or due to higher participation as i mentioned student support is higher than usual largely due to staffing adjustments this is where that um student information system person is it's the alternative program for the high school it's the rocksbury increase for nurse um the principal line is decreasing and that's uh due to the fact that as you look at all the faces on the screen you'll see that we have a lot of new administrators at rocksbury main street special ed so those are new higher savings and and we appreciate the work they're doing for us the business office for the first time i've had to kind of justify my own line this is a fairly big increase and it's because this is f y 22 is the transition year it's the last year i'll be with you um so i have a person who used to be a business manager that's doing payroll work i'm going to bump that person's salary up have them learn kind of the responsibilities that i have so that we can have a better transition once i leave buildings and grounds is a 10 or almost 11 increase part of that is because of that grounds maintenance position another part is that we have a fairly large increase in projects um a couple that i mentioned on the slide are the autism space that we're trying to create that program at union and then uh main street has a library project there's some classroom renovations at all the schools basically um safety you see a fairly large percentage decrease not a huge dollar amount decrease that's related to the school resource officer position which i'm sure we'll circle back at um that budget for school resource officers 45 000 i've dropped that and just left a little bit of money there um because i want to make sure that um that we have some kind of resource available to us to fill any kind of gaps that might um raise their heads um and clearly the board can redirect if they don't like um what i've put in the budget for the school resource officer but basically the position is no longer funded um transportation is a decrease largely for lower special education requirements um debt services always goes down a little bit because of interest dropping each year fund transfer once again is food service now we're going to look at it by category and you can see what i mean by category salaries benefits professional services um typically i go through this just the first time so that you can see the expenses kind of slice two different ways um but as the briefings go along i usually delete these slides and just focus on programs over 73 of the budget is for salaries and benefits so you may be asked that that may be a good kind of data point to have in your hip pocket most the vast majority of our budget is salaries and benefits professional services just so you know what that is that's things like occupational therapy physical therapy autism support psych evaluations um professional development audit work that kind of thing um purchase services is our repair and maintenance projects our capital fund copiers things like that uh contracted services is our like our bus contract travel cost phones postage liability insurance tuition that's grandparented rocksbury nine through 12 kids it's outside placements it's private pre-k it's also tech tuition uh and then funds are fund transfers food services like mentioned in the next slide we have the same issue the vast majority of the budget is salary so the scale kind of makes this graphic a little hard to kind of follow as far as the changes from year to year but the next slide goes into those details and you'll see in the comments basically the same kind of justifications that I already told you about it it's just now they're in different rows so all of the staffing adjustments now show up as the impact for salaries as an example um actually that number is lower than I thought it would be um considering we added the equivalent of about two and a half FTEs so we did have some new higher savings from year to year that helped offset that health insurance the rates as Libby said went up over I think 9.8 percent um so I was very happy to see that the overall increase in health insurance was only 2.78 um part of that is me being me and being conservative and always budgeting for full family plans for employees whenever we get people in some of them don't even use our health insurance some are two person for example so we've um we've budgeted new people or vacancies at two person level instead of family and we've looked at all of the current types of coverages our employees have and so that helped kind of lower this impact professional services shows a large increase um some of that's for contracting for systems management um so the IT world um and also there's higher special ed services as I mentioned like OT, PT, autism hopefully not so much autism now that we're building a new program purchase services um is higher because of facility projects that I mentioned earlier uh contracted services is decreasing because of special ed transportation that I mentioned earlier um tuition is down significantly mostly for Roxbury Grandparented 9 through 12 and private pre-k to give you a little bit of detail on there we budgeted for 100 pre-k kids private pre-k kids this year um I think we're only at about 58 I know that's artificially low because of COVID but um it doesn't make sense I don't think to budget at 100 anymore so we dropped that to about 75 kids at about 34 $3,500 per kiddo utilities are down mostly for heating oil and that's based on Andrew and I looking at historical usage and costs so we think there's some savings there the rest of the lines are either a fairly routine percentage increase or the numbers are the dollar amounts are very small so we'll move on and we'll look at revenues and if you thought the numbers were small before the font is very small now because there's a lot more on here um I mentioned the term non-tax revenues when I say non-tax revenues I basically mean everything from that third row tech unenrolled tuition revenues everything from that third row down are non-tax revenues meaning they don't get factored into tax rates um obviously the education spending grant the number one line that is the vast majority of our revenues and the next one is tech on behalf what that means is um when a kiddo goes to a tech center the cost might be $18,000 for tuition we pay out of our local budget $9,000 the AOE sends the other $9,000 directly to that tech center and that's the on behalf payment it's not truly a revenue because we have to show the full expense so it's an expense and a revenue but those top two lines are tax rate um drivers the reason why some of these are highlighted yellow is because they're unknown um the tech on behalf depends on what our six semester average is which hopefully I'll find out by around the 15th or at least get a first cut at that number um our special ed block grant and intensive reimbursement and our triple E block grant preschool block grant those I will get from the AOE I think I have pretty good guesses but we'll find out um education spending is highlighted of course because anytime any number changes that number will change because that is the number that balances our revenues with our expenses uh let's see what else I should point out here um if you look at those special ed lines there's about one two three four five of them the overall impact in special ed is revenues are down about $150,000 um that's not necessarily a bad thing uh it means that hopefully um what we're seeing for services are reduced a little bit professional services are going up but uh other services like tuition I think are going up so um we'll see hopefully those numbers come up a little bit about halfway down you'll start seeing things like idea B grant so idea B CFP means consolidated federal program idea B is individual uh individuals with disability and education act basically what that is is it's special ed revenues that are federal funds idea B all the way through EPSDT which is another type of Medicaid fund all of those revenues that you see on this screen those match what we are showing in our budget as expenses so for example we have $340,000 of expense that are going towards idea B type of expenses and the grant is $340,000 so those all those federal funds basically just balance out um expenses and the total is not really impacting our education spending at all pre-k tuition is not that much we don't we don't pay to send our pre-k kids out very much very often but there are a few um tuition k-12 is showing a pretty big decrease that is a COVID impact I believe because this year we only have two high school tuition kids and one elementary we typically have more than that I'm assuming that we're going to have a couple more high school kids next year but I didn't want to get more aggressive than that and talking about COVID impacts rentals is I show a decrease there we're not renting out our facilities at all during COVID which means we are losing some of that business and so it might take us a lot of build that back up so I didn't want to get too aggressive with that number either um special ed excess costs are whenever we have kids that are from other districts come into our schools and we provide additional services then we bill for that um so the number there is based on what we're anticipating for the level of service and the bills that we will be sending out I think that's probably enough on revenues capital plan as I mentioned this number 250,000 in FY 22 has already been factored into our tax rates it's not above and beyond for FY 22 you can see it begins with about halfway down the UES behavioral room renovation and it goes all the way down to window replacements I get well Andrew's on the line if you have any questions about any of these projects he can circle back later the window replacements that's just some money for planning to be able to get ready to be able to do some of these window replacements the auditorium renovation and small gym renovation that amount is also kind of planning money to get ready to execute the project which we will then do in the following year because capital money can roll over from year to year the next slide I think just gives you a few examples of the spaces we're talking about the behavior room at UES the gym at main street and then the little gym at UES now everybody's favorite part of the briefing is the tax rate calculation and for folks that are new it's important to understand this because this is what you'll get asked about so it's going to take me a little while to get through this but I tried whenever I built this to even put the you know the mathematical operations in there the symbols for that so the way this works is you take your general budget general fund budget plus the capital plan and that gives you your total expense budget all of the expenses that we have then you back out your non-tax revenues which I explained were basically everything except the ad spending grant and the tech tuition that's paid for on behalf of us that gives you education spending so a lot of times you hear people confusing the total budget with education spending or people just saying education spending thinking it's the total budget education spending is what your tax rates are based on you divide that by your equalized pupils and right now I'm assuming it's level but I sure hope that it goes up when you divide equalized pupils out of there you get your spending per pupil that number gets compared to the statewide property yield which drops as the note says $235 this year typically that goes up from year to year last year it went up $350 this year it's dropping $235 just that $235 is a 4 cent impact on the tax rate so a huge driver then what you end up with is your equalized residential tax rate which we have one more step because as Libby mentioned due to our merger we have a merger incentive you can see that's dropped from eight to six to four now two next year it goes away completely so we subtract out that incentive it gets you down to your final or adjusted equalized residential tax rate they're both the same this year Roxbury and Montpelier typically Roxbury's has been lower because of a five percent limitation on how much their tax rate can drop from year to year that limitation doesn't pertain this year and there's only one step left that's dividing by the common level of appraisal which I kind of explained a little bit about what that was I'm assuming right now that that's going to drop two and a half percent for each community but you never really know last year Roxbury actually increased which is very unusual but right now I'm assuming both will decrease by two and a half percent and you can see the impact of that two and a half percent drop to the tax rates in that note at the bottom to give you just some kind of a data point to think about and I don't it may come in handy if you're looking at tax rate implications you could drop our budget by a hundred thousand dollars it will only reduce the tax rate by one cent if we have six or seven more kids it'll drop the tax rate by a penny so just six or seven kids drops you a penny a change of fifty dollars on the dollar yield is a penny which is why 235 is over four cents a change of two and a half percent on the CLA as I mentioned is in that box so what you see is the big drivers ironically are not the budget itself it's the equalized pupils which hopefully ours will go up it's the dollar yield and it's the CLA and there's probably a whole lot more I could talk about on this slide but I won't the only thing outside I will say is if the board did want us to hit that three percent increase for ed spending it would be another hundred thousand dollar decrease in expenses or increase in revenues so I guess we can move on I'm sure I missed something we always show this tax rate implication impact kind of chart so in Montpelier if you have property worth a hundred thousand dollars your tax rate your taxes would go up a hundred and seventy nine dollars in Roxbury your taxes would go up eighty dollars I don't want people to get too excited about this because the unknowns that are still out there could change these numbers dramatically the other thing to think about is the footnote at the bottom if you don't know about two-thirds of residents receive an income sensitivity credit so only a third of the people see that full impact that you see on these slides two-thirds of the people will see somewhat less of an impact this is something just for a good reference for you to have it shows what the tax rates have looked like for both communities from the year before we merged to now in Montpelier I kind of circled some numbers there in FY 18 the tax rate was a dollar fifty three it's now looking like it's going to be a dollar sixty hopefully that will change a bit so that that's without CLA the impact of CLA which we have no control over so over that four-year span basically Montpelier's tax rate without CLA has gone up about two cents or one and a half percent per year which is very good comparatively speaking in Roxbury it's even better if you look back even when you factor in the effect of CLA the tax rate in Roxbury was higher in FY 18 than it is even in this proposed budget so that's good I show the non-residential tax rate but I mean most people don't really care a whole lot about this because this isn't residential taxes this is more for businesses that kind of thing the reason why I I don't even get excited about this is because the budget has no impact to non-residential tax rates it is a statewide base rate divided by the common level of appraisal so no matter what our budget does this number won't change except for the impact of the CLA and we are wrapping up here the outlook I added this chart a few years ago to just kind of show that we're not just looking at FY 22 we're looking at years beyond that to try to make sure that we're making fiscally responsible decisions so the merger incentive ends in FY 23 which basically means as Libby referenced it's really a two cent increase each year from the after the first year that big incentive we can use fund balance to help offset the impact again next year fortunately we do have a large fund balance to lean on enrollment will likely increase through FY 23 which is definitely unique in Vermont most districts are dropping UES is trending down the high schools trending up as I mentioned we may look we may need to look at future FTE changes to just try to make sure that we get close to that sweet spot of the optimal class size transportation aid should increase it would have increased more this year but because of COVID our transportation costs dropped off in FY 20 and that's the number they look at to give you your aid two years later so this year we should have higher costs which will mean higher aid next year in FY 23 and long-term debt looks pretty stable decreasing slightly until we actually pay off some bonds and it'll drop off dramatically let me introduce you for and let me just interrupt you for one second on this outlook as we think about what we're proposing for a budget and and the future is that with Act 173 and special education in the block grant we don't have this bullet on here but that will happen in the next probably two years bill can correct me on that but it's one to two years out on they keep they keep moving it back but it is happening and so as we build if we can build our capacity with not only our intervention remediation services but also our ability to keep our kids in house service by our faculty with significant special education needs that's going to help us as we transition into the block grant for special education we just forgot to put that on there and then just to add some clarity on that so as Libby mentioned it's a block grant which means it'll be x number of dollars times x number of kids instead of getting reimbursed for our actual expenses so it's more flexibility but it could be less money so to summarize the budget a 2.5 increase in the total budget is one of the lowest increases I've seen in my 15 years the 3.5 increase in education spending is because some of our non-tax revenues have dropped off but it is the exact same increase as we had last year although last year the tax rates were I think in Montpelio the tax rate went up I think eight cents and this year it will go up 18 if the factors don't change the same increase in education spending for Roxbury last year was a tax rate decrease and will be an increase this year so that shows you that it's not just about the budget it's about those other factors and hopefully that education spending amount will change a little bit if our revenue amounts come up a little bit I mentioned what we need to cut to get to a 3% amount residential tax rate the first bullet just kind of focuses on what the calculation is the increase in Montpelio right now is just under 18 cents which is very large and hopefully that will drop Roxbury is about eight cents which is large for them but once again it's lower than the tax rate they saw in FY 18 and that's pretty much it our next meeting is December 16th I'm there's a lot of data that I'm supposed to get on December 15th the CLA preliminary equalized pupil numbers preliminary tech FTEs hopefully I get those in time to factor into that briefing for the 16th but it will be another last minute thing if I do get those so at this point I'm going to turn it over for any kind of questions or requests for changes that you want to see yeah thank you Olivia and Grant that was um as usual very informative and well put together um questions for uh for Granter Libby and we all want to put you on the spot we also have the principals here who might be able to answer building specific questions and did you want to do public comment first um I'm okay either way uh yeah I see a public comment first that makes sense it's the order of the agenda which I should have looked at first um do we do the raise hand function again um looks like Julia has her hand up looks like Julia has a question uh Julia and please again introduce yourself for the camera hey I'm Julia Sheffitz I'm a monthly resident parent of a first grader um thank you for including public comment at this point in the meeting I appreciate the opportunity um I wanted to um flag I noted that uh the $45,000 for the SRO was removed mostly um and I think it's really important to consider that um a big part of the advocacy that we've been doing is about reinvesting that money in mental health um or restorative justice um and and student support services it stands out to me Libby um talked about the goal to have all kids learn at high levels and um that's actually I would say one of the drivers behind why we're advocating the removal of the SRO um is to um to to cease the impact the the the trauma impact the negative mental health impact um in part or that's part of the reason I guess we're we're advocating for that um to um and so I mean I really see that mental health aspect as as one of the things that would get in the way of kids being able to learn at high levels um in addition to the obviously the um high quality instruction that that the school district provides so I just really would caution you to just remove that money and instead to really think about holding it to reinvest in mental health services and I wish the I wish the timing was such that the that the um committee that's working on it could have could be further along in terms of being able to propose what that might look like um but I I hope that that's what the committee will be working on in in the spring and and I think it's really important that the money be there to be able to implement some of the recommendations that they come up with thanks Julia um other comments as well as I'll open up the board great let's um let's go Tina go for it I I have a longer range question and that is um noting the comparison of all of our schools the price of comparison for all of our schools obviously Roxbury is quite high because there aren't many students there and I'm wondering what the conversation has been on the long run about what we're doing at Roxbury anything come up that's different what are we doing now I appreciate it's a bad year because we're in the middle of pandemic and nothing's working exactly right but I'm curious to know how that discussion is it is on the radar but um I think moving slowly given the challenges of this year there is a placeholder in the budget for some visioning work which that might be within the realm of that visioning work right um thank you and I don't see any other folks am I missing someone okay um let's move it on to board discussion any questions for Grant or Libby I'm sorry Jill and then Emma okay thank you um Grant first of all I'm I'm so sad to hear you say that on the record that you won't be here um in the future I don't really know how we're going to manage to tell you um and I realize this is completely out of the realm of the board so this is more just a comment rather than expecting an answer but I feel really strongly we're about to enter pretty uncharted territory and really need a very strong um person in your position I think it's frankly one of the most important positions in our community and um I would just encourage you folks to um I think it could be a really competitive position we could find some really great folks so I I'm a little concerned that it's just sort of an error parent is is sliding in here but of course I don't know who people are and maybe this is someone with plenty of experience but I just found that a little a little surprising because I don't think that happens with like an assistant principal to a principal or anything like that so I just just wanted to mention that thank you and I I should clarify Jill I'm not assuming the person that I brought in that does payroll is simply going to take my place but I have a year to be able to work with somebody to make sure at least somebody in this office understands all of the different aspects of the job and to have somebody work through the whole budget process with me whether that's the person who takes over or whether that's the person who will help the next business manager I just want to make sure that yeah I've been there before a business manager leaves on June 30th the new business manager shows up on July 1st that is almost an impossible task so I'm grateful that there's somebody that has the experience that can absorb and understand all the stuff that I will be showing as far as how our process works whether it's that person that carries forward or whether that's the person that helps with the transition but valid point great thank you Grant and I just want to follow up on that really quickly so is and sorry to make this all about you but you're a critical component here and the board really does appreciate your work and I've come to really really appreciate your work and all that you do for our schools and community does this mean so are you going to be with us through the end of FY 22? Correct so I will be building the budget with you even a year from now okay great all right thank you please be lying to you all I he will be in there as long as I am here all right we've already had this discussion he's very clear about this expectation just change the locks on his office okay ignore what he's saying right now display his tires exactly I would just make one last overall comment I'm really glad to to have the focus on high quality instruction and supporting staff and students again it's kind of refreshing after months of triage and crisis related to the pandemic we're all in so I really appreciate in value there's a lot of energy and and and obviously a lot of conscientiousness going into those recommendations so I really appreciate that thank you yeah no I second all of that um other questions for living around oh that was sorry I totally so part of the agenda item that I wanted to add anyway was about the school safety and police relations committee and the work that we're doing and and I part of what I wanted to talk about was I was hoping to get the support of the board of keeping the full amount for the SRO position in the budget and then and just your market as school safety and then through the work of the committee and whatever decisions are made by the board moving forward into spring we would decide what to do with that money or Libby would decide what to do with that money once more recommendations are made and we've and we've done the work with fidelity so I would love to have the support of the board to keep the full budget for the SRO in in the budget just flagged as school safety thanks everyone I think um that would also go I think you said this but just to put a finer point on it with a delay in a specific recommendation on the SRO position until they have more time to do it right I jump on with a couple quick questions yep please do great um Libby maybe Renee having a hard time visualizing what's coming with enrollment in the high school so it sounds like we're definitely increasing the PE but there's talk of maybe science teachers coming on also it sounds like the enrollment is going up but not necessarily across all classes I'm just trying to get a sense for over the next couple years kind of what what is happening are we going to be adding new science classes we just have more of the same class just kind of what's going to be happening with the numbers Renee why don't you give that a go yeah you know I'd be more probably concerned about space um that I am certainly about staffing right now but the the high school schedule is a tricky is a tricky thing and you know we did it once um in the spring but I had to obviously overhaul that to create a schedule for this year so it's it's fairly new to me um I do think that at some point depending on the type of schedule that we create going into next year we are going to have to increase in some content areas I would imagine English is one that I would foresee us having to increase staffing to support the school board policy class sizes as it relates to English um there's a little bit of wiggle room it really just again it plays out on how students um you know where they sign up for classes the ones that we can really you know hang our hats on are the required classes that every student has to take right so the ninth grade English the tenth grade English the integrated science you know um biology those are those are classes that we know we can basically count on a certain number of sections per students but the rest is a little bit up in the air to some degree we can kind of look at historical data and say you know this number of students took biology and chemistry in their sophomore year therefore we should have this many sections so we kind of play around with this in the spring um at least we did last well we did last spring um even through prior to COVID happening we we created the sections in the schedule and actually um we have a little bit of space and we have more space this year to some degree because of the the schedule that we created and because we have almost 100 students less than what we normally would um so I do foresee staffing increases needing to happen um more than likely not next year but the year after that I think one of the things when we talk about PE and the increase in PE is because of that split between a health position between the middle school and the high school um our that position at MHS has always been a PE slash health position so that health now has been taken out and increase that um position in PE to support the larger number of students who are coming to us and because that class is required um for a year and a half worth of credit throughout throughout high school so I don't know does that make sense so it's kind of in flux um I do foresee a need for staffing increases but I don't foresee that and then in the next year no thanks that's helpful it's complicated with it is the enrollment and the student numbers don't necessarily equate to class number sizes and it's just yeah I'm just trying to get a sense for kind of what's happening on the ground I think Grant you know he said that in his budget presentation too you know it's not the same as it is at the middle school or the elementary where you can just take the number and divide that by the number of teachers who are in the staff it's just so um so much more complicated because of um the sections that are requested by students um based on any given class that's coming through so um it is more complicated than just taking a you know 420 students dividing it by you know 26 teachers and you get a 16.70 number I know those aren't the numbers Grant I'm just putting them out there you don't have to correct me. Great thanks that was helpful um Libby maybe one general question for you um Bridget's not with us tonight but I'll memorialize her with her favorite question when you are working on draft budgets with all the administrators what was something that everybody would have liked to have seen in this budget but wasn't included uh so we talked we had a lot of conversations um particularly for the middle school level and what we want to see at the middle school we talked about um potentially looking at um Katie's gonna have a spring committee around what crafter's edge the future crafter's edge should look like we want that individualization and personalization and and action oriented work with kids I think we've talked about this before with the board and and perhaps how can we bring that into uh um more modern um more student centered focus uh Renee talked in conjunction to that Renee has talked about um the fact that our tech education teacher who's now split between the middle school and the high school spending more of a time at the middle school in a normal year not this year but in a normal year at the middle school um Renee and the high school has a definite um population of kids who would not only really benefit from having Jason at the high school more um but also it'd just be a real win for the high school to have another fine arts opportunity for kids that's different than music theater or um band and and art so we talked about could we potentially add staffing at msms to cover what Jason does at msms and build that personalization program at main street middle school with more staffing in order to and get more fine arts over at the high school we talked about different integration interventionists and what we would want to add to increase our intervention capacity particularly at the high school a little bit the elementary school as well we also taught we talked a lot we had our our whiteboards in our war room completely covered for a while um we talked about different types of potentially um more like capital plan or or buildings and grounds improvements across all four buildings and what we could do there um we really tied that ended up tying that obviously to the staffing with the intensive needs special educator um we had lots of conversations of where it made the most sense for the intensive needs special education to go um the middle school doesn't have room like it simply does not have space for um that type of programming right now um so we had long conversations um around multiple ideas that were all tied to our four pillars uh but in the end we prioritized with what we what we really wanted to go with and I would also add that some of the things that we decided not to go forward with it wasn't necessarily a financial decision it was it was whether we were at the right time and place to be able to do something so I mean some of it's financial but some of it isn't just because we need some more time to sort through some things no thanks for sharing I know you guys so a tremendous amount of work preparing these drafts and there's a lot a lot of work and a lot of mental energy goes into it so thanks for all the hard work yeah the veteran board members will know that that um Grant's and I in particular and our entire leadership team do not just add things to add things we add things when we know we're ready for them and we're constantly thinking about our growth plan for the future um based on those four pillars and so we're not going after shiny pennies and in our budgets as as we've seen for the last three years now um so this is another another example of that and from a tax rate perspective this is uh this is a tough year I mean with the statewide dollar yield dropping like that um all across the state I think it's going to be tough and it's going to be tough on residents to see tax rates going up as much as they are I'm hoping that it gets tamped down a little bit but right now that tax rate increase is not something I'm happy about and you know if we start adding more to it then it just gets worn more out of control that equalized people number is conservative as my friend Grant likes to do that's gonna that's gonna go up and question Grant I don't I don't know if this has ever happened in your tenure can you remember a time when the property dollar yield went down year over year no it hasn't um as you probably know though and Jill knows this new model for building tax rates with the dollar yield isn't that old it hasn't been around that long but in the four or five years that we've had this new process of the dollar yield it has not gone down um the only thing I think at some point in time we probably should have a discussion about whether or not I used the tax commissioner recommendation as you know last year I did not I used a higher number which ended up being within a couple dollars of what actually got set by law um dumb luck but uh each year it seems like we fight to get a budget approved showing a tax rate that's here and then the legislature sets the dollar yield higher than what the tax commissioner's recommendation is so I mean it would be a lot easier to pass a budget if you had you know a more realistic tax rate calculated um I'm not sure whether we should play with that or not I've only done it one time it was last year I was sweating bullets the whole time until it came out and luckily it worked out um but it might not in in the future um but last year as an example the tax commissioner recommendation was a hundred and fifteen dollars lower than the tax the dollar yield that was set by law so something to consider and maybe as we get into further briefings we might have a discussion about that with revenues looking the way they do for FY 22 I'm not sure this is the year to get creative like that but we can talk more about it and actually Andrew would have a lot more insight into that probably yeah I have a question on what would we what would give us guidance if it wasn't for the recommendation how much guesswork would that be and then I also guess that's that's balanced against the fact that um you know knock on wood we have not had a super close budget vote um I think we're very lucky in that regard um and I think it's it's generally nicer to have a budget passed and then have people see the taxes go down rather than pass a budget and have a tax rate that that might be higher than what people thought they were getting into so I just want to throw those two thoughts and I guess a question on the table and and Andrew probably can talk more about the factors from the tax commissioner's perspective that maybe we should factor in um I last year I knew what the assumption was for increases in education spending statewide and I was pretty confident that that estimate was high and that's why I was comfortable with lowering it of course then the pandemic hit and I thought I was going to get fired but like I said it still worked out but um FY 22 revenues looked like they're horrible if at some point between now and the end of the budget process if it looks like things are turning around then maybe we could say look those tax revenue assumptions for FY 22 look low and so that might give us the confidence to increase the dollar yield a bit um I will find out from the AOE what they you what they provided to the tax commissioner for an estimate on education spending um an increase in education spending to see if I think that's reasonable but I'm not sure that we're going to have any kind of concrete data to be able to say let's overrule what the recommendation is to me it's more like just this feeling like every year the legislature at the last minute bumps it up because the tax rates look high and they you know maybe are desiring to be reelected I don't know um but this year is uncertain for a lot of reasons so it may be best to just leave it but I'm sure Andrew we'll have some insights yeah well for several years we had major um surpluses in in state government we've had you know the past several years economically speaking has been terrific and the governor has wanted to keep property tax rates down I think a lot of legislators have too and so some of those surpluses have gone to keeping those property tax rates down um and you know that information isn't generally available until later in the fiscal year or after after the fiscal year has ended and so a lot of it's outside of you know way outside of our control now the one thing I need to forecast I believe the tax commissioner memo which I just got today so I'm not 100 you know aware of everything in there but I believe that recommendation said that it assumes that they will restore the ed fund uh that fund balance of of five percent and so that's an assumption that they're going to basically get that that fund balance built back up that surplus built back up to a five percent level and the legislature and governor scott could end up saying well let's not have that five percent let's reduce that which would allow us to increase the yield um so I'll dig more into that um you have your hand raised earlier I did have their hand raised too yeah um grand it's nice to meet you this is my second meeting as a board member I also want to echo the appreciation for you and Libby and the administrators for that that presentation I especially appreciated how it was started out and grounded in really big picture the you know what we're all here for and then helping helping us use that to to wrap our head around the numbers and a lot of my questions are very sort of like I need more context or definition to know what we mean when we say x um so if it helps if it would be better for me to email these to you that would be I'm happy to do that but I don't know what we mean when we say the dollar yield can you tell me what that is uh wondering how much time we have the dollar yield is a statewide factor um right that we get from the tax commissioner and basically it's a number that that he believes is required in order to collect enough revenues to keep the education fund where it needs to be okay and so everybody compares their local spending to that dollar yield number everybody is comparing to the same number um and it's a fairly new process that it has begun with this tax rate calculation only within the past four or five years um so that's what the dollar yield is I can't really tell you how it's calculated other than showing you the actual memo the tax commissioner gives but and that might not mean anything to me anyway if you did yeah I can I can send you and I can send the whole board the tax department actually um Jake Feldman who's a Montpelier resident uh did a lot of this work he's the statistician at the tax department and uh he put together this great kind of like FAQ of how property tax yeah he put together the video and what is yield and how much is it this year how are the yields used to figure the tax rates in my town that type of thing so I can send that to everybody yeah that would be very helpful thank you Andrew yeah no problem yeah I mean the the particularities of how the it's it's Byzantine and it it takes a while to sink in and there there is it is good to like watch a couple of videos and explain it and and also to realize that you may never ever fully comprehend everything that goes into it that's helpful perspective to have don't get it all he's not lying that's no that's very helpful perspective to have thank you um I I if you could please remind me also the merger incentive and how that might then equate to what you call I think you said a two cent increase absolutely so there was a law that was passed and act 46 or maybe I had multiple numbers um and there was an incentive put in place for districts to merge or s used to merge yeah because there was an idea that there would be long-term savings but it was kind of a carrot that was held out there saying if you merge then you can reduce your tax rate by eight cents which we did and was awesome in the first year but then it drops by two cents every year which so basically after you get that first year of a big savings you're losing two cents of it every year so it's almost like it's an increase of two cents every year after that first year got it that makes thank you that makes it more clear um and then the six semester average I'm assuming that is the average number of kids who are attending whatever not outside education but tech education for a career career and technical center yeah okay what's what's the official name for the berry is it it's a central Vermont career and technical center I believe there you go so cbcc so if we have kids at the high school that want a tech education they would go to the cbcc and we would pay the tuition for that got it it's based though there's it was based on a six semester average though because for especially small districts if you only had one kid go into a tech center and the next year you had four um that would be a huge increase in your budget and a huge tax implication so what they did was they looked at six semesters or three years worth of attendance and they average it out so that you don't see a huge spike or a huge drop from year to year it's more great thank you and um what is the line item uh in the budget or maybe the program area that includes mental health supports because I know we have school guidance counselors social workers and I know I saw special ed I don't know if it's all together in the special ed area they're all under the teacher salary teacher salary they would be under salary if you're looking at it by that kind of category but if you look at it by um program it would be under what's called student support that's where we have social workers that kind of thing so student support is the the program great um and I think that's all my questions largely because Ryan you did ask the one I was gonna ask which makes it seem a little appropriate that I have filled the vacancy uh that bridge it left because I was going to ask what hard decisions have you made already what have you already said no to so um thanks for answering that one already and and I just want to add one thing with regard to the two cent incentive uh that grant was talking about before and how that drops off each year the 250 000 that's a strategy that grant proposed I guess it was Libby in my first year it was when I first joined the board and Libby had just become superintendent so Grant definitely had had this in in mind and it's been a helpful strategy and what it does it does cover the drop from four to two cents but last year it went from six to four cents so it doesn't cover that so what we're doing is we're essentially pushing out the impact on so if you look if you were to look at that incentive kind of dropping off like this it takes it and it flattens it out a little bit so that non-peel your taxpayers don't feel it as quickly if that makes sense yeah I have a couple quickly um so yeah I just I I'm just going to echo what everybody else has already said about I just am looking around at the team of administrators that's here and I appreciate you all so much and I know that you all have what's the best interest of the students at heart and so imagining you in your war room with your big white board and all of the pillars and everything it just fills me with faith and you know I have all the faith in the world that you did your best on the budget so thank you for all that work um also there's a huge win in here that I've been following for a few years now around health education and sex education at the middle school in particular and so I just wanted to highlight that I'm really excited to see that there's um a health educator position being added and I was hoping that you could speak to what that is going to look like um and also just thank you thank you again for adopting the Planned Parenthood Get Real Sex Ed curriculum and just listening to the constituents and listening to parents about about what we need for our kids um I don't know who if Mike is the best person to answer that or Libby um we're I can give it a go I can honestly say we're adding more um health education FTE um and we know we have we have a skeletal plan because it's based on the MSMS schedule that will change so there will be more and Katie might correct me if I say anything off because it's still in the planning stages um there will be more health education opportunities for particularly our middle school students um because we'll be making it like one of the prep periods like art for more kids um we're also and it would be a dedicated teacher um however we're also considering still using for at least one grade level and Katie correct me I know this is in the planning stages um part of an FTE for one of the PE teachers simply because we'll still need more at the middle school and um so what we needed was 1.2 but because of 1.2 FTE because of the number of FTE we have currently at the middle school in PE and health we can use part of that so uh Renee is actually just hired um what we think what we believe to be a really fantastic young health teacher coming in who will start this court next quarter Renee yeah yeah um yeah her name's Lucy and she uh she's coming in and she's very interested in increasing to 1.0 um in the in the fall so we're and then then the other thing to consider is that health is one of those mandatory courses for ninth or tenth graders they have to take it so with that increasing enrollment we needed a little bit more FTE at the high school as well um so we're I can't answer exactly what the plan will be with that simply because we're still working on it we just knew it was something the community desired and it was it was also something that's going to really help with I we think with the MSMS schedule and something that our adolescents need a little bit more quite honestly um so we we just don't have the the it nailed down yet we wanted to get it in there though and so for the line item in the budget how what how many FTEs was included in the line item in the budget I didn't see it so it didn't actually increase any FTE need because what was current this is going to get Renee Grand and I went this like Renee's already laughing she's like let's see how Libby does this so we had 1.5 FTE and PE at the high school right Renee yes 1.6 we had 1.6 FTE PE at the high school and 0.4 FTE health our that health position was was held by a 1.0 teacher but she was 0.6 PE and 0.4 health right and then we have at that at the main street middle school I'm not sure how the FTE broke down Mike Mike or Katie do you know we had that broken down with our three PE teachers do you guys know what the FTE was there I can't remember what the FTE is because what between the health and the PE split is that what we're talking about yeah it means you can't remember what it was but the but because of those splits we were able to make it so we didn't increase any FTE we just switched what the FTE was based on what student need is so I guess I would just say based on my experience with the community around this is this particular issue if there's a slight increase in FTE is needed to actually you know run the program the way that it should be run at the middle school and at the high school I would fully support that so I mean if that's something to consider in the next round of the budget process you know whatever it is that you really feel like you need to get the right number of classes in both the middle school and the high school I would get behind that and I think the community would be super excited to see that also my other question was the was the tech change at Union Elementary School so I saw that Ms. Frye will be taking over 0.5 tech ed and being reduced by 0.5 library and then you're going to be adding a library a librarian assistant and I'm just wondering I don't know if Ryan can speak to it but it feels like a loss I guess like it just just my gut feeling about it but I wonder what your perspective is and maybe you can share how you got to that place yeah it's not actually a loss the library so part of what this is the same model we have now in the high school and at the middle school and it was part of the budget last year to move the high school into this model so that sue monomy our library library media specialist at the high school could do more of the tech integration piece it's actually been in place at the middle school for quite a few years now and it's to a lot of success that might can speak to a little bit better and so what what we're actually doing she's not actually losing 0.5 library what we're doing is taking away the the necessary part of putting books away and checking books out you know that time consuming tasks of librarians that can be done by an aid we don't need a licensed teacher to do that work and so there's it's just a different use of her time in going into more tech integration piece Mike do you want to speak to that model in general sure I can talk a little bit about what it looks like at the middle school and the high school right now and also we did increase proxberries of librarian time for this year to do that same kind of work and work in that same model so it's one of those things that I can't really I couldn't really document for you with a detailed bulleted list of how it works but it does part of that's due to the success and the dedication of the people that do it a large part of it but it's a balance between working in the library media and the research components and the technology components and putting them all together so that we're supporting teachers and implementing some strong use of technology particularly around research and digital citizenship and so what a typical day might look like for you know I'll use Lauren at Main Street she'll have library sessions with students focused a lot around research and text and finding information it involves information technology but then also support teachers and implementing new technology to the classroom kind with that same lens and it works really well they're doing a great job with it it's the first year we're trying it out in Roxbury so there's some growth there that we're going with but it works really well with the folks once they find a groove with it and once we balance out the library needs with that assistant one of the things that we've we're learning through I mentioned the PLL the literacy audit that we are doing this year and currently getting data back which I'll present to the board in the the next couple months is that one of our holes and gaps across our system is informational literacy and informational text where we're simply we simply need to build our capacity across our system and how much informational reading our students are doing informational reading and writing so moving into this model supports that that need there is ample research that shows schools that reach high levels of learning and really increased choices for kids upon graduation have ample opportunities for informational reading and writing and right now that's all that is showing in our literacy audits in the beginning stages of what we're getting back that data we're getting back and we have a hole in our system there Levy can you just really quickly can you give us a couple of examples of what you mean by informational literacy here yeah and at the most simple level it's just reading nonfiction text and writing nonfiction text of choice not of not textbooks that's not what I'm referring to but just I mean that's the most simple piece of it right but there's also the piece of engaging in research engaging in action research and then taking action off of your research that is student choice and student driven we've got a hole there we assign it in certain places but we don't we don't have kids voice and choice in our informational learning how do we access the global society in different ways so to give kids access that they don't have living in small town Vermont those kind of things those kind of pieces and what we look at we we know our data is showing up that we have significant gaps there Libby I just wanted to jump in a second Libby to clarify the PE health positions I just looked at our staffing there are five PE slash health positions this year there are six next year so we did increase a full FTE for PE and health together so just to make let you know Emma there there was a full FTE increase but at least part of that is for PE at the high school correct correct so this is so the health position is not going to quite be a full FTE the the health position will be a full time position so basically you can look at it like well we got about a half of an additional PE because some people were sharing time with health but it's there's the way it looks to me is PE is going to be separate dedicated PE and now there's one full FTE that's dedicated health so and I just want to circle back to the tech position and the how I said that it felt like a loss it's because Mr. Jared was a full time tech ed teacher correct he was full time and so he he resigned he retired and now we're not getting back a full time tech ed teacher we're getting a halftime librarian assistant so it still does sort of feel like a loss that of that program which I just anecdotally both of my kids that was one of their favorite parts of being at Union school was going into the tech room and playing around with computers and I do think tech literacy and and digital citizenship is is really important so I don't know it it's still I'm not 100 convinced I understand the model of sharing librarians with you know and I understand the licensing piece too that that is a very common licensure um marriage between librarians and tech ed and that most schools are moving towards that model I'm just wondering about um it it feels like a reduction in tech ed FTEs it may be a reduction in FTE but I think it's actually an increase in the services we're providing to kids um because that was that one person you mentioned was the only tech integration teacher we had in the district that person had nobody to to do pd with to programming with to to do anything as far as like working with a colleague now with this model they they will be able to do that because it's the librarian at every school that now is focused on this and the librarian also is kind of the holder of a lot of the technology pieces as well so I may be overstepping into the curriculum area but from my position I think instead of bringing in a person who would have to figure it out all on their own without a colleague to do any kind of working together um it gives me more confidence in a system for tech integration and just to pull us back to to uh full in's research around the right drivers and the wrong drivers the wrong drivers being technology for technology's sake and the right drivers being increasing pedagogical awareness and capacity as well as a system approach um so the tech integration was kind of that fragmented approach whereas what we're trying to build is a system across our multiple schools so are the um the librarians on each school they're now half time doing the tech is that how it's working or Mike you want to speak to that yeah it's it's kind of what I was saying before it's it's not a super clean thing that I can say yep at 11 a.m she switches to tech uh it's very seamless throughout the day and throughout the weeks um some days there's there's more of that tech integration component and that that technology leadership and other days it's more embedded in the library and research component and literacy um and it and it flows really nicely um because there's a there's an educator connection there between all of those worlds that really helped support the kids and the teachers it's something that we want to grow and and keep doing better with as well last year we put together a digital citizenship curriculum for grades k through 12 that was the first year we had that articulated this year we've been rolling those out at main street middle school uh lauren does asynchronous lessons around technology for the students in the building and in the virtual academy so they're going through that curriculum right now but she's still maintaining library uh components for students helping them find text doing all of those things um I can't give you a real concrete what it looks like every day because it really flows with the needs and what's going on yeah I thank you for that response I wasn't I wasn't um incidenting that that's you know I wanted that information but to me it sounds like as you guys mentioned if it was one person shared across the district trying to do all these things together splitting it not going through that model to me right now it sounds like an improvement for this um I had an unrelated question I'm sorry I didn't want to jump in but if you're if you have a couple other questions go ahead I just want to quickly clarify that Mr. Jared was not split across the district he was just at union school he was a union school tech ed teacher full-time did you say you had other yeah I just had one more sorry I would know go ahead okay um maybe I'm wrong but we were last year when COVID hit we were talking about um buildings and grounds projects pushing some of them um is that did we end up pushing them and if we did is that getting picked up this year Andrew you want to have a go at that um we did we did uh we did do that we did um back off some of the projects that we usually would typically do in the summer um and uh but we did not stop spending money we did a lot of repairs this year but we didn't do a lot of projects this year um and so grand my actually when you look at the processes grand I've gone through is we sort of really refined how our budget is developed and really we used to put a lot of money as big projects that actually turned out to be a lot of little smaller projects that we were able to take care of and coordinate ourselves in house we kind of made that shift internally so I feel a lot more comfortable with the way we developed our budget that those numbers reflect in the right place so we did we did hold off a lot of that a lot of those projects and um but we'll get back on track with them just coming here for sure and I kid do you mind if I ask a question I just want to be mindful that we're not getting an echo at least on mine but it's quarter to nine and we've got three more budget presentations so um yeah keep the questions going but but we are drifting into overtime yeah I'll I can I can save it for later it's fine that's all I had for now yeah I didn't mean to shut everything down but um but if there are if there are other questions go ahead and ask otherwise we can we can move into executive session and Libby and I just um just texted about about pushing the superintendent goals to the next meeting so we can do a little more justice and and not not push the evening further on before we wrap up Jim just to clarify for me because I want to make sure I give the board what they want is there is there anything that I need to change before the next briefing other than factors that might come through I know there was some discussion about whether to put $30,000 back into the budget which I mean of course I'm looking more at the other direction of trying to find ways to cut but there was the idea of maybe restoring to the same level of funding that we had for the SRO even though it won't be necessarily for the SRO just want to make sure that there's consensus that I need to do that or not do it. What I don't think we actually have to vote on that because I think you can amend it just based on kind of recommendation or consensus is that correct Libby? Yeah this is a draft for you all to tell us what you want to see different this is this is our first dam or first shot at it so you are more than welcome to to say do this or don't do that. Jim I do have one thought on this regardless of what we do here well not regardless if we decide to put money more money aside for public safety and I thought about this just a little bit ago if we do decide to put that money back in we should communicate with City Council probably or maybe Jay through the SRO because I know City Council has put in more money in their budget to cover public safety so if we think public safety dollars are still going to go to the city and the city is grappling with large budget increases themselves I think we should communicate and coordinate with them on this even if it's not going to the SRO. Andrew I think it's too early to assume that the that the line item on the butt that those funds would be directed to the city to help us with public safety. Okay and I'm not saying that that's going to be the case I'm just saying if we thought that it was going to be the case what the city would probably appreciate knowing that hey the school district is going to send some more funds over for public safety so that you know public safety budget isn't getting it on the city side and on our side now in a difficult budget year for everybody. Yeah I mean my my sense is that it is highly unlikely that we will send a similar amount of money to the the city that we did in past years. So I think it would be with the idea that it goes into a slush fund that could be spent in a variety of ways probably not on the city at the level it was previously. That that's not a term of our gym. I was just going to say you will never repeat that phrase to the audience. That is not what we call this. Speaking of which but using the correct terminology we do as. Yes sorry it is not a slush fund but a into a a safety spending fund that has not been specifically appropriated at this moment. And and that's what I was actually going to propose is that maybe we leave the budget the way it is for new board members that might not be aware we have about 1.3 million dollars in unallocated fund balance that was a lifesaver for covid and will help protect us because we'll probably have somewhat of a deficit this year. But it's certainly enough that if we decide and and scope out exactly what we want to do we could use that from fund balance instead of actually budgeting for it. And then that way we do get to show the public that we have made we have not funded that SRO position but we do know amongst ourselves that we have funding available to do something else if there is some concrete recommendation that comes out from the committee that the board supports. I think that I think that's a great suggestion. I think that would be a great use of fund balance. And we have to be cautious with fund balance because it can save us as it has now. But if you have too much then all of a sudden you're taxing the public when you have a bunch of public funds on hand that you can be using for other purposes. So what's the fund balance sitting at right now just out of curiosity. My estimate right now is about 1.3 million that's after some of the things that we're kind of bookmarking like fund balance revenue for next year and the year after and a few other things. I do think we're going to take a hit this year and probably have a bit of a deficit because of some of the things we're doing. But even after this year I think we'll still be over a million. So I confident that we could cover whatever comes out as a recommendation the board accepts. And then I have a follow up question. It seems like fund balance would be something that we would use for like a one time or maybe two time. Two school year expenses like if we wanted to do really intensive restored justice training for as a professional development thing for all teachers or something that would be you know but if it's going to be like us adding a staff person like adding another mental health professional to our FTEs that's probably not the best use for fund balance. Would that be right? You wouldn't want to use it annually the fund balance annually for the position but you could use it grant correct me if I'm wrong but you're thinking if for example there was a need for an additional $30,000 in FY 22 we could use the fund balance for that and then we'd build it into the budget in the future. Yeah that's what I'm thinking but Mia you're absolutely right if it's a recurring requirement then that would hurt us next year because we'd have to add it to the budget and it wasn't added this year. But there's a lot of these statewide factors that are killing us this year. So I'm okay with with maybe putting it in you know after the fact this year and then we could hopefully absorb it next year when the tax factors stabilize a little bit more that you're exactly right. We would do it for things like typically we do it if we need to buy a new vehicle because you only have to do that once every five years six years. So that's the kind of thing that we try to use with fund balance or managing this this merger incentive for another couple of years and then we'll stop using it but we won't lose that incentive anymore so that'll level itself out. We are very careful with it and you're you're kind of talking like me now so so thank you. The beauty of our fund balance and it being is that when all of this happened Mia we didn't worry about getting what we needed to for our teachers or our building because we just did it because we knew regardless of whether the federal government was going to come through or not we had it was raining and we took care of it with our fund balance so but the federal government did come through quite a bit for school funding for COVID expenses so that fund balance gets refilled a little bit because of where the situation we're in now. Yeah sounds smart thank you everyone. So what is let's just do a quick straw poll on approach one is grants approach of let's keep the budget as is with the idea that if we want to dip and add some for the fund balance we can with the idea that that would be something that we want to continue that expenditure we'd have to build into the budget next year or we can just add that money back in now as Emma suggested and put it in a not-slush fund that would be set aside for for safety as broadly defined by the committee which could include mental health service mental more mental health services more social work support etc. So option one is the grant option option two is the add the 30,000 back in option. Emma one or two. Well I almost think that there could be a third option where we just like bump it up by 10 grand at least to just be safe because I feel like whatever the committee comes up with there's going to be an expense associated with it and I think it will be more of a long-term recurring expense. So I'm willing to I understand the the situation that we're in right now is like we should be looking to um save every penny if we can because we're in like very very tight spot so if that's the case for this year I'm happy to defer to what grant recommended. And just so you know Emma the the line item was 45,000 I dropped it to 15 so there is still 15,000 in the budget that we have some flexibility on. Yeah it feels like it would probably need to be higher than that. And it can be I mean if we add it I mean in some ways it's it's yeah it'd be add back in the slush fund and then you know coming to the budget this you know next year whereas if we put in the budget it'll still come into the budget next year. It'll just come from a different place this year. So number one option for Beth or for Emma so that's the name Ryan. I think it makes sense to leave the money there we're going to be using into the future and there's things that that 30 to 40 thousand dollars could go to. So you're number two put it back in. Yeah number two. Jill. That sounds reasonable I'm not sure what safety entails I've been thinking a lot about what we're going to need for recovery from from COVID and all the mental and physical health impacts of it so if it's money that you know I support that if that's the consensus of the group and just knowing that I do think we're going to have some unanticipated expenses that might not fit neatly into other boxes. Okay so just to clarify number two add the money back in. Yeah Mia. Number one. I'm okay either but I think I'm about to pick out right now I'll pick one number one. Andrew. And number one is using fund balance right. If we need to. It's keeping it at 15. The reason why I like the idea of using fund balance is because it's uncertain we know that this will barely put a dent in the fund balance and I am concerned about you know right now we're looking at what like a 17 cent 17 plus then increase to the tax rate and while I think our administration has put together a really thoughtful budget we're going to have to sell this to the public and fortunately we have a really supportive community so I'm hopeful that we'll be able to do this but I as you know Jim I do get a little nervous about what what message it would send if we had our budget voted down you know what that would what kind of message that would send to our educators and our students in these difficult times so for that reason yeah I'm going with number one. Am I missing anyone? Jerry. Sorry. I vote for number one. Okay I think number one carries the tide but obviously this is this is only consensus recommendation. Should we move to executive session for the purposes of it's just for new new board member we we don't have negotiations do we Libby it's not on the agenda and I don't recall us needing to talk about that. All right I don't think we need the fancy language that no one probably has remembered so I think we can just move to executive session for the purpose of appointed a new board member to have a motion to move. Do we have a second? Second. Emma. Hi. Ryan. Hi. Jill. Hi. Mia. Hi. Anakin. Hi. Gary. Hi. Andrew. Hi. I think I have everyone I certainly have a majority so let's move into executive session Libby are you doing us a breakout? I'm ready to go administrators thank you so much for commenting. Yeah thank you everyone and a special thanks to Grant for another fantastic budget. Yeah thank you Grant. Go to bed. So on a purpose by saying again this was an incredibly hard choice which is one of the reasons we deliberated as long as we did really really it just incredibly lucky to have such amazing candidates and yeah again we we welcome we really appreciate the applications we welcome people to to get involved and stay involved and for you know people who you can not select you know please continue to be engaged and think about seat openings in the future. So thank you everyone for being willing to to throw your half the ring and and to serve on this board which can at times be be somewhat thankless but it's super important work. So I uh like to entertain a motion to appoint Amanda to the to the board for the remainder of Morris well until March when she can choose to run for the remainder of tomorrow's term or another term. I move to appoint Amanda Garces to the open position created by Mara Iverson. Second. Anakit. Hi. Jerry. Hi. Mia. Hi. Jill. Emma. Hi. Andrew. Hi. Brian. Hi. Great congratulations Amanda we uh excited to have you have you join us um and uh first order of business uh is you need to get sworn in which you can do um either in person or by phone at City Hall um you can either stop it if you're open open in person Tuesday and Thursday or you can just call John Odom and he will he will do it over the phone it takes um less than a minute um and then once once you get sworn in you can be official and vote um and um Anna and or Libby will reach out to get you an email set up and um we do want you to take an MP RS MRPS by my friend my brain has stopped working uh email um largely because uh correspondence of the board is subject to open records and it just makes it a lot easier if you're receiving all your email through that and it's not interspersed with your your personal email so um it's it's another email account to manage but um if something like that happened it would make it a lot easier to to separate it out and protect your personal communications as well um so uh looking forward to to having a full board again and uh thank you and we do have a mentorship program which um is not as robust as it could be but we'll try to hook you up with someone uh and I think with that I will um with extreme pleasure entertain a motion to adjourn thank you so much thank you Amanda for volunteering welcome I move to adjourn I'll second that I'll second that uh arrogant hi Jerry hi Mia hi Jill hi Emma hi Andrew hi Ryan hi great thanks everyone all right good night and uh thanks for hanging in there for the long call