ACMI productions are only made possible with your support. Visit patreon.com slash ACMI to learn how you can help. All right, we are starting the morning shift. We've been through the finding of somebody and we have as guests today representatives from the department to committee. I'm going to make the introductions and then the next week. Hello, everyone. Great to see you. Thanks for having us. My name is Liz Holman. I am here for attendance to present the school committee's proposed budget for FY25. I want to introduce a few folks I have with me. To my right, it's Jose Ferrius. He's the assistant director of finance for the district. As you might have heard, Mr. Mason has moved on to be deputy city manager in Chelsea. He went on a parental leave earlier this winter and has since resigned the district, so Mr. Ferrius and I worked on this budget proposal for this year together in partnership with Mr. Mason. He was still working a little bit during the leave and now moved on to Chelsea. Also, our members of the budget finance subcommittee, chair, Lynn Carter, chair of the school committee, Percy Allison Anthony, and Jenny Morgan. I also have two administrators from the district who I'd like to introduce. Wesley Pierre is the director of communications and family engagement. That's a new role this school year. It opened the welcome center for us and it's the result of a reorganization at the central office. So we're thrilled to have her in that role. I'll explain why she and Bobby and Pierre Maxwell, who's the principal at the Gibbs are here tonight. They are part of a program called Influence 100 in the state. It's run by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and that program is specifically designed to diversify the superintendency and senior leadership roles in the state. It's been very successful at doing so. It's also developed in order to help districts spread equity practices and practices that improve outcomes for all groups of students across the state and to help leaders learn strategies that are specifically linked to the superintendency, but also linked to leading districts that are strategic about equity work. So the both of them are fellows in that program and are here observing one of the things that people don't often get to see in superintendency from within the system. So I'm really happy to have them here and made only a little bit more nervous by their presence. So thank you for welcoming them as well. I'll jump right into it. That's okay. So I'd like to start by talking about some of the priorities that are central to the FY25 budget that the schools have developed. Key among them and of course top of mind for us as we thought about everything we were doing this year into next year was to make sure that we funded the override commitment specifically those tied to competitive compensation. This was a key element of what we said we needed to prioritize in the strategic plan that we said we were going to prioritize as part of the override commitment to the town and which is really central and you'll see that in our plan for FY25. We wanted to make sure that we were ensuring adequate funds for what will be a 40% projected increase in electricity supply rate, which I'm sure you'll hear from other town departments that's having a really big impact on APS considering we're also trying to be more electrics. And so when you have an increase to the supply rate and you are going more electrically you're going to have an increase to your overall rates and try to account for that in our plan. We're adjusting elementary staffing levels to respond to what are some decreasing enrollments, but we're trying to sustain and improve existing service levels in some other areas particularly in areas of priority like special education. We're maintaining our existing staffing for special education and expanding secondary enrollment so we're not doing big additions at the secondary level. We're trying to maintain the staffing levels that we currently have and I'll talk a little bit about some needs that have a resident FY24 that we're just keeping into next year as opposed to doing very many add-ons at all. And then we're going to continue of course our implementation of the five-year strategic plan. So I want to begin by demonstrating a little bit of where we're at with regards to enrollment because this is a key component of the funding formula that goes into determining what the town allocation will be for the school system. So one of the main pillars as you know of the long-range planning formula funds the town appropriation general fund of this budget has to do with student enrollment. So this shows the actual enrollment. This is the blue line from FY18 to FY24 and our projected enrollments from lots of different projections. So projections can be difficult. We've talked about this before for a number of reasons we have to guess at. We have to go and look at birth rates and whether or not those are changing. To some extent we're guessing at vacancy rates and real estate trends and sales and trying to assume what some of those are going to do over the next few years. We have to consider alternative education options. So our projections have given us actually a pretty good sense of where our enrollment's going to ride. Where if you look at the gray line right here this is our in-district projection. So this is a five-year weighted average and we've tracked along with that pretty closely. The orange line is the McKibben projection. This is the best vendor projection we've gotten in terms of overall trends but it of course didn't account for the pandemic dip. So what you see there in the blue this is the pandemic dip in enrollment and then it has tracked right along with that orange line following that pandemic dip. We've recovered a lot of the enrollment and we're starting to now see that overall we're leveling out. These two lines are from a projection that we got in FY22 from Decision Insight and we have not gone back to them and I I'm sure you can imagine why and it's because they haven't we haven't tracked very closely with the projection that we got from them. So we're using right now combination of the five-year weighted average which is tracked pretty closely and monitoring the McKibben projection at some point the next couple of years might go against our projections but that's where we are with enrollment overall it's leveling out. But I want to show you something that was not in the slides that you've got for today but it's worth noting. I think I can't check it remember was it the same slide? Oh it was perfect good because it's easier to see when I'm not sitting in front of it. The blue line on this graph is grades K to 5 and the enrollment in grades K to 5 from FY15 through this year and then the red line is enrollment in grades 6 through 12 and what you'll notice is the enrollment in secondary has only been rising. It had it leveled off slightly it has continued to go up. So at the secondary level we've only ever had more students over the last many years and we've been trying to account for that and sort of proactively plan for that over the past several years. I'll talk about that in a minute. At the elementary level we saw that significant pandemic dip we actually see that secondary level and since then it rose slightly and then has leveled off or is declining and in between FY22 and 23 we saw those lines those paths cross and so what we're trying to account for now is that shift in enrollment which is resulting in some reduced elementary sections for next year some maintenance of what we've already put in place at the secondary level while trying not to expand and we're going to need to keep tracking this to make sure that whatever staffing levels we have in place and licensure levels and that's important because licenses differ at the elementary level versus secondary level so you can't just move a teacher from the elementary level secondary level they have to be appropriately licensed in their field at their level and so you often need to shift positions eliminating some at some level adding at the other level in order to make sure that you're accounting for where the students are and that the resources are placed for the student okay so i want to go over a few things that are also key to our enrollment trends over the last couple of years first is something that's in our strategic plan that is worth noting and tracking in addition to our overall enrollments the enrollment of students in our focal groups so APS identified five focal groups as the groups that we would keep a particularly close eye on when it came to outcomes when it came to service needs and when it came up to making sure that they had what they needed in school because traditionally these groups have been underserved by the public school system so they include students and the families and teachers of students who have IEPs so special education students families and staff who identify as Black or Hispanic Latino and that is because traditionally the academic achievement gap for those particular focal groups of students has been significantly lower than their white peers students families and staff who identify as non-binary lesbian gay bisexual transgender queer intersexual and asexual or to put it much more shortly LGBTQIA plus students who are multi-lingual learners and their families as well as students and families who speak a language other than English as their primary language in the home and finally students and families who are low income and I mentioned this particular piece of the strategic plan because this the students in these groups their enrollment has been rising over the last several years and often students in these groups if you have more students with IEPs if you have more students who identify as LGBTQIA plus and often that comes along with potentially mental health implications sometimes it can it can result in increased bullying in the schools this requires resources you're going to address it you need the resources and the staff they should address it so I just want to show you some of those trends so this is the BIPOC or student of color population and you'll notice that we have stable populations of students who identify as Asian and as black or African-American but a steadily rising population of students who identify as Hispanic so that also includes students whose language might not be English first language might not be English I'm in an increasing number of students who identify as multi-racial and then in the second graph a steadily increasing number of students who are multilingual learners students who have IEPs students who come from come into their household or who identify as non-binary overall these lines are fairly flat but they are increasing steadily and Arlington is becoming more diverse as the years go on and so with that comes an increased need for these students and we have identified them as focal groups in the strategic plan which means we are placing resources towards those needs and trying to shift and allocate resources to make sure that all of our learners get what they need in our schools that is because our theory of change is that if all of our students in focal groups see an improved experience that all of our students are going to see an improved experience and we've seen evidence of that at several of our schools which I'm happy to talk about so just in terms of numbers we've been grateful for the investment in our schools our budget has increased year over year to accommodate the needs in the school department Arlington will be strongly in the value of its schools in creating a healthy community and a civically engaged community which we appreciate those increased funds help us continue to provide at least level services to our students and to add positions as needed this shows the four actual years of how we were funded and the projected funding force for FY25 so the local contribution increases year to year as does state aid the town contribution to the FY25 budget comes from both state aid from chapter 70 and from the allocation that comes from town revenues and so that's represented in that block block and one of the things that is happening this year is we're seeing a reduction to additional revenue grant revenue because of the expiration of COVID-19 so notably this is what we anticipate the percentages of each funding source in FY25 to be and the town appropriation accounts for almost 93 of all funds in FY25 so our ability to do everything we're going to talk about is resting 93% on the fact that the town funds its school in Arlington exceptionally well which we are very grateful for this chart demonstrates overall anticipated funding sources including the town appropriation and other sources of revenue it's the same as the previous graph just numbers wise so it shows the town appropriation overall the local contribution in chapter 70 these two things make up town appropriation overall grants COVID related grants which you can see is going down by 880,000 this year special revenue and revolving which you can see is going down you'll note this is a negative number and that's not because we're in deficit on special revenue and revolving because we're trying to spend down special revenue and revolving so we're budgeting to spend down dollars that are in revolving if it has been carrying any dollars there so that's also strategic that's also purposeful we're trying to use the resources that are at our disposal and circuit breaker which is going down because our number of out-of-district enrolled students is also going down so our spending on special education in the district is going up our spending on out-of-district funding is going down overall we're keeping more of the kids in the district which is our goal okay this chart demonstrates the proposed budget expenses by budget transfer categories within the school department this is similar to what you've seen in previous years but a notable distinction and this might be a little confusing because it's a new thing in the school's budget is this last line of budget contingencies so there's a contingency budgeted line that in FY24 has $400,000 placed in it that's the allocation that was agreed to this year for the school department to improve competitive compensation particularly for unit D salaries in this fiscal year FY24 it hasn't been allocated yet but i believe you all have a memo from Mr. Feeney speaking about this $400,000 allocation so we placed it in contingency because otherwise it can cause some fusion on bottom lines so that's what that $400,000 is this 1.2 this is contingency because it's set aside for collective bargaining which was our override commitment but it's a combination of the dollars set aside for bargaining and dollars set aside that are tied to positions that will be eliminated but we have not identified which position exactly will be eliminated because of contractual obligations so we don't go through the position control and say we're eliminating that teaching position we've just said we're eliminating a teaching position because of a decrease in sections and then what happens is we figure out who like what the appropriate person is attached to a position over the next couple of months based on people leaving somebody else can go and fill a role hopefully everybody who wants to stay in Arlington gets to stay in Arlington so we place that in a contingency line so that's a combination of negative dollars and positive dollars that were placed towards collective bargaining and negative dollars that are efficiencies that will come out that is confusing i'm happy to try to explain it but that's what that is right good as a member of the sub-community simple explanation um within their budget they created their own article 65 collective bargaining the town does it in a separate work article the schools are doing it within their budget it's and it's it's when it was explained superintendent mr. Cardin used the exact language that the town manager used every time this article 65 comes across it makes no sense to put expected raises against an employee's buck salary right that's town manager always says we don't know how we're going to settle these contracts but we know we're going to settle them so they just created their own article 65 but they have to be quite statute dual in their budget that's it thank you yep okay so i want to go over what some of our adjustments are from f y 24 to f y 25 this is a high level summary of our proposed changes to the f y 25 school budget what you'll notice is that there is a significant increase in contractual obligations and salary adjustments that includes some of our that includes any new positions that were added during f y 24 which i'll talk about a little bit more in a minute in this the second line is collective bargaining for unit a so that's 1.7 million dollars set aside for collective bargaining for unit a if you combine this with the budget efficiencies here a portion of them that we don't know exactly what position they're tied to then you get to the 1.2 million that i was talking about on the other page this unit d f y 25 increase of 344 thousand represents increases in salaries for unit d employees compared against what their original contractual agreement would have been prior to an moa that we agreed to in december of this year so we increased our ta salaries as soon as the override was passed given the 400 000 commitment to the schools that had already been agreed to we went back to the table with unit d and significantly increased our paraprofessional salaries or some of our lowest paid employees in the district and so that difference right there that 344 000 that is the difference between what we would have otherwise paid them and it also subtracts out that 400 000 allocation for 424 okay so it it assumes that 400 000 moves forward into next year's budget so it's accounting for that so this is what we would have otherwise not had to budget for had we not gotten the 400 000 allocation and we would have stayed on their previous contract um then there's a utility increase like i said our supply rates have significantly increased budget department adjustments this is only a two percent increase adjustment on department budgets for next year which will be tight but we've only adjusted up by two percent uh we are going to make as much do with what we have we're doing a curriculum rollout we're going to use our internal resources to do a lot of the handouts and stuff for that we're going to purchase the trade books associated with the curriculum rollout in order to make a two percent adjustment work because the cost of supplies has gone up pretty significantly over the last couple of years as well um there's proposed budget efficiencies in the form of positions which i'll talk about in a moment as well as some additions that i will also speak about so i want to talk a little bit about s or three because this is a significant source of funding in previous years that we're losing as we head into f y 25 so we're maintaining some roles from s or three that we had in place this year as trial positions and we're also eliminating some roles that we had in places for our positions i'll talk about why we did have a diversity equity and inclusion specialist in the district this year that we are maintaining a director of research data and accountability which we are maintaining a hs director of counseling to oversee mental health services at the high school which we are maintaining and a communication specialist at the level of 0.6 we had a full-time communication specialist this year we're maintaining 0.6 of that these roles are increasing administrative support to the high school at a time of growing enrollment and specific to supporting student mental health which i think is very important at a hs we are trying to increase our capacity for teaching and learning and keeping really functional data systems because this is tied to our mtss goals making sure that our our services that we're providing students are grounded in strong data that's why we need a director of data and accountability to maintain all of those data systems as well and to provide transparent data reporting to the community school committee and to our teachers and we're trying to increase support for professional learning and consistency in communications families and staff these are priorities from our strategic plan so we're maintaining those but we're also eliminating some of the things we had in place from s or three we would like to maintain a director of leadership development onboarding it's been a really useful role this year but it was a one-year role when we put it in place we knew we wanted them to build some stuff up send us some recommendations and that we would not be able to maintain that role and she's done some excellent work backing up our principals this year and building some onboarding systems that we plan to take into future years we also would love to maintain family liaisons we have a 1.0 this year at Gibbs we want to take another look at liaison work because we don't know that it's sustainable for us to have one at every school and so we want to look at whether there's a different model that we can use for liaisoning whether we can make some staff that we already have maybe a partial liaison and a partial something else and so we're going to take a look at the model on that and make some decisions about how best to do that and we're going to only have a 0.6 communication specialist next year instead of a full time yeah so are we still stabbing a welcome center or yes we are still stabbing a welcome center and I can speak a little more about what staff are there but that 0.6 communication specialist here to register our type roles their family engagement specialists an administrative assistant is shared with DEI so yes so we also have some commitments that were made in previous budget years using a combination of COVID dollars COVID grant dollars and operating budget funds and I want to name them now because we're keeping them and they were very strategically placed when we knew we were having increasing secondary enrollments so it's notable that they are there in this moment of increasing secondary but decreasing elementary we added 6.2 positions at Arlington High and FY 24 a number of those were tied to the opening of the building and various spaces within the building and a number of them were tied to programming at the high school some of it linked to the building we added 3.9 positions at OMS and Gibbs in last year's budget and in previous years had added learning communities at Odyssey middle school the students are grouped into learning communities at Odyssey and Gibbs and we had increased the number of learning communities which basically increases the number of core teachers to reduce class sizes at those schools we're maintaining additional staff and sections that we had added in Gibbs and FY 23 they have the biggest classes they're going to have next school year and we maintained due to a big increase in students two years ago the staffing level at that time and we're carrying it through into FY 25 we shifted last year the monotony paraprofessionals worked in a setting where they are primarily working with students with significant needs and so they moved from being TAs which is a lower paid paraprofessional to being SSPs which is a higher paid paraprofessional we actually now have everybody on a similar grid after our agreement in December but we had shifted them to be higher paid paraprofessionals in FY 24 and have maintained that commitment and our elementary class sizes are being maintained at between 20 and 25 students per section for next year even given the reductions that we're having in elementary sections so we're trying to maintain service level even if we have a couple reductions to the elementary level so I'll talk specifically about what we are adding and subtracting in FY 25 we're looking at a reduction of five classroom teachers this is actually six from FY 24 but we had one that we added in FY 24 that then we're taking out in FY 25 so it's not reflective here because from 24 budget 25 budgets net zero but we also have five additional teachers that have been in previous budgets that will be eliminated next school year because those students are moving up into the secondary level we are aligned with reduction in sections you can take a look at reduction in specialists so we're reducing PE specialists at the elementary level by 1.0 we had last year two curriculum specialists in social studies in one in science we were trying out that model to give some additional support to social studies we decided that we really only want a curriculum specialist in social studies in science and we're going to maintain that level for next year so we're reducing one curriculum specialist we're reducing an instructional coach at the middle school level we'd like to get a stronger model for instructional coaching at the middle level in place before we invest in staffing in that sort of program and we're reducing a library paraprofessional at the elementary level that had been added to sort of make schedules work last year but that we feel like we can do without next school year we also have some corrections I'm including these for the sake of transparency but for the most part this is us making sure that our data accurately reflect the number of positions we're actually holding and carrying through in the budget so there are a couple of things in here that are just adjustments from based on how we say fill the position so for example if we have somebody in a teaching assistant position at Pierce and they're filling that position at 0.66 then and we don't feel the need to carry it at 1.0 then we're reducing that 0.33 because that person intends to stay and it's fine if it's part-time so we have a number of positions that we're just maintaining at the level of staffing that they're currently at and we're not going to plan on filling it to a full 1.0 or positions like this classroom teacher at Brackett that has been carried for a number of years but is not actually built and so we're cleaning out the data to make sure that it accurately reflects what to make it what's not and what we actually plan our filling for next school year so these are just corrections the FY25 budget additions are listed here and I want to be really clear about what these additions are most of these everything with a double star next to it which is everything except this classroom teacher position at Monotony and this specialized support paraprofessional 2.0 positions 0.6 of which is actually already at Monotony so it's actually only a 1.4 from what we have right now addition all of these other positions are currently in the system these are positions that based on student needs we added after the FY24 budget closed so this is maintenance of service and that is because when we started the FY24 year we had a number of programs we had a lot of new leaders we had a number of programs that required additional staffing so like if you look at the high school we've had additional custodial needs as a result of the new high school opening we've had a tutor added to a learning center to provide more early support for students who needed additional homework help or needed additional support in a particular content area so we created a 0.6 tutor on top of a 0.4 that had already been there we've needed one-to-one classmates so there's a number of one-to-one roles that I'm not finding quick here there one-to-one teaching assistant 5.0 these are supports required as a part of an IEP so it gets written into a student's IEP that they require a one-to-one aid we are regulatory required to provide that level of service when we took a look at our SLC at Stratton the way that that was being staffed compared to what our students needed told us that we needed to add more support there so there's all of these roles of part are in response direct response to student need this account actually for a lot of what you see as an increase in spending for special education in FY25 and then there because monotomy just opened and has an additional classroom we want to make sure that we put a teacher in that classroom and have more space for more students to enter monotomy so most of these additions with the exception of the one that monotomy are positions that already exist within the system they are not new humans in FY25 and here are some of our brilliant students and I'm having to take any questions before we do so. Kersi or Lynn or Jane or Paul, do you want to add anything? No I want to thank Dean and Josh and Peggy for their patience this year with with Michael's sudden absence due to the early birth of his child we had a few hiccups we had a condensed schedule we had more versions of the budget come out than we normally do with corrections so it was a bit of a bumpy year but they went on for the ride for us so we're very grateful for that. Mr. Cardin has led us through a number of budget subcommittee meetings to do all of that work and we appreciate that the only other thing to add is to clarify when we're reducing the sections classroom sections this coming year it's not changing the number of students in the class it's because the group that's coming from the lower grade to the upper grade is smaller than the one that's already there so because a lot of times when parents hear they're reducing sections they assume that it's going to affect class size that is not true. Thank you all. Dean, Josh, I'm not here. Do you want to say anything before we open it up for questions? No just thanks for putting it together time for our deadline as well. I appreciate it. It's all stressful. We agree. All right, questions as questions. Charlie. Thank you Madam Chair. So Dr. Holland, it's the secondary in this chart where the secondary enrollment and the elementary enrollment cross and the secondary and I'm sorry the elementary enrollment is dropping doesn't that say that the future population school population is going to drop? So yes I mean what we're at right now I would say is the evening out and so it remains to be seen whether that line that stabilizes as some of the projections show it stabilizing some of the projections show it dropping none of them that we've seen show it significantly increasing which tracks with what we've seen in the pandemic which is a decrease in birth rates. Arlington is a densely populated town of a lot of people who move in and out and one of the hardest things about our projections has been accounting for moves and vacancy rates in rental properties in you know what what real estate sales are going to do whether new families are going to move in so all of our projections part of why we use the five-year weighted average is because our past is the best predictor this has been the best predictor of our present and future so I would say what this is demonstrating is the leveling out and that the other projection graph is also showing a leveling out and that our numbers are showing a leveling out whether that stays level assuming Arlington stays about as populated as it is with young kids or whether that drops some more will kind of remain to be seen we'll keep using that five-year weighted average we're down a little bit this year and anticipate being so in elementary as well you're right that as those big classes of students move out that we should see a drop in enrollment if everything stays stable where it's at right now so over the next five to six years if our kindergarten rates stay the same then slowly this will district will see a decrease in enrollment thank you thank you so we know that not every kid costs the district the same amount you know we know some subgroups so special education just are more expensive my memory is that that is also true at the secondary level so that there are additional resources you need at the secondary level so as we have a district that's moving into more heavily weighted to secondary students that that comes with a cost is that is that right is that I would say yes often what can happen is that um force if we're not doing this if we're not doing the job we hope to do when it comes to address some needs at a really early age then the challenges the students face if that gap is growing will only increase as they head into secondary school so we have more students for example on ips at secondary level than we do at the elementary level um that and if you have that and you need to provide more services for students they are struggling with math class that there are constraints in the secondary schedule that make it difficult to do that without adding staff so you know we you can run there are ways to run a secondary schedule efficiently so that you can provide those services as flexibly as possible um but kind of no matter what level you're at if you have a student with significant needs they are going to require additional resources sometimes that's going to include additional staffing as we're seeing this year's budget um and often there are only more students with those needs at a secondary level than at the elementary level i would actually also refer to my memory so you have a certain number of students and you say the elementary level you know class of 25 you know that not just one teacher supports that class because you have a gym teacher and a music teacher and so forth and my memory is that the the numbers that you need to support say 25 students at the secondary level is a higher number than you've worked for yet i can't remember the numbers but 1.3 versus 1.5 or something yes mostly because the programming options at the secondary level particularly in high school are so much more so you want to provide them with as many options as possible we have a program of studies that is incredible with high school um and you have to account for what they're going to opt into now the nice thing about that is you can also base staffing decisions on what students opt into if you can run schedules early enough so we're trying to move that earlier because it helps us make projections about what kind of staffing of this week but we can also be flexible with the high school principal on the left um within the bottom line of FTE's move what he needs based on how the schedule is filmed okay thank you madam chair um so i just have a few questions on the large what you sent us um page 18 you talk about a special ed category doesn't include expenditures for preventive efforts through intervention so this is response to intervention the but in the budget transfer category for special education on page 18 yeah you talk about i'm sorry page 19 the star yeah correct so um so this is classrooms this is kids are still in a regular classroom and we're getting extra help um yes so so that asterisk is accounting for the fact that um we may have students who receive targeted intervention that do not have an IEP or even who receive targeted intervention that's not linked to their IEP um sorry i just had my screen get sort of partially taken over by oh sorry thank you i got distracted by that i apologize um but but yes so that's not accounting for all of the different things we might do to intervene with a student who's being challenged by content um within the budget that doesn't count for reading interventionist it doesn't count for math interventionist the special education line right okay um and then inclusive specialist that's special ed correct the inclusion specialist position yeah so that was a new position that we created to help with really lack of space and class sizes at the Thompson we're also working on what we might need to do to adjust enrollment booms at the Thompson um with you know things like buffer zones and other mechanisms that we have available to us that role specifically was designed to provide support to teachers in giving inclusive services to students not we wanted them to have a dual certification special education so that they could provide services if they were say in a classroom um that had a lot of students and they were students with needs who they could service but it's also a dual certified role so we wanted them to have the general education background as well um and we were trying not to always default to hiring non-licensed staff to support large class sizes we wanted to support teachers and supporting large class sizes as well as support the kids and so we created this position um as a trial this year to see how it would do in supporting Thompson with an additional certified teacher um unit D is settled is that right correct um for this year we go back to the bargaining table with them next year for all the other bargaining language we only talked about compensation in this last round okay we did get an additional this year and next year do we negotiate for them in the following year we did as a part of that negotiation get additional time from unity so we have like an additional 100 minutes per week that we get to allocate towards breakfast programming um various other programming tutoring for students um and so that actually is significantly helping us in saving us some money as well but that was significant and then just a curiosity question how many afghan students we have I'd have to go look up a number we've had an increase um I am not and we actually got a grant to help support our families who come from afghanistan but I don't know the exact number unless anybody else I could get it but as you get up here it's okay thank you Mike superintendent the budget's a masterpiece of of pulling together parts and pieces and resources and things like that and and and you're well commended on that how are you doing as a school how's the teaching how's the learning how do you measure your own success I hope you can speak to that with a little bit more specificity than you know like wobe on school district where everybody is strong handsome and above average that's a great question but I would need a whole bunch of other slides but I didn't help answer it all right I'll narrow it yeah that'd be helpful how do you measure how well you do as the teaching institution so we have a number of different things that we rely on as our measures of success in the strategic plan we name specific ones for each individual initiative that would take me too long to outline here there are a few things that you know if pressed and asked in setting like this I would say we pay very close attention for our accountability ratings and that is because the state has recently revised how they think about accountability and they grade us they give us points basically based on how well we do improving absenteeism of students improving outcomes for like tests and academic outcomes as well as absenteeism outcomes as well as high school graduation rates for the very vocal groups that I named and that we put in our strategic plan so the state actually rates us against like how well have your English learners learn English how well have students that are from low-income families done in your schools this year and we have to submit plans to the state linked to the student opportunity act which is linked to the funding formula that funds chapter 70 that says what we're doing in those areas and so we use the accountability measures that come from the state in a big way to assess how we're doing our accountability ratings this year this school year from last year's MCAS scores and all the other data we submit to the state were as good as they get we were meeting our exceeding standards across the board and so that was a really great thing to see and that tells us that we're doing well academically not only for all of our kids but also for those students who might have been underserved by the system previously in addition to that we survey our families students and staff routinely we use the results from that survey I'm actually doing a forum with families later this week where I report back what the results were how we're thinking about them what we feel like we're doing well on we've said over the last couple years we want to focus on improving belonging for all of our kids and we want to focus on improving this sense that I'm held to a high standard rigor for all of our kids and what we've heard from them is that we are steadily improving those things we have survey results that say that while we're not knocking it out of the ballpark on rigorous expectations and belonging we are steadily improving those two things for our students at the elementary and secondary levels we have areas to improve around communications around how we address challenging topics of culture and identity in our schools but overall those are the things we look to first to say we're getting it right or we just thought that's a ring to draw. Thank you. Is there any long-term evaluation of student successes five ten years out from graduation? Yes the state takes data on four-year graduation rates from college on college matriculation and we that's some of that from college and four-year graduation rate for the high school as well as engagement in advanced coursework which was one of the areas we saw a lot of improvement this past year get are part of that accountability rating that i was talking about post college isn't factored into those data but it is some of the data that we have and can look at so down the road i think after you've had a chance to graduate and to calculate and go through college some of the kids we're doing some of this work on we're going to keep it very close on I think the federal standard is how many kids who enroll in college end up getting their degree after what six years thank you. Annie? Well Michael just covered it but you're talking about the national data that standardized across the board that all institutions get out a lot of clients will get it and that goes up to six years of data. The students of college first master on comes back they'll help on American it doesn't just end at four years. John and then Joe. First thank you for all the efforts I went into this budget you can tell that you guys work really far on it and just looking it over very easy to see what changed from last year you know at least my takeaway from what changed from last year is it seems like the FTE is kind of like he imposed a stabilizing in other words you know not a lot of new hiring last year but at the same time compensate the people that do work here a little bit more generously that's kind of the big picture of what happened in the last year at least going forward that's what the plan is going forward. So I actually have three quick three questions I'll kind of keep them as quick as possible but the first one is um as far as the salary you know this one bullet here says allocations to support competitive compensation in preparation for bargaining with the unit A negotiations so like can you just kind of explain the rationale there like for instance first of all unit A are they the teachers yes they're the teachers so are they under contract through FY25 no they're not no they start a new contract in FY25 so we're bargaining with them right now this year they're out of contract yes so you know comes September 1st yeah I guess okay so that's where the reserves come from and that's where um the the pay so the so um I'm just wondering like how coal when they sit down and negotiate you know whatever they you know negotiate for it's four percent five percent twelve percent over how many years that's going to be applied to the FY25 salary excuse me the FY24 salary uh 25 yeah 25 so I guess what I'm getting to is what's like so you raise the salary before negotiations then they apply the coal is are we going to get hit with much much higher base we have we negotiated new salaries for unit D in FY24 this year we are currently in negotiations with unit A for the start of their next contract which will be FY25 yeah so that so different different groups yeah um so what we committed in the override let me you want to talk about that sure yeah I mean so the amount you see in the budget we committed is the amount that we committed to the public we would put towards salary along with the 300 that we were putting towards unit D yeah the two million two million two million dollars was promised but it was already public union knows that they know that that two million dollars is there to grab right yeah so uh as far as the strategy um it's going to be similar to what the police union did it's going to be a market adjustment um hopefully we're in negotiations we don't know but the idea is a market adjustment and a cola and so the cola is already there in the budget um we're not going to say what it is but there is a cola built into the budget and then there's this pot for market adjustment then they end up going into a cola and they end up going into certain steps and lanes it may even be going into different places that we're currently negotiating with that so that makes perfect sense so essentially we're going we're trying to budget for a contract that isn't completed but it will fit in FY25 yeah so okay that really clarifies a lot of stuff um now the next question is estate funding you know speaking kind of stabilized this year in other words it didn't go up as much as it has gone in prior years um so were there any considerations and you know alright the state of massachusetts has decided we just can't spend this much on education this year were there any um adjustments made on your end in other words you know we just certain things have to be cut because that's what's getting handed down yeah one of the biggest impacts of some of the um really a little bit surprising either stabilization or even decreases in some of our title funding which is some of the state-based allocation funding has been to title one which is most significantly impacts our students from low income households and we used so during the pandemic title one funding significantly expanded we had the code funds as well so we were able to put a lot of dollars towards expanding our title one summer programming in particular and we have had to now constrain our title one programming to only serve um a sort of smaller subset of those students who benefit most directly from having the services that come from that funding but what we've been able to do because we uh negotiated with unit d like I said for an additional hundred minutes a week is try to shift some of the things that we were using those dollars for towards being uh built into the school's budget so trying to do a little bit more like let's say you have students who don't necessarily come from a low income household but could use some extra tutoring because those two things are not necessarily linked then we can have some tutoring before school or we can do a little bit of before school homework help programming uh because it's built into the contract that we have those people for that amount of time and so that that in bargaining we're trying to be really strategic about making up the difference of some of the spaces where we might be losing some state allocation grants um so it is having but it is having an impact I mean we simply serve fewer students in the summer now then we were able to at the height of the pandemic when we had all these dishes yeah okay thanks now um so kind of continuing along that you know that's great kind of color and detail which I would never really you know be able to see from the budget but it's it's great background what I do see in the budget is are the numbers and it's basically um you know that the top line numbers in other words um what Arlington taxpayers are paying what the state is paying and uh you know what the overall budget is increasing as you know we all know the school budget is going up by eight percent the state input is kind of like almost like level funded so then the taxpayers contribution is actually going up by ten percent so which I think it comes up to right around seven million dollars which was the full overall that would just pass so you know as far as you know getting feedback from the students and everything put me down as you know we love the Arlington schools they're excellent you know couldn't be happier with them but I do worry is this sustainable like in other words if if this budget passes and is implemented are we essentially voting for an override in a year or two years like how how are we just gonna like is there any long come projection yeah so I mean I think you know that's more of a political discussion than an administrative position um so we have the plan that went to the voters yeah and the plan only covered three fiscal years right FY24, FY25, and FY26 the plan showed a cliff in FY27 that's what we put before the voters and it and it passed right so we still have that cliff it's a tiny bit larger because of this chapter 70 a state funding issue but when the when the town reconciles all their revenue with the new growth coming in higher than expected and other revenue coming in higher than expected that cliff will narrow again so when when we when the long-range planning committee representatives on meets again in the spring that's the right forum to discuss that going forward for FY26 though this is the plan that we put before the voters and this is what we're delivering to the book to to the town okay so we're very aware you know we're very aware that there's that clip out there we're being very careful in adding positions only adding to you know these three new people from the not any next year that that's it really we're funding we're we're bringing in in other positions that were funded by the extra grant and we added those positions during FY24 and that's that's where the spending is it's increasing but we're careful we're going to be very careful by adding positions over the next three years because of what you're talking about yeah but in the meantime we're continuing to spend the levels that we've committed to the voters so just to summarize it sounds like we all know we're heading towards so in short it does not sound you know without an override it does not sound system that's to me for the long-range planning committee that's something came to the protocol yeah I guess the final question you know which is in the future we'd have to consider a plan B like you know plan A or right plan B I don't know and maybe that's this is the right forum for that at some point all did you want to add yeah I just wanted to have one thing the only budget that's out there on the state side right now is the governor's budget which is pretty neat here there's a lot of pressure being put on legislative words right now to improve the chapter 70 numbers and the other numbers underlying numbers within the budget and traditionally the senate house coming with a higher and I'm getting the drugs but anyway so because of the law being proposed there's a lot of activity in a lot of districts and getting hurt by this much worse than we are so there's a lot of noise out there in the commonwealth a lot of pressure on the state reps it is an election there so I expect that so it might go up yeah yeah okay it's good Charlie thank you madam chair I have three three questions so one is Lynn just touched on this idea that we're just hiring so putting on three new bodies this year but you know the the covid funds the extra money was supposed to be one time one so we really are not we're really adding more than three people because the funding for the extra people has gone away so that represents a significant increase in staffing that's not part of the historic continuum so I have a question you mentioned earlier that in the I think it's the unity personnel they went from one grade level to an ssp is that the term of art used so and that's higher payload was there a skill change there in other words but did we just sort of magically anoint them as higher level people or do we bring in new people or did we train them what how did we get the justification for paying them at this new professional grade level that's a great question so they had the nature of monotony programming is that we had assigned them assigned as teaching assistants to the classrooms when we had a few specialized support personnel but if you look at the job descriptions between an ssp and a ta there were a lot of pieces of the ssp job descriptions that ta's at monotony were expected to do because of the kind of environment that they were in where half of the students in a classroom had significant special needs and where at monotony we have the most full inclusion model for students with ips that we have anywhere else in the district and so during the pandemic we had done additional training also with the ssp with the now ssp's then ta's at monotony and when you compared their skill set their training and the demands of the job against our ssp's elsewhere in the district they were doing the job of an ssp and we had gone through the work of doing the additional training with them and so we had a lengthy discussion with them about this and ended up doing an MOA with them to come to agreement about what the appropriate level of salary would be knowing that it was our goal to get everyone in unit d paid at a competitive level and knowing that we did not pay our other ta's in the district at a competitive level but they were if you look at the salary study a couple of years ago the most underpaid people in our district were our teaching assistants and so knowing that strategically we really wanted to move everybody up to the level of pay that our ssp's were at at the time and that there really was no good argument for keeping them at the ta level given their training given the environment that they were teaching in and the demand of the job we made an agreement with them to move them up to that pay level and then to do the work of negotiating with unit d which we've now done and as a result of that everybody all of the ssp's at monotony now provide that extra 100 minutes a week that we agreed to in the unit d agreement so they they received that earlier pay earlier because of the training they received over the course of the pandemic so it was a true great change as opposed to a yeah it was a yeah it was a change in the job description but one more question which michael ruin sort of asked it in general but i've got a very specific question so over the last several years we heard the great deal about the achievement gap and closing the achievement gap aren't we closing the achievement gap that's a fair question so we are closing the achievement gap for some groups in some grade levels and less so in others for others so we're doing well in science at beginning to close the achievement gap particularly for english learners um we are i'd have to pull all this data up to see it we are leveling out the gap in elementary e la and we've just implemented a new literacy curriculum um that we're hoping we'll begin to turn that achievement gap to be much smaller um i am happy to give you a lot of data on this mr proskett but i don't have it sitting right in front of me would you send it please yeah sure it's also on our district profile on the desi website and you can look at like different subgroups and they achieve versus all students um but we have this out in graphs and i can show you want to close the gaps and i just yeah surprise the density i can send you the outcomes report that we sent to the full community also that talked a little bit about this too dean and then they'll come i'm going to ask you a few questions um they're consistent with what i asked the time manager just will freeze a little differently and i'll say some of them if you don't want to fully answer okay just the preference okay um so the first one is current and future relationships in our work right so here's my here's my preference okay um when i was a kid teacher strikes were unicorn events like in 1995 i was a senior at belmont high and the teachers were on strike and they're the first teachers went straight for like 20 years and 12 years later teachers union went on strike 12 years later debt and went on strike that was in 19 and these were like big events okay the last two years following students of the art story brocline alton avril wooburn and over in new well gone longer okay that doesn't count for malrose medford and a host of others that were teed up ready to go okay so it clearly indicates that there's a problem right like and i'm gonna be a little bit personal like this like my wife was teed up at that belrose strike and i watched how hard it was for her so this isn't like willy nilly like greedy selfish teachers who are like we're going for that like they're this is a problem 24 one bunch from today hmm the alton teachers gonna be in front of like tonight absolutely not i could say that with a lot of confidence okay um i and i live in new i know i remember i wouldn't say that if i didn't outline um yeah both both dr homen and our predecessor have done a lot of work in building good relationships with the union and that matters a lot there are deep concerns you know across the state about pay fortunately we have the override money that we've been talking about that'll help address that it's very timely that we have that but also the the baseline is there right there's a there's a level of trust that is not present in a lot of other districts um that we fortunately have in arlington and i'll add to that by saying you know arlington has demonstrated just in this year such a commitment to competitive pay for its educators and that and and then we have followed up on that commitment by setting those dollars aside in the f y 25 budget and then we're going to make good on that promise that following that kind of follow through builds on that trust that foundation of trust and is the only reason i can confidently respond to that question so but the other thing is all the teachers saw all of the school committee out there working for the override specifically to increase teacher pay i mean we were saying that and i think that builds a lot of respect because we're putting our time we're putting our energy and we're working we can we're clearly working for them in very trouble playing our intense just a community that uses process right we said we're going to do something we're going to do it started a few years ago and it went from bond range planning all the way through this committee through the school committee and we just we do what we say we're going to do and it's just really important that we keep doing that okay second question um what keeps you up at night like what bothers you like it doesn't show doesn't show up on this presentation it's not in a budget but it just it's a problem it bothers you you know the answer i do it's the answer to mr fosk's question if we like and it's that that takes so much time closing achievement gaps for kids making a school system operate effectively and create a sense of belonging for every single kid and allow every single child to thrive and be curious and do all the stuff of learning in our schools creating a system that actually does that takes so much time and it takes so much trust building it takes so much blood, sweat, and tears on the part of educators that if it's hard to we're in year one of a strategic plan where we said we were going to close achievement gaps you don't eliminate the achievement gap in year one of a strategic plan and to know that we are continuing in a system that does systematically underserve some of our kids because they demonstrate a need and miss it because we're trying to do a zillion things or we don't have the support available right at the right moment or the student feels ostracized because everything interaction wouldn't appear like for all of the different reasons that we sometimes fall short that's what keeps me up at night. Anything else team helps us? Good pays great results are better. About 10 days ago the Boston Globe and their main editorial stated that if you want your kids to learn reading you should send them to Mississippi. All of our Arlington elementary schools using the best reading programs available based on science and our kids learning to read. I'm really excited to answer that question. So we will be in FY25 right now in FY25 all of our students will have access to a curriculum that is backed by the science of reading research. They all already get access to rigorous phonics instruction. They all already are screened routinely from kindergarten through grade three and if needed through grades four, five, and six for any gaps that they might have in their foundational literacy development. And this year we began a pilot. 25 percent of our elementary sections are working with the new curriculum and this curriculum is based in science of reading research that says that if you build kids schema in a particular content area and then you build their vocabulary and content knowledge in that area they will learn to read faster. They will learn to read with more depth and understanding. Their comprehension will improve and that is how this curriculum is built and organized. And like I said 25 percent of our classrooms are using it this year 100 percent of our classrooms finished. So do all our elementary schools use the same reading curriculum? Next fall? Yes. Okay. As soon as we get everybody else on the same curriculum. So we don't have to send our kids to Mississippi. Please don't. Okay so I'm going to ask you a question. It's kind of the opposite of Dean's question about what kids do on the night. Okay which is this we all know that at some point throwing money at a problem she ceases to be effective okay and yet um there's a it's it's hard to engage or judge when you're at that moment. Okay so when you say that you have this thing keeping up at night about reaching all of these kids is that a time of attention and a technique problem? How much of that is a money problem? And I know we just gave you a bunch of money to help with that but I'm just saying it's I mean it's both great which is a probably unsatisfactory answer so I'm trying to be more specific. No it's unsatisfactory answer. It's unsatisfactory if it was oh no we need to know slower. Yeah don't not that. I mean it's definitely part why we have a strategic plan and it's that we're going to put our dollars in these buckets is because we think that that will make a difference. I mean one of the I think one of the questions I was asked here last year was if you had to prioritize any of these things which one would you prioritize and I said compensation because the quality of the educator you put in front of a child really matters and you're not going to attract the highest quality folks if you can't offer a competitive salary and I you're also not going to attract them if you if they don't you know feel like they connect with that community and its purpose and its goals so you need both but like if you have that purpose and that connection and you're offering five percent less than the neighbor down the street you're definitely not going to attract the best educator to be in front of the students and the number one factor that people tell you impacts a student's achievement is the quality of the educator in front of them so you definitely need both and you have to be able to really identify and pinpoint and this is some of the work we've been trying to do in professional development like what is the strategy that will make the biggest difference for the most kids that we can teach as many educators as possible quickly as possible with as few resources as possible so that we can get the biggest bang for our buck with the dollars that we do have I mean if you compare Arlington to other districts of the same size in our immediate area you'll see 130 million dollar budgets and that has a big impact on the ability to pull in consultants for professional development we try to do as much of that in the house as we can so we try to find our experts and put them in front of educators and have them provide the professional development as often as we can because that saves us dollars but sometimes you have to pull in these consultants in order to teach the methods for the new curriculum that you're just now rolling out we're doing that now and so you know it's always both and we will always operate within a constrained environment in Arlington and so we have to be really thoughtful about what we need to spend money on the $30,000 it's all for and what we just absolutely don't right and every other decision is similar we may right where do we actually where's the target going to actually assist so let me ask you a flip side question then so we know who the kids are who you're struggling we know where the gaps are because of all the things that we are measuring there's kids at the other end of the spectrum who are not the fits perfect kid either okay having had one of them I always worry that we're just going oh they'll be fine right because they're super smart and they're this and they're that that doesn't mean they're not struggling in a different way do we have our eyes on that problem there's no such thing as a fits perfect kid um I don't think having had one well I don't she felt she fit perfect right but there's not like every child in front of you and this is something we're kind of we're working on talking about the system every child in front of you has needs of some kind that are unique to that human being in front of you so if you don't create a classroom environment in your second grade class where every student they may get some grade level content but has an opportunity to make it their own in their own way so that's a could be extension that could be here's my avenue into this so that I can hit grade level standard or comprehension um then you're you're not doing it right I mean one of the things I like about this curriculum that we're rolling out right now is that at the end of every module it has a performance test and the kids get a lot of choice and ability to kind of create a way to doing that performance task at fifth grade they do monologues about human rights um and they can there are all kinds of different ways you can do it you can do it in multiple modes of media you can um you can choose what character you're going to do your monologue from the voice of and it can be based on how you connect with them and so with that sort of constrained choice you can create extension opportunities for students who are ready for it you can give students some creative options about how they convey their ideas you can provide you can put support mechanisms in there that help kids who might struggle with it still access the task itself and that kind of flexibility which you have to build into every day now doing that requires resources because you have to have enough support people around to help this kid fly and and this kid get to grade level um but that's that's the dream like is that you can not be teaching to a middle that's not ever the goal you don't close an achievement gap by watching this line go down and this one go up right so if you've got an achievement gap and you have these kids are tracking right along and these kids are going down that's definitely bad news because this gap is bigger but you close an achievement gap when all groups go up but they meet right i'm accelerating this group that hasn't achieved at the level that we want and this group is still improving too and they meet up here and if you that's what it looks like when it's closing the achievement gap this is not closing the achievement gap good thank you everybody also want to thank all of you for your hard work on this and it's every year it gets better and better and more readable and more transparent i want to bounce off something Charlie mentioned about the COVID funding you know last few years uh i think it's like four and a half million dollars worth of funds to mitigate the impact of COVID and i know we HVAC and remote learning and things like that and it looks like it's dropping to zero um from $880,000 i'm wondering what specific positions or functions are we losing and i'm sorry i haven't read all 254 pages yet maybe in a document but what positions are gone what functions are gone because this money's going away so we've been really careful about making sure that as we went along that we wrapped whatever we wanted to keep from those dollars into the plan to keep it sustainable um because yes those are one-time dollars and we knew they were going away and this year with that 880,000 left we needed to make sure that we spent it down like you don't want to leave money on the table and we knew that there was no way we were pulling all 880,000 of that over into the base budget that wasn't going to happen so we we tried to select roles that we thought would have the biggest impact for a short period of time so the leadership development and onboarding role was in response to some specific requests from unit D in negotiations previously as well as the fact that we knew we were going to have four new principles this year that we're all going to need oriented to being a new principal and that's a lot of new principles to onboard all at once we knew we needed one of the things we've seen in some of our data is that we have a lot of teachers in their first five years with us who on surveys will say that they feel the least connected to their colleagues the least connected to the school culture the least sort of sense of efficacy in their work and that's really concerning like that tells us we're not onboarding new teachers very well and these are the folks we're going to lose in years five six after we've invested in them off they go right and that's not ideal so that leadership development nonboarding role we put in place for this year knowing full well we weren't going to have it next year and we said write us onboarding programming work with our mentors find us a partnership with an organization that can provide mentorship training to our mentors for new principles which they're doing this year so we she's gotten some mechanisms off the ground that we can continue in the future years but we won't have that role next year we really want to expand the capacity of our individual schools to work in partnership with families there are other districts where this looks like a full-time position districts where there are a lot more title one funds there are a lot more just allocation grants from the state results well in some of these districts that have roles like family liaisons the just the allocation grants and the competitive grant access is a lot higher because of the populations in those towns Arlington isn't competitive for a lot of grants from the state because of our tax base in terms of our like the excellence that we have in Arlington it sounds like that that would have happened without the pandemic right yeah she's getting that she so we added a family liaison last year with the ester with the COVID fund to try that out other towns have it they fund it on an ongoing basis from other grants you got this pot of money we tried it it's not sustainable it's not something we're going to continue right so gone right so there are so there's many residual income of financial obligations once this money has gone away well that's that we went over that that chart there are there are four positions 3 3.6 that were moving that we are continuing we tried them with the with the COVID funding and we decided they're really valuable to the district we're going to continue that okay did anything about anything else for those well sort of we did because we've got these other positions that were eliminating because of of at the elementary school because of class sizes and that sounds like the one-time money was sort of I mean all of that one-time money to experiment with with things some of them were keeping because we found them valuable their priorities were the budget is always a prioritization right so we found these things are higher priorities than the social studies coach we had two social studies coaches going down to one because these these other things are higher priority than that social studies so the budget is always a sense of laddering the priorities and we did have those extra funds that allowed us to experiment it was wonderful and we were able to find some things that we wanted to keep okay thank you just one more example of that though like two years ago we added a partial learning community at one of the elementary schools using COVID funds which a year or two later we rolled in to the base budget so you all have been seeing over the last couple of years examples of us doing exactly what Mr. Carter just talked about which is take dollars that are in a grant that we think are high priority additions to the budget and move them over into the base so that we can sustain them and this is what the COVID dollars set up is because the reality was the needs resulting from COVID weren't going to go away after four or five years it was going to completely transform the school system and then we were going to have to figure out like towns and municipalities and departments all over the town are needing to figure out what we keep from the needs that we've identified targeted addressed and what we simply can't sustain because the dollars are going to go away yeah yeah actually I want to kind of COVID from a somewhat different angle sort of approach to it from a financial perspective but I don't I don't think we've ever seen an event and think about this all started about four years this time four years ago since a universally impactful event how are you seeing we're about I think about two years or more or less coming out of it are you seeing in terms of impacts on the kids you know hopping down the system and then teachers admins whatever and are you seeing sort of enduring impacts coming out of it yeah definitely um one of the biggest ones that is most visible to us right now is we have more adults staff members who are have needed for various reasons to take extended leaves of absence due to their own or close family members health challenges sometimes physical health sometimes and really very often mental health challenges of their children of close relatives of even a sibling we've had you know staff members you have to be out because they're caring for a sister who has been diagnosed with cancer and they're the only family that they have left for example so like we have a lot more of those than I have ever seen in my years in education we have used up sick banks because of like horrifying illnesses that people are suffering from and they run out of time and so the union has the bank that people donate to and they start being employed the long-term impact of that on people's mental health when they're coming to work every day is pretty significant as a result of some of that we see an impact on student learning so some of the things we're trying to prioritize as we think about next year is how to make sure that our staff have everything that they need to support them to make it to work because that has a significant impact on kids when their teachers are present and at the same time teachers have a right to care for a loved one and teachers have a need to have the ability to stay home with a sick child and we've had a lot more students like initially right out of the pandemic adolescent mental health was in severe crisis that has improved which is great and we've seen the increase of student participation in extracurricular activities we're really glad a couple years ago if you recall we wrapped instrumental music into the school's budget and athletic fees into the school's budget since then we've had a significant increase in student participation in both of those things like yay likely because we're coming out of the pandemic and also likely because the fees have been eliminated that has a positive impact on students mental health so happily what i would have said in answer to that question a year and a half ago or two years ago is very different than the impact we're seeing now but the impact we're seeing now is in a big way sort of the lingering impact on a lot of the adults coming out of the pandemic and that has an impact on kids because it can create a consistency in their schedules it can create really tricky situations when you can't backfill and i worry in a really big way about the profession itself when we cannot find special educators we cannot find science teachers to backfill positions and you know they just don't have the big cohorts coming out of the teaching colleges anymore i mean the profession itself has been i hate to use this word but it feels gutted by some of the things that occurred over the past four years and we do worry about that a lot but we're seeing that john and i do the police inspired by this and we're the police department is very challenged and getting a new police recruit so having worked in government my entire career it's not a great time to be in government um my last question i know it's very early days but uh well how are you seeing the new high school this is the reverse of dean's question this is what makes you smile at that um that the impact is that on adolescent mental health has probably been uh one of the more positive things i have a student advisory group that i meet with about once a month and i talked to them maybe two weeks ago and asked them what the impact of the new school has been they're like oh it's just so much light and it's just so bright and i get to hang out with my friends and on the forum stairs or like over in the fine arts wing and the having the social spaces built into their space is awesome seeing them use that is amazing um it's just and it's lifted the spirits of everybody in central office too because we're in a new office as well so um we're very much enjoying the new building it's gorgeous last couple of questions on the f y 25 budget so mine's similar to garyl since the next step which would be are there some um creative things that and you just talked about it a little bit that um teachers and administrators have come up with to deal with the fact that kids are coming out of COVID with so much either mental health or isolation um and lack of socialization and lack of development in sport and music and feeling like they don't want to participate because they're not the best you know anything along those lines and it's a short short i think as much um encouragement as they can give students to first of all know what the options are so like in our advisories at the middle school level i'm talking about what the various clubs are encouraging kids who have an interest in just that to check it out um we've had more at the elementary level um extracurricular after school like school chorus kicking up and then they'll do concerts and that's inspiring and exciting we just had all of our townwide concerts we've been doing that stuff for years but um having so much of that now in person gets kids socializing and excited about those events so i mean i i'm struggling to think of anything specific creative but some of the programming that's come out of the new building has been really exciting like they've opened a cafe it's part of the courses that the kids can sign up for to run it there's a copy shop upstairs students are learning business skills through that which is highly motivating in terms of courses that students will take we have more internships students can intern in the central office we've actually had several interns in the communications department this year um those kinds of opportunities that kids can see relevance for their future job prospects and college applications and have been really motivating for kids to take on so uh we see we see a lot of of that students really thinking about what's my future and what do i want to be interested in and advocacy our civics day and eighth grade civics projects have gotten kids really interested in advocacy and change you've met some of them it finds me so um like we're really proud of that because it gets them really rubbed up and excited about getting involved when they get to high school and then you see more participation in student governance and those sorts of things the high school's also added to no-cut sports over the last couple of years regarding the term um which makes it a little bit in the affidavit so you are looking for an account appropriation of nine six million five hundred and twenty one thousand two forty eight correct any other final questions about the f y twenty five budget chair thank you madam chair so um you're asking for a big increase and i think that our chairman just noted that ninety some million dollars and um my recollection is in the five-year plan um your speedy plan that the cumulative increases on the order of forty seven million dollars more than would be spent if you didn't have that plan and um i'm wondering and we're looking at this uh as as len pointed out before we're looking at um in 2027 a short quote how are you going to tell us as a community maybe this is the question of you dot oh and but also for the spookman how are you going to tell us as a community that we're meeting the objectives of this strategic plan and that we should continue funding it this year and next year next year so so i'll describe sort of our mechanism our process and in it off to my folks um holland sears so um we have a reporting structure that uh each year i develop goals for the district for the following year um those are based in the strategic plan uh and then report out on the goals from the previous year and we'll be using the metrics articulated in the strategic plan so like for each priority area we have and each initiative was this successful or not what's the metric we're using to determine whether this was successful or not some of those will shift if we have a better metric one that's more specific to the actual initiative that we're developing and one of our some of our initiatives say we need a metric for this so year one is establish a metric your two is once you've got a baseline identify what your metric is that shows whether or not this is successful and then report back on that so there's an expectation built into this plan on transparency as to whether or not we're meeting the goals and objectives of it and and we'll see that in community yes thank you all right shifting to the f by 24 budget you've all received that memo from the town and turn the superintendent asking for a reserve transfer 400 000 into the f by 24 budget uh first i will ask the school side so anything else you want to add to that memo from not from what was already provided in the community any questions that anyone has on finance committee about that was the body already been spent yes it's being spent on salaries any other questions all right um thank you very much this has been very informative and i appreciate the hard work and especially getting the budget to us uh what you did under a very trying circumstances i know i appreciate it thank you thank you for your patience for your time appreciate it thank you thank you very much yeah yeah thank you let's knock off for a minute thank you three 13 feet 8 and 20 starting with March 13th yes this is one that town manager was in yeah and this was there had there was the outstanding um item about um whether the transportation infrastructure fund funded the entirety of the blue bikes or how we wanted to work that um and it is to fund the entirety of the bikes i spoke to the manager and and reaffirmed that it is for the bikes um he's thinking was the 23 000 who was just dropping it in the bucket and to do any roadwork or sidewalk repair and then he values this money rather than general funds on the program so that is his plan so anyone have any other questions or visions to the um minutes of March 13th and we've already noted the um article 55 report is that an easement no that's an article 55 comment your office plans to request no action he said do you know what number it is article 10 number 10 i think we covered that what we've got we're going to request no action on 27 okay i'm sorry was there a change that was supposed to be here yes tell manager office plans to request no action in article 57 oh yes okay got that yes all right is there a motion to approve the minutes of second second second all right all in favor raise your hand 16 any opposed any abstentions next yes repeat yes page two article 50 yes Rebecca we did not vote yes noted that so that is struck in any other corrections or additions to the minutes of 18 is there a motion so moved second all right all in favor raise your hand 16 any opposed any abstentions yes and lastly then this this already has a correction from alan jones which is number five c which is the figure for the liability insurance so that was changed to 607703 dollars other revisions to 20 minutes of time all right is there a motion to move that seconded second all right all in favor raise your hand 15 any affirmative any opposed abstentions jordan let's take out the school budget so would people think it's a motion I know that we accept the budget as is second right discussion all right all in favor of approving the school corporation of the demand 96521 thousands 148 raise your hand 16 any opposed any abstentions you ask let's take up the 400,000 dollar reserve transfer requests little bit critical second any discussion I guess I'm the timing of this why were we hearing about wow no no no I mean I knew the issue but in terms of the actual transfer well but wouldn't you request the transfer what I'm asking is if we do a request for the six months there wasn't certain what pool of money would be available so as we've gotten closer to the end of this year um also where the funding was covered was actually eventually the reserve fund was always hostile yeah oh you were saying one of the companies so as a matter of finance committee policy um for every department when we will we've always said to them when they've had overruns is do your best to manage it down and then tell us where we are at the end of it so I remember one year um it was the police or fire budget I think with the police budget we knew was over budget like the first block because they had a an incident and so but instead of just giving them money we're like okay we've kind of got it in the reserve fund we know it's kind of like informally here marked there but it doesn't mean you have carte blanche to just spend spend away and so the school needs to be subject to the same standard they ever have to be on the same standards and so even though the school knows about it like really early they still have to make an attempt to manage they still have to manage their money through right they can't be like hey we need this 400 grand and oh no and then we need two more and then we need to be like no no you gotta manage all the way through we'll get to the end then it's there that's why just to keep everyone sort of consistent they have managed okay thank you um what else have you been on charlotte I I thought this uh reserve fund was supposed to be used for emergencies um I think I think there's some language to that effect in the viral I remember I'm positive and um this wasn't an emergency they do they they went ahead and spent this money when they knew they weren't going to get it in the in the over I'll pass the menu no actually emergency is not a mustachio it's unforeseen or extraordinary well so I guess you could argue that the school committee it was unforeseen when they developed the budget and it was passed by town meeting that what was the override I still remember yeah so it was unforeseen that the override would fail and that the wording was wrong sorry that the override passed but the wording was wrong in the question um so I think it would qualify for that I'm sort of interested though Dean what what do you think should we wait until June with all the other transfers to give them the 400 or should we on should we say that we anticipate that any money is left over on the school budget at the end of the year will be turned back to one of the general fund well no so I think it's fine to give it to them now because one of the interesting mechanics of unique mechanics of the school budget is by about October 1st you know where they're going to end the year because teachers don't turn over mid-year right so like a teacher doesn't start on September 1st and then resign to take another teaching job on January 1st you you can perform out and project where they're going to land like really early um and so at this point they know that's where they're going to land and historically if you look at like their money they don't they don't usually go over they usually don't come in very far under either like it's just they've projected out of they go so I mean whether we do it now or we do it then we're just gonna we're going to land at the same place in and out just just to add and I think that now given the other things that we have used the reverse reserve fund transfers in the past it just qualifies um I I know that we use the reserve fund transfers to cover things like the cost of retirement and sonic roll court but as far as I'm concerned could have been anticipated and budgeted for and work so it just seems to me like we're not in a neutral territory with this particular transfer there what's the balance for the reserve fund oh two million yeah there's plenty of money there yeah and I have spoken to um Tom Angela definitely and they I asked them what other contingencies maybe out there by the end of the year and I think that we could fund those contingency plus the 400s up and still have money so we didn't ask them this but I suspect that there's some additional costs that they've had to absorb in their budget for example the electricity costs which we know is based on the calendar year and not the fiscal year and we know we've seen a big you know I I suspect there are places that they've had to move things around you know but having but knowing from the beginning that they were sort of this implicit commitment for the additional 400,000 but knowing that they couldn't ask for more and they have to you know shift things around and I'll just say that I was in the meeting where there was a at least one slip word member if not two who made the explicit promise you'll get this money right somehow so it wasn't as if the school committee and school department went off on just saying we're going to do it um they they were given some I'm sure I did that with on what was the mistake and awarding of the overwrite. Al Jones. Just to comment since this isn't an award article it's probably not going to be discussed at the town meeting so I guess my request is that we put something in the every passage that'll be in there. It is an explanation. Other questions or comments? All right it's their emotion to approve a reserve transfer. It's on the table. All right. All right. All in favor raise your hand. 16. I'll post an extension to unanimous. I'm chair. Yes. Did you just say that it is a warrant article? It is a warrant article. So if it is a warrant article it's not going to if we rewind the warrant article to get them the money they're not going to get it until after July 1st maybe six weeks later when when it's I think when it gets certified by state governments. Wait what is this a reserve fund? So so it should be a reserve fund for you. Yeah not a warrant. I don't think it's the just FY 24. This is just a reserve fund transfer. Yeah I can I can clarify if you want. There is an article in case you guys didn't deliver a reserve fund transfer. So the alternative source would be to appropriate that money from the override stabilization fund during this FY or somewhere. So I'm going to take the position that we just voted on the reserve fund transfer and I'd like to go action on article 38. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed. Next is the proven investor article. So she hasn't got it. She hasn't got it. That's what I'm going to call 56. You sure I'm trying to go? 56. The new investor. We'll um power send out a bunch of different things today that we got um um the deadly town manager. So what do people stop? So I know that seemed to me that the pattern was to not do this before because there was a lack of investment policy. I was struggling with my thinking was having read through the materials and I'm finding out that both behold it actually isn't the best policy. I'm feeling a lot better about it. Jennifer and Annie. I'm actually going to argue the opposite. I was ready to vote for this last time and I've been persuaded by Charlie and Dean's concern that there isn't an updated investor policy that would incorporate potentially the new ability to invest that you know that that this type of thing would give them. I also think even more I worry about the rush to move into more risky investments at a time when stocks are going up so much when we know we're going to be buying high right and we know there's going to be a drop again at some point. So I think it's okay to take some time on this. So I was ready to vote for this last time but I'm actually going to vote against this but I'd vote for next year if there are things going on. Annie and Charlie. So I go back and forth. I don't find this terribly scary because I think that the fact that we have a corrected pressure because it's the better position than we were the one time we had difficulty with our investments which also happened to be in the year of the Black Swan when everybody had trouble with their investments. We just had more trouble than we should have because of lack of officially over the income and treasurer. So I'm pretty comfortable with this policy but I also don't see any problem with waiting until we have a little more structure increase. We have an investment policy that's great Jen's right it's not modified and what we don't have in place is a really visible public oversight process that might be more than reassuring to those of us who want to know that somebody is paying special attention to this that somewhere there's a quarterly report being made by a public body that says oh by the way we've checked on these investments and their digital ties and things are online policy and that there's some public commitment that there would be more than just the treasurer engaged with who is the investment advisor and who wanted that to assist them in you know I get to and a goal and you know my center has an investment committee there are three people on it they report regular over the finance committee and the finance committee reports regular to report directors so with some structure like that that we may be more comfortable but I do trust the system that we have in place and so you know it may be generally our volume high if we buy now I think a smart investment advisor isn't going to buy high in a market they think it's going to drop they've never told cash until they're ready to make a move that is pretty much on support so I don't worry about that too much but I do worry that we could be pushing it a little so I don't know if that helps anybody but that's where I stand at all right charlie and now i'm Joan can you then else postie so thank you madam chair I think that I share Jen's concern we don't have an updated policy I share Andy's concern that we don't have a any formal oversight process I also don't think we should be the first out of the gate on this new state rule I think we wouldn't hurt to wait a year or two to see what towns get out there and do with them how successful they are and who the successful financial advisors are in this process you know they they've mentioned I think with rocklin but you know there may be other then they may be good or they may not be good we did to see what what firms were successful with this process then finally and this is not an ad how I'm coming toward ad treatment in common but our treasurer is new and this is a big job that she has and she needs to sort of you know have some time in the saddle so I think that postponing of the year and while she's dealing with all the other intricacies of that job is not a bad idea that's that's why I'm in favor of not doing it this year the one thing I asked for was sort of a long-term analysis of the relative performance what we got was a five-year comparison from Rockwood Trust who's trying to sell this it looks pretty good in the last five years but last five years been pretty good what I wanted to know is if we've done this in 2008 or 2007 what would happen a long enough cycle to see you know some real stock market cycles to compare you know risk and conservative I know if this was my money I wouldn't invest on based on this so I agree should delay it and get some more data I want to find out what's the potential likely return versus the likelihood risk thank you I'll ask you um I agree with all of you just not sure where I'm going to vote oops I uh looking at the legal list that exists now it's basically a bunch of large cap companies you know and a bunch of mutual funds for government securities bonds bonds and government securities so that that's it and I think the trust fund commissioners should have more flexibility I mean you know they might want to just stick 60 percent of the money in a 500 index fund and let it ride uh but there's no there's no mutual funds in there because there's it's not really all that great um so I think that we should go in this direction um but as I said maybe not now the treasurer is new she's very good but she's new her background isn't in treasury management um and so I looked at the investment policies once from 2015 once from 2020 and they're fine but um you know it doesn't I'd like to see something that says well we're going to put 50 percent bonds 50 percent equities or or something like that you know what what their intentions are um so depending on which way the wind blows the next few speakers I think my inclination would be to vote no but to request specific things like we want an updated investment policy from the board of trust fund commissioners are stating what how they foresee this going what percentages they want to put in all signed off by the treasurer um and um and the manager so uh anyway those are my thoughts all right john i'm going to sway everybody now so first up I agree with charlie that you know this may probably not something you want to be first out of the gates on and also maybe just coming behind jennifer when she said the market is so high is really a great kind of put money in the market who knows but along with that interest rates are very high and it's not that hard to make a lot of money off interest I believe one of the meetings alex said that that uh our revenue is up you know significantly because interest rates are high so kind of like if it ain't broke don't fix it uh do they really need another tool right now where they're just putting the money and interest bearing accounts and getting a pretty good return so I would say kind of leave it as is you know so I would agree with the incenses to not go on it this year of the site I agree mostly of charlie said it but I'll say it so slightly differently um I would look at it as whether new or not that you know the finance committee does have some ability here to I would also phrase it as protect the treasurer right um so one of the things you learn you have to do that function is there are competing interests in the house or the treasurer is the custodian of funds and she's ultimately responsible for making the decisions the library trustees go over those earning statements in nauseating the painful detail every month um and the trust fund commissioners don't have the same risk as the um professional treasurer are usually a little more like into like they're not as at first to rescue the treasurer right um etc etc kind of ripples down the line and and I think you know what the treasurer has to contend with is these these different thoughts that first one commissioned by one in one way the library trustees are looking in a different way there's there's a mess right because all these different groups have money in this one pot right so the money's in the pot and then it gets you just figure out whose percentage is what and all that and um why I say protecting the treasurer is I think we make without there's not a policy to make a shift and a plan to make the shift you then just all the noise just collapses onto one person and now you've just made one person's job really painful and they're having to battle it without the wedge right by voting no we empower that position to say no can't make the changes here like you all have a lot of work to do so get your pencils out sharpen them up write up some plans and let's have them approved and ready to go by the next time town meetings but that next time is in the fall and they get their work done by September 1 you can do it at a fall special if not it can go to the spring but it's not it's not a no we don't like it it's a no like we're not ready and we're not going to set one professional individual up to bear the brunt of all of this I can make a motion of no action with the proviso to be added to the comments that we request that the treasurer and the trust fund commissioners I guess all three trust fund commissioners all have developed an investment policy specifically for these funds with their plans and intentions over the next year to be signed off by the town manager and when that policy is is set you know we'll we'll re relook at this next time can you add an oversight yeah just going to say that oversight yeah what do you want to have oversight yeah then come up with an oversight they need an oversight process to develop a process to develop an oversight process reporting at a public meeting over the select board on some periodic basis whatever let them come up with yeah yeah exactly oh you said the town manager signs off or the town treasurer no town treasurer is down here but in fact even it goes to the manager he has to sign off on it too all right well I think the comments have convinced me treasurer finance director manager panor the other questions on this second one you don't invest when the market's high all right so there's been a motion that's been seconded all in favor say on I be opposed man that's no action this is no action without prejudice advice I want to revisit collective bargaining something about there's a potential however small but the potential that there may be some agreements that can be reached by the end of the town meeting um so that and being able to set aside a salary or server makes it important that we keep part of the 65 a lot so what do we consider there's a motion to reconsider all right all in favor say aye aye opposed all right so um my suggestion is that we report on 65 at and because that will still be outstanding I think we have to also report on 64 which is sorry which one yeah let's be done probably talking about a million dollar difference that's higher than the infarming rule I haven't had that years all right so um all in favor reporting at town meeting on art full 64 as a motion all right sorry all right all in favor say aye opposed I think we have pretty good everything couple of things though Alan Jones when do you think we will have something to circulate because we have to do everyone to check their numbers and head counts right and I'm in the final reviews with alex with the finding you know $22 here and you know $13 there or whatever but it all needs to add up oh sorry but we'll still yeah we still want to get it out to everybody so so yeah I like to have everything add up around the yellow watches so I'm thinking late this week it depends on what hours it gets back and then it's looking and we are going to the printers Thursday and next week next next week or Tuesday or Wednesday the second or third I thought um I thought it was okay well yeah Thursday okay okay so anyway so everybody can expect before the weekend hopefully more like Wednesday or Thursday to get a preliminary copy of appendix b and c you know just ask everybody to look at them and confirm check the numbers check the head counts and if you could do that by Monday that would be very helpful and I'm sure we're going to get these this week this week yeah okay so you're getting your discrepancy just from alex you know for us to provide many of them are the old are the old fashion you know these two spreadsheets are supposed to be talking to each other don't so uh if well can I go yes the chair so how how do we uh what what five-year plan just put in is appendix what is it d years I had that same question also appendix c um I you know just to make a really balance I think probably I don't need to talk to you about probably what we want to do is to put in zero for the collective bargaining and and put in a number in appendix c to balance the budget with sufficient footnote I didn't need to talk to you about how to handle that where would we put the number to balance the budget well just go stand and say if if if we if we if we knew a number within the being carbon tolerance that we could vote tonight on 65 then we could increase the overhead stabilization fund allocation and then tweak it later but um in order to appendix c and I can't put a question mark I mean I could but it requires some explaining usually it's balance I mean the long-range plan that's appendix d and the one-page summary of appendix c should have a zero at the bottom and which means we have to have solid numbers and the only solid number I can think of is zero with you know knowing that that may change and uh uh and then maybe on the floor of town meeting once we know the numbers we can hand out a new appendix c and a new appendix d a new long-range plan and a new one-page or I'm not sure from I'm just looking at april on patriot stage the 15 I'm assuming that houseways and means committee reports out on the 10th do you have any sense usually because what they do is they report out on the Wednesday the 10th or Wednesday that and then Patriots Day everybody's scurrying around trying to make amendments to the budget and then they start um they start after that week after that actually voting so hopefully by the 10th we'll have some sense of what houseways and means is going to do and maybe we should schedule a meeting for the 10th to do all these last little things but we still need to get the report out that's what that's what we're struggling with getting it out next week is relatively early I mean I think they're they're you know they're retracting the schedule and the fallback is we mail it out to pay the post to do ourselves yeah so that that's an option but what are we waiting for I mean we I don't want to be in a situation of last year right right having things not on a consent agenda so I'd like to get and it's just easier and cheaper for us to let the select board mail it out so if all we're dealing with is what to do with the salary reserve well okay so we've approved reconsideration of 65 but I think maybe we should finish the report as if we hadn't with zero for the salary reserve and zero everything out based on that but how about putting it in reserve fund finance committee reserve fund jack it up by a million dollars or something like that whatever comes out we take it out of that and that way at least you've got an expense level that's in the right it's not going to kill us you know normally we have a 1% reserve fund okay so if it turned out to be 0.9% because the what we pull we throw into the settlement is uh so I won't hurt on the other hand if it turns out that they don't settle we can actually lower the reserve fund in the town meeting put it into the overhead stabilization but if they don't settle we still get to set some money aside all right well we put it into the other yeah so is it whether it's settled or whether it's not settled we still have to have the same amount of money set aside for court to bargain right see so I think Alan's probably dead on right like I think if we're weighing our our struggles like her issue is um getting the town meeting book getting the town meeting budget book out on time well it's on finance report out on time so we don't have people holding every of our articles on the consent agenda which is troubling last year so we want to avoid that and the that the offset to that is what Alan said that we fund it as if we didn't reopen it and we have to make an administrative adjustment when the budget comes up but we have to put out a supplemental like sheet that says this changes right I think that path is okay because I think the alternative which we went through we're trying to avoid and so if Alan just pushes the budget through as if we didn't reopen it for his tables that's fine then if something were to change it would be very easy for you to stand on the floor down we didn't and say we have a sheet or we send up we send out a sheet and then you just have now it's like these changes have been made we're done it's easy it's just trying to make a logical finance committee report with the numbers adding up that's that's all we absolutely may when this comes up we can we can do I can do with that having hope we can have an agenda and we can send right so the amendment would be the article article 65 the article with appropriation of overwrite on an appendix C and appendix D but don't we want what we want something now don't we well that's what I'm proposing we it's as if Alex has never mentioned it or zero three weeks from now and we didn't we weren't reconsidered so we put him zero we put him the three million dollars from the override file and then amend that and it's like three pages of paper but they must know some kind of money they're getting 3.25 percent increase they spend this anything leftovers there's a number that Alex is thinks it will be the salaries or so we have we have a number yeah when he says the number was right was that the one billion 107 282 yeah is in the master yeah wouldn't allow it yeah so we could we could vote the number that is in his master budget right now which goes back to the four million dollars from the override uh and then if it doesn't spend it goes the freak cash or something so there's sort of two approaches if we think it's either that number or nothing pretty good that the rest of it's so far yeah we don't want to put the exact amount that that he thinks it is if the negotiation is still ongoing but we can put something close and I will say that this Sunday at our service I had two 10 on meeting members who know I'm on the finance committee come up to me and say when are you going to have your report this year so that was a big deal so they don't work I'm all for sure everything it's so good at work we're just going to get priority on what we're doing 64 and 65 we are we had no action on them we're going to report on and tell me this one so I just want to make sure that it doesn't go into the consent agenda even though it looks like right it will that's a great yeah so the the only issue the only thing we're talking about is the number so that we have in our finance committee report that's being sent out a balanced budget um any so I would suggest that we put a million dollars into article 65 which is close to what the anticipated amount is and then you put whatever into the appropriation for the fiscal stability stabilization fund and then we make dean's motion and then I think we'll be so close that you guys can modify those numbers you know when we get to like in and again the more whatever without us that is still wouldn't be a report would mean wouldn't be okay well unless unless the they finalize it this week right we're just gonna I guess we're just gonna happen what I'm saying is that you guys right then don't necessarily we'll go by then we'll be meeting and some meeting we'll have a meeting before okay that's again I guess we just use zero I think it's cleaner to do that and then changing that we have to as opposed to well maybe it's going to be this or this and then we'll put them one way or the other okay well I guess the making the final couple of numbers come together that's that's quick I mean that's a two-minute job going through all of the and making sure that wine item after wine item by everybody here that takes time so my suggestion is just send the budgets out have everybody take a look at their budgets and anything else they want to do that'll be done by everybody gets in say in a week um and then you send the warrant the rest of the finance committee out to to research and if we set aside a meeting of the 10th which is a Wednesday night um and then if houseways and means committee comes up with something significant the way Paul thought it would be we can make the final adjustments on the 10th it goes to print Thursday morning no that's the correct thing to do with the select word on the 8th yeah Monday the 8th so we have to go to the printer like Thursday before a week from the day I you know we shouldn't be run by the select ones we have to find out what the houseways and means committee is going to do they give us another 500,000 that changes everything yeah but but again as we've heard tell me members want the report well it'll be available electronically on the on the 11th and my friends on the 12th it doesn't change anything it only changes the stabilization I don't think we're going to throw money around that we have another half no not going to throw money around or maybe it's everybody's going to drop the stabilization button five times three we're going to do that all right we'll use zero and and then we'll get the report out and then when we get a better sense of all of those figures we can amend it on time and for um we don't need to revoke anything no I think it's still a report I think zero I think I think zero really is and then if something happens on the first you know the next thing on the meetings we vote a couple of numbers and do whatever papers all right so um there's a chance maybe I'll call a if we need it to call I'll call a meeting between next week and a start of how many needed I'll entertain and be in common motion hopefully to avoid having to do that um so take it away I think so I move that in the course of creating the budget book if the officers of the committee find any accountants are out of balance for administrative reasons that the committee authorizes them to fix it in the book without having to come back to the committee for approval is there a dollar amount attached to that we trust them that we know where they live I mean usually the things that happen is the salary sheets don't match the salary sheet I just have to go back now and say which one to write all right the kind of precinct meetings and just some news Brian Beck is resigning he just doesn't he's had some health and family issues so he is grand yeah so we have we need treating to so we need precincts to and we need right so um so um so so you know uh Brian was um they contribute there um and he will be missed and I'm sorry the circumstances for that I'm just going to come in here and for you I can that we should we should then know he's invited let him know um yeah anything else that anyone has we're free for a little bit motion to adjourn second all right all right ACMI productions are only made possible with your support visit patreon.com slash acmi to learn how you can help