Okay, well, hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today for our presentation on the currency reference data project. And so by way of introduction, I'm VJS Chandel. I'm an executive director at Goldman Sachs and I work within our data modeling engineering team. I'm joined here with my colleague, Elaine Fraser, who's also an executive director at Goldman Sachs and works in the product data engineering team. And we'll also have a video of Silesh Pandey, who is an executive director from Nomura working within the data services team. And together the three of us have been co-leading this initiative for the past roughly about a year or so on trying to build out a currency reference database. And so thanks, Elaine. Just going to the first slide. So by way of background and how this project came about, back in early 2020, we were working on the open sourcing of Legend Studio. And I myself led one of the FX-based pilots for the open sourcing with the industry through Finos. And what that entailed was analyzing FX option products and their features. And we were trying to essentially develop the ISDA common domain model, which some of you may have heard a little bit about, just very briefly, the ISDA common domain model or CDN for short. Is a blueprint for representing derivatives and their features. And so the idea with the FX pilot was, we'll try and use Legend Studio to model different products and their features to enhance the CDN that exists. Now, one of the, I guess, interesting discussion points that came up from that work was regarding currency data. And currently out there in the world, currency data tends to be in a string-based format. So obviously you got USD, GBP, and then you have different associated data points to that. So for example, who is the issuing authority of that currency? Now, what we felt was that there's perhaps a gap in the data market for currencies. And that then sparked the initiation of this project and Finos kindly connected us to Nomura, who have been running a broader securities reference database project. And so we started looking into this. Now, the objectives of what we're trying to do here are also, I guess, the benefits to the industry from this work. So the first one is standardization. So what we're trying to do is build a model that standardizes different data points associated to currencies. And you'll see more about that later in the presentation from Elaine. Secondly, we wanna create a central repository for this. So rather than having to go to different sources and pulling data from different vendors, et cetera, we're trying to bring it all together so you have a one-stop shop for whatever currency data that you wish to consume. And thirdly, we want to store this in the cloud because we wanna make it public. So not only from a data consumption perspective, but also from a contribution perspective. And what we mean by that is we want the industry and participants to basically be able to define the data in a common way, but also work together publicly on the workflow behind that data gets approved and added to this reference database. So with that, I will move to the next slide and we have Silesh Pandey, who's recorded a video to talk us through the strategic solution and the workflow behind how this is all going to work. So here we go. Once again, welcome to the session on currency reference data. First of all, thank you Vijay for the great introduction and for setting up this topic today. Vijay and Elaine have been instrumental in shaping up the currency reference data working group and together with the wider community. I feel we have come a long way, especially if I look at the day when we first spoke about the need for modeling currency reference data. Now, one thing we all agreed was that besides modeling, it would be great if we could maintain the currency data in a public store, which could then be accessed by the wider community and something that could serve as a reference for data compliance, et cetera. Now let's take a look at what this proposed workflow would look like or what it can do. So at the heart of the design, it would set a workflow engine which would do all the data processing and decision making. Let's take a simple use case and then run through this model. So consider a new ISO currency that has been introduced in the market and assume that there are two firms, Nomura and Goldman Sachs, that have been considered as data contributors. Now consider a scenario where both Nomura and Goldman Sachs send a request to this currency ref master to add the new record. Let's say that Nomura is the first one to send the request. So first, I want to be provisionally able to check whether Nomura has the permission to contribute or not. Next one is that validation is successful. The engine will do data validation to ensure that there are no discrepancies. If any critical or mandatory attributes are missing or if any validation fails, then the engine will send an error message back to Nomura and the request will be queued up for all the contributors to review and approve. So basically this step is to bypass validations if needed. Now if however the validation checks are successful, then the engine will create an entry in the cloud store and send electronic confirmation to electronic notification to all subscribers of this data. In the scenario we just covered, let's say now Goldman Sachs sends a request after Nomura. The engine will be able to automatically determine that an entry already exists. It will however do a comparison of this incoming record from Goldman Sachs with the entry created by Nomura. And any differences will be analyzed by the engine and will attempt to determine the current value between the two contributors, between Nomura and Goldman Sachs. But let's say if the engine fails to resolve the conflict because we don't expect all entries to be rule-based. So it may not be possible for the engine to resolve the conflict. So in that case, it will policy result for the community to review and approve. Now that kind of summarizes the way we envision this model to work. Now Elaine will talk in great depth about the data modeling but before I hand it over to her, here is a thought for future expansion of this concept. We would like to use the same concept to model other asset classes under the wider security reference data working group. So to give you an example, to illustrate what this future proposal is, let's say when we, let's consider, when we say bond, there's an image in our mind, as to what this bond would structurally look like. For example, it will have an issuer coupon, issue date, maturity date, frequency, et cetera. For every business function in a bank or a financial institution, they normally fetch the bond data electronically from the web data master. Now what if we could define a standard object model to represent a bond? Then now these idea applications that deal with bonds will have to worry about which attributes to fetch or the difference in other semantics or the difference in classifications, et cetera. Of course, there will be a different model to represent different bond types and different functions will have to, will have their own needs or own understanding of what they would need this model to look like. We'd obviously capture everything, all the nuances in the design but fundamentally this will help create a template which could be used by the issuers in the issuance process to promote standardization. Same thing could be used for structured bond product issuance. And so once this objective is made, we could probably deep dive to drive standard classifications. That's the next step. So on this note, I'll conclude my part of the presentation and hand it over to Elaine. Thank you all for your time and we all look forward to engage further on this topic. Thank you very much. Have a great day. Thank you. Bye. My thanks to Salish and to Vijay for the introduction earlier. My name's Elaine Fraser, as Vijay said. I'd like to talk through how we've actually devised the model and the process of our working group. So the first thing I'd like to do is show you if this is gonna work. The discussions that we had initially in our working group were around what requirements we had for currency reference data. And we asked the participants and we had representation from a large number of groups. We asked the participants for their use cases. And the common theme was that people wanted to be able to have the same set of reference data for currency so that it would make it easier to communicate between themselves and regulators and communicate between themselves. Now, this may become clearer when we look at the sorts of things that people wanted in the currency reference data set. So what you're seeing is our draft list of a data dictionary. And you can see that as well as having ISO codes for the currency, we also have an onshore, offshore indicator. And we have things like rounding rules. Now, the ISO currency list will tell you the currencies that are actually issued by countries of the world and used as hard currencies within those countries. But there are other things that you need in a trading context that are not ISO currencies. So the example of onshore, offshore that came up very quickly in our discussions is applicable to countries such as China where the currency that is used internally cannot be used outside the country and a non-ISO currency code is created to cater for that. This also resulted in the need for our item number nine here of vendor codes to be able to actually create mappings between the currency codes used in the ISO list and currency codes used by various vendors or local regulators. So this was our initial list of requirements and from this, we devised our initial model which has since evolved a little bit as you can see from the diagram. So the things we were interested in that I've already talked about, we've got at the bottom here, we have a set of non-ISO codes which would allow us to create mappings from particular issuer data sets such as let's say Bloomberg currency codes back to ISO. We have a data type for rounding so that we can talk about the precision and the direction of rounding. And we also, as we discussed further, realised that there were many more types of issuer than just simple countries. So the ones that we included in our model are obviously countries, but also for things like the Euro, we need to be able to cater for treaty organisations and we also felt because at the time we were still discussing things like crypto currencies and other non-standard currencies that may potentially be issued by organisations that we may need legal entities as issuers. The other thing that came up as we were reviewing the model as well as having an onshore-offshore requirement, there was also a question of whether the currency was actually deliverable. So this is something we are going to revisit because we don't think we've completely understood what it means to be deliverable. But the concern was that, for example, for Brazil and for India, you can use their currency inside that country but if you want to trade that currency, you actually have to do an exchange within the country to another country. So it's not deliverable outside the country. Our next step was to actually look for some sample data. So we started with the ISO list and I think this computer doesn't like my hands because they're too dry or something, there we go. We started with the ISO list and the ISO list, as you may be aware, also has precious metals and test currencies and funds in it. So we started with that and that gave us our first impression of a currency type and right at the bottom of this screen, you can see we have precious metal. We then looked in more detail at this and the ISO list itself has a lot of duplication. So we decided we needed to tidy up this list and make sure that each currency appeared only once. As Salish said in his video, we want to be able to understand uniqueness of currencies. So we needed to do a bit of a tidy up. So we then took the ISO list and we took one instance of each of the currencies and we investigated what we understood to be the issuing country of that currency. So we now have a single list of currencies and for example, Australian dollars, euros, US dollars are actually mentioned several times in the base ISO list. So we just took one instance of each of those and we assigned the appropriate issuing country to them and on this list you can see an example of a treaty organization which isn't the euro. There are a few more in the world than just the euro where multiple countries use the same currency. So we have actually put this data into Legend Studio. We are considering how to store it potentially in the cloud and have it retrieval using other features of query that are available in the tool. So we have stored it at the moment in memory and H2 in this studio project. We can query it locally but we want to be able to use the features that Salish was alluding to allow other people to improve the data set for us by adding extra values and so we haven't actually progressed with a physical store for the currencies yet. The other thing we want to do is we want to improve the model so people have also in our meetings mentioned other things they want to cater for such as understanding the minor units of currencies so the pens for pounds, the cents for US dollars. So once we have our initial set of data stored somewhere persisted and we've actually prototyped the workflow that Salish was describing, we hope to then move on and model other things and create new data sets over this model. And on that note I'd like to hand back to VJ who will describe how other people can get involved in this project, thank you. Back to the slide. Okay, yeah, so final slide just in terms of how you can all get involved and we're obviously keen for more and more participants across the community to take part and contribute to this project. So we run a fortnightly Tuesday meeting, 10 a.m. Eastern time, 3 p.m. U.K. time and so that's open if people do want to get involved definitely reach out. Additionally we do have a mailing list so you can see it on the second point currency-ref-data at finos.org. So any questions, et cetera. And of course the model that Elaine showed within Legend Studio that is all available to anyone who has an account set up with Legend as well so if you want to explore that you can do so and all the discussions and contributions that we're making to the model itself are all done through the studio platform. And finally obviously got a GitHub and issues page as well where you can point out any particular use cases that you would like the group to consider and so we'll be continuing to progress with this project. There's still a few moving parts to it but definitely get in touch with us and on the distros that are available there.  So thank you everyone. Hope you enjoy the presentation and I'll open for questions. The model itself is the expectation this will go back into is the CDM and wherever we are let's say using ISO currency would be replaced with this class, new class. So broadly speaking, yes. So right now the way currencies or currency attributes are represented in the CDM is mostly in a string form. So the idea is that with this model once it's fully built out you could essentially create a mapping to the CDM and be able to pass through your data according to the validations and controls that this model will provide for. Now obviously ISDA themselves have been involved in this project as well. So we're ensuring that whatever we are building and what the attributes that we're defining and the standards that we're creating is all in sync with what is expected of the ISDA CDM. So that's the goal that eventually we will be able to plug this model into the CDM. Any other questions? Yeah. So yeah, at the beginning you said that different banks are contributing to this and there's a reconciliation model to decide what goes into your online H2 version, right? But what if the banks fundamentally disagree about the attributes? They have different views on these different things. Doesn't that compromise the ability for your model to be used in all those banks? Yeah, that's a great question and one we've thought about to some depth. So the idea is that a bank can contribute any suggestion that they want and in some cases it will be fairly straightforward in the sense that let's say there's a new currency code that's been published out there and everyone accepts it, that bank will contribute it. It should be fairly standard for the community to accept that. For more, I guess, technical or nuanced use cases where there is a certain view from a certain party, the current kind of short to medium term kind of workflow that we're thinking of is that suggestion can be brought forward and then the working groups that we currently have set up will be used as a platform to discuss that in depth and come to some sort of mutual agreement across the industry. In the longer term, as we built out more of the strategic sort of workflow behind this, the idea is hopefully we can somewhat automate that in the sense that, as Silas mentioned in his video, there'll be notifications sent out to the relevant, I guess, approvers of the data going into this. And then again, if a discussion needs to be had to get more detail, more insights and rationale, then the idea is that we'll meet together to have that discussion. Make one more question, yeah. Yeah, so I have a specific modeling question. Have you thought about modeling the full set of currencies as an enumeration? This comes up a lot in my domain. It has always this like balance between doing it as an enumeration that has advantages. It becomes part of the model itself. So all that negotiation about what currencies are included becomes part of managing the code itself. So it's not a data set that you have to manage separately. We already have tools to manage the code, right? It has come up. And one of the concerns we had when we were developing the model is, as you saw, there are features of the currencies that are important from a trading perspective, such as whether it's deliverable, whether it's the offshore version. If you have an enumeration, you cannot encode that in the enumeration. So when we have talked about this, there is a rationale for having an enumeration. For example, as Vijay was saying, if we want to incorporate the list into other things, such as replacing the string in the CDM, then that is a good context for an enumeration. But we would still need the full model so that people can interpret the data and understand the trading potential of the data because that list in itself is not sufficient to understand the currencies. Any other questions? Yeah. Yeah, where do you draw the line?  I mean, is it any crypto? Any commodity could be in there? Or, you know, is the dollar on the same footing as Dogecoin or whatever? Yeah, I'll maybe help you out. You wanna go? Yeah, well, I was gonna pass over to you anyway, but I think the driver is what are people actually trading? So as Vijay said, the origin of this project was talking about FX derivatives. So I'll hand back to Vijay now on that floor. Yeah, so it's a philosophical question that we've discussed as well in our forums, but it's tricky, it's tricky. And I think there's also a different understanding across the industry as to what actually is a crypto, you know, from a regulatory perspective. I know there's sentiment to view it as a commodity from a business side, it viewed as like an FX, others may view it as something else. So in light of, I guess, the blurred boundaries associated to, you know, these different possible, I guess underlying assets, we've taken a sort of phase approach with the project to try and at least define sort of standard fiat currencies as an initial phase and then expand upon that over time and obviously spend the required, I think, level of discussion around those different topics. So yeah, very interesting question. And I'm hoping by the end of this project, we'll have a somewhat of a clear review as to sort of, you know, what exactly is a currency versus not. So yeah, more to come on that. All right, okay, I think that comes everything. So thanks again, everyone for joining us. Thank you.


Hello everybody! In today's video, you'll see how to install the VMW ESXi hypervisor onto a server HP Proline DL300 ATP, how to recover data from a virtual machine of the VM hypervisor and partitions with the VMFS file system. Hello friends! If you need to recover deleted data, view or restore removed browser history. Hetman software products will help you. Follow the link in the description. Download the necessary program for free. Reinstall it and analyze the disk. The utility will show you the data you can recover, so you will be able to view it or get it back. In our channel and blog you will find solutions to any problem, from installing an operating system or configuring it to fixing possible bugs and errors or optimizing mobile gadgets. Our specialists will answer any questions you ask in your comments under the videos or articles. The hypervisor lets you virtualize servers to manage various IT infrastructure, so it allows you to consolidate applications while saving time and resources. In this video, we're going to cover the vSphere ESXi hypervisor by VMware. The basic package of VMware vSphere includes two main components ESXi and vCenter server. In this video tutorial, I'll show you how to install ESXi version 7 on a server.  These operating systems work separately from each other, but they may interact within a network. There are both free and commercial versions of VMware ESXi. The functionality of the free version is somewhat limited. It lets you consolidate a limited number of operating systems on one computer, and it cannot be managed with the central server, the vCenter. Nevertheless, the free version of the hypervisor can easily connect to remote storage where you can create, store, and use virtual machines. So, let's begin the installation. The first step to take before you can install ESXi is to download the installation image from the official VMware website. To get a download link for the free version of the hypervisor, you need to sign up. The trial period is 60 days long, which gives you enough time to get acquainted with this tool. When the image is downloaded, you should record it to a pen drive or a disk. To create a bootable drive, you can use any tool available that supports this feature. For example, Brifus. As soon as the bootable drive is ready, you can begin the installation. We're going to install ESXi 7 to the server HP ProLiant DL300 ATP without the operating system. Boot with the bootable pen drive or disk. Select the installation device and press Enter to start the installation. After that, you will see the ESXi installer loading. Next system information about the server will appear on the screen, and then components will initialize and boot. In the end, you will see the ESXi installer welcome screen, so press Enter to continue or Escape to cancel the operation. After that, accept the license agreement by pressing the F11 key, and then storage devices available for installation will be scanned. The program has found the disk, so hit Enter to continue the installation to this disk. In the keyboard settings, don't change anything, and leave the options as they are. You ask default, and press Enter to accept. After that, the installer will suggest setting a root password that you will use to enter the ESXi Management Console. Type the password, confirm it, and hit Enter to continue. In my case, the installer displays a warning that the central processor in this host may not be supported in future ESXi versions. Hit Enter to continue. Now the installer asks you to confirm the installation. Press the F11 key to start this operation. After the installation, you'll be asked to remove the installation media and then reboot. So, hit the Enter key to do it. This is the last step of the installation process, and now you have to wait until the server reboots. Now the system is up and running. Above, you can see a brief overview of the server characteristics, and below the IP address which you can use to connect to the server via the network. It can be modified in the settings, if necessary. You can access them by pressing the F2 key and typing the login and root password. Here are the functions available through the settings menu. Type the password, configure the network, restart the network manager, configure the keyboard, view system logs, access the console. Below you have the option to reset the system configuration to default values. After the configuration is complete, you'll be able to connect them to the server from another computer in this network. Open the browser and type the service IP address. Take the risk of dealing with the untrusted certificate. On the page that opens, give the username and password for the root account that you specified during the ESXi installation. Click login. This is how the VMW hypervisor looks like. Here you can see the ESXi version and its state, not connected to any vCenter server. The next step is to create and configure a virtual machine. The system has detected the storage, identified the drive type and provisioned some space for virtual machines. You can check the network settings as well. Now let's see how we can create a virtual machine. Open the navigator and go to the tab Virtual Machines. In the right side window, click Create, register VM and select one of the items. Create a new virtual machine. Select a virtual machine from a special file or register an existing virtual machine. As we want to create a new one, choose the first option and click Next. At the next stage, give a name to the future machine. Select the family of its operating system and the version and click Next. Select the storage and click Next again. In the Virtual Hardware tab, specify the settings for the new virtual machine. The number of processors and the amount of RAM to be allocated for the machine. Also, don't forget to allocate some disk space. In the CD-DVD drive settings, select the disk type as a datastore ISO file. And a new window opens to let you choose the file. At this stage, remember to check the box for the option Connected Power On, otherwise the system will refuse to boot from the disk. In the window that opens, look at the top left corner, click Upload and give the pass to the ISO image file of the operating system that you have downloaded in advance. Click Open and wait until the image is loaded. After that, highlight it and click Select. Next. Now check all the properties and click Finish. The new machine will appear on the list. The only thing left to do is to start up and install the operating system. Select the virtual machine and click Power On. To run it from the virtual disk drive, press any key. The actual purchase of installing an operating system to a virtual machine is the same as if you were installing it on your computer, so just follow the wizard directions. After the operating system is installed on your virtual machine, you can boot it and start using the machine. Here is how to recover data from a virtual machine created with the ESXi VM Hypervisor. As we know, files of virtual machines managed by ESXi Hypervisor are stored on the disk, in volumes having the VMFS file system. The biggest problem is that when an ESXi host breaks down, there is no way to retrieve the information stored on its disks, unless you use some specialized software. The matter is that classic Windows and Linux operating systems cannot recognize volumes or partitions with the VMFS file system. At the moment, such a data recovery tool as Hetman Partition Recovery doesn't support VMFS, but you can still use the program to scan the disk with this file system and extract the information. If you accidentally removed some important data inside the virtual machine, just install our program, run it, and scan the drive where you used to store the accidentally removed files. The program will find these files and you'll be able to recover them. Select the disk you recover your data from, right click on it, and choose Open. Select the scan type, click Next, and then finish when the process is over. After that, go to the directory containing the deleted files. You can see the program has found them easily, and now they are marked with a red cross. Select the files you want to restore, and click Recovery. Choose the pathway to save them, and click Recovery again. When the entire process is over, you will find the recovered files in the folder you have chosen. When the operating system on the server is damaged, or the host suffers from a critical error, the data recovery gets a bit more complicated, because you can't just connect a disk to another computer and extract all the data you need. When running with the anti-FS scan option, a Hetman Partition Recovery finds data in VMFS partition of the drive. As a result, you'll be able to get the virtual machine data from the drive. Select the program, select the partition of a virtual machine files as stored, and run the analysis. The file scan option is not available in this case. Select Full Analysis, specify the file system of the virtual machine disk. In my case, this is anti-FS on Windows, and click Next. As you can see, the program managed to find the virtual machine partition with Windows and the anti-FS file system, which is located in the bottom having the VMFS file system. Open the detective partition to find out that the utility is displaying all the files, even those that have been deleted. These are marked with a red cross. Select the files you want to recover and click Recovery. Select where you want to save them. When the process is over, you will find the recovered files in the folder you have selected. And that is all for now. Hopefully this video was useful. Remember to click the Like button and subscribe to our channel. Hit the bell button to receive notifications and never miss new videos. Leave comments to ask questions. Thank you for watching. Good luck.


Hello and welcome to this session. Let us discuss the following problem today. Find the quadratic polynomial each with a given number, the sum and product of the zero respectively. That is 4,1. Now let us write our solution. It is given to us that sum of zeroes is equal to 4 and product of zeroes is equal to 1. Now let us frame our polynomial f of x is equal to k into x square minus sum of zeroes that is 4, 4x plus product of zeroes that is 1. So if we assume this k to be 1 to satisfy the product of zeroes and sum of zeroes, we get our required polynomial as f of x is equal to x square minus 4x plus 1. I hope you understood the problem. Bye and have a nice day.


The leader of the Shiites in Nigeria, Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zaqi, has accused the federal government of marking him and his wife a Zinat for withholding their passports three months after they were discharged and acquitted of criminal charges by the Kadrana State High Court. The couple was stopped from acquiring fresh international passports so they could travel overseas for medical attention after security operatives reportedly lost their travel documents during their six years in detention. Sheikh El-Zaqi also accused the government of refusing to disclose any reason for doing so. He said they had no intention of fleeing the country since the court had declared him innocent of the eight-count charge brought against them.


Hello everyone, this is Amit Dan of AmitDan.com. Today I'll talk about Air Canada Wi-Fi. Air Canada has Wi-Fi on select North American, Caribbean and international flights but it is not free. You have to pay for it and Air Canada has a website where you'll be able to see the flight and the availability of the Wi-Fi for the next five days. In order to go to that page just search for Air Canada Wi-Fi then you should be able to find that page. On my flight I tried accessing Air Canada Wi-Fi although I didn't purchase but I was just trying you know how to access to the Wi-Fi. So you can access the Wi-Fi two different ways. The first thing is that you can just you know go to a browser which has to be a compatible browser that Air Canada supports. Air Canada Wi-Fi works on browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Safari and also that this information is available on the same website I just mentioned. So in order to connect to the Wi-Fi you can have two options. You can either connect it via a browser or you can just connect it via Air Canada app if you have installed it on your phone. So if you'd like to access from the browser then turn on the Wi-Fi well in airplane mode and then you know connect to the AC Wi-Fi or ROG Wi-Fi depending on what flight you are on and then open the browser and type Air Canada Wi-Fi.com or ROG Wi-Fi.com and then just you know follow the steps or if you have an app you can access that from the app as well which you're going to see in that video. So they have different types of plans for example there's a plan for one hour there's a plan for the full flight and also they have a pass where you have you can buy a pass for only North America or for global and in this video you'll be able to see the different pricing for each plan and I noticed that they have different speed options as well so you know if you're paying more you're going to get higher speed if you're paying less you're going to get lower speed. I haven't purchased it but I was just like you know trying to see how it works and it looks like the app or the Wi-Fi options they're glitchy sometimes you have to just like you know keep pressing it it doesn't it's not very responsive but at the end it took me to the right page but I didn't buy but you know that's what I wanted to show you in this video so thank you for watching this video there will be more videos coming up so I'll see you shortly thank you


Has it gone guys, my name's DPjen, I'd like to thank you for stopping by and checking out the video. If you do enjoy it, leaving a like really helps out and if you're new around here, and enjoy daily Destiny 2 videos, be sure to subscribe.  Now, if you have any amazing clip you'd like to share with the world, send it into the email or just a link to the top of the video description. And guys, I do hope you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next and I got this. Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Probably just woke up my parents and they're gonna come upstairs and yell at me, but I do not care! Let's go!  I'm back. I'm back. Uh, what?  You just left!   You literally left four seconds ago! They're all dead!  I'll, I'll clip that. I'll clip it.


Live from the wigwam in Phoenix, Arizona. It's theCUBE, covering Data Platforms 2017. Brought to you by Cubull. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, along with George Gilbert. We're at Data Platforms 2017, the historic 99-years-young wigwam resort outside of Phoenix. And we're excited to be joined by our next guest, Alex Sadovsky. He is the director of Data Science for Oracle Data Cloud. Welcome. Thanks, thanks for having me. Absolutely, so I know we got a short time window. You're racing off to your next session. For the people that aren't here, what are you going to be talking about in your session here? So the Oracle Data Cloud, what we do is online advertising. And essentially we have lots and lots of data. Customers come to us and they have some sort of question in mind. They want to say, I want to figure out who's going to buy a minivan in California next month, or who's going to get a hotel in Las Vegas? Who's going to buy Kraft macaroni and cheese? All sorts of different questions. We have all of that data. We have to turn it into actionable insights. Turn it into audiences for them so they can advertise Facebook, Twitter, all over the web. And so what this talk is really focusing on is, how do we take all of this data and use it efficiently? And it's going to talk about the technologies that we've used, specifically Hive, and then moving that technology over to Spark, just so that we can use more data, get quicker processing, and essentially make our clients have a better experience and give them a better product. And do the clients execute the results of this process inside their other Oracle apps, or is it something that they can use with any number of apps? So a lot of the ways that we work, we actually are interface with companies like Facebook and Twitter directly. And so essentially what we're doing is we're partnering with them so that the client, all they really need to do is kind of come to us, either onboard some data through maybe other Oracle applications, or onboard data directly through us, and then push it out. We help push it all the way through the process, all the way into Facebook, et cetera. Yeah, it's just because we were covering Oracle Modern Marketing, which is now Oracle Modern. Customer experience, I'm sure you guys must be tightly integrated with all that. Yeah, and so for Oracle Data Cloud, it's kind of interesting. We're a collaboration of five recently acquired startups. And so it's everything from two to three years ago, all of this coming together. So for us, we're really excited because we're just at the tip of the iceberg of getting into the whole Oracle ecosystem and having that help build up our product even better. So when you say partner with Facebook or Twitter, that would be for brand or direct response advertising that one of your B2B clients has signed up for, or I should say B2B, you're B, the client is B, and the end customer C, so it's a B2B to C. And now, okay, so you help them in a consultative way. You have the data, you have a consultative sales approach. Are you building models for them, or are you telling them, you know, like sort of running a model, sort of which is it? So we run models based upon data. So a customer could come to us with, here are a thousand people that that customer knows bought their product last month, and they say we want to expand our business, we want to advertise to 20 million people who might be similar to those thousand. And so that's where all of our data comes in. We can look at those a thousand people and we can say, hey, did you guys know that most of your customers are millennials? Did you know that most of them tend to live on the West Coast or East Coast populated cities? And we're not really consulting that in the sense of like there's people looking at the data, it's all machine learning. And so computers are looking at all of our data to help get insights from what the customer is bringing. So would it be fair to say then that the, let's say the thousand example that the customer brings in is the training data? Yes. And then you use your data in your databases, your consumer databases to say, to generate essentially scores and say, we're going to send out to these. That's a hundred percent right. They come in with a thousand of their customers. We see how those thousand customers rank up against every single household in the entire United States. I was going to say, we're going to be at Spark Summit in a couple of weeks or a week, whenever it is, I can't keep track of all these shows. So they can't do the whole thing, why Hive to Spark, but in three minutes or less, why Hive to Spark? So number one reason for us and number one reason I think a lot of people are moving to Spark is just speed. Without getting into a lot of technical details, there's just a lot better engine, a lot more flexible engine underneath Spark than kind of traditional Hive. And then machine learning models are, most of the libraries are built in. Yeah, and so Hive doesn't have. Yeah, machine learning is really built into Spark. There's whole projects within Spark built around that. And so for us, we really, Spark considers machine learning kind of a first class citizen. And since that's essentially what our business is, we go 100% into Spark as well. So let me ask you, what is the scope now and potentially in the future for these data-based predictive models where customer comes to you with, you know, essentially some labeled data and then you'll come out with, I guess that's the training data. And then right now you have data in what categories and then what categories would you like to have? So we have data everything from what people are doing on the web, so what they're searching for, what websites they're going for. We have grocery store data, so what people are buying in the grocery store. We have retail data, so what people are buying in the malls. Because a lot of what happens is, you know, even though consumers are spending a lot more time on the web, 80 to 90% of purchases are still made in the store. So we have all of this actual real-world purchase data that we've partnered with different retail partners, including with automotive data too. So that's really like the core of our data. So really what we try to do is have data sets strategically placed all around and that's why the Oracle Data Cloud is made up of so many different startups for really getting expertise from different areas for different data sets to bring that together. Do you need to buy those sources of data or can you license? Data is everything from license to purchased outright to shared revenue sharing with other companies. It's really, there's a huge data market right now. It's kind of the data gold rush and we're trying to get in anywhere we can figure out what's going to help us and what's going to help our customers make better models. What would you like to see in terms of the, if you look at a couple years, where would you like to see your data assets sort of augment all your Oracle application? Yeah, so I think, so augmenting Oracle, really we have so many different data assets that everything from live streaming data of what people are searching for on the web to historically what someone has bought in the last three years. And so as we partner more and more with Oracle, Oracle has different things in healthcare, in retail, in all sorts of B2B applications and our data really can fit almost everywhere. It's really like a data driven sort of product and so we've been partnering with Oracle left and right, many different groups, just trying to figure out where can this data help augment kind of your services. All right, Alex, we got to leave it there. That was a good summary.   So thanks for using this in your busy day. Thanks so much. All right, he's Alex, he's George. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Data Platforms 2017. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching.


I only count five of us board members at the moment so we can launch in and if we if we cross that the quorum line at some point would you mind if I called to order. I don't mind at all and yeah I just have to carry and he's logging in right now so we are all set. Great. And I have a question about that because it's a forum. It's not a board meeting so I don't think we call the order do we we're just doing a presentation. We aren't making any decisions. No that's true. It's just that when we when we reach that critical mass. I don't know if there's a parliamentarian in the house. So it's okay that's the way that we, we posted at our meeting starting at five. And then we were going to use part of it so it's okay go ahead and toward I think would be the easiest. Thanks. Are you all set. Try good started. We just carry just got here so he's getting logging in right now. Perfect. Okay, so I'll get started and thank you Jim for and just leave us on that first slide for right now back to the picture sorry. Okay. So, welcome to our community budget forum. At first I again would like to thank start by thanking our amazing Washington Central. Unified Union told this team administrators teacher staff cooks custodians bus drivers and families thank you for all, continue to be the heart of our communities and thank you for all you're doing for our children during this challenging times. We're really grateful for you. This pandemic has brought into focus public attention to children and education, the inequities in our society are now on every community members mind, shooting security mental health access healthcare homelessness broadband income inequality, etc. Hopefully as a state and as a country, we will continue prioritize community and common good. And let that be the basic, the basic focus of well being for all our children, meeting children needs inside and outside of school. A strong public education is the basis of our democracy and the key and the key to equitable and flourishing communities. With that in mind, we can get started with the budget presentation. This is the final draft, not final draft is the final budget approved by the board. The school board makes decision on behalf decisions on behalf of the entire community that support the educational needs of each student, engaging our communities in this conversations helps us make sure that the community voices at the heart of our decisions and it also helps us ensure that we're not only working towards equity in our school boards, but also in our communities as a whole. We all want the healthy. We all want healthy communities and families and ensuring that each and every child has what they need to thrive and succeed sets the foundation for long term outcomes for that child, not just for that child but also for our communities. And we can move to the next slide. Jim, thank you. Good. Good budgets don't happen by accident planning and collaboration are key components of drafting budgets that are also that are not just a that are grounded and driven by data. Sorry, I'm trying to write on my notes. It meets the needs of students research programs that meet the needs of all students and right sizes school personnel through early retirement reassignments and minimal staff reductions and reduces expenses and supplies for budget purposes today. Equity is a school culture that supports educators and practicing effective and responsive instruction that meets the needs of the whole child. For example, everyone getting what they need to thrive and master our student outcomes. So you see right in front of you are our student learning outcomes, student learning outcomes are statements that specify what students will know be able to do or be able to graduate when they have completed or participate in a program activity course or project outcomes are usually expresses knowledge skills items and values are in alignment with the Vermont educational quality standards. The leadership team has continued to work on our proficiency based learning system with all the specific outcomes with assessments and and working on making it consistent across our schools. We still have still work to do, but the end result will be a system that flows from pre K through graduation. And you can see here trust our skills are at the heart of what we do to and you see them here I'm not going to read one by one I'm going to assume that I see that all our public is joined by video, so they can see. We have the responsibility to lead and make sure that we remove various and provide the resources necessary. Last summer, we said three goals as a board can we go to the next slide Jim freeze. Improving student achievement, building board governance and community engagement. These goals helps us take focus on student learning and collaboration and on monitoring results. The school board objectives for for the budget that you're about to see was establish a budget that is less than 3% net impact on taxes. Find ways to pay for three initiatives is strategic planning facility director and health instructor, using some of the fund balances where they were appropriate. And then establish a budget that was less than the ex expensive, ex expending threshold, a per equalize people. And lastly establish a budget that will move towards supporting a strong multi tier system of supports across all our schools. And next slide. We have much to celebrate a we are one of five districts in Vermont to reopen fully for live in person instruction from grades pre K to eight. We create a more robust, more robust and community center remote learning offering for students. We work to align our instructional approaches for teaching math and literacy, provided all students with increased access to technology. We also help our own personal care assistance and behavior intervention is the school bar is committed to the committed to the strategic planning process for continuous improvement and the creation of assessment plan to track students academic progress progress and this last bullet is a new bullet. So just last week we received confirmation that we were awarded a all the grants for our covert reimbursement so it and in the amount of $4.3 million so that's really commendable to all of our staff, especially to the Lori Carla Virginia Matt and probably Carla Michelle I'm probably going to forget somebody but you know who you are thank you. And lastly before I really let you go in a, you know, we hope that the financial forces that are probably coming to us in the coming year, or years one doesn't make the education for our kids, but will transform it. We continue to collaborate and continue to look for opportunities with the superintendent and the leadership team and we will monitor programs use findings from the upcoming curriculum and evaluation and, and, you know, engage our community as we go. Next slide, please. And I will give it to Scott to continue. Thank you so much for floor gets the words, I get the pictures. Before my speed. Welcome, all of you, I noticed there are a lot of old hands in the audience. And I'm thinking, many of you have not only seen these slides before, you may well have even delivered them. I'm, I'm really tempted to ask for you to, to actually say it, but instead, I'll just breeze through so that there's plenty of time for questions and discussion at the end. But as I think everybody knows this whole budget formulation process is extremely complicated, both technically and interpersonally. It's a highly political activity, political, both within the organization, as different units are jockeying for, for resources and, and trying to express their needs. And outside the organization, of course, it's political, when the whole question of how are we going to pay for all this comes up, and the question of what the impact on taxes is going to be what the legislature is going to do, what the feds are going to do, all of that. So, that I think you understand very well. Next please. Right, this is the flow chart. And again, I think, very familiar to many of you. In this particular cycle, what is what's unusual is that the board gave our, our guidelines are parameters for developing the budget, and because of information coming in about tax impact, the initial tax estimates that really changed the picture. So the, the superintendent and the administration went about actually trying to, I don't know, exceed the, exceed the standard, I guess, that we had set in terms of, you know, being being very thrifty, and we're even more thrifty. And this, essentially, I believe we draft three was the final budget that came out. So we went through this cycle, several times. Next slide please. Yes, this is the, this is the picture of our demographic decline, as it's referred to. The fall in student enrollment over the past as five years and projected into FY 22 the budget year, both the actual number of students and the weighted pupils equalized pupils, which is very important for the tax formula for those of you who aren't steeped in all of this. The tax formula starts off with education spending over an a fraction education spending in the numerator equalized pupils and the denominator. So everything else remaining equal, even if you have no increase in education spending. If equalized pupils go down, which they're doing, then the, that portion of the tax formula increases. So something that we have to take account of and work with. Next please. Right. I get some words. So this basically puts it puts the picture into into words. And, and rounds out the somewhat, maybe downbeat feel of declining enrollment with some of our assets, which I think many of you are also quite aware of that we have great people who work for us. We have fantastic students, which I mean, this is crucial to having excellent schools. The students are are the are the heart and soul of the place. And we try to, we try to live up to to their quality, both of them by offering as as new and interesting and educational opportunities as we can. And I do believe that is it for me. Okay, good evening folks. My name is Kari Bradley from Calis. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the specifics of how we plan to spend the money next year. So this first chart compares the overall size of the district's expense budget, starting last year on the far left with the four versions that we developed this year. So we did version one a back in December that was a level service budget no changes other than the normal inflationary increases. And since then you can see that we have been working to reduce the budget overall by about 600,000 net. And we're actually calling for less spending in the 2021 22 budget than in our in the current year. And I'm just, I need to point out at this point that expense budget is just one of several factors that will determine next year's tax rate we'll get back to the other factors in just a moment. Next slide please. These two pie charts show the breakdown of expenses by major categories for the current year on the left and then next year's proposed proposed budget on the right. The takeaway here I think is that the personnel expense the wages and salaries and benefits that we pay to our teachers our support staff and administrators. That really makes up the lion share of our budget it's about 70%. Otherwise we are looking at relatively minor changes in the relative proportions. One thing I want to highlight here is that the key driver in this year's budget once again is medical insurance. We're facing a 9.5% increase and that means that this portion of our budget, that wedge, big wedge just gets a little bit bigger every year. Next slide please. So, we're going to take a closer look at next year's proposed budget focusing on the items that most significantly impact the bottom line. These are the highlights so don't try to add up the numbers are not going to add up exactly. The key takeaway here is that our proposed budget has a net impact of a decrease of 1.0% over the current year. In the first section labeled salary and benefits. This covers the compensation items. We've been able to offset offset the increases in medical insurance and salary rates in a variety of ways, including by reducing several positions. So that in accounting parentheses mean negative in this section. And much of the savings here is accomplished by offering an early retirement option to our employees, and then planning not to backfill some of those positions and the openings that were created. So I want to thank, thank Brian and our administrative team for bringing us a solution back in July. And I think it's good to point out that there are new positions within this budget in particular for special educators, along with health instruction that was mentioned early, earlier in our elementary schools, and a new facilities director designed up to free up our principles and our superintendent to focus on improving education. The next section in the middle there is non compensation items. This is showing a decrease of 1.4% in that in that category. There are many changes both negative and positive rest assured we've really scrutinized each line and adjusted with an eye towards what's in the best interest overall in long term. And in the last section labeled labeled revenues I want to highlight two important points. One is that we are drawing on our fund balance where it makes sense to that's the accumulation of funds over time. We built up these reserves over time, and we asked our administration to look at where it would make sense to use those appropriately, in particular for one time expenses like funding the early retirement program. You also see that we are projecting a significant reduction in revenue from the tuition that we receive from students who come from other towns to attend our schools. And many of you know that for many years we've benefited from students mainly from Washington, Orange and Roxbury, primarily attending you three two. They have historically contributed a significant amount of revenue to our system and we are now seeing a decline in those numbers. And the number of those students and we're going to need to monitor this trend is just another challenge that's adding pressure to our budget year over year. So, I think if Chris McVeigh is not shown up I'm going to take the next couple slides going to get the next slide please. I mentioned earlier that our expense budget is just one of the factors that contributes to the tax rate. The other ones are the equalized people count and Scott talked about that and the trend there. There's the property yield amount that's set by the legislature, and that's, we don't have a final number on that until much later in the legislative session. I'm sorry, correct myself. We do have the yield amount but not the state tax rate that's set by the legislature. We will be using in their projection. And then there's the common level of appraisal for each town that is going to vary by town based on appraisal levels versus what the state thinks the value of homes are. So all of these factors come together into computing the actual tax rate. Let's go to the next slide please. And here is the breakdown for each town, and you can see that in the second column over from the left we've got the common level of appraisal. We've got the tax rate in our current year, and then applying everything we've got the tax rate in for next year with this proposed budget. And in the right hand side it's the actual impact on taxes and the good news here is that we are projecting decrease in tax rates across the board. It ranges from the least amount of decrease would be in middle sex where we're looking at 1.7 cents. And I believe the high is in Berlin where we're talking about a decrease of 15 and a half. And so this is this is significant this first time I've ever seen this kind of these kind of decreases across the board. And I really want to thank the entire team, which includes Brian and Lori and and the staff the administrators, principles and and and the school board and the finance committee I think it was an amazing team effort and I'm really looking forward to hearing your feedback. What's next slide please. I guess that's it for me I'm going to turn it back over to floor thank you. Thank you, Carrie. Thank you everybody. So as we, you know, as you, as you can see, we, we did a lot of work in finance this year and the only thing that we forgot to mention is this is just our second budget. So we're really proud of this is our second budget as a unified district. So there's a lot to be proud of. We have three questions for you as we open it up for the public what clarifying questions do you have a what information will help you support this proposed, you know, not proposed budget that has been approved by the board. And what ideas do you have for informing the community members about this budget. We unfortunately got the numbers a little bit later from the state so we updated the budget that was before posted on on the websites showed the show increasing the taxes in some in some for some communities but we actually have the final number so it's a decrease for every for everybody so we do need help and some of our town clerks have posted all the information but our school reports didn't go out until yesterday. So rest assured that you'll get the information at home and and you know please remember to vote so with that a what clarifying questions do you have Let's open it up. Do you want to monitor this is Scott or do you want me to do it. You're doing great for do you want to continue. Sure, I don't see and maybe I don't I don't see hands up yet. So if so much and I, and I, and we don't get to see with the with everybody's with the presentation, we don't get to see everybody so. No, that's, that's true. I don't see any hands up unless if somebody want to, you know, just in mute. Oh Scott, I see your Scott has please go ahead. Just a good question I know it's it's a statewide crisis, but the long range plans to address the decrease in enrollment that we're all facing I know it's huge pressure on budget and state but what's the thought process process on if it continues to go less enrollment every year. You know, I think there's a lot of I think we would have to see what opportunities are there to provide concentrating what would be best outcomes for kids so if we continue to see a, you know, a decrease in population we would have to figure out, you know, are we structured the best way we need to. Are we structured the best way to serve the student needs. So, so you know at the end of the day is like what can we afford to to give the best opportunities and outcomes to our kids and I think that Scott and Carrie both have some. You know, I just also want to thank, thank you all you do tremendous job and I know serving, serving on school boards could be the most thankless job but thank you so much for your, for your, for your hard work. Thank you, we appreciate it. I'll defer to Kari and go after. I'm going to point out that one strategy that would as potentially less painful in terms of right sizing is to is to try to attract more students into the system. So that there's a marketing element. And of course that's limited because we're talking about an overall trend trend in the state, but where there's opportunity to attract to attract the students from neighboring towns or even within our towns if they're being homeschooled or or going off to other places. So Brian has identified that as a strategy and then, then the obvious is your, your left with the challenge of how do you right size the system for the number of students you have. And it's not happening in an orderly way it can happen in, you know, in fits and starts and different grade levels. We don't want to approach it from a scarcity mindset we want to think about how can we actually improve our education as we're right sizing the system that's that's a huge challenge. And I think something that when we start the strategic planning process that we have in mind next fall I think that's going to be near the forefront. Yeah, just a second what Carrie is saying, it's very definitely a, you know, a long range strategic discussion. It's a, it's a great question, and it's much on our minds. The, the whole problem with demographic decline is that it's not necessarily something that we're just passively. We're trying to reckon with, we may also be able to do things that will help turn it around, because it's not as though, you know, we're doomed to extinction, and as Vermonters but that if, if, as a society we're able to create the conditions for families to not only to want to but to be able to have children, the children that they that they wish to have, then I think we can, we can probably help the whole, the whole social system attain a kind of equilibrium, but this is part of this is one of those discussions that I think all of us are looking forward to having as opposed to having to worry about the pandemic. Diane, do you have something to add to. Yes, and actually Scott was getting at it basically you know our schools are microcosm of our communities and so our decreasing number is also a comment about our affordable housing families are about our ability for families to connect and engage in the work that is so important for them and their families so again, it is that broader question of as Kari was saying how do we create a system that's just right while helping our students to gain and grow, but it's also about how do we help our community to stabilize and be strong and able to provide for the needs that we all have within our, our world. And I guess the last thing I would add is that as a state there's a lot of work being done to try to diversify our state and make it more sustainable for the BIPOC community to move up to Vermont and there's been, you know, a lot of money to try to get people to move up to Vermont and the demographics for you know Vermont continues to be the second white estate in the, in the nation, and the demographics for Vermont, the population that is growing the younger everybody is over 65, it is the biggest growing population in Vermont is over 65 except for the BIPOC population, who they are that for 2050 they are going to double. So, so that's something to keep in keeping in mind too as we make our communities more sustainable and attractive for for people for a diverse population in Vermont that will benefit our entire state. Okay, Alan, I see you on mood on mute. Do you have a question. Yeah, go ahead. I should not. I'm not on mute I don't think. Can you hear me. Okay. Just a quick comment I think the single most important thing we could all do to help our schools are and this area generally is to support the build out of high speed Internet in all of our towns. I think that is probably the most important impediment to any sort of renewal of the population pool and getting more people into the schools I think that's that that just cannot be understated. So the questions I have the first one. I wanted to know the, the 4.3 million and coven funds that Kari mentioned a few moments ago. Is that baked into the projected tax rates that floor you were you gave about 10 minutes ago. Yeah, I think we switched that I, Laurie's in the call with us too but that is not so we were able to take those those out that does not reflect that in our, in this budget that you're seeing right now so we, I'm going to let Laurie speak a little bit about those and we're going to go into detail and those in our meeting in our school board meeting too but Laurie, do you mind taking. Um, right. Um, the coven in the cares relief money was to reimburse schools for expenses that were incurred last spring and this fall that we're not in the budget. In addition to that it was to support food programs. Um, and our regular remote instructions and the third part of that that you'll hear later is that the good considerable amount of the money was used to repurpose staff that would then return funds to the education fund, which is what has helped with the tax rate reduction because the yield that the state is using assumes that schools will repurpose staff so that the state will have additional funds in their education spending budget. So Laurie, it could you tell me what what is what is in the budget related to coven are both expenses and reimbursement from either the state of the feds included or is it just the expenses. There are neither expenses nor revenues and next year's budget with regard to COVID. We have budgeted to have school and have business as usual next year. So does that mean the 4.3 million that Kari mentioned has no impact on either the budget or the tax rate. True. Thank you. The next question I had was about the fund balance. The fund balance. If you look on page 23 was it 1.9 million in 2020. And in the 2022 budget, it's at $144,000 has that much money really been taken from the fund balance, or am I missing something about the way the accounting has been done here. Do you want me to answer that floor or were you going to answer it. Yeah, I have it here so that that is not the right I don't know where it is what we have right now just go opening my finance notes that I was reserving for after the. So right now we are showing it one is 1.2 1,287,000 dollars in for fund balance and that would include us making a fund balance transfer to capital. So I'm curious in what page are you on Alan page 23 under it's in the top top block. That I'm remembering right now the three things that we use fund balance for this year were for early retirement for getting to health educators in it to have equity around our schools and for hiring a facilities director, but other than that Lori unless I'm missing something or Kari or Scott. One of the things that happened. I can speak to that Alan was that when we became a newly merged entity last year all of the fund balances transferred in together. And those fund balances have have yet to be reserved for capital funds etc. And that is the action that the board is considering tonight. The board did increase the budget revenue by 144,000 for the early retirement payments that are due next year. So they were trying to use some of the fund balance to have tax relief for those one time payments. So you sort of hit on what my third question was, I could not find any line item for a capital fund in in in this budget. Is that because that hasn't been created yet. Capital fund balance was created last year by the voters. There is $725,000. Just looking at my notes. Yes, there's 725,000 as a transfer in for this year. And if you think about the fund balance transfers in the past. That is not enough to sustain the capital fund. So the board is considering tonight. Moving the transfer in to the capital fund. Okay, I won't belabor the point but I'm really having trouble following where these things are because it doesn't seem to be laid out in the budget. And that's what I was relying on. So I'm sorry if my questions don't have the context that it sounds like you folks are dealing with. I can connect with you tomorrow Alan if that's okay. I'll just have more specific. I'll go online and and see what I can find on the website maybe there's another document there, other than the booklet that arrived in the mail today. The annual report that would help me out. I just looking what I'm trying to just ignore is I'm, I'm, I'm concerned because it sounds like there's some one time money that's being used to keep the tax rate down. And I'm trying to figure out where it's coming from how much has been used and what impact that's having on the budget because I think we all know what what spending one time money leads to. And I would be concerned about that, especially as the enrollment appears to be continuing to trend downwards. I mean that's what drives are per people spending up and that's what drives the tax rate so I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to get a fuller picture of what's what's going on in terms of movement of money and spending and taxing and so forth. Thanks though I appreciate your help. Thanks, Alan. I think Scott wants to answer. If I might, I expect the lawyer will probably follow up on this with more detail but we've actually taken great pains to use one time money for one time expenses so as not to create any kind of fiscal cliff of any kind. But when I, essentially, we're, we're, we're not, it's smooth that the curve is smooth. So that we're not, you know, going to clunk off the off such a cliff in our next year's budget and find ourselves having to raise taxes significantly in order to cover for the makeup for what we did this year. We're being very careful not to have that happen. But you could understand Scott why I might have gotten concerned when I saw a fund balance of 2020 at 1.9 million. And for next year it's 144,000. That's how it appears in the documents and I, I worry that when people see that they're going to think oh my gosh these people are spending, I don't know almost almost $2 million of money that is it that is in the bank and can only be spent once. It sounds like it's more the presentation of the information than it is a fear that that this money is being tapped for something and it's and the fund balance is going to disappear after next year. No, no, the fund balance is not going to disappear rest assured Ellen but that is really, really good input because it's something that we had, you know, we have the same beliefs that you were saying we do not want to create that and and the fund balance. Like I was saying a few minutes ago, even with the if with the bar approves moving it to capital fund, it would still be a, you know, the projected fund balances over $1.2 million. What we have to consider is that Lori is still working on finalizing a, a, you know, and increasing that fund balance because there were a lot of savings from last year. There were not field trips there were, you know, there were different things so we don't, we don't actually have the final number quite yet of what that fund balance is but rest assured that your input has been taken. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Any other questions. So exciting to see so many people we've been doing it for ourselves. Matt, you have a question you muted yourself. Yeah, I have kind of a budget adjacent question I guess it's really more probably suitable for the agenda of a future school board meeting, probably in March. I'm going to take a couple minutes and kind of explain what I mean by that but I don't want it to track from folks that may have, you know, legitimate questions about the budget that you presented. So, I don't know if there are other people sort of with hands raised I can't really see what the queue might look like. I don't see any hands up, and I will encourage anybody that is in the second page to speak up if they have but I don't see anybody. I'll just, I'll go ahead and comment comment here. Yeah, the mic for the moment but so I guess I just wanted to raise something up to the board the tension and again and what I'm really requesting is maybe hopefully 10 or 15 minutes on the agenda of, you know, the school board meeting that will happen after the reorganization so, you know, maybe March 17 of that that works and I can be in touch with the steering committee about that but. But essentially the topic is a program that you 32 has been piloting for the last two years so last school year and this school year, which is called the equity scholar in residence program. And for those of you that may not know about that. This was something that was created by virtue of a grant that was secured by a nonprofit organization, the Friends of Washington Central Schools, which provided an opportunity to you 32 to get a trained and kind of seasoned equity expert stationed in the school year on a day to day basis throughout the school year to do a variety of things like, you know, get a sense of where the staff may be at and the student body may be at with regard to equity issues and concerns to provide, you know, different ways of referring to help out and taking a look at the curriculum and reviewing the extent to which there may be any inequity kind of embedded in the way that topics are being handled. All kinds of different things basically relating to different equity issues. All reports from everybody's come into contact with the person. Shelly Vermillion who's been serving in that capacity. It's been incredibly positive for the school system. I've confirmed that with the administrators. And her work has also caught the attention of leaders in education in the state of Vermont. The Vermont principals Association and the McCleary Foundation are very excited by this and are working hand in hand with the organization that Shelly is associated with to try to find ways of evaluating this more quantitatively this model is impact on the school, seeing if it can be replicated elsewhere in Vermont as well as in New England and perhaps nationally so perhaps I don't know maybe board members are aware of this but it's also possible that somewhat. You know below the radar of the board you 32 has been really pioneering and approach to equity and supporting equity that is really garnering a lot of positive attention and cut to the point that car and and floor we're making earlier. You know, could be not only a great benefit to the student body that's there now but also as a sort of marketing and selling point to many people but particularly to folks in the BIPOC and in the community. So that's that that's the topic. So sort of somewhat of a budget question is that there is obviously the grants running out so there is some question as to how or whether this model could be sustained. The groups that are involved are very committed to raising funds to continue them all and I'm involved with participating in that just why I'm here tonight. And of course we'd like to come to the board and, and really sort of share with them what's been done what the outcome has been and, and maybe, you know have a conversation about whether there is any kind of commitment to the school community might be able to make to you know ensuring this can continue as well so that's the, that's the long and short of it, and happy to talk more about it if that's an interest. Thank you Matt. Yes. Yeah, I totally yeah I think we an equity director not just a you 32 I globally is for all our schools. So that to me that should be the model so yes you're I think that I all of the members of the of our planning agenda planning committee are here right now and notice we'll begin and we'll find the time in the agenda for you to join us and we'll give you plenty of time to. Yeah, and I should note that the director of the organization that Shelley is associated with would also attend the meeting and speak directly to the work that they're doing and kind of, you know, sort of how it works and what the, what the needs are and that kind of thing. So, yeah, thanks for the thanks for the time. Appreciate it. Thank you. So it's 1740 I mean 547. It's so Scott if you want to take it back and maybe give people a little break before we start, or unless. We have, we have a quorum now. So I can. We can come to order at 547 officially. And, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to, we have to shift gears right away. If, if there's anybody out there. Attending who would like to contribute I'm really grateful to to you Scott has Alan Matthew for for speaking up and for being here in the first place. It was lonely last time we tried to do this. And it's much better like this and budget adjacent, as far as I'm concerned, is this beautiful. So, before we go any further. Is there anyone else who would like to just say something. It doesn't even have to be about the budget, it can be adjacent as Matthew so beautifully demonstrated just now. I just wanted to point out in Matthew, I see your background there with the Chinese symbol back there so what I understand that Matthew has gone to China several times as lived in China and I have gone there several times and if I recall that correctly, and I could be I could be wrong but that thing behind you is basically a is a very is a Chinese symbol, it means many different things to different folks. I was told it helps with fertility and and childbirth so it made that might be the solution to improving our student enrollment situation. But I like it, I see it there Matthew I like it very much. Sure, I'm happy to buy into the, the superstition there. It's got us I have one more question since I have kids that are quite a bit older. Can the board give us some perspective on, I mean how is everybody doing through all this and how are the kids and the teachers and through this crisis, just a little bit of color because we're also concerned and wrapped up in our world at home. But I, you know, I'm just, you know, we're worried and concerned about how, how our community kids are doing and teachers if you could maybe just give a little insight possibly. Yeah, thanks. Brian, I think I would defer to you as having the overview. Yeah, I thank you for that that question I think we're doing really well in so many aspects of our children are in school 95.5% daily attendance rate. I was gonna say that in my daily report, my super intense report. So our children are in school. There, there is a lot of districts that don't have the opportunity to have their children in school like we do have our experiencing significant challenges with mental health. Students mental health and the COVID slide is what they're calling it nationally the number of the academic drop in academics. So I think we're seeing some of the slide because we were closed prior to the school year. But I think we're really making some strides and we're looking at the test data we're going to be looking at that more closely in the coming months to make some further decisions about what we need to do for our kids. But I think our children are, you know, are in school they're doing really well. I think the teachers and staff who have been the unsung heroes of this pandemic, especially in our district are doing are doing well I think the I think the challenge is they're also really tired when I think we're really looking forward to this we come this upcoming break that's coming up. And we're all really tired. My staff, my administrative team and leadership team we've worked weekends, we haven't taken our vacation. We haven't didn't have a summer break. It's so it's been it's been challenging, but I think it's also been very rewarding and I think we're going to have one of those situations where we look back one day and I think we're going to say that you know we did we did a heck of a job here at Washington Central. Thank you Brian. I hope that gives you a sense. Scott. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Um, anybody else who would like to to deliver some parting remarks before we maybe take a bit of a breather in advance of the of the regular session. I can get it to unmute. I just like to say one silver lining of all of this COVID because there is one. It's the first time I experienced as an educator in the state of Vermont not going into February break with every school so sick with flu and colds and respiratory diseases. And we don't have the colds because we're masking and we're keeping distance. So, for once the schools won't have to be fumigated because of the flu going around the schools for the COVID cleanup. Yes. So there, there's one little silver lining. Let's take all the silver linings we can get. Sorry, floor. Did you ask me just to remind people that we will be having a March 1 presentation of the but an informational meeting to so before we leave and March 2. Again is town meeting please vote. And hopefully everybody, you know, every single town agreed to send ballots to all of their voting of the voting register voters so we're hoping that you have your ballots and be able to, you know, call us if you have any questions reach out to any of us in the website there's the phone numbers and emails of everybody or if you have any questions reach out to whoever you're more familiar with so and thank you for coming today. Amen. Many, many thanks to all of you took the trouble to join us tonight. And you're welcome to stay of course, but I'm not asking you to because that would be a bit much to ask. In any event, if there's no objection, we can recess until 6pm. We can pick up again and in regular session. Thank you very much for putting it all together and seeing. Thank you. And to the rest of you as well. Have a good evening if we don't see you later. We'll see you next week.


I think that the way that we can see the benefits of the local finance is when the agriculture are prepared to receive them. Because when they emerge in their forest activities, they know what they need and they have to be prepared how to use it. So the benefits are going to see and they're going to feel and they're going to have it well. But if they are not prepared, they don't know how to manage the finance, well, it almost always is, it is well perceived as a benefit at the last. Well I think that it works better when they are organized, see, because when their people are together, they help each other to do their thing best. Associations, they are going to be very successful in Guatemala. We have a great number of associations that are going, that they are doing it well at their level but they are doing it well. In cooperatives, you know, we have a very big one, that name is Federico Vera, it is a federation of cooperatives, but they are doing a very good work in the central north part of Guatemala and the north in Petén, there are a lot of associations that they are working very well with the financial they receive for the forest activities. So I think that if the forest people get integrated in an association or a cooperative, they are going to use the finance in a better way than if they are doing it alone. Well in Guatemala we have different levels of the forest activity. We have a part that they are planting, we have a group, another group that are protecting and in a few years to most they are going to be harvesting. Now we have to be prepared to move those who have been planting to the next level, see. So we have to move them from the plantation to the industry and the industry to the trade and this is going to be a very, very big challenge because we have been working very hard, very hard for the last 20 years almost in the production of the wood so we have a lot to do now.