This is called the meeting to order of the Washington Central University School District on December 20th. Welcome everybody, thank you for being here. I wanted to start the meeting today. Don't worry, there's no big speech.  And I'm also express gratitude and I'm grateful for our staff and my staff, I mean everybody, for educating and supporting all our kids, especially this time of the year. I know how stressful sometimes things can be, but thank you for being there for our kids, grateful for all the parents and families whether they're joining us remotely or here, for supporting the students and for supporting all of us and supporting our staff. And finally grateful for all of you here sitting with us at the table, so thank you for your expertise and for your love for all the kids and looking forward to the next year with all of you. So I'm not quite happy in here, but I thought I'd do it right now instead of at the time of the meeting. So with that and with the, you can and you can do this today. Let's get started on the meeting and I have two adjustments to the agenda. One is I would like to add to move to 2.4 a student report and add a 5.6 to a point, correct, correct. Do we have to accept this, Ms. Rosely? We don't have to because we've been invited, but we will talk about it then but I would love a motion to accept the agenda. Okay, so 5.6, 5.6, up point, correct. Rosely, move. Second. Second by Daniel, all those in favor? Yes, aye. Signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. We have both. Seeing none, let's get started. The recessional guests, please turn on your cameras. They can't really see if we have a good time for comments. We're gonna be discussing the agenda today. We're here for other, there will be time right at their agenda presentation for some public input. But if you have questions right now or you have some input for us not related to the budget, please raise your hand. Does he have any hands up? Please speak up if you're not, can't raise your hand. Okay, seeing none, we're gonna move on to the fire student report. Okay, so I'm gonna use my phone, which we're not really supposed to do. But, sorry, Stephen and Jess, even though it's not, I feel weird doing this. But, so some of you reached out and addressed Linnae and I about interest of coming to the school, which we really appreciate. And then, we all left school that day because the flood happened, or was close to happening, some places did flood. So, we did send out an email, we're gonna postpone it till I think it's gonna be the second week of January. And we're gonna set up you guys with some kids, we're gonna set you guys in some classes. So, we do apologize for that inconvenience, we're really excited for you guys coming and then stuff happens. So, it's all right. So, I have written sports are booming.  They were down 16 and then they were tied and then everyone, the student section was great, it was super exciting, everyone was involved, it was super fun. This week has been really slow. Great is next week that we all know is coming up. So, everyone's feeling a bit jittery, everyone wants to be done, but everyone's also finishing some tests we have. I know I have my English class writing essay in class tomorrow, so everyone's kind of finishing up with their semester, or yeah, their semester. And they're figuring out what's next and what is everyone doing. With what is everyone doing, most of our seniors are starting to hear information about schools and trying to figure out what their next plans are. So, that's what's super exciting to hear about. And our senior lounge has yet to be shut down, we are going so strong. Jess got us a little treat the other day because we haven't shut it down yet. So, that's been great. Spanish students are getting presentations from a Spanish student, which was actually my host sister who was here for two weeks, so Lisa gave us an approval, which was great. So, she's been giving presentations and speaking Spanish to all our students and they've been able to practice. I've heard a lot of great feedback about just how exciting to be able to speak the language you've been learning to someone who speaks the language fluently. And that's kind of it. Like I said, everything's kind of starting, but at the same time everything's kind of coming to a close because we have a new year coming up, we have a new semester. Linnea's at her hockey game in Rutland tonight, so she could not make it. And then I'm off to soccer practice for the couple of minutes. But that's kind of it. Do you guys have any questions? Can I have a raise of hand of who is interested in coming the week of January? The second week of January? So, I'd love to come, but you know what I mean? So, I just want to be sure that you all know that we really... And whoever can come was like logistically able to... Wait, we've got a raise of high, I think I can see. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Wow, that's so great, okay. So, more information to come. We appreciate you guys being interested. We appreciate you guys listening, and hopefully that's going to be great. I think I sent out the email saying, our student body can't be two members. And when they do, it's Lenea and I. So, I think that's kind of an issue. So, hopefully this is going to bring more of a connection versus a divide, because you guys want to be a part and the students want to be a part of this. So, I do thank you guys for showing interest, and I cannot wait for you guys to come see the school. Hi, it's a student report. Thank you, Lenea, thank you. Any questions for Mila? I promise I planned to ask this question before you started breaking the rules. But how are, now it's been a couple of months, how are things going with this new cell phone policy? That... It's been well. I think it was honestly the right direction for... It just was getting out of hand, and a lot of kids are fully respecting that the teachers are enforcing it. So, at this point, it's just every day. At first, it was everyone just really nervous about getting a striker here and there, but at least in my classes, everyone's respectful of the rule, and just the text will be there after class. And you truly don't need your phone. Sorry to any student on the line. Yeah, so that's kind of it. That's been good, it's been good. I think it's been helpful for me. So, with that, we're gonna welcome Jodi, who's the host of our identities here to do a presentation for us on this budget for the Central Board, for our Deer Center for Monitoring Center. Mark, are you... Some of you I know from lots of years of experience with this district and the board, and you're the headlining photo this year, actually. Mark, what are your students? It's not playing through the Zoom, so people from Zoom can't see it. Sorry. Let's share the screen. Hang on. Sorry. So, most of you know I'm a superintendent director at the Central Room Life Career Center, which is currently housed in Berry, that's all in this board. And this presentation is one that I give every year to all of our Sunday School boards. And if you saw last year's, it's based off the same slideshow with new photos from this year's students and also some new information because our board actually has goals this year and more things that I can share. Which is exciting, and I'm truly thankful that Floor is on my board and I also understand that maybe in March, she might be asking one of you to step on in her place because she's taken on some other roles here in the state, so be thinking about that. You can go ahead. Maybe. Maybe. So it's, that's fine. Okay. This has both the Career Center School Districts vision and mission, and also the Career Center itself, which are very much the same in that we're building students to be engaged members of the workforce and our communities so that they can continue supporting all of us in making sure that our electricity works and cooking great food for us and providing all the services and supports that we need to keep going every day in our lives. Go ahead. So we have three goals and I think the third one is probably every school board's goal, but the first one is long-term planning and this one is starting to get really exciting. Before I got to the Career Center, there were two different groups that were meeting. There was a governance committee that is the one that got us to this new school district, but then there was also a re-envisioning committee and they did some work with two different architects to try to plan what would the Career Center look like if we could actually house all the kids that apply. We have over 267 at last count first-round applicants for next year. We don't have that many seats. So one of the things we're looking to do is to expand to meet the needs of our students but also the workforce across the state and in our region. And so one of our goals is to build that new center because there is not space to renovate Spelling High School to give us the space that we need. So the facilities committee is looking for fall of 2028. Our architects are thinking more fall of 2029. We'll see how that goes. Got it. The second one is just making sure that our programs are equitable, they're safe and they're rigorous and this is something that's a little different or that people might not know about Career Centers is that we are required to offer industry-recognized credentials or credits in every program. If you were here last year, you heard that already. Next year the number of IRCs or credits are going up for every program. So we either have to have multiple industry-recognized credentials or we have to have six credits in every program. We have one of our biggest program has or the most credits that a program has is, I think it's 30 by the time they're done with us for one year. So we range from three to 30 credits in our programming or we have industry-recognized credentials like apprenticeship plumbing level one, for example. Apprenticeship electrical level one. So all of these things and we're gonna have to up those expectations for our students next year in the access that they have. So we're working on that rigorous piece as part of our goal. And then the third one is that community engagement. You have a ton of people online tonight. And, okay, most of them are used to that. So I don't know if they don't have to count that, but we, yeah. We don't. Flora could tell you that if we get a guest it's pretty orcas, usually our esteemed guest of the night. And so how do we get our community engaged? We're 18-town district. How do we get folks to come and see what we're doing and get involved in that? So that's one of our goals for next year. We do have some ideas around the school. Oh, you saw that. Open house was amazing. Open house was amazing. It was. We exceeded our previous record. It had over 550 folks come through Open house, which was great. Only seven of them went to the design and fab down the Grand Museum, though. So it wasn't enough time to do everything. That's true. It really isn't. Okay, so we have to expand our hours again. Okay, that's good. Go ahead. So one of the charges that I've kind of been given by the board and sort of taken on is developing and implementing a full day educational program. We have full day CTE. It's four hours a day, 1,200 minutes a week. That's a requirement for a full day in CTE. But we could offer academics beyond that. We were talking about doing that for next school year, but then we also recognized that there's a need because we have so many students applying that maybe we can open up a program that could take in a few more students. And what is our real goal if it's career in tech ed? Then that's where we have to focus primarily and move towards that full day with academics. And so we are pushing that out to go with the new building and building up to it over the next few years. So that's a work in progress. It will come, hopefully, because that's one of my goals. And I think that's probably why we keep pushing it out because the board keeps telling me I get to stay for longer. So I have to keep staying until I get that goal at least. We want to increase student access. We had 408 total applicants last year and we took 208 of those students. And part of that offset is that 70 or 80 students apply for auto. We can only have 16 in the program. Some of the programs are capped. But there's still a lot more students that could be accessing and gaining the skills that they're interested in that we're not currently serving. So we want to increase that access and we want to make sure that our students are really prepared. There was a few board meetings that I went to last year where folks gave us scenarios where students were great. They were prepared. They went into the workforce and then other students that they knew about that. They worked there for a couple of months and didn't work out and were they really prepared. So we're trying to make sure that, yes, they are prepared as we move on. So again, I already talked about we want to address the issue of turning away so many students, that was nearly half. We want to improve our access to students that struggle with attending or thriving outside of us. So a lot of our students will talk about in our end of year survey just how wonderful the community is for them. And it's the first time that maybe they've enjoyed school. I hear that from parents all the time. And many of them get back on a bus and go back to their Sunday school or they get in their car and they drive away and don't come back to their Sunday school when they should be for a class. And then maybe they're pulled from our programs halfway through the year because they're not gonna graduate if they don't. And so we want to make sure that students are coming to us and getting what they need but also getting what they need in your buildings. So again, the mission, it's very similar to the district mission and I just love the tagline. So it was a great opportunity to remind you that CBCC is education that works. Good. This slide is exactly the same in Unchanged, the link document in there. And Megan, if you haven't, you can share that whole thing with everybody so that they can get into that. That's basically our budget planning process. And so it's month by month. What do we do? And it's this year's version of that. So you can see when we started thinking about it. One of the wonderful things that Floor told me this year that I hadn't been doing was that I needed to take off my superintendent hat and put on my director hat and make a wish list. That wish list would have included full day with academics next year which was a 25.8% increase on our budget. We only have a $4 million budget so it's not as big as the one for Washington Central but that was too much. That was too much. And so it was good to just try to separate the two roles that I play and think about, okay, if I'm just the director, what do I want for our kids? What do I want for us to be able to offer? And then to step back into that superintendent role, what's realistic for us? And then to look at the resources and all the things that we need to keep the current programming strong. So at the November board meeting, the board gave me these parameters to look towards a future full day with academics program, to look at opportunities to collaborate with my sending schools. And Steven's already reached out a couple of times about ways we might be able to do that, which is great. Consider configuration changes that might realize program quality improvements to serve more students. And that increase in the budget can only be between 60 and 18%, which was pretty generous. And this just clarified that the numbers that we were receiving then made it, there was just no option in whatever we were lending. We considered at our last meeting, can we just cross that? We were trying to just stay with the information that Michelle has given us. Right. Which was really terrible. And that was before we got the base rate. The anticipated base rate, right. So that really actually helped us out. Okay. So these are sort of the same things. The things that we're thinking about are the class sizes, how much space we have and how can we maximize that. We made some changes in where our classrooms are. So my medical professions class, for example, switched rooms from last year to this year and we were able to get more students into it because of that ice for space. So looking at things like that to meet the needs and then working towards that new facility. Getting the state base rate was helpful because that's up a little bit. Yeah. And then of course you guys know that the insurance and benefits are increasing, impacting all of our budgets. We also just settled last week, our first round in negotiations for a teacher contract. So we have a collective bargaining agreement that did bring about increased salaries. But we survived our first time of that. So it's really good to be able to celebrate and say we have that. The health insurance increases. Our facilities, we pay a facility's used fee to the very district. And so that continues to increase. And then small line items for purchasing on lumber. Other materials for our programming, which is a little different than classrooms here. Except for your metals and woods, of course. We also are expecting that our FTEs are gonna flat line before we get the new building. Cause we have pretty much been building up to capacity. So you can see that there was some pretty significant increase in our FTEs, which is our six semester average of students. It's a little different than how you do that. But pretty soon we're gonna be at the top level of that. And we're not gonna see that continued increase. This slide was in there last year. A difference is when you look at this year, you'll see that design and fabrication it went from in his first year, had three students. It finished that year with two students. This year it currently has five students. My instructor just resigned. So we're hoping to replace for the rest of this year. But we've zeroed it out because we have only a co-op student, a student who's currently in the program interested in co-op next year applied for that. So no students that are interested in that program for next year. Meanwhile, we've included welding because we don't have a teacher. We don't have that program yet. And we have over 30 applicants for next year. So we've made a little shift there. This slide is exactly the same as last year because I couldn't get all the numbers from our sending schools yet, or not our sending schools. But our colleagues in CTE, what I can tell you is it's gonna be pretty much the same look to the graph. Patricia Hannaford Center is gonna be just under 30,000, 29 something next year for tuition. Southwest is gonna be 27,7. Stafford is just over 21,000. And River Bend, which is behind us, is gonna be 17,6 next year. So pretty much the same trends for the cost of those. And so we're gonna stay pretty much in the same spot, which means we're quite reasonable. Go ahead. So our tuition is anticipated to be 19 or 23 next year. We won't know that for sure until probably December 31st at 9 p.m. Whenever we get the numbers from the state that tell us, and then we're required to provide our tuition information to our sending districts within about 15 days of that. I can't remember the exact date, but within the 15 days. And so how it happens is that we get some payments towards our salary, we get salary assistance, we get a few other pieces. We do have some grants that help us with our funding, like Perkins this year is it was 250,000. And then I reallocated some funds that weren't spent last year. So we got about 300,000 this current fiscal year from Perkins. And so once all of those in the on behalf payments come from the state directly to us, the remaining apart charged to our sending schools is 8,058 for each student, which is an 11.9% increase. Much lower than what we had originally thought was gonna happen. And that again is based on your six semester average. So it could be that you have 40 kids with us, but your average is 36, or it could be that you have 36 with the kids with us and your average is 40. It might not be accurate, but it keeps it from going really high or really low any single year. This is just a graph. Maybe you do this with your budget too to kind of look at where the funds going. And so thankfully most of it is going into that education. We wanted to highlight also how much is going towards the current facility and how that might be better spent in our own new building eventually. Yeah, we're putting into our capital plan. That's great. We are putting some funds under the capital plan. So that's great. These are some of the revenue sources I was just talking about. Mark, you can go ahead. Oh, sorry. It's okay. And here's your opportunity to ask some questions if you have them. Will your expansion also increase the number of automotive students that you can have? Or will that- Hopefully, it really depends on how we do that. If we build it big enough so that we can have two programs at once or if we have a rotation or we can have first years and second years, that might help in, well, a lot of the students that apply for automotive also are interested in welding. So they may be able to shift out a little bit when we have that. Jory, you're talking about full day academics. Does that mean students wouldn't go back and forth? Correct. They would come here, come to our center, and come back. At the end of the day to go home, not for classes. Okay, so what does it mean to have full day academics? It means that whatever the, so this is another complication, right? But if I look at all of the graduation requirements across my sending schools, it means making sure that I embed or provide that instruction within our day so that students can still meet their graduation requirements without having to come back and take a class here. I think you can speak to this, Stephen, but it disrupts the schedule at any of our sending schools. And so I think my students come back here and they have a special class of US history that's just CBCC students, for example. Other sending schools, the one that I'm attached to, their third block starts half an hour before my classes end. So kids are running to the cafeteria grabbing food and going to their class late every single day. And so trying to mitigate those pieces where it's not really equitable for students and giving them everything they need when they're with us, so that's a goal I have. So would that then prevent travel back and forth? Would students be basically located at the career center and have all of their academic and technological needs met? That's the goal. That's the goal. But that won't be happening for quite a few more years still, unfortunately. Now I'm going to ask you a budget question. Where are those students counted for funding purposes? Yes. They're counted here. And some of the money for their tuition comes directly to me. And the rest comes here. And then it gets paid to me, some of it, and tuition. So it depends on how your tuition costs it versus mine. Would that still be true if you became full time, full? That would still be true, right now. For now, yes. For now. I'm talking about the future. Yeah, the future we don't know, this is probably going to be a CTE year in the legislature. And one of the recommendations that came out of the study that was done by APA, and I can't remember what that APA stands for, out of Colorado, was that there needed to be a new funding system for TechEd. And interim secretary of states is very interested in pushing that this year. And so we may have a funding formula that changes, but right now it would stay the same regardless of whether we have those students all day long or if we have them part of the day. Okay, thank you. Yes. I was going to ask about faculty and you alluded a couple of times to challenges with filling positions or not having a welding instructor, for example. I was curious if the new collective bargaining agreement, you think that will change that? And also, how do you compare to the other CTE centers in the state, if you know? It really depends. And yeah, it's complicated because the CTEs across Vermont are so different. So some of them have two-hour programs and so their students are there for two hours in the morning and then they go back to their same school and then they have another batch of students that come in for two hours in the afternoon and go back to, so it's very different or there's a private St. Jay Academy has some CTE. So it's very different across and there are some that we're comparable to now and some that we could still, none of us equal to it in accounting. In terms of tenure for the faculty, that's the structure of the school day at the career center affects your ability to hold. I'm not specifically thinking about whether other career centers have an easier or a harder time than Central Vermont in the field. I think we all struggle a little bit with filling and I think it's more about when we hire a teacher for a program, it's usually not the same type of background that your teachers have. And so they're coming directly from industry where now they might be making a good amount of money to come into teaching where there's great benefits, right? But there may not be the same level of money. There's also not the same hours or some of the other things they might be dealing with in the industry. But my teachers, if they're brand new, they're coming from industry. They now have to teach a class of students and they have to take their classes at the same time because they have to work, they do a teacher apprenticeship program and they have to take classes in the first three to four years to get their teaching license. So they've got the double whammy of being first time in a classroom with kids, trying to figure out behavior management and curriculum and all of the systems that we have for collecting attendance and putting your curriculum together and all those things. And they have to take these classes for less pay than if they stayed on the job. But with our new agreement, at least we were able to make some... We're close to gap. Yeah, close to gap. So industry will be paid fair, because sometimes industry comes to us and has 20 years of experience, but that doesn't translate to 20 years of teaching, right? So that was a hard conversation, but I needed conversations. So now maybe we will be able to attract more people in industry because it's important to have that experience. Thanks. So I went to the open house with a coworker in mind and we're in the trades and it was really fun. And I just wanna say how good it felt to be there. I mean, all the students were super excited, all the faculty were super excited and it was electric in there, truly was. So I just wanna say you're doing some really great work. So thank you. Thank you, thank you. It isn't... I loved working here when I worked here. Observing classrooms here was nothing like the classes I get to observe there. So it is... It's pretty wild. Yeah, it's cool. I think you have a question from someone in that room. I don't see him. Who's it? Well... Okay. Can you... You can stop sharing. Jody, can you hear me? I can, yeah. It's Brittany. My question was just about special education services at the Career Center and is differentiation built into the programming over there? I just know a lot of times students on plans are really interested in that hands-on tech learning. And I just wanna see how their needs are met when, you know, at the tech center. Yeah, so there are times when we cannot differentiate. We have to meet industry-recognized credentials and we have to meet, like, OSHA 10 for students to go into our workshops. So there are times when we cannot do that. What we can do is offer supports and I think U32 is really special in that way because we get one of your case managers, special educators, twice a week. And so she is on site, knows what's going on and is able to help students and support them in those things to help get them through that. We also are not an LEA, so we're not responsible for the services per se, but we do provide the supports necessary. So I know that I have a special-ed coordinator and she is often sitting with students and making sure that she's giving them whatever they need as far as their plan to, like, if it's reading the assessment for them or working through the math for them and with them, not for them. And so there are things that we're able to do and there are also some pretty rigorous standards we're held to and so we have to be careful about who's coming in at their program and if they're ready yet. It doesn't mean that it's not available for them ever, but we need to make sure that students are ready to be successful. We don't want to have them come in thinking that it's gonna be a great hands-on experience and then realize, oh, I also have to know electrical code because we can't, there's not a lot we can do about that. It's not on tape. You have to know how to thumb through that code book and find what you're looking for and you can use the code book on the assessment at the end for that apprenticeship license, but you need to know it to be able to do that and so it's hard in some cases to meet the needs of all students and we don't have the same quite requirements as that. We are held to different standards for those IRCs and college credits that we have to offer and if our numbers start to go down then we lose funding. So we have to always be building up and supporting kids. So one of the things that I wanna do as we build up to that full day center with academics is to make sure that we start at foundations at the ninth grade level so that we bring kids in and start teaching those technical pieces. Like, how do you read a manual, for example? How do you understand what this piece is telling you if it's a title or a heading and how do you get to that next part and how do you take this test and understand how to look at these questions or hear these questions if someone's reading it to you to be able to access it. I also wanna be very clear that when students apply to our programming there should be absolutely no evidence that they're on a plan. So we do not get those in advance. We do not, well, my special like coordinator should be able to talk to your case managers and make sure that they know what the expectations are or what students need to be at a base to be successful in our program in advance of anyone applying. So we don't get any of that information because our decisions are not based on that and that should never come into play. Does that help? That does, thank you, Jodi. I appreciate that and I'm excited for the future where they're working in ninth grade to really start all the skills they need. So I'm excited for the future, thank you. Me too. Thank you, Brittany. Any other questions? Otherwise, we're gonna... You don't want me to take all the time? Keep going, Jodi. This is really exciting. I think that one last thing that I had in that presentation is just to remember to vote and to ask for your career center. It doesn't get mailed to you because it's 18 towns that would have to go petition. If you can just imagine that. To send the mail to the balance. And remember when you're voting for our budget, it's not above and beyond your budget. Yeah, it's in those $8,000. Correct. So to be honest, can you say that again? Out loud? So when our ballot goes out separate from all of yours and to all of our 18 towns, and this year it's gonna have on it the one Washington Central at large person. They are on a one year term, so we'll be looking for a three year term person to get elected and so it'll have that and then it'll also have our total budget amount to support the career center moving forward next year. And when you vote for that, you are supporting the career center budget which is already embedded into your own. So it's not money above and beyond for taxpayers. It's not extra. It's not a separate budget, it's within our... Correct, it's within it, but you vote on it separately. Right, okay. Thank you. Yeah, thank you all. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. So now that we're all excited, let's get excited for our own budget. Megan. All right. We have a lot of budget tonight. Okay. So this is our second budget meeting. To remind you where you are in the process. This is the meeting before the meeting where you would adopt your final budget for warning. And then that's in preparation for our annual meeting in our town, meeting day vote. This, just to remind you what we're doing tonight, this is what the board asks of administration. One was to essentially give more information about instructional program changes. The things that we proposed last meeting over what the service delivery looks like with proposed changes and then some breakdown of cost implications of changes because the proposed November budget talked about FTE and not dollars associated. And then as you always do in the December meeting, you'll get some updates because there's information that we have now that we didn't have then. This is, we will try to make this as accessible as possible with a lot of complexity to the funding system, especially in a good year there is. And this year it's even more complex. So that is what we're here to do. The leadership team will be part of this, including some that aren't actually here. So we'll bring them to virtually. And this will be a multimedia presentation. And again, these first few are just, I think they're good grounding among kinders. This is the engagement timeline that the board's been operating under. So we are at this point where the board is digging into its conversations and taking all this input into consideration. And these are the budget parameters that you provided for administration. You did make a decision to eliminate your original eight parameter that was to keep the impact under the inflation rate. And you removed that parameter once you saw the baseline. This is a reminder of one of your parameters is to use these three lenses or to ask the administration to use these three lenses. So when we look at our budget building, we are looking at education quality and evidence-based practice. We're looking at how we distribute resources across the system and we are paying attention to student needs. And these are kind of the operating principles that administrators used as we entered this budget season. We know the biggest priority is to be able to provide programming within the configuration that we have currently. Different from last year, we wanted individual schools to be able to make the recommendation that was based on the needs of their building. And gave direction to start by, we know we have revenue loss of our best of funds. So at the building level, what was that revenue loss and make a proposal that responds to that and pay attention to enrollment. So respond to enrollment changes while staying within ed quality standards. This was how our principals approached the work. We are gonna talk about that first piece, the instructional program changes. So first, you've seen this slide before. What are education quality standards? Both the current and the proposed are linked in here for folks that want to look in advance. But why do we use that quality? They are the Vermont law. They are Vermont's requirements for appropriately resourced schools with a focus on quality. They give us consistent guidelines so that we have something that's objective. And for us, in order to meet the needs of our students and achieve our global needs, we need to be adequately staffed. So we wanna speak to this chart a little bit. It might be easier to see on the print out. For those that's on the screen, and as usual, the slides will be put up on the website. These are, this is a chart, it's how our staffing compares to education quality standards. And this slide in the highlighted areas speaks to what it will look like with the proposed changes. And this, so highlighted in green and highlighted in yellow is one piece of it. But this is to demonstrate that we did ensure that we stay within quality standards when we made these proposals. A couple of notes about this slide. The counseling role, so education quality standards, when they develop that ratio, the one to 300 and one to 200, that includes more than just school counselors by design. It includes school counselors, it includes social workers, if you have them, it includes an SAP, which is a substance abuse professional. It includes school-wide behavior systems, supports. So we include more than counselors. When we show you these ratios in a typical budget season, we just look at the counselor number, but it doesn't mean a really good picture of all the other supports in the building. And as you'll see when principals speak to their model, there are more than just counselors that provide these supports. So the highlighted areas, so for example, in Berlin, that number includes the counselors, but also a school-wide behavior support staff and the additional BCBA, School-Wide Behavioral Projects serve in Calis. This includes a school-wide behavior professional that they currently have. Doty is their school counselor. That is what that includes. East Montpelier, that calculation includes their school-wide behavior professional, same with Romney, which is a support staff. And at the high school, there is also a social worker and in the proposed model, the addition of a substance abuse professional. So just a learning you to why that role looks different than it looks last time. This is a district look at the changes. When we go into a little bit more detail, each building summary will show you the individual building impacts, but in case it is helpful, you did look at it this way last year. Across the district, these proposals include reductions in classroom teacher ESP, that supports that, school nurse, library media, school counselor, and then additions in SAP for the high school and BCBA behavior systems at Berlin. Both of those would be offset by grant funds. So that's just a high level summary. And as we just, the administrators are gonna jump in and speak to their side when we get to the board operations later in the agenda and you discuss them, there will also be available to answer questions that the board has. Thank you. And I think Jen's up first. So the first thing we wanted to share with you is a little more information about the remediation and to find the degree to which we're running early and to find the degree in which we're running early. And fundamentally, there are ways to change the program to kids who are three, four, and five. We want to offer a robot program to the same type, lots of students who are learning how to use school to the right level of kids who learn how to use for reading love tickets. And so right now, our gender enrollment for three-year-olds across global counts is 12. And our gender treatment enrollment across global numbers is 8.8. So for our combination of 20-year-olds, those are technically three grade levels. So we want to combine those two weekly pay programs into one program. We run two sections and we play with air, and we're an important part of this puzzle is that we have that many of our families want any kind of ground around care. And when we're offering lots of programs to our school schools we need to have that in the staff and people. We need our families, our doctors and needs ground around care. So either we lose the families because any program is not accessible to them, or we sort of catch things together, especially in special grants we don't have going to burn a number of students. There are also times when we've had some staff available, we don't have enough money to convince them that we're going to generate a full program, and then we're not going to offer a staff to care for 100 students and fund that with a good employee. So we want to go together just to help in some budget savings. And that has to do with student aid, and has to be being able to reduce one of their professional or free-free AA at that point we're going to do at FTE. Still within our agency of human services, but also by some regulation as well. Next slide. Similarly, in kindergarten, we want our kids to have a lot of experiences in MME, as opposed to diversity of thought, and experience in learning in school. Our projected enrollment next year is 7, and our director of enrollment totally next year is 6. So the country is small to offer quality instruction. So we want to close bringing them together. That would result in a 100 FTE reduction in those classes. I want to be real clear that we would be bringing recommendations to you, regardless of what your area of expertise is going to be, or the right things to do for kids, and the right things to do for our families. We are still exploring options from legitimate location because we have lots of things to explore, primarily at transportation, and then that's the space inside the space that has to be and other impacts. So none of those decisions can be made, but it is our strongest recommendation. Mine is the townhouse that you're here for, for our kids. So can we be safe, if it was not at this point, because we can have in-need-reasoned transportation on the bottom? Our assumption of that transportation would not result in, we will look at it for sure, and look at room lengths, but we do not in space having to add routes, which is the only way we would go off in transportation costs. So are there any increase, expect by decreasing the number by 5%? Or are there these net savings, or are these only based on the actual net savings? That is the staff reduction. That's right, that's right, that's right. But we need net net more than any other increase cost from combining different earnings. We don't anticipate there being any. No, we don't anticipate there being any. I'm referring to that. We've been in the NAMM groups, and some of our groups actually already go, like one group goes right by the other school anyway. So we think that we can act for all of that and it's been met when we make this decision. Yeah, thank you for that question. There are many numbers. My question is about projected enrollment and what numbers that we take on. So our teachers, our admin assistants, and our principals do a lot of work trying to figure out what was out there. We get that at some C-6 impressive rates. We look at the first records, we get the fifth one, we make the phone calls, we look at the first records. It's always a bit of a moving target, and you are asked to make the best effort to when that at 6.99 goes over the number that we're expecting. So it's not just based on the school's free show. No. And then the other question is, if you have an after-conception, and they're having access to new connections in the morning, create a whole day, or they have access to transportation, application, to the option to access transportation in the morning, like a morning, yeah, when we're in the morning, which will do the work, or it needs to be connected to instruments, right, which is what I'm all about. Do you anticipate more families signing up for pre-paping since they have access to new connections? I would think it would be great. I mean, you have conversations. But I know, and it would be, is when we have an after-conception, they have access to full-time families. And I know that we have families that would like to come to our programs, and they have, because we haven't been able to wrap around. So I would agree. I think that since this word gets out, and now that we have one year from under us, we would work four days, if you would have offered a day, a year, except maybe a semester, and sign up for it. Would you even work four days at their local school and do more than what the websites have previously? So I think the two communities are coming together. And I would agree. Five days, wrap around the air, and transportation. I think more people will, it's a great solution. So just a couple of questions, one, do we have an anticipation of what the following year might bring in terms of combining those? You know, maybe I'm going to get a size out. We have a moment, remember, and we're all continuing to have enough to look at what we're doing overall, I think, for all those things that are moving forward. Yes, we have a moment, interjecting. The younger kids are always up, isn't it, right? We do our best to stay on top of things. I just think in terms of, and also in terms of configuration, as we've been talking, different configurations, and as we're trying to figure out how to make these decisions, 15, 20 years ago, we had only, we worked kind of consolidated programs, and then we worked hard to put them into the schools. And so as we get it, life has changed. The world has changed. So of course, that's why we see these changes. But as we're considering configuration changes, there's a lot that's bubbling here as to this pendulum swinging back and forth. And so it's trying to figure out a question. But you know, it really is about, I just want to be sure that as we consider our configurations, we, that may come apart of it, that we also know it's a moving target all the time. The other thing, too, I want to, I really appreciate that we have this partnership with Community Connections. We have to understand, though, it's a full school day, but it's not a full day for parents. And so I just want us to be clear around that, because I don't remember parents who this is very helpful, but it doesn't make things totally important to them. So there's still some adjustment that should be passed out. Thank you, Jen. OK, so Pat was not able to be with us today, but she did project herself. I'm going to take a second to do this to make sure that it's oh, it does look like it's on the screen. I'm going to start hitting play. And I'm hoping that those on the screen, if we find out that you can't hear, or do something so that we know that. OK, so I'm clicking play. No one can hear.  So I think you're going to mute the owl. Yep, thank you. As long as they can hear. And I'll just turn my volume up so the folks in the room are here. For the holiday season, and I did that not knowing that tonight would be a night when we would be having this really important meeting, so I asked if I could record in comments. I wanted to talk a little bit more about the rationale behind the decision, so like me, on this slide, that you'll see. People are raising their hand mark to say they can't hear. Yeah, the owl's not making that decision. And you, well, because stop sharing. Yes, stop sharing. Share that with me, and I'll play it up here. Yes. Can you hear the owl on so they know we're working on it? We're working on it. I'll turn my sound off. And I will share the video with you. It's actually linked in the slides you have, but here, if they can hear, I'll just email you, please. First. Oh, yeah, we're going to put it in the chat. So. Which one are you? Post. Your owl. OK, we're working on it. It's in your email. Yep. You can come from the meeting. Thank you. No. I am away for this meeting tonight. I had increases in schedules. Can you see if anybody's saying it's better? So far, no ands, right? I think we're good. Welcome to the season, and I did that on Monday night. I was having this really fun meeting tonight. I asked if I could work with you on Monday night. I wanted to talk a little bit more about the rationale by the decision that I made on this slide. I see some of the factors to the decision of the budget. I want the decision to keep in mind. You've heard me say in our previous budget meeting, a little bit about what I'm getting. School money, day-to-day counseling. I know that I'm in a position, but what you've already heard is what I want to know. I think you also want to say that the House of Business will want to be thinking about how we utilize our resources behind money, and thankful across all of our schools to the rest of the world. And the House of Business will want to know why are you in the House of Business and the fact that we present the resources and the budget in Washington Central and that we have money. And one of the things that has always told me thinking about having a partner decision is if I use data points and sources of information, that's a practice to which I have some liberty behind the decisions I make. The piece that I quite love is important to know is that my staff heard some of the comments that I made in the last board meeting, and they still don't want to wait and I'm really thinking about my rationale, so I want to add some talking to you for all of you. What I was charged with, what I was charged with was to talk about how we're going to be able to show a lot of success on funds. If you think that's the last budget and if you use the best of funds in Dallas, we can use it to increase the PTE in the interaction and school nursing and school counseling. One of the things that you don't see on this slide is what I mentioned, and that is because I find the decision if I actually choose something, I have to organize the part that's most important to me based on all of the data that I have available to me, and my data sources I need. I have access to all of the data to what I see as expertise that I have in my learning, especially on numbers that first or the nearest. I have access to the non-assets that's not needed to use their Health Bust and Track. What is the duration of the visits? I'm going to talk about the health bosses. I also recognize that our teachers are reading their time and their calendar daily, so to be able to move them in sense of power that I'm not making it alive. When I look at all of those things, the achievement that is one is the one that stands out to me the most. And it's not for that reason what you don't see on this slide is reading intervention. I have made the decision based on all of those data points that it is important for us to prioritize reading in our building for true reason, actually. One, I think one reason she should prioritize reading is I think that they get all the accounts no matter what, no matter what, no matter who you look, the biggest thing is if you're a successful staffer, students, it's to be able to read by grade, the proficiency, grade, grade, and what we point in time where students transition from reading out to reading, to reading to work, anything. And it's so critical that the skill is solid. And our only intervention is the only person in our building who is fully focused on this skill set. And when I think about, we either have our knowledge and support that we have in our building, we have our physical time, we have our spiritual time, we have our political time, we have our spiritual time, it has a lot of these resources and four different, really, people that I can contribute to supporting students who are struggling in whatever way, anyway. And that just seems like a really simple map and to, I don't know why, I just can't remember if I was doing anything and I do, but I do. Why I would pick reading and teaching on that goal and figuring out the most resources that we have with less FD in when it comes to students' support. Would it be wonderful to have all the things? Yeah. And when I think about it, because that's what we need, and I'm not necessarily mainly that it would be based on some realization of all of the data that is available to me. If we were to make the cuts that I have proposed on this slide, I would ask the Black and Indian Skills Group to continue to be available to students who are struggling and help services will all still be available to students. We've also discussed our service in place where we've also said that they are named as the needs or are the orders to be able to support a variety of needs, if it's FD, if it's lower. One of the needs of the library. But I can mention this last one as well. I want to make sure that it's clear that we have a, this is already something that is occurring this year. Our library time integration is awesome. It is only coming out of 0.6 FD and making my library a better work. And the rest of the time is spent as a new service and orders to a computer teaching a fourth grade in core academics, in literacy. We have an extremely large class size, and we have a large number of students in the library to work with. And the order of students to get into that, they, um, like library textbooks, and education programs for the first day of every single day to be to be a fourth grade literacy and bachelor. And we're working out really well. However, this is budget, this is budget, it's really important for us to separate budget for attentionally and when we make a choice or decision to pick a bit, to benefit or adjust the number of students we need. We did that last year with Anne Anne, which I did in using library tech. And it didn't differ from library tech at all. I'm saying we're working to adopt the right TTE library and think about other ways to support the students we need. I think I might want to end on one of the points that I made at the beginning. Cali, how does it look small school? Take on, it's just disproportionate of how these resources are added to watching Central because we are a small school. And I'm so grateful for all the support that our board and our meeting always give in. Cali, how does it look small school since I'm watching Central? And I recognize also that there's a lot of people who are in charge of doing so wonderful work and they're doing it with a less than proportionate amount of our resources. And that is not, it's still not what we need. I think it's important that we work in a way that we need to do in the 80s and is a lot of budget. It is for more work to be taken as we move into the system of strategic planning, vision building, and aligning our budget with our board by the needs of our community. Thank you. Thank you for that bearing with attack. Megan, can I ask just a quick question? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I've got to take on some work in Cali for the next five minutes, but what's the, what would be the remainder of SEE for the matter of interest? 0.7. 0.7, thank you. Which is what we are currently functioning with right now at 0.7, we've had it budgeted at 1.0, but the reality became a 0.7, which I actually worked best with that employee. Thank you. That was kind of what we came up with. And if we can't all run down, and we'll get them back to you. Is the 3.3.4, 26.6, due to last night, is that due to continuing on from next year to the year after? It's softened because of the split. It's because of the 3.4 that it's big. So when the fourth graders move on and move into 5.6, they write sizes both. You know what I mean? It's never even been done. Yeah, yeah. The second is, I'm going to do just that with the argument that the small schools think they're taking in too much resources from our body, but it's still portioning them out. It sounds sort of serenely, because they don't really need to have any of those activities, like the high school, the other ones, and drive drivers, athletics, and all those things in that high school is just needed for their patients. So I don't understand that that decision might crank that into our part. I don't understand what the building and the foundation blocks for our students and their future here are really breaking them down. I don't think they're taking in too much resources in terms of our body. I just don't understand that. The other thing is, what is the important thing about mathematics? The important thing that the grade and the university and the university, like the grade, and the important stuff that comes down to it, what's the kind of level that is important for mathematics, skill, and understanding, and you need to be sure in terms of it. It's a tip. The metric that I'm aware of has actually has to do with algebra in the middle level, which is a little bit different grade level, and, Jen, I don't know if there's another metric that is as solid as the third grade reading law. Yeah, no, and as I was saying, there's no metric. I would agree with that. I would say that we talk a little about the education, right? Those who have education from the third grade are not, and I'm working on business with them. And I'm not a busy man, but I'm working on business and all those good things, so they all go up to our front. Thank you. Can I make a suggestion? Yes. We have a really long list. This is only the presentation of the discussion. Can we read it? That's a great question. People have a look at that. That's a good point, Kyrie. We're going to have a space for questions from public right now, and then we're going to do our board questions and during our discussion. So let's wait until the end. Thank you. Kyrie, you're up. You're the best. You're the best. You're the best. You're the best. You're the best. You're the best. Budget changes for this year, and I do just want to echo what Jen will talk about in terms of the K-A and the current numbers. It is, there was just in terms of programming that we would be able to provide for kids. For a 235-year-old, we don't have the student mess to do it. Am I also going to jump out? It's too important. It's not important. There just don't seem to be there. So I think that really just to get that foundational learning is so important. And really, like Jen said, we would re-publicizing that even if it had added to the budget, because it is what's best for kids and what kids need. So for Doty, what I had to look at was the budget parameters that you were given and the loss of extra budget. So one of my goals is reducing back down to having a fully paid counselor. One thing I want to point out is that in front of the Doty-Doty counselor, I'm sorry, I haven't known why I'm the first person to do this, but I'm sure I am. It's quite frankly incredible. And she also takes on a Doty-Doty to have a separate pay-per-support order, because Maureen is so intimately involved in her career support system as well. So with that, she's an incredible person. And the other reduction related to loss of extra budget would be reduced to pre-candidate level of nursing, which would be reduced to 0.5 of the total nurse. And with the goal of still working with her as a nurse literally every day, I think it would be one of the steps from the site of pre-c-visits. So I will begin to report to the students because that is a reduction. I mean, I'm sorry to blurt something, because it isn't enough, but we have reports in place that are general systems that are unfortunately used in the front of the classroom to really build a real result of uniting the important community structure as well as having the DT meetings by the teachers in addition to the DT meetings. And we have staff meetings as teachers every other week individually to discuss and also to look at the professional development of that. The, and so how the students are reported in addition is we have body opportunities in front of the classroom. So we do have teachers supporting each other with students and they are reporting together. We will continue to have guidance and we will leave small groups, lunch punches, snack punches, have brush paintings, back-up to person's now. And another group we are able to do that is the convention services are embedded in time to allow flexible and, my friend called NIMBAL delivery so that students are taught about the classes to the intervention class to the intervention school. Students rather than students going to the internship. Justice is really the thing that I'm not going to stop. This is one of the truths that's in the message. I think we're looking at it in small steps. But listen to this thing. The larger class has a real help. Don't let them come out of this. They're larger class. So I have that. What Cat was referring to, that is definitely true. True. True. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Gillian. Gillian, I was the concert. Yes. What is a two-year-old's concert like? I was leaving. I was kind of thinking, here, here, here. And as I was leaving, they said three and four-year-old preschool class was getting having that, and they were all all in that class, and then they were seeing country roads. And now they're all in that class. So, thank you very much. Thank you very much. It was great, great. My daughter was like, she was a little bit, and that's why she was kind of back in my day. Thank you so much. They know all about the two-year-old already. All right. So, thank you very much. Thinking about where we are, it's a very, very nice place to get to know. We have a wonderful staff with really, really great friends right now in the racist system, and we've got a lot of resources. So, when I look at our overall... I'm going to start with our top teacher, our representative number. We currently have two representative teachers that are going to be our representative next year. Our are 18, which isn't a big and big impact for me that I'm confident in coming to. Coming to, and I need to, because I'm a garden teacher. So, in thinking about that, I think I'm going to be able to change the force that I need to racist in one. I have a reduction of one classroom teacher. The Red Cross School counselor is something that I'm carrying here. I'm carrying here very, very closely with Project Director Randall, because I believe that it's a shift in our model. Our, our, our building for the current crisis has two children counselors, and my, my, uh, and the paraphernalia professional group are by, uh, out of the wide wide industry. And our, our children are, we're going to try to serve 30 amazing students, and then, and then, um, with an, with an FDL lesson. And we have a lot of teachers here. And we really care about a school counselor role, that, that a school counselor can have their area of their mind around what, what counseling and what the, what the, what's it going to be to serve for. And, um, I believe that our, our building will go back that way by having a full-time, full-time counselor, and then, I want to know your circumstances presently. We would work very closely. Great, and I think we're a part of it. And many of our students just, just to thank you now, we're always trying to help now, today I'm observing right now. Um, the students feel like they need to not always have their own right, I like that shift and funding and funding and of course, allow the activity that we and all of the students, that students need to be in the classroom emotionally and emotionally. We really do feel like we're just working towards that. Thank you Celia. So prior to COVID, we had a 0.6 FTE school counselor, which is going to be so 1.0. I, as every good project, make my staff and ask for input and feedback, which I also did in September. And they just said, we did a chop chop activity. Where I asked them, tell me, what do you believe about SEL, academic and behavior support intervention and instruction? And through that activity, it became very clear that our staff would be going back to COVID numbers for a student body and the size that we have. It's not in the best interest of our children. Also, looking at our staff sizes, in order to find some sort of reduction, our staff size would go up. We noticed on that EQS by 10, there was a yellow highlight for each volunteer. We would give up the staff size, and I always set recommendations that I also believe. If I have to reuse anywhere, I would rather have worked at staff sizes, and keep most of them still an counselor. The decisions that I made truly were based on input from my staff, the observations that I made, and also looking at EQS across the board. I feel guilty and attached that she felt guilty in not making more rejections, but also more rejections will put us further, Our staff decision ratio is the highest, and all the elementary schools are ready, and I feel it further attached will just put us back that much higher. I don't want to be a burden. I can't go back to my teachers. I'm sorry, you have to serve more children than anyone else in the district, and we're going to further attach so they can serve even more children. I can't really decide if the equity point is bad, and it's not something that we talk about often, because I've said to my colleagues at the college that they'll feel the same, that at the same time, if I get the school nurse who's serving well for two hundred children, it doesn't feel like what the school needs to say. You need to serve even more when your colleagues are serving fewer than you across the board. The last thing I'll say is that I gave a LDS presentation just a couple of weeks ago, so I'm not going to share anything that we have in the audience. We've already heard that from you very recently, but that's just students that are supporting them, and we hope that they will continue to support them in their state. Thank you. Thank you, please. Caroline. So, the letter from me had a full total number of school counselors and a full total number of teachers that you need to support with this letter from me and who they really think I would help support from me, which is what we're going to have. And the key to your position and our student support is part of our four staff members and as a team, which I would like to present to Don and Mark.  So, in considering all of the justice in the building, the key to your intervention was the area that was most reasonable to shift from possibility to a team. So, the student and as a team, we'll continue to utilize and the first responders will shift from teacher to teacher position to an era of discussion in the proposal. Thank you. See you in a minute. So, we've seen these things already. We had one school counselor, and the other one was added to the middle school. We have two school counselors in the middle school, three councilors in our high school, and a director of student services, who also carries a small student load, but definitely a portion of the time. So, it's so important that we provide services. We're resuming that as a school counselor as a position, and we are asking for us to have an S and D counselor. So, we really really like this great, great evening. We'll redistribute the meaning of our school counseling to the team. So, that is still a reward to the councilor, lots of directors of student services, who also carries a load. That's the S and D position. We're lucky not to have a grant, that will cover a significant portion of that. We'll certainly have to take a little bit of money into that. We would lose a long term as to what is the continued meaning around that position. I think the ward is very rare in our executive section because we need more support for our students who are struggling with substance abuse. And so this counseling position is great, because we need not only reactive, which is certainly a part of counseling, but a different program, in working with students to reduce the incidence of abuse. So, I'll call it a back-up. It really fits. It is the number one. I would also say the resumption of parents, that is now one position, and one position that we don't need. There's been a change in the student plan for a year. So, there will be a reduction in the need of one or the other for professional play. Just one time at a specific speed, the other one in unfiltered position, which still leads us with like four or five full-built positions than for a professional, even with that reduction. So, I think these are very reasonable cuts for us. We will have our praise made about our support resources, our LEL, that will be coming up in a year. I'd like to see some more general systems and some of the support, so I'll just do that there. I'll outline the Student Services Department, the House Research Unit, and then here's the next slide. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Steven. Okay. We're going to power through the number of fortune and then we will... Which I will happily turn up both of us, so we'll just do that. Thank you. We answered this new slide to give you some general definitions for some terms that are pretty common throughout the tax rate development. As you're aware, our 27 legislative takes effect for our 2025. And it's a replacement of the equalized pupils with the long-term weighted average daily membership also L-P-W-A-D-M. Neither one's very good to say. Vermont has changed the weights and added new categories using the long-term weighted A-D-M instead of equalized pupils who can calculate the tax rate for F-25. Long-term A-D-M is your average long-term average daily membership plus state-based student plus all the school weights. The F-24 spending a long-term weighted A-D-M is equivalent to that. That's not what we used in F-24 but they've given us the calculations to figure out what it would have been. We'll be compared to the F-25 spending per long-term weighted A-D-M. If the district increases the spending for pupils by more than 10%, the tax rate will be subject to review by committee. So if we talk about... CLA is a comparison of each town's total property value on the brand list versus the state listed value. The state listed value is comprised of actual sales generally averaged over years. This is how the state provides tax payers with an equalized brand list across the state. Reflecting on variations that are curving some of the appraisal schedule and other factors. As homes sell for more than they are listed on the brand list, it lowers the CLA. And as the CLA decreases, the tax rate increases. But that's what you're looking at when you see the CLA number. It goes down, the tax rate is going to go up. It goes up, the tax rate is going to go down. In F-24, the district starts to increase ranging between 5.19% and 8.95% with the most significant drops in mid-sex and Berlin. Then we have the property value. The property value is set by the legislature after a meeting. So we currently have the X-ray by the tax commissioner from November 30. It was December 1st this year, he came out of the air on the 15th of November 3. This bill now tries to project an amount necessary to fund school district budgets across the state based on the preliminary budget information provided for AOE in November. So the tax commissioner and co-couple get together and try to figure out what that yield would need to be based on very, very excellent. This year, the property yield also needed an adjustment because of the long-term weighted average membership. It is a much higher amount than the equalized pupils across the board, which then drives the purposeful spending down, which means in order to fund budgets you have to have a lower property yield. So as that yield decreases, the property tax increases. So somehow they have to figure out how to pay for the money, pay for the school, the budget, and that property yield is for that adjusting factor in the entire equation. Which is why it's one of the last things that gets set by the legislature at the end of this whole process. So you've already seen this list of factors in the FY25 budget development. Notably, these factors were also identified in the package number 30 letter as impacts affecting school districts but statewide. With an undetermined CLA as possible changes the property yield that may still impact the tax rate so much is still at our goal. The board focus now is on the expense side of the budget. So these are the updated numbers. We have an 11.78% increase in expenditures. A reduction in revenue of 7.02% for combined percentage increase of 16.07% in education spending. Some more budget numbers for you. The initials of the long term weighted average of members with this extra divided tax ALE is an increase of 8.14% from 2,184,51 to 23,6024. That is an increase of what I had last month even. It's an 8.14% increase over what wouldn't have been last year if they used that same number last year. The state excess spending for individual expenses through I-29, the I-25 spending for long term weighted median will be compared to the I-24 spending. If district increases spending per pupil by more than 10%, again, tax rate will be subject to review by committee. The low spending per pupil is a 7.3% increase over I-24 from 14,510 to 15,573. Since this increase is less than 10%, the district would not be subject to tax rate review with this budget. The I-24 tax rate denies out $452 as the property bill from the tax commissioner. It's an increase of 0.158 or 10.52% from 1.4908 in S-24 to 1.6476 in S-25. Since this tax rate increases more than 5%, the district tax rate will be halved at a 5% increase. This protection extends for F-29 or until tax rate falls below a 5% tax rate increase, whichever happens first. The board should be aware that if the budget is 10% spending per long term weighted ADM and fails with the tax rate review, the district would not be subject to tax rate. The limit on tax rate protection. The current tax regulation uses the property bill of $9,452 from the tax commissioner to provide my 30th letter. Again, the property bill may change during the legislative session. I know I'm repeating things, but I feel like it helps to hear it in a different way. The equalized tax rate at the district would have as all properties were assessed at fair market value. The estimated tax rate rates project education tax rates seen on a property tax bill of a resident home owner in the individual town. For simplicity, we've used $100,000 in house value by residents. That's rare, but if you multiply it in multiple states, that should get you closer to where you can estimate your own. Town CLA states right wall likely change. This is a very preliminary tax rate protection. The local CLA is to calculate the tax rates for each town. Should we know January? They are telling us we will not get into this December this year. We need more time. Don't expect it until January. In considering the sensitivity of the adjustments, we will not get into this November 30 letter with state of Vermont tax measure. Most tax payers base credit and income rate but most portionally with property tax rates. And all credit by the FY 25 tax bills are based on prior income and tax rate. Because of this slide this letter in FY 25 should income a tax regardless of income. We should also keep in mind that in order to generate funds necessary to account for school districts receiving the 5% tax rate tax included property yield or income yield or the non-states tax rate may be accepted by the legislature. So the more towns that do that and experience that 5% tax or some other factor that they use is just sort of to reiterate when the legislature put in these calculations in Act 127 I do not believe they were anticipating the number of districts that would hit them and it is the math is not working out so there will need to be some fix to the ed fund because all these districts spending at this level taxes are capped here so the money that goes into the ed fund tax here and there is a gap how big that gap is there is a lot of distance between now and then. There is no mechanism to fill the gap. The property yield. That is that mystery number that the legislature sets or they can use their non homestead tax rate adjust that or adjust the income yield that the legislature controls to make up that gap. So is this chart based on 5% yes correct yes 5% our actual increase is 10 10. And when you say until it sunsets we don't know when it sunsets. When the law goes away but here is the little the little tweak is if we hit above 5% next year then we are protected by the 5% cap. If we hit 4.9 our tax rate is increased by 4.9 and we don't get that protection back in the following year. So even though the law would protect us if we went over 5 next year and then the following year we would be able to get that protection. Once you lose the protection you don't get it back. Looking at it conservatively and that's determined by town reappraisal. Not reappraisal but it's like taking the fair market value of each of those towns and trying to reevaluate if it were among a statewide. So no town can kind of fudge their numbers on the grand list. So is there a sense that these numbers will go down and tax rate go up? I think some of your towns will be significantly impacted more than others. Like going down. It's clear that the housing market is very tight and that is causing a demand in higher prices on homes. So we would open it to the public if anybody that is hearing us right now if you have questions please raise your hand. I don't see any numbers of the public live. Go ahead and raise your hand if you have questions or comments. Honey do you want to unmute yourself? Go ahead. Hi I'm curious to know if it's been talked about to have a K1 class together at both Dodie and Romney that would keep kindergartners in their home school and not be bused to a different school. It would still reduce a teacher if you had a K1 class and a K2 or a K1 and then a straight second depending on what the numbers are. And I know K1 isn't the ideal combination but it can also be very successful and it currently is being successful in some schools. So I'm just curious about if we've talked about that combination which would still reduce a teacher to keep kindergarten students in their home school. So the Romney staff discussed that and were opposed to that they have been for years we've been fortunate not to be forced to do a K1 it is what we would consider if we did combine which is why the combination is such a great opportunity for both communities. And the community this is where I have to like close my eyes and think because it's next year's numbers not this year's numbers is if I were to have a K1 I next year I would have a K1 of 14 students and then a straight second grade 13 students both grade levels still be under EQS. Thanks for I'm not going to go on camera because I'm in the bathroom brushing my children's teeth but but I've been trying to listen so I just have a quick clarifying question which is related to the kindergarten combo the FTE reductions at Doty and Rumney that were discussed by the principals the FTE for the kindergarten is not reflected in those slides correct so this is sort of an additional separate savings or reduction I just wanted to make sure I understood that and we don't know and that would be a decision in terms of the loss of the FTE there that would be based on staffing so we don't know yet or seniority and all that sort of stuff we don't know yet which school would be losing a teacher from their community right that's exactly right and seniority is district wide so it's not just seniority at Rumney and Doty even it's all elementary schools that's super helpful thank you I don't see any other hands so we're going to continue to move on we're going to have a chance to discuss this as a board so I'm just going to go through our next central office I'm going to open it first for questions and then Megan is also going to highlight something were there any specific questions otherwise we would like to highlight can I say anything about the Russian to Megan go ahead a specific piece that we'd love your feedback on is you impacted the draft of the equity indicators and just process wise as you know you passed an equity policy which is really exciting and as part of that policy we have to report back to you how we're doing and in order to do that we need metrics indicators so we have convened a design team to do kind of a legwork in the research and the drafting for equity indicators and then that group is also in charge of gathering input and feedback from a number of groups we've talked to the Humanity Injustice Coalition we will be inviting the families of color affinity group Humanity Injustice to get some input we've talked to multiple student groups which is great so the version that you have is a mid-year checkpoint and you are a group that we would like to give you the opportunity to give us some feedback and I'll try not to just repeat what's in the memo we are looking at measuring our progress toward our equity policy in three ways one of them is traditional outcomes those are numbers that's data one of them is what are experiences what are our students in particular but students and families experiencing that interrupts injustice and what are we doing what are the things that the system is doing because we think that by looking at all three of those metrics we will get a broader sense of our work and I probably should have started with this piece the first thing the design team did was review how schools measure equity because we are not the first people to say how do you measure equity there's some resources linked in the bottom of that document and all of the brainstorms that you see are somewhere in those resource documents so we love just general feedback certainly can answer questions but this is iterative so this might change this will certainly will change by the time you see it at the end of the year Megan who's on the team that's creating this so it is design teams are a leadership team structure so it's numbers of the leadership team it's myself Lisa LaPlante who's not here and Caroline that's all of us right okay thank you that's so that we can do the work and then we do obviously need additional voices and you referenced the families the people of color affinity group and that are there other representatives of other historically marginalized populations that might have been historically marginalized by poverty or by you know access and things well it's not we have one affinity group currently so there isn't a pool to draw from is there is there a thought process around that or a thinking of how to potentially I mean you know because of digging down into where does equity ripple all across our district and so just ways of checking in on this with others you know a wider population I just I didn't know we did talk about this our last justice coalition meeting and part of the work of the justice coalition is not just you know it should integrate everything you know that's having that equity lens so part of our justice coalition work is part of so so we don't have an affinity group but it is part of the justice coalition does that make sense? Well I think it's good feedback because that's part of why we're asking for this level of input is how could we gather that input so that's helpful and again I should the design team wants to take all of this and say okay now where do we go so that's helpful, thanks oh sorry I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the ILI study and what that looks like yeah great thank you so ILI is the organization that our equity scholar comes from so our equity scholar is not an employee and they are conducting a study actually for purposes of furthering research into how do you make a difference in equity and we have the advantage of being able to benefit from that so they are seeking students, families community input to participate in focus groups to be interviewed and the goal is to say when things went well so they are speaking specifically to folks who identify from a marginalized population of all kinds and the question is when it worked for you when either a teacher or an adult or someone did something what was the something and they're trying to generate concrete actions that kids experience and the first step would be just learning what those actions are but once we have a set up here the things that you do that make students feel welcome and valued how do we then increase those behaviors so that's what the study is designing it's really exciting they are at the point right now of figuring out what those things are which should be great where's the study taking place they are seeking input here students but also families so it's within our direction we're at their first pilot program I was going to say I think this is great I really like the three categories of outcomes experience implementation because it's such a complex set of things that we're trying to measure and it's still a relatively new field that just makes some sense and the way when I look at this I kind of put it into three buckets I'm glad you asked about that I didn't know anything about that I mean really considering but there's a lot of activity kinds of stuff especially in implementation which is relatively easy to measure just talks about things that we're doing not necessarily the impact it has there's the disaggregated student data which this board of the Ed Quality Committee are getting to know pretty well and while it tells us a lot it's very complex there's a lot going on in that data and so that left me with a climate survey which I think is really good it sort of gets at the subjective experience of going to our schools but it just reminds me that we'd be putting a lot of emphasis on that we need to get really good at climate surveys in designing them so that they're asking they're collecting the right data and then analyzing them all of us I think about that one as you know this year is the first year that will deliver a common one across the system so even just that fact by itself means it'll be a little bit but one of the most there's lots of meaningful input that came from our student conversations but one of the things that the student group shared with me is the addition of and frankly they said focus groups but interviews with students in that middle column to also get not just surveys give some good data that's can crunch the numbers summarize them and it should be fleshed out by actual conversations with students so that's a piece of feedback that the design team is trying to wrap their heads around because I think it's really important there's a term if there's a book about it but just this concept of street data that it's not just the numbers it's also experiences and you have to be open to gathering it from multiple places but you also need the numbers we also need so it's really about having all of them so that's helpful one question I wonder about is how is there an opportunity to apply this to existing documents so like do we apply this lens to our family our staff handbooks our family handbooks what are the ways that we can apply our equity lens to the things that already exist I think it's a great question one of the things we're doing so on that right hand column is to use equity lens tools because there are some tools that exist we have a sort of home grown one to look at traditions and what are things we do we have a tool that the policy committee has looked at I don't know that we really really used it but there's a tool equity lens tool to look at policy through so there are a few different things that also reminds me speaking of existing things one of the things that the design team recognizes is this type of data really should become part of the ed quality reporting cycle so that instead of getting one like equity report per year you are actually getting these metrics throughout the year this year for the first time we'll probably get a standalone equity presentation on the metrics but over time it will make more sense to be folded into ed quality maybe just two comments that I really appreciated the email on the traditions and I don't know if it came from Cecilia or from Megan but I got it as a parent probably as a board member too and really appreciated that and also I wish that I had started my question with also saying that I really like this framework I think it's really great to see the activities and how that's looking to outcomes and experiences and it has a very logical flow of understanding what you're doing and how it's working and I really appreciate the thought that's gone into it so thank you for that thank you and the direct way into this policy plus the support and the governance of the links to the policy and monitoring to the part goals thank you that was really helpful I think that addition to just as someone who has a privilege of participating in graduate credit training with the equity scholar as a board member working with administrators and educators in that course that there is just incredible value in having that targeted time to work collaboratively and as a board member I just highly recommend it to better get acquainted with administration and staff and also better understand what the district is working to do when it comes to equity and it's a commitment but I found it incredibly valuable and of course it's open too and you get January and we need more people I just I met with Shelley this morning and you know it's coming your way Jensen and you know to staff I got the stuff from Shelley today and it's coming it's coming your way Megan I'm wondering do you want to highlight anything just because it was part of our configuration conversation can we highlight just a couple of things or even the last we call it some class size so this is a time of year when your policy asks that we give you class size guidelines the guidelines are interesting because we develop them to some extent to match our configuration and so they are quite a bit lower than and what I mean by lower is just we have small class sizes and we have some class sizes we believe are too small for good instruction and so after lots of conversations and we discussed this last year and this reality was true last year too we have a minimum that we don't believe a typical classroom should be below 12 with some exceptions particularly at the high school but in general and we don't meet that minimum we have many class sizes that fall below 12 and that's because of our configuration and so that just came up a little bit during the finance committee conversation it's just acknowledging that one of the reasons we want to look at configuration is to be able to meet our own minimum that we think is best instructional so if you have a yeah that's good if somebody didn't have a chance to read that my more just read the class size and also they're sending that presentation in some title one I don't know I missed the idea that there was a presentation it was really helpful understanding which are our schools and just the short explanation of how they're using this which schools this year are benefiting for linked ODI and U32 is what I believe was in that but it's a good presentation and sometimes those links I can see would miss so just look at it we're moving right into the BNBA report there was I would just highlight today just read your update we're trying to do a better job about monitoring how many so please help us out and like those to everybody last week just 60 people with any notes in these letters so there's more people that there's a lot of really helpful information right now and especially one of them is asking people to drop the floor can you speak up oh sorry because I'm speaking to that side so just to make sure to open your newsletter updates we're trying to do a better job about making sure that we are adding stuff that is interesting for everybody we're adding national stuff too but we are counting how many open you know we can tell how many people actually it's not just going to air inbox if you open it it's not like anything like that but so we want to make sure that it is valuable you're trying to get my data that's what you're saying we're trying to better we're trying to better serve you and public dedication is important unless you guys don't know that's why you're sitting here so I appreciate if you check your updates I'm going to leave it at that education quality update mine's really quick um last no at the beginning of this month we talked yeah I'm sorry I don't know what month we talked about scientific inquiry and content and we got a report from Jen and that was really great and we also tackled having a conversation about the ed quality standards which is also big and we still managed to do it in an hour and we're going to be coming up we don't meet in January we'll meet in February and then we won't meet in March and one of the things that we're going to discuss is how we're going to actually schedule our reports to the board because while we have a plan to give you four reports we didn't actually like come up with a schedule so we're going to do that and come up with the next report which should be on student learning outcomes okay so then we can move right into our project discussion we're in five corporations F1.25 budget graph now is the time to ask specific if you have any other specific questions for our leadership team and for Magnus now we can ask any other clarifying questions I have a bunch but I'll just you want me to just do one at a time is there anybody else that is ready to ask a question otherwise ask two and we'll move on so that everybody gets an opportunity to question around so the Berlin the behavior systems coach that is being covered 0.5 FTE for next year is that beyond a one year plan or is that just next fiscal year it's so it's interesting the financial end of it is the reason it's listed as a 1.0 position but the funding is for 12 months so our estimate when we hire which we haven't hired yet but once we hire it'll be 12 months from that time we estimate that to be about halfway through next year so from a budget standpoint we've budgeted half the cost so that's why if I do like just a comparison between the school counselor is taking away 94,000 but 0.5 is 61,000 you're not necessarily proposing that the following year it would bump up I mean it all depends who the person is obviously but not necessarily 122 that you would be absorbing into the budget okay thank you and then East Montpelier you know Alicia I was just um and first off thank you all for this information this is very helpful it's more meat um I mean you gave us meat last year that doesn't sound right and my vegan daughter in law would like me but anyway there's a lot of substance plant-based substance to the information last year but this year was very helpful to have very specifics in speaking to these so thank you um so Alicia you were talking about you had brought up about the counselor but the counselor isn't in any of this correct it's only that 1.0 ft not only but it's the right it's not listed in that table but there is that additional money to bump up from the COVID times 1.6 to 1.0 counselor okay so that's that is an increase this current year it's an increase for next year so what do you see in that slide where like on average say a hundred thousand dollars is 1.0 ft teacher and that and on my slide it doesn't show I'm not looking at the slides I can't tell you the exact number but whatever that number is it's like before the decrease of the 1.0 teacher because it is offsetting the 0.4 counselor cost does that make sense yes but that's kind of new information though I don't think we saw it was that in a previous presentation counselor add to the budget was part of the baseline budget okay okay and it's just I'm just trying to get clarity so that makes sense as to why you were talking about there's no hidden number I know I'm just trying to go see that number yeah yeah so okay um thank you so those are my two are there any other increases in positions that are not obvious like the counseling position at this winter well it was on this slide did you see it on this slide show it was on this slide show it was I think what you're asking is the two ads essentially the personnel is the SAP at U32 and the Berlin position well it sounds like there's an added 0.4 it's a functional ad because it's essentially keeping the SR counselor which means so instead of Alicia finding her dollars by going back to her pre-pandemic counselor letter level she's choosing to reduce a classroom teacher okay so the classroom teacher then this reduction of 95 is less 0.4 within a higher reduction if there wasn't an increase of 0.4 in the counselor is that right okay thank you for all of the school individual school budgets reduced by the portion loss of SR funds allocated to that school they all sought to do that not all of them hit the entire amount but yes they were all looking for reductions in the magnitude of whatever their SR portion was and some did it more sounds like callous did it more thoroughly than anybody callous had the most SR funds to go yet essentially yes they were receiving the most yeah next is thank you I heard about a I guess it may have been Rummy that the first responder duties are going to be allocated to a para equally trained to the position that's being lost in terms of emergency care they won't have a teaching license but they will have the behavior response training which we currently use in other places thank you so yes they would have that training well is that equal to what's being lost if you shook in your responsibility of first responding I'm assuming someone else already had it it's not going to be there anymore if a first responder normally has a teaching license what they would do with a student would you start with the escalation which really starts with connection and I would actually maybe think the first responder more in a medical sense sorry no no no sorry sorry but now I have for review sorry because even though that wasn't your question it raises a good distinction to make when there's a professional in that position they are doing more than responding and that's the difference they are coaching, they're consulting with teachers they're doing the pre-work and working with the adults and responding when it's a support staff it's the response it's the kids in a bind they're building on the relationship they're going in and helping but not joining a consultation so even though that wasn't what you were asking it's still a good question and that was the piece everything Fagan just said about the teacher with you that when it was a teacher position was taken up by that thank you and giving for the loss of path in nursing position are there others on the staff who are equally trained to a nurse that would be able to step in and do it a nurse would do if they were present well there's no one on the staff who is equally trained none of the rest of us are nurses but we're all trained in first day CPR and then there's a training that we do every year for students with allergies or medications so proper medication nurse medication no the equally trained nurse provides nurse delegation training to the staff members so the nurse sits down and says these are the students that we have in our building this is what how to administer the medication you have to go through you sign off because you're technically operating under that nurse's license this happens across all of our buildings I have a nurse delegation from my nurse it would be the same for Gillian and Carrot does that apply to reactions in emergency situations as opposed to giving standard medications that's part of we're trained in first day CPR we have emergency responses and you're able to work under a nurse's license even when the nurse is not on the premises that's my understanding about the nurse delegation for emergencies that's not working under their license that's working under the training certification that you've received is either first aid or CPR it's more medication delegation and things like that that would be under the license so hold on one minute because I just want to make sure that nobody else has questions because I know Diane also has two more so just hold on one second I'm going to go to Daniel and then to Cary and then I have questions about nursing also it seems like something important to talk about I'm curious I really appreciate what you said Gillian and I'm curious if Megan do you have anything to say about how the district we've talked about in the past how the district might approach less than one FTE per building for nursing if there's been any further talk about how staffing might look because I like the notion of having a nurse in every building for at least part of every day and I'm just curious if there's been any more thought to a district-wide nursing lead and how that might look because it seems worthwhile gaming out if this is a real proposal so my sense is that the best way to ensure that everyone is covered properly is when we have the FTE that we have that covers the district as a whole so added together how do we distribute that and in order to do that we would intend to pull a group of people together to develop a school nurse leadership model and that does not necessarily mean there's a separate position that is the leader there is a person who may be designated as the leader and then that leader helps exactly that so they would help us to say what's the regularly scheduled plan to distribute this FTE and then what's the plan to rotate through mandatory testing what's the plan to rotate through the busiest times so I would envision doing that once we have a settled amount of FTE is pulling together and said what's the best way to serve all 1400 students in the system with this FTE thank you Karyan and Makayla I just want to make sure we get ourselves enough time in terms of process I suggest we wrap up the questions and hear from each board member about what we think about this and what the next steps ought to be because if we each speak for one minute that's another 15-20 minutes before we can even move on thank you Karyan I'm going to let Makayla ask a question and then we'll move into seeing you know I would like to question that process after Makayla speaks go ahead Makayla I don't know if I should have a question I'm the way I'm the way so if you guys are speaking to the budget I think what we do need to do is move into giving guidance to our administrators we're hoping to approve this budget January 17th so we need to have a final are we ready to accept this budget as our final draft well I guess I'm not sure why we're not why we're closing down the questions because perhaps the questions that I'm asking are informing me as to whether or not I mean I'm not asking questions just to ask questions and I don't know that I can say yep let's move forward unless I've had an opportunity to ask and I only have two other questions I guess I'm a little frustrated that this is the time I thought that we need to ask our questions so we can give the guidance and know once we come together in January are we solid or not I mean I've been up since four so I'm exhausted too fair enough okay so let me just go around ask your questions can we take a break first can we have a moment to let it since 6.15 before going into like a very intense period of sharing sure let's take five minutes yeah please thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you oh my gosh oh my gosh okay so so Chris I'm gonna change my mind I'm gonna start here because I already had you're in charge text in the corner Maggie do you have any questions can you ask a question or give input for the budget or you can even say if you're ready to support a budget, whatever, and we're just gonna go, if you're not ready to pass, but let's just keep it moving. I'm still struggling with reductions in nursing and counseling services, and I understand that there was a mandate for administrators to think creatively and make selection and that this isn't like their dream scenarios of what staffing would look like in the dream situation. But I'm still struggling with that. Any, do you think their meetings today meets? I question that, or I wouldn't be struggling. Amelia. I'm appreciating the complexity of the lack of funding and the ESR and making these really tough decisions. And I'm also really appreciative of the work and the extra effort that you made to really present what the general systems of support are like and the details of how the students are supported. I think it makes a lot of sense, and I think it's a really creative and inspiring way for everybody to come together to meet the student needs given that this is not an ideal situation. You just don't have the funding. So I'm ready to pass it. Thank you very much. Danny. Yeah, I guess I'm basically where Maggie is. I also recognize in the work that was done a ton of thought and creativity was put into it, but I also represent a town that was looking at the largest tax increase and the largest amount of cuts and also a lot of long-term uncertainty. And I'm just trying to provide what feels like the right level of scrutiny with this budget. And I guess I haven't, I really miss Kat's presence here. I would have loved to chat with her. That's where I am. Thanks. Thank you, everyone. I feel like I sat with this proposal sent for a month now and this only added, I guess, much needed clarity to what the proposals were. It feels like they're great. I'm ready to pass this budget. I'm so frustrated. I think with, I'm frustrated with the situation all of our small towns are put in. And it's not a situation that we can control. I mean, we were given this money. All schools across the nation need this money. It's really clear. But instead, you know, our elected leaders, not here, but at the federal level are deciding to spend that money in other ways and not in our schools. And we have to make the hard decisions that nobody really wants to make. And so, yeah, and I wonder, yeah, I wonder if that will change, but I'm ready to support this. Thank you for your work. Thank you, Joshua. I wanted to thank all of our administrators for putting in the time to share with us how the students are gonna be supported with these cuts. And I am gonna just mirror a lot of what Joshua said and I'm sad on it for a month. I'm ready to pass it. I'm not really sure what the utility of this conversation is because last, with the first draft, we asked questions and expressed concerns. And I was sort of under the impression, and I understand about the wrong impression that those questions or concerns were gonna be addressed in kind of a tweet draft, but I guess it was more explanation as to why these changes were suggested and further kind of reasoning behind it. So, that's comment number one, but my other thing, going along, I still have concerns about the nursing and the counselors as well, specifically, you know, from Worcester, have a kid at Doty, the reduction in the school nurse and school counselor, I understand why that was chosen. I also know that Doty is the only elementary school without a health educator, FTE, you know, pretty small, small FTE, but still, and the nurse and the counselor are who are providing that service at Doty. And so to further than cut that, when just seems to me inequitable, or looking at the other way, if Gillian feels like these services are still gonna be robustly provided at Doty, then can the other schools learn from that model and maybe we could reduce the cumulative point of FTE and health educator, and those nurses and counselors in those other schools can provide these services. Either way, it seems like there's potential savings there or something to be marked. So do you need more information or do you need more information? I mean, also, you know, if everyone feels like those students are gonna get what they'll need, I support it, but again, I mean, maybe we could pay more money if things are being done in an innovative way at one school, right? So to clarify, and then to 1.0, we actually only have to ask for funds because it was a 0.9 nurse position. Part of the reason there were two parts of the decision was part of it was that my school nurse at that time, and also at this time, very interested in health education and very engaged and wanting to be into the classrooms. And at that time, we didn't have a, and the Guides Curriculum Dove tells really nicely with the health education curriculum and the Guides House of Arts does a lot of components of the health education piece. And then just the lack of people in the district, we didn't actually have many schools at that time who didn't have dedicated health education. So this was a workaround that we came up with at Doty, and then as we started hiring the various decimal and splits, I'll be really upfront, scheduling is my weak link in terms of, and I just couldn't see how, if I'm gonna have somebody in, how to make it work to have somebody come in for some portion of some days, sometimes, and not really upset the apple cart, whereas with having both the counselor as a nurse student, she could come into the guidance classes, and they could also, they could also ask things come up, like we had a, last year we had third grade around the older sister's date and then brought it into school, like, four or more years later. So then we were able to, they were able to come in more immediately to the class kind of conversation. So it's just sort of worked at Doty to do it that way. So the nurse position would be, Doty would either need to hire a nurse who was willing to do the health education, and it would be a .5 position, or we would have to hire a .4 nurse, and I just make it even more complicated. It's helpful context. I feel like it is helpful because it's another demonstration of how creative and more comprehensive model is actually put into practice when other people are stepping up to share the responsibility and the roles to support the kids to fill the functions. Yeah, I just wanna thank all the administrators for all of the work and for the extra explanations. I really appreciate all of your hard work and trust that you all know what's best for your schools and it seems like you all are confident that you're gonna continue to serve all of our children in a quality way and I'm ready to pass the pleasure because of that. Okay. So when I look at the comparative summary page, which is page 15 in the packet, I'm really struck by how weak a picture that we are facing in terms of the budget. You know, it's a 16.1% debt increase in the local education spending and yet, just by fortune of this new pupil counting method and the 5% cap, we're actually looking at tax rate projections that Arnold had that. And so I'm kind of feeling what, you know, it will dirt a little bit. And yet I have two significant concerns. One is a long-term concern, which is that nothing about those two benefits changes the long-term fundamentals. We're still gonna have student population decline and we're still gonna have cost inflation and specifically salaries and medical insurance that I don't see that changing. There's no reason to expect that to change in the next five years. And so in five years, when that 5% cap, if it holds, goes away, we will face a fiscal cliff that is all the accumulated buffer of the five years. So I think this board and the next boards will really have to do our best to get as close to 5%, maybe without not going over, but get as close to 5% as quickly as possible. So then we reduce that cliff at the end. There's a moral component to it, ethical component. There's always another cliff, isn't there? It stinks. I'm sorry, but it's shocking that you said that out loud. The other concern is a near term, it's more like this year, and it goes to the point that Megan made earlier, which is if this benefit, this 5% is applying to us, who are seeing a 9%, more than 10% readjustment in our student population. If we're getting this benefit, then that means most would think of the districts around, and the money's gotta come from somewhere and it's not gonna come from some other bucket. There's no one pot of money that the legislature has. So I think they're gonna likely take a second look at these caps and we would be a candidate for a change. So if the rules change on saying we are especially vulnerable, all that said, if I knew all of this when we started, I would probably advocate for more reductions. I think it's too late to do that now and I'm in favor of supporting going forward with this. So I'm not, I wasn't totally comfortable with the framing of Calis is a high cost schools that you'd have to cut more. I worry about sort of thinking about, you know, because it's a smaller school, a kid in Calis might not get the same things as a kid somewhere else. And I know that we all already do have some inequities where we need to deal with them. I think that's something the board really needs to look at in terms of how we structure the entire district. That being said, as I look at some of the ratios, there are things like, I can feel more comfortable with those reductions knowing that, okay, you're still, you know, if you were in a bigger school, yeah, you might have a full-time counselor, but if they're off of another kid, that's not so different than if they're in their time when they're not working. I think with the nursing, I think I support the proposals. I think we do need to really look at how we can use nursing resources as a district rather than thinking them as schools. I know that during the pandemic, I mean, things that were impossible on Tuesday were done on Friday. And so that's, you know, I trust that we will be able to work on that, but I think that is something that needs to be done to make sure that we are using some of those resources, if there's a resource in one school and a kid who needs the resource in another school, that we can connect those things. But I would support this budget as written. Thank you, Sam. Can I ask my questions? You can answer two questions. I added a few more, no, I'm just kidding. So when, Caroline, in terms of when you were doing your presentation, I just wanted to ask a couple of clarifying questions. So with the reducing of the 1.3 paraeducators, are those currently filled positions? That is a good question. Part of it is, and part of it is on the bill. That's the best way I can answer it. Just so you know. And for the total, it's a shift in IEDs that were anticipated for next year compared to this year. Okay. And then when you were talking about the para being, this is question 1.8, asking, shifting, is it the reduction of that school-wide behavior professional to the para professional that's now your emergency responder? Is that the shift? Yes. Okay. And then, last one, or maybe that was the last, oh, no. I didn't want Stephen to feel left out. So. So under your general systems of supports, is any of that different based on the reductions or is that systems that already exist? So like this. Let me double check, let me double check. Sparks that are right. Oh no, those are all things that exist and will continue to exist. Yeah. And then the students, the student services, which is the four school counselors director with point four caseload, is that both? That's the project. And is that middle school to high school? Or is that, okay. All right. That's the entire bill. Okay. And then this is just a consideration that I know is like, I'm just gonna lob it out there and let it sit. But I think that what I'm wondering, and I know there's so many things about it, is at what point do we have to consider, and this is across the state, moving our budget votes to when legislature is done. There's so many parts of that, which is around the protection of hiring and moving and things like that. So I get it, and I'm not saying we're doing that now, but I'm just wondering about that. And again, and thank you Daniel for reflecting. As part of this big board and the fact that my lens is Berlin, it's helpful for me to understand that I'm also representing Calis. And so to understand that ripple and that impact as well is important for me to hear. So I appreciate that. I am leaning toward supporting this. A lot of the explanations, the very clear details of the coverage of nurse delegation is helpful. And so I am leaning toward that. And I might not have been with him. No, just kidding. Okay, I'm gonna let Chris go and then I will ask you the questions because he was out and I don't know that you've heard. Well, I know I missed some of the substantive discussion, I'm sure, but I had to go pick on my daughter at the train station, so. It's okay. I was racing around, yeah, racing around a little bit, but it was fun. It was pretty well, I mean, back in half hour, bro. Yeah, that was pretty good. Yeah. So how do you feel about this proposed budget and you're ready to support it? And then if you had any questions, you can think about that while Chris answers because you just came up.  Okay, so I have a couple of comments. And I would generally support the budget, generally. But I would like to see reallocation taken to account some counseling and nursing services by reallocating funding that is for fund-filled positions at U32, I think for PARA, and use them to fund positions that are actually being, live bodies being cut and taking care of addressing nursing and counseling services because it seems to me that counseling is still a crucial need if we're hiring behavioral specialists. It seems like counseling is still a significant need in our district. In terms of I appreciate the quality standards, but those are basically just numbers. They don't take into account is my understanding environment. It's basically, this many students get this many administrators, this many teachers, without taking into account the individual circumstances for each of those schools. So the numbers may say, yeah, we'll add to the staff, but the environment may not really reflect that. One final note is that I trust that if Romney and Doherty do consolidate pre-K and kindergarten, that they'll be split. One will be in one school, one will be in the other as opposed to heavy loaded on one or the other just because of the impact on the school communities and the greater community in the schools, outside of the schools, like Little Sets and Wooster. So I would hope those two programs would be not located in one. I mean, I know that's an administration decision, but I would hope that if those considerations occur, that they're split between the two schools. Matt speaks to the paraprofessional open positions. Those positions need to be filled to meet the needs of our students who have service plans and we are currently understaffed to meet those needs. So if you cut those positions, we will not be able to meet, we're not meeting the full needs of our students right now because of those open positions. You would guarantee that we wouldn't meet them. We're trying to fill them. And if you cut them, then I can't fill them. Those positions tied to IEPs, is that what you're saying? Yes. Okay, I didn't understand that. That's okay, I just wanted to make sure that you said that. Okay, thank you. So I still think we should provide more funding for counseling in there. So just not trying to put works in your mouth, but I'm not trying to put works in your mouth, but you're saying, unless we add more cash to zero, you're not ready to support the budget. I'm just trying to figure out, because we're, you know, we... I haven't said that yet. Okay, okay, okay. So just clarify. Thank you.  You know, I heard some discussion earlier about funding certain positions at pre-pandemic levels. And we're not in a pre-pandemic place anymore. And the needs of our kids from where I sit and from what I understand of all what's happening with reductions in, you know, across kids' abilities, loss of grade levels over time over the last few years, greater mental health needs, greater social service needs, all points to me in the direction of needing more counseling and more of that type of help for kids' availability and also for nurses. I mean, to Chris's point, the one chart that talks about what the equal quality standards, the EQS or whatever they are, I think the state standard is one nurse for every 500 students. That's absolutely absurd. I mean, that's absurd. In my mind, how can one nurse possibly, effectively provide, you know, nursing needs for, so if we're, and we're not compared to that, our ratios are much better than that, which is great. But the point is, if that's some kind of a benchmark, that's not a benchmark that I wanna consider. So I think that the needs remain great in terms of mental health needs, in terms of counseling, in terms of having RNs or other nurses in the district. And even if it's having to rotate or having more nurses available as need shift, I think, you know, I think that's important. I know there's been a lot of work on this budget. I appreciate everything that all the administrators have done. They know their building's better than I do, certainly. But my opinion, and from what I see and what I understand about what's happening, in terms of kids' needs, I don't think this necessarily reflects those particular needs. So. So you would be comfortable going about the 10%, I'm just trying to, like, ask, would you be comfortable going? Well, I'd be comfortable going, but see, for me, yeah, we, it's hard to know exactly where that line is, where an acceptable budget is for the public and where it isn't. That's very difficult to get a pure grasp of. With certainty, in my mind. So, but all I know is if we're, again, cutting counseling positions, cutting nursing positions, I don't think that reflects reality in terms of what kids need in those areas of their lives, for me. Again, same question as Chris. So are you not ready to support the budget as it is, or are you not supporting the budget? Well, as it is right now, I'm not saying we're going to be interested in that. Yeah, I mean, there's aspects of it, I think, in terms of shifting grades around and having to do some realignment and most types of things. I think I generally am supportive, knowing full well that the administrators have spent a lot of time looking at this. I respect their professional opinion. I know that they're working very hard on trying to do something that is both meeting the needs of the kids and also is fiscally responsible. But, again, cutting counseling, I just don't see, for me, that's just really not something that I can support. So no, that's good. So there's parts of the budget I do support and others I don't. I mean, if that's if we're going to split hair, is that? So I don't think I missed it. Can I just make a comment and really echoing Zach's comment, I think. There's, I think we need to make sure that we're framing the conversation, especially about nursing and counseling in the reality of there's a service where there's a person in the building for the whole day. But when you're looking at the actual nurse to student ratio or counseling to student ratio, the smaller schools still have a higher ratio than the bigger schools. And so if we're actually talking about meeting needs and having that availability, I wanna make sure that people are understanding that looking at these numbers, that there's a one to 198 in Berlin for nursing and it's one to 156 in Calisthen and Dodie, one to 216 to E.M. and at East Montpelier to Alicia's point. So I think we need to take that into account too and what that does to the numbers and the equity. If we do have a whole day nursing counselor at those schools, then that nursing counselor has way fewer than at the larger schools. So when we're cutting it, we're actually cutting it to normalize levels across schools more than anything. I'll just take a moment to just take my board chair hat and just like if I was just voting right now, obviously I would vote to support the work that we have hired the best administrators that we can think about and we've asked them a hard question and they come back with data and form it twice back to us with what they think I am not the expert in the room. It doesn't matter how many education conferences I go. I am not with the students all the time and I'm asking their informed opinion on what would be best to serve the kids. Putting that aside, I am really worried about the education fund at large for the estate as it is right now, even that 12% we had a project come to our last meeting at UCI, just that it's making me that cat that 5% sustainable right now, the 12% increase that we're protecting and most boards would go through is $200 million in the head cap. Just to put it, and it's not like we have to bear, we have our responsibility to the rest of the state, not just to us. We have our responsibility to our voters too. We had just one brave gentleman come back, come to us the other day, really worried about the tax impact for himself and you know, we've had part of our responsibilities to make our decisions and make our business more sustainable. What gives me hope right now is the conversations that we're having in our configuration study, the conversations that we're having as aligning or come on our core beliefs, right? That we're moving towards that direction if we had more time or so, I think that we need to cut more. We don't need to cut less. What we're cutting right now is the burden on life. We're gonna be, if we hit this cap three years in a row, we basically be 15 years behind of where we need to be. Not, you know, and that's exaggerated, right? But we are, we're not making sustainable change to do what we've been saying to do that long-term planning that we're gonna be budgeting year round so that hopefully once we do all this configuration changes and come back configuration I mean like necessarily it's gonna close all our small schools, you know, whatever we decide to do that is best for all our kids. We gotta be able to budget so that we're not having this conversation every year just thinking about, you know, doing lots of cuts every year. That's what we're gonna be looking at next year. Next year, if this year is hard, next year is gonna be even harder and this budget cuts right now represent the bare minimum that we can do as a district, you know? And I mean that with all respect. I know that you guys work really hard on this. Is the bare minimum that we can do as a district because of the way we're configured right now and because we're all having these important conversations and sharing it with, you know, we need to have enough public input for those configuration changes too, but I'm thankful for all the work that you guys have done. I'm ready to support this budget. We would have, we need to give some guidance to our, we don't have enough for, but we have enough for members ready to support the budget as it is. I don't feel comfortable sending our administrators to sort of present a draft to bringing back these cuts. I don't think that that's what, I don't think that would be responsible for us, but I'm looking to thumbs up from you guys saying that, so does that mean you're looking for us to make another suggestion to think about more cuts? No, I think we're too, you know, that's, you know, if I had a magic wand, I definitely would want more cuts. I think this is the responsible thing to do where we are right now, but to think about bringing action cuts is just not, is that what we're asking? Go ahead, Daniel. I don't think I'm asking for a modification of the budget. I guess a second round of d