No, I don't know what that is. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. It's with us. Is that made it? Oh yeah, this is here. Ready to go? Thank you. This meeting to order is 637. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for being here. Some of you were here already for the first part of the meeting. I see some new faces. Exciting to get a lot of the community here with us too. I know that this setting is a little awkward, but we're trying to be able to be hybrid. We have some people online and be able to see you. If at any time I'm not really paying attention to you, please let one of my four members know so that I can call to you. We're going to get started. And I'm going to do the same opening for our finance committee just to get us in the town for this meeting. So I apologize to this other members that were already part of that. But we were using today at the word of the day, and it was perseverance. And it's a steady persistence in the course of action, a purpose, or especially in spite of difficulties or obstacles. So what we were talking about is that in the past few years, we have overcome remarkable and unprecedented challenges as a district. Whether it was the pandemic, whether it was consolidation, whether it was any of those things that were thrown at us. I believe that we for sure can pursue and lead Washington Central Unified Union District to the new era and trying to think about community in a bigger way and trying to think about making our schools, our Washington Central District one system that serves best all of our students. And in that spirit, to achieve educational equity, that will consider the experience, opportunities, and best outcomes with that broader sense of community. And the last thing I would say is that what this all reminded me was the quote from Nelson Mandela that says, it always seems impossible until it's done, and then it seems inedible. So the reason to bring that up today is because we're going to be talking about budget. And I know that a lot of us are feeling like, oh my god, really big. But I think that we are able to do really great things. And I'm excited to open this meeting. We're going to have a budget presentation. We're going to have plenty of time for the community to give us input too. And then the board will do their meeting. So with that, let's move into any adjustments to the agenda. Go ahead. I've just noticed that there's sort of an overlap between 6.4 and 5 and 8.1. Yeah, we have to consolidate it. It's just going to be part of our operations. You're talking about the budget part. It's still going to be part of that. And that's why there's just 15 minutes to get to the fact that there are any public comments that are not related to budget that somebody wants to make before we get started. I don't see any hands. Do you see any hands, Mark? I don't have any. So then we're going to move into the budget presentation. Mark, do you have the slides up? Welcome, everyone. As usual, we will share a lot of information. There will be opportunity for you to ask questions. We also have a leadership team here who can answer questions as well. We're here to share with you the first draft budget. And we always take a minute to review where we are in the budget development process. And I think it's important for us to also share with you. As you know, we made a change to the budget process this year to give the board budget assumptions earlier in the process so that we could also bring budget recommendations earlier in the process. We just want to make sure that you know that we really felt that as we went in between the community forum and this meeting to pull together the budget. Typically, we are giving you budget recommendations at that December meeting. And so it's taken quite a bit of scrambling, frankly, to bring this to you. And also, there are more changes that you see to numbers because of how early we gave you that assumption. So some of what you're going to see tonight is reflective of changes that happened between those budget assumptions and today. We did this for a really good reason. And I'm not caught. I don't want us to second guess why we did this. It's just an awareness piece. So tonight, you're going to hear a first draft budget. You're going to have an opportunity to react to that, ask questions, give input. There will be another budget meeting on December 20th based on this timeline. January 17th is when you will have another budget meeting and finalize your budget for approval to meet our warning timelines. And obviously, the annual meeting and town meeting day. This is our agenda. Oh, thank you, Flo. We have copies of the slides. One of the pieces of this is we work on it down to the wire. So here's a hard copy for folks in there. These also will be posted on the website. So for those on the screen or anyone who wants to access it electronically, thank you, Flo. So first, we're going to start, as we usually do, with what is it our community has asked us to support. What does this budget need to provide for students? We'll talk a little bit about enrollment, some student information and education quality. Some of this you've seen before, so we won't take a lot of time. Then we're gonna tell you about the changes we're recommending to you in this first draft that helps us achieve your parameters and our district goals. And then we'll talk about the budget proposal and the costs associated with that. So you've seen this quite a bit before.  This is version 3.0 of our core beliefs, but we ground our budget work in what is it we're trying to do for students. This is related to our strategic plan. And you're also familiar, that clicker is not working. Did you click off? I think you clicked off the slides. There you go. Thank you. These are our three pillars. We talk about these quite a bit. These guide the work within our school. So we talk about these a lot with our staff. Again, it's all of this that this budget will support. So I want to... Careful where you click, Mark. Because you're in there. I don't think you're doing it on purpose. I wanna talk a little bit about how we engage folks related to this budget. Obviously, we already know as a district, there are things we have to do that we're already working on. This is our required work. This is implementation of new statewide requirements. This is our long time focus on lifting all students. It's our district work. That always exists. When we think about how we engage our staff, we've done this a little bit different this year. We reflect on this process every year. We, this year, are providing more regular budget updates to staff after every budget meeting. They have had a staff thought exchange. We've always had surveys in the past. We also, this year, are trying out a budget ambassador structure which has a member from each school who sits down with the central office before each budget meeting. Those conversations have been really helpful. It's very organic because we're building that process as we go. And we will continue to meet with them. So community, we've talked a lot this year about how do we engage students and kind of lift student voices. So there's a couple of different places that we've done that. This happened last year where I met with members of the student council but it was later in the process. So we started meeting earlier. They get the same budget updates that we give staff. And so there's a connection there. Obviously in November, you all held your community input. We sent a survey out on your behalf and we're having this budget meeting. So in December, we'll have another budget meeting and then the board, your opportunity to see the budget this year before January is those two days. And we wanted to share some themes. Mark, can you give me a favor and move that I can't see the bottom. Folks can move if you can't see the bottom of that. Sorry, let me try. Maybe not. Maybe all the way up. Maybe all the way up. It might not be that. There we go, perfect. Thank you. So if we merge all of that data, there's a lot of themes. And these are some of the themes that I think are important to share with you because the leadership team thought a lot about this in addition to their own work as they started planning. So we know our community cares weekly for our schools and they wanna make sure we have what we need to educate students. That comes out really clearly in all of our feedback. They really want to make sure that our kids, there's themes in this first bullet that are similar to our strategic planning themes. Our community is value-belonging. They wanna make sure our kids' social-emotional leads are met. They wanna make sure that we expand engagement with the community, support the wellness of students. They really recognize the intersection of school and community. Our staff are community members in many cases. There's a pretty significant theme in all of the feedback on making sure we maintain opportunities for students. Center student programming. There is an openness in the feedback in all of those settings to consideration of different structures in order to ensure that we can provide those robust opportunities. There's a strong support for our humanity and justice work. And in terms of learning, just feedback around making sure we have the staffing we need in the critical mass class sizes. Talk a lot about quality workforce and continuing our student support systems. So those are themes across all of the input. And Mark, you gotta click on the slide again so my clicker works, sorry. I'm sorry. It's okay. You're familiar with us four. These are your budget parameters. I know that you are gonna come back around to at least one of those parameters. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about how the leadership team approached this given our discussions and our input. But one of the pieces of your, or one of the parameters that you've given us is these are the three lenses that we look through when we are building a budget. Okay. So because you'll see later in the slides that we've really centered our decision making around quality programming and enrollment, responding to enrollment, I'm gonna give you a little bit of information here. Or you've seen this information before, some of this information before. As you know, we ground our work in the education quality standards. That is Vermont Rule. If you care to look at it, there's links in the slides for both the current and proposed version. We know that they are undergoing some revisions. There are not changes in those revisions to the pieces that we look at here related to budget. So staffing ratios and things like that. And this is Vermont's definition of appropriately resourced schools for quality education. That's why we use it and that's why you choose to use it as a measure. It also gives us some more consistent guidelines. You have seen this chart before, so I won't spend much time here. This is our enrollment by school, looking back and looking forward. And one of the key things that we looked at when we built this budget is how do we respond to the fact that we are educating fewer students now than we were a number of years ago and we continue to expect to educate fewer students, at least in the immediate future. This is a new slide, at least this year, you saw it last year. Our average K3 class size is 14. That range is nine to 22. Education quality standards are measured by averages. So they look at, is the average class size in those grade bands below those numbers? So our average of 14 is well under ed quality standards of 20 for grades K3 and our average of 16 in grades four through 12. Yes, that's a strange span, but that's how they define it. And they would look for those class sizes to be less than 25. It's quite a big range, as you can see, for that four through 12 number. Some of that has to do with highly specialized courses that by nature and definition have a small number. So that's your range. But those are our averages. This is a big chart you've looked at it last year and the print is small, so hopefully copy's made their way around. But you've seen this before, this is how we compare to Vermont education quality standards. I'll give a little bit of a second so that you can review it, but the theme is that we are well below education quality standards, meaning we are more than sufficiently resourced in the area of personnel in each of these. There is always time to go back and answer questions later. So the next few slides are gonna show the board what's included in this first draft budget. And again, this is what we are recommending that we do in the context of the budget realities that we have in order to serve our students in our current configuration. And you're gonna hear me say that several different times because the budget you're going to see has a significant cost increase and we'll kind of walk you through that. We'll be talking about changes that we made that we believe support better programming for students. That was where we started our leadership team conversations and then you are gonna see changes that are specifically related to enrollment. And so we're gonna walk you through that and then Suzanne will walk you through a lot of numbers and then we'll have time for questions. So the first thing that we did, so you know your several slides ago, your budget parameter, your original parameter had two things related to finance. One was to try to match the October inflation rate which you all acknowledged was a soft target once you saw the baseline budget and then you had a parameter around avoiding the tax rate review which is Act 127's new version of a spending threshold for lack of a better word. But there's a lot of distance in between that budget parameter so we needed to give ourselves some direction as an administration. And here's some of the things we talked about and then I'm gonna talk about how they changed because even the numbers in this slide have changed. But we knew from the beginning that our goal is to make sure we have enough resources for robust student programming in our current configuration. You are gonna see some recommendations for changes but not large scale configuration changes. And we'll talk about kind of why that is. We wanna be clear that that parameter, that option one would be significant reduction. So at the time that we were looking at it, this number would be even bigger now but that's about a three, little over a three million dollar decrease if we were to try to reach an inflation level budget. So then we talked about different things that we could look at. Sometimes districts say if you could just bring that under 10%, so under double digits. So we talked about what that parameter is. We talked about trying to align the increase to kind of workforce cost increases and you can see that increase. Where we landed quite frankly is that threshold of keeping us below what would trip us into a tax rate review because frankly it's the most conservative one and what we found and what you are well aware of is we currently run a configuration that is costly to run and if we were to cut and cut and cut in our current configuration it would start to impact student programming and that's not a place the administration wanted to be. So the changes we're gonna propose, there are reductions, there are absolutely reductions that we believe preserve or expand student programming and take into consideration our enrollment changes and you're going to see that it does not hit your parameter and that's the information we wanna share with you today. So said a different way. Once we picked what number we were aiming for as a leadership team we still had to figure out how we were going to approach that. I already talked about the first bullet. This year which is different than last year and this is based a lot on the feedback we got from staff, our budget ambassadors also talked about this. Our schools are different and we wanted to make sure individual schools could make decisions about reductions based on their situation. So long as we are not moving anyone out of education quality standard range and the two pieces of direction that we gave is to make an attempt. We already know our ESSER money is going away so that was a try to reduce offer reductions related to how much money you currently receive from ESSER and then enrollment related reductions. Just if you are serving fewer students what does that mean for your budget? So again responding to enrollment changes while staying within a quality standard. So I'm gonna go through the next several slides because these are the highlights of the changes and I'll get through them all. Your leadership team is here to be able to answer questions and give you more information which you may need but kindergarten numbers between Dodie and Romney are projected to be very small next year. Small enough that we don't feel like a class of seven and a class of six by themselves would be good programming for students. So the proposal is to combine Dodie and Romney kindergarten into a single class. We would like some more time to talk about where that class is located but it would be a single class and that would be a net budget reduction from both of those schools essentially of 1.0 FTE classroom teacher. Board should know in general reductions. You know this, you've heard us say this before. We have preliminary conversations with potentially impacted people. We never really know who is impacted until later in the process. Second piece related to enrollment is about Pre-K at Dodie and Romney. So similarly small numbers and each of these age groups and so the proposal is to combine Dodie and Romney Pre-K one program that still runs two sessions and be able to pair it more consistently with community connections so that there's full day care available. That's something that's hard to do right now because we don't have enough numbers to justify the childcare part. So there would be more consistency for that after school component. This is not a huge net budget change. It does allow us to reduce a paraprofessional, partial paraprofessional because of the numbers once combined. So that is a proposal. So budget changes outside of those two. We kind of pulled out those kindergarten and Pre-K because they're very specific. The rest of these are really the proposals coming from that individual work with buildings. You can see this total spending decrease. You'll see this on two slides because it took two slides to say this is about $890,718. So that's a significant amount of money. That's almost $900,000. You'll also see that that doesn't hit the target. But we'll talk about that in a second. We believe that these changes still allow robust programming. We believe they're related to enrollment. Productions are related to enrollment. And in some cases, we are looking to serve students differently. So in Berlin, there is a net reduction of a classroom teacher based on enrollment. There is a reduction of a school counselor and an addition of a BCBA position. You're familiar with that position in this case because we are applying, actually we've received, that's an update, project serve money. The reason that says 0.5 is because project serve is a 12 month grant. So it will fund that position roughly halfway through next year. So this budget needed to find the money to fund it through the rest of that year. There's a net reduction of a classroom teacher at Ace Montpelier related to enrollment. In Calis, there's reduction, partial reductions in these areas, library, media, school counselor, math, intervention, and school nurse. Doty, partial reductions in nursing counseling. You can see in some buildings that's very clear the SR connection in other buildings, it's not. Runny reduction of paraeducators and there's a reduction of a school-wide behavior professional. That's a Medicaid funded position but we wanna make sure that there's an awareness of this. U32, similar to Berlin, there is a reduction of a school counselor and an addition of an SAP counselor, that's a substance abuse professional. We are seeking grant funding through this to partially fund that and there's a reduction of two paraeducators. A lot of information there. I'm gonna keep us plugging through. Suzanne's gonna share numbers and we will be able to flip back and forth if people have questions. I may read notes a little more than Megan does. So this slide is a reminder of the factors impacting the budget. Many of these items have been on our list of realities for multiple years now as we anticipated the sunset of our ESSER funds, the further declining enrollment we anticipated, rising costs and changes to Vermont ed funding. Implications of Act 127, it's legislation that becomes effective with this budget. It is a change in the long-term, a change in the weighting of our pupils. Instead of equalized pupils, it becomes long-term weighted average daily membership. We are in a scenario where it is favorable to our tax rate and overall increases across the state will impact the yield and negate some of that favorable benefit in the tax rate from Act 127. So what that means is we don't currently know the property yield. We don't currently know what our pupils will be this year. What we know is the change that this formula created in last year's pupil number was significant enough that we're projecting a sizable decrease in the tax rate. The final property yield is not set by the legislature until after the budget is actually passed by voters. Well, sorry, actually voted on at town meeting. It's when legislature is done and settled. If, yeah, so. The board's focused at this stage right now. We're asking you to focus on expenses because there's so many unknowns in the other realms. This is a slide that we shared with you at the budget training. It's a complex slide. So I'm gonna let it sit for a minute and talk to you about it. It talks about what Act 127 actually does to our equalized pupils based on the FY24 equalized pupil number, which was 1,376.82. It creates a new pupil number of 2,184.51. And we know from years of seeing our enrollment decline that that can impact the tax rate pretty significantly. What it did when we took it and applied it to the FY24 Ed spending number is it brought our equalized per pupil spending from $23,022 down to $14,510. Just think and ask a quick question. Are both of those weighted numbers, they're both used, yeah, are they both used simultaneously or are we moving from equalized pupils to the long-term weighted? We're moving from equalized pupils to long-term weighted average daily membership. The 10% it's a little different. It's a little different. Oh, I just, all right, there we go. All right, let me talk a little more about long-term weighted average daily membership. It's the two-year average of long-term average daily membership plus state-placed students plus all applicable weights. And the weights of the students are the big thing that really changed and then also categories. So grade level has been involved in equalized pupils. Poverty has been involved in equalized pupils. New is sparsity or population density, which was a huge impact on our district. Districts with small schools to your average enrollment of a small school, which we used to get a small schools grant. You'll see in this budget that the small schools grant goes away with this legislation, which negatively impacted us because we used to get $171,000, but it impacts us positively in this weighting. And then also English language learners, so an ELL count. And I would just add the purpose of this is a recognition that different students cost different amounts of money to educate and we have been not really measuring that properly in Vermont for a long time and now we are. And so it's designed to give the ability of communities who have a lot of these students to have a higher amount of tax base to be able to direct towards students. That's all right. What the upshot is, the final upshot on the tax rate, if we applied this information to last year's spending, last year's information on the property yield, we would have had a tax rate of 94 cents instead of $1.49. So it's a sizable reduction applied to last year's numbers. Again, we don't know several things so there's still a lot of flux. If the district increases, the spending per pupil over that number, that $14,510, then we're subject to a tax rate review by a committee. There's a lot unknown about what that committee looks like and what that review will look like but that's what the legislature says or the legislative action says. So if we increase that per pupil amount over 14,510, more than 10% we end up in that review state. We're all continuing to learn more about this legislation. I know that Ursula on floor and maybe some of you went to a training just this week. There's more information coming out daily, more requests for information from us that is going to impact the letter that comes from the tax commissioner on December 1st. So they're collecting ADM information, what we're estimating for possible budget increases across the state. And I will tell you that currently what we're being told is the early estimates are coming in at about 12.8% across the state. So we're not outside of that realm. This budget draft includes adjustments for estimated salary and benefit increases. Health insurance came in at 16.4% increase which the early estimate that I gave you was a 15% increase of that one up. This draft also has movement of staff from columns, steps, new hires that were brought in from last year to this year. So the early estimate was more around last year's staff. Now we've got this year's staff, we've got information about that. It's a little bit tighter, a little bit firmer and that's why the budget that you see in this packet, even though we made those sizable cuts, really didn't make an impact on them, the ed spending number came in almost the same, a 12.96% increase versus a 12.89, what we were projecting in October. So let's see if I got it. The expenditures you can see here, they're the amount the district plans to spend. Revenues are the money that the district anticipates receiving to offset those expenditures. Expenditures are going up, revenues are going down, the local ed spending goes up. We're anticipating an increase of $4.1 million which is a 12.96% increase. Page 19 in the packet that we sent out today which was page 20 from Monday's packet, sorry about that, there was a blank page that we decided to take out at the last minute, is a comparative budget summary that gives you a breakdown of the major changes in the budget from last year's final approved budget. And to provide you some perspective, a 1% increase in the local ed spending is equal to $316,972. Say that again please. $316,972. Round out our talking so we stop and you can ask questions. We realize that that number of 12.96 is still very high and that's with almost $900,000 in reductions. So we know or we had conversation about where else we would consider reductions because in the feedback around last year's budget process the board wanting to know what it would impact if you were to ask us to reduce further. We would consider further preschool restructuring to run fewer programs. We believe we could do this with some work and maintain robust programs with more consistent and full day. So this one for us is possible that said going from five to four which is what we are actually proposing in this budget, we could consider talking about bringing that down to three. Sometimes something like that though is a big enough move that you may prefer to do that in the context of configuration but we want you to know that that's a conversation. We could decrease Allied Arts, FTE across music art PE to respond to our enrollment decline. This would maintain the same level of service to students. This however would be small reductions over a large number of people. So there would be a lot of staff impacted. The total amount is when you pull it together it's a, it's a, it's a, it's not nothing but it does impact a lot of employees and I think the board needs to think about whether or not they want to do that because we want to retain good staff. We want to take care of our people but it is true, we serve fewer students and this would be responding to that and maintaining student services. We could look really closely at our intervention models. We don't recommend doing this in a year because this would represent pretty large scale change especially here at U32. These are the types of things that we have talked about. The message that I think that we want to convey is, again, it's expensive to run our current configuration and I say that without, without a judgment. It just is and if there is a need to reduce further in our current configuration it would, with the exception of these first two, it would impact student services and that second bullet would impact a large number of staff. So right now we could use several examples of this. We, we run intervention classes at the high school. They're very small by design. If we were to look at that and revisit that model to be able to pull FTE out, we could look at that but that's a pretty large scale change but that's what that means. Is how do we deliver intervention services? We could look closely at that. Again on the intervention, can I get an example just so I understand what those types of classes are? Just, I'm curious but then my other question was, should I let Steven answer and then I'll ask the second part? I don't know unless it's related. I wouldn't want Steven to answer that piece. He was looking attentively. I figured it would be so, so the current structure for interventions really does put a lot of teachers. So about 3.8 FTEs are used for high school intervention in the way that we have it configured. We could look at redoing some of our class sizes throughout the high school so that and eliminating some classes so that we could reduce the total number of teachers necessary for all of those programs. So if we said that our class sizes needed in all classes except for intervention needed to be 20 or greater, then any class that was under 10 would be, we would not run, then we could reduce our FTEs to be able to meet some of those intervention services as well as trying to bolster the class sizes as well. I guess my follow up to that is because you mentioned it's a big change. Now I hear it's a very big change. Yes. What do you have an idea of the scale of relative reductions? Well it wouldn't be all of that in 3.8. So I would say that you're probably in the 2.5 to 3.5 FTE range, somewhere in that range of positions just off the surface, right? I mean if we wanted to go deeper we could but that would be more programmatic changes at one time. Okay. And a simple math exercise, we still kind of use the estimate, it's about $100,000 with salary and benefits. It's probably more than that, quite frankly. So you're talking, but I can't do math and when it's not round numbers, so 2.5 is $250,000. Now per FTE is 100,000 per FTE? Yes, that's a very close, yeah exactly. That's a very gross meaning, right? Yes. Could we go back to the slide with the FTE losses per school? I had a couple questions. One was what these represent in terms of a from where to where, in terms of the FTEs and maybe a different way of asking the same question, how many specific individuals, does that look like it's affected and are any of these counselor or nurse positions being zeroed out? No, we, I can have principals speak to what's left in their building, EMS folks who's on the slide here. Actually I can do it. So Berlin would maintain a school counselor, a 1.0. They have two, one is funded by ESSER, they would be reducing one and adding this other position. East Montpelier, that's an enrollment related position. Kat, you wanna speak to Callis? And Callis would drop to a 0.4, 0.6 nurse? And a 0.6 nurse. And a 0.6 nurse? Yes, sir. 0.6 or 0.4? It's a reduction of 0.4. So it would go to 0.6? So it would go to 0.6? So I look, just to make sure it's really clear what is on the slide that we're talking about dropping of 1.0 currently for library media to a 0.6. And what I'm not sure that everyone understands is right. We talked about this during last year and the person that we hired this year is newly endorsed. So right now he is, he's largely already doing this position of a roughly 0.6 library media. And the other part of his day, he is spending as our fourth grade math and literacy teacher, which helps offset the, and support a more robust instruction for our very large three, four class of 26 students. Given that explanation, can we get a sense on in terms of introduction, how many other staff members essentially are being introduced, also wear multiple hats. So they have a broader impact than just a library media specialist. Sounds like Matt, would you say literary? Literary? Not in literacy. Literacy. So are there any other individuals that would be affected here that it's had the broader effect than just the singular role here? Well, the first thing I would say in answer to that question is that it's hard to answer that question sometimes because seniority eventually factors in here. If someone who has a 1.0 and is being reduced to a partial FTE, but they have been in the district longer, that's not the person who would be reduced. And so there is potential for shuffling. We won't know that for quite a while. I don't know if there's any really concrete examples like yours, Kat, that anyone else can, but that's a hard question to answer. And not because we don't know the answer yet. Could we just come back and finish the list? Yes, sorry. Looking at Dodie, so it's a 1.0 to a 0.5 for the school nurse? Yes. Yes. And there's some health complications in there. She also delivered primary health curriculum. And so it would be a reduction from the 1.0 school counselor to pre-COVID. And then Remney's, looks different. Remney does not have an S or funded counselor or nurse. So that's why you don't see those on the Remney side. Sorry. Yes. Oh, sorry. We have our school counselor who has S or funded. Thank you. So given the total, this was a suggestion to keep our points to the school counselor. I just want to be fair to the public because I don't want to talk to people. So I want this part to be public input. Sorry. And then board members will have a chance to ask questions. Do we? And go ahead. Yeah. Suzanne, to get back to Diane's question, how is that 10% increase on per pupil spending being calculated if we're shifting between apples and oranges? It's the local education spending. So that bottom line divided by the number of long-term weighted average daily membership. So when we get that number of students, we'll divide that bottom line. And that's that per pupil number. If that goes above 14,510, that's our 10% calculation. 14,000 is our base. So they're going to use those weights for the past two years. Yeah, so that number, that's how they developed a base was telling us. OK, so we have that number. Yeah, we have the base. That $14,000 number that was on the slide. $14,000, $5,000, $5,000. But even reducing that, keeping that below 10%, which is a reduction of $9,000 to $19,000 from the level service budget, right? Yeah. OK, it still means like a $3.5 million increase or whatever that was. OK. And my second question, and I think Chris asked this the last time we were in conversations like this and I don't want the question to be misconstrued. I've worked with so many members of the administration. I have so much deep respect for all of the reductions that we're talking about are instructional. Did we look at any reductions in administrative staff? Yes, I speak to that. So a couple of things. This is really, for me, related to our current structure. I believe that if you're going to run a school, you need a principal to run it. And yes, there is variability in the total number of folks. We have principals here that teach classes. So there is, you know, I think Zach in the past has talked about sort of like critical positions that exist regardless. And then we have shared in the past our central office numbers are quite thin comparably. We can bring back more information on that if the board would like it in December. But yeah, it's the right question. I think it just needed to be asked. Quite terrifying. The 890,000 spending decreases that all due to staffing reduction. And I know that we'll have a chance or whatever. But I do wonder about, and it's a question way back to what Steven was talking about in terms of if we look to reduce that number 10 or making sure that all classes are 20 and up, that would be an equitably applied number, correct? So that would be all classes, including those that might be.  You know what I'm saying? So whether or not we're able to apply that equitably, not just to intervention and that, but all across the board. Is that? That's what the board wanted to pursue when we bring a full report on what classes would be. OK, thank you. So we're going to open it up for the public to either the public comment or ask questions related to the presentation. And that would inform the board deliberations on their board operations. So this is your time also opening it up. But maybe stop the share for a minute, Mark, so I can see the screen. Because I don't comment on my screen today. To see if we have any hands up, I know that we have one hand up on the screen. Any members of the public, this is your time to ask. And then we'll have another opportunity at the end of the meeting. So at least say your name and where, which is your share. Debra Loom, and I have two kiddos at Doty. I have a question that I'm not sure can be answered right now. But I would certainly be curious about. Essar going away isn't new. We didn't just learn that when we started working on this year's budget, we knew it was a temporary patch. So, and you know, I'm glad to hear that Project SERV has become to fruition and that is something that you're utilizing. But my question is in general, a year ago, I'm a little disappointed that there wasn't a larger conversation about other funding sources that exist out there to make up for some of these positions. Or some, because I know there are a few, but they are out there. And so I'm wondering if you can speak at all to any research or any other funding sources that you're thinking about, fulfilling some of these really critical roles in our small schools. I mean, we had this conversation about the nurses last year and how long it takes AMS to get out to Worcester or up to Rungney or to Calis. And that service, that person at the school is critical for the health and safety of our students in these rural areas. So that's, I don't know if anybody can answer that question right now or maybe you can come back. But what's the research being done for other funding sources for some of these positions? Well, one way I would answer that question is your administrators are recommending a level of staffing they believe meets student needs. And therefore, if they were concerned that it wasn't going to, then there would have either been seeking of other funding sources or quite frankly, a different decision made at the building level. Again, these are reductions that they believe preserve student programming and exist in our current structure. And there are pathways to being able to resource our schools differently in different configurations. And it's not the programming case that really has the health and safety with the first piece, but then proceed. Okay, we have two people online. So, honey, and then, thank you. Can you hear us? And I can, yeah, there you are. Super, hi. I am honey Dean Barrett and I teach at Dodie and I'm also a parent in the district. And I had two questions for you. One, are you willing to put forth an itemized savings from these proposed budget cuts? And two, are you thinking of providing transportation for the pre-K and kindergarten students that would be going to a school that's not in their town? And does that then still have, do we still have a savings there? Yes, we can put, not right this evening, but yes, the total of the reductions is 890. We can, in the next board packet, we can put out information about what that is for each. And then, yes, we would continue to provide transportation. It is not our belief that that would significantly increase costs on that side. And we would still provide it. Okay, thank you. Thank you, honey. And I would just add that those cuts were not necessarily budget-focused cuts. Correct, correct, yes. Can you repeat that, what did you say? Those cuts were more focused on the size of those classes and to make them healthier-sized classes than it was about budget cuts. Which is why it wasn't in that calculation of the 800 and whatever. I think they were, yeah, they were, but... So they do result in cuts, but it's just... It's the best one. Yeah, they're focused on that one. Lisa, go ahead. Hi, I'm Lisa Hanna. I'm a Worcester resident. I taught at Doty for 10 years and now I'm still teaching in the Moyle South. I guess my question is more of a hypothetical or just a proposal of a way of framing or thinking about this. But in my time in education, especially in the last couple years, I will be honest to say that I haven't met another person in education, administrator or teacher who feels like we have enough robust supports for students despite everyone's best efforts. It's been a challenging number of years. And so now as we look at this challenge that we have to face with our budget and we see teacher cuts and nurse cuts and counselor cuts and we still use the language of, we're gonna provide robust support for students. I just wonder, and I ask everyone if there's any value in speaking more frankly about this and admitting a little bit more frankly that maybe because due to budgetary concerns, we may need to provide less robust supports. It's not what I want, but I also, it feels a little bit like we're not digging into the realities of what we have to face. And I think there's value for the community and for the board to talk about that more frankly. Because again, as an educator, we haven't had a lot of conversations where we feel like we have everything we need, even if we highly, highly value what everyone is trying to do. And so it's hard to look at cuts and still feel like there's true honesty and transparency in that statement that we'll be able to provide those robust supports. Thank you. Anybody else in the public has anything to add? Okay, so we're not gonna move right into that part for members, but we're gonna move into and I'm gonna make sure to keep you guys a little bit of a break too because we've been sitting for a little while. So maybe what I'll do before we dive in is just have five minutes to use the bathroom and grab some food because I know a lot of you were not able to grab your food. No, I'm sorry. We're gonna go through right now. We're gonna talk about where to mount, where to mount. It is next to that. And we get each other. Okay. That's not the best way to send this to you. Sorry guys, get it in. I just sent it to you, Mark. Okay. The thing is that it won't let me send it. Maybe we're moving to the next one. I think you can just mute your microphone in secret. I did, but then it doesn't let it sound. Yeah, so I sent it to you, but I have to text it. This is too big to email it. You won't be able to get it on this. No, no. Okay. I'm gonna wait to resolve that one. We may not be able to show that. No, I think Mark, we'll just move on. Yeah, let's move on. And what I could do is just. We can see your email. We have our entire server. Can you guys see it? That was perfect. Yeah, you won't be able to see them, but you were just here to report. Since they made it, I feel kind of guilty now for sending it to you. Hi, work members. Sorry we can't make today, but we have our entire schedule ready and we're gonna go through it right now. So, what we're gonna talk about word of mouth, word of mouth is next to music. And we get to perform original piece music and we have a ton of signups this week, so it's super exciting and we can't wait to do it. There is always a bunch of student interaction. We always go and watch and we always cheer everybody on and it's very fun. Yeah, the next thing we're gonna talk about is the sports banquet. So that is kind of just a celebration of, I'm just like a celebration of all the fall sports in this case, just like celebrating our achievements and the fun and really quality and everybody got great awards. Our two principal's awards went to War McLean and Will along, so congrats to both of them. And the best part in the sports banquet is everyone brought in items for the food bank. So, I scheduled a food drive this week. I scheduled a food drive and I'll send you a photo and there was so many items of food and it was great and I'm so happy that everyone can tell me that it's great. I'm gonna send it all tomorrow and we're gonna feed some people for Thanksgiving, it's gonna be great. But then, the next thing we're gonna talk about is the sex act of course that has been set up and it's happening after school, Monday's and Wednesday's. This program was done by Alison and Rosé. She's our normal right now. She's going about to walk into the mall. Thank you.  Sex acts, I'm doing. To learn more about yourself and other people and I think it's great. Anyway, that's after school on Monday and Wednesdays. A reminder, also something that's gonna be happening for us is working with SSJ, which is seeking social justice at 1.10. I need the board members to come next Monday. I just invite any board members to come and take charge of learning more about your students and what they're doing. Last thing we want you to do is invite all of the board members to come to the next meeting for questions with them on how to respond to the student body and like, maybe something crazy in the mall. I'm just really, I shouldn't get curious because that's why we're here. Welcome, welcome to questions. We're interested to see what you guys think and what you guys are truly curious about. They're out of school that as much as you guys are part of our board, it's good to bring in that community-based stuff. Into our school and get them through. So we invite you guys and we hope the meeting goes on. See ya. What was the thing that she was inviting us to? I didn't hear. She didn't say date. She just said invite. We'll follow up. We'll follow up. Yes. So thank you. She didn't say date. Okay. Thank you very much for sending the report. I'm sorry, we couldn't broadcast it, but hopefully everybody was able to hear it. Superintendent in Central Office and Literature Report, it was in your packet. And I'm wondering if there's any questions, just because I know that most of our time is gonna be consumed on highlights. And there's no questions. I've had a couple of questions that might be highlight a couple of things. Is that okay? So Stephen, I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about Barwee. I could share a little bit more. Yeah, I went into the website, but it was just one page and it was just like, be mindful. Just sharing is exciting so the community can know about it. Yeah, so for the last three years, one of our school counselors, Jade, and has been leading a group of teachers around Barwee, which is building anti-racist white educators. And so that group, but if you saw the, I did a link in there to the group that started this, which was in Philadelphia in that area. And that group meets monthly to discuss issues associated with essentially being white teachers who would teach students of color. And so they discuss some of the issues that come up. There's usually a curriculum piece that comes out of Barwee itself. So they actually have publications that talk about, okay, here's an article to read and have a discussion about that. And so that's generally the format that they follow during that time. It varies in its membership in terms of numbers, but I would say that on average, we have about 20 to 25 teachers who attend the meetings. So it's a pretty good group. Thank you. Is that the information you wanted? Yes, yes. Just to thank people, and the community members from there to hear in, I could keep going, but I don't want to put everybody on this spot. But I was wondering, because of the conversation that we're having, I'm wondering, Alicia, if you would mind sharing your little piece in academic achievement, mostly about the data for how you identify areas of growth and that have implication on your tier one instruction. Is that okay? You can ask anything you want. Yeah. You're asking about teacher goal setting, looking at data in the open. Yeah. We've been doing this for quite a few years and looking at, teachers do goal setting several times throughout the year and looking at those benchmark assessment windows, one of them just happening this fall. And thinking about, because we have such a emphasis right now on our layers one and two, which is classroom instruction and classroom teachers really using the data that they have to identify needs and address those needs and set academic goals for their students. Like if a student doesn't understand this concept, the hope or the goal is that they will have it by this time and right taking some data on that. And so looking at a whole class and setting goals for their students and instructional goals for themselves and then coming back and talking about those and measuring them, we'll come back to that in the winter when we look at the next benchmark assessments to say how did we do? How did, you know, did what we were doing work? And if not, why not? And what will we do about it? Does that help for me? Yeah. I think we just do two because I would love to hear from everybody, but because of time, when the board members have any other questions, I was just, just repeated appreciation for the detail of that. Yeah, it's really, really helpful to hear all of the good things that are happening at school. The next part is the Central Vermont Career Center. I just wanted to highlight that you have here, highlight a couple of things. Is that tomorrow, Thursday, is the open day from 5.30 to 7.30. And it's a great day to visit the Career Center. It's an open house, and you get to sit there and... What was the date? Tomorrow. November 16th. Yeah, 5.30 to 7.30 p.m. And then the other thing is that we had the opportunity to have a highlight with the governor, came to the center, and they were able to visit. And mainly, around the state, there's a lot of advocacy going on right now in support of career and technical education, and, you know, superintendent association, Vermont School of Business Association, and both Jody and Scott Farr have been really good about providing the data to make sure that we're able to fund our career centers in a better way. Those were the only two headlights there. The next one is the Vermont School of Business Association report. If you didn't go to the webinar, make sure to look at the database of webinars, and there's a great explanation of exactly the questions that we're talking about today on Act 127 and on budgeting. That's a great resource for you guys to have. We send the students a webinar that is not a webinar on invitation. There's gonna be an open group of students across the state to see how they can network and figure out better ways to serve as board members. And last, on December 12th, there's gonna be a webinar from six to 7 p.m. for people to be able to come in, anybody that is interested in serving in a board member. So if you can spread the word, that would be, so we have a few people to participate and encourage others and what they want. I'm not gonna be able to be there, but I'm hoping others are gonna be able to be there in a patient quality update. Ursula. So I'm reporting back on what we talked about at honor of our first education quality meeting, and we reviewed the fall I-ready math in the meeting assessment data, and it does not get reported out to the full board as I report, but we see it as Alisha mentioned as our growth data that we look at when we look at the weekly assessment. We also got to the staff and administration who's the assessment data that she talked about, but we got to hear some of the feedback of how they were doing that information. And so that was really nice. We were scheduled to discuss education quality standards, which we heard several times in budgeting and sorry, reconfiguration conversations. Ed quality is gonna take a deep dive into those Ed quality standards. We were supposed to do it in November per our working calendar, but it is a working calendar. You can feel we had the time to give it justice, so we're moving it to our December meeting, and what we did was review them very briefly as people skim the like 14 page document. It's beautiful reading. So that we could bring questions to Jen so that she can include them in her presentation so that we can get the education that we need. And it's so that we can also own information on those Ed quality standards when questions arise while we're talking about budget reconfiguration. Any questions? Always we're gonna move into the final part. So the finance committee part, we're all the way in six now. 6.1 is configuration study report out the committee met today at 4.30. And we've been doing this practice of having three bullets to report back to you. So if the committee brainstorm ideas for possible configuration today, we agree on three areas to explore, but we also discuss what kind of information would be helpful in order to discuss those ideas. And last, we want the board to go through the same activity, and we're talking about making that possible on our December 6th meeting for the board. That's what we have to report from that group today, but it was a great exercise. Okay, I'm gonna count on the finance committee members, Alia, Kari, Ursula, and Daniel. And I'm looking for a motion, it's on page 13, or on your finance packet, to review the, and approve the prohibition criteria for 2024 capital improvement projects. Daniel. I move that the board establish the recommended pre-qualification criteria that contractors must meet to be included on a selected list of pre-qualified bidders for the 2024 combined capital projects. Thank you Daniel, second by Ursula. Discussion, any questions, any clarifications? Yeah, some questions. Yes. How would these criteria be proven? I mean, what type of criteria would you say a contractor would have to show in order to prove that they meet two criteria? And is it like, do they have to meet full 21 criteria, or is there a weighting of priority? No, these are the criteria that we would request of all of our bidders. And so they go through a pre-qualification process, they submit proof of each of these items, and Bill, and Chris, and John Hemmelgarten from Black River Design would review the applicants and decide who is qualified to move forward to the bidding stage. And so you just answered my other questions, who would be checking on it? Thank you. Any other questions? All those in favor, be signified by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Aye. Jonathan, any extensions? All right. Oh, it carries. Okay, review and approve the scope and budget for the Berlin Fire Alarm and looking for a motion again. Ursula, your hand is up. I move that the board authorize an additional allocation of $13,894 from the Capital Reserve Fund for the replacement of the Berlin Fire Alarm Panel to be completed in fiscal year 2024, 2025, and approve the district moving forward with the bid document development and bidding as necessary. Second. Thank you, Ursula. Thank you, Daniel. Discussion, any questions? I have. Yeah, go ahead. I noticed it's to include the contingency, and I was curious what the contingency percentage is. 10%? 10%? And that's dictated by us or by them? It's one that we use, but they did propose it with 10%, so both, I guess. We usually use 10%. And how often are we seeing those go to include the contingency in expense? From the quotes, maybe 50, 50, like some of them will and some of them won't. And it's up to us whether we use that as the contingency or not, but it just happened to be the same. Thanks. Any other question? Seeing none, all those in favor, if we sing a five by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? The motion carries. Okay, we're gonna discuss during board operations 6.4, so don't be scared. We're getting there. Discuss budget parameter number five. We actually have the finance committee, Matt, and each one of them through half and half. That way, like Megan and Suzanne mentioned, and our leadership team mentioned that parameter was, we kept saying a subparameter or subparameter. So at the end of this, I know the first part will seem familiar, but at the end in red, we have proposed two parameters to change. So we would eliminate parameter number five, the one that talked about bring the net impact of the expenses budget under the October inflation rate. And the proposal would be to have this two parameters, consider configuration changes that realizes program quality improvements that can serve more students. And the other one, lowest increasing net spending with meeting EQS and addressing equitable distribution of resources and student needs. And so in the, we can talk to it, why the, sorry, Matt. In the first one, what we were hoping by this parameter is that it allows us to look at configuration. This might be a little easier to have this conversation after we debrief the budget in some ways, but this is where we had it on the agenda. I don't know if there's anybody that has concerns with that one, but in essence is to allow them to be creative to achieve education, equity, and take it into consideration of the experience and opportunity and outcomes in some ways, right? But bringing that key word of configuration allows them to do that work, to stay in the field. Is this in addition to the previous? We will take out number five completely, and they bring the net impact with funds budget under the inflation rate. And we will take out number six, no question. So I would also suggest that instead of number four, but which I don't, you know, there isn't the threshold for the penalty, but there is the threshold for the tax rate review. And with my understanding that that was the parameter that we had for the gravity parameter. Yeah, and we had already some, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll update that one, good catch, thanks. And floor, I think the last one, the lowest increase in net spending, that's meant to replace both five and seven, like combined spending with those other parameters. So are we discussing these at this point? Yes. Okay, so to clarify, Jonas, what you just said about number four. The number of options. Right. Number four. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. No, right here. The making number? The parameter number. Parameter four. Parameter four is not actually what we discussed. It was the 10% increase over the, 14,500. Right. So. The dependent water. Yes. If it helps, the way we phrased that in the slide was option four, avoid the tax rate review. That's right. Yes. So I guess, so yes, that is a parameter, but I can, as a board member, knowing that this is really new ground in Vermont and that we're hearing of its impact across the state with many, that I think as a board member, we need to understand that too. And yes, we are working to avoid it, but for me, I just want to be clear that that might be a parameter, but if we're finding that that gets pushed against that I think we need to use. I agree and I think that the tenor of the conversation we had last time was not that this is a red line. Yeah. Right. And we use the experience of last year when Megan and the administration came back to us and said, we can't meet your parameter and the quality standards, right? And we appreciated that, right? So the parameters are not red lines. Yes. They are what the board would like to see. So that's my understanding. Thank you. That's helpful. Then. A question that I have with that one, but we do agree that we want to avoid the tax review, right? Yes. But just to be clear. No, we're not going to rain and have fire in the room, so that doesn't go to the tax review. Please note that in the videos that I'm going to. One minute, yeah. No, I'm fine. Who was first? I just, Daniel, go. Oh, I had two things. One was we, I don't want to, I don't want to have a tax rate review, but we also were talking about how much emphasis we're placing on what we can control versus what we cannot control, and so to include a parameter that is framed around tax rates seems to fly a little bit in the face of that, I guess, for me. And the other thing I was going to say was it feels to me, I'm all for removing the old five. The old five, given that the proposed personnel reductions represented 890,000 in savings, I had my back of the envelope math, I think it, where we would be looking around $3 million in cuts to hit that, and that's, I guess, I'm not an expert. It seems as if we would have a lot of trouble meeting ed quality standards. Unless we consider. Even remotely, unless without drastic, you know, configuration changes, yeah. So I'm all for removing. Just to finish, number four, just because you have said. So we'll remain under the Act 127 for people spending to avoid the tax. That's right. And Daniel, I totally hear it. I think it's important for us to have at least one parameter here that's based on a number. There's a lot in here about equity, and doing the best we can in configuration. But I think that, I would imagine that Suzanne and her team appreciate at least having some kind of target. No, I think that's important also. Resentment. And while it affects the tax rate meaning it would be sent for tax rate review, it is a number we can control because it is based on our local education spending and our per pupil number that we will eventually know. Thank you. Chris. I just have a question for Suzanne. The 12.9% budget increase. Is that based on the new rating system? So we're already over the 12, 10% or is it based on the old system? So that 12.9 is just on the local education spending budget number. It has not factored in any equalized pupil yet. When we know the new long-term weighted average daily membership, we will take that number and apply it to the total local education spending number. So we'll take the local education, divide it by the equalized pupil number, the new equalized pupil number. Okay, so will we line very line here in terms of trying to get to a number that's less than the 10% review triggers because they're really separate, though. They were pretty comfortably under that with what we were talking about. I would say we're not comfortably under it. I think we're comfortably over it. Over the 10%. Yes, yes, yes. Because if you take our current budget, which is over 10% already and you apply the same exact number of pupils, you're gonna be over it. But I think you create the number of pupils increasing with the new formula? From, so what they did was they gave us the long-term weighted average daily membership of what it would have been applied to last year's student numbers. And that 10% is an increase over that base amount that they came up with. So we know what our base is and if it goes over that. And chances, we don't know everything. We don't know how our students will be weighted at the end of the day, but we do know enrollment decreased. So we already know there's one factor in our long-term weighted average daily membership. That word is so long. That is already decreasing it, which is going to increase our per pupil. So we already know one factor that's going to cause it to go up. We also know that the budget is a factor that's gonna cause it to go up. So we've got a couple factors that are indicating going above 10%. Because of the fact that we now have to take whatever would have been covered by ESSER and if we're continuing it forward, that is gonna automatically create this increase in our end spending, potentially, depending on what we're doing there. So there's a number of factors that are playing against us. Going back to just some four, check, okay? Did that change your language before? Number five, can we change number five to that first red bullet that you have there? Is it the first one or the second one? The first one. Considered configuration as a realized program of quality improvement that's there for our students. Oh, sorry, sorry. That's the right, it's the last one. Yes. Okay, so we're gonna do the last one. Number five is the last one. So I have a question about the first one. So number seven, we replace number five. Which is the one that... We're replacing five and seven for Kari's comment. It sounds like we're replacing five and seven with the second red proposed language. It's a lowest increase to that one? Yeah, yeah, lowest increase in that spending with needing EQS and addressing equitable distribution of resources in student needs, which essentially combines the two in terms of the language. I'm good with it. And we're replacing number six with the first one. Yeah, but we're not there yet. She's going numerically through them. Mm-hmm, yeah. And that's not... Seven is after seven, so I'm just saying. I think the easiest way to do it is to just like, let's just give you input in those two that are there. Yes. We'll figure out how to place them. So, yeah. So, considering configuration changes, I realize there's program quality improvements that can serve more students. So my clarification is that more that, you know, I mean that I don't know that we're necessarily only considering a configuration change that would serve more students. Because if I apply this thinking to one of the recommendations here, we're not serving any more students. We might be, we're changing up how we're serving the preschool and the kindergarten changes by that reconfiguration, but it doesn't necessarily mean we're serving more. I think there's a ratio missing there, serving more students, right, per resource unit. There's something, but it's like, I just, I want to be sure that we're not giving the impression that we're somehow magically by changing this configuration. I would suggest that can serve students more efficiently. That. They were not bringing these students. Right? Yeah, yeah. That was my idea. And he said, no, we open the door. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and the idea of it, we went back and forth, back and forth, and how the words meant that, right? Because if they just said more efficient, instead it doesn't say about the experience and the outcomes. So we felt like more, you know, so we could add a. How about better serves, do you? Better serves. Yeah, there you go. There you go. That can better. Don't ask me. Yeah. I'm just trying to move in a longer time. Bones, what did he talk to you? Okay, with that one. So then the next one, do you guys have a problem with that one? You change with the while meeting. While. I think I must check that. Good. Okay. Question. Yes. What was substantively different between the red line to consider configuration changes and number six, other than develop options changing to consider? Yeah. I don't understand why we're rewriting that. Yeah, and it's just, today we'll choose both of these ones came from trying to get, take out number five. It didn't really come out of just trying to. But maybe this, I'm advising this redundant, six and the new one. Like. Well, we changed. It just is like where configuration is different. Longer term configuration changes. Consider configuration changes. What is the, I don't know. Is the results and improved student outcomes versus. Better serve students. What was wrong with results and improved student outcomes? Are we taking that? Is that going away? Or is this replete? Is this in addition? It's in addition. Okay. Thank you. That's what I was thinking. Oh, it's in addition? We're not. I thought we were replacing six. We were replacing number five and number seven with number, with this last one. Is it possible to track that down? Maybe next time. Because I didn't think they were taking that. Yeah. This too came out of trying to replace number five. And then, and then as Gary said, it's makes sense to continue to budget the system sort of equity standards, equitable distribution and resources. So if you are okay with approving this too, I'll bring this back to the finance committee and then just organize the parameters on, on that and clarify it to the board members. As long as you don't hate those two, the, I still don't understand why we need to duplicate that. It seems redundant. Develop options, consider. But you're asking for the same thing. I wonder if we just pause on this because what this is really asking is to give the administration some direction. And I wonder if after the feedback on budget one, I presume you will give us direction that it either stay the course, do this, do that. And that's sort of what the parameters are supposed to be and maybe it will make more sense after that. And that's why we did a finance plan. I was just gonna say I would recommend in the future doing what the policy committee does and use the editing contracts so that we can see what's going on. Just to simplify the discussion in the future. Okay. Yeah. That's a good idea. That's a good idea. We just added two at the end to change number five. Yeah. So let's move into the policy committee. Of course. I'm a hard-knocked one. So the outcome of that is going to start to look at removing number five. And then it's gonna go back to the finance committee. It's gonna go back to the finance committee and just if you took the notes on better, that can better serve students. Yeah. And those that would be the only, yeah. And then the finance committee will, and then we'll gonna talk about it at the end of the budget discussion. Okay. Sure. Can I allow you to ask another question? Sure. I just thought I heard something that I'd like to see where the board is at. It sounded like there was talk about us doing further work so that you avoided the tax review. And then there were comments that we wouldn't be held to that. And so I just wanted to clarify that was what the board was asking me to do. And then share a little perspective that that's okay. That that is absolutely the worst nightmare is that we are asked after we came back with a draft that had roughly 800,000 worth of cuts to be asked to go back and do $950,000 worth of cuts only to know that the whole board does not firmly agree that that is the expectation. That's a lot of work and conversation with people to then have it not feel good and go back. And that's what happened last year. Thank you so much. Yeah. I think we need to take that into consideration when we talk about the budget. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. We're gonna move into the policy committee work. Sure. So we're here for a good meeting, I think. Like a little over the two hours with the town of Estonia, but we have a couple of policies here for first read, including B20, which is personal recruitment selection, appointment, and background text policy. What is significant about this is that it incorporates the recent change in the Vermont Supreme Court, well, not Vermont, but the US Supreme Court in terms of affirmative action issues and makes clear that we can consider diversity issues in recruitment, but we make very clear that we do not decide hiring based on diversity factors to stay on the right side of the law. And so that is very clear in the policy. I think the BSPA actually did a pretty good job differentiating between those two processes in the recruitment process. So that is our first. Any questions on B20? I noticed in the second page of this, it's 30 of the packet, bullet two under recruitment. It does away with the requirement of the administration to provide a report, which I support. I think that was really aspirational when we created that. I've seen that happen before. We asked for a report, and there's no system to follow up. Actually then, it was under my radar. I didn't even know we did that. But, yeah. What does board wanna report? What do you think, Nach? We haven't missed it. No? We haven't had time to miss it. The other thing that is notable is that we no longer have the criminal question about criminal history in the application process. We still ask in the hiring process, they're not in the application because that is illegal in Vermont now by statute. So the policy is amended because prior policy allowed for that. So we'll bring it back next time for adoption. Okay. The next policy up is the, for first reading is the B34 library media center selection and reconsideration policy. And we did kind of a whole overhaul on it using guidance from the grade school partnership policy. And what we really focused on was putting a lot of faith in our library professionals to make selections for our libraries in conjunction with the faculty and staff members and rely a lot on their judgment and support them. We also incorporated the process for any challenges that anybody, not anybody, there's certain group and it's community members, staff members, students, but basically have to or a resident of our school district if they wanna challenge a book and there's a process for working through going to the librarian first then the principal, superintendent, and ultimately the board. And the board is the one who makes the final decision on that and we had it with the board because if there's challenges more likely than not they're gonna be hot political potatoes. And we thought that the board would be the one to make that decision. And deal with that. But we did limit who could make the complaint to essentially our community members and not an outside group. Unless community members sponsored them, of course, but. Hegan, you're good with the board being the final board? Yes. Yes, yes. She said something like, thanks for this. I'm sorry about it. Chris. Yeah.  What? You ready? Great. What? Like, but. Yes. He's doing a dance. They may or may not tonight. VSBA has a selection of library material policy, D22. I'm curious why we're not using the same numbering. Is it because it's numbrastically different? Yeah. Even catch that their policy was differently numbered. Our, and ironically, also in here is a reading of our own policy, which says we will align with VSBA numbering. Which made me think of it. Policy committee won't talk about that. So many names. It's D22, and it is worded slightly differently, which also made me wonder how, and I think it would have to be crossed out because I think it's intermixed. How much of this is policy versus procedure? And what are some of it needs to be pulled out? Well, we intentionally kept it in, just so that it was clear, because it really deals with the objection part. So it's very clear what the procedure, and you're right, it is procedure, and we're very cognizant of that, but having the procedure right there so that everyone knew what the procedure would be and what the decision making chain would be. But you're right, it's unusual in that respect and that has more procedure than the policy embedded in the policy and will become part of the policy than normal. And from an administration's perspective, this is one of the policies that I believe would benefit from that level of clarity in policy, which is unusual for that to be true, but this one benefits because it tends to be such a very, it's usually not a non-emotional situation. So then in that, like I'll call it, a review section, we have a timeline for when the request is brought up to the principal, they have 30 days from the moment of request. We do not have a time limit for when, like when the superintendent, like it goes up to the next level to the superintendent, we don't give a time for when they should respond. And then when it comes to us, the timeline is 45 days after the hearing, but there's no timeframe given for the hearing. It's inconsistent. I don't know if there's just, I don't know if I'm missing something or if we're missing timelines that maybe should be in that. I think number two, I would say, we were pulling from the other policy that we had for the next time policy. The 30 days was based on principal recommendation, and that felt reasonable to be able to pull this together. So our principal reps helped with that. Good catch, there is no timeline for me. We probably should be talking about that. And the 45 school days to Chris's point was to be consistent with the other policy that we have that request hearing, which is the mascot policy. Okay. And basically gives fixability. That's a good question. It gives importance to the school. It gives importance to the department. Like for the scheduling of the hearing. Yes, because it doesn't just involve us, it involves other people. Exactly. So it just gives you the ability to do that. And then, because Megan's report is in writing, it's supposed to be in writing. I mean the principal is in writing too. I don't know, like whether we wanna also take 30 days for Megan or, I don't know, policy committee, whatever you feel like. Yeah, send it back to them. I don't know what they're talking about, if there should be. So then, when I was looking at this, I also looked at the greater schools policy. And I noticed the whole to assist with the selection of material, which is on page 33. We took that straight from the greater schools policy pretty much, but they also have another section of the details, very specific criteria for the selection that felt like it discussed more global implications of diversity and equity and those considerations. And I was curious why we did one and not both. You know, I'm really disgusted. Yeah, I mean, I think the origin of where we landed might be in answer to that question or might not. Two things, the reason for the first part in using the great schools, this is actually just a basic snapshot of the library bill of rights. Our previous policy just referenced it. And from a strength of being really clear about what we believe, we thought this should say it. So we took that section specifically to say, it's a little bit of belief statement, whereas before it was a reference. And then from there, we largely kept the policy the same and then inserted our own procedures. So I don't know that it was by design that it didn't keep going. Great schools partnership is also a very lengthy policy. It is. So that's all. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's the origin of it. It's the one that caused me pause when we talked about representation of the many religious ethnic cultural groups and their contributions to our American heritage. Whereas like the birth or place of criteria talks about global ethnic and cultural considerations. And we as part of our mission have a discussion of making global citizens. It's just a thing that kind of pushes for policy conveyor. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. In over group. Yeah. Thank you. Nope. That was it. That was my body. Thank you. Anyone else? I can move to A2 so that we can keep it raw. Okay. Next up is the second reading for transportation policy. What? What are the directors? And that's a C3. Well, A2, A2, A20, and A22. I guess what you were saying I don't remember any question on the. So A2, policies and procedures. Go ahead. This is also a BSBA policy. It's A30. Thank you. You're welcome. Sorry. That was good. We should be in keeping with our policy on the policy policy. We had to change that, yeah. I did laugh about that. Did you say A30? It's A30. Thank you. So you wanna move to a mandate? Because this is up to you. It's a first reading. No, it's a first reading.  It's a first reading, right? Yeah. I don't have to make a motion. Never mind. I'm just sharing information. Any others? A20. Exactly. Different years, as well. I did have another question on that one. On which A2? Yeah, on A2. Or A30. Or A30, however we wanna. Under the procedures. So it ended up bumping down to like page 39, but at the very top of it. It talks about at the discretion and the board may order a review of any rule or procedure. Are we, who's performing that review? Like we're ordering the superintendent to review it or we review it? We review it. And the superintendent is supposed to routine when the superintendent makes a procedural change for institute's procedures. Supposed to have the board review it. So not a unilateral act, not a superintendent. And so it's, we can review it. Okay. Should it be conduct? Rather than the order if it's us? Well, I would argue, actually, the board would ask me to review a procedure and I would review it. Because procedures are administrative. Would you then report to us? And then I would report to them. I was curious how that was supposed to go, based on how I was working on that. But I think we also have a policy where there's a procedure that is instituted or changed is supposed to be shared before. And I'll dig that up, but I can remember that we have a very specific policy on that. So the board is informed of procedural change because the procedure can be a very crucial part of the policy. Would imagine it would be this policy if it's... Isn't that part of the procedure? This is the policies and procedures policy, so. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, part of procedures, it says the superintendent shall in a timely fashion notify the school board when they have developed any new procedure. Not changed one, developed a new one. So I don't know if you want it to say something different, but that's what I'm trying to myself. No, I think that's... The goal there is to keep the board informed of procedures that are applying to the policies. Because we'll do it that way. I was looking for some parallels with policies, these are the procedures, and I noticed that there's nothing about the board's right to review its own policies. Both of the conditions of reviewing policies begin with the superintendent, and that feels incomplete to me. But even in the first one, it says the school board should adopt them and take policies to carry on as pursuers to any of the authorites on their note. The first one, A. Yeah. I mean, is that inherent to the power and responsibility of the school board? Yeah, that is our responsibility to review. I just... We have a specific heading on review, and we're not mentioned as having the right to review. Because it's right under policy. It's our job to do that. And that's our job. Well, if everyone else is all right with that, I'll defer to the majority. I still feel that if they're going to explicitly have a heading on review, we should just turn our own right to review. So you could amend that to have the word review? Adopt, maintain a review, perhaps, yeah. Policy A. Under policy A... The school board should adopt, maintain, and review policies. Yeah, it's A30. Yeah, can you pull it and press it, say on the review? Does it have something for me? No, you would want to come. Which one would you? Just asking that. Although this is under policy A. Yes, so yes. Because this is under policy A. Okay, yes, so there's nothing under policy A. That has to be, yeah. So there's nothing under policy A. Okay. That's right. The board has nothing under policy A. Okay, I'm going to try to keep us going, because I'm not trying to pick it up. We've got to mobilize. So, next. Next, okay. Thank you, Daniel. Next is A20. That's all, is this okay? Yes. I'm good. No, we're good. Yeah. This is a board meetings agenda and preparation, and board meetings and agenda preparation. Any comments or questions on this? Okay. And, let's see, next is A20. We're not A20, we're just doing A20. Oh, wait, 20 terms, right. Notice of man discrimination. We just reminded with the DSDN. Any questions? Okay. Okay. Next up is our home study students policy C6. No, no, no. C3. C3. Sorry. C3, this is the second meeting. This is the second meeting. This is up for adoption. Yeah, so can we do those two on a slate, since there's no changes, and we reckoned the last time, could we do both C3 and C6, looking for a motion from the committee? We move that we adopt the proposed C3 and C6. Thank you, Kari. A second, but yeah. Any questions? Okay. Any discussion? Any questions? All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? The motion carries. Thank you. As far as the committee, that was great. I think it's for the members of the board. Okay. This is the big one. And it is, it's for the members, right? Feedback. And the budget drafted one. And questions. I have concerns specifically about Palace and Doty having such drastic reductions in nursing and counseling, which I understand why that happened with the loss of ESSER funds, but particularly with nursing, we've talked before like, I mean, how one of those things where you have one or you don't want like on a given day, you might have a nurse in the building. So for safety, I have big concerns there. And then in terms of mental health, the nurse serving that big role and then with the loss of counseling, FTE also, I just worry about the social or emotional component. And I'm wondering if it's those two schools that are using, you know, having reductions in these areas, is this actually equitable, which is one of our goals and does it actually meet student needs and meet with their friends? Can I follow up on the Kellen's question by asking pre-COVID, what were the nursing staffing levels in those schools? Yes. With a tweet of this reaction. You want? Yes. This was, these would be taking them back to the FTE that were placed to be ESSER, pre-COVID. So I don't want to just illustrate there is a balance between autonomy and equity. And that is, so that answer to equity, what we did last year is we recommended across the board and we made a conscious decision not to do that so that each building could make that decision. And the bumper of that quality standards. So I'm not, I can't give you an answer to, part of that is comment and that's for the board to discuss. I'm just trying to give you a. And I guess when I say equity, I think specifically of the higher level of need that may be true in some of these folks here at the others. Is that a measurable, like can we measure the amount of need that may be in one school over another? Well, that's our third lens. So I think what our message is to you is we believe this recommendation fits all three lenses which is quality, equity of resources and student need. And so that's how we made the decision. Obviously it is up to the board to give us direction but that's where that came from. I guess that was just moved by Lydia Faisy, the nurse who is from Isampulia and her children went to Isampulia just being overwhelmed by the amount of need she's seen at TOTI. And that's not measurable. Maybe she would have been overwhelmed if she was the nurse in one of the other schools as well. You know what that makes me really think about is like do we need to have a bigger sense of community for what TOTI is? So would we better serve the needs of the students as the nursing by combining them, seeing that we're not needing, just seeing where we are, that we're not really like scratching where we need to be when I hear that. I'm like, well, maybe if there's more need and the students need a nurse all the time then maybe we need to have a change in configuration in order to best serve and use. The nurses that we have right now. That's what it brings to me. Not necessarily bring back a full-time nurse to, is that the responsible thing? That's what it's like. Absolutely in the long term. Yeah, I can bring with that statement. I just wanted to make sure that, yeah. Looking at how few students we have per nurse compared to the equality standards, is there any opportunity to use telehealth for some of that, for nurses at other schools? Is that even medically appropriate? Is that something that we have looked at or could look at? So one of the things that was talked about last year, when we were looking at more across the board removing the assertive positions is using a school nurse leadership model, which takes, it allows a district to say how will we utilize the resources we have so that it's, there's the example you would give is there's someone who plays the role of coordinating and deciding, so if it's vision and hearing testing and DODI, or resource goes over there, that's likely, and then if telehealth is something, then that might come out of that. I think schools in Vermont that are small have had partial FDE for a long time. It doesn't mean there's not a plan in place for what happens when the nurse isn't there. Also, I just wanted to comment about it also. It will be going back to the pre-COVID FTE, but not necessarily the pre-COVID structure of having a nurse who is two days at DODI and three days, two days at DODI and three days at Calis, but that it might be that at DODI, what we're looking for is a part-time position that where we have a nurse in the building every day who covers the high frequency, visit times. So pre-COVID staffing levels doesn't mean pre-COVID scheduling. This is based off of what I'm talking about, like the coordination of the nurses and our resources. How do we do that now? Just they talk amongst themselves right now informally, okay. I want to second McKaylin's concerns specifically about nursing. And I wonder about the desire to have in this climate as a healthcare professional to acquire an employee for a designated couple of hours to get high flyers and a climate where staffing is incredibly challenging, that that seems very high in the sky from an available people perspective unless perhaps the person who's in that position is interested in that, but that would be tailoring it to one individual, right. So that just strikes me as a concern. I'm all for full-time staffing. I think the EQSs are incredibly high as an elementary school employee in the school with two nurses trying to serve a big population. It just, it worries me. The idea of not having full-time nursing in every building, regardless of what we did before, I don't think it was great before. Thank you, my, and Ursula, and then I'm gonna open it up to, I wanna make sure that everybody gets a chance to at least, even if there's not a concern just through what do they see in the presentation or a highlight or what make them aware or if they have a particular direction. So I wanna go with Ursula. I have a question that wasn't through the nursing. Yeah, yeah, it's okay, go ahead. I was curious, and I wanted to hear from our administration. Cuts have been proposed. They get us close to that number that would keep us below the tax rate review threshold. And I guess, what is your feeling on how doable is it to get that number reduced further to get us to that threshold? Senator Carolyn talked, but it's a lot of work to go through that. I'd hate to put you through it to realize it's not achievable too. From my point of view, I thought that was our goal in the budget work that we did in the past month, and we weren't able to hit it. But that's just my perspective. I think to add to that, the list that I ensured with you with those three other bullets of, right, we could look at the guidelines, we could look at Steven's intervention, the reason that we could, I think that would be the next place we would go, and the reason we're not on the list of recommendations is because we don't hold part of the recommendation. I would add a callus, and I know we'll let Gillian speak for Doty. We are of really small school, and at some level, it is hard to imagine how to maintain the current level of service. And that weighs on me because I recognize that we are seeing a disproportionate amount of the resources for our very small school. And if we say, if you figure it in the way you currently are, we need it, it's a function. I just think the court needs to know what you're like. I'll see you again when you want to kill us, right now. I would say for you 32, that when we come to a decision like this, we really look at U32 as being, since it is the most efficient in terms of the dollar per pupil, we look at it as being the first place to cut to get to those numbers. I would say to you that this discussion is going to get really big in two years when U32 starts to drastically drop in its enrollment, and that will be the better time to have the discussion about reconfiguring some of the U32 programs. I would also say that if the board said that we needed some additional cuts, that there are some places within our budget that we could probably streamline a little bit more, but we are getting close to program cuts when we start to do that. To be fair, and I will say this, the board didn't ask about the cuts at U32 when we looked at the slides. The two paraprofessional positions are two of five empty positions that we have. So we didn't cut any people. We just are real, we're coming to the realization that we can't fill positions anymore, and so we have to look at other ways to do that. Can I follow up? The thing for me, you've been- Just a clarifying question. We found $890,000 in savings, and we're comparing that to the $920,000 to avoid, that's our best guess as to how to avoid the tax rate review. So it's a $30,000 gap, correct? Yes, to our best guess number. Thank you. Which is the right way to phrase this. Sorry, if I could just follow on that really quickly. Is it also safe to assume that a lot, given that you said the average that they're guessing right now is an average 12 points? A lot of schools, a lot of districts are gonna be in that tax rate review, and if we went into that $30,000 over, the penalty probably wouldn't be that large. Those are all safe to assume. Should I take it? Consider any penalty, just be a review. Sure. Especially considering that our tax rate would have gone down significantly because the change was exactly 27. So Steve, there's something you just said in my understanding that the two cuts are not even filled. So currently we have a need for 15 paraprofessionals of U32, next year we'll have a need for 18, given our current estimates of student need. We have five open positions right now. We could very well have eight open positions next year. So cutting those two positions, our positions we haven't been able to fill. And so this, and for all the other cuts, the ones that are currently filled, I mean, that is, which ones are not? The 0.3 math interventionist at Calis currently is not filled. The person does 0.7 already. I mean that, to me, gives you much different gloss with these numbers because you're not reducing U32 positions that are actually filled and serving student populations whereas in these other schools you are, except at a point where you math. Let me be clear, we need to build those positions. I know, but they're not filled now, and you're not, which is why we're cutting back some of those positions to make these numbers. I think there's, Chris is right, there's a psychological difference at least between riffing people and cutting open positions. Understood. And I think that's a, I'm gonna let Joshua, go ahead and make a decision. I don't know, you can let Joshua go. You've been waiting for a minute. No, okay, great. So I just wanna point out one of our lenses is equitable distribution of resources. And Kat sort of talked about this. We aren't fully equitable, meaning our smallest schools take a bigger percentage of resources, which frankly leaves U32, which serves the biggest population of our kids with the smallest percentage of our resources. So if we were to say soften some of the reduction in those smallest buildings, it would make that disproportionality worse. So that's just something the board should understand. It makes that dynamic, it increases the gap. And what is the criteria for proportionality? It's pretty simple. 50, 57% of the students in this district attaining 32 and 47% of your personnel. And, I think we should go around. Yeah, let's say, I'm gonna let Jonathan, because he's online. Go first. Jonathan. Yeah, I just wanted to express my concerns that have been shared by a few people. And I'll just say, I guess, really similar things that I said last year, which was that everything I've read about the youth mental health crisis in this country among young people is real and while we have a unique district in many ways, we're all people and our kids are all people too. And so I think many of the things that are reflecting the mental health crisis among young people are also affecting the children in our district and students in our district. So I would very much be opposed to cutting nursing positions, counseling positions, other mental health type positions. I think that's completely counter to our stated, one of our stated elements and mission, which is to provide safe and healthy schools for our students. So to me, that's a priority right now. Very much so. Thank you. Thank you. Do you wanna go one side on one side so everybody gets, I don't wanna put you in the spot. Yeah, no, no, I have a question actually. You said that the, so in Berlin and East Montpelier, there's the reduction of the one classroom teacher in each and I heard somebody say that wasn't actually a budgetary cut, it was a lack of enrollment cut. And can you just explain how that works and where that comes from? It is a budgetary cut, but it's related to enrollment as opposed to we're reducing for change in program or because of a loss of grant funds, which is what the other ones were. This is just, we have fewer students and we can maintain our class size ratios even with one fewer student in both buildings based on what we know now. Okay. And so like, is that something that is planned and you know what grade that comes out of already? Okay. Okay, thank you. Kari, you have had a chance to. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, so I'm trying to keep in mind Fuller's comments about perseverance because this is really difficult. That these kinds of reductions are painful to contemplate this and yet asking, still asking our town people to accept a 13% increase in spending that I'm not at all comfortable with that. So it's actually hard to know what ought to be the target. So I really appreciate your leadership. Everybody putting this together means a lot. I personally would like to see further reductions, but I think this is gonna be difficult enough. And so I think this is a reasonable place to move forward with. And I would say the last thing is that keep in mind that we are here because there are very real trends, real drivers to this situation that student enrollment's not getting better, it's getting worse. And affordability is gonna continue to be harder. And so these kinds of changes feel inevitable. And last year we didn't make reductions and that makes this year that much harder. And so I would urge us not to put off things that will make the next year harder. Thank you, Card. Daniel. I get to go. I guess I'll use my time to sort of second what Jonathan said. And I think I appreciated what you said, Megan, about equity and equitable distribution of resources. I think if we all wrote down how we would allocate resources in the district equitably, we would all have a different, we would have 17 or 15 different ways of approaching that. So I think there are a lot of different ways of looking at equity. I guess I hear what Stephen said and I think it's not our peril to cut those positions even if they're open. I also think thinking about what Jonathan said that we have to think about the upstream interventions in terms of social and emotional learning that we can maybe take and or preserve. Maybe it's an intervention we preserve by keeping nursing positions and school counseling positions at the elementary level. And maybe over time they pay off in needing fewer paraprofessionals for behaviorally challenged or well for behavioral challenges in our schools, our high school. So I think we should find an additional 30,000 in reductions. I also don't want to see the nursing positions and the counseling positions cut. So I would want to see something different than what we have in front of us. I wasn't prepared to speak yet.  I'm gonna keep listening. Okay, Natasha. Sorry, Chris, I'm not trying to be. No, go ahead, go ahead, thanks. Natasha. I know that last year we made decisions not to be any pets. And we did that knowing it was going to make decisions more difficult in the future. And I mean, I'm always gonna believe that we shouldn't cut any of our staff. I was an educator, every comedian, I don't ever want to cut staff. And I also feel very strongly about not cutting the nursing and counseling. I think if COVID showed us nothing else, it's that our students need to have those supports in a way that we were not aware that they needed them before. Having said all of that, I also understand the reality of where we're at. Where my head is at right now. Thank you, Natasha. Echoing, I think, the general consensus that we're concerned about the social emotional well-being of the students. And that's a lot of really difficult decisions based on the limited resources. And this really messed up equation that at the Vermont School Board Association Conference, people from all across the state were sharing their concerns. That the way that the factors come into play does not reflect the need and the numbers that we have. And the process is a strange one where we're sort of learning what we're going to have to work with after votes come in. So I also don't want to see the counselors and nursing physicians be cut. And I also, I'm appreciating the support that the administration and the teachers have been providing through COVID to students. And I'm curious to learn more about how the school structures have functioned to fill in those gaps where students have needed extra support and we did learn from the social emotional support presentations that were given, kind of the policies and systems that have been put into place. And so I think given the reality of what we're faced with and the creativity and the resilience of the schools and the staff and people coming together, I feel like even with the cuts that we can support the students and find ways to make it work until those positions can be filled when that's determined that that's essential and needed again. Thank you. So just a few clarifications. And again, I'm not calling this into question. I just need some understanding. So under, you know, when I'm looking at the overall budget and the different increases in different areas, under salaries, so like under superintendent, the increase of almost 150,000, is that that additional position we were talking about? Okay, thank you. And so I'm just trying to get, and then the operation and maintenance, that's like 230,000, is that, what is that covering in terms of salaries? Is that two new people? I'm just trying to get a sense of- There is one position that was created to cover both Doty and Romney. And it's like an increase of 0.4. That was in the baseline budget. That's why we didn't highlight it in the list. But it is an increase over last year. Equipment, supplies, things like that would be. This is solely on the salary line. So that was why I'm just trying to- That's probably just the salary increases that we're estimating. Because that also doesn't include the benefits. So, you know, just trying to get a sense of where and just a better understanding of it. The other thing in terms of that 1.0 at Eastmont Pillar, and I know last year, we put it in for last year, right? Was that a new position last year, two years ago? Yeah, it was in two years ago and it was part of the package from last year that was recommended. And so we've considered that this year a gift of a teacher that we did. We abused that gift. And also felt like, again, because this year's kindergarten class is smaller and this year's kindergarten class is also coming in. We only need one. We have 21 kindergarten this year in one classroom because we truly did not believe two classes of 10 and 11. We're best for our students. We have a similar scenario next year and we're graduating two sixth grade classes. So it was in there two years ago. Okay, thank you. And then, so then just a couple of things. So, my understanding, it isn't necessarily a penalty that we would have under that review. But if there's a large number, my understanding too is if there's a large number of school systems that go and get granted this cap, that also is gonna create kind of like our community's tug where it's gonna then ripple to then we, even though we're saving, we're not saving kind of a thing, which seems to be the... And it affects that property yield. So that property yield is all dependent on how much everybody's affected still up. And so the more everybody's goes up, the property yield is affected. So then that affects the tax rate anyway. That's why that property yield is a factor that's super important. Yeah, yeah, so that. And then just the last thing is I absolutely, and I appreciate that again, administration brought forward what your recommendations are and what your understanding is, even understanding that we can't make it what you're talking about your cuts and that. And so, and last, so keeping those three pillars in mind and everything else, I also know we are going to start to hear from our communities. And we are gonna start to hear lots of different stories of the impacts of that. And all I'm saying is to me, those all feed into the puzzle. This is a huge piece of the puzzle that you brought forward that we as being fiscally responsible, being also wanting to be equitable, wanting to be also able to manage these things responsibly. To me, that also just begins to fill in the story. So I don't want, I have every intention of considering all of these parts, but I want to be transparent that I also hear stories. And that just feeds into the question. Sure, sure. Yeah, so I know, Megan, you said at the beginning that none of the reductions, no reconfiguration was looked at in terms of the reductions. So with the exception of the Doty and Romney K and 3K. Which was based more on a quality standards. Yes, to have a reasonable size class for good instruction. I guess, well, first I'll say that I appreciate this work and I think it's a good step. I think it's a good start. But I'm starting, what we're starting to hear everybody sit most folks say, which was something that reminded me of last year.   Like I want our children to serve full-time nurses. So I guess what I would say was, I wonder, and it's a question, is it too, is it way too soon to think about larger reconfiguration? Or is it just going to turn out very poorly if we try that now? So this is a conversation our leadership team has had quite a bit because I think we feel very strongly that we could be configured in a way that lets us do much more to the point that you're making. Oh, I'm sorry, and I'll say also recognizing that infrastructure costs are second to staff costs. Correct? And just that the fact that we have to care for so much, we would, one, could realize savings in that round. Sorry. No, that's okay. The two things, and there might be more, but the two things at top of mind around configuration. One is simply the amount of community engagement that this board and frankly the community has asked for related to big configuration, and that takes time, and that would be really hard to pull off. And the second piece that we talked about a little bit is we could make certain moves. The problem is if you make a move and you don't know what that long-term configuration is, you may have made a move that makes this hard. The example we were talking about at leadership is let's say you moved a grade over to U32, sixth grade up, but then later the configuration study said, oh no, you know what? We should use one of our buildings for a middle school. Now you've just zig-zagged. So that's the other risk that you would take in moving a configuration faster is you may, time might get you to a more judicious like, oh, this is really where we wanna be, but we did something over here. Those are the two things that jump out. Can I ask for a little clarity on your facility statement though? Only because I know it costs a lot to keep these buildings going, and every year we're putting more and more maintenance into them, whether it's upgrading our pellet systems, or improving ramps, which all these things need to happen, regardless if we're underutilizing the facilities or using them to capacity, I feel strongly about that, but I just know that that would represent savings as well. Are you? Yeah, I'm just gonna ask a question. I just wanted to get back to the equity thing, and I understand that equity does not mean offering the same thing in every school, but it seems to me that when nursing and counseling means all the basic needs, and when I look at how things are currently distributed, it looks like Doty already is the one school that doesn't have banned, for example, or the one school that doesn't have a dedicated health educator position that's covered by others. I think the nurses and the counselor are the ones doing the health education at Doty?  The nurse position at Doty has always been funded through little bits and pieces, you know, I inherited, I was checked with Suzanne, they're about 27 different piles of money that funded nursing, and the part of what it came out of was when we moved up to having the full-time nurse with COVID, and then just the change in personnel and the difference in the interest, it just organically happened in that first Maureen and Jess and now Maureen and Lydia just have the, they have the teaching mojo and chemistry and rhythm to have the nurse. Which is beautiful, but each other's school has, you know, 0.2 health educator, and we're looking at taking away 0.7 of the two people that are doing the health education at Doty, just seems not fair to Doty. And I don't wanna cut anyone either, I really don't. But, you know, if it were, you know, last year I know there was a lot of talk about the Spanish position, and I'd love all our students, all of our skill and interest students to have Spanish, but like, if it were between one school having Spanish and all the schools having a nurse, I'd rather have all the schools have a nurse. Maggie, at McAlan's like speaking my mind, so I second those things. I also appreciate the complexity and all of the work that you as an administrative team collaboratively done and the hard conversations you have been having for years about our changing demographics. But I second that whole hardly. I would much rather have healthcare providers in every building full time than Spanish in one or two schools. I'm gonna take a moment to reiterate everything Kari said, so I agree with all the things he said. This budget number is hard to see. I didn't like it when I saw it, I'm gonna be honest. Between my work in the finance committee and tonight's meeting though, I really appreciate the work and the time the administration team has put in to giving us this recommendation and having to think about those cuts because that's your community and your people. I would love to see more cuts if we could but it doesn't sound like it is entirely feasible this year to cut more. And so I very much appreciate this recommendation. I am going to definitely plug trusting our administrators to tell us what our students need and what their schools need and to trust in that and to remind us all that last year we did not make cuts for a variety of reasons. But we did say like we know it's coming next year and it is now next year and they are here and we can't keep putting them off. We have community members and I understand that all of our staff, our community members and cuts affect our community but the people who live in our community are also part of our community, not everybody in our community could afford a budget that doesn't have any cuts and those families who experienced that hardship because of our increased education spending problems with financial difficulties have kids who struggle at school and so that's a direct impact to one of our pillars. And that's fine. Thank you. I'll pass for them. So one of the reasons why we've been talking for the last two years about, so deeply about our budget and our configuration and our spending level is because our spending was high and our taxes were high and our spending was near the top if not at the top of per-people spending. I wonder where do we land? And like this whole Act 127 is about resetting what the expectations are for what it costs to educate different students, right? And I think we owe Scott and Dorothy a lot of thanks for their work on that. Where would we fall? So my computer died, I can't give you the exact number but I did look at that. We're not at the top anymore, we're more like in the top third. Okay. I think I can't remember the, I don't wanna throw a number out but it was like the top third. So it sort of bright sized us a little bit. It made us not look so very expensive per-people. And there were a number of, so the proposal that we saw today, if that was what we went with, right? There are some things that are unknown. You're very confident that our tax rate would in fact go down because of that reweighting and the recalculation of per student spending essentially.  Yeah, no, it's not gonna do that. But, and I hear you, but I just wanna make sure that we have the facts, like what the tax rates are going to look like and what our spending looks like. But I really don't think she can answer that. The thing that I don't know, Jonas is that property yield. Right, and that is gonna affect it by a large number of points, so don't hold Suzanne. I'm not holding Suzanne. I think I have not held Suzanne to my staying. I have asked her for a lot. My point is that I just wanna keep that in mind. That as we talk about cuts, as we talk about the impact on the community, and as we talk about the impact on education quality and on student experience and on our staffing levels. And as we look at that raw number, 40 something million dollars is terrifying. But there are other factors and the reweighting is a significant change in how education is funded, right? And what our per student costs look like compared to other districts, which is how the money gets distributed. So, that's for that. I would vote for this budget today. I think it will change. But I think it's done in good faith by the administrators. No one wants to lose staff. No one wants to lose nurses. But we got along, you know. Some of this is gonna be taken without a spoon. I hear you. Thank you, Jonas. Chris. Lisa. And I'll go back to you, sir. So, Lisa, I'm gonna ask you a question. Okay. The staff member that he's my player is losing. Was that a staff member that was going to be lost by attrition anyway? Was that the two year staff member that we talked about two years ago? Some people, right, because since then, there has been turnover, there's been retirement, there's been new hires, other things have happened. But I will say the position is the position, if you remember that you had funded as a one year position, because we had an increase over the COVID years, we had a lot of families moving. And that was going to be a one year and we were gonna revisit it. And it's been two years because last year, we state status both as a staff member. So, back to my question, is that a staff member who's considered to be like a temporary addition to meet an increased need that each one player had at that time? Were any staff members in their first two years are temporary, right? So, I don't think I can talk to people, but it is that position that you all approve to add because of an increase in enrollment that we had, where our last two years, this year's can revert and the next year's can revert and no longer support that increase. Okay, thank you, that's my question. I just don't wanna talk to people because it could be one of several people who have been hired since that before the attack. Okay, thank you. So, my, you know, I just don't like these budget cuts. Well, I don't like these staff cuts. Budget cuts are fine, but staff cuts are not favorable to. And, you know, I just, I think if we're gonna have these staffing cuts, they should be more equitably across the board and include administration. If we combine the Romney 3K and the Dodie 3K in the kindergarten, then it doesn't seem to me that we couldn't also combine some administration as well. The superintendent's office, I think, went up by 36% from not mistaken, this year increased. And I can recognize the need for that. There's been others, pretty significant increases. Diane talked about the operations going up by about 20% or so. And guidance services going up 32%, and I know we increased salaries this year, but the cuts are not equitably distributed in my view. It's falling more heartily upon elementary schools. U32 is losing two powers that they don't even use right now. They'd love to have them, but they don't have them. And it doesn't look like the market is gonna increase in that. And we're making choices here. I mean, there could be other things that could be considered to be cut in a draft, I know this is gonna come blow back on me, but how much do we fund for the equity scholar? Equity scholar, how much is that as a budget item? If you know. I will tell you. Give me a minute. We don't pay full, even paying the position to, we don't actually, we pay full amount. But what I'm gonna say is just doesn't even sort of capture the amount of work that, you know, it's not like we feel we're tearing. So, but I don't, I wanna move us away from trying to pick positions, Chris, because you know, what they equitably, so just four, four. These are positions, these are positions that are being applied. You know, there should be no sacrosanct positions, really, if we're talking about, especially with direct services to students. And I think that's really worth, to me, where the harm comes in, is that we have direct services to students and I know everyone has a impact on our students across the system. But when we're missing nurses and, you know, I guess John can talk about the mental health, we keep hearing about the mental health crisis in our schools and we're cutting counselors, that just doesn't make any sense to me. Because I'm not hearing that kids are better. I'm not hearing that the need has dissipated, but we're making choices here. And my choice would be to look for other budgetary cuts, not in this stack that's directly serve our students. Can I say something? Go ahead. I think we need to be careful about comparing certain cuts, for example, like the combining the kindergarten and the pre-pay. Those, from what I understand, are to maintain educational quality standards. So when you compare that to, say, some administrative position, that comparison may not be apples to apples. These things are contextual. What was that? The educational quality standards for a qualitative, not qualitative measure. Is that right, Megan? And my understanding is that we're over capacity from administration or are we under capacity for administration using non-educational quality standards? For administration, we're actually within a quality standards because they measure it by a number of teachers. Within means what? Within means what? Within the range? Their ratio is, every time you have 10 professionals, you need a full-time principal to serve them, and we meet that, we don't exceed that. We have differences amongst some of this team supervises more people, but we have 10 professionals that need supervision in each one of our buildings, so we meet it. We don't exceed it. Have we been overstaffed in terms of our students' needs over the past year? I'm not really understanding your question, because overstaffed means a lot to them. In terms of our student need, have we been overstaffed in terms of our nurses, our counselors, people being, the positions that are being cut, are we overstaffed in terms of our actual need for what our students need? Your leadership team, including us, has brought you a budget that we believe sufficiently staffs us. It's not my question. And that's the way I'm gonna answer your question, though, because we have a budget that we are recommending to you that we believe meets student needs. So we had a very good comment, I think, from our Worcester resident saying, we shouldn't, I don't think we should say that their student needs will be robustly met, and things like that, because I don't think that is actually possible when we're making the number of cuts that we are making here. We should recognize that we probably will not be providing the type of services that we have then providing to our students because of the cuts, just to make, doesn't make any sense that we wouldn't be, unless we're saying that we've been overstaffed for the past year, and I don't think we ought to have that. Anyway, that's my, that's my position. Do you mind if I respond? I don't wanna put the administration on the spot, there's no magic number, there's no magic number that this is exactly what we need, and more than that is work overstaffed and under is understaffed. There's an alchemy, listen to Gailia. I have a response. Yeah, and then the other thing that I wanna remind us, that when I get SAC, I wanna do it checked on time too, but the other thing that I wanna remind us is what Megan keeps saying, that they came back to us with responsible cuts that they felt was where it was responded, which is let me finish. That was the responsible thing to best meet the needs of all of our students. Are we the professionals in charge of the students or are they the professionals? And so I just want us to caution ourselves when we start to go with specific positions that we are not the experts, right? We pride ourselves of hiring and supporting the best staff to come to us with those recommendations, that's all I wanna say, it's SAC. I hear a lot of angst about what we're gonna be doing about providing nursing and mental health. I think it might be really valuable for the board to get some more information about how we're actually going to meet those needs. I know that it's certainly, during the course of the pandemic, how we provide healthcare has changed wildly. Even the course of four days, I've seen it change wildly. But I think it might be helpful to get a little bit more of that picture of how are we gonna meet the needs in some of those places that have been, where we are seeing decreases. I also wonder, and I don't know, this is sort of out of turn in terms of role, if we have these arts positions where we have fewer classes, we have, we need a 0.9, we have a one. Are there other roles that some of those teachers can help on some of the student support where we do have these needs, maybe not the level of they need someone who's licensed in mental health, but are there ways that we can try to fill those gaps creatively? Yeah, I wanna add to that. As a psychotherapist and someone who grew up in a school with a lot of supportive teachers where actually the counselor wasn't always available, and then going into the field and appreciating the dual roles that a lot of the teachers just naturally fill because they care about the kids and they're supportive. And so I am also interested in learning more, and I don't know if it's appropriate to provide that of the question right now, but to sort of get a little feedback in terms of how you understand the comprehensive support that the students are getting from the entire school, and perhaps certain teachers more than others, or right, because it's not always the role of the counselor, and sometimes the counseling position is actually limited to give more attention to certain students or to do other tasks, like preparing for continuing education, but. So the question I hear that I think is a really good question that the administration could bring me more information about is what does service delivery look like in a model that has these proposed reductions? Because I think one of the comments that I would make in response to some of this is, the leadership team did have choices to make about which positions to cut, and based on what they know about their systems, what we collectively know about our systems, we made those decisions. If there was a decision to externally have someone say, put this position back, we would have to go find it in another place, and it may be a place that they would not recommend. And that is something that would be difficult. So I do think it makes sense to have some information about what does the system of support look like within each building, because I think that's important. Can I just? We can dive into that later. Can I say, we have seen, at least from Carolina at Rumbi, what that support really looks like. Sorry, Tyler Smith wants to get into the meeting. Oh, thank you, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Thank you for watching. I just wanted us all to remember what, from Carolina's presentation, at Rumbi, what some of that robust support can look like. I don't remember exactly, I'm sorry, if that was delivered by the nurse, or by other teachers, or by Carolina herself, but that support was there. So we have already got a glimpse into what that system looks like. And each school does something different. And that's, we're hearing from the principals that, at one, like that's the theme of our monthly meetings. So we can bring, like Megan said, we can make that part of the data that we need for our community engagement. Part of this, so people understand. Can I ask a clarifying question, just because I feel like it's going to be a commodity indication? You were asking about if, how would we, so for example, with the reduction in the DOE nursing staff, your question would be, what is currently happening now with the reduced FTE? Obviously not all that would happen by that one person, so how would we fill that need? Part of the plan, from that I just want to make sure that I get you to go on. Yeah, or maybe when I think, I think get very focused on, we have a full-time nurse and then we're going to have a less than full-time nurse, shouldn't we have a full-time? And maybe to reframe it as, here are the needs that a nurse needs to meet. How are we going to meet these needs? I think what, I like the question, how Megan phrased it. I said, what does the service delivery model look like for the needs right now? That's, I think what we need to give the picture to the public and to the board is what the needs are right now and what that delivery system is going to look like with the staff that you're proposing. Just that, I don't think we need to dig into what was pre-COVID or whatever. This is where we have now, what are we doing to serve our stud