All right. We are back in the second session portion of the team's order. So we're going to do with public comment. We're going to have initial general. But we are going to have an initial public comment. And then we're going to have also a period after the budget presentation for public comment on the budgets that people can give comment on what's been presented and give the number of people here unless it grows. I think we have plenty of time for that public comment. It's a 45. But whenever it does grow, we will make sure that there's some sort of time limit. So it's orderly. And then also, I just want to reiterate in order to support the show up, we'll have that public comment session that the board will discuss. And we will not be taking comments from the public during the board portion of the discussion. So any initial public comments? Please step up if you have some. Great. Otherwise, go to the consent agenda. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? I'll make a motion to approve this, Mr. Senate. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? There's additional one. What's in our consent agenda, Jim? Minutes of November 14th, division statement, co-curricular contracts, policy for adaptation, and why warrants. So there are the additional warrants that sign warrants. She's good now. We're good. I pass those on to Jim. I'm actually not able to sign those anymore. So we got them. So Jim's got them. So I've only signed one more. No, that's the one. That's it. It's just the one. Yeah. Perfect. I can hear both. We'll shout. So all those in favor of consent agenda? Aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Learning focus. Ladies. Hi. Actually, and before you start, let me just preface just to give the board the context. So what I asked you to talk about today. A while ago, Jim asked, when the students came on the board, to talk about how the students, the avenue students had towards addressing when they had a safety concern at school, and rape culture, and things of that nature. So I posed that question to the students for this time around. So I just wanted to make sure that you knew where that was coming from. Yeah, I just added a little on that, just totally. Are the students feeling that if there is an issue and they're having a problem that they have a safe environment where they can go and have that resolve and that's known, and it's both known, and people feel comfortable with what's there? So go ahead, Mark. Sorry. OK. So just following our normal format, we just have a few celebrations. So to begin with, the Montana High School Mask is having their production of Once on this Island this weekend, which they've been working on since the beginning of the school year. So it's very exciting. The Racial Justice Alliance has already started planning our Black History Month events just to make sure that it goes as smoothly as possible. And so we've broken up into committees to make sure that we're working as hard as we can and being as effective as possible. So we're already excited. And as you probably all know, a series rose onto the top of the Capitol building. And the Honor Choir sang, and some UES classes attended. So that's really cool. And the Honor Choir was wonderful. I'll let them know. And this weekend, MHS Wild, which is sort of our outing club and focuses on getting out and enjoying nature and what Vermont has to offer, went snowshoeing on Mount Hunger. And at UES, a worker from Prevent Child Abuse, Vermont, has been visiting to teach some classes about respecting other people's faces and their bodies, which is kind of just amazing and really cool that it's starting so early. And MHS Earth Group has started working on some new signage in the cafeteria, because we want to make sure that students are aware of what they can compost and trash and recycling. And I'm helping make those signs. So it's kind of exciting. And we're also just working on our larger campaigns of sustainability and making sure students are aware of how they can be more eco-friendly in their daily practices and food waste in the cafeteria and student activism in regards to, I don't know, helping fight climate change. Moving to student concerns. And we wanted to highlight continued efforts to support diversity and inclusion in Montpelier-Roxbury Public Schools' education and specifically speak to the equity policy. And I myself am a member of Montpelier's racial justice alliance. And at today's lunch meeting, I asked them, like, hey, I'm presenting tonight at the meeting. And I was wondering if there's anything you wanted me to speak to. And they had some really important points that I also agree with. And they wanted to place emphasis and highlight the importance of an equity specialist in sort of just every aspect of the lives of our students throughout the district and ensuring that from the time they're elementary school students to when they're high schoolers, they don't have to face the feeling of being marginalized. And whether it is in regards to their identities or just social dynamics in some way that they can be supported. And I think that having someone hired by the district that is trained in supporting equity and education and knows the ins and outs of it and is able to place their just to have their job be placing focus on ensuring that all of our policies are equitable is really fundamental to ensuring that our students receive an equitable education. And they also wanted to highlight the importance of the language in the equity policy and to make sure that it, yes, it's meant to support all of our students in the district. But when we speak of equity, we also speak of uplifting students who are disadvantaged, whether it's socioeconomically or whether they face gender bias or racial discrimination or some form I don't know, discouraging environments that they have to handle in growing up in today's society. And that so although we want to support all students and the equity policy will do so, we need to make sure that we're placing enough focus on supporting marginalized students and that the language of the policy reflects that. And we're excited to the equity policy committee, which includes Emma, me, and some members of the Gender Sexuality Alliance at MHS. And our Racial Justice Alliance are going to meet with Libby next week and really just work on organizing our thoughts and brainstorming to see how best we can move forward to make progress. And just really quickly, just going off of that student who needs, we want to continue to bring this up and prioritize the achievement gap, just focus on research and increasing professional development just to ensure that all students are learning at the highest levels possible and that bias isn't interfering with their capability to access the wonderful education that we have here. And so moving on to the question that Jim asked. And so speaking of educational resources, the question that was asked to us specifically was what avenues are available to students to ensure they feel safe at school and channels of communication around issues that arise. And we think that it really speaks to how resources are made available to students in all aspects of their life here in the district. And when we speak of the achievement gap, we speak of educational resources and making sure that they're empowered as students and as learners and as global citizens and that opportunities are made, they're made aware of opportunities and are able to access the educational resources that are available to them and just reach their full potential to those students. And it kind of relates to what we had previously spoken on as well in relation to the achievement gap, which is sometimes teachers and staff have different expectations of different students because they coordinate with them on a really personal level in a smaller school community environment and oftentimes by cultivating, I don't know, closer relationships with their students and the students in the district, they will treat certain students differently and certain students will be comfortable and with certain teachers. And a lot of times that reflects in how students navigate the resources made available to them in the district. So there might be specific roles of support, like social workers or guidance counselors, but students might not know how to reach out to them. A lot of times when I asked my fellow peers at MHS about how they felt and who they were most comfortable reaching out to and they mentioned specific teachers that they were able to cultivate a close relationship with and their time as their students and really felt like they could trust and a lot of times that isn't necessarily universal with every staff member. And yeah, so resources might be available to students, but they might not know about them and we need to ensure that more students are aware of support systems here rather than just a select few that are viewed as, I don't know, like the right fit for certain opportunities or might seem like they need extra support because it's often hard to communicate that. Yeah. So you mentioned rape culture when you brought up this question and something that I thought a lot about was how we're not impervious to the turmoil, like social and political turmoil that might be happening in our country and world, but I do think that we do a great job at Montpular High School in my experience and hopefully in other, in the lower schools, to acknowledge and discuss those events. And I think that does a good, that really helps kind of support students in like just dealing with those situations, but at the same time, I think that we should be assessing gender bias a little bit more closely, like gender bias in the classrooms and dress codes even, athletic codes. Yeah, facilities like gender-neutral bathrooms, those have all been very, like focusing on those things would be helpful in making young women specifically feel safe in schools. And when we speak about sort of the fact that we aren't impervious to the greater societal climate of today's world, our goal isn't really to insulate students from the outside world when we try to change school culture, but it's to provide the infrastructure to make sure that they're able to be prepared for being socially responsible people and being globally-minded citizens. And that includes how they navigate rape culture and whether they are perpetrators. And so we have student support groups like the Conversation, which meets during solo blocks about once a month or so. And that's a way for students to facilitate and partake in dialogue regarding rape culture and trying to change the culture on campus. And I think that our student groups have been really effective in promoting, I don't know, a more positive culture, but that there's still work to be done in that regard. Also, sorry, this might be a lot to be throwing out the board, but also just like starting early, I think something that I really appreciated seeing was the worker from preventing child abuse from on, visiting the elementary school and just talking about consent and issues of that relate to sexual harassment and violence. And just starting those things, those concepts early does a lot in preventing really icky environments for young women. And also, it helps promote intellectual risk-taking in young women when they feel comfortable in their environment, in their learning environment, and that can be physically or academically, et cetera, et cetera. I have a question. I assume we track reported incidents related to harassment and bullying of different kinds. Are we seeing an increase or a decrease, or is there any trends related to that? Principal colleagues. Yes, Madam Chair. Do you all see an increase or a decrease or staying the same with HHB investigations? Overall, I would say there's a decrease in the number of instances that confirm policy violations. Right. Certainly always inappropriate student behaviors that we are navigating, particularly at the middle school, there's not a lot of learning around the social dynamics and how to be a good citizen, but in terms of violating the policy, those numbers are not going up. Similar. I think the numbers are steady and declining, but I don't know, I'm always sort of suspect of what the real experience is for students versus what ends up reported and consequences. So, I'd be hesitant to say that any of our numbers would reflect dramatic change for our students. Speaking from personal experience within my family, I think for African American kids or other marginalized kids, they feel it, they hear it, they're impacted by it at the elementary and into the middle school level. At that point, they either become just numb to it or they're navigating it on themselves without involving other people. So, I'm not sure. I think what I'm trying to say is that at the different levels of where the kids are in their educational process, you'll have a different type of incident, perhaps, being reported. And if you're black or you're gay or marginalized in some other way, by the time you hit your sophomore year of high school, imagine most of them are dealing with it individually, unless it's really egregious. It could very well be. Yeah. What's kind of the pure culture of incidents? I mean, if someone says something that is arguably harassment or certainly inappropriate or is targeting someone for gender or sexuality or race, do you feel there's, do people call them on that? Is there a student self-performance or is it like, hey, that's not cool? Or is it the other way or does a lot of this don't happen where people aren't aware? Well, we're not in every friend group or peer group at our school, obviously. So, my answer is going to be, I think we, my peer group, I can only speak from my experience, which is a good experience. I feel like if somebody says something that targets somebody else's identity, we feel comfortable calling them out or going to an adult if it's egregious. But then I'm also very privileged, so maybe I'm not observing everything. I have a pointed question that pertains to some of these issues. I heard from a parent in the past week and she was okay with me sharing this experience that, and this is a family that supports gender-neutral bathrooms and her daughter's in the middle school and apparently her daughter is avoiding going to some bathrooms because there are eighth grade boys in the bathroom. Do we have non-gender neutral bathrooms in the middle school? This is like a general question that I don't know the answer to. Okay. We certainly do, and we also have several single-stall bathrooms for our school. Okay. So, it's specific to the gender-specific bathroom and then there's a single bathroom two on the middle floor and one on the top floor. Great. A local's office. That's helpful. Thank you. I was going to ask a clarifying question along the same lines. Emma, you refer to gender-neutral bathrooms and then you refer to women feeling safe and I just wanted to check that like we're thinking of gender-neutral bathrooms as a piece of progress. Are we having situations where women don't feel safe using the gender-neutral bathrooms? Or is that? I think that would be a good question for me to ask my peers about because I do not know. I mean, I have two daughters in high school as you well. Yeah. And I haven't heard that from either of them and I feel like they said some, I don't know if they even know which bathrooms are assigned gender and which aren't, but yeah, if you ask around. We'll do that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Super good report. Oh, yes. So my superintendent report was all about snow days. We started early. We started early, yes, because it's my first year of superintendency so why wouldn't we start early? Sorry, sorry. We're back here in the snowfall in November. This is special for you. Just for me. So I just wanted to make sure, I know that as board members, you are probably asked about snow days quite a bit and how they are called or I'm guessing anyway. So I wanted to make sure that you all had the process for just how those snow days are called in front of you so you could refer to. So I know Ryan had some questions. Do you want to pose them publicly, Ryan or? Right, I think at the end of one of our last board meetings, we were expecting snow soon and we talked a little bit, it's different in the communities and you know in the 706 process and that transition year, like we theoretically said, maybe we can have some schools closed, some schools open, but then it sounds to me that wasn't necessarily possible. So it was really just kind of how does that decision fall out across the district of? Doesn't make sense. So I think it's possible. I think it's tricky and I want to avoid it at all costs or as many costs as I possibly can. The reason why is we currently have 15 students from Roxbury who come into Montpelier. So if we, let's just say hypothetically, we closed Roxbury, which I would assume that Roxbury transportation from Roxbury to Montpelier is too safe or is too unsafe for those kids to travel. We're making that statement. So they don't come to school. If that happened, there's a few things with that. One, how are we getting them their education for the day because their peers are getting learning for the day, right? So that's a conundrum, right? Which isn't a huge deal for one day, but it is if it starts talking about three, four, five days and then you start mixing, what if they don't make the student days that they have to make for the state? What if they don't get to 178 days and then we have two teacher contracts now, but we'll have one teacher contract. So some teachers will need more work days according to contract than others. It just gets really sticky fast. So I would like to keep it as one district as much as humanly possible. I think I shared with you also the last one year Roxbury has had less snow days than Montpelier. Yeah, I know. We don't see it being an issue, but it has come up a little vast. And how does that play out across the district in the future? And luckily so far, while the first snow day, the major draw was Roxbury. I think Montpelier probably could have gone with a delay, but Roxbury couldn't have. It was just, it was cleaner to do the whole thing. The second time when I made the call I said to Michelle, I think that UES was the one who didn't have power when I made the call around snow days. So, and it turned out that Roxbury was impassable that day anyway. So, and much of Montpelier was as well. So it turned out easier for that day, but it's not an easy, I'd like to keep it as we're one district. And that's pretty common across the state. That's not unique to us, but it would be one district. You commented, it's in your report how you decide. And I have it in front of me. If somebody watching wanted to know where they could find this, where would they find it? Superintendents on the board packet online. And I can do a quick rundown. So, very quickly, I'm up quite early that morning and I'm talking to Brian and Lauren, right here in Montpelier and Lauren and Roxbury about what the roads are looking like. I even had, I had some people from the police station the last snow day emailing me as well with power outage information. So it's about 4.45 when everybody starts talking to each other, all the regional superintendents are on emails, one common email thread talking about what they're hearing from their road crew, which is really helpful because we share roads across districts, and so it's really helpful to hear what other people are saying. And once I start hearing what other people are saying and what my road crew's saying in our two communities, that's when I make the decision. It's really based on Brian and Lauren saying, yeah, we can get these roads cleared up or we can't. And Brian and Lauren are the road, the people who are out looking at the roads. Yep. So, I make the call, but it's really not my call. But yeah, that was pretty much the superintendents report because probably that was what was on my mind when I was writing it for the snow days and I wanted to make sure you all had that information of how those days are called. And I can't say to the public that I do take requests if you want me to give any suit and expectations on my next call, I take requests. So, if anybody wants to stick one in there for their particular kid, let's let me know. No, no, no. Any else? No. That's my question. So, I think it's a bunch of times. All right, before I get started, does anybody need a hard copy? Unless it's changeable. This is kind of hard to read. It is not. It is not. Do you have it? Yep. Thank you so much. Can you hear Bridget? Bridget, I'll set to you. Thank you for the books. All right, well, while they're working, I'm gonna go ahead and get started. First off, saying I wanted to show some appreciation for my colleagues who are all supporting me from right over here. They make building a budget as easy as it possibly can be. It's not an easy thing to do, but we have a great team and we work together on staffing and they put together their budget input and send it to me and they always give me all the information that I need to be able to put these slides together. So, I appreciate the work of my colleagues. I will throw a couple of caveats out. One, I mentioned to a few of you, I have just driven back from a two-day conference talking about a statewide financial system and chart of accounts, which is not exactly the most uplifting two days of my life. So, I may not be at the top of my game, but I'm gonna give it a college drive. The other caveat is this is 27 slides. I've got 30 minutes. Ain't gonna happen, but I will do as good as possible at staying on time. What would help is if, as I'm going through this, if you're coming up with questions, if you could jot them down and hit me at the end, potentially I will answer the question as we go along. So, it might save some time to get to school. Yeah, just two quick comments on that. One, we're starting five minutes or so. There will be time. Second, we have a discussion budgeted in the time. And third, we thus far have a relatively low public turnout so we'll probably have even more time. So, we'll play a couple of questions.  After this first one, it goes a lot faster because we're only talking about changes and things like that. So, strap in and we'll get to it. Here's just a quick outline of what I'm gonna be covering. So, I don't need to talk about much here except the second to the last bullet there, tax rates may change dramatically. I'm looking like a genius because they already have. I will be briefing you on some new numbers based on new data that's already come out. And there will be new data that keeps coming out. So, we'll go over that and we will update as briefings go along. So, for context, obviously we focus a lot on staffing because that's where the majority of the budget is. Salaries and benefits. So, we talk about staffing as a group and make decisions as a group. We also obviously talk a lot about student needs because after all, that's why we're here. In the back of our minds, we're sensitive to tax implications for the community. So, we always are thinking about, are we really needing to add this and add that? And what are some potential offsets? The last thing under themes is last year we added a capital plan into the budget and incorporated that in. This year, it's still there but we are probably gonna have it as a separate fund. So, it would be a separate article and those funds would then be able to roll over from year to year. Some state factors. Internet sales tax has filled the Ed Fund shortfall. So, while that may not be good news to us individually, it was great news to the Ed Fund. And as a result, the dollar yield that is set at a state level didn't need to go down. It actually is going to go up. And what that means is if the yield goes up the tax rates go down. So, that was very good news. Health rates on the not so good news are increasing 11.8%, which is a large increase for the second year in a row. That has been offset by us reducing our assumption for how much people are gonna utilize their health reimbursement arrangements. So, we're no longer assuming that everybody is gonna use 100% of their health reimbursement money. The other thing that's kind of good news is there's no clawback. If you remember two years ago, the state took money from us and said, well, they didn't take money from us. Instead of giving us all our money, they held back some and said, well, with these new health plans, you should be saving money. So, we're not gonna give you all the money that we planned on giving you. That happened last year. It happened this year. It's no longer gonna happen next year. So, that's $65,000 that we don't have to worry about covering in the bottom line. Local factors, you can read them all there. You know, we as a merged district got an 8 cent tax incentive last year that drops 2 cents every year. In essence, what it means is our tax rate goes up 2 cents every year now that we've cashed in on the 8 cents. Enrollments, we'll talk about later on. We'll talk about staffing. The budget does include, as of right now, additional busing for Main Street Middle School. There are a few different capacity building initiatives within the budget. Some relating to foreign language, of social emotional learning, equity. This is the first year that we had to absorb the bond principle, the $4.9 billion bond we paid interest last year. This year we have to pay the principal for the first time. As a result, we knew that was coming. So in FY19, we had a lot of one time project money in there that we knew we could cut out to absorb that cost this year. We did reduce a lot of those one time project costs. We didn't go all the way down to the level that we initially thought, but we did come down significantly. I think $167,000 from 19 to 20. To try to make up for that difference that we didn't make up, we were gonna come down to like 250 and we only came down to 167. So to make up for that difference, we were proposing to use some fund balance as a revenue source in the FY20 budget. That way it would really, basically bring us all the way down to where we initially thought we would be on one time project costs. That's something we can talk about later, whether we should use fund balance or should not. Reduce tuition costs. That's tuition in a couple of areas. The big one is Roxbury 9th through 12th students. The amount that we need to budget for next year is significantly less than the amount we budgeted this year. One reason is because we actually are coming in under budget this year. There are kids that have decided to go to tech schools. So we have to pay tech tuition, not high school tuition. There are kids that are living with a different parent in a different town, so instead of paying tuition, they're now resident students at Northfield or Barrie or U32. So we had a lot less kids this year and that translates into a lot less kids next year too. Also private pre-K is lower, outside placement costs are lower based on student needs. The unknowns, equalized pupil count, you know that that has a lot to do with tax rates. Last year we got initial pupil count on December 12th. I'm not optimistic that we're gonna get a pupil count on December 12th. And if we do, I'm not optimistic that it's gonna be correct. There are a lot of problems with the statewide longitudinal data system. So people aren't getting good data to the state, which means they're not gonna be able to give us good pupil counts, I don't think. As an example, Burlington South, Burlington don't have data in. Those are two big districts and without that data, makes it hard to think that we're gonna get an accurate pupil count. So that may be an unknown for a while and when we do get a number, it may not hold. So we'll talk a little bit more about that later. The dollar yield and non-residential tax rate, the tax commissioner letter did come out. I got it Monday, I've been out of town so your briefing isn't updated but I will tell you what the impact is. That does still have to be set by law though. So it's probably as good as it's gonna get until after town meeting day, but it's not set by law yet. Common level of appraisal, I think we got that around the middle of December last year so that should be out soon. I did make some assumptions, hopefully pretty close, maybe a little conservative, but we'll see. Revenues, and when I say revenues, I'm talking about non-tax revenues which you'll see in the tax rate calculation how that plays out. There are some unknowns there, special education, some of those revenues, the AOE gives us, we haven't gotten that yet. Small schools grant for Roxbury, we haven't gotten that number yet. We should get those probably around the middle of the month. Transportation aid, the last two years I haven't gotten a number in time for the budget so I have an estimate plug in which is probably gonna be as good as it gets. Career center six semester average, that's for kids who go to tech centers and we don't pay a tuition like we do for kids who go to a high school. Career center tuition is based on a three year average to try to level out any spikes that you might see. So when you pay for tech tuition, you're paying for an average of the number of kids over the past three years. I don't have that count yet. It shouldn't swing dramatically because it is a three year average. I made an assumption of 11 kids. I think this year we're at 9.99 so maybe it'll come down. Health reimbursement arrangement, I mentioned that a little earlier. So if we give say a single teacher $2,100 to go against health costs, in FY 19 we assumed they were gonna use that full $2,100. In FY 20 we're assuming that as a district those people who are getting $2,100 in total will average about 90% of that $2,100. They won't all spend every dime of it. That's the assumption. We still don't even have a full year under our belt so next year we can make a more informed decision but I think 90% is probably safe. This slide at the top there just is a quick preview of the numbers and it compares FY 18. Remember FY 18 was two separate districts, Roxbury and Montpelier kind of added together as best we could. 19 was our first unified budget and 20 is what we're proposing. You'll see that about the middle of that chart you'll see the total budget is 24 million over 30. That's about a two and a half percent increase over FY 19 and just as a comparison point FY 19 was an 8% increase over 18. So that is pretty good. Non-tax revenues are estimated, hopefully conservatively estimated. If that number goes up and spending goes down, tax rates go down. Education spending right now is just over 20.1 million. That represents a 3.2% increase over 19 as compared to a 6.5% increase from 18 to 19. You may remember that the board gave guidance to try to limit the increase to a 4% increase and we're at 3.2 which was a very good surprise. And I will tell you that we did not go back to administration and everybody else and say you have a target of X. We built this budget and it just came out this way. So there weren't artificial constraints. Everybody knew the challenges that were going on so I think people were realistic that nobody was artificially constrained when they built their budgets. Equalized pupil count is probably the biggest unknown and I talked about that. You'll see right now I'm going from 1225 down to 1220. Our pupil enrollment is increasing so you might think that that should go up and I hope it does but I'm just not sure. With equalized pupils it's a very complicated calculation and then at the very end there's a statewide equalizing ratio that gets applied and I have no idea what that ratio might be so you never know until the end what's going to happen to your numbers. I would hope 1220 is conservative. If that goes up spending for pupil goes down it actually goes down and hopefully we'll know a little bit more in the coming weeks. We instituted a capital plan last year at 250 we're proposing a capital plan at 260 for FY20 and this time it would be a separate article and a separate fund. So enrollment projections just to kind of if you haven't seen the slide before K through four does not include Roxbury and the reason why is because if we rolled them in when you do class size analysis it would really skew the numbers. So K through four is just the Montpelier schools actually this whole thing is Montpelier schools because Roxbury students are feeding into Montpelier schools in starting in fifth grade. So fifth grade, sixth grade, fifth grade. So fifth through 12th actually includes Roxbury students as a grandparent wears off and they come into our schools. It's hard to see but there's a darker kind of square that gets bigger or rectangle that gets bigger every year that's as students are transitioning in. So in FY20 or 2018-19 you see fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth graders are in the middle school next year that adds to ninth grade. The next year there's 10th graders, 11th graders, 12th graders. So FY23 all Roxbury students in grades five through 12 will be in either mainstream middle school or Montpelier high school. So that's a little bit about the chart. Two things to kind of call out. You might see kindergarten numbers and think those are kind of hokey they're going all over the place. The model is based on birth rate data and it's a little smoke and mirrors to try to figure out what's gonna happen four or five years after a kiddo is born. So don't put a whole lot of stock in the kindergarten column. Those do change a lot. Especially you'll see in FY23, 55 kids I'm sure that's a low number but it's just how the model kicked it out based on birth data. The other thing to notice is at the very bottom you'll see we still have increasing enrollment every year going from 1072 projected or actual this year up to 1212 in 2023. Some of that is because we have additional Roxbury kids coming in but one year's worth each year is not making up these numbers. I mean you're talking like five to eight kids and you're seeing increases of 19, 64, 28, 29, 19. So that's more than just Roxbury kids coming into monthly schools. I do think that after 2023 we should start seeing some kind of leveling off but increased enrollment across the board. This slide shows kind of how that translates into class size analysis. Even though we have increasing enrollment we are not proposing adding any classroom teachers until probably FY22. So the 21, 22 years, the first year you see a red highlight in a cell. If it's red highlighted that means that is at the point where we now are over our max class size. In FY19 or FY20 and FY21 you'll see some yellow that means we're getting close to max class size where we're within one student. So we are getting close in a few areas especially sixth grade, seventh and eighth grade in the next couple years and then in FY22, six, seven, eight and then you start seeing it in the high school. So we will have to add but we're only talking about probably one or two teachers over this span of time as the increased pupil count goes up. So I don't think spending for pupil is gonna go through the roof. I think both are gonna go kind of in the same line. Roxbury, my apologies to Roxbury. This is not a highly complex slide with a very difficult algorithm. All we're looking at is basically assuming that there's five first graders, there's gonna be five second graders next year. The numbers just aren't there to try to do a complicated model. But you can see we're looking at like 29 to 32 kids is pretty stable in Roxbury, Cape Town. That isn't a typo if you notice that 11 kindergartners going to eight first graders. That is true, three kiddos moved out and double checked that. But other than that, usually you have pretty stable transition from year to year. So staffing, there's only one page of staffing adjustments that we're proposing this year. And on this one page, half of these are really shifts. They're not really increases or decreases. At the district level, we are proposing and we've talked about this before, a human resources coordinator. So that would be an additional full-time person coming in. If you're familiar with the district, you know the workload has gone up. There's Family Medical Leave Act issues. There's Fair Labor Standard Act issues. There's new health plans and HRAs that are coming on board. And then next year, you've got statewide negotiation for health plans. So that's still gonna be changing. And there's a lot of work that we need to do with job descriptions and that kind of thing. If you're familiar with the district, you know there's three people that basically do a piece of this job. So it's not real efficient, especially from an employee or a consumer's perspective. This would really help centralize that, help be more efficient. And it would also free up some time so that somebody can start focusing a little more on transportation coordination as we add more busing into this district. Custodial, that's a decrease of a halftime position. It's not a real, it's not a cut. It's a vacancy. We had a halftime person that we added in the FY19 budget. We haven't filled that and we think we can go without filling it. So it's not a cut. It's a cut to the budget, but not a cut to people. The next two lines are those shifts that I talked about. Shifting partial FTEs from title funds from consolidated federal grant money into our local money. And you do that whenever you wanna make sure that if title funds go away, these people don't go away. So I certainly wouldn't wanna see 0.17 of Mike Berry go away because we lose title funds. So we wanna shift that and make sure that those are just sustainable positions that we don't end up having to cut at some point. That takes you down to union. And for union, we have an interventionist coach that's a shift from title funds to general fund budget. You may wonder why it's even in here. It's in here because it's not an increase to the expense budget, but it's an increase to ed spending because you don't have an offset in revenue if we take it from federal grants to local budget. So that's why it's in here. The shift under union elementary school is needed because union elementary school won't qualify for title funds next year. So we don't want that position to go away. The only way to keep it is to shift it. The last position that we're adding is also a union. It's a social emotional learning coordinator. Early on in this process, I think I told the board we were thinking about adding another special educator. Instead of doing that, we're adding a social emotional learning coordinator. And that would basically be to help institute a model to integrate kids back into classrooms. And that would help avoid costly outside placements. But more importantly, it would focus on teaching social and self-regulation skills so that we could get those kiddos back into the classroom because we all know that what's most important is high quality first instruction in the classroom. So this would be, if you're following along with MTSS, this would be MTSS level three to get you back to level one. And we think it's very important work to do. So now moving on, we get into numbers which I love. So we're going to talk about expenses by both program and category. And when I say program, I mean like general education, special education co-curricular. When I say category, I mean the type of expense like salaries, benefits tuition. We'll start off by looking at it both ways. Couple of briefings in we'll probably just focus in on one or the other to save some time and confusion. So as we do this look, I just wanted to point out on this chart again, the number that we're looking at is this 24-030-446. That's what I'm going to be tracking to on the next five or six slides. So first by program, nearly 60% of the budget relates entirely to direct instruction, meaning general education, special education, career-centered tuition. And it would be even higher if you roll in, and say speech into the equation if you've broken out separately. Most of the programs that you can see, hopefully you can read everything from there. Most of these programs are pretty much self-explanatory. A couple that maybe call out are buildings and grounds. You may wonder what's in there. Well, the capital fund is part of buildings and grounds. Utilities, electricity, heating oil, that's in buildings and grounds. Safety, that includes our school resource officer. It includes bus aides, crossing guards. Principal offices slash special services administration. That's your principal's budget and the administrative offices of the principals. It's the special ed directors administrative budget. That's where that is. Fund transfer is another one that you might not know what that means. Fund transfer for us is one thing and one thing only. It's the money that we have to transfer over to food service to cover any deficit. That's the only piece of food service you see in our budget because other than that, food service isn't enterprise. They have expenses, revenues, the offset. The only thing that you see in this budget is what we supplement to food service to make sure that they are breaking even completely. The next chart is really just to show I have skills at building charts. This is just a bar chart that shows from year to year what's going on. So you can see increases and decreases just visually.  So it's a lot of words. I'm not gonna read them all to you but I'm gonna try to hit some of the highlights and some of maybe the more complicated things. And I'll start with the most difficult one to explain. In general education in FY19, there was a $170,000 expense. There was a transfer out from our funds in the general fund to triple E which is preschool, special education preschool. The reason we had to do that is because triple E was considered a separate fund and it never had nearly enough revenue to cover expenses. So we would show a transfer out in general education. We no longer have to do that because triple E is really just part of the general fund now as part of this statewide uniform chart of accounts. So that expense is a way, so that's part of the reason why there's a decrease in general education. On the flip side, it shows up as an increase in special ed because special education used to get that as a revenue, kind of a transfer in to cover triple E costs and they're not gonna get that anymore. So it's not really a big swing. It's just a swing between general ed and special ed. You would expect special ed to be a decrease. You can see it's like a 1% increase. It really is a decrease in special ed other than that dynamic of this transfer in transfer out that we don't have to do anymore. So in general ed, some of the other stuff, tuition, the Roxbury tuition or tuition for Roxbury students that are 912 is much lower as I referenced earlier. Outside placement costs, well that's special ed, so pre-K tuition is lower. Another dynamic that you're gonna notice is that we pulled out transportation costs from some of these areas and booked them under transportation. The reason for that is there's a separate function called transportation. Anything to do with busing should be there. It wasn't. Field trips were under general education. Even though the busing piece of that probably should have been down under transportation. We fixed that in this project. So some of those shifts are going on. You'll see that in general ed. You'll see it in co-curricular and athletics as well. A shift of funds or requirements. Special ed, I talked about the fact that it would be a big decrease if not for this transfer in the vanilla gift. The reason why it would be a big decrease is outside placement costs are way down based on student needs. It's always a prep shoot. You have to go by what the student needs are.  This year it happens to go down based on what we're seeing. Contracted services is also going down for things like OT, PT, autism services, those kinds of things. And once again, it's purely based on student needs. And what we saw as we built a service plan was Mary built a service plan. Career center tuition, that's shown about a 15% increase for two reasons. One, I'm assuming there's gonna be a little bit of an uptick in the six semester average. And two, the two tech centers we typically send kids to, Central Vermont and Randolph, I think it is.  In actuality, that number's gonna go up even higher the next time you see this presentation because Central Vermont gave me a number one day and the next day they gave me a number that was $1,000 higher than the number the day before. So that's gotta be rolled into here. But I'm hoping that the six semester average number is lower so that higher tuition hopefully will be offset by a lower number of students. Co-curricular and athletics, even though we added some advisors for co-curriculars like Equity Alliance, Racial Justice and The Conversation which you just mentioned earlier. The cost came down and the reason why it came down is because we shifted all the transportation, all the busing costs out of this line and put it under transportation. So there really is an increase in co-curriculars and athletics but it looks like it's a decrease because we shifted busing costs out. Some other things to point out, student support, the reason for the increase there mostly is that social-emotional learning coordinator that I talked about. Staff support, there's a fairly big percentage increase there. The big drivers are the World Language Immersion Study that we're gonna do and there's also not an exciting one but phones has to go up by a significant amount because we used to get e-rate money to offset the cost of phones like a discount. Phones are no longer considered reimbursable through the e-rate process. So we have to cover the full cost of phones down so that's another driver for that increase. Another one is Equity Steigens that we have in place and I might talk more about that later but really we're talking about a systematic way to build capacity through kind of a train-to-trainer model instead of just bringing somebody in to do a PD event. We're going to have say three or four, I think three, maybe folks that are trained on equity that become kind of the champions district-wide that will train other people that will basically systematize equity professional development through the district. Let's see what else. Superintendent and school board is pretty flat. The reason there is I took credit for this in the business office last year so I'll give the living credit for it this year. New hire savings, so thank you, Libby. Business services, the big increase there is related to, that's where we plugged in the HR coordinator. Building and grounds, big decrease there. As I mentioned, we inflated one-time program costs in the FY19 budget fully intending to back that out this year. We did back it out, not quite as much as we initially planned. Andrew looked at requirements with principals. We didn't want to bring it all the way down to prior levels before the merger, but we did bring it down significantly with the hope that maybe we can bring it down the rest of the way next year, but we'll see what the needs of the facility are. Safety, not a big dollar amount, but a good percentage increase. That's because we're doing a resupply of things like cones fencing, things that Andrew's taken an inventory of, that we want to resupply. Transportation, a large increase there for two reasons. One, as I mentioned, field trips, co-curricular, busing costs are now put down in this line. Of course, the other big one is adding busing for the middle school. Debt service, I talked about the fact that this is the first year that we're gonna have to pay that principal on that $4.9 million bond. So that's a big uptick this one year that we have to absorb from here on out. You won't see that. It'll actually drop a little bit each year. Fund transfers, not a huge dollar amount, but percentage-wise a huge increase in food service to cover potential deficit. The reason there, I think everybody supports the idea of trying to make a more livable wage for food services employees. And also, we're kind of infamous for having just under the number of hours to get benefits. And we don't want to do business that way. So if we need somebody for six hours a day, then we're gonna hire them for six hours a day and we're gonna give them the benefits that they should get for six hours a day. So we're anticipating because of that, we're gonna see maybe a bigger deficit for the first year or two. As Jim continues on down the road, maybe we'll see some efficiencies be able to be driven from that. Maybe we'll see higher participation rates. But it's an initial investment to reveal it's important to make.  You just need to take some oxygen, just in case. You're doing fantastic. So now expenses by category. So now we're looking at it, as I said, salaries, benefits, thank you. So if you look at the numbers, you'll see that nearly 72% of the budget is salaries and benefits. So that's why obviously we spend a lot of money agonizing over stocking levels. Professional services, I'm gonna give you some examples of what some of these things are because you might not be able to translate. So professional services are things like OTPT, autism services, psyche valves, the foreign language immersion study would be under here. Professional development, audit, legal, what am I missing? Some flexible pathways services to get into instruction. So if there's virtual learning or online courses that would be in here. Visiting artists, those kinds of things are professional services. Purchased services are things like repair and maintenance. So when we renovate a classroom, that kind of thing. The capital plan is all in there. Copiers, that kind of thing, is in purchase services. Contracted services is your busing, traveling, conference expenses, phones, printing, postage, advertising, property and liability insurance. Tuition, that seems like a no-brainer but just to show what all that encompasses. It's tuition for Roxbury kids that are grandparent and in, private preschool, it's outside of placements. Am I missing anything? I think that's, oh, tech tuition is also part of that. And then we've talked about the fund transfer that might be one that you wouldn't have recognized before today. The bar chart just showing things that you might want to visually see and then go to the next page to see what the words are to back it up. So for example, salaries is an increase, tuition is a decrease. Those things are all explained on the next chart. Most of these things I've already discussed is just there in a different bucket. So now when I talk about those positions, they're all in under the salary line instead of HRs under business office and the different categories. So now all those positions are under salaries that I talked about. Health insurance, we broke that out separately because it's a big piece of benefits. I talked about the health rates going way up but 90% utilization of HRAs, that assumption brings it back down some. So it's about where you'd hope to be at about 3%. Benefits less health. So we're talking about social security and teacher retirement, federal grant assessment, municipal retirement. So for example, the HR coordinator would most likely fall under VMware so we have to add that in. When we talk about teacher retirement, you may think, well, we don't pay for visitors. Well, we do for some. If we have a new teacher, there's an assessment amount that we have to pay for teachers who are new to visitors to help make sure visitors stays healthy. So for a new teacher, we do have to pay an assessment amount of about $1,500. The other time we pay for visitors is when we're paying for somebody using federal funds. So if somebody's position is funded by idea B or a title grant, we have to pay visitors from that grant, which hurts because this year it's 15.175, I think, percent. That's a good chunk of the money that you're getting. You have to put towards visitors. Next year that percentage goes all the way up to 19.125.  And visitors for the people listening is? The Vermont State Teacher Retirement System. So it's teachers' retirement. And it's only those two pieces that come out of this budget. The rest is budgeted and paid for at the state level. Let's see what else. Professional services is down due to lower special ed services that we anticipate. Purchased services is down because of the one-time project costs that we pulled out of facilities. Contract services is largely due to adding busing for middle school. Tuition, I think I beat that horse. It's grandparent tuition for Roxbury, outside placements, private pre-K. The private pre-K, just to put a number on that, we budgeted for 120 kids at private preschools times 3,000-some-month dollars. We're at about 100, and it seems like that's where we're gonna stay. So we're dropping that level down. That's why private preschool is down. The rate is certainly going up. But instead of 120, we're thinking 100 is probably reasonable. So I'm not being overly conservative for once in my life. Supplies is about where you'd expect it to be a little bit of a shift from equipment because we're trying to make sure that unless you're buying something that is significant dollar amount as a unit cost, you shouldn't call it an equipment item. You should put it in supplies. Utilities, that's a pleasant surprise that it's only about a 1.7% increase. Electricity is pretty flat. We looked at what we budgeted in electricity for 19 and what we think we need for 20. It's pretty level. So we were able to kind of offset some of the other increases there. Equipment, not a huge dollar amount but a huge percentage increase. And a lot of that is because a little bit of sloppy work last year when we shifted furnishings, furniture costs, we shifted it from the facilities budget into the principal's budget. And I wasn't closely watching to make sure everybody caught that and so we missed it in places. Like, the high school here is trying to backfill for furniture because we missed budgeting that. And so we put it back in here. So that's why it looks like there's a big increase. At Union Elementary, I think we only budgeted like $800 in FY19 and typically that's $7,500 a year. So those are added in there. You also see that there's some high school PE equipment that we're adding in. We're gonna have a better space in the fitness area with the bond. We don't want to cut a ribbon and then have people walk in and see treadmills that are held together with duct tape. So we have some treadmills. We have some squat racks that are built into this budget. See dues and fees. It's small dollars. I had the reasons in the comments blog. Principle and interest, talked about that. It's a $19 million bond principle. Fund transfers, we talked about food service. So there you have it. Moving on to revenues. There's still a lot of unknowns. I highlighted those in yellow. Actually, I got a little sloppy because there's at least one other one that should be yellow. Tech on behalf should be yellow because I don't know that until I know six semester average. So I made some educated guesses at these items that are in yellow, but we should get better numbers with potential exclusion of transportation aid because I just don't know if I'm gonna get better. If you're looking at education spending, that's basically where we balance revenues with expenses. And that's what's gonna drive what the tax rate looks like. Everything other than those top two lines are considered non-tax revenues. So whenever I say that you have the expenses minus your non-tax revenues, everything on that list except those first two lines are considered non-tax revenues. So if these numbers go up, that means I'm subtracting out more money from your total expense, which means your education spending is lower, spending pupils lower, tax rates lower. So hopefully these numbers all go in the upward direction. Special aid intensive, that's basically, if you've been around for a while, you know that when you have money spent towards special aid requirements, you get about 56% reimbursement from the state. So that number is basically looking at what our spending times about 56%. Some of the other special aid numbers are going to depend on factors that the AOE comes up with and sends back. Just hitting on a few other items, you'll see a couple like IDAV, title funds, EPSDT and Medicaid. All of those, the revenue amounts will match exactly an expense amount. So if I'm going to spend X number of dollars towards social workers using Medicaid funds, the revenue is exactly that same amount. So those offset each other. Same thing for like I said, Medicaid, title funds. If you skip down to tuition, that is tuition revenue now. Looking at who people are paying us to have kids come here. That would be pretty much level with the exception of, we've now included in there when we have to charge for special aid excess costs. So the student comes here, we charge X number of dollars, 16,000 for tuition. But if they're receiving additional services, we also charge for that. If it's above and beyond, we will charge for that. We didn't use the budget for that and we're trying to be more fully encompassing all these revenues. So that's why there's an increase there. Other than that, we're pretty flat. I'm assuming that the kids that we have here that are tuitioned in are going to stay here. It may come in higher if we get additional kids next year, but I don't want to count on that. Balance forward. So down near the bottom, balance forward 87,500. That's what I initially plugged in because basically, when Andrew and I looked at one-time project costs, I was hopeful that we were gonna be $87,500 lower than what we came in at. When we didn't hit that target, I figured no problem, we'll push in fund balance revenue. So it basically is like we came all that way down. The problem with doing that then is next year, when you take out that 87,500, it's like increasing your expenses. So next year, we would absolutely have to take out that 87,500 and one-time costs if we're gonna take out this revenue so that both go out and there's no impact. If the tax rate's looking good, we may decide not to use any fund balance there. That way, next year, we can bring down one-time project costs a little bit more and we don't have to reduce any revenues. So that would help us out to offset that two-set tax incentive that we're gonna lose out on. So the 87,500 is something I'd like you all to kind of put in the back of your head so that by the end of the budget, you're telling me, yes, put it in, no, don't put it in, or maybe we're gonna make a different number like 50,000 and call it in the middle. I think it's probably prudent to see how some other numbers come out first like our equalized people count and our CLA. And we may decide that, hey, the tax rate's looking pretty good. So let's not throw this in here this year. Let's shoot that bullet next year. IEP Medicaid, just one last thing to point out, you'll see that that's a fairly big increase percentage-wise. Mary and her administrative assistant, Spooky, have done a great job putting in for Medicaid reimbursement and getting Medicaid money in. And we get to roll that over from year to year and we've built up a pretty good amount of money. We use that to pay for 25% of each social worker. We think we can bump that up to 30%, which then reduces the amount that we're paying out of the general fund. And we think if we just do a 5% increment, we can sustain that for several years. So that's why that revenue is going up and that helps us out on the general fund side. Capital plan, now we're rolling downhill, this will go pretty fast. This is about 1% of the overall budget. So 260,000 is what we said we were gonna do for FY20 and what we said we were gonna do with it was renovate two bathrooms at Main Street Middle School. So that's still in there, that's still what we say we're gonna do for FY20. The other years don't get too excited about, I think you should take comfort in the fact that there is a plan, a multiple-year plan, but we have time to tweak those numbers and those requirements. And Andrew, I mean, he's done a great job jumping in, but I think as he's got some more time under his belt, he may decide next year, I think I might wanna change this around a little bit. We have time to do that. The only thing we're locked into is what we say we're gonna do in FY20. So if there's questions about this later, Andrew's here, he can address them, but I wanna work through the rest of these slides. The tax rates, I don't want you to get too excited about these because things are changing and you can change them magically. What you should take from this is on the left side, you can follow the math signs. This tells you how the tax rates are calculated. If you didn't know, this gives you the math behind it, but the factors are going to change. The dollar yield, as many of you know, the dollar yield, the tax commissioner came out with a number and instead of 10 to 20, the number is 10666, so if you wanna jot that down, the dollar yield number or the tax commissioner's recommendation is 10666. What that means is if you go all the way to the bottom and you see that 1.729 under Montpelier, that number would be 1.653. That's a huge drop just based on one factor changing. As a matter of fact, that's like seven out of the 12 cents or something like that, eight out of the 12 cents. If you're in Roxbury, don't get too excited. Your number didn't change. The reason why is because as you're getting tax incentives for merger, Roxbury's tax rate can't drop by more than 5% from one year to the next. So that equalized rate of 1.654, it can't be lower than that. We could cut our budget by $5 million. Roxbury's tax rate is still gonna be that number. Conversely, we could add a million dollars to the tax rate or to the expense budget and it probably wouldn't be enough to increase that either. So Roxbury, your tax rate is gonna be this, basically no matter what we do in the budget. And I shouldn't say, I mean, things might change, factors might change, equalized pupil numbers. But even if those things change, my guess is that 1.654 is gonna be the Roxbury number. Equalized pupil count hopefully will change and make the Montpelier side better. The CLA numbers might change. You can see that for CLA, I've estimated 90% for Montpelier and 100% for Roxbury. Last year, Montpelier's CLA dropped 1.9%. I'm saying it could drop 2.3%. Hopefully that's conservative. If it doesn't drop that much, then the tax rate is better. Roxbury, the CLA dropped 3.9% last year. I'm showing about a 3% drop this year. So that probably will be close, but we'll see in a matter of a couple of weeks. I think that's about it. Once again, if you live in Montpelier, don't get too excited about these numbers yet. I mean, there's a lot still to go as far as unknowns go. This is yet another one. The residential tax rate implications. So this is where we say, if you have a house that's worth $100,000, this is the impact. Instead of $128, that number would be 52. And that's just because the dollar went up. So it's decreased by a factor of more than two. So the numbers, if you want to write them down as of right now, it's 52, 104, 156, instead of 128, 256, and three. Obviously, Roxbury hasn't changed. Hopefully those will get even better as we go along. Non-residential tax rate, we put it in here because not everybody has a resident, not everybody has a residential property. It's nothing to get excited about as far as the budget is concerned though because the school budget has no impact to non-residential tax rate. That is simply a statewide factor divided by CLA. School budget could go up from $10 million or down 10 million, but this won't change. This number on the slide will change though because the tax commissioner is recommending 1.58 instead of 1.6 that's on here. So basically the tax commissioner is recommending a level rate. So that means instead of 1.778, for Montpelier it would be 1.756. Instead of 1.6 for Roxbury, it would be 1.58 until we get a better seller number. The outlook, and this is something we spent a lot of time on last year. I think we should spend a lot of time on it in future budget meetings. The merger incentive, two cents is gonna increase every year because we go from eight to six to four to two to zero. Whenever you basically lose two cents of incentive, you're really kind of, it's equivalent to maybe adding 250 or $300,000 to your budget. So if you wanna absorb that two cents, you would have to cut 250 to $275,000 to keep that tax rate level estimate. So I'm always thinking about that. So next year, if we wanna control the tax rate, where are we gonna come up with that? Or at least minimize increases. Enrollment and staffing shouldn't be too much of a challenge because even though we might have some more staffing, I think we can go hopefully another year without adding classroom teachers at least, but our enrollment will go up. So spending for pupils should go down and might be able to accommodate some of that debt dollar amount or that two cents. Some expenditures will decrease. Nine through 12th tuition for phasing out grandfather or grandparented Roxbury students. I thought that was gonna be more like 100 or 150,000 every year, but because this big drop we have from 19 to 20, it's not gonna be as much from 20 to 21 because there's only say three juniors this year and they will be seniors next year and then they will go away. That's only three kids times tuition so it's not as much as you might have thought. So we're looking at maybe a drop of 40 then a drop of 80 and 80. One time facilities projects, we can drop that $87,500 maybe next year. But if we have fund balance in there that we take away, that's not really gonna save you anything. So that's why you need to think about should we use fund balance this year or not. Transportation aid, we're not gonna be able to decrease expenses in transportation but we'll get more money. Transportation aid is about 40% of your transportation costs but they go back two years.  So in FY 21 we should see a bump up because we've added some busing costs this year and FY 22 we'll get a big bump if we add Main Street busing in FY 20. So if we add $120,000 worth of busing costs in FY 20 from middle school, two years later we'll get $48,000 more in transportation aid. So if you think about it in the long term you're not really spending $120,000 in busing in the middle school. You're spending $78,000. I hate doing math in public but I think that's right. 72, see I did it wrong, 72. The other thing to think about is bond expenses. Construction bond expenses by their nature go down every year. But we have a Wiemers bond where we bought into the Vermont Municipal Employee Retirement System years ago. The cost of that actually goes up to every year until it gets paid off. So one's going down, one's going up. The net is you're gonna have a decrease each year but it's not gonna be much, $7,000 to $10,000 probably. So last year when we showed this slide there were some pretty big ticket items that we were gonna be able to cut in the next year, in the next year. It's not as big, there's still some opportunities there but I do think after going through this budget once I think the next time when we go through the second cut or the third cut we may be talking about maybe taking out that fund balance revenue because we may need to be able to recoup that in the next year. But at least we're thinking about future years. The summary, as of right now the increase that it's spending is 3.2 which obviously is better than the target that we were set that the board asked us to set. We didn't constrain anybody so 3.2 to me is great news. Tax rates, I'm gonna wait until the next time when we have some better data to get into that. Finally my friends, is all I have for you. So, that was a great job, thank you. So it's probably gonna be very helpful. So, now we're gonna take public comment and then we're gonna have the board and then we're gonna show them the numbers for the public. Oh is that one? I can't see any video. Yeah, I think so. We should have more battery mode. Is this yours? Yeah, battery's dying. Is there a plug maybe or? Why? Give me a plug. So, if any members of the public wanna comment on the presentation, that was the time that you've got a couple people out there. All right, perfect, so we're up to the board discussion. Questions or comments for Grant? Yeah. So does social emotional person is not specialized so no reimbursement? Yes, no. I think it's not reimbursable because this would serve as kids that aren't necessarily on an IDP. Well, we put the special ed teacher in. Yeah. And I think I've backed it up with the intensive reimbursement amount. So, this is a great conversation. So, we initially anticipated hiring a special ed teacher which would be reimbursable and so would impact that special ed intensive reimbursement dollar amount but when we shifted and decided this might be the better model to go after to actually attack this issue, I had to re-calculate kind of what I anticipated for revenues and special ed. So, it's not a reimbursable position. Can you elaborate on why that decision was made? To do a social emotional learning? Because... Could it be accomplished the same goal with the reimbursable position, I guess is my question. No, because if you have a child that's struggling with social emotional issues, they might not be on an IDP. And so, if we hired a special ed teacher, they could only service the child that's on the IDP. So, we want to make sure that... And there are social emotional issues that are big right now. And so, that's kind of where we want to attack things. At least that's my take. So, to be clear, this position is going to have only an impact on one school, right? Not the entire district, not all schools. Right. We're starting to target at UES. However, that's not to say that this position couldn't be utilized in the other buildings as well. So, you mentioned two... Oh, can I go on? Go again. I got a list. You mentioned the shift of title funds. So, I understand what you're doing. You're assuring those salaries for those people that are not hitched to the title funds. What's... What are you doing with the title funds? What are we doing with... The title funds that you used for those... We actually are anticipating that we might not get quite as much title funds in the future. But we did. Classic. We looked at the positions that we thought we needed, the highest priority positions. And we also... I think if... Let me look at the revenue slides. The other things we used to show consolidated federal grants as one big bucket. And it's really Title I, Title II, A. So, I broke that out. But you'll see that we budgeted 401,495 in FY19. And if you add the two numbers in FY20, it's about $36,000 lower. We think we might get less title funds. And that's what they've been threatening for the past five years. So, it's prudent to not overdo that because then you lock yourself in the positions that end up having to not be able to hire. So yeah, there's just a couple fractional pieces that we shifted for the purpose of making sure that we don't have to lose those positions or portions of those positions. The UES one is because we no longer qualify for title funds. So we, if we wanted to keep that position, we had to switch it to each other. Was that... Roxbury does qualify. Roxbury does qualify for Title I. I'd love an explanation of the World Language Immersion study. We're right now, should this funding go through, our plan is to work collaboratively with a consulting firm, basically, whose job it is to start doing immersion in schools. It's not an easy process. It's not just saying, yes, we will teach Spanish to kindergarteners next year. So this is a group that worked with Chittenden East, Supervisor Union, who now has a language immersion at Jericho Elementary School. It's now K-1. It started at kindergarten last year and now it's K-1 next year. It will be K-2 with the potential to second kindergarten adding onto it as well in Richmond. So they have done this. They've worked with this group before and they led them through the process of how to do it. And my definition of immersion is, if I go into that room and they decided that you're speaking Spanish, that's what they're speaking in that room to second class. And along with this thought, have you decided which language you're immersing? No, we haven't done any conversation around that whatsoever, but they will help us through that process, through all of those decisions. So the money in the budget for this, when somebody asks me, is for what? Is to work with this group closely. So a program would not be in next year? No. It's a development program. There's no guarantee a program would be in. Yeah, that's where there's some real unclear here. Have we decided to hire a consultant to cause a program to happen? Or have we decided to hire a consultant to study what that might look like? Thank you. We will most likely be going down the road of starting an immersion program through working with this consultant. What is the deliverable that we hope to get from the consultant? A plan of how you open up this, or how you start this whole program. And there's obviously different ways to set up these programs. Some are full immersion.  You're going to ask a question that's too specific for us to answer right now, because that's a question. Well, let me ask you my question. So there are dual language immersion programs, and which teach kids English and another language at the same time, half and half. Is this consultant going to look at different options for how we can do this? I would imagine. I'm not positive, but I would imagine. Are we going to send out an RFP and see what other organizations might be able to provide us with such products? We could. Because $22,000 to one entity that we're familiar with from one school's experience. When there are a lot of successful programs of this nature going on around the country, it makes me wonder if we should maybe look to other organizations too. Not to say that this organization might not rise to the top. We could. Well, this organization or any others that we hire help us plan the finances for this. Yes. So it would help produce a budget that would say, OK, you're one, you're doing kindergarten. Yes. Next year you're doing first grade concoction twice a semester or something. And next year you're doing so they would plan that out. So the deliverable at the end of the year, that's what I'm trying to get to for this amount of money, is a plan. Yes. Which includes the finances of how it might begin next year. And one thing I would correct you on, or I would, yeah. Or I would think of a correct way is that it's not an addition. So it's not adding teachers and teachers for foreign language or for language immersion. It's using spaces that we have already currently. So let's say if we started in kindergarten, we wouldn't be adding a kindergarten class. One of our current kindergarten classes would be dedicated to language immersion. Right. But as far as I know, we don't have a kindergarten teacher that could teach full day in another language. Yeah. At least I'm sure of that. Oh. I can be fairly sure it wouldn't. It would be issues, languages. Yeah, exactly. And depending on what language we chose, which is, it may sound minor, but community-wise, that would be a discussion. So saying you aren't going to add staff isn't necessarily true. Or it might be a shift in staff or something. That would be a better way to put it, a shift in staffing. Yes. Well, I think it's very exciting. And I was curious if there's any thought on how Roxbury versus Jungian, I mean, how would that? I know it's early, but so we'd be discussing. Yeah, but I think part of the goal of this is to answer a lot of the questions that are being asked right now. What is the timeline that we're anticipating for this? A year-long study. Year-long, OK. So we're thinking fiscal year to fiscal year kind of thing. And if they find it feasible, and if they have a good roadmap once the earliest that we could actually have an emergency program, would it be two years from now? Could it be a year study, and then putting it in the budget at this time? I don't want to promise anything about that. I'm not positive. That's a question that we can answer just yet. I think the second two years out would probably be a worse case. The question is whether we might be able to do it in one year, but that's what we're going to find out. Well, that would lead me to believe, are you going to ask for $22,000 next year to continue the study for the next year? You know what I mean? It's when I'm thinking of the money, I don't have any problem with the program or what's happening. I'm trying to think, how does this money play out? Because now I think I've explained to people this amount of money is for a study to see if I'm ready. If we can do this, how we would do it, and how much would it cost? But now you said maybe at the end of the year you won't know, so is that going to require more money than next year to continue study? I can't answer that question without going through the year first. That's a trickier one for me to be explained to you. Could we hear from Jericho Elementary? Mike has a lot of experience with this program since he was the one who helped put it together over there. Great. Mike, how was that year? Put you on the spot there, big guy. So I come up for it. I'm doing my work. You weren't prepared for this at all. I'm 1.7 behind you. What was the question? Can you explain a little bit about Chittin' and Ease history with the group around language immersion? So Chittin' and Ease, we were the first school district in the state to implement language immersion, and we tried to do it on our own. And we had to go back and retrofit quite a bit of work. And the first people we called were the Center for Applied Gymnastics, which, by the way, are one of two organizations, both with the same parent organization, but do this work nationwide. There isn't many other folks. Some people have left and are doing private consulting, but they worked here. So we called them, and they came up and helped us go through what they call the pillars of immersion programming. And so there's program structure. There's curriculum, instruction, assessment, and accountability, staff quality, and professional development, family, and community, and support and resources. And those are things that most organizations, when they try to do it on their own, don't think about. And so these folks come in and, through a systematic way, really help us kind of parse out what are the details of our program so that day one it starts really strong and well and doesn't fizzle. Give you an example, when we started the program about three weeks in, we're like, what are we going to do for report cards? How do we assess these kids? We hadn't really put that together. Those are the things that they help us really think about. As well as just the extreme connections that they have to this world of language immersion and dual language and thinking about staffing, thinking about recruitment, thinking about costs. They do talk a bit about costs. Thinking about sustainable practice. They do have connections to a lot of curriculum and resources that you would need based on many different languages. So they are the people to go to. If you're starting a program, maybe five years in there might be different folks, but these are definitely strong folks to go to.  Yes, yes. So we went through a very, I don't want to say intense, but it was intentional process of discussing which language and everyone has a different opinion. We left it to data. We did a lot of research. There was a big push in the Chitinese area for French. And when we started to look for high quality instructional materials, there were none. So that became a good kind of impartial factor in discussing languages. So we determined that we were gonna go with Spanish based on that. And people came to consensus on that. I think that would be a great process before or at the beginning of when you hired somebody. To know which language you're talking about or which language the community was interested in. Why do you think that we have to nail that down at the outset? I wouldn't. Because we keep our options open. We have, I mean, we have one of the leading schools of instruction of foreign language teachers on the other side of the mountain. We might have teachers throughout the study, we might realize that we have some teachers who have some skill sets that we weren't fully aware of or certifications that we weren't fully aware of. I don't know if we know all that information or not.  I'd imagine Spanish there would probably be the most opportunity, but French and Chinese would also probably present a lot of opportunities. And I don't know if we'd wanna box ourselves in from the get-go with one. Yeah. I'm not suggesting boxing in, I'm suggesting that there be a discussion that the community could take part in before you, at the same time that you're doing, it doesn't have to be done before you hire somebody, but that the community's part of the discussion. Definitely, the community should definitely be part of the discussion. I agree with that. Yeah, and I agree with that, too. But part of the process is figuring out all the factors that go into what makes sense. And also just, I mean, my understanding educationally is that when you immerse particularly younger students in a second language, picking up the third, fourth, fifth, sixth languages becomes much easier once those pathways are developed in early age, the ability to pick up. So the fact that a second language is at an early age is more important than probably what that second language is. A follow-up question. For education. Education. A follow-up question, how is it structured in Richmond? Is it all in the target language, or is it dual language? Yeah, so it's 100% K through 2, and then it starts to reduce by 10% each year after that up to the fifth grade. And that's intentional design based on visiting programs. We based it on a program in Menden Upton, Massachusetts. They have a long-established language immersion program. They became our partner school and our mentor. We also partnered with Middlebury language schools and had a broad network of connections. So we're in good shape to work with them and partner with them. They are having Cal come back to work with them. And if the timing worked out, we may be able to collaborate as well with them in terms of costs and all sorts of things. And I'm assuming it's a choice. Yes, it's a lottery system. Students and families apply to be a part of it. How does that go? Pretty well, actually. We spent a lot of time detailing it so that people felt comfortable that it was fair. We reserved spots for free and reduced lunch students first. And it was per community slot, so it went very well. It started the year after. It's my only critique. And we're in good with that. Happy to have you here. This is really helpful. Thank you so much. You're welcome. I'm very excited about this stuff. Thanks, Mike. I have a question for you, Jim. In terms of drilling into some of these items, which we've already started to do, I imagine we're going to continue to talk about these issues over the ensuing meetings. Is that right? Would you mind laying out the general process that you envision? Yes, so we're going to get a second presentation in the 19th in Roxbury. It will be a similar deep dive. So I think our grant's going to have to bring his caffeinated coat of clothing out. And that will give Roxbury an opportunity to talk and we'll also, my guess is there might be some additional numbers or tweets then. You know, further opportunity for the board to delve in. Then we're going to have another pregnant focus presentation on January 2nd, which will be closer to the final. And again, I'm not sure how much more information will happen in the state for a little more. Yeah, we might have some more equalized pupils. I don't know when we'll get the first one, but I'm sure we'll get multiple versions of it as time goes on. I don't have to go look at the calendar again, but I think we've got one more shot scheduled and by the time to have perhaps additional before. So typically between the first and second, there aren't a whole lot of changes then, other than new data that comes through. And then it's usually after the second one that I will start looking to see, do you have things you want me to change before the third cut and then between the third and the fourth, there might be some changes. But by the time it's the fourth cut, we're pretty much baked at that point. Yeah, and you know, there's different professors who are not doing our arbitrary pick a number and don't go over it. Yes. Yeah, that makes me crazy. So yeah, sure, I just have kind of a general observation. So grant the capital plan looks great. And I know the village school doesn't need work. It's in largely great shape. But when I look at the capital plan table, we're all the way out to FY 25. And the village school hasn't shown up anywhere. It wasn't as a bond as in here, like I know there's gonna be some small things here and there. And I'm a little bit nervous that people might start asking, hey, what about us? And we're looking like six, seven, eight years out post merger, maybe there's some benches here or there may be a little bit of this. We'll go back like sooner or later. I think we're gonna ask, hey, what about the village school too? Yeah, and I think the first pushback is the capital plan is supposed to be for big projects, roof replacements, boiler replacements, major bathroom replacements. You'll see window replacements on here, but we're not talking about like five or six. We're talking about 100. Oh, please. Please help, there you go. I would also say that, so if Roxbury had a roof replacement that was in this timeline, it certainly would be on it, but I think we're good with some of those things. I think that another argument would be, we were thinking we might get down to a point where we're doing $50,000 for projects in the general fund, not the capital. 50,000 for kind of more routine projects at each of the three Montpelier schools and 25 maybe at Roxbury because it's small. But like this year, we're probably closer to 75,000 maybe at each Montpelier school. And I think in Roxbury, it's like what, 62 and a half or something. So we're putting almost as much money in Roxbury and the general fund budget as we are the other schools. And we are doing a lot of work there. We did a lot of work in the kitchen. We're looking at bathrooms. We're looking at town hall. So there's gonna be some significant investment in projects.  I guess I didn't have any concerns, but it was FY25 and people might start asking and they're just gonna make sure that it was. It would be more convenient if somebody would rip some holes in the roof and we can put something on. Andrew, could you speak to any? Could you speak to what you're thinking about for Roxbury for next year? I know the door at the town hall. Yeah, absolutely. Some of the safety grant money to, we have money allocated to spruce up the town hall. There's also, we're looking at, or the biggest need that that building is the bathrooms and that we've been budgeted. We've gotten money in the budget to revamp this, just coming here. In the general fund. In the general fund, yeah. Just so when Ryan or Lisa get those questions, they can say details as to what is in the general fund. Yeah, and a couple of additional comments about it. I know the school that's not on this is the high school. It's not listed. And there have been some community questions about the fact that the bond did not cover the middle school and our answer has been, we have established this capital fund that is gonna address some of the issues at the middle school and be like, the middle school is eight and the 12 is getting a little so this is, I think, data to back up people who continue to ask about the middle school and the fact that the bond is comfortable with school. The data is here that the capital fund does have quite an eye on the middle school. And yeah, we didn't ignore it. I mean, Andrew's been looking at all the schools and the requirements. So I would say, honestly, if there's a school that needs a roof, no matter which school, it would be on this list. The high school is a good example. We just did most of the roof here. We're gonna do another set of roof as part of the bond project or as part of the fund balance. We've invested a lot of fund balance in schools too. So this is, and there's time to tweak, as I mentioned. I mean, this was kind of a quick baptism by fire for Andrew to come in and then not only have to deal with all the stuff we're dealing with but then also try to build a budget. So I have no doubt that we'll be making some changes to it. But I think it's a good first blush at a long-term look for now. And it won't be long before there will be something that pops up that's big enough to end up on this list for Roxbury. The bathrooms might have been, but we kept enough money in the budget to try to tackle that in the general fund instead of pushing it out. And since you mentioned that the high school wasn't really on here, a lot of the money in the bond, however, is going. That's what our high schools are. Can you explain? The majority of it would take up the playground. That's important. Playground everything. Can you explain how you calculate that there'll continue to be an increase in enrollment given the birth figures? I mean, how do you figure that out? Yeah, it's an actual big modeled spreadsheet that looks at historical trends and it looks at in migration and out migration from year to year. So it looks at over a 10 year period, we will have 108% of first graders as second graders. So we'll actually have an in migration. It looks at not only birth data to calculate kindergarten, but then it looks at year by year, what's the trend of in migration and out migration. I'm a little nervous about the model right now because of the impact of adding Roxbury in and that's not in historical data. So it'll be interesting to see how accurate the model continues to be over the next few years and it may take a while to settle in with new good trend data over five, 10 years. But it is based on looking at historically, how many first graders become second graders? How many second graders become third graders? So, I mean, it's good historical data that's modeled that more than one district uses. So I think it's as good as it gets.  Well, and I'm thinking there's only so many houses and only so many people can live in my city or you keep telling me it's gonna increase. So you must be assuming I'll sell my house and somebody will move in my house with three kids. We're gonna change it into a new place. I think that's where the model could be flawed because I don't know that the model considers saturation of land. That's what I'm wondering. Because we've been lucky. We've been increasing. And I mean, what'll happen is the model will correct itself over time because as real estate housing is saturated, you're not gonna be seeing those increases anymore. So the model will correct itself but it could be wrong in the near term as that dynamic is occurring. So yeah, I'm hopeful that we still see some level of increases, but I think it's gonna slow. It might have a correction in the model just like the stock market has a correction in it. We might see a correction in the model at some point but right now it's still looking good. Michelle. I don't think my failure is gonna get full. It's not finite. No, I didn't mean that. Just checking. On the budget overview for FY19, you have 118,000 for the proposed bond. For FY20, you said we're going to be paying more on the bond because we're paying capital and interest not just interest. But that bond says zero. Did that go somewhere else? Yes. Because we had to show it as a separate article last year. So the 118, I had to show separately in case that didn't get approved so we come out. Now it's just part of the budget along with all the other online expenses. And that's probably something I should have pointed out. The other thing that you might ask about is the grant funds budget. You'll see that in 18, there was a separate number for grant funds because the way it used to be built is we didn't break out how we were gonna spend title money or idea of being money. We just said, we'll probably get $200,000 in title funds. So add $200,000 to the expense at the end. Now we say, we're gonna spend title one money on this person, that person, this is the salary, this is the benefit. It's rolled into our actual budget now. So it'll be nice next year when we don't have to show that grant funds budget line because that history will be long. But some of that uniqueness is gonna happen for a few years. But I should have probably called out that that proposed bond was there because it was proposed at that point. Once it's approved, it goes into the general fund or the general budget. So the other question I have is you want us to make a decision about taking $87,000 from the fund balance. And I don't think that you've told us what the fund balance is. Are you wanting to wait till we have the audits? Yes, and I'm probably gonna get it drafted. I was hoping that we might be able to have the audit available for the next few years. That's where we slated it to go. But, and it's not the auditor's fault. We were delayed in getting some information because of the hiccup we had with fixed assets. So we're hoping to get a draft of the audit by the end of this week. I don't know that we're gonna have a final version in time for the 19th, but I do think that I will have numbers. So I think I will be able to say what the fund balance is. It's big because we finished last year very good. So I don't wanna say the word, the number out loud, but I'm thinking it's like $700,000 or something like that. So it's $87,000 you could afford. Okay, I'm just checking. And we had talked before when we set up the capital plan and we talked last year, maybe the year before, about this fund balance situation. Not all districts have a fund balance or they have policies regarding their fund balance. How it can be spent or what amount you maintain and so forth. I think we have a policy that says we have to maintain two percent. And we haven't had any further conversation about what we have free latitude with what we do with beyond two percent. I believe that is within the board's purview. I mean, legally you have an article that says you have the authority to decide how to spend it. So I think now that you have that legal authority it is within your realm to decide the operational rules behind how you wanna manage it. Okay, but you don't have a recommendation for us as to how are we? I think that might be a subject for another day, but I do, two percent, I wouldn't go higher than two. I just asked, because we talked about it last year, but that was a long time ago. I wouldn't go higher than two percent. Okay. I just think that would certainly be the most I would say that you should require that is maintained. Okay. And the reason why you wanna have some is because you never know. Mary does the best job she can at forecasting like outside placement needs for 19 months in advance, but you don't know if three kids are gonna move in that need to be placed. So that could bite you at any point. So it is good to have some money, but I think two percent is certainly enough. So one question on the audit, I think that the Montpelier board is supposed to meet to accept that audit. You are correct. Okay, just check it. And that is probably, so maybe your last and final act. That is the last and final act. Yes, yes, yes. And the Rocksbury as well. It will be. Okay. On the fund balance, can I just follow up briefly? A couple of meetings ago, quarterly financial report, we were looking at anticipated unreserved fund balance of like $902,500. You just mentioned a $700,000 figure. Has that changed a little bit? I don't have it. I wasn't. Okay. But this week in the line up. I wasn't sure if that was after you had to, what's the bottom line whenever there's some things you have to subtract out of it. We should make sure that. There's the unreserved, which is like 1.14 million, then impossible Rocksbury deficit settlement. And then we get to the anticipated. I was just, the 900 was the bottom or the 900 was before those people came out of it, so. So that's what we're talking about. Yeah, and there's a good reason to have a good chunk of that because we're heading into a $4.9 million bond project where costs right now are through the roof because of tariff issues and all kinds of things and just saturation of vendors doing work and not having people redo work. So we're seeing costs way up there. So it is nice to have a little bit of cushion that we might be able to put in there to make sure we deliver what we hoped to deliver. So I would keep that set aside. We do have the Rocksbury deficit we still haven't covered. So 875, I think you can definitely afford that. The problem is not this year. Yeah, yeah. The problem is next year. Yeah. I generally, I don't like to spend the fund balance in that, for that reason, but I just wanted to take some context on that. And that's what I was going to say. I think of spending the fund balance on one-time things, not on your budget because then next year. Yeah. And that's why it was associated with what we think might be another drop in one-time projects. So we're both going to go away. But we're still in that position. Pandora's Rocks in a way. We are. We don't want to wash. Maybe we do get rid of the fund balance revenue so that if we have a drop in one-time project costs that helps stabilize the tax rate, especially since we're not going to be seeing a huge drop in tuition. So yeah, I didn't realize that until the numbers started shaking out and the tax rates started shaking out, then I was like, wow, why'd I put that in there? Right. With the higher yield. We're listening to our superintendent here. She's looking pretty. Oh, yeah. What, hour 16? We're good. Keep going. Thank you. Thank you so much, Grant. Yeah, thank you very much. I will try to speed it up a little bit next time But as Jim mentioned, it is kind of the opportunity for Rocks, but it folks to see it at first time. So you can't really show it. You should have your caffeine as well. Yeah. Thank you to all the administrators that were here today. Yeah, thank you. Now we didn't ask you five million questions. We were glad you were here. I'm thinking too. Did you hear her talking about MTSS? Oh, yeah. Did you hear it? Yeah. Tier one, the fifth day in a ten. It's very impressive. So, motion to adjourn. I move will you adjourn? Second. Second. All in favor? Aye.