What does it mean the pin comp does that? This is not my language. This is not the school committee's language. This is straight from the state's guidance, DESI's guidance. So that's available out there for anyone to see. We can provide it to you if you want it, but you just do a quick look at Desi's uh district and school finance guidance on municipal approval of a regional school district budget March 2025. It's out there for anybody to see. So, everybody was asking questions about that. What does it mean for two towns? That's that's what it is right there. So, uh moving on, I'd like to introduce please Miss Tracy Novik to please come up. Uh you're gonna take it up. All right, Tracy, you can come up here or up there. I mean, whatever. wherever you got lights on if you want the mic. Okay, please excuse me if I drop things when I start to write things down.
That meeting uh will take place on Monday. This is a public meeting and it will be posted for anybody that wants to come to u we're going to hear from our insurance broker and our insurance consultant at that meeting. And the final thing I' I'd mentioned is that um tonight uh you'll hear um we'll be able to talk about the custodians uh contract which is completed and we'll be moving into the secretar's uh negotiation from there. Um and that's all that I have.
Um and then you know final room for improvement as if you know not inherent by me saying that the 2021 codes are being adopted in 2025. Um it's been a little slow in terms of the process for it. Um before I move on, Larry, do you want to comment on that or anything? Yeah. Um I apologize for coming in in the middle of here. I'm dealing with three grand uh young grandchildren right now, so things are kind of hectic. Um anyway, I I just wanted to make people aware of um talking about incentives for electrification. We did a pro I'm sorry I'm chair of the Wolfpack climate action team um which is a local group. I don't know how many of you know about the Wolfpack, but we are a group of about 30 individuals that are interested in um you know climate action and we've been working on um building electrification zero emissions passive house standards for the past year and a half or so.
So, we got a that's a one-time credit. I I can't count on that million dollars next year. Transportation went down. I can't count on that. Okay. So, on to the present. On May 3rd, excuse me, March 13th, guys, we sat here with a preliminary budget. We don't pass our budget till May 1st. On March 13th, we sat here. We gave you a budget that said we recommend that we raise the tax levy 2% because we are legally allowed to do that without any additional vote. The board can do that. That's the law. We're allowed to do that each year. In fact, the state funding formula makes the assumption that you go to 2% every year. That's part of their calculation. Nevertheless, when we and this is the part I take responsibility for. We made it clear that night that we needed 2% to just maintain what we have, to keep what we currently have.
Uh that severely adjusted the means in which we could live by uh or I guess pass a budget by, I should say. Um and now as a result we are being punished for living within those means as opposed to just taking the easy option of you know raise the taxes every year as much as we possibly can. Yeah. Sorry if I can just add something. Um to think of it may help to think of it another way. um when they're saying adequacy for budget purposes, they're saying the funding level that's necessary to provide a thorough and efficient education. So I know that there are just two more words out there, but basically you're saying, okay, we're we're providing a thorough and efficient education for the students in this district. So just another lens to look at that through. Are they basically saying in a perfect world that is the funding we should be getting from the state?
Would you? Thank you. Yes, sir. President, members of the board and members of the community and members this time of the year so we can begin the process of reviewing our benefit and the comparisons for this particular year. this official analysis not only of our benefits um but also um what other uh how our current uh packet or or um insurance company compares to other ones. We have a presenter today uh that is going to be joining us today. So if you don't mind coming and and introducing yourself on the podium and walking us through the presentation. Let's give her a warm hand and welcome our presenter today. Thank you. Good evening, members of the board. My name is Jennifer Aragon. I am the CBiz representative for the district. I'm here to present your upcoming 256 next school year. Oh, okay. There we go. Will you move it along as I Okay.
You can see that Tuba City Unified School District is one of our peer groups. We are not similar to Tuba City Unified School District in many, many ways. One way is they are 100% funded by impact aid. That essentially means that they get double the amount of funding that we get because they get 100% impact aid because they're on the Navajo Nation. Um and you can see some other schools in there. They're not in the same um funding situation as Tuba City. But just remember when you're looking at these reports, when the auditor general says it's a peer group, it's this list, not our neighboring districts. So here we go. So, here's our classroom spending report. You can see that um 66% of our um dollars that we get um go into our classrooms. That's instruction, student support, and instructional support. And then so then the other the other part of the pie is our administration, our plant operations, that's our maintenance facilities, our food service, and our transportation.
It's only function 1000. So, I just wanted to make sure that all of you were aware of that as well. So, if you look at Mesa, Mesa reports a 74,000 then a 72,000 for average salary and their district spending report shows 69,000. That makes sense to us. I mean, it's logically makes sense because they may have done what we did and they included everyone that was classroom site fund eligible at that time to determine what the average teacher salary is. What looks odd is that Higgley, as an example, reports 64,000, but the calculation results in 67,000. Again, the same idea. If you're going to report it, you'd want to report it as accurately and as high as possible. So, it just seems it it seems very very likely that at least at this point in time, the data that's being pulled out is not accurate.
So if they if those families had another child, that child goes to another school, right? We're not even grandfathering in those children. The other thing is with the budget constraints, we have to maintain our residency because if we have another issue where we have to pull in a service to do that, It's got to be fair because one of them people could say, one of those families could say, "Well, that person doesn't live here. Why are they here?" So, you could have that argument. And I know we've worked really hard on trying to give the taxpayers, you know, they're like I said from the beginning, it's not about it's it's about our taxpaying children first. So, every taxpayer in this district and their children, what and then anything after that. But I just think we worked really hard on the residency to maintain that level of you're a resident here then your kids here bringing an outside uh staff member.
Okay. And we have uh of course that's Jaden. Oh, now we're switching. Exploding Eli. All right. And we're still climbing. Look at that. We held them at 99. Now we're at going on 90%. We keep it. Keep going. Yep. We just killed their tank, but we've lost our tank. So, it's going to be right now. I think we're in trouble. Uhoh. I think they're they're about to get control. There's this little Once this overtime bar we have to get on the point here before, which we did. But is it because we're both at 99%? Correct. So now it's Well, even when someone's at 99%. Oh. Oh, just fell just short on that one, but it's still the first. All right. So, do you think they'll they'll talk among themselves and talk about what uh what maybe they need to do differently the second time around?
Um, good evening. It's good to be with you again. Um, I I know that everyone around this table knows who I am, but for those who um haven't been here when I've been here in the past, my name is Tracy Nic. Um, I'm the field director for Central Massachusetts for the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. Um I uh am here in part to to basically uh to give you an update on what you have um before you this evening. Um for those who are sort of tuning in now, I guess I would say um you in you, the school committee decided in February on a two-part process in terms of the superintendency. you decided that you would pursue an interim superintendent for next school year, so the 2526 school year, and that you would um then be searching for your permanent superintendent as soon as the school year started next year, that superintendent starting in um July of 2026.
Any questions for me? Is that um insurance meeting on Monday hybrid as well? It is 6:30. Yeah, it'll be at the community center. I've asked for it to be hybrid because I know the community's um interested in that meeting. Any other questions? Then I'll sorry then I'll move to the uh the superintendent, Dr. Gford. Thank you, Mr. Daniels. Good to see everyone. It's great to see so many faces that I see in the hallways at Kent Middle School. And I want to thank especially our our staff coming out at a after a long day. I'm going to start off by saying that it's been a busy past month since our our last meeting. It seems like there's so many events that are happening and our athletic teams are back out onto the fields and the the courts even though our the weather has not been very nice to to the start of the season and the track actually too.
We held a workshop and um got input from the developers themselves, the developers and builders and had them to uh come up with a list of 32 incentives. And then we went out for a vote and had them vote on which ones they thought were the the best. And so, um, you know, this was about a year ago. So, I don't know if people are aware of that effort, but we do have a list of the 32 incentives that the developers themselves came up with and their rank ordering of those incentives about what would incent them to, you know, electrify their buildings. Um now I note that a lot of those uh incentives probably you know are are no longer needed since you know pretty much all um as Ken Garber said all buildings now are being pretty much all electric multif family buildings but there's still some work to do in the uh single family residents commercial buildings for you know making them all electric and not just all electric but zero emissions.
But I don't think I know that I didn't fully explain all the things that we have to say no to in order to just maintain what we have. Meaning I think people were under the mistaken idea that maintaining current operations means we didn't look for other ways to save money. We did. Not only that, this process starts in October and November. Mr. Shiada and his team meet with every principal and we start planning our budget for the new year. And as part of that budget process, we ask, "What are the needs? What do you need? What do you have to have?" And then in the event we get that half a billion dollars, what's your wish list? Knowing they're probably never getting their wish list. So that 2% wasn't just to maintain operations. That was also a no on every need that came from our staff member, every request that came from our staff member saying, "We need this." And it was also a no to any possible wish list item.
They're acknowledging that we're not and basically giving us the opportunity to take it from the taxpayers instead. See, because my understanding to this is that a lot of districts in New Jersey, right, they were falling below that thorough and efficient mark, right? So, what the state then did is they decided we're going to give them 37 $37,000 per pupil, some districts even higher, right? as opposed to us where they're now looking at us and saying, "Oh, well, you know, sucks to be EAM Township. Now, you got to go to your taxpayers instead." Right? I mean, I don't know if there's any thought as to where it comes to being on the loser end of this. Um, it's it's just when we present that we might have to raise taxes up to $1,000, right? Or nearly $1,000 on the average assessed household. Um, I I think people want to know the answer to that question.
You have the power. I have. So, here we go. So, this evening, we'll go over a little bit of your current summary programs. We'll take a look at your claims. We'll look at the medical renewal that's coming up along with your current plans, cost summaries. We'll review your dental, vision, life, disability, and then some communication strategy that we put on during open enrollment. So your current programs that you have in place is your medical and that is with asbait which is inside a trust for a 7125 effective date. You have a DHMO with employer dental service. This is leaving the market for this upcoming year. So we do have a couple of options to show you. The PO dental plan is with Delta Dental Visions with VSSP and then Sigma carries your life voluntary life and short-term disability. So, taking a look at your quarterly claims through December of 2024, the plan is running better than it's been in the past.
And I would say that that's a really good number. Um statewide, I think it's more like 62 to 62. Yeah. Um, so this is just the difference that we had. This just shows the difference we had from uh last year to this year. So when I say last year, I mean 2023 and 2024. Um, and you can see that our uh our our classroom um spending went up a little bit, but our non-classroom spending went down. So that's good. We're putting more dollars in the classroom. All right. So this is just a little graph that the um Auditor General's office puts together. And you can see that peer average column. Remember that's that list that I showed you before that's comparing us to for instance Tuba City. Um so take these numbers and the comparisons a little bit with a grain of salt because I don't feel like we're similar to Tuba City at all.
So again, just another indicator of as we draw conclusions from some of these summaries um that we take it with a grain of salt and make sure that we understand the story behind it. So again, we will be sharing this again a year from now where we will have more confidence that the the data that's put into those buckets is more accurate because every prior to this, every district can do it however they think is right. include stipens or not include stipens, include um other things or or not include those and and so it was their own formula and our formula might not be the same as somebody else's. That's correct. Wasn't mandated by the state. That's correct. Okay. So, I'm just not saying it's incorrect. I'm just saying it's suspicious. It's not, you know, it's likely not totally accurate. I would feel much more comfortable a year from now when we're presenting to you.
I just so I I do have one question one one I don't know if it's a question or a statement the the taxpayer and I don't care what y'all decide at this point. I mean that if somebody wants to come they're going to find a way. um the taxpayer thing, right? That might work in nutri or something like that where the base of your money comes from tax dollars. We have a small percent small a much smaller percentage of the base of our money coming from tax dollars versus Lincoln 60% of our property tax revenue property taxes from grants from uh from title funds, right? We're not getting much about 12% federal. I'm wrong. I take that back. We get 70 70% right for sure that I think I think Jason going to talk on the property. So I think if I'm correcting in the 65 to 67% range is a ballpark that their property tax that's why most people associate their tax bill like Jason's got a presentation here.
Yeah, I think so. I was looking at the board over there. Well, it they're showing a little bit on the scoreboard that was on there. Mhm. Um, looks like we're changing up some characters on this one. Okay. And we've started, right? So, Aiden is looking through his perspective here, right? Correct. Yep. Aiden. Yep. He's now playing a character called Ash, which is a little bit more of a distance. The character he played before was Reaper, which you had to get in close and do some damage up close, where this clo character does damage from far, but still still the team concept. still got to work together as a unit and his job's to do some damage. So, he's got to do damage from afar. And you can't I can't hear him, of course, but you can see him moving. So, obviously he's talking to his other teammates.