That's right. Yeah. I think so. That's three. Can we discuss the twos? Um, within that you want to discuss the twos. Okay, let's pick what two to discuss. Are we allowed to say the one we looked up that had votes of no confidence? I don't know if everyone googled people to look. I only found one. I found two. You had to dig deep because she had a different name. Okay. All right. Uh, let's pick one and discuss. Who would like to propose? But I'm asking, are we allowed to talk about their votes? I would say two things. First of all, votes in no conference are public information. Okay. Um they are also not uncommon to be fair. Okay. Yeah. No, I just I get it. I just I think my I think my first question, Mr. Chair, is do you want to do you want to discuss your twos or do you want to discuss your threes only because you have three threes?
Um, Wednesday, April 30th is going to be the spring band concerts at 7:30. Um, Canton's Got Talent, as Dr. Gross we already mentioned was this past Friday and students from all schools came to uh celebrate their unique talents. Um science olympiad a second year event um had students competed our second the state competition on March 22nd earning um 10th place overall in the state which is uh very good for a secondyear program. Um, juniors took their SATs on March 26th. Uh, junior prom will be April 25th and all spring sports are underway despite the um difficult weather. Uh, moving on to CMS. Um, on March 28th, Mr. Moore and instructional coaches and Mr. Bishop uh presented at the Connecticut Association School uh schools leader state conference which I think you still on April 1st and second CMS uh hosted walkthroughs with visitors uh coming from across the district to see the exceptional work that students and staff have been doing.
And then the other question um that I had relative to that um is anybody thinking about whether that and maybe this is an output of the meeting whether the H height bonus would be carried over um in the new comprehensive plan and would it be applied for example to residential districts? Um I anybody that's following local news knows that one of the big points of controversy in the new comprehensive plan for the residential um areas is whether or not the maximum height will be three stories or four stories. And then if you apply a 30% height bonus to that um whether it's for this or potentially affordable housing um will those height bonuses um be carried over into the new uh residential zoning uh that will accompany or be a a followup to or or tied to the comprehensive plan. So I'm done and Joe take it take it away.
And then finally, for my part, and I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Shahada for some of the technical stuff. All right, he just gave me a dirty look. I'll take I'll do it. I want to share with you some fun facts. Somebody said to me, "You got to trim the fat." And I took offense to that because I thought they were calling me fat. They're like, "No, the budget. You got to trim the fat." Because, you know, I'm a large mammal. So, everybody thinks there's fat. I don't know. There might be fat. Maybe maybe Mr. Rose is hoarding boxes of pencils up in her office. I don't know. But here's why I will tell you there's no fat to trim. And here's just a few things. And please fact check me. Anybody can Google the New Jersey taxpayer taxpayer guide to education spending.
Um, we're also charging off a portion of many admin salaries. So, a portion of the principal salaries, the custodial salaries that are there, a portion of your executive admin team as well. Um, so we are seeing it. If we don't charge off a portion there, we could certainly charge it off the utilities, but it would just be a net zero for us. But in the future, as the grant or as the program expands, there might be more flexibility to start charging more towards some of those other things as well. Okay. Very, very good. Thank you. You're welcome. I have a question as it pertains to the way our budget works and I know we kind of outlined this, but I just want to make it really clear. Um or our agenda, sorry. um tonight, uh item 6.1, the vote on that is pretty much, and I'm going to explain it in layman's terms, voting yes or no on whether or not to explore the option of taking the amount of money.
Um the out-of pocket max is moving from $5,000 to 5,600. Primary care office visit remains at $35. Your specialist co-pay does increase $30 from 45 to 75 and the urgent care does increase from 55 to 85. And then the classic silver plan within the banner network is the $400 deductible increases to 700. The Etna network is 500 to 800. Again, co insurance does not change. And then the out-of- pocket maximum changes from 36 to 42, 84 for a family, and then the 4500 to 5,100 and then 9,000 to 10,200. Again, the co-pays for specialists increase 32 $30. So from 32 to 62 and from 40 to 70 and then urgent care from 42 to 72 and then 50 to 80. So again, these are the changes that they have does put them in line with the market. If you go to the next slide, it's same thing.
Are there any questions about our classroom spending report? I just I just have a comment. I don't know if it's really a question, but um I noticed that on our one of the data points about teachers in their first three years, that number seems very low for us. We're not we're not attracting younger teachers to replace all the all of us old people that are leaving. Um, so I just wanted to kind of throw that out there as something to to consider as we go forward. If I might respond, Mr. President, yes, it is a concern. One of the projects we've been working on is teacher housing. We're working to expand that. We're working with Allison Heapner to try to get 11 additional units next year. Um, we've built, I think, out seven, six or seven districtwide. And we the cost of living is a big barrier for teachers right out of college.
Dr. McCord. Thank you, Mr. Thompson. Governing board members, again, I'll turn this over. This is will highlight uh what we're looking and we're proposing for salary increases, but uh there's a little bit bigger story to that to tell you how we got to where we came up with the the percentage. Great. Okay. Thank you. Um so again, just to remind you, we're in 2025 and so this is our preliminary budget. we're anticipating in 2026 and the legislature is nowhere near being complete with the budget conversation. Um, however, the govern we do have the governor's um budget and we do have what we think is a pretty good projection of what we think our student count will be for next year. So, we felt like we had enough information that we could make a recommendation to you tonight. Okay. So um student count projections the GPS M budget projection we are specific to maintenance and operations today uh not discussing unrestricted capital uh the uh two fiscal year 2026 classroom site fund allocation which is playing a large role in balancing the budget increases in costs and expected savings the recommended pay increases.
So, uh, one change that did come from the summer of 2025 is we are actually going to start work on the middle school this summer. Um, if you guys can remember, the plan for the middle school was to add seven additional classrooms, four smaller workspaces. Um, believe they're currently being used for like PT, uh, small group instruction. And then in the addition that was added in around 2015, I believe we were going to wall off a little bit of the rotunda and make that a teacher space uh where meeting space for teachers to work on our plan period. Um after meeting with um the contractors, we decided to go ahead and get started on that project this summer. Wow. So you guys will see a line item. No u no alteration to cost. I just took the the cost estimates for those that portion of the project and moving them up into summer of 2025.
I think outside of Ponito. Ponito. Yeah, outside of Ponito. This looks a lot like Ponito. Yeah. Mhm. So, right now, Norwell's going to take the turn first. So, they're going to start here and they're going to try to push this robot/payload guy, whatever it is, as far as they can. And then each team will take a turn and see how far they can push it. So, as of right now, there's little checkpoints you can see with those the progress bar and those little diamond blue those little blue diamonds. Is it also a lot of teamwork still involved with this? Same group different characters for us. Yep. Yep. Looks like they've changed off of their main their main um tank character. They're no longer the the hog character. They've got this character called Winston who just made that little bubble over there. He's kind of an ape who kind of jumps around.
I'm happy to discuss if people want to discuss. But let's be clear if we're discussing based only on what's been provided or if we're discussing based on whatever I think we're discussing based on whatever else has been researched or or found that could be a little iffy at this stage where picking resumes to then bring in for an interview that interview process reference checks background check all that should be done at that point I think I personally think we should be slight selecting resumes that have been submitted that we then want to move to a further we've got it sounds like three right now. Right now you have three you would if you if it was as you noted if it was a majority you would have Thompson you would have Gilson and you would have G. I'm open that's what I would suggest but if anybody wants something different that's a good point that is the other question as to whether or not you want to move forward keeping in mind that you also have scheduled yourself for a single meeting.
Um, and CMS held their own very own version of March Madness, competing in trash kitball competitions with the champion to be named this week. Uh, and coming up soon, uh, CMS eighth graders will be heading to their long awaited Washington DC trip April 23rd to the 25th. It's great. Good.
Yeah, no worries. Um I I do not know on the hype bonus side or on how the how it's fitting into the comprehensive plan. I can look into that. That's been mostly through planning. We've we've had conversations. I have not been part of those. So I I don't know that one off the top of my head, but I definitely would love to hear folks feedback on that just in like I said, I know it's been talked about. I just don't know exactly where that is. But if folks have strong feelings um or thoughts or insight, whatever, um would definitely love to know that. Um and it's all good. I was mostly um wrapping up with my stuff anyway um and happy to turn it back to folks and participate as as makes sense. But the only other things I'll say is just like we are um it's always been a thing we've been working on towards this but we are like more actively incorporating these into you know more defined work streams and work plans um around both how we decarbonize our new buildings and our existing buildings.
And how they do this is they separate districts. They compare districts by their size. And so we are in a cohort of 96 districts with a population of 3,500 students or more. And in that cohort, our administrative costs in this district rank the 19th lowest out of 96 districts. That's the lowest 20%. That means we don't spend as much on administration as 80% of the other districts that are size 3500 students or more. Our operations and maintenance cost, look at this, ranks 14th out of 96 districts. That's all the things to maintain our buildings, our 100-year-old buildings. 14th. Our per pupil costs are in the bottom third, 33rd out of 96. That means we spend less per money than twothirds of the other districts. Our classroom instruction costs, direct costs for classroom instruction are in the bottom third of the 96 districts, 31st. By the way, that per pupil cost uh last year or it might have been two years ago, I think we were 15.
We're not voting on any specific dollar amount. We're not voting on any specific percentage. Um, we're voting specifically on getting into the point of of looking into how much we're going to take. Am I correct on that? Yeah. The the So, yeah. So, 6.1 it outlines our opportunity that we are eligible for an additional $15ish million of additional tax levy. It does not specify in 6.1 how much of it we should take. Um it is just an acknowledgement that we are eligible. So our our task here tonight is twofold. From a voting perspective in 6.1, we need to vote whether or not we should acknowledge that we are eligible for that 15 million. If the board is not interested in taking any of that $15 million, we should be voting no. If you're interested in any amount between $1 and $15 million, you should be voting yes.
I just have it highlighted here. So I kind of broke it out on the page before. You'll see that um there are some pharmacy changes in the co-pays. The percentages stayed the same except the minimum and the maximum did increase by $30 on what um depending on what tier that falls into.
We recognize that and that's something the next administration will continue to work on too. Mr. Grenell, when you were explaining the numbers on the on uh the schools that we're being compared with, I would imagine that the smaller the school is, the the more jobs are covered by the teachers. So, they go in all these other categories, too. So the schools that are smaller than we are have a harder time comparing themselves too because people have so many hats in those schools. Why did they think that this is a good thing to compare them like that? I I think the legislature at some point back in the early 20ou or 2001 or whatever decided to do this and I I'm not sure that they really comprehend like what they're doing for I bring Tuba City up because Tuba City has a lot of money. So those teachers probably the opposite don't have to do a lot of different jobs because they have so much money.
Then we got to balance the budget with all these moving parts. And then finally the budget risks and opportunities associated with how we're going to move forward over the next two months, two and a half months I guess. So student count projections. So over the last three months um we have been working pretty closely with our student accounting data team and technology services constantly having them check what does the cohort movement look like i.e. when kindergarteners are going into first grade, first grade going into second grade, what is our enrollment loss today versus what we might expect in the future using um um Mr. Brammer's uh demographic report to try to make a a good estimate on what we think our student counts will be next year. So, based upon the most recent information, we believe that um anticipating a student loss of 1,300 ADM has enough conservatism um to it that that we feel comfortable that that we'd probably beat that.
So really excited to show that we're getting started with that project in addition to completing the sports flex. Um then for this Oh, sorry. No, we just Yeah. Yeah. Subliminally clapping, right? She got me doing it, too. Maybe I'll be doing it by hand. As long as you're not dancing. Okay. So, Jason, the work will get started, but it still won't be will it be completed this year or those those rooms will be ready. Those small rooms, just those small six rooms will be completed for the start of school. We've already spoke with principal Cos. She's working with, you know, the summer school. We're not going to shut it down. She's got summer school in separate area. But those rooms will be ready to be utilized. And then we'll continue with our plan to add the classroom throughout the year and be ready for August of 2022.
And now now why do Gavalon and Fish have an X by then? That means they're dead. Oh, so that's not So that's not that's that is not Unless you're playing in a zombie type. Yeah. So that means they are coming back to Got it. Now they've resed back and Got it. So we're trying to hustle back here. Okay.