So, there's 2.5 million right just to start right there in a conversation. Um Chris and I sat and we started adding these numbers up. Um and let's assume another increase for a for salaries at 2%. Another million dollars. So we're looking at close to five million. It was the five million. Yeah. 5 million was the number we're looking at for FY28 because you've got to replenish the funding that we're taking out of this of of our onetime accounts as well. Like you we will never be able to recover if we spend it all and then only get an override for the operational expense. That's just the reality. And again, I I'm harping I know I'm harping on it, but I'm trying to convince this community. I'm trying to fix the structural deficit and ensure fiscal stability over the next 5 years. If we continue to rely on these onetime funds, not only at the school level, but at the town level, that override number is going to just escalate quickly.
Uh many of you have talked about the yellow conference or meetings that are coming up. Have a a brief description from Mr. Martin at GHS. Talking about that on Friday, April 17th, the history department at GHS in collaboration with dial youth and community services will host the annual yellow which is youth engagement with legislators and officials conference in the ghs library. A few dozen students will have the opportunity to meet and engage in discussion groups with elected officials from the Greenfield School Committee, city council, and other town committees, as well as state legislators. This year's main topics chosen by the students are one, municipal finances and budgeting, two, AI in schools, and three, drugs, alcohol, and vaping amongst teens. So, you are obviously all invited to that, and that's going on. So, thanks to Mr. barn for organizing that. I want to mention that I was able to attend a great play at the by the high school drama club, The Secret Garden, which was fantastic.
Uh many of you have talked about the yellow conference or meetings that are coming up. Have a a brief description from Mr. Martin at GHS. Talking about that on Friday, April 17th, the history department at GHS in collaboration with dial youth and community services will host the annual yellow which is youth engagement with legislators and officials conference in the ghs library. A few dozen students will have the opportunity to meet and engage in discussion groups with elected officials from the Greenfield School Committee, city council, and other town committees, as well as state legislators. This year's main topics chosen by the students are one, municipal finances and budgeting, two, AI in schools, and three, drugs, alcohol, and vaping amongst teens. So, you are obviously all invited to that, and that's going on. So, thanks to Mr. Martin for organizing that. I want to mention that I was able to attend a great play at the by the high school drama club, The Secret Garden, which was fantastic.
So, Greenwood Industries has been contacted to assess this the condition. And the alarm is very sensitive. There's motion sensors in the classroom, which are frequently going off and causing excessive false alarms. So, good. A lot of work to do in the new school. Nothing like a leak at the new school. Any Anything else Sorry. No, our issue Uh the motion sensors inside the classrooms have essentially been turned off, so that there's not the frequent um false alarms, because they're very the motion sensors are very very sensitive to anything where there's like light coming in. So, classrooms with windows, um obviously, they would trigger those those alarms. Um I do have an update on the the roof. Um uh Greenwood Industries, which is the installer of the roof, uh was out, I think at the end of last week or maybe even the beginning of this week.
They cut it short, but other than that we got to go. The kids were awesome. They went to ski and snowboard and they had so much time. So, we're really grateful that we got to participate in that program. >> [clears throat] >> Um then we had cross country um and that was available to um kindergarten through eighth graders. So, it's the only sport that we get to do all grades. Um we had I think 90 90 runners. >> [laughter] >> Um so, school was really small on the days that they were gone, but it was so fun for them to be out there running. Um as you can see they're all tired. Then we had our academic pentathlon which the last meeting we got to see them and congratulate them. They won first place um down at their county competition. So, that was a great season for them.
And so in the Office of Hawaiian Education, one of our strategic priorities is really to focus in on establishing a solid Ka Ka Puni Teacher Pipeline specifically with our educator educator preparation programs. Okay, and I'm really hoping that we can flesh that out because the Standard Board, like the whole idea of Ka Puni is to disassociate. And so it seems like there's been a little bit of a clash there, but um, thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. >> Thank you. We will resolve in the next meeting.
I I hope my language someone makes you proud of your time tonight and board members. Let's take a five minute break just because we've been here since 4 and we'll be back at it for a regular meeting. Thank you. for a minute. Then I saw your How are you? So the eyes All right. It's question. Sure. >> I'm excited. It's really good. Just remember that. by the last field trips how a class field Hello basketball. Oh, All right, we're going to call everybody Thank you everybody for your patience. We're clearly running behind tonight, but I suspect that we'll be able to catch up on some time um through our program this evening. Uh good evening to all. Welcome to this evening's regular board meeting this Wednesday, April 8th of 2026. April means it's ArabAmerican Heritage Month, a month to celebrate and recognize the rich culture history, achievements, and contributions of the nearly 4 million Arab Americans in our United States.
Um, if that should happen, we're made aware of what is presented to the committee before it goes. >> Right. And we would use and we have set up in that novel review process. We use that novel review process the same way in reverse. So if an approved text comes up and you say, "Oh, hey, the board already said that Great Gatsby is okay." Now, we got a couple of parents who are saying, "We don't think Great Gatsby's okay." We would follow that same process of, "Okay, we bring the community together. We bring some teachers together. We read it together and we say, "Does this person's complaint have merit? If it does, we bring that to you and say, "We think they're actually right. we probably shouldn't be reading this in sixth grade or we probably shouldn't be reading it at all, whatever the case may be and we remove it from the approved list or we say no, we did the review and it's one person or two people's personal viewpoint and we leave it alone.
Just has to because you've got to you've got to come back in and pull the uh you know the the expense lines that you've paid for out of one-time funds into the operational override. >> Yeah. And Jim, I think one of the keys is to make sure people understand that these >> revolving accounts are essential for the eb and flow. We can set a budget today and we can we can know what the state budget is and know we can the day after we can set a budget and it will fluctuate. It fluctuates daily. And so, you know, you probably can't articulate it any more than just saying it, but the if we were to deplete these, >> there's a need for these revolving accounts to have balances in them. And and that need doesn't go away. So, that is a critical piece. And that's the reason why it would need to be more because >> if if these are gone, >> the budget never is is static once we set it.
Uh everything, the acting, the scenery, all things that went about it. And we did such they did such a nice job that they did a presentation and invited our third and fourth graders from our city schools, our elementary schools to go and see it in the daytime before they had their first run at nighttime with adults. and the students did a great job sitting there being attentive and being a great audience. Also have another shout out to GHS senior Ash Bigalow who pre who presented in participated in the Academy of Music's regional youth poetry slam that happened last Friday, April 3rd and many of other students did. Ash competed in the slam and made it to all three competitive rounds and then won third place with a cash prize. So, congratulations to all those students who performed their poems, showing great vulnerability, courage, and strength.
Uh everything, the acting, the scenery, all things that went about it. And we did such they did such a nice job that they did a presentation and invited our third and fourth graders from our city schools, our elementary schools to go and see it in the daytime before they had their first run at nighttime with adults. and the students did a great job sitting there being attentive and being a great audience. Also have another shout out to GHS senior Ash Bigalow who pre who presented in participated in the Academy of Music's regional youth poetry slam that happened last Friday, April 3rd and many of other students did. Ash competed in the slam and made it to all three competitive rounds and then won third place with a cash prize. So, congratulations to all those students who performed their poems, showing great vulnerability, courage, and strength.
Um they did do some patches on some of the seams in that area um where the leak was, and they also looked at the um there's one >> [snorts] >> um air handler that was on top of the roof where there was water coming out when when he stepped on the seam between the air handler and the roof. Um they are going to um they agreed that it didn't look right, um and they acknowledged that, and they they're going to send somebody back with more materials to correct that um to correct that issue. So, there's been some there's been some movement on some of these Is it And there hasn't been any reports [clears throat] Not that we would. Um of odors um with those um chillers turning on um in the since, you know, middle of last week, I would say. Um it's been it's been clear.
>> [clears throat] >> Um we still have our garden going strong. Um we didn't have lessons in the month of April because we have our Earth Day activity, but every month our kids get to participate in wonderful garden lessons put together. Um so, there's some pictures there. Our wonderful [clears throat] PTC sponsored um the sky dome assembly. So, they come out with this big dome and the kids um climb through and they look at um different constellations in space. So, that was really cool. So, it's fun for them. Um our ASB team, those girls up there in the corner with the aprons on, they wanted to raise some money for ASB um to allow us to do other fun events. So, they put on a movie night. So, they um we had pizza, popcorn, candy and we watched the movie Cars. So, that's why those decorations are like a road and a stop sign.
Chair, did you have any questions? No. No other questions. Okay, we will move on to the next agenda item, uh, Senate Concurrent Resolution 202 and Senate Resolution 190 requesting the University of Hawaii to allow an Olelo Hawaii pathway under the Niihau dialect. Um, testifying on this measure is the University, I hope. Yeah, Deborah Halbert. Good afternoon, Chair, Vice Chair, representing the committee, Debbie Halbert, Vice President for Academic Strategy. We'll stand on our written testimony offering comments and I can answer questions if you so Yes, you don't have questions. >> Okay. Do you want me to stay here? Okay. Julia Alkahone. Support. Cheryl Burkhart. Also in support. Anyone else here wishing to testify on this measure?
Arab Americans are a diverse group representing the cultural heritage of 22 countries across Southwest Asia and Northern Africa or commonly known as Swana and West and Southwest Asia. The Arab National Museum has some wonderful virtual tours available online along with other learning resources and our very own Chandler Library has a creative list of children's books to check out by and with ArabAmerican protagonists. I want to thank everybody for joining. We appreciate your time and engagement with our board and its business. If you are joining online, please bear with our single wide view for this evening's meeting. We are experiencing some technical challenges, but we're glad to be able to live stream our meeting. And with that, we will now initiate roll call with Mrs. King, please. >> And Missa will be joining us later in our program.
I think the big thing is that we just need direction from you as a board as to how you want to make that decision because I'm willing to bet that amongst the five of you one of you, some of you has zero complaints, somebody has 15, somebody has three, and we just need you to get on the same page about what we're okay with just so we don't create any confusion for teachers. Other than that, I got no investment in it. I think as long as each of us have ample and fair opportunity to review the list so that if there are any concerns um we can think about them, discuss them, figure out is this something that is just one person has a problem with it and then we can go from there and decide just like anything else that we would decide as a board tonight when we decided that there were five things from ASBA that we are moving forward with.
We need that ability to uh change as as the year goes on, right? >> There's just so much volatility, right? There's so much volatility with um with our out of district, especially education costs, so much volatility with our transportation costs. Uh all of those things create um stressors on our system. And if if we need roof repair, uh a boiler at the Pitway School, right? I like like we need these things. How do we fund them? and what's a good approach and and our approach is trying to again fix this problem so we have flexibility um to do these things. You know, for the community, you've seen this in the budget. I've I've gone over it numerous times. We're still reducing our our FTEEs by 13.2 staff members this year. um ranging from some unfilled positions, yes, um but mainly retirements as well. On the right hand side are are true reductions of personnel um that were not impacted by non-filled position andor retirements.
I'd also like to mention that yesterday um Mr. Sullivan and I were fortunate enough to attend the Greenfield High School poetry slam after school and Miss Pollock the school librarian runs that club and does a wonderful job. all the present they had students presenting um written poems that they wrote faculty members as well they're doing the same thing and I mentioned to her and many of the students and participants afterwards that I was amazed at the creativity and how they could I guess you I'll just say write poems sometimes I don't see myself as as creative in that sense of doing it maybe I'm more of a scientific linear type of thinker in that way. But I was very impressed at what they did yesterday at Greenfield High School in their own poetry slam which they held they hold once a year. So shout out to all those who participated.
I'd also like to mention that yesterday um Mr. Sullivan and I were fortunate enough to attend the Greenfield High School poetry slam after school and Miss Pollock the school librarian runs that club and does a wonderful job. all the present they had students presenting um written poems that they wrote faculty members as well they're doing the same thing and I mentioned to her and many of the students and participants afterwards that I was amazed at the creativity and how they could I guess you I'll just say write poems sometimes I don't see myself as as creative in that sense of doing it maybe I'm more of a scientific linear type of thinker in that way. But I was very impressed at what they did yesterday at Greenfield High School in their own poetry slam which they held they hold once a year. So shout out to all those who participated.
>> Thanks. Is the NBC um they're aware of all the problems? >> Absolutely. >> Okay. >> And they they immediately um you know, Paul Checko has reached out to, you know, the the the engineers, the you know, the architects, the design teams of all these systems to really get all hands on deck to see if this is Our concern is really are these individual one-off issues that we should be correcting as a maintenance team, or is it um emblematic of a of a more systemic problem that, you know, it was maybe an issue with how things were designed or installed. So, we just want an answer on that, so we have some guidance on how we should continue to address them. Yeah, I mean And so, yeah. No, I just like I said, I sat as the rep, so and I know they've gone through the school nonstop, so I just want to make sure they're involved, but I mean, I would think with a 3-year-old school, we shouldn't be having all these problems.