That's essentially inflation. Next slide. We have many categories for expenses, but I try to simplify this because I wanted to focus on what's driving costs and that's really salaries and benefits. And while you see a certain healthy increase in salaries as we would expect over time, the largest increase that we see now and in the foreseeable future is in benefits. Can you repeat that? The largest increase that we will see now and in the future is in benefits, employee benefits. Unfortunately, we're we're struggling to contain those costs and we don't we're doing our best, but we don't foresee that uh this is something that is going to be easy to do. And this isn't a Batavia problem, this is a nationwide issue. These costs are exploding nationwide. I I just it's hard for me to imagine how we can sustain increases as we have been or we're likely to see both here in Batavia and nationwide.
>> it means in the future exploring buying accessories for an iPad that help them understand how to use these other devices. And we could even look at laptops again times have changed maybe it's time to look at something different like I'm not against looking at something different I just don't want people to think we randomly chose iPads and we're just unwilling to change. Like the the choices that we're making have come through a continuum of development over time as we initially brought when we initially brought in curriculum that required and as the state initially required us to have technology for testing um our original model was to have a split of the two different types of devices. I just want to add real quickly if I may all of our iPads do have keyboards mouse in the fashion of iPad laptop. Oh that's right that's right.
You see some differences in the green, those are the capital expenses primarily and those fluctuate based on when we're spending money for warm safe drive. And the reason why I show purchased services is because in Batavia we rely very heavily on uh third-party contracts that provide custodial services, transportation services, and food services to our students. Whereas most school districts have our those employees that do that work are employed in-house. >> And this is the net result is our fund balance. You can see in 2026 we're spending a healthy chunk of our fund balance on warm, safe, dry. And then we'll continue to do so for the next 5 years as we complete that work. The challenge here is that based on our forecasts, by the time we reach 2030, those fund balances will be at our policy minimums. Which means that essentially we're going to be living paycheck to paycheck after that.
The mouse thing is the weird I will say that my kid my especially my kindergartner goes on his desktop and is like doesn't touch the mouse and just uses the >> [laughter] >> on his keyboard he's like I don't know what this device is. Yeah. Um I appreciate all the comments and the conversation and if obviously if we want to talk about more about what's going in the classrooms um based off of this then we can have a deeper conversation but at this moment I would like to call for the motion and the motion would stand as approve the purchase of Apple iPads for district refresh from Mohave contract. May I have a second? Second. All those in favor? I. I. Do I have any nays? Nay. All right Ms. Juarez that was Mr. Jones and Ms. Marquez as nays. So 3-2 motion passes. All right that brings us to our next agenda item which is um item 10 which is the business and plan to consider and discuss and if it deemed advisable to adopt resolution approving the governing board's argument in support of the special district additional assistance override at election and also um in And also the governing board's argument in support of the special maintenance and operation budget override election.
And we're not going to have enough money if we get below the red line to pay all of our bills in the due course of the school year. And we'll have to borrow money to get through that that year, which incurs additional cost and creates cash flow issues. So, next slide. Here's a snippet of our staffing and relative to our enrollment. So, across the blue line is our student enrollment, which is declining slightly. What is going from about 5,200 to right about 5,000 over the span of this forecast window. We expect it to stabilize and stay at about 5,000. Our staffing, however, generally sometimes increases rather than decreases with fewer enrollments. And this year we expect it to go down pretty dramatically as Steve mentioned earlier. Our staffing should have been going down in theory to maintain those ratios for a long period of time.
And with that, I will turn it over to Ms. Shapiro. How I'm just looking to for some guidance from Mr. Mann on how we should navigate. Um I've taken all of that I've received so far from the board. Do we want to uh put it The The board could So, if it if it doesn't match what's in the packet, the board could amend a motion for the for the updated version based on the feedback received. So, um if you want to go ahead and project that on the screen and walk the board through it. I keep forgetting not to press back on this thing. It's cuz you were on an eye. It's I'm on a Dell. No, I'm I'm teasing. Bless you. >> Bless you. That's not it. I can't see. The only uh changes that have occurred at this point from what was sent out to the board, um was we did get feedback from our um election and uh attorneys uh to change here.
We are making a reduction here this year and expecting that to carry forward in future years. But that's what drives the vast majority of our costs is staffing, salaries, and benefits. Our current ratio is 7.4. And here's a summary of our capital needs. By broken out by school, the vast majority of costs are associated with the high school and middle school. That's where the square footage is, quite frankly, and that's where the a lot of the students are, too. It's categorized by health, life, safety items. You'll see those in blue and in red. Those health, life, safety items are identified in our 10-year health, life, safety survey. Those that That's work we must do. It's not discretionary. We must do it. Um is it is integral to health, life, safety. It includes things like replacement of um fire systems that are beyond um their their life useful life.
It um did say originally um will not increase, uh but as our attorneys have pointed out, the tax rates are set by an outside entity and um while we plan our tax rates very carefully and we work with the county, uh unexpected things can occur and he didn't recommend that we put in there a definitive statement. Um he said it that the district uh would be better served to put in that it is not expected to increase um the current tax rates. We have uh no intention. We're continuing these as is and we will monitor and manage and work with the county to set those tax rates to not uh be increased based on these two initiatives. Are those set by the county treasurer or the board of supervisors? County. It's actually set through the county superintendent of schools. >> Schools. Oh, so >> There's a school finance division within the county superintendent of schools and then there's there's actually, I believe it's the county board of supervisors that ultimately votes on it.
They don't make the parts and pieces for them anymore. And so, um we have to replace them with newer modern systems. And then there's um warm, safe, dry, which is in the yellow, which is the bulk of the $50 million that we've committed to um that we've committed to to quite literally keep our schools warm, safe, and dry. They keep They include things like um roofs, um HVAC, uh you know, doors, the work we did at Storm, and the work that we're about to undertake here at Louise White School this summer. And then there's moving outwards on some more of what I would call discretionary capital projects, but um projects that we should consider that would actually serve our programs and make the facilities serve those um instructional functions and programs actually more directly and and better. So, in terms of what we face in the future in terms of risks, the first and foremost is health insurance.
>> That would make sense. Well, considering the political makeup of those things, I doubt there's going to be an increase in taxes. Well, it's it's not entirely political. Sorry. Go ahead, Jay. You know. Yeah, tell us more. >> [laughter] >> I just said tell me more. So, she's blaming us for increasing taxes? I'm You go. Well, she's not going to claim I'm increasing taxes. She'll blame us for it, but >> [laughter] >> the the point is it's driven by the number of dollars that need to be raised and then they they calculate it for us and then we review it. One of the challenges we've had over the years is the calculations are not always perfectly accurate. >> formula-driven process and so we check those carefully, um but even this last year there was an item um that was supposedly it was $15,000 that randomly showed up in our tax calculation.
Right now, our insurance committee is working diligently on that. And we forecast for fiscal '27 an increase of something between 15% and 25%. And that's with reductions and modifications to those plans to keep them within that range. So, we have some pretty significant challenges ahead. We can't sustain many years of increases compounding like that. It drives out other costs, our ability to to provide services to students. As I mentioned earlier, and I I think I do at every meeting these days, is state funding. And increasing pro ration or the reduction of their support for those mandated categoricals. Enrollment declines change graphic demographic trends and they change student needs. As you mentioned earlier, Rob, we've got to be really keeping a close eye on how those needs change over time and adapt so that we're our staffing and our resources are aligned to those needs. We're also facing unprecedented construction costs escalation.
Um and when I went back to the county to say, "What is this?" Um they thought it was uh the lawsuit with uh Kismeyer, um but we had taken care of the lawsuit through um another through our dead cash. >> Um so, I was very surprised and and just kind of like I needed to try to find the details and was unable to find the details. Eventually, um the next uh version that came back to me didn't have that amount on it. So again, we just we really, you know, carefully work with our county to ensure that our tax rates are set and that we can explain why the rates have been calculated at at what they are. But there are a lot of calculations that go into it in order to collect the proper amounts for um all of our voter initiatives, but also those primary tax rates that we don't control.
And as has been mentioned here earlier, as the board approved in December, the bids for Louise White there was 20% increase over the very same work we did last summer at HC Storm School. And it just stopped. It just every time we make an estimate or prediction on what something is going to cost for our schools, we're wrong. And it isn't by a couple of percent. It's by two digits. And so, that's a seriously complicating factor in keeping our score schools literally warm, safe, and dry. So, we're going to have to be very careful about how we time this work. The sooner we do it, the better. We can't necessarily afford it. And we have to be thinking about uh the most cost-effective approaches. So, on the next slide, we talk about ways that we could address this pressure. Of course, we Our plan is to spend our reserves.
And when it's off, that's where the where some of that dead cash accrues from or we could come up short, which I guess now that we've got dead cash, we'll probably be able to tap into dead cash rather than having to raise it the next year, but it would depend on the amounts. It's dependent on the amounts, yeah. And then um the other uh request uh for changes came, um but this was the district additional [snorts] um assistance override argument. So, this hasn't changed other than that statement that we put in there. Um we also uh change it's it uh said such as and we changed those words to which may include um just in order to have that flexibility. These are the types of items that the our voters have um given input on in the past that were important and uh ensuring that we capture uh those needs in our uh pro statement.
There's about two or three more years of our ability to do so. And as I said, once we get past that, then we will be essentially living paycheck to paycheck. We We adjust our spending. Or are we going to align especially when it comes to staffing? That's the most dramatic change that we can make. Um anything else or otherwise is generally trimming around the edges, but we have to keep that go growth less than 3% in those annual costs. In terms of capital, we can phase or defer projects, but that can only work so long. In this case, as I mentioned, pretty serious chunk of that capital work that we identified is non-discretionary. It must be done by law. Another serious chunk of it is our warm, safe, dry project, which is literally keeping our schools warm and safe and dry. Where we have roof leaky leaking roofs.
And then the maintenance and operation override, we had received feedback uh from the board that we wanted to have support. There are um I I don't know if we want to go into the details about full-day kindergarten, but um full-day kindergarten obviously is um there, but we also wanted to expand that to other opportunities for early childhood programs. Uh we know that that's a struggle for our parents in our community. And so, when we have opportunities to um invest and maybe support those programs more fully, we wanted to make sure that that language was included in here. So, we did add early childhood programs including full-day kindergarten, uh but if for some reason something occurred where full-day kindergarten was covered through some other funding source, we wanted to make sure that there was uh language em- embedded in here that would allow us to support other opportunities for early childhood.
We've got tuckpointing that we have to do at schools so that water isn't seeping between bricks. We've got pipes that are near near failure because they're so old. They're galvanized pipes that are over 70 years old and they're corroding to the point where they start to leak. And the whole building is that way. And if that happens, for example, at JB Nelson School, we we could lose the whole school. That work needs to be done in the near future. We're rolling the dice by not doing it. Last is that we have limited revenue. And as I saw you saw in that that slide earlier, the new money is going to come solely from local property taxpayers. So, the good news is that our operations are stable. We have a structural surplus, but we're spending beyond that surplus to take care of work we know we must do for our schools in terms of capital.
Now. >> Um it takes a certain type of special person reads the election manual but our booklet, whatever. I do. I Yeah, you know, but what I am asking is generally speaking, do we aim for a certain reading level for these because I will say they are quite advanced compared to like a newspaper reading level. These are what has gone out from the board in the past. So, we've just And I'm not trying to be >> I was just going to say USA Today is written in an eighth eighth-grade reading level. >> Yeah, yeah, and I think this is higher. I think the especially the first one is higher than that. And and also just as a reminder to everybody that our SWAG framework does say that our information should be at a sixth-grade reading level. So, I'm just trying to cuz there are some big words and concepts in some of these and I just don't know that that's going to be as effective if we're if we're trying to meet that, I guess is what I'm trying to get at.
The good news is that we have some discretionary in that abilities in that timing, but we know that the longer we wait, the more it will cost. And um not just in terms of construction inflation, but generally the longer you wait on deferred maintenance, the more expensive it becomes cuz in some cases you're not just fixing it, you're ripping it out and replacing it. So, we've got some tough choices to make in terms of finances here in Batavia for the foreseeable future. Thank you, Tony, for that presentation. >> It's your presentation from 2 years ago, and we were like, "Great news." Yeah. No, but thank you. Thank you. Uh are there questions for Dr. Inglisa? It's the comment. He's painting a very bleak picture for our future here, so. Could I ask to put slide six back on the projector? Sure. So, I know your crystal ball gets a little it gets hazier the further out you go.