001Well good afternoon everybody. Welcome to our school board work session today. This is in regards to our budget and our adoption of adoption of the twenty five twenty six time public schools budget said. Can I please get roll call. Director Tej home. Oh. Present. Director Espinosa. Here. President Vane. Here. Director Alvarez has an excused absence director will be here short. What that said. You know turn this right over to our chief financial officer Jackie Brian to get us going. Thank you for all the work for you and your team and everything you've done. Appreciate it. Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. Before we get started I wanted to introduce the team in case not everyone has met them. Andrew Burgess to my left is our controller so he oversees accounting procurement and payroll. We've Lauren McAllister
002who is our director of budget oversees all things budget and the really technical pieces of pulling the budget together. And then Sarah Semrock who is our director of budget strategy who oversees categorical budgets as well as grants. And I'm going to allow to turn it over to these two we have our team here to support us in the back and we have some new members of our team as well and this is their first time ever in the boardroom. So I'm going to let Lauren and Sarah introduce them. Yes. Thank you. I just want to say thank you to our entire team. I know we have some new team members here so welcome to them as well. Introducing Ingrid Chan our senior budget analyst not present as well is Aiden Rosler and our newest project
003manager just on the team in the last couple of weeks is Gavin Deer and Sherry. Sorry and Sherry Sutliff our enrollment specialist. Very excited to introduce a few members of our budget team and so I'll first start by introducing Monica Nelson who has served as a budget analyst on our team this year and welcome some new team members. So Edgar Lopez-Nava is joining as budget analyst and also welcome to Mack South who is joining and they are doing their onboarding right now and excited to welcome all. Appreciate being here. And also here is Ellie one of Miss Ellie in the back executive director of capital planning and structure. And so to ground us before we take a look at what is ahead in our budget for next year we're going to just ground with our
004district. So our promise is that every student and Highland Public Schools is known by name strength and need and graduates prepared for the future they choose. So today as we're talking through the budget we are talking about what are those financial and budgetary aspects of our system that are creating conditions for this promise to be true. And I'm also going to take a moment to invite us all to center on our land acknowledgement. Part of what I got the chance to share when we did our equitable share consultations with private schools locally is also the important part of our tribal partnership with our school district. And every year there is a tribal agreement between Muckleshoot Indian Tribe and our school district. And so that is a part of our our stewardship of fiscal resources specifically
005with our federal grants. So we'll read our land acknowledgement. We begin by acknowledging that we are on the ancestral land stewarded since time immemorial by the Salish people of the Duwamish, Green, White, Cedar and Upper Puyallup Rivers. Many of these giving birth to the contemporary citizens of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe. We honor and give thanks that we are able to collectively engage in this conversation on their sacred homelands about the future of teaching and caring for our sacred children and youth. And so as we look at the ways that our system and our district is planning to take care of our sacred children and youth and help prepare them for the futures they choose, we are grounding here in our district strategic plan. And so just want to lift up that we are centering and
006our budgeting processes and the strategy mapping that we're doing our district's culture of belonging our work around innovative learning and our bilingual and biliteracy goal as well as ultimately preparing students to be future red. So I'm going to quickly review our objectives today. We have quite a bit of information to share but we are hoping we'll have some time at the end as well for questions and feedback from all of you. So the first thing we're going to focus on today is really reviewing the 2025 legislative session and the impacts that that has had on our budget. Understanding our five funds that make up our budget each year. Of course, general fund is the one that is the largest and the one that we talk about the most often because it pays for our schools
007and all of our instructional needs but we're also going to be reviewing capital, transportation vehicle fund, our ASB fund and debt service fund. And then we'll be going through our longterm fiscal outlook. So the next four years and the fiscal plan moving forward and then we'll review our engagement. So what was the process that we went through as we went through budget development this year and how did we engage students, staff, community and family? So as always policy 6000, financial management for equity serves as our guiding principles as we go through our budget development process. And as you know, this year we went through and we revised this policy. It focuses now more on our strategic plan goals and we passed and revised that with all of you at the board meeting in January this
008past year. And so I'm not gonna go through and read all of these. I think you're probably all very familiar with them but as I said, this really does serve as our guiding principles as we go through budget development. So before we get started today, we're gonna go through kind of where we've been, where we are at now and where we're going. So we're gonna review kind of the last couple of years and then the next year. So 23, 24, as I'm sure you remember, that was the year where we made $8 million in reductions going into 24, 25 budget. We also had to account for our loss of ESSER funds that year. So that was a year where we were making reductions of $8 million and reducing all of the things that were funded
009out of ESSER. So that was a difficult year. We ended that year with an unassigned ending fund balance of 7% which is over the minimum 3% fund balance that's in policy. This year, we had higher enrollment than projected which was great news because as you remember, we were anticipating spending about 6.5 million out of our fund balance this year and we don't anticipate spending much out of our fund balance so we think we're gonna actually come out almost completely equal revenue and expenditure this year. So with that, that means we are budgeting right now to end our year at a projected fund balance is 7% as well, the unassigned. It was a long legislative session. I think everybody has heard that for many, many months now and we also decided because it was a long
010session that we weren't gonna make any reductions going into next year. We were gonna pause and wait and see what the legislature did. And then looking forward into 25, 26, we're anticipating steady enrollment so a slight, really slight decline. You'll see it when we look at enrollment but nothing like we've experienced in the past. So our demographer came back and shared that with us which is great news. Minimal new revenue from legislation. So we did get some additional funds from the legislature this year, not as much as we had hoped for but grateful for what we did receive and we're gonna start really thinking next year, continue to create efficiencies within our systems and our processes and start to evaluate what potential reductions may look like depending on how enrollment comes in next year. So
011before we move forward on the highline context, I wanted to kind of review what the statewide context of budget development is and what happened with our 2025 legislative session. So I found this slide really interesting. You can see this is from the, so biennium is how we pass budgets in the state from the 2019 to 21 biennium through the 25, 27 biennium which is what just was passed into law. Beginning in 2019 to 2021, the total budget was $26.6 billion for the state and 51.6% was K-12 specific. So 51.6% of our state budget was spent on K-12 education. That number has decreased throughout the years, that percentage. So we hear about, yes, we're investing more dollars into K-12 at the state level and that is true. They are, we are investing more dollars as a
012state but we're not keeping up with inflation and we're not keeping up that 51.6% percentage. So actually this year with what was passed, even though we went from 26.6 billion back in 2019 to 21 to 33.7 which is an increase, it actually decreases the percentage. So we went from 51.6% of the statewide budget being spent on K-12 down to 43.2%. So that's a large decrease over a few years. If the state had kept up with inflation and had invested continually that 51.6%, we would have received as a state for K-12, 6.5 billion this year. So that is far from what we actually received. And then to go a little bit deeper into what our legislative outcomes were this year. So we had really, of course, the big three that we talked about throughout the year,
013special education, material supplies and operating costs, transportation, and then also the levy lift. So special education started out strong when legislation started in January. It was very promising. The first bill that came forward would have been 14 million in additional revenue for special education. It would have almost closed our gap, close, not quite, but very close. By the end of session, we received about 2.5 million. For MSOC, which is material supplies and operating costs, again came out strong at the beginning of session. First bill was about 5.6 million, and we ended up receiving less than 1 million at the end of session. Transportation never quite gained the traction that the other two did in the legislation. It started out with about a million in the first bill and that bill died and we didn't receive
014any additional funding for transportation. The one kind of bright spot slash surprise was the levy lift. And so the state legislature has gone through and changed the rules and the amounts around levies so we can actually collect additional local levy now. So in 25, 26, it's about $4 million, and that has already been voted on by our community, so we are able to collect that in 25, 26, which is great news, helps, it definitely helps bridge the gap of the funding that we didn't receive. So with that, we're gonna go through, like I said, our largest fund, 25, 26 general fund, and as you know, general fund funds our schools, funds everything, transportation, nutrition services, everything you see in a school. So our overall general fund revenues for 25, 26 is about 421.5 million. Expenditures
015are coming in slightly higher, so 428 million, leaving us with underfunding with about 6.5 here, 6.5 million. So we're anticipating using that 6.5 out of fund balance next year and it'll drop our ending fund balance. Again, this is budgeted projections to around 41.5. And in a few slides, you'll see all of these broken out by percentage, so you'll be able to see. So we'll go through and talk about what makes up our revenues and our expenditures. As you know, we have a couple of different ways we receive revenue for operating our schools. About 71.3% of that revenue comes from our state funded sources. So that is directly from the state through apportionment and we'll go through each of those in a minute. About 15% of our revenue is now coming from our local levy. 7.5
016are from federal revenue sources and 5% is from grants and other sources that come in. As you know, state funding is driven primarily through enrollment and so enrollment is the piece that we are looking at as soon as school starts in September, even earlier in August, to try and anticipate if our enrollment projections are close, because that really does affect the budget. We contract with a demographer each year and he gives us a high, medium, and low projection, which is what we use as kind of our guardrails as we go through and build the budget. We always use medium projections to build the budget and build the four year plan, but we always keep in mind that high and low as well as we're building the budget. So you can see the green line here
017is our medium projections and next year we're anticipating a really, really slight decline, another decline, 26, 27, little one, and then we're actually anticipated to start growing again, which is great news. So what is state revenue? When we talk about enrollment and why enrollment is so important, it is driving all of the funds you're seeing here. So state revenue is really what we also call basic education. So when you hear about funding basic education, it is the state revenues. So our largest one by far is apportionment and that comes in, all of these come in on a monthly basis based on enrollment that we report monthly. Apportionment's the largest that covers things like teachers, staff, everything that you can, when you think of a school, apportionment is covering most of that. So we're anticipating about
018206.4 million next year in apportionment. Special education comes in as a separate fund and we're anticipating 50, a little over 50 million next year in special ed. Learning assistance program or our LAP program is also considered a basic ed program, even though sometimes we think of it as a grant. 15.4 million next year, it's very steady with what we've received in the past and that funds a lot of literacy supplemental, it's supplemental funding for things like literacy and math at elementary and then other things that secondary like graduation. 13.3 million in our transitional bilingual program, roughly 10 million in transportation, that varies depending on how many kids are riding the school bus, so that's our projection right now. And about 0.6, so 600,000 and highly capable. And for highly capable, it's a set amount, we
019can only collect 5% of our general apportionment and highly capable, so that's not an amount we get to dictate. Based on enrollment. So our local revenues are our levy funds and you'll see these fund, this funds everything that we would consider kind of over and above basic education. So staff and salaries, all the staff and salaries and benefits that aren't covered by apportionment and those other things you just saw are covered by our levy. And I won't go through each of these, but things like facilities, maintenance, health services, athletics, all of that is funded by our levy. Can you share a little bit about school supports there? What? The 2.7, that is a few different things. Some of that is levy funding that is for material supplies and operating costs at schools. That's the large
020portion of that one. For the 10 million in transportation for the state revenues, does that only cover buses or does our funding for like third party contractors that we utilize come out of that as well? Yes, both. Thank you. So I wanted to take a few minutes and talk through really what the state is funding versus what basic ed funds versus what we're funding. So bear with me on these slides, they kind of get a little bit confusing, but I think it's really important to understand just what the prototypical model is funding versus what Highline is budgeted for. So as you know, the state prototypical model is how we receive our apportionment. So basically the state says, for a high school, we're gonna say it's about 600 students and you get a 1.2 administrator. So
021it's a very strict formula that they go through. And it basically spits out a report, tells us how much staffing we receive, which translates into dollars and that's apportionment. And so this slide is really for our certificated staff, you can see the green. So I'm looking at teachers and specialists first. The green is our apportionment. So our state prototypical formula is 774 teachers and specialists. We fund out of just our basic ed funds, 805, but in reality, we have 1,228 teachers and specialists. Now that includes special education because that is not included in the other two that you're seeing here. It also includes things like LAP and transitional bilingual and other programs that we use to fund those supports. So you can see throughout this, the purple bar is much higher than the green, which
022is the kind of the point of the slide. We are funding far more than we are receiving from the state right now. So this is for certificated staff and central administrators. And then the following slide is for our classified staff. And I think the one here that really tells a pretty amazing story is we are funded for 31 instructional assistants. Those are our paraeducators. And we have 383. So we are using special education to fund those. We are using LAP and our title federal grants to fund those. So there is a large gap there. Our federal revenues, you can see most of these are our food and nutrition services. It's a USDA program that comes in through the federal government. And we are anticipating about 12 million next year in that. And then the other
023one that we talk about a lot is our federal title programs. So 10.2 million in our title one, two, three, four, and all of those grants. As far as we have heard up to today, we will be receiving those grants. We will be receiving the full amount that was budgeted for. So if that changes, we'll be sure to let you know. But as of now, we're budgeting for them and we're hopeful. So before I move on, are there questions around revenue before I jump into expenditures? Another question, I think if you go back to the formulas, you're gonna know how much we're adding on yet. One more. I think this one, again, just speaks to, again, even with this legislative session, we had the priority, the three big priorities during this legislative session. But we
024really have to go back and work with our legislators, understand the typical model, just how old and antiquated it is and not sparing our needs. So I think that's gonna be part of the conversation work we're doing over this next year as we prepare to continue these conversations with our legislators to fully fund education. Thank you for sharing that. Dr. Duran, you were down there as well as Stephanie and just lobbying, right? And looking at what was truly funded versus the amount of time that all of the superintendents and board directors were down there, it's very minuscule too. So really, were they listening? I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't see it. They sure say it, but I will urge us as well as our other district partners to really do that during. And
025one thing I will add to that is the big three will be the focus again next year and continue to be until we're fully funded. Yep, through. So 25, 26 expenditures. So how are we spending our money next year? 79% of our $428 million directly funds instructional activities. So that includes regular instruction, CTE, skills center, and other supplemental programs that we are funding in schools. 4% funds nutrition services and transportation. And then 17% funds district-wide services. So that's things like utilities, insurance, facilities, security, technology, all of the things that are in the background helping to operate our schools every day. This was pretty staggering when you see this percentage. 86% of our $428 million directly funds staff salaries and benefits. So this number, this percentage is increasing year over year and it is at every
026district. It's usually around 85%, 85, 86% at every district throughout the state. So it just makes you realize when we're talking about making reductions, that impacts people. It's really hard to make any sort of reduction without touching salaries or benefits. So one thing that is driving this increase is not only inflation, but benefits continue to cost, continue to increase as well. So that's another cost that you're seeing reflected here. So you can see what makes up that 86%. 45% of that is certificated salaries. 20% is classified salaries. 21% is employee benefits. So that's the largest portion of our budget by far of those three. For nutrition, we are not paid upfront is my understanding. We're reimbursed for each meal that we serve. So do we have a number for how much money is lost in
027food waste? I don't have that. I can certainly talk to our nutrition services department and see if they have an estimate. Thank you. Yeah. So I'm gonna talk for a minute about special education because it is something, a topic that we were very hopeful as we went into the legislative session that we would receive the funding that is so needed for our students. And unfortunately we didn't get full funding. So even we did receive about 2.5 million in additional funding this year. That still does not fulfill the paramount duty to fund basic education in the state of Washington. And next year we're anticipating to be underfunded by roughly 19 million. So that is $19 million that is coming from out of other programs now to fund special education when truly, truly that is a basic
028education service. And for our highest needs, most vulnerable students. I just had a quick question. What was informing our hopefulness for full funding? Repeat that. Yeah. What was informing how hopeful we were for special ed funding? I think we were hopeful in the very beginning because the initial bills that came out had somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.6 billion that was allocated for it. If that would have came through, it would have been an additional $8 million for us. So we were right at the very beginning. I think that came out of maybe the first or second day of the legislative session that dropped. And so we were very excited. But by the end it ended up being a little under $400 million across the state. And so just through the process of, I think
029what Director Vance said earlier, I think they heard us. I just don't think they had the will to fully fund it the way that it was set out. I think the legislators are also really struggling with trying to deliver a balanced budget in a time when they were facing $16 billion deficit and trying to find the funds for that. But in the end, there just wasn't the will to carry it through. And as the play from Hamilton always says, everyone wants to be in the room where it happens. And I think we were all wondering what did happen in those rooms to get to where we ended up. So in addition, there were some changes made to special education. And I think it's a really important point to understand as we start talking about our
030levy and what our local levy is gonna fund in the future. So as I said, 69.2 million is roughly what we anticipate in expenditures for special education next year. 73% of that will come from state funding. As you know, we had some committed fund balance that we committed back about two years ago was $10 million for the underfunding. So 3.5% of that will come from our committed fund balance. We still have that for the next two years. And then last year, we talked a lot about how local levy was making up the gap of the underfunding for special education. Within the bill this year, within the last week of the session, a decision was made to no longer allow districts to use local levy to fund special education. So we have to use basic education
031funds now to fund special education. So really, what does that mean? It's just shifting costs, right? So now instead of using local levy, we take our apportionment money, we shift it to special education, and then we use the levy to fund what really is basic education. So as we go through and we talk about levies and local levies, we can no longer say we're supporting special education with our local levy when in reality, we're now supporting basic education with our local levy. And the other big topic this year was material supplies and operating costs. Again, we are anticipating about 10, almost 11 million underfunding for this. Five to 15% inflationary increase in utilities, insurance, and other materials. Insurance continues to increase, it increased 53%, and utilities is 24%. So those are, and we're talking millions
032and millions of dollars, so you can imagine the utility bills for the operations of the district are quite large. So 24% is millions of dollars. I'll pause there for questions around expenditures before we move into our four-year outlook. Correct, directors, any follow-up questions that you'd like to add? I do have one. You know, with the $19 million deficit for special, I know we're gonna fund that from other revenues, but how are we gonna mitigate that? That's just for this following year. How are we going to sustain that, just grabbing it and then another bucket? How, I'm just trying to figure out how we're gonna be able to sustain it. I think one thing I'll start with, and Jack, you can add on to this, but I think as we shared at the last board meeting,
033one of the things we really need to do is spend some time on our systems and support for the paraeducator piece. As we know, again, with the agency hires, they're twice the cost that we are paying, and so we have a plan in place to be able to have cross-departmental work on this to ensure that we are more closely monitoring those education hires and then also ensuring that we have paraeducators that are hired and hopefully in a pool that we can actually train and get them on board before they go into our schools. And we'll also keep track of any of the openings that we have so that we can provide immediate support as possible and try to move away from the agency paraeducators as much as we can. We also do know that the
034agency staff funds other things for interpretations and for nursing staff, and so those are some ones that are just hard to serve that we will never be able to move completely away from agency, but we will definitely be doing our best to try to mitigate the cost there. The only other thing I would add to that, during session with the special ed bill, they lowered the amount to be able to claim for safety net, so we're gonna be really doing an audit of all of our special education students and their IEPs and see if there are things that we can now claim that we weren't able to claim in the past. Thank you very much. Moving on to our four-year outlook. So as you know, every year we do a four-year outlook. It is required
035by the state, and as we do that, we always have to make some assumptions as we go through and project for the next four years. So the numbers you'll see here, these are the assumptions that were included in these numbers. So we used demographers' medium enrollment projections. Implicit price deflator, which is IPD, that is the state inflationary adjustment each year. So OSPI shared some projections with us for the next four years, so those are included in these. We've used OSPI's multi-year and levy tools. So OSPI put out a levy, a new levy tool to help us measure what the new caps are for the levy and then the multi-year tool for apportionment. In these, there is no bargaining impact included. So we have three contracts open next summer, and in these numbers is no impact
036of those contracts. No new legislation is included. So we will, of course, be focused on our big three again next year and going into the next biennium, and none of that is included. And going forward, there'll be no new positions added into the budget unless they're directly tied to enrollment increases. So no new positions are included in these at all. So the four-year outlook looks a little bit different than we've seen it in the past few years because we are no longer in the time of ESSER, where we had a really high peak and then we had this really significant drop. It looks really steady, you can see. So the green on the top is our expenditures and then the yellow line is our revenues, and really the fluctuations between years are simply enrollment. We
037have enrollment decreasing for a few years and then increasing towards the end, towards 28, 29. So what does that mean for our fund balance? If we were to do nothing and just continue operating as is, this is what our fund balance projections would look like over the next four years. So 24, 25, we're projecting 48 million as our ending fund balance. 28.5 of that is unassigned, which puts us at 7%. And as you know, 3% is the minimum fund balance that we must have per board policy. Next year, 25, 26, we're budgeting a $27 million unassigned fund balance, so that puts us down to 6%. And then you can see the next few years, it drops as we continue to use our fund balance. So 5%, 5%, and then ultimately in 28, 29, 4%. So
038the good news is we're not at 3%, we're not anticipating going under our minimum fund balance. So it allows us to take some time to make adjustments really strategically in the next four years. And just, I think this was important to include just the kind of the statewide story that we've heard this year of different districts. Right now, I think I saw yesterday, there are seven districts in the state which are in binding conditions. And binding conditions means they have zero fund balance and their expenditures are exceeding their revenues. And so seven districts currently, at least two or three more by the end of the summer. And that will continue throughout next year. So statewide, it is difficult for everyone right now. I feel fortunate that we are not in a position where we're going
039into positions, and we're not anticipating going under our minimum fund balance. But I also know that that context is really important as we make adjustments moving forward. Just a quick reminder with binding conditions that earlier you're at that point where you cannot pay your monthly bills. And so I know, just shout out to Toquilla, they've been under binding conditions for the last two years. They are coming out of binding conditions, but the impact in that district right now is that they have multiple positions they have to reduce and people literally are doing two to three, if not more, jobs. So it definitely has some impact on the work that's happening. So again, just really grateful for the work that we're doing. Some other districts that are close to binding conditions, you're seeing districts borrowing from
040their capital dollars, literally $100 million in one district, $10 million from another district. And so it is creating a great amount of stress and challenges in places. Again, I just want to acknowledge the great work that our teams have done, and we are in a much better place than other places, and it's great to have that context and reminder. I had a question. So the 3% per policy, that's so that we could keep operating for how many months with that? The minimum 3% is not even a month. Not even a month. So it's low. Our expenditures, monthly expenditures are, what's the average now, 35? Yeah, about 35 million. Okay, thank you. Given that last year the projections were not quite accurate with the demographer, how confident are we that that is what it's gonna look
041like? I think it's confident as we can be. We did sit with him quite a bit this year and go through his data and pull a lot of the information that he's looking at ourselves. So I would say we're confident that they're accurate. I'm saying that because what he's projecting is not very different than where we currently are right now. So unless something changes dramatically over the summer, I think his projections will be pretty close. Okay, thank you. So that was general fund. 2526 Capital Projects Fund. And as you know, I have the very exciting year with Taiye and Evergreen opening and Pacific groundbreaking last week. So our beginning fund balance is about 109 million. Ending fund balance is 134 million. We'll have our final bond sale this year, so the final sale of the
042current bond to complete construction at Pacific by 2027. So that's very exciting and that's what you're seeing reflected in our revenues. Evergreen High School opening September 2025 on time and on budget. I just have to big thank you to our capital team and all the contractors and everybody. As you know, we had some vandalism there last year and we've been going back and forth with insurance still to this day. We actually had a two hour meeting yesterday with them and it is amazing that we're still opening on time and on budget. So big, big, Ellie, thank you so much for all your work. Quick plug real quick. Just remind everybody this Saturday at noon is the official goodbye to Evergreen. And so if you're around, stop by and there's gonna be quite a few alumni's
043wishing they had a sledgehammer to start the process, but remind people that we still have students in school until the 25th. Other such exciting news, Taiye High School also opening on time and on budget. It'll be opening for students September 2025. It's absolutely beautiful as is Evergreen. I'm hoping you all get to see it very, very soon. Walk through it. I was there a couple of weeks ago and they're wrapping everything up. So really exciting. Pacific Middle School, as you know, we did our groundbreaking last week or the week before. About 62.5 million is gonna be spent this year, this fiscal year on construction with a date of September 2027 for opening. So that's the largest amount within capital fund for next year. Our transportation building also will be opening sometime in September. Also very
044exciting. It's gonna be great to have transportation have a facility that they can come and take breaks in. And it'll be a really beautiful facility. And then safety security and critical improvement. So about 3.2, 3.3 million in the budget for this. This includes things like roof replacements, fire alarms. You've seen me come before the board quite a bit this year for boiler replacements. That'll continue into next year. And anything else that really comes up throughout the year that we need to make improvements to. But we also have it planned out in specific projects. Any questions around capital? Okay, I'm gonna turn it over to Lauren. She's gonna review transportation vehicle fund and ASB funds. All right, so our third fund is the transportation vehicle fund. The transportation vehicle fund is designated for the purchase and
045major repairs of student transportation vehicles with the primary focus on school buses. This fund is primarily supported by the state reimbursements to school districts based on depreciation of transportation equipment. And the funding is calculated based off of the transportation schedule tied to our current fleet. For the upcoming year, we anticipate about $800,000 from the state. What you'll see here is a little bit higher number. So our beginning fund balance is about 2.9, almost $3 million there. We're anticipating that 800,000 in depreciation and have capacity for any other grants or any other unknown funding in that for revenue. And then we built into expenditures as well. And we should end the year around the 3 million fund balance. I have a question in regards to our vehicle fund. I know that we are earmarked for a
046couple more electric school buses. How does that all come into play with this? What is the cost of the school bus, if I may ask, but I don't know if we have those. Two that have been. Yes, yeah. Sarah can probably answer that. She's working on the grant right now. Yes, I can speak to that. So the Washington State Department of Ecology, there's a grant available to support some, but not all of the funding needed to fund the purchase of electric buses. And the cost quotes that we've received for two of the buses comes in just under $900,000. And the grant available is just under about $700,000. And so that's kind of the capacity we're looking with that one. And just do a quick call, but does the grant include any funding for the charging
047stations? I know that has another cost to it. No, it does not. But that's one we'd have to be adding from our dollars to do that. Yes, yep. So have we done an evaluation on the cost savings from an electric bus versus fuel-efficient diesel buses and to look at that? I know that we have quite a few in our fleet now. Have we done a cost analysis on it? We haven't. I'll certainly check with transportation. I imagine that they have those numbers. Thank you. Fourth fund is our ASB fund, our Associated Student Body Fund. And it's used to manage funds raised by students to support optional extracurricular activities that foster the students' cultural, athletic, recreational, and social development. The programs are designed to encourage student involvement beyond the classroom. Washington State requires that each school
048serving grades seven and above establish a student-led ASB governing body in order to conduct any ASB activities. Each school is responsible for managing its own ASB budget with set limitations. Our process is that they, during the resource alignment meetings in the spring, that the schools meet with their teams and send their budgets to our team. We compile that and that is what this beginning fund balance and expenditures for this upcoming year. So our beginning fund balance is gonna be about 1.3 million and we anticipate another 1.34 in revenues and expending about another 1.4 and ending our fund balance with just about 1.3 again. I missed this slide. Oh, yes. Sorry. And pictures of our beautiful students. And I'm gonna turn over to Andrew. It's my favorite fund. Debt service fund, going back to these slides,
049this is to pay off the debt that we incurred in order to build schools. Both the ones we're currently building as well as prior projects. And so it's in general terms a pretty simple fund. The revenue is property tax collections in the spring and the fall. And the expenditures are we make payments on that debt in June and December. We make principal and interest on that debt. So we always keep a little bit of a fund balance because you don't wanna not pay your debtors. And so yeah, 71 million in property taxes we'll collect this year and then we'll pay out that much in debt, those construction projects. Okay, so we're gonna go through some next steps and I may go through this pretty quickly so we have some time for questions at the end.
050You've seen this slide I think a number of times but this is just a board and school leader engagement for budget development this year. This is our third work session this year and we do monthly updates at board meetings as well hopefully to maintain a very transparent process and transparent fiscal outlook. And we've also engaged our staff, student, family and community quite a bit this year. We've had our student advisory leadership team which Sarah worked on and was amazing this year and we'll continue that into next year. Resource alignment meetings. So in central budget development meetings which Lauren and team led some of those. We've also had SSLT, we've met with FAC which is our family action committee and we have our capital facilities advisory committee and we also have had three thought exchanges this
051year. So our January thought exchange, we asked the question as we plan for the next school year's budget what are the most important things Highline needs to think about in order to support all students? So we had lots of participation, 360 participants, 13,000 ratings, something that was interesting is 69% of participants reported knowing at least a little bit about the budget. So and the budget development process. So that was a higher number than we've seen in the past. And some of the things that were prioritized were things like retaining staff, smaller class sizes, a focus on special education, mental health and then resources for our students. Our March and April thought exchange, our question was how do you believe we can best allocate resources to support our four priorities? Which of course you know our
052secondary redesign, literacy, inclusion and MTSS. We had 265 ideas shared and 332 participants. The top priorities identified were inclusion, literacy, MTSS, high school secondary redesign. And you can see under that, under those four tiers are the things that were identified as important, the participants. And we went from 69% of our participants knowing a little bit about budget development to 78% with this one. So that was great news. People are learning about the budget and we're providing transparency into our finances. And we're watching our June thought exchange right now. So our June thought exchange, the question that we're asking is what questions do you have about the proposed 25-26 budget? And this is open to everyone. So please feel free to take a few minutes and answer the questions. And then our next steps. So today
053we're having our final budget work session of the year. We will come to intro on June 18th. So next Wednesday the budget will come to introduction at the school board meeting. June 25th we'll be having our public hearing. And July 2nd we'll have action at the board meeting. We separated, we did it a little bit differently this year for a couple reasons. One, because we had a long session and we just didn't get the tools from OSPI in time. We got them actually last Friday. So it's been a really quick turnaround. But the other reason that we separated this is we heard from the public that they wanted time to review documents and review the budget before the public hearing. So we're giving a week between intro and the public hearing now. So our community
054can review our documents and our budget and come with questions. And then 25-26 and beyond. So we're gonna continue with our monthly board budget updates and continue with all of the engagement we have done this year. And with that, we're happy to take questions. I will add tomorrow online, I felt Lauren looking at me. We'll have the interactive budget book will be published. So that is a, it's interactive on our website and it's broken down by school and by department. And it gives you a ton of information about each school and each department separately. And then as a whole, our printable budget book, which I don't even know how many pages that thing is, 200. There's a lot of information in that book. Lots of charts, yeah. So we didn't print it for you this
055year, but it is, will be on the website tomorrow in PDF. So feel free to print it or read it online. And then the F195 and the F195F, which is the state tools that I just mentioned. We submitted our F195 yesterday, day before, two days ago. And F195F went in today. So we will publish tomorrow what we currently have with a disclaimer that the ESD is still reviewing them. So there may be minor changes. But we're hoping to have those reviewed tomorrow or early next week. Not really up to us, so we're waiting. With that, what questions can we answer? Thank you so much, Jackie. Directors, any follow up questions on presentation? I don't have any questions. I just wanna note, as was mentioned, the number of schools that are in binding conditions in the
056state is pretty scary. I mean, it's terrifying, frankly, and just unprecedented. And it would be lovely if the state would fulfill their paramount duty to fully fund education. But in lieu of that, in the moment, I am very grateful for our team and Dr. Duran for your fiscal oversight and your fiscal foresight. I mean, just the position that we're in, we're in a really good position, just compared to a lot of other districts. I mean, not to compare us to them, but I'm just really grateful that we are in this position. It's unfortunate what the projections are looking like, but I'm happy that we're here. And I greatly appreciate all of you and all your work. Numbers are not my forte. So yes, you are appreciated. There are a couple of things that I wanna
057bring up, Jackie and team. You all are the visibility of the budget, I think, has been to the forefront. And I think it's very important to the community to do that. So I wanna thank you for all of that. We're constantly looking at how we can save money and move it to the right direction. So continue to do that hard work. It's tough to make cuts somewhere and move it to the right direction towards the vision that Dr. Duran has sort of outlined. So I just wanna say thank you for a lot of this hard work. Apologies that I was a little late, but I just wanna say thanks. So thank you for all your hard work. How often do we update or look at employee benefits and what are those updates? So Human Resources
058is the department that manages the benefits. What we're looking at is primarily what the state is funding versus what we're paying for benefits. And that continues. So the state funding continues to increase. And the reason that creates a gap in our budget is because we only receive those benefit payments from the state for the prototypical model. So as you saw, we have a lot of staff that's not covered by our state funding, which we're then directly paying for those benefits. Okay, thank you. Any other questions? I do have a couple questions. Given that 80% of our expenditures are on our staff related, so how are we approaching our staffing efficiency without impacting our students? How are we looking at making sure that we have the right people in schools without impacting if we need to
059make any additional cuts? I would say as part of the process we're gonna be going through is again, I think similar to what we did last year, looking at again what's our vision, our promise is very clear on what we're working towards. We have our goals, we have our priorities. And I think the opportunity for us to take a look and see just how well aligned different positions are to that. And then if we do see that there may not be alignment there, that could be a potential for us to consider. But I think ultimately we wanna ensure that we're able to provide the right resources and supports, especially to our four priority areas where we're seeing some positive movement and growth. But as I've explained before, that if we're gonna invest in more in
060our literacy, for example, we're gonna have to find the resources from our box of people type of money which is not growing right now. So it's just gonna be a matter of going similar to what we did with the initiative mapping process and just looking at what we have in place now and are there other opportunities? I think one of the things too, keep in mind is that the reductions we made last year of $8 million, we went through pretty thoroughly here in central office because we really were trying to minimize the impact at the school. There was definitely some, but we really tried to minimize as much as we can. And so I think that's something that'll always be in our mind as we go through the process. How can we find potential areas
061to reduce so we can do further investments? But it's gonna be tighter as we go through. Thank you for that. I think being able to show our community what the pro-typical model is, what the state and federal funds versus what highline funds, it's staggering to see that. But the community needs to see that we are committed into ensuring that our students are taken care of on that. So I would really love to get this out there and it needs to be shown. And I'm hoping that our community's listening tonight. So one other question about our thought exchange, really thank you for having our community put their voices and bringing in their priorities. How is it being reflected of the top priorities? How are they being reflected in our budget? I know we can't have our
062cake and eat it too, but how is it now? I think one thing, we're collecting the information and we started collecting this information when we didn't know what legislation was gonna look like. I think we were at that time hopeful that we would be able to make investments next year. Obviously that's not the case anymore. But I think we'll be taking that information and really using it as we go through and start thinking about creating efficiencies throughout our system and really prioritizing those things that our community has identified. And I have one other question that I don't know if it was brought up, but with regard to the renewal of the levy, I believe the last payout is roughly around 65, 66 million. Do we have projections if a future levy would be passed? What
063would those numbers be? That's a great lead in. We are bringing that to the board next Wednesday. So you will see introduction of the renewal of our education levy. And one thing, we'll be talking about that at the board meeting, but one thing you'll see is the projections that we're bringing forward are using our high enrollment projections because levy is all based off enrollment as well. And so we wanna ensure that we can collect our maximum amount, but we roll back based on enrollment. So those numbers will be coming on Wednesday. We are anticipating, because the levy was lifted, additional funds in the levy. As I mentioned earlier, we are actually able to collect additional funds next calendar year as well, because that was already passed by the community. Wonderful, thank you, Jackie. Any other
064questions or comments? Well, I think we're in a really good spot. Thank you so much, Jackie and team, for being here and presenting during this work session. A lot of work, still a lot of work to happen and more to come, Dr. Grant. With that said, I would like to have a motion to adjourn. I'll make a motion to adjourn. I will second that. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Yes. Any opposed? None. Thank you, everybody, for being here. Appreciate it.