001you can see is everybody good afternoon everybody welcome to our special board meeting our work session around budget a March it's already 445 and please get a roll call director Alvarez here director to the home president president van here and to the right is our superintendent dr. Duran with that said yeah I'll kick us off good afternoon everyone good to have you here this is our second board work session on our budget development process and along with our monthly updates that we started here in January this is another opportunity for our community here how we're doing from a financial perspective to hear what we're kind of anticipating from a legislative perspective at this time now give an update there and again in the spirit of transparency for our community knowing that we've heard that many
002times people believe in that they only have one opportunity to provide input to the budget in June where we're nearing adoption that this is an effort to be able to provide more information to our community so that people can come and share their perspectives and thoughts on the budget development with us I'll hand it over to our chief financial officer Jackie Brian thank you good afternoon I would like to introduce the team that's with me and then I'm going to hand it over to them to give us the intro so Lauren McAllister director of budget Sarah stock director budget strategy and Andrew Burgess controller thank you very much in an effort to always try to engage meaningfully with our promise you know promises that every student in Highland public school is known by name strength
003and need and graduates they choose and I think some ways a verbal contract business world deal with contracts a lot and I was thinking about promises as regards the land acknowledgment and it makes me think about the promises that might have been made back in the day that were not contracts and we wrapped up an audit a couple of weeks ago and I was filing away digitally some of those records and just putting away some of the purchases of property that the engaged in was thinking about those purchases property and and again thinking about our landing that I'll read here and what may or may not have happened back at that time with and so I'll just read it we begin by acknowledging that we are on the ancestral land of stewarded since time immemorial
004by the Salish people of the Duwamish green white cedar and upper rivers many of these giving birth to the contemporary citizens of the Indian tribe we honor and give thanks that we are able to collectively engage in this conversation their sacred homeland future of our teaching and caring for our sacred children you and then just to roll all these up we have our pillars our goals and we're going to discuss about you know putting things not just promising but but putting things down and writing and making contracts to accomplish these goals for our students in a meaningful way and so those are my thoughts about our budget thank you so today as we sit down together to engage us in this work session on our budget we're going to be looking at some objectives so
005to start we'll look at our 20 25 and 26 enrollment projections and work to understand this current year's initial year-end projections for our budget we will then look at initial 2025 to 2026 testing okay there we go we'll be looking at projections for next year and explore long-term fiscal planning for Highline public schools and finally we'll look at some different potential impacts to the current legislative session that is still actively continuing so we'll look through a few different scenarios that will inform our planning for next year and so to that note we're looking at always grounding the work in policy 6000 typically named financial management for equity and also our equity policy and procedure policy zero zero one zero and so as budget district I'm really excited that in Highline we are looking at how
006we can leverage our fiscal resource support all the conditions for students to have humanizing teaching and learning experiences and make sure that we are making responsible decisions steward the resources across our system and so policy 6000 we looked at this last time we met in our work session we spent some viewing all of these specific bullet points that you see here and I just want to lift up these again the very first bullet point which is that as a system we are working to make decisions in a way that is student centered and ultimately make decisions in our system to support the reduction of systemic inequities and opportunities so that our students have access to the futures that they choose so I'm going to take a few moments and just remind where we are in
007the process as as you know we were here in December and had our first work session it was really to close out the previous year and and give a preview what this year it looks like since then we've done some work with schools and allocations have gone out we've also worked a lot with our legislative reps and dr. Duran has been down to Olympia a few times to testify on behalf of Highline and our students so we'll be really covering a lot of that today and get into the numbers so we were here in March at our second budget work session and next week starts RAM the RAM process with our schools which is exciting it's it's always a great time of the year to connect with schools and school leaders one thing to note
008this year is with the legislative session it is a long session this year which means right now it is scheduled to end April 27th we're about halfway through so there's a lot that can still happen a lot is changing every day and you'll see as we go through this I've made some edits since when you received it on Friday because things changed over the weekend and I wanted to make sure you had the most up-to-date numbers and so you'll see those today the other thing to note about the fact that it's a long session is the way it works with OSPI is the session ends and then OSPI has about usually it takes them two two and a half weeks to take all the information and turn it around to districts in the tools that
009we have to submit for our budget so it's a really fast turnaround for us if for some reason this year either we go into a special session so past the April 27th date or OSPI is postponed for whatever reason and we don't receive tools in time we may have to push out our June 4th intro date to the second board meeting in June and then so that would be intro and then action in July so it'll just depend on what happens this year I know I really would like to avoid that as well so we're hoping OSPI can turn around the tools pretty quickly this year but it's it's really so we'll see what happens with that we'll also be doing monthly updates so there'll be a lot of things happening pretty quickly in the
010next couple months around budget especially with the legislature you know where they're halfway through now the next revenue projections from the state level come out March 18th and then the House budgets will be released towards the end of March but then a lot of work to do to figure out where the final budget will end so a brief reminder of how we engage with our staff student family community this is similar slide to what you saw at our last our budget session just a reminder that we're always engaging with our our community and our students and our staff as we go through budget development we had I had the privilege of attending a feast presentation with Kisa a few weeks ago and some students and it was an amazing evening presenting to students that were
011so engaged in this work it was really kind of inspiring and it's really digging into budget and and how the legislative session works and what it all means so we just had that and then our I'll be attending the family action meeting next week and starting the subcommittee on budget development so exciting work we also had our first thought exchange in January and and gathered a lot of information from that so I'd love to take a few moments and review what we gathered in our thought exchange so of course this is the first of three that we are planning on doing so the first one went from January 17th to February 2nd our second thought exchange will be towards the end of March beginning of April we're waiting until we have a little more information
012from the legislature before we we push anything out to the community we want to make sure that we're working with numbers that we think are pretty concrete before we send anything out so in our first thought and we asked a question one question for the thought exchanges as we the next year's school budget or next year's budget what are the most important things Highline needs to think about in order to support all students we had about 330 ideas come through almost 13,000 ratings 360 participants what was really nice to see was 69% of those participants said that they have they understand at least a little bit about budget development process so that's great news we're getting out there we're getting the word out so we'll continue to do that work some of the key themes
013we saw come through on the thought exchange there were really five you broke it down staffing and support so retaining qualified staff and offering competitive wages you know this is of course a goal that we are committed to as a district we have a strong track record of competitive wages so you know we we increased our para educator rates up to $25 in our last year and we also this year certificated teachers received 1% over IPD so we are working to actively maintain competitive wages our class sizes was mean the ask was to maintain smaller class sizes and that is something that we we do our class sizes are significantly lower than the state allocation and we'll continue to do that as well inclusion and special education prioritize special education education and inclusion resources that's
014one of our big three with the legislature this year we've been pushing on special education funding and being able to serve all of our students and we'll continue to do so mental health and well-being so prioritize student mental health support we invest quite a bit of levy dollars into that priority so we staff well beyond the prototypical model for things like counselors psychologists social workers etc and then funding resources secure adequate funding for essential services and this is a really interesting one that we haven't necessarily seen in the past there was a lot about the state adequately from districts and so it was the word is getting out there that the legislature has some work to with school funding and districts so I'm going to turn it over to Lauren she's going to go through
015the twenty five twenty six enrollment projections and then I'll take it back over all right so each fall we all right so each year we partner with a demographer to review the current year's actual enrollment data and analyze trends that impact our upcoming year the official start of our budgeting season really starts with our demographer and drives our decisions throughout the budgeting season and allocations in general so this year K through 12 enrollment in our four county Puget Sound region being here since no homeless grew by over 2,900 students making it one of the largest gains since the pandemic we saw a great deal of that in Highline highlighting that kindergarten enrollment is still below our pre-pandemic levels and we anticipate our kindergarten enrollment to return to pre-pandemic levels coming in the 27 28 years
016as new families and younger children arrive and remain in the region enrollment for the current year came in higher than projected as you guys have heard and we have had much fewer students leaving Highline than in the past and we've had two new affordable housing complexes that have opened that we're attributing to some of the increased enrollment as well private school and home school instruction has was rising during the pandemic and has returned to pre-pandemic levels looking at the next few years enrollment trends in the Highline and King County areas are expected to improve but at a lower growth rate than prior to the pandemic so this is due to smaller birth cohorts and lower population growths projecting in the next couple of years so we'll see an additional growth with some additional new housing
017in the next couple of years so if we move on to that next slide so as always we work with our demographer to produce different models that we sorry that what might happen if housing and growth were to be higher or lower than our preferred so our preferred model is the medium model so you'll see here on this chart that we going back to 2019-20 year we've been declining about 800 annual FTE that solid teal line is our actual numbers for the past few years and then our medium model is the dotted lines for the next for this next few years the yellow line or orange line whatever it's appearing to be on yours is the demographers projections for the lower model so our preferred model again is that medium model and that's what we
018project all of our students staffing or student student numbers and staffing off of so we are seeing that we are staying steady mostly for the 25-26 and then 26-27 year we're dipping a little bit before we come back up and stay start gaining again this next slide is our annual headcount the solid lines again indicate our actuals back to 2019-20 and the dotted lines indicating our preferred demographer projections here I like this slide it shows you the bubbles as K through six moves up that or K through five through moves up to sixth grade and then eighth grade moves up to ninth you can kind of see the bubbles as the years trend through so I'll pause briefly and see if there's any questions about enrollment projections or thought exchange information before we move into
019really 24-25 and then planning for 25- 26 thank you so much directors any follow-up questions director Ted home I'm gonna start with you you not have any questions at this time thank you director Alvarez okay I do have two questions one was around our projection numbers a few years ago actually last talking about our cobit babies and when they're gonna be on incoming so would that be this year or last year so I'm just trying to look at numbers and trying to recall when we had projected yeah yeah so the kindergarten decline coming into kindergarten we're gonna see that in the 27-28 year that we're gonna see those kindergarten numbers rise which kind of makes sense it's a couple years after and that's that the interesting thing about the the birth cohorts is they continue
020to decline and so we kind of saw it creep up a little bit during kovat but it's declining again and so we don't anticipate large enrollment growths the levels we were when our enrollment kind of peaked but it is gonna start trending upward again thank you so in regards to our enrollment projections the 2900 students over the past year we had 18% of that 100 so was that an anomaly did our demographer think that was an anomaly and I mean it could happen next year or the following year so yeah so what yes he he doesn't think it's an anomaly he thinks that but he didn't project us to be as high as we are there's two reasons for that we actually aren't higher than we were last year we're actually trending pretty steady so
021we didn't lose students so for the first time since kovat we didn't lose students over the summer so enrollment didn't decline year-over-year and it seems to be in the whole King County area that it's stabilizing housing is stabilizing movement is I think a lot of that is after the pandemic it took a few years for things to stabilize and we're seeing it now stabilize more than we have in the past so after we worked Lauren and I worked pretty extensively with the demographer this year and he does believe that our enrollment will be steady in the next few years the birth cohort for the second year going into 26 27 is slightly smaller which is why you see a little bit of a decrease there but then he actually the cohort start moving up in
022the right direction thank you all right I'll continue on so 24 25 budget updates we're gonna talk about enrollment current enrollment initial projections and then what budget extension is so this is the slide you saw at the previous board meeting a couple weeks ago the enrollment looks like so we're about 534 over projection a lot of that is attributed to the elementary school we're 330 students over projection so that is good news and we anticipate that continuing into next year our initial projections for this year so a reminder the green is expenditures so are what we're spending yellow is revenue so what's coming in and then the purple bar is actually updated revenue projections so because our enrollment was higher this year than we had budgeted we're receiving additional revenue we think right now we're
023going to actually come in almost exactly even so that's great news we had projected in the budget last year that we were collecting about 6 million less for spending so we were going to spend about 6 million a little over 6 million out of the fund balance we don't think that will happen if if we have to spend anything out of the fund balance it'll be minimal so we should retain our fund balance as is going into next year which is great news one thing that we always have to talk about when we have unexpected revenue is the the need for potential extension so you've seen budget extensions come before the board it's any time our expenditures even are a penny over what we've budgeted we have to go out for a budget extension by
024law we right now don't anticipate having to go out for a budget extension but we're close because we have revenue and expenditures very close together if for some reason enrollment continues to increase and we have increased cost associated with that and our expenditures increase we would have to come out go out for a budget extension if that happens we're monitoring it really closely right now almost on a weekly basis we'll bring that information to the board as soon as we know for sure that it's going to happen it doesn't look like it will happen this year but I just want to make sure that you understand it's a possibility depending on if we have some sort of large expenditure we're not anticipating because we're so close to that threshold we may have to go out
025for a budget extension at that point is there anything that comes from being on the safe side if we know there we're that close to go ahead and just go for a budget extension to be on the safe side or we we have to OSPI likes us to wait until we know for sure we're gonna go over that the expenditures will not get let it get to that point we'll definitely go out for an exit for the budget extension if we anticipate going over at all right now we do have a little bit of contingencies still left in the budget that we always budget each year it's just a matter of are we going to end up using that or not if our revenues are higher so I would say probably by May we will
026know for sure moving on to 25 26 budget development so in order to put any sort of projections together our initial projections and then really spend some time going through the legislative update and each bill that is tied to the big three priorities that we've discussed so just a reminder of where we've been and where we're going with our budget 23 24 last year as you remember we made eight million dollars in reductions going into for our 24 25 budget we also had the loss of ESSER funds or the end of the ESSER funds last year so you know looking back at last year we did a lot of hard work to get us to a good place where we are now and we had an unassigned ending fund balance last year at 7% which
027is a fund balanced which is secure going into 24 25 as I said our enrollments higher than projection which is great news we have increased revenue which means we don't think we'll be using a lot of our fund balance this year we are in a long legislative session so we won't know definite numbers until you know May but we're not anticipating doing any reductions going into 25 26 and so we're we're holding this year to see what happens with the legislature what additional revenue we receive going into 25 26 because I really I think all of us agree that main unnecessary cuts should be avoided and if we can avoid doing that we will 25 26 as I said steady enrollment is projected potential increased revenue we don't know what that looks like yet so
028next year 25 26 budget development going into 26 27 is really kind of our year for adjustments because we'll either have additional revenue and we'll we'll invest that and or we'll have we won't receive the necessary revenue to balance our budget and we'll have to look at reductions and so we'll we'll really have this this time next year we'll be having those conversations of are we investing are we reducing are we holding and creating efficiencies so we can invest so we'll we'll we'll be doing that this so as I said long-term planning we're gonna continue to work with our legislatures to fully fund basic education we've been doing a lot of work this year I think the message has been received we'll see what happens but definitely every district in the state has a three
029three priorities and we've really gotten the word out there our long-term plan as I mentioned may include reductions in 26 27 if we don't receive additional funding from the state our minimum long-term planning we always ensure that our minimum fund balance is three percent which is our board minimum or above that one thing that we haven't talked about as much yet but you'll start seeing in the next few months is the fact that we're going out for a levy in November and so we're starting to ramp up work for that now you'll see the intro and action will be in June the same probably same time as the the budget is being introduced and going to action and then we'll have a lot of work over the summer as we prepare to run that levy
030and then as always we'll continue with feet click continue to collect feedback from all the stakeholders so assumptions as of February 2025 so as we're going through and doing trying to do projections for next year we always have to make some assumptions in order to make any sort of projection so our assumptions as we went through and did these projections that you're gonna see as of February 2025 is that our unassigned unassigned fund balance will remain at 7% going into next year we have a lot of unknowns so we'll continue to work through those unknowns throughout the budget development cycle we do know that IPD will be roughly 2.4 percent so we can anticipate those costs and that revenue already and we continue to be guided by policy 6000 so looking at next year just
031to be really really clear these are initial projections so these numbers will change and as you're looking through this the initial projections don't contain any new revenue so anything we get that's over and above IPD is not reflected here so no new revenue so you can see right now projected revenues and expenditures are a little bit off it's about 6 million or 7 million sorry roughly so our revenues are about 7 million dollars lower projected than our expenditures for next year have increased expenditures that we anticipate already you know all of our contracts are increasing so all the salary increases IPD increases transportation is increasing year-over-year special education as well as increasing year-over-year and things like insurance utilities at least each year so we just know that they're going to be more expensive for next
032year so we're anticipating that so as we went into this year just a reminder of what our legislative priorities are so the the hope is to make up that seven million dollar gap with additional we spent fourteen million dollars out of our levy on special education alone last year so our priority one was full funding of special education services two was around transportation and fixing the model priority three was around material supplies and operating costs so M Sox and we know that throughout the state every district is spending more on M Sox than they're receiving and a lot of that is attributed to insurance costs which went up 20% alone last year and utilities and gas and just the basics for operating a school priority four was supporting our capital facilities so that was around
033lowering the bond rating percentage from a supermajority to a simple majority and priority five was fully funding our mastery based learning programs so as I said some of this has changed from when you saw it on Friday so these are the most up-to-date information we have it will change by it changes on a weekly basis unfortunately so it makes projections a little bit difficult for revenue the first Senate bill that was introduced in the first lead bill that was introduced this year was 52 63 when it was first introduced it was fully funding our it has since been lowered and so right now the potential increase for this bill is 8.4 million in revenue that's if we take our special ed funding right now and our special ed students right now and apply this we
034would receive 8.4 million additional revenue they're increasing the multiplier they're decreasing the safety net threshold which would be very helpful and then they were moving the funding cap completely so no more 16% this is a great step towards fully funding special education it still wouldn't fully fund our special education but it would be a good step forward towards that goal the second bill that was introduced was House Bill 1310 and this one was one that changed late last week so this as well was very promising it was about the same level as the Senate bill when it was introduced so about 14 million in increased revenue unfortunately the last minute on Thursday it was pulled and a new bill was introduced in its place and you'll see that in a minute but it would have
035done a lot of the same things that the Senate bill did but unfortunately it did not move forward it is it is no longer moving forward and it's been replaced with House Bill 1357 and 1357 is not as promising it just increases our multiplier slightly it still has the cap in there at 16% it still has the threshold for safety net remaining the same and so it gives us a potential increase of 1.6 million which is not nearly what the cost is for special education legislative priority to transportation unfortunately at the end of last week our big three became the big two the transportation bill neither one passed and so even if this had it was very minimal revenue it was less than a million dollars the proposal we still do think that we will
036receive a little bit of additional revenue for our McKinney-Vento and our special riders that's still being you know worked through right now McKinney-Vento I will say transportation costs are where we are underfunded and so if we do recoup at least some of that funding it would help greatly legislative priority three was our M SOC bills and these were the ones that late last week really kind of unexpectedly changed at the last minute as they were moving through and so the Senate bill 5192 had a proposed substitute bill introduced and it still increases our allocations in M SOC which is fantastic as we need that it's still actually calls out the valuation factor so right now we have no idea how much M SOC will increase year over year it's decided each year this would give
037us way to project it which would be very helpful and it eliminates some of our categories that we have to spend in certain categories we'll have to report all of our spending bill but it'll give us a little bit more leeway and how we were how we spend our M SOC dollars potential increase when it was first introduced was about 2.9 million with the proposed bill the substitute bill decreased to 2 million but would still you know greatly improve our M SOC underfunding just the 2 million this was the surprise on Friday House bill 1338 was actually the most promising of the it increased our per pupil by almost 20% so it really gave us a big bump in our M SOCs and also required us to look at it or that required the legislature
038to look at it every four years we were still being funded adequately for for M SOCs the potential increase when this was introduced was 5.6 million as of last Friday it was pretty they went from a 20% per student increase to a 3% per student increase so it's about five dollars per student per year so less than a million is even being very generous it's it it's at a point right now we don't have the numbers that they're proposing so we don't know how much it'll be but it will definitely be far less than we need so those were the big three priorities there are some other bills that are moving through that are promising as well this the bond simple majority both the Senate and the House bills are still moving forward it would
039be simple majority which would be fantastic one of the trade-offs is that we could no longer districts could no longer collect impact fees for the past five years we've collected about four hundred thousand dollars it's a really minimal impact for a really big benefit for districts statewide so we're really hopeful that that continues to move forward and our local levees so there were two bills introduced that would allow us to collect more locally this means that our levee thresholds would increase we would have to go out to voters every district probably would have to go out to voters and have that approved to collect additional resources and additional funds but it would rebase the levees both bills would so they're doing it a little bit differently each side it would Senate bill 55 93 actually
040would allow us to start collecting LEA funds again as well which would be helpful the thing to know about both levy bills is it puts the responsibility on districts to go back and pass levees at a higher rate in order to collect that money and we would still be using that money to fund basic education services so just like I said both levy bills are very similar it's just increasing their per pupil your per pupil limit or the threshold that we're allowed to collect so I'm going to take a breath for one minute that was a lot of information very quickly next steps for our budget development cycle of course we're going to continue to advocate for the full funding of basic education it's the paramount duty of the state of Washington to fully fund
041basic education and we're going to continue to advocate for our students one thing to know is during the we had a lot of momentum the first half of the session we had a lot of school districts down there testifying and the thing we're hearing now is we have to continue that momentum we can't we can't let up now so keep pushing forward and keep advocating so we will continue to do that we're going to also monitor and analyze all the bills as they come through like I said we're doing that on a weekly basis you can see the result of last last week's updates unfortunately you know last week was a setback and it's anticipated with a long session and we're just hopeful that it will move forward in a positive direction we'll continue to
042provide monthly updates to the board so we will bring information as we receive it to the monthly update so it won't just be where we are this year but it'll also be where we're moving forward with the budget development for next year and so that when we come in June you won't be surprised by revenue expenditure projections and our numbers for next year and as always we'll come in 20 will present our 25-26 budget and the four-year projections to the board in June so we're really really really hopeful that that'll be June 4th depending on the legislature's work we'll we'll make sure we keep you informed if that is going to have to be pushed to second meeting in June so with that I will pause and for have some time for discussion and questions
043I just have a few kind of questions that maybe I could pose is what questions do you have about Highline's fiscal long-term plan and is there any additional information that we haven't included that would be helpful as you move towards approving the 25-26 budget well thank you for those questions or for the presentation I'm going to start with director Tithole any follow-up question I don't have any questions at this point I appreciate the presentation it was pretty good and I think just waiting to see what happens in this session and go from there so thank you all of you I know that you know numbers are always kind of tricky because especially since we don't know any everything is on a daily basis changing thank you also for I mean just thinking of adjustments and
044move forward and and this year unnecessary you know that's amazing and then thinking forward around even with the advocacy piece around importance of keep pushing in figuring out I know that it's tricky with us as well as like what role can we play for us to continue to make sure that we let our community know the importance of making sure that they're advocating because this is our district and they also the community could play a big role in making sure they're either testifying or calling in sending in or calling their own reps legislative representatives to have their own opinions and voice in there but I think as far as the questions about you know the long-term plan I think as I think about the importance of I mean keeping I know that we have our
045own priority all the five and I know that it's important for us to also keep at times there's myths out there that because we have these priorities that our educational priorities are not priorities in the district which we know that that's not true also wanting to make sure that we're thinking and putting those at the forefront you know as well as understanding that just because we how do we message that just because we wanting you know like transportation and fully funding our special ed and our transportation and that releases the money to be able to pour into the rest of literacy and everything else I think those messages are important how we weave those into all these presentations to make sure that people understand that everything else is important that that we want our kids
046to be able to graduate fully ready for the future they choose so as we continue to plan I think these long terms love to hear more on I've heard also from some of the families and as I connect with wanting to know like where do we and I know that's getting into the weeds around how are you know funds being used in district and in different or applied where does where's our money going as we hear right and I think sometimes like for us we understand like these are really high level or highly you know 30,000 foot level explanation as to where our budget is and I think I know that we have the opportunity to dig deeper as we connect with you all but I'm just wondering even how do we maybe have a
047little bit more tell times though just getting more of an understanding am I making sense yes definitely I appreciate it we do so each year we publish the budget book which has a lot of information in it and we also have resources online but it is it is very complicated and so happy to break it down as much as as possible the other thing that's really important to remember and I think one of the reasons that we push this fully funding basic education is that would free up our local levy funds to be used for things that would benefit our students greatly and right now we just we do we use it we use levy funds any of those things but we also are using it to to backfill basic education 14 million dollars in
048special education last year I mean if we had 14 million dollars to invest in the needs of our students instead of back filling the state's basic education that could make a big impact and I love I love to hear this because I think that a lot of people don't understand how much is needed you know and I think as we're going out for our levy and I think that's something that I mean these are great messages for our community to hear that we're not going out for levies because as we used to before you know levies were for certain things that were sometimes would be used for enrichment levies were that was back then but now we sometimes need to use it just to simply fund the basics that are weird you know and and
049yes I know about the I mean they were really big stakeholder about everything in detail so I do I think I think I need the big balance around how do we not go in such detail but it and for me I think these are these are just up you know at the deep I'm just trying to balance that out even for myself as to getting a better understanding and that could be something even for myself it's been a while since you know just getting just digging deeper into things have changed so much where before these would just be an overview of whom we would get it but things change on a daily basis as we heard just now so I just need to think even deeper as to what do I really need for myself
050so I'm sure we'll be so not for the questions one of the things I know we've talked about you know in the past around trying to you know align our budget to our strategic plan goals you know so we do you have some dashboard work going on there but another thing you may want to share is just how you're even trying to capture the spending in the four big areas process that's gonna be really helpful for us to get that information from schools because as we try to think about how much money we're spending to impact literacy it can be very broad we're trying to get some information tools to help think through that so if you want to get in that process it's gonna be helpful for us to name where some of our
051dollars are going and how we are prioritizing our strategic plan and the priority yeah we've been we've been working on dashboard information that would be able to be published and our first step is really trying to start capturing some of that information and so one thing we did this year with our categorical plan which is our title and lap supplemental funding and our TV is we added a drop down so as schools go through and plan those dollars they have to if it is tied to one of our big four they have to mark that so that we can start tracking and and building out informations to understand our investments so that's kind of step one we're hoping to roll that out further as we go so we can identify almost all of our expenditures
052but that's that's step one in the process well thank you so much director Alvarez so I was just sharing with dr. Duran that he was stealing my thunder I think he was thinking already what I was gonna ask around our bid budget development around you know slim making sure that communicate with our community where money money's going and I think first and foremost that the monthly budget dates our board meetings it's fantastic so continually keep what keep that process going one is about the ramp about ram you have 35 sites and full septic Adams are we going to get that get across to all 35 sites within let's say a month it is yeah the timeline is extensive for for Rams we actually start the January so we send out enrollment projections in January and
053then Lauren and Sarah this year conducted training for the school leaders so they came and we talked through enrollment staffing allocations and we also had some partnership with HR and student learning there as well so really talking through changes this year so that when they received their allocations in February they understood what any of the changes were so that in February they received those and they receive it's a large large package of tools they receive and I have to give credit to this team because you know nine years ago when Lauren and I started this process it was manual data entry on Word documents took forever and we have team has really built an incredible tool just with the things we have here and so we send those to schools and they start building their
054master schedules they look at and allocations for next year and then was it last week that we had the technical meetings yeah last technical meeting so it was an opportunity for all of student learning HR business services all the leads to come together and principals dropped in and had strategic conversations about their staffing and and where we worked through a lot of different things it's like a big work session with everyone involved and then next week starts the actual RAM meetings and so each I'll let you yes next week we have about an hour with each school so it is back to back for quite a few days and it is everyone again from the student learning and HR and business services teams and we meet with them to finalize their staffing and make any
055adjustments to their categoricals or ML plans and really work through all of their tools to finalize it so we can finalize our budget that is great thank you so much in regards to that you know as we go into our board meeting tonight one of the intro was 11.6 in regards to non-renewal which we do every year and you did share with us in regards to our thought exchange one of the key themes was you know supporting of staff competitive wages and things of that sort and with the 7% or the fund I think we're gonna be sitting in a really great spot oh the board has shared with dr. Durand the previous meeting was that just because we are in a good spot doesn't mean that we won't be we're gonna continually look at
056opportunities for efficiencies right we're gonna continue on looking at things that make sense doesn't make sense to make those changes and so it we're not gonna cut it just say we're gonna always have our eyes looking at so I appreciate any other questions or comments from the directors and then I know that you threw us some questions at the very end here that I'm gonna ask for some time to think about that and then kick that to you thank you is that it okay well then I guess that concludes our budget session thank you so much y'all for being here and sharing that motion to make a motion we adjourn I heard her but can you go off me all in favor thank you very much