001Next thing number five, the budget departmental request. Uh just a couple of comments. This is the [clears throat] very very first step in the U process and uh one of the things that I was looking at uh state statute. I want everybody to be aware that in state statute it says this is a budget but it's just an estimate. Every part of it is an estimate. uh part of it in uh the income to the district uh expenses uh whether there's a u surplus at the end or debt at the end that's all supposed to be in there and uh recognized in preparing this budget. This was uh recommended to us a few years ago by Dr. buyers that we do this because very often the board just gets kind of like the final product
002and uh this way we're hearing what the staff people our administrators are putting in at the very beginning and uh the public is also uh uh getting the information. So you can't say well uh you just picked up a figure from last year and then just uh that's what we're using. We just added a small percent. Um we do use a zerobased budgeting uh technique where every every dollar that's uh put into the budget uh on every side is expected income and uh expected expenses and there are uh things to uh that we follow. We do use some history uh as a guide but not specifics uh saying okay we're going to use this this and made everything 1.5% or something like that. That's not done. So with that uh I'm going to move and
003uh I'll let Dr. Buyers uh continue uh with uh this part of the meeting. >> Great. >> And I'll get out of the way and keep my mouth shut and we'll go from there. All right. And um this is the budget presentation that I have the fewest number of slides for. Um which is great because most of it is going to come from the principles and from our departments. Um [laughter] ask me to test it though. I told everybody that this clicker was going to work. >> I'll do it for now. >> Okay. All right. Um so um again going back to um what Mr. Davis was saying, the purpose of the um initial proposal presentations was to give board members information on all of the initial budget requests. Um it was really to let
004the board see what the departments identified as what they needed um without um any sort of uh interference from Mrs. Lumis or myself co coercing uh budget cuts right from the very beginning. Um it will help the board to see through November all the way till March um what was removed um uh as we go to our um uh additional reductions. And it also gives us some long-term planning um goals. So some of the things that we may present tonight that ultimately get reduced may end up showing back up next year or the year after because they are things that we need. Um but there are things that we can sometimes defer as we uh look into this um more. Um very clear the initial presentations are absolutely not the final budget. So when you
005see the numbers and percentages here tonight, please do not think that that is where we are going to land at the end of our budget um process. And it is also not a wish list. Um I think it's been interpreted in the past that we just kind of put everything out there right from the very beginning and have you know these outrageously high requests. Um but truly the the um building principles and the directors have already made um some [snorts] reductions have already gone through um looking for where we can make changes from last year and are putting forth a budget of what they believe they need um not the extra stuff that they want. Uh so I [cough] just want um everyone to know that eventually when we start making cuts, all of those
006cuts are painful and they take away from things that we want to be able to uh provide for our kids and accomplish. But at the same time, we also understand our fiscal um responsibility to the communities. Uh so the agenda tonight um you essentially have it in the packet. You're going to hear from each of our um from our uh directors, from our principles. Uh we'll start with our self- insurance um analysis from Brown and Brown. Um and then um we will um we actually don't have distribution of information for tonight. That's that's old news. Um we will um we will actually have uh budget books and u materials that we can distribute when we actually present to the AFC beginning in uh January. Is it gonna work now? The >> Got it. Okay. um
007turn it over to Miss Thomas. >> Okay. So, what is the process here at AM to build the budget? So, uh we start with the staff um and we ask them to submit their requests to their budget department leaders. That might be uh department chair submitting to the principal or principles uh developing their budget. Um the athletic director, there's about eight or nine different departments that collect budget information. That all comes in to um our financial system ununice and through for Microsoft forms we collect some information there. Uh we start reviewing all of that detail and every account. Um we have a group administrator meeting which we actually already had last week uh where all the administrators who are responsible for our budget come and we talk about everyone's requests. We talk about new personnel
008requests, any new program request, what is the uh driving forces in their budget and everybody gets to hear everyone's priorities. So when we have those those difficult discussions about what to cut, everyone is taking into account what everyone has presented. We start making our revisions to the budget. I'll have individual meetings with each department uh who presents a budget. So, I've already had a couple today and I will continue this week and next week to really go um through their budgets to see if there's anything there that we can uh revise uh their committee meetings, facilities, technology, curriculum all during this process. We'll be uh reviewing before we make a request to the uh AMD finance committee which will be in January. Uh so what is the data that the staff works with? So we
009provide them with historical data. What have you spent in these accounts that you are asking uh to budget for that goes to the content leaders, department chairs, they have meetings um we also with facilities or technology. So if they have specific requests in those areas, they may meet with those directors. Curriculum requests go with Dr. Perry Carlson. In special ed again always uses historical data, but then Mr. Brandt reaches out to the elementary districts to make sure we're aware of the students who will be rising up into AMD and making sure we're going to be ready to address those needs. Also, students who may be leaving any transportation configurations and always looking at grant funding and whether that's going to impact our operational budget. >> In technology, again, everyone uses historical data. Um, look at
010the contracts that are expiring. any new district-wide request. Obviously, AI is a big topic this year. So, there's um you know, always a software programs that we're reviewing. Are people using them? Should we be renewing them? What's the new request about? And then a five-year or long-term plan is developed [snorts] for facilities. Again, the historical any contracts, a lot of maintenance contracts are on three-year cycles. Any capital requests that come in to Mr. Money, he's reviewing uh whether they're appropriate to be in the operational budget or whether they should be on the 5-year capital plan, [snorts] athletics, again, historical data, and then looking at the quantity of the events that are held, the staffing, uh and transportation needs for that. And then what are the current rates? Some of the things uh are not set
011by uh Mr. uh Goodwin. It, you know, the CIA set some rates. We have a transportation contract. So they have to take into account all of that for curriculum and staff development. Besides the historical data, it's what professional needs uh does the district have for to meet standards that are in place? What grant funding is available to support those? What curriculum writing requests are there? What curriculums being reviewed? Any new courses being proposed? And then our five-year textbook plan to make sure that we're addressing and renewing textbooks on a a periodic cycle. Finance looks at all the salary data. We make sure we're budgeting for every single person who is currently working here even or position that is is here but is even if it's vacant, we're making sure we budget for that. We work
012with our insurance consultants Brown and Brown and also USI for uh workers comp and liability insurance. We review contracts, debt service. We have committee meetings and we look at the long-term planning. We bring all that information to the superintendent for a full budget review. We look at statistical data, enrollment analysis from a district-wide pre uh review and we start again revising our presentations as I mentioned start in January with the AMD finance committee being first. Then we go to um actually that's flipped now. We go to each town finance committee um between January and February and then the board has a its first formal presentation in February. We take the advice um that we hear from any of these meetings and we try to incorporate what we can into our budget in preparation for our
013May referendum. So, as you can see our timeline, we start this process in December. That's when the staff first get uh September, that's when the staff first gets the uh budget uh data that they can start looking at and start entering. Uh first presentation is tonight here in November, December and January. We're out to the towns and the AFC. April is our public hearing. March, the board of ed must approve a budget. Um, oh, go went down the wrong way. Sorry. February, the AFC has to make a a budget approval by the end of February to the board of ed. And then the board of ed has to make uh an uh has to approve a budget by March 15th so we can have our uh public hearing in April. So again just going over
014the timeline, the collection, the different forms that we use and develop a reports that we look at. We give these reports to the departments and we also sit in in our individual meetings and go over them especially the historical data to make sure that their requests are um you know have been used in the past. So it's not just Carpalanche assuming that you get if you got the money last year you can get it again this year. We look at uh three years of historical data. So just a little bit of about our account count structure. So if you see our reports that we hand out um the the number set across the top each section has uh each segment has a meaning. So the first one is the location and as you can see
015from there 01 is Bethany, O2 is orange and on down the list. The second one is program. Um it's whether it's regular ed, special ed, whether it's a supportive service like guidance. um or curriculum and then general support is you know the office running and then non-programmed. Um function is really think of it like the subject uh there's a broad category of instruction and then beneath instruction is all the different types of subjects we have art music fizzed >> [snorts] >> um then we go into counseling services media services etc. And then last is the object. Think that as the detailed type of expenditure that's happening within that account, whether it's a [clears throat and cough] salary, instructional supply, or a textbook. This follows the um the state guideline for account structure and the accounting
016standards. But it it helps us to recognize what easily what kind of um expenditure is happening. So, the enrollment, the October run enrollment this year, you could see um a little bit of a change um and what's projected for next year. Um Bethany went up a little this year and so did Woodbridge while Orange went down. Uh we gave that report out at our November meeting. Um but not significant differences as there was last year. Um and you can see that next year it does uh by school look like you know the schools will be pretty steady but an increase. So overall our budget request right now is a 2.97% increase. Contractual increases make up are at 3.87. So overall that at the 2.97 means that there's reductions elsewhere and the largest reduction is debt
017service which is decreasing uh over a million dollars. If debt service wasn't decreasing, this budget request would be sitting at 4.8% right now. Uh, new personnel and benefits are.99% of the budget or 576,000. Benefits overall increase about 10% including medical cost and benefits for new personnel and then we'll get into some detailed [clears throat] information about medical insurance. Thank you, Terry. >> We have Brown and Brown here. Um Justin Levette and Chuck Petrasonone. >> Thank you, everybody. Um I'm Chuck Patricio with Brown and Brown Insurance. We've served as the health insurance brokers for region 5 for about five years now, I want to say. Uh and Terry has always included us in this process on this night to uh walk through the initial proposals for everybody. uh which I'm very happy about because this is
018a huge part of the budget. Uh anywhere I work, salaries number one, benefits number two. Uh it's always a very large portion of the expenditures for the taxpayers and as such very happy to be able to walk through what's going on. So I oversee our department at Brown and Brown that all we handle is towns and boards. So we represent about 50 or 60 different towns and school districts across the state. So, we really know this market space well and very happy to be able to come out and represent. I have with me tonight Justin Levette. Justin is in our underwriting department. Since this is a numbers presentation, I want to have Justin run through our slides here. So, Justin, you want to take it away? Thank you. Good evening, everybody. >> Down here, >>
019man. Okay, we're first going to start off with our reserve analysis. And what this is is just um it's just a suggestion for extra funds to have on hand since you guys are a self-funded group. Um self-unded meaning you pay your own claims and you pay a fee for service for a network. Um this covers all unpaid claims and then helps offset any large claims that might spike during a course of a policy year. Uh this is uh your current rolling 12 as in 12 months um of large claimments at the moment. Um right now in your current policy year 25 26 you have four months of claim data. Right now we're currently looking at the past 12 months up through the end of October. At this moment, there's about seven large claimants um on
020the list here that are targeted to be above your 150k individual stop-loss level. Um in the current four months of data that we have today, there are three claimants over 50K and one claimment at about $110,000. This is a look back on the performance for 2024 to 2025. Uh we projected the total spend to be 5,985,000 and total spend came in just under that at 5,915,000. It's about a 1.2% deficit which is good. So for 2025 2026, we're projecting at this moment to total spend to be 2 million or 6,225,000. Um again, this is based on only four months of current claim data through o end of October. Uh your total spend at the moment looks to be about 6.5 million. Um it's about a four and a half percent increase. Um data is still
021coming in. It's still very very early in the policies year. Uh we are actively watching the large claimments week by week to see if there's any changes. Uh we're very hopeful that one of the top claimments that you saw on that list previously um that it's pretty much came to a standstill and we should see claims start to be dropping for that individual. Um, next slide here is for 2627 initial outlook. Um, we put in 6.6 million and this is just an initial 6% increase over our projection from last year of the 6.2 million. Um, again very immature. We our data is still rolling in and as it comes and as we come back in the spring I believe we'll have a little bit more details on a better projection for you. This chart is
022a trend analysis of your claims over the past five years or so. And the very light blue line in the middle is is how your claims have been over the past 5 years. very steady. Um nothing too out of control. The as you could see this at the end of the the chart here all the way to the right in your first couple of months you have those large claimments. So you see a big spike in the the light green and dark blue color there. But overall over five years your your claims have been pretty significantly steady for given the size of the group. Again, this is a look back back to 201819 of your claims as a total. Um, as you could see, the medical side, what I want to point out here is
023the medical side has been pretty pretty flatline. It, you know, it only just a 20% increase over five years. Uh however, where we're seeing an uptick everywhere across all companies that we work for is in the pharmaceutical spend. Your pharmaceutical spend is about uh 250% increase over 5 years. Um bigger increase on the pharmacy spend leads to bigger rebates as well. doesn't really wash it all off, but it is a positive in a in a situation where we're seeing higher pharmacy costs. Uh your dental claims have been a smooth steady ride. They're uh they've maintained their their levels can very consistent throughout the past five six years. And that's all I have. Um, and I know we don't typically do questions. This is the one place where um, Brown and Brown comes this evening and
024only this evening while the rest of us are always around. Uh, so if there are any specific questions related to um, insurance, now's the time to ask them. And if not, we can move on. >> One quick question. Can you explain the reserve accounting the where you have the difference between a 15% assumption versus a 22% assumption and how that filters into what we experience as an expense. >> So claims >> I can tell you that the board um requested that we uh keep an 18% reserve. So you can see that we are below the moderate reserve and just going towards the low reserve end. So that is the level that AMD's reserve is at. This is an illustration of if the district decided to have a strong reserve, you would be looking at a
02522% of your claims. If you the moderate range is around 19% and the low reserve is down to 15%. Obviously the risk gets greater as you go down lower. If you have anything else you want to see. >> Yeah. So there's a couple different components of it right to to speak to your question. So the top line on each one of the versions, whether it's strong, moderate, or low, is IBNR. Uh that's a number we get from Anthem. IBNR stands for incurred but not reported. So those are claims that occur at the end of the fiscal year, right? People go to the doctor late May and in June, but those bills don't hit the system until after July. So if you ever packed up shop and said, "Oh, we're not going to do self-unding anymore.
026We're stopping as of June 30th." there's still going to be bills that roll in after you close the doors on that. So that's what that money is for. So absolute bare minimum, you need about that much on reserve to account for those roll in rollover claims. The others are the parts that fluctuate depending on what your appetite for risk is. And that's where Terry said the the the board has wanted to keep it moderate level. So uh the the reserve has been right in right around line with that 19%. You know, we would always uh as a consultant say bare minimum you really want to have 15% on hand. If you're super conservative and you want to pad a little more into the budget, creep up toward 25%. So that 1819 is is a perfectly
027reasonable amount. And then how it affects things. Um if things have been running well like they have in the last couple years, there's really no effect. You're kind of budgeting yeartoear. This would come into place if you had a bad year and you ate up some of that reserve. Now you're like, "All right, we've got to start budgeting for that." So instead of 6.6 million, maybe we have to budget 6.8 million and include that. But over the last four or five years since we've been working with region 5, it's been pretty good. So really, it's just if we had an unusually high claims year and or needed to replenish the reserve or we altered our reserve assumption, then that would impact what flows through as expense. >> Yes. Correct. >> And just to be clear,
028it going from low to moderate is an extra $200,000 in receipt, right? >> Just about. >> So that's what we're talking about, a $200,000. >> Can you talk a little bit about the pharmaceutical um increases you've seen? >> Yeah. So, uh, like Justin said, it's unfortunately something we're seeing across the whole market. This is nothing unique to region five. U, the price of medications has really skyrocketed everywhere for the last five, six years. Um, you know, it's a double-edged sword because there's medications now that cure diseases that 10 years ago if you had that disease, you were going to pass away. Now, there's medication you take, take it for a couple months or a year, you're you're cured. Uh those medications come with hefty price tags. They there are million dollar $2 million medications out
029there. So, it's that kind of specialty medication. I mean, whenever we look at data, 20% of a population is spending 80% of the drug spend for a group. So that's it's it's no different here than we're seeing anywhere. It's just a significant uptick in the cost particularly of those specialty meds. [clears throat] >> Relatively these are new medications and that's why their costs are as high as they are. >> Yeah. If you see uh any commercials on TV, you can be sure those are expensive meds. Uh and whenever we look at groups, the top spend drugs are Humra, Skyrizzy, right? It's all those those ones you see commercials for. And again, they do a great job and they solve issues. Uh but you know that one of those medications might be a 60 or $70,000
030annual spend. You have a handful of people in the district take it. That's how the prices go up, >> right? But [cough] [clears throat] when they go when they're off and they generic, so it's good that way. >> Yeah. You know, and some of these do move to generics. Some have bioimilars. Uh but most of the time when a drug enters the market uh they've got seven or eight years before there's going to be a generic available. >> It's challenging camera. I mean, you're almost done. [clears throat] >> All right, pass that on down to my two friends down. >> Thank you, everybody. >> Jason down the down. So, um before we um the middle school shares their uh budget request, we wanted um to talk about um the middle school schedule redesign process that
031we went through because this has an needless to say an impact on the budget um and really was at the forefront of our thinking as we looked at the budget this year. Um middle school has changed a lot over the years. the way kids learn, um the tools they have, um the way we instruct kids, and we were looking at a schedule that we've had for probably over 20 years. So, we really did a lot of work um to figure out what kind of schedule do we need kids to do we need at a in a middle school um to best serve the needs of our students. Um and so we worked collaboratively with uh teachers across the district. I'll talk a little bit more about that when I talk about the timeline, but um
032we really um looked at what is our vision um talking about what are our needs and you know we work collectively to determine that you know kids need more options and autonomy. there's a lot more choice um that students need um in terms of the learning needs and the kinds of things they want to explore and how they want to learn. Um we want to expose students to a greater variety of learning experiences. Um it is not just reading out of a textbook anymore. Um authenticity, authentic learning experiences and hands-on learning experiences are where a lot of kids learn best. Um so we wanted to give kids more exposure to different types of learning experiences. We also um want acknowledge that middle school is continues to be a unique age. Children are growing and developing
033um faster than any other time in their life aside from birth to three. And um they're getting a lot of information today, more so than they've ever had. Um, so their needs are different. So how can we better meet those needs? Um, and one of the paramount things that we were looking at as a as a team is recognizing that middle school students are not elementary students and they're not high school students. They need um specific support um which is found in the team model which is really like a school within a school where you have four to five core teachers that work with a small group of students. That is at the heart of what all best practices for middle school students um have. So those were kind of our those were the things
034that we thought were key to um creating a new middle school schedule. Talk a little bit about the timeline. This was a uh an arduous process that was started back in 2023 where we identified a scheduling committee that would really reflect all the you unique departments um across uh the middle school. We included um teachers from all disciplines, guidance counselors, um special education [snorts] teachers, um life arts teachers, administration, um union representation. Um everyone uh around the table came with a unique perspective um and some valuable insights. Um we identified the strengths and weaknesses of our current schedule. Um and we reviewed and we spent an enormous amount of time reviewing schedules um from other districts in our dur and more importantly um AMD is unique because we are a 78 school and having just
035a 78 school with certain restrictions and has implications in terms of how we schedule kids. So, we really looked at not only schools in the DUR, but really sought out schools that have the same grade configuration we did. Um, in 2024, um, after we identified our priorities, we wanted to turn out and, um, our ideas or gather the ideas from families, students, and staff. So we surveyed um all of them to find out what their thoughts are, what was important to them and gathered that data to influence what our decision-making process was and what was going to be important to the group. Um in 2025 we brought um the scheduling committee [cough and clears throat] back together and evaluated all the schedules that we had looked at and all the other um priorities that were
036shared across the board um by families, teachers and staff. Um and in November 2025 um we shared the work the the work of the scheduling committee with the entire middle school staff. So um it was a very meaningful process, a very thoughtful process. Um but it it was really something that you know it's really at the heart of our middle school. So, um I want to appreciate the time that the committee spent um doing the [snorts] research and having the conversations and really um putting self-interest aside to create a schedule that we feel best meets the needs of our kids. When I talk about um the surveys um the themes that came across um was and again in keeping with um the first slide restoring and expanding elective opportunities. Students um wanted more options. Um
037we felt that our advisory program which we have taken several years to build [snorts] um has been very successful and so we wanted to maintain the advisory program and of course the team structure. Um, [clears throat] equitable access um also came into play in a in a meaningful way because uh we didn't want a schedule that was going to limit the options [snorts] of students who might need support services or might um because they needed other supports not have access to certain electives. We needed to have a more flexible schedule to allow every student to have access to the same learning opportunities. Um, we also recognize the need for increased physical activity. Middle school students need to move and um, our middle school doesn't have um, uh, recess, so to speak. Um, their recess comes
038[clears throat] in three minute increments. That means walking from one class to the next. That's that's about it. Plus PE. Um, but we felt that was still important. Optimizing instructional time. Again, when you're doing inquirybased work [snorts] and uh studentled, student uh led work, um it takes longer. Our current 42 minutes was not enough oftentimes to fully develop lessons and give students the opportunity to really deeply investigate things or practice before they would get sent off to their next class. Um that actually comes into the idea of transitions. Um our current schedule um when you look at the number of transitions a student goes through in one day every 42 minutes switching gears um is difficult and if we had to do it as adults [snorts] I think we'd find it rather challenging. Um we
039also felt it was important to align the middle school schedule with uh the high school. A, it helps prepare um students as they're transitioning to the high school, but also too, there are valuable resources um at the high school that can't currently be shared because of the varying skules. So, in order to maximize the resources that we have across the district, we felt it was important to align with the high school schedule. [clears throat] >> Okay. So, I feel like I need a drum roll. Here we go. That's what the schedule looks like. So, for those of you that um have seen the high school schedule, um this looks a lot like it. It's an eight period schedule. Kids pick eight classes and two of them drop a day. Um very much like in the
040high school. So, again, like Kathy said, one of our our main goals in the middle school is prepare kids for the high school, prepare them for what for what they what lies ahead. Um this schedule um does a lot of the things that that we just said that that were in the surveys from both the students, the parents um and the faculty. It increases instructional time. So periods go from being 42 minutes, if you look over on the right, to being 57 minutes long. That overall increases our instructional time in seats in classes um by about 200 minutes um throughout the school year. Goes from 6,888 minutes to 7,1. So, um it also honors advisory. It keeps advisory built in there as a static period throughout the day. Um and it adds um some other
041options for kids to take electives and to explore electives. It also takes world language and puts it off the team. This is important um in this configuration because it allows students to take other world languages. Currently in the middle school, if you want to take Mandarin, for example, you have to take Spanish and Mandarin. um that's a lot um to to learn one language is a lot to learn two um I don't know how a lot of those kids do that. So in this model it'll allow for them to pick whether they want to learn Spanish or Mandarin and we'll see later on down the road when we get to the budget [snorts] part of this um potentially other languages that we're going to kind of request um to be added in. It allows for
042students to have PE twice in a 4-day cycle um for 57 minutes each, which is an increase overall right now from the time um that they currently um have PE. And it allows them to take other courses. So, for example, if you wanted to take band and Mandarin right now, you can't do that. In order to in this schedule, you'll be able to do that. You'll be able to stretch your options and take more electives. There's a difference between what the seventh grade schedule and what the eighth grade schedule looks like. That's in the weeds. Um, we don't really need to get into it too much, but again, it opens up more options for kids to take more electives. And you might notice there's a thing in there called win wn. Um, that is essentially
043um academic success. It's just reimagined. So, if we called it academic success and expected to add new things to it and do new things in it, um, anyone that knows anything about marketing knows you got to come up with a new name. And so, um, this is what other schools call it. We've a lot of the schedules we saw um call that time that academic success time what I need now. And it's for kids to start to make choices. In middle school, we talk with the kids a lot about independence, about fostering that independence and using your independence to get what you need out of school. So, it allows for um more experiences for kids to access teachers, for example, to access interventions to access what they need from teachers. Um it also allows us
044um what I need as the administrator. We often make um I think if you looked on a on a monthly basis, we probably have seven different alternate schedules whether we have speakers come in or we do portrait of the graduate experiences with students or some some kind of an alternate learning experience with kids and extended advisory. I have to submit a separate schedule. I have to change the bells. We have to kind of reconfigure all the class periods. This allows us to do that during this period. So it gives us more opportunities to work with kids in a way um that gives them more experiences in school and it also um allows kids to then pick what they need um from that time. So some of the benefits um of this new schedule um it
045increases instructional time across all disciplines. It increases choice in both the seventh and the eighth grade. Eighth grade like I said is a little different. they have more options to take electives um which is the way it used to be. Um it allows for preference of world language like I explained. Students will be able to take um Mandarin or Spanish, not both at the same time. Um it maintains the daily advisory period which is something that's been important to our teachers and to our students um across the surveys. It increases time for physical activity like Kathy mentioned. It provides more equitable access to all learning opportunities. Right now, if we have students that have special education needs or any kind of special services, um they get pulled and they get taken out of electives, which
046um is not the best thing for kids. Um we want to give them the opportunity to access those opportunities. So, this allows us more flexibility and how and where kids are and the ways that we can schedule them throughout the day. Um it decreases the need for special schedules like I just mentioned, maintains the team model, and it enhances our ability to share resources across the district. like Kathy mentioned earlier and again we preface this because um in a second we're going to step in to talk a little bit about our budgets um at both of the middle schools and some of the requests that you'll see in in the budget as we get along for additional staffing. This is where it's coming from. Any kind of increases um that you see that are any
047substantial increases come from this change um in middle school schedule. So um to get started on the middle school's budget um the middle school mission you know obviously in AMD schools in general and the middle schools we believe that education is a cooperative effort um that is shared by the school the family and the community. We believe uh creative and challenging academic program and strong support services with varied opportunities for students. Um we encourage students to acquire knowledge and think critically as they seek to achieve their potential in school. I got to get a picture of Bethany with a rainbow. We have a bunch. Um, so this is a middle school philosophy. Um, and again, this comes from best practice and exemplary middle schools. Teachers who work together on a team, design and share much
048of the program and collaborate across their specialty areas. Um, and they operate the program um, to help to support literacy development um, advocacy and student life among other things. They take advantage of opportunities to use um and vary time um space and staff and grouping arrangements to make sure that we're providing for the success of all students. Um from the inception of middle school movement, the team approach is one that was considered to be the preferred way to operate a middle school. It breaks the school down into smaller learning organizations within the school. Um, it's key to achieving the potential of a dynamic middle school, one that can be flexible and the one that truly responds to the unique needs of the adolescent. Like Kathy said, this is a time when they go through the
049most development in their life than they do from birth to three. This is the the second most um accelerated kind of growth during adolescence. Um, so it allows us to help them to support them with their social, emotional, their intellectual and their moral development um as they move through adolescence. >> Okay. So, um, when we take a look at the middle school budget, um, we did have three priorities. Um, aligning the budget, uh, process and requests to the AMD portrait of a graduate. As the portrait of graduate has evolved, it has really become part of the AMD culture and the ideas of communicator, collaborator, planner, problem solver. Um, and having students develop skills in terms of empathy are really at the heart of a lot of the work that we do. And so that is
050why advisory is important. That is why we uh continue to do learning walks um and look at where do these characteristics live within our school and our curriculum. So um obviously we are looking for budget support on that. um AMSO and AMSB. Um Jason and I have worked really well collaboratively over the last several years to really align our budgets um in terms of making sure that our requests are pretty much in line with one another give or take to depending sometimes on um special circumstances in one school or another or enrollment. But we've really come a long way in making sure that our programs are similar and they're financially supported in a similar way. Um and of course back again uh to the middle school model, maintaining the team model and recognizing and supporting
051those schools within a school so to speak um are a critical component of uh the middle school and the financial support needed to maintain that. All right, our budget drivers. Again, um the primary budget driver, a lot of what we've uh been t talking about um is preparing for the transition to the new uh middle school schedule. We have um some increases in staffing and supplies that are going to be necessary for us to implement um next year. Um and certainly there are longer term goals for uh implementation of this budget as we continue to work to provide students with more options. um with this new schedule. Um obviously computers and technology both um and textbooks and software continue to be um a major component of our budget request. Um computers age quickly. Um Prometheium
052boards, I'm sure, um Sean will be discussing the average age of our smartboards and um have a lot to say on that. But um at the heart of what we do now is all technology based. So that's an important component. And then cost of goods like everything else inflation um is hitting everyone and so we had to account for increased cost of goods and supplies and services. >> So here are some drivers. Um we just picked out a few accounts. I mean obviously there's many more than this that that are in the budget. Um but these are a couple that kind of show some of the the similarities between Kathy and I uh and and how we're budgeting and um some of the changes year-toear. So um a quick look at this you could see
053that you know in the areas that things have increased things like dues and fees mean services cost more money um having professional development cost more money. So a lot of the increases that you see are due to um some of those inflation um kind of aspects that Kathy was talking about. >> [snorts] >> um some differences. You'll see some actual areas where the things decline. And if you remember back to the original slide that Terry uh showed in the beginning of the presentation, um if teachers don't use it, we don't rebudget for it. We go to a zero base. So, we don't just take what last year was, add a percentage to it, and keep moving on. We go back and take a look at it, and if they haven't used it, then we then
054we take that out um of of what we do. So, um like I said, if it becomes a historical event, then we then we change it. But um Kathy and I have worked at this over the years to kind of align it. This year we kind of um flip-fpped a little bit in our bottom number, but um we're still um in the same ballpark. >> Some of the um the drivers want to talk about that one, Kev, >> I just uh so the budget continues to reflect a continuation of the work being done between the two middle schools. Um again, we t already talked about increases in goods and services. um support for our new school climate program. Um again, the state has come out with new regulations and requirements in terms of um creating
055school a school climate program or a school climate uh plan that we have to submit to the state. So, we've kind of expanded um the program. We also have the greenhouse um attendance recognition, student of the month and transportation for programs. All of which are supported with this budget. Um at AMSB we have a similar request at AMSO. Um overall increases are very similar. Um and so again we are really trying to align so those experiences in me in both Bethany and Orange um are the same. So we are preparing kids to enter the uh high school um well prepared and again ha having a level playing field when they get into the high school. So these are the additional uh staff requests that the middle school is requesting this year in the budget. Um
056requesting a total of two FTEEs but one FTE in each um school in the area of physical education and health. um due to CLA the class capacity sizes and um in health classes in particular um in the way that the schedule works in this rotated kind of schedule um this is necessary to make sure that all kids get access to physical education and health. Um two things that are mandatory um obviously we could look in other areas of elective down the road but these are two areas that must be covered um in order for us to make sure that all the kids are getting access to the things that we're we're [snorts] mandated to give them you know by state policy. Um, but that's that's the first request. The second request is an additional one
057FTE that's going to be shared. Again, when Kathy and I have the same schedule in Bethany and Orange, we could share staff very easily. We already do that right now with our Mandarin teacher. Um, and this would be an additional teacher to that. Um, I can't predict the future. It'll be based off of student requests. We'll put it out there for students. It it more than likely would be a French teacher, um, is what was what I would think in my head. um because that would align again with the high school program where we're trying to make sure that what we're doing in the middle school aligns with the high school. I can't predict that. Um we we'll use it based on student um requests, but um that's for an example um what what may
058happen here. Um so obviously when when we're doing this, we don't just look to align ourselves with ourselves. We look to make sure that we're being aligned with the board of education's goals that you've set. Um and so [clears throat] um one of the board of education goals contin continuously improve instruction, cultivate creativity, and enhance student engagement and performance. Um there are a number of things in this budget that help to do that. Um they to highlight a few, we're asking for more staff, and that clearly allows for students to have more choice um and be engaged in in more languages and more um activity. Um it offers more robust options for students in this new schedule. Um and we're budgeting for things like language testing. um continuing to ask for funding for late buses
059that allow our students to access after school activities. Um and continuing to focus on the technological advancements both in software and in hardware to make sure that we're providing students with the tools that that they're going to have in their working environments when they leave us. Um second board goal is to enhance the efficient and effective use of resources. Um so while there is an overall um increase in the budget that's requested, it comes primarily like we said due to the cost of um goods and services that are increasing [clears throat] um and a and a line by line analysis will show that most of the accounts are at or or just a little bit below um kind of where we were last year. Um teacher leaders have consciously worked to include more digital resources.
060Um so that then saves us on the side of kind of the paper and the other stuff that the other accounts and we transfer that to different um places and we've worked to like Kathy said align the two middle school budgets as best we can. >> Okay. Um supporting and uh fostering uh a positive climate for students and adults. [clears throat and cough] Um again field trips and experential learning are important part of the middle school experience. Um, I'm happy to say that we're, you know, since the dreaded COVID years, we've really returned to having kids, um, have the opportunity to go outside um, outside of the campus and, um, go on field trips again. Um, funding requests to support um, support services in academic and social emotional areas. the new schedule. Also, it like
061one of the things that we're looking at for the win period is to increase the number of developmental counseling lessons that will be available to students um or that students will experience. Um and again, the idea of um helping students um grow not only academically but emotionally and socially is very important. Um line items to uh for professional development. Dr. Carlson um will certainly share a lot of the work um has been sharing the work that's been done throughout this year and the plans for more development in terms of uh professional development for teachers um in highquality instruction. Um and of course continued support for national organizations in each each subject. Um, we really do want to encourage our teachers to grow professionally because the better trained our teachers are, the better quality uh instruction
062and learning happens for [snorts] our students. So bottom line. >> Yeah. So the bottom line um this [clears throat] is what it costs um or cost in 2526 to run each of the middle schools. Um and you can see the the comparison to 2627 um percentage increase there. A lot of that percentage increase is due to salaries and benefits. Um Kathy and I kind of have talked about this. There's I think a little bit more of a veteran staff um in Bethany. [snorts] Nicest way I could say that. Um and so um therefore the increase when you add the salaries um to the N number. >> Thank you. Good evening everyone. And now we get on to the high school budget. And just like the middle schools, first of all, when we're working on developing
063our budget at the high school, we're always keeping those three U board of education goals in mind. you know, always focusing on improving instruction, um, engaging students, uh, focusing on their performance while also looking at the efficient and effective use of resources in a welcoming school climate. And when I worked with the building leadership team, which is all of our administrators and then our department chairs and a few other people such as our librarians, um there are a couple of guiding questions that underly all of the work we did on the budget. And the first one is what will it cost to continue providing the same quality and standard of services to our students in the coming year? We we always want to make sure that what we're doing well now, we have the resources
064to keep doing. But knowing that the needs of our students change every year, know that knowing that technology career interests change every year, there's always that second question. What will it cost to provide necessary improvements? And what I'm going to share with you tonight is a mix of the two. um making sure that the quality of what we already do remains high, but also adding some new programming that is driven by student interest. Our key factors are always that very first one, student needs and interests. [snorts] Both their needs and their interests change over time. And one thing that we've learned a lot in in the last couple of years about our students is there's an increasing interest in career readiness education opportunities for kids to learn skills and and abilities that will really translate
065into the work world and also at the same time a real thirst among our students for more dual enrollment courses. And for any of you who aren't familiar with that term, a dual enrollment course is a course we're offering at the high school that is aligned to the curriculum of an entrylevel um college course of the same content and where the uh instructor has actually been vetted by a college and is approved to teach that course. very often they will give us also the midterm and the final exam that we need to give our students and if a student takes and is successful in a dual enrollment course they earn college credit and unlike AP courses this is college credit they get without having to take that big one-day um you know highstakes test and
066that is not on our transcript it's on a Yukon transcript or University of Bridgeport or a sacred heart transcript and we've done a lot of work and recent years to expand those. Also, of course, upgrading instructional technology, supporting high quality instructional practices and always that professional learning for educators, we need to keep growing if we want our students to benefit. [snorts] And just like every other walk of life, we are hit with inflation and that does have an impact on our programming. Uh so, we do work to keep our costs contained. Uh the big part of that is a very careful analysis of our budgeted versus actual expenses in recent years and we've got a number of departments that when when I met with the department chairs they came to me and they said you
067know we've always budgeted right about this amount but I only spend 75 80% of it. We should reduce it by 20% for this coming year because we think we'll be fine. And there are a number of places throughout the high school budget where that is exactly what you'll find rather than people looking at their budgets as just a year-over-year pass through. They're being very realistic about what they do spend and what students really do need and are making adjustments in real time year-to-year based on that. Um, also carefully reviewing technology upgrades and replacements. There's some areas where we do really need a new Prometheian board in a classroom. There are some places where a new projector or a new sound system at a fraction of the cost is sufficient. And in those places, we really
068do look to what is the most cost-effective way to get the technology we need in that classroom. [snorts] And also a lot of very careful reallocation within what we call the principal services budget that just basically takes care of a lot of what doesn't fit within an academic area in the high school. A lot of our graduation expenses have gone up over the last couple of years and rather than adding money to our budget for that, we've looked very carefully at places where we can start reducing. For instance, we don't send out that much snail mail anymore. So, our postage costs have been going down and we've just been reallocating that funding into the areas that we are seeing going up. [snorts] Now, new and improved programming. This is the stuff we're excited about that
069is really going to have a positive impact for kids next year. And I will talk in a little bit of detail about all of these. First of all, we're going to be starting a CNA certification program uh next year. [snorts] The we do need some funding to support um it says Yukon dual enrollment education courses. And I know you might be thinking any course we offer in a high school is an education course. But what we mean by this is they're not English courses, math courses. they're actually courses about education as a profession. Um, one of the things we're seeing in the education field is that we just don't have the number of teachers candidates going into education programs that we used to. And so we're partnering with Yukon to offer two dual enrollment college
070credit earning courses about the field of education for our students in the hopes that we're going to start growing that next generation of educators. Next, um we have an awardwinning student newspaper publishes several times a year. [snorts] We don't fund it um and or at least we don't fully fund it. And so my budget request for the high school for the coming year is going to include all of the funding necessary to actually pay for the publication of our newspaper rather than having students doing bake sales to be able to publish the actual record of our school. Um and then um supplies and professional learning to support teacher growth. And there's some areas in the building where there is equipment or furniture that needs upgrading. So about that certified nursing assistant certification program, the CNA
071Academy is this really interesting opportunity for us to pair one of our teachers with a a practicing nurse who will co-instruct a course in in basically the medical field that will lead to students being certified as CNAs at the end of it. That is a huge expansion of our focus on skilled trades and career readiness programming which we've really been boosting over the last several years. It it's co-taught by one of our teachers and a nursing professional as I mentioned and it does come with a cost. It's it's not free to us um where we are paying for that person to come in and for some supplies and equipment and the cost of that exam of course. So it does it will run us roughly $27,000 for the CNA program. Um now those that those
072dual enrollment education courses which we started offering this year and we began them with some seed money from a large uh grant to um get more dual enrollment courses into our program of studies. But now that we we've got it running and we've got student interest in it, there are some expenses we'll need to cover for next year. And the two courses are one called if you love it, teach it. And the other is called introduction to special education. It's not a course for special education students. It's a course for all students that helps them understand the laws behind special education. How does it work? Why does it work? um how do we ensure equitable education for all students? Um so they are they are two great courses to hopefully build that that teaching core
073that we're going to need in in the future. Um and funding for this will include retired field study experiences. They're not just learning about education in a vacuum. There are number of times throughout the courses where they have to go to schools of different grade levels and do field study work. So we need some transportation for that. Of course we need textbooks and course materials. And you know what we get for it is that hopefully that next generation of fine AMD educators. We've got a long history of hiring our own and this will hopefully keep us doing that. Um we do have one big technology upgrade coming and that is computer lab 164. Um it's right down the hall past the uh machine shop. It's a lab that's shared by both our career and technical
074education department and our visual and performing arts departments. It's um a bit out ofd. Um I'm sure Sean could provide more more technical details than that, but it is also a room that is in constant use throughout the day. These are the the variety of courses in both the CTE and VPA fields that are being offered in it this year. introductory computing, computer applications, robotics, web design, electronic music, studio recording, internet radio and podcasting, financial literacy, and interior design. And most of those are courses that really do call for um just stronger computing power than what our student devices have. So getting this one up to standard is going to really enhance the programming in all of those courses. And then I mentioned our newspaper, the Trident. Um, it's a student produced newspaper. We publish
075typically six editions a year. We also do a very very popular um, April Fool's Day edition. Um, and [snorts] in it's a pretty good newspaper. I'd say it's won first place in the American Scholastic Press Association's National Competition three of the last four years. Um, so really, really good work. Um, but we've never fully funded it. >> [snorts] >> And so, um, we're hoping to start fully funding it, um, both the print edition and, um, beginning an an online version of it, which will be housed on our website. Um, and next, just the general category of supporting highquality instruction and professional learning. Um, we've we've had a a a number of new hires in the last few years. We've got a lot of teachers who are really interested in growing their knowledge, growing their skills.
076And although they can do that in the classroom, they can do that even more going to conferences and getting specialized training. So, we are building in a little bit more money in the coming year to support professional development conferences and trainings. Um and then materials as well for um supporting high engagement in instructional practices such as the building thinking classroom approach that has really re revolutionized a lot of our math instruction in the last few years. Um in a couple of departments we're looking at equipment and furniture that is either at end of life or is getting repaired on a regular basis and is getting really close to end of life. So we want to have some funding available for that. And then of course any of our subject areas that have a high volume
077of consumables. That would be all of our technical education, our foods classes are, you know, often our science classes, although they've actually reduced their instructional supplies requests. Um just the co inflation, the cost of living um affects them just as it does any anybody's home budget. So we are seeing some increases in supplies costs, equipment costs in a number of departments. >> So that is basically the high school what we're hoping to accomplish with our budget for next year. And now I'll turn it over to somebody. >> Is that you? >> Me. >> Good evening everybody. And as you heard, all three building principles um mentioned the importance of curriculum and staff development. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about that tonight. Um as we look at this section of the
078budget, you'll see the core investments that really support teaching and learning. Um and these are the resources that ensure our staff are prepared, our programs remain current, and our students have access to highquality instruction. And this account covers certified salaries, uh, professional learning for staff, travel for staff, conferences, um, outside or I'm sorry, other purchase services and instructional supplies. Um, so curriculum revision remains one of the most influential levers we have to elevate our work and student learning. This portion of the budget supports the ongoing work of keeping our curriculum coherent, current, and aligned to high expectations. And we've invested in a cycle of continuous improvement, as you've heard us talk about over the past couple of weeks. And our curriculum cannot remain static. We know that standards shift, students need evolve, and instructional research
079advances. And this funding really allows our teachers to refine units, embed updated assessments, and deepen alignment across grade levels. And you'll notice the second bullet down there. Um, at the high school level, our NEASK self-study underscored the need for sustained curriculum revision. And accreditation expects a living, responsive curriculum that reflects best practices and provides equitable learning opportunities for our students. as well as this first driver aligns to our um district strategic plan. [clears throat] The second primary driver is our professional learning to support curriculum implementation. And as we develop, revise, and strengthen our curriculum, we have a responsibility to ensure that our teachers are fully supported in bringing that curriculum to life. And we all know that well-developed curriculum is only as strong as the instructional practices that accompany it. So this this funding supports
080the training and the coaching our teachers need to implement newly developed curriculum with confidence and consistency as well as this is aligned to our um district strategic plan. So you'll notice this slide provides a deeper look at the components that make up the curriculum account. And what you'll see is a combination of stable costs, targeted reductions, and strategic increases, each tied directly to curriculum revision, instructional improvement, and our district priorities. Overall, the account reflects thoughtful investments that align to our strategic plan, and ensure that we continue strengthening teaching and learning across our schools. The investment directly advances our first goal, improving instruction, cultivating creativity, and enhancing engagement. When teachers have strong professional learning, teachers benefit much more from a rigorous, relevant, and more engaging classroom experience. And we all know as part of our district-wide
081curriculum timeline, professional learning is a critical step, vital [snorts] step in the cycle. Reviewing and revising curriculum is only the beginning. We then need to ensure staff are trained, supported, and prepared to implement it. You'll notice an increase in line 511, certified salaries, and this is as we continue to increase our curriculum rating. This will continue to increase. You'll also notice a decrease in line 5322. And this is as we slowly move away from outside consultants. So for example, as we're building the capacity of our teachers to write curriculum and provide feedback to their colleagues, we are slowly pulling away from using an outside consultant to support that work. Staff development. These funds support the coordinators who guide instruction work across our departments, ensuring alignment, facilitating communication. We're increasingly leveraging coherence across uh ex expertise
082within our own district as both all three middle school principles talked about earlier. This category includes targeted professional learning and specialized support where outside expertise might be beneficial. And the consultants help us introduce new instructional practices, build teacher skills, and ensure we're aligned with best practices. And this um salary line item is certified salaries, instructional program improvement, travel, other purchase services, and instructional supplies. And our first driver is around staff development. And this investment directly supports our goal of enhancing the efficient and effective use of district resources. High quality training ensures we're leveraging our staff time and tools in ways that produce the greatest impact for our students. And we've committed to providing professional learning that's both timely and relevant. This also supports our district goal, enhancing the efficient and the effective use of our
083resources. Staff development primary driver two. This portion of the budget focuses on providing the right instructional materials to our students who need additional time and targeted intervention in ELA, math, and language development. [clears throat] We're requesting funding for specialized intervention resources that support students who might be performing below grade level. These materials allow our teachers to to deliver evidence-based targeted instruction. This also supports the work that we're doing right now with our MTSS, our multi-tier support system across both middle schools and the high school. This is also aligned to our district strategic plan. You'll notice an increase in the salary line item 511 and this is due to the um the professional learning that we are providing our staff next summer. Um and also um 5611 this is for a diagnostic tool um that we're
084using called um otherwise you will notice a decrease in line item 5322 and again this goes back to um building the capacity of our teachers and not um bringing in outside consultants textbook requests. This is a multi-year textbook purchase plan and this provides you with a long range view of our instructional materials needed across content areas and all three schools. Um, it ensures that we are budgeting responsibly, anticipating curriculum revisions and supporting teachers with the most up-to-date resources that align with state standards in our strategic plan. You'll notice one import one important point I want to highlight in the forecast if you look closely is the increase you see in several content areas during the first two years of the cycle and the primary driver of this increase is the need to renew and update
085digital textbook licenses. Many of our current licenses are expiring and as publishers shift more of their curriculum to digital platforms these renewals come at a higher cost than traditional print replacements. So you'll notice this year we came in very low at 133. I just point that out. So next year when I'm in front of you asking for an increase in that number, you're well aware that a lot of our digital licenses are up and we will need to renew. Just want to plan ahead. Um in addition um we are requesting one district-wide instructional coach position and this coach would provide embedded coaching and feedback to teachers to ensure the written curriculum is actually being taught. And I think so many times throughout of our when our curriculum council is here and we're presenting curriculum to
086you for approval, we share with you that while really well-written curriculum is great, it's even better when it's actually being taught in the classroom. And so having an instructional coach kind of boots on the ground to support teachers while this is happening would really help us carry out that work with fidelity. Um this would also model that person would also model effective instructional practices that emphasize critical thinking, problem solving and inquiry. They would collaborate with teacher teams to analyze student work and data to inform instruction. And they would build teacher capacity through differentiated professional learning and classroombased um coaching cycles. So um at present we have one curriculum and instructional coach who serves um Andrea Drury who serves all academic departments spanning 7 through 12. She focuses on curriculum and instruction. And this single position
087is responsible for supporting the curriculum development, the classroom coaching, the instructional alignment and and so much more. And giving given the breath of discipline and the complexity of the secondary instruction, one coach cannot provide the depth of engagement necessary to sustain continuous improvement in all content areas. So by adding a STEM curriculum and instructional coach, we would achieve a more balanced and strategic approach to instructional leadership. >> Sorry, sweating all over that. Sorry. >> Thank you, Dr. Carlson. Uh so now to everyone's favorite part of the evening, uh people services. Um so nope, we're going backwards right off the bat. >> Uh once again, I start everything with our vision. I like to think that pupil services, we are really the helpers. We are supporting staff, students, and families really in their learning process. Uh
088I share this slide every year. This is everything that pupil services uh within AMD is um responsible for. You know, my uh favorite I pointed out last two years uh influenza liaison. So if you have any questions regarding the flu, I am here to answer all those questions and be your liaison for flu related questions uh that I will happily hand over to the school nurses. Uh you'll see uh ever growing our assist of technology. Uh we maintain a very large fleet of iPads and special education AI. Now uh really hot off the press this last couple of weeks how AI is impacting special education, the supports we provide our students. Uh some of our data very heavy uh data slides. Uh this is the number of students identified for special education services and you
089can see in 2223 we were at 275 students. This budget is built on uh an estimation of 327 students in special education. So a growth of almost 50 students uh within the last four school years. This is based on the projections from our elementary schools. So incoming sixth graders rising who will be rising seventh graders. uh that will be an increase of over 22 special education students that we currently have this October which was an increase from the previous year. So we are steadily increasing and we expect this to continue to increase as we move forward. [snorts] Um additionally something that we've talked about is that student eligibility mobility. So we know we have highs and lows throughout the school years in terms of the students who are eligible for special education. So I start
090to try and keep track of this throughout the year. So these numbers that you'll see red is our high. So last year we hit a high of 309 students who are eligible. That black line is actually the line that the state of Connecticut reports. So they take a snapshot on October 1st every single year and say that is your number. The number of students you have eligible for special education on October 1st is the number we're going to say you have the entire year. So our number last year is 302 with a low of 298. So, we can see that at any given time, we're going to vary somewhere plus or minus 10 students throughout the course of the school year between students exiting special education, becoming eligible, andor potentially moving into the district or
091moving out of the district. Um, additionally, a lot going on in this graph. I'll uh openly admit that. What you'll see is this is the eligibility rates for the elementary districts that service us. We know that we receive our students from our elementary districts. Uh so what the numbers show you is their prevalence rates and what we project them to be. Uh made it really simple. The town of orange is in orange. Makes it very easy for me. So you see those orange bands. Those are the town of orange. Their prevalence rate for special education. You can see the town of orange is increasing. The town of red is the town of red. In red is the town the town of red. Uh the in red is the town of Bethany. You can see a
092very large increase within Bethany. uh trending towards 20% eligibility uh within their elementary district. Uh black is AMD where our numbers is and then blue is Woodbridge. So you see all of our feeder elementary schools are increasing. We would expect this. We are coming out of the backside of the pandemic. Some of those COVID learning gaps. Additionally, students um and families we know move into the area. The one you do not see represented, the yellow line for 2526 is the state of Connecticut. The state of Connecticut is rapidly increasing from 16.7 back in 2223 now to 17.8 and 24-25. If I was a guessing man, over 18% next year. So we see an increase in the number of students who are being identified for special education, not only within our own communities but within the
093state in totality. Additionally, when we look that pupil services and the services we provide to students is more than just special education. It includes students who are identified for section 504. Those are students who have a disab um a medical diagnosis that require accommodations to their learning. Uh this number has like everything else increased within the time. This number I also pull right on October 1st to see what the number is. It was 363 students as of October 1st this year. So that means in addition to our students who are in special education, we have 363 additional students who are receiving accommodations within their general education or the regular education learning environment. Combine those two numbers and within AMD, 31% or almost one-third of all of our students have some kind of support through a
094formalized plan or what we'd call a mandated service, whether that's IDA, which is special education, or section 504. That number is up about a percentage and a half since this time last year, up 3% since I started tracking this number two years ago. So we see each year we have more and more students who we are supporting within the classroom to be successful. With that being said, there's a financial impact. Everyone knows that that this year our special education or the pupil service budget is up 2.95%. Over last year that's including contractual salary increases. So a very modest increase given the fact that we are looking at this budget is nearly is supporting nearly one-third of all students within the district. How that breaks out and what's driving that some of our fixed costs transportation.
095Our transportation is not guided by the transportation contract that we are signed. It sets some parameters but these are special runs that are bid out at any given one time. We'll I'll get a little bit into that. We saw this year increases that ranged from seven and a half to 15 and a half% on these runs. I will show you a graphic that really shows that out. Tuition where you see tuition that represents the increase at special education approved special education schools. Anywhere on the low end from 3.89% to on the high end 14% increase. These private schools have their increases. They pass those costs on to us. There's been a lot of talk in the legislation. You'll hear recently about setting caps at the private school. We expect to see some additional information coming
096out regarding that, but some of that the intent of those bills and laws was to help public school districts plan for some of these costs. That is a very wide range when trying to develop a budget. And then finally um our certified and non-certified salaries between certified teachers, special education teachers, related service providers and our parah educators who support our students. [clears throat] One thing a lot on this slides but try to draw your attention. One of the things we talk about a lot um at the AFC and at the board is our reimbursement through excess cost and what that looks like. Per the law that is written, we should be receiving 85% of our expenditures. We'll get into detail with how they calculate that in the next slide. Last year, we were set to
097receive 59.96 rebur re uh reimbursement before a one-time appropriation by the legislation that brought it to 73%. So, while 73% is certainly better than 59, we like that, you know, 14 percentage points higher, that is still 12% below the law. the laws said when fully funded or when funded adequately. We are not anticipating 85% at all. But again, that was a one-time appropriation. There is nothing guaranteeing that that 73% will happen again this spring. And in all honesty, [snorts] we're budging for it not to happen. How we get there? So right now in this proposed budget in amity before we receive any reimbursement back from the state of Connecticut we have to spend four and a half times of what's known as the pure per pupil expenditure. That number for us is $102,000. So before
098we get any money back we have to spend $102,000. This chart shows you two different examples of the reimburseable amount. So, you take the total cost you're spending on a student, subtract $102,000. That difference is what you can receive reimbursement for. The top line or the third line down shows you as by law how much money we would get versus what we're anticipating, which is going to be 60% back. 60% and what the net difference is. So, but by the legislation not able and the governor's budget not able to fully fund what's in the law, these two examples show an a loss of roughly $100,000 in what goes into a revenue line, I believe, Miss Lumis, for the district within that excess cost. So, how the budget was driven this year. So, our major drivers,
099we have one rising out placement from the elementary districts from one of our towns that added about 91,000. We have a student who requires onetoone school nursing services. Um adding the money it did residential and hospitalization services. Uh RBTs those are for students who we have in district who need the highest level of care. This number has drastically come down through these budget presentations. The last two years you keep seeing reductions there but it is a high cost service. And then the various legal fees associated uh within pupil services. Those are the numbers that drive our budget and lead to what would be our budget drivers within this. We talked a little bit about transportation and right those high transportation costs. to give you an example from about 3 weeks ago. Uh we were looking
100to find a transportation company to take a student from this uh from uh our general area, drive them roughly 50 miles total um 25 miles round trip two times per day to the general Trumbull Strapford area. This this transportation did not require a bus date. Went out to bid to three transportation companies. Um, and you can see what they quoted us for daily cost, a range of almost $200 from the high and the low and then what that cost works out through for the entire school year. So, it shows you the extreme variance we're also seeing in these transportation costs for students who might need to have their needs met outside of the district. With that being said, we have created uh cost savings programs that allow us to meet the needs of our students
101right here in AMD where they belong to where they deserve to be educated. We have three specific programs that help us do this. Our transition academy which is anticipated next year to save you know around 650,000. our um 712 Spartan Academy which is our independent and life skills program which is housed in AMD Middle School orange and at the high school saving almost $2 million next year. It is a very large program next year. [clears throat] The high school program alone next year is targeted to have 13 students. These are 13 students who need the highest level of support our district can offer. That is a large amount of students to have in one building. And then uh our self-contained smart and prep program which is to support our students who might have difficulties regulating
102their emotion. So our anticipating savings next year with these programs built into district is about $3.7 million. This just gives you this is one of the slides I'm I'm most proud of. I guess we'd say a little funny made my boxes bigger, but you get the gist. Um so the bottom shows that this is our sixth year starting this program. Next year I'll be I'll be entering my seventh year in the district. Over the six years that we've had these three programs to support students and educate them here within district, we have saved over anticipated to save over $14 million. That represents two fully funded years of the pupil service budget. This allows us, as I said, to educate these students right here in AMD and provide them an appropriate education with their peers. You
103can see there's some variance in how much money we save each year in each program. You'll see a small uh small decrease in ATA next year. It's because we'll have less students in ATA. But we know sales is increasing because the number of students is uh increasing in sales and then sales feeds into our AMD transition academy. Um additionally some additional savings that we're looking at. So uh we are phasing out the transportation the bus that's provided for Trumble Boe. Next year we'll only have one student attending Trumbull Voeek. Uh so we will be utilizing the reimbursement method through the state of Connecticut that they uh require us to utilize. Uh phasing out that bus for that upperassman at Trumbo Voag will save the district $45,000. Um additionally, I found in working with my uh
104team of coordinators, we're able to uh increase our efficiency of our ESY transportation. I want to make it loud and clear, we are not eliminating ESY transportation. and we're improving our efficiency of it. That's going to save us roughly $35,000. We saw some run redundancies that we were running with our ESY transportation. Additionally, as Dr. Buyers talked about, this is not a wish list. There were certain things that we considered within the department that I decided would not move forward in the budget, thus will never be coming to the board. They these are areas that we could certainly use, but they are not my priority areas right now. So, these were cut before they even came to the budget. The first one is a district-wide PPS coach to address how we're writing our IEPs, the
105accuracy, compliance, and quality. That'd be roughly about 87,000. That has been something that the state has been recommending for a few years, and we have said that we have enough internal capacity that we don't need this right now. Something that we explored um in great detail is something known as the teacher residency program. It's called a grow your own program. Um it's an alternative route to certification within special education. Um, and it's uh put in place by the state of Connecticut to help diversify the workforce and to address a need within special education. Uh, there is a a substantial, my words, cost to the district because you have to pay for this. It allows it to be low cost to no cost for the individual who's enrolled in the program. So, we would pay them
106a small salary. We would cover their benefits. They would do their coursework um through the state of Connecticut. we would pay for the coursework and then they would continue to work towards through a three-year process of obtaining their certification within special education. That anticipated cost was $77,000. And then additionally, uh some executive functioning support at the high school uh following a tutor rate for $43,000. Those were things that we could certainly benefit from, but are they required to allow us to provide high quality services to our students? No, right now they are not. Uh so that was able to save us an additional 207,000. [clears throat] With that being said, I do have a staffing adjustment I am requesting given the increase uh specifically in special education students and the increase in the growth size
107of our sales program. Um we are requesting Oh, I'm requesting a 912 sales teacher. Um and it says a traditional special education services. So at the high school, this would allow us to support the sales program with the equivalent of a 6 teacher to help support those 13 students and then use those other additional point4 or additional teaching periods to support the increased number of students. Where we see the increased number of special education students is actually at the high school. We have a very small senior class graduating or exiting out of the high school in the terms of eligible special education students and a very large incoming uh freshman class. So, we'll see our actual largest amount of special education students at the high school, those additional students that we are adding to the
108district. Um, and then final, I always uh end it with this because I want to be uh completely transparent and blunt. There are some fiscal uncertainties within special education that a lot of us know that we've heard about final excess costs. Uh Miss Lumis does a great job. Every month the AFC here's the number of what we're projecting, what we're thinking, and sometimes just guessing. Um, we all know that you never quite know what the Connecticut legislation's going to do in the spring. It's a short season this year, short session, hopefully not a lot, but three, four years ago, remember they added they tacked on an extra year of eligibility for special education that we, you know, had to address with very little notice. Uh there's there was a reduction I shared with the finance
109committee there was reduction to IDA grant funding. So although the number of special education students went up, we got less money through IDA. So we have to be aware of that. Um the variability between our outplaced students um unanticipated outplacements at the elementary schools, we work very well with them, but if a sixth grader gets outplaced in April, that sixth grader does come to AMD for seventh grade. Now we offer to bring them into our programs early. We've been very successful and we have done that in the past. Um but that is something we have to be aware of. And finally, you saw one of the things Mckenni Vento is how we support families who are experiencing homelessness. Those costs are observed by the district and can lead to some fiscal uncertainties. >> That being
110said, I am going to hand it off to Mr. D. Roza. Thank you. I don't know how I end up right after people's services, but we might have to have a talk about that. Um, so this year's technology budget is is very similar to technology budgets in the past. Our two main drivers have always been um to support both what we have right now which is usually infrastructure so access points and and that kind of stuff uh the network itself servers and the other one is staff requests which is usually our software um and our 1:1 devices. So um that said maintaining our onetoone digital learning environment is a high priority for us. We have an incredible setup here both with our devices uh and our infrastructure that we just need to maintain. We are
111at the end of a five-year life cycle for our last major project which which was replacing our servers um our access points our Wi-Fi system and our server stacks and our switch stacks. So we are starting to look at options for that in the very near future as to how we are going to continue to keep that up and running at the levels we need it up and running at without coming across another massive project. Um so we'll see that as we kind of get into it but right now we just want to keep things running smoothly and upgrade where we need to upgrade. Luckily, the way we did our last uh luckily because of really good planning, the way we did our last upgrades to the system, we are still in really good shape
112even though we're outside our normal 5 to sevenyear life cycle for for infrastructure. Um we also have peripherals. We've got some classroom audio upgrades that we're going to be looking at that we have some plans for and and of course keeping our entire network safe with Arctic Wolf, Microsoft Defender, and Aristotle. Um Aristotle is a classroom management system. Arctic Wolf is a sock that we have a security operations center that we use to monitor our our network and Microsoft Defender is like our antivirus. So our initial I'm going the wrong way. >> I am tech. Uh so staff requests which is the second major driver um that we've so here's the cool thing too. I'm going to back up really quick. Technology actually touches all levels of our budget. So all those locations that Terry
113talked about earlier, the 01, 02, 03, technology has accounts in all of them. So we have uh at all building levels, we have it at the district level, we have it in people services. Um so we kind of spread out everywhere. A lot of what you've you're going to see in the technology budget drivers you've already heard about tonight, whether it was through the middle school, the high school. Um nothing really at people services, but he does ask for stuff. So part of that is again the music and video production lab that we have at the high school is a specialized lab replacement. The student devices are very good. The student devices are are learning devices. We didn't buy these laptops so that our students could go home and play Fortnite on them. They don't
114have huge graphic drivers in them. They don't have massive processors, CPUs, or RAM. They are tools used in learning. That said, there are situations where we need a more robust tool to facilitate that learning, and that's what we have our specialized labs for. We're never going to get rid of specialized labs. We knew that when we went one to one that that was never going to be an option. Um so we are maintaining the few that we have left and this is one of them that's on the schedule for replacement. Um and again the software that comes through the staff requests things like no red ink magic school AI because anything with an AI on it right now is being um proposed the Adobe Creative Cloud uh we use a lot in our CTE classes
115but across the district both at the middle school now and at the high school. Originally, that was just a high school thing that has seeped down into the middle schools, which has been incredible, and we're supporting that as well. Um, and Body Viz is a a software we're looking at for some science classes. There's a couple other options, too, that we're going to look through, but um it really supports the next level of um anatomy. That that particular one is anatomy. There's some pretty gross stuff in there. And then Prometheium boards. So, we still do have some smart boards in this district that are well over 15 years old. um and we are trying to get rid of them. Most of them are still functioning. They've been supported for a long time, but certain things
116just don't last. So, Prometheium Boards is still an ongoing cost that the district has been we've been at it now for about five years, and we've probably got about another four to five left before we start the cycle over again. This is my cool graphic with colors. This is our one to one device schedule for students. Um we finally got into a full four-year cycle on our devices. So, it helps us do a few things. one, we can do four-year leases on our devices, which brings the overall cost per year down. Two, [clears throat] it allows us to do um where we purchase two classes worth of devices every two years. So, this year was our second year of purchasing two classes, which will be our incoming seventh graders and our 9th grade classes. Next
117year and the following year, we'll only be purchasing devices for our 9th grade classes. Those devices follow our students. They have the exact same device from 9th grade through 12th grade at the middle school level where we hope that they can take a little bit better care of their devices. They're still on a four-year cycle, but what ends up happening is they go seventh grade, 8th grade, and then they go back to seventh grade and eighth grade again before they get replaced. So next year's seventh graders will be getting this year's eighth grade devices, and the seventh grade will keep theirs into eighth grade. So that allows us to just purchase for the nth graders next year so we can start that cycle again. So, it actually helps us kind of normalize our costs over
118the course of well, you can see it's two classes, one class, one class, two classes. Um, and the cool color coding shows you each one is basically named on the year that the lease will end and those devices will be returned. Um, they are fair market value leases. So, at the end of each lease, we turn them around, we repackage them, and we send them back whatever is left. Um, so that saves on cost as well. We're only actually paying for the cost of about I think it's 70 80% of the cost of the devices over the course of the four years that we have that lease. Last year uh we purchased all new teacher devices. So this is the new cycle for teacher devices. Seventh grade teachers had devices. We purchased them the year
119prior. This year we purchased um eighth grade teachers and the whole high school staff. So those are also going to be slid sliding into a five-year lifespan where we'll in the 2930 year we'll be purchasing new devices for the middle school completely 7th and eighth grade teachers and then the following year in the 2030 2031 year we'll look to purchase um devices for the 9th through 12th grade staff. Those are also on uh four-year fair market value uh actually they're fair they're fouryear $1 buyout leases. So, if we can get past the four years, which we will because our staff takes excellent care of their devices, we won't have payments on them for those last year to two years. We will reassess as we get closer to the end of these leases. If the devices
120look like they're in great shape and they can go six or seven years, then we absolutely will do that. We take these devices back at the end of every school year from the teachers. We go through them, we clean them, we update them, we check to see what kind of status they're in, and we'll adjust this schedule as we get closer towards the end of that little colorcoded thing. What's not a driver in our budget this year? The cost to repair our 1:1 devices. So, [cough and clears throat] the first thing we did when we did our fair market value leases is we purchase extended warranties on all of our student devices. So, we have three-year manufacturer and um image warranties basically on on the devices. So, that's covered by the manufacturer for usually a
121device will come with a one-year warranty. We have them for the full four years. Um the other thing that we've done is we've created a an accidental protection plan that we offer to our families when they have the devices. It's a very affordable I think we're at $25 a year right now, but it helps cover the cost of any accidental damage that's not covered by a manufacturer's warranty. Um, and that's not covered by just things that are outside the student's control. Um, but for that $25, if there's an accidental drop, that covers the entire cost of replacing that device. But what it's allowed us to do is build a nice um it's almost like a self funded insurance plan, but it's not insurance, it's accidental protection that we can use to repair those devices. So,
122um for $25, a family can purchase for a full year piece of mind that any accidental damage that happens to their device will be covered and we can use that fund to cover those costs. We don't charge anything above and beyond. We don't charge for labor. We do all the work in house if we can. We ship them back to the manufacturers where it's it's applicable. Um, and we only charge for the cost of the actual repair if we get outside the accidental protection plan, which is on the website if you guys want to know how that all goes down. Um, we don't have ink and toner for non-zerox printers in anymore. We used to have a very sizable line item for ink and toner in the district. That's no longer in there. It's all
123part of our Xerox contract now. Um, [cough] cases for student devices. This is a funny one. We didn't have I lied. We didn't have them in there because we purchased them the first year we did one to ones and they were a bit of a failure. They were expensive. They didn't work the way we wanted them to and they permanently defaced the devices. We decided um after I slide apparently that the eighth grade devices that are going back to the seventh graders next year, there were a couple issues. One was we purchased metalcased computers hoping that they'd be stronger than the plastic case ones we were using in years past, but we didn't understand what's going to happen until that happened is that metal cases tend to dent when they're dropped and stay dented. Um,
124so instead of taking those eighth grade devices and just handing them back to seventh graders looking like they've been beaten for two years, we are going to put on some cases that we have found that we've tested that go on without adhesive that hold the shape of the computer customuilt for these computers. They're not super expensive and I feel like it's going to be better to give the incoming seventh graders a device that is in a nice fresh clean case. Doesn't look like it's been dropped off the bus a few times. So, we are getting cases for DICE devices, but only for incoming seventh graders. It's not something that we normally do. We're not doing it for the high school students because it's not needed. Those ones are still in really good shape. They're plastic
125cases which have been um holding up really, really well. And the only metalcased computers in the district are our current eighth grade devices. Um, and then additional student devices are not on the budget every year. We've we've purchased an additional 10% overrun for our student devices. That's been held up really really well between what's covered under the extended warranties. Um, and 10% overrun, we're in a great place with our current student fleet. For the future, we're going to continue on with our smartboard replacements. Our smartboard replacements, projectors, non-touch panels. What we're finding is there are some places um as Mr. Hower said in the high school where we don't need uh $4,000 Prometheian boards. There are certain classrooms that would do just fine with um an 85 in TV basically that we can get for,
126you know, less than $1,000 because they don't need a touch capacity. They don't need the extra speakers in it. They don't need the things that come in Prometheium board. So instead of putting a Prometheium board in there when they don't need it, we're assessing their situations and we're getting them what they do need. So, there's some cost savings there, but they still need to be purchased. So, they will be um constant for the next couple of years. I don't honestly see an end to that. By the time we start the cycle all over again, we'll be doing the same thing. Um there's a specialized lab replacement. So, we got rid of all of our specialized labs in the middle schools, the ones that I just told you that we knew we would never get rid
127of. Um specifically in the middle schools, we would like to put back in the CTE labs. So, there's been some um there's been some desire down there to teach some higherend stuff to get them ready for the middle school and CAD programming, interior design, um some robotics classes that can't necessarily use the current capacity of the student devices. So, there is currently right now basically a CTE middle school lab, but it's in a cow format computer on wheels. So, it's they're laptops that are slid into um basically a locker on wheels. Even those those devices are very similar. They purchased about 5 years ago and they're very similar to the current capacity of the student devices, but the software they want to use is beyond that. So, we'd like to put back in actual desktop
128machines that are more like a lab environment you'd see in a college or at the high school when they get here. Security cameras, we're constantly replacing them. Um, we've got pretty good coverage. There are some places we'd like to add additional cameras, but for the most part, a lot of that now is replacing cameras that are end of life. Um, so that's going to be an ongoing. And then like I said, the infrastructure we need to get ahead of the switches, the servers, which we we have a a good plan in place for right now that we can share as we get as we get closer to executing that. And then the battery backups that were replaced in all of the closets are lead acid battery backups, which was industry standard when we did them
129about 5 years ago. The problem with them is that they degrade relatively fast. Um, we are right now at about a 10% capacity. So, we have some very large, very heavy batteries in all of our switch stacks that currently keep our switches and our servers up for about 3 minutes when we lose power. It's just not it's not capable um in a major outage to keep our servers up and running. So, we want to get somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes is the is the sweet spot of battery power before we can get the generator kicked on and someday the micro grid working. So, until that happens, we we really need to look at doing battery backup replacement. So, unfortunately, it's it's um going to the new lithium ions. And even if we went with
130the old lead acid, they're expensive. They're really really expensive. But, um that'll be something I'm going to come and beg for next year. And that's me. We're on the downward uh stretch here. >> Got to press the down arrow. >> Down arrow. So again, facilities budget is [clears throat] uh kind of similar to past years. We have a lot of outside factors that uh drive this budget that we can't control. We also have factors that we can control and we use those to try and offset the the drivers that uh that we can't control and and drive this budget up. Um let's see. >> Down the other down. There we go. So some of the drivers um one of them is obviously our custodial supplies, chemicals to clean the building, paper goods and whatnot. Um
131we have seen the cost of cleaning supplies, paper goods have stabilized. Um I've been working with multiple vendors to secure best pricing and service and within you know probably this last fiscal year and moving into this fiscal year uh we've been really able to secure some great pricing on custodial supplies. Uh so we've been seeing some substantial savings there. Um one of the biggest factors that is kind of out of our control is obviously on our utility costs. Um for electricity we have not seen any decrease yet in our public benefit charges. Um the the benefit charges are just ridiculous still. Uh we are having the virtual net metering program um that we're getting credits back from the project in or um in Sonia. Uh we are also putting in the solar canopy uh next
132summer here at the high school. So we're going to hopefully try to offset some of those public benefit charges with these credits and with the solar canopy and hopefully lower our electric bills. Uh our propane prices continue to climb every year. Um the natural gas prices, those have kind of remained consistent. We haven't seen any recent spikes. Um and we have seen some slight increases in our water and sore rates. Uh current contracts, most of our service contracts are three years. Uh usually see about a 3 to 7% increase uh year to year on those contracts. Uh for the 26 27 fiscal year, uh the trash and recycling is going to be going out to bid and be [clears throat] looking at new contract for trash and recycling, the fire sprinkler inspection and testing, uh
133the building automation for the high school. Those are uh some of the bigger ones. So we're anticipating an increase there. Um, we always look at exploring options for extending contracts, lock in pricing. Uh, if we could get vendors to lock in uh, current fiscal year pricing for next year, uh, we try to utilize that and try and save money there. Uh, for the utilities forecast, typically Bethany uses about 20,000 gallons. It's consistent. Um, give or take, you know, a thousand gallons here and there for the year. That's for the heating oil. Um we do we are part of a consortium so we always have been able to lock in favorable rates in previous budgets. Um it's usually a little bit of an increase but it's definitely below average what we usually see uh for what
134we're actually paying u you know for the home. Uh natural gas right now the current supply is pretty high than it was in previous years. Uh prices are still expected to decree uh decrease. We haven't seen a huge jump in the purchase uh gas adjustment rate like we've seen like two years ago where that rate just went through the roof. Now that's leveled off and it's been consistent. Um for our electricity, we do have a supply rate locked in until November of 27 with uh First Point Power. Um as I said, the public benefits continue to remain high. Uh the high school alone just for the 24-25 fiscal year was $115,960. That's what we paid just for the public benefit charges. Uh currently right now at the high school since July, we have paid $46,000
135just in the public benefit charges. So once we kind of get a little bit more data about the credits that are being applied [clears throat] uh for the virtual net metering project and the contract for the solar p uh project uh once we get a better idea on that we're looking at reducing that even more and we'll be reducing that. We'll look at it next month hopefully reduce that before the AFC vote uh January. Um, again, propane prices are increasing annually, but they seem to remain consistent once the uh throughout the year once we get the first bill in. We usually see that same dollar amount uh last all year long, so we don't see any huge increases with propane. Um, for the adjustments, we use historical data to track our spending and adjust budgets
136for supply purchases, [clears throat] utility costs. Um, look at the usage for propane, what we've been using for the past couple years. Um, this coming fiscal year, I was able to knock that gallon amount down a little bit more. Uh we've been using improved cleaning products uh reducing the chemical usage and again saving um chemicals and not going through them as much for operational efficiencies. Uh we've seen these great mild winters. Uh fewer repairs on snow equipment. We're able to keep supplies stocked longer, which is like ice melt uh repair equipment that we need for the snow blowers and and whatnot. uh we haven't been able, you know, have haven't been buying shovels and all that stuff uh because we've had the mild winter. So, we're able to keep out that stuff longer, save money
137there. Uh we have a great staff of in-house technicians. We have a great HVAC mechanic, uh in-house electrician, and a wonderful in-house maintenance mechanic. So, we use them to cut down on service calls and do a lot of stuff inhouse. We have multiple vendors that we're continually evaluating them and getting the best pricing products and services. And sometimes it's, you know, kind of playing a game back and forth between the contractors and going out and getting additional pricing. And once they hear that we're going and looking at other vendors, then magically they lower their costs. So, we're constantly uh looking at everything to to try and get best prices for everybody. And again, as I mentioned, contract extensions, um, leverage the current fiscal year pricing for future contracts. Um, you know, pretty much the core
138operating needs as you know, to keep the buildings running, electric, water, oil, gas, propane, contracted services for repairs and maintenance, service calls, supplies, you know, these are the core needs to keep the facilities operational. Um, I actually was able to get it in at a point8% decrease over this current year. So, you know, even with the utility costs as high as they're going, you know, looked at saving money in supplies and and contracts. So, um looking a little bit of a decrease from last year. Uh capital items, uh that was actually decreased from the current from this year. Uh the total request is 248,000. Uh got 148,000 for capital items, 100,000 for contingency. Some of the highlights for the capital plan was uh we are on phase two of a four-year plan for power washing
139the exterior uh at the high school. Uh that was 27,500. Um upgrading the boiler controls that was 20,000. Uh updating the art classrooms here at the high school that was 17,000. Some of the highlights for uh the capital plan for the 2627 fiscal year. uh the 2660 the security account uh we were able to decrease that by $2,900. That security account covers additional and replacement cameras, equipment and uniforms and supplies for our security guards, training for our guards, uh the visitor management software. And then the de decrease it reflects the new facility work order program that we just implemented uh called FMX. So there's some savings that we saw there for facilities. Save the best for last, right? >> Thank you. >> Okay. Uh again, the great thing about AMD is we continue to focus
140on our three A's, academics, arts, and athletics. And uh we have uh started off with an outstanding fall this year. Our boys cross country team. were class L state champions. Girls soccer was class double L state runnerup. Our girls volleyball and girls swim teams were SEC champions. Overall, we have um a total of 94 teams and unified sports that uh that go uh we instituted last year AMD, Bethany, and Orange. Um have one team uh wrestling that uh started off really well last year. our budget drivers, our professional services that includes officials, game management personnel. Our transportation to take us all all over the state. Our supplies, uniforms, balls, nets, helmets, pads, medical supplies, any other any other supply needed to have our for our teams. Dues and fees. Uh those are for our league
141dues, state tournaments, jamberees, other season inseason events that we have. Rentals, we rent ice, pool, and other indoor facilities. Sometimes when school's not open, uh or if the golf courses aren't open in the spring, sometimes we hit the golf range uh up in Bethany, which is a great place. uh and uh repairs we maintain and and um our equipment and facilities as well. Uh our part new positions that I have put forward this year. First is a part-time athletic trainer. Our athletic trainer currently uh is we only have one number. First off, we have an expansive uh footprint of our school district here at Amity and you know we could be having a game up in the stadium and a volleyball game down in the gym and that's well over a quarter mile distance. Uh
142we do have a a golf cart, but we could be having up to we have sometimes up to 13 events in a day uh home and away. We could in the spring have legitimately six varsity events going at one time, which creates a lot of a lot of chaos and a lot of stuff to do. We do certify our our coaches in first aid and CPR, but for one person to to have that level of care. I know that we had one instance this fall where we had a game uh on field three, a JV game and a varsity game in the stadium, and we had two uh student athletes go down at the same time, which created a really tough uh strain for uh our athletic trainer going back and forth. and people were
143getting upset because where's the athletic trainer and she's over taking care of one place and the other. Anyways, um everything from even when we go away, the amount of taping that she does for ankles and knees and wrists and whatever uh is a lot for up to 800 plus student athletes uh throughout the year. So, uh an additional part-time athletic trainer would really ease that. We also our athletic trainer goes off site. We play hockey in Hampton and West Haven. Uh we swim down in Orange. We um also cover away football games, the athletic trainer has to be there. And it's it's a rule that in uh CIA playoffs that we have an athletic trainer go uh for a neutral site. So our athletic trainer has been all over the the state already this this
144fall. So that would ease the burden and allow us to maintain a high level of care for our student athletes. Uh I had put in for an assistant wrestling coach. Girls wrestling, if you haven't been uh around, girls wrestling uh has been around for a long time, but uh the increase has been dramatic. We had the uh girls state tournament start in 200 20 I believe it was and um we've done very well. We've had a three-time state champion uh and that kind of stuff. But uh girls wrestling is now up to 279 girls and so they're starting to have their own events. It's really starting to I would say within the next four or five years there's actually going to be girls teams and AMD hopefully being one of the first ones. But um
145they host the girls tournaments because they use the same officials and the same gyms and mats and everything like that. They're hosting some of the events on Sundays, which creates our coach working seven days a week. So an assistant coach, we don't need a head coach at this point, but an assistant coach would allow us to uh coach both the boys and the girls at the same time and have have our coach not go seven days a week. And then our uh my last position is an assistant uh tennis coach. We currently split one coach between the two programs, boys and girls. We have about 30 uh student athletes on each team. So that creates a lot of it's, you know, about a 1:30 ratio for our assistant coach to try to coach both the
146boys and the girls. So having that additional coach would also allow us to be more consistent with our other programs that generally have a head coach and an assistant coach. Um and so that would be um the addition there. Uh overall our athletic budget still accounts for under 3% of our total athlet budget. Uh and the total res the total requested amount this year is $1.6 million. That includes all contracted salaries as well. >> All right. And so like I mentioned at the beginning, this is really just a first run uh so that you could see what requests have been brought in. Um we will present um uh the first real full budget to the AMD finance committee at the first meeting in January. Um it's at that point that you have your first um
147budget book. Although I'll remind you that this year's budget book is not going to be that paper thing that we keep bringing copies of. It's online um and it will be um available um in a much more um say portable format. Um although you can still download your paper copies if you want them. uh we'll do our same process that we've done in the past is um after that AFC meeting we'll open up um a document where members of the AMD finance committee or members of the board of ed can just send us questions and we'll answer them but it'll be public facing so that way everybody can see the questions asked and everybody can see the answers that are provided. Um and um just appreciate your time today and we're going to go back
148for the next six weeks and keep on working on the budget. Davis. >> Thank you all so much. Uh for our board members, uh the next meeting will be our bianial meeting. That'll be on uh Monday, December 8th, I believe. And uh that will be both my annual meeting and regular business meeting starting at 6:30 here. Um, I would I would encourage you if you have any questions that you uh develop uh in looking over what happened today uh to send those in to Dr. Buyers. Uh we won't start the uh website yet with questions, but uh we will in the future at that point uh allow you to do that. So if there's uh nothing else on board uh without objection uh we will adjourn at 8:43. >> Objection. >> [laughter] >> Do you
149have a final score? can remember that tomorrow morning we