001is she sick well i mean like really is she in the hospital i i have a i'll talk to you for a second afterwards [Music] we'll call the january board of education meeting to order please stand and join me in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance okay first item on the agenda tonight communications and recognitions uh jack can i start with you uh sure this is gonna seem a little random um but you know how you hear a word or you hear someone's name and it's you don't hear it often you hear it and then you hear it over and over again well that happened to me this week we were at our retreat and i think gordon brought up janice lamb's name and then i was talking to a parent about something and
002they said you should talk to mrs lam and i was at a conference call today with uh one of chloe's my daughter's guess it's the guidance counselor at the high school and she she said to chloe you should talk to ms slam about getting whatever she needed so it sounds like mrs lamb does a lot of work at the high school and i'm here to recognize the fact that uh she seems like a great employee and she's uh evidently she does a really good job so janice thank you [Music] she's not here for sharing that jack yeah that's really cool it's true heidi anything for you um i i just guess that though recognize our board because i think we did a really good job on tuesday we really covered a lot of ground and
003made i think some really good constructive decisions um to to help the progress of of the school so i was pleased by that thank you [Music] craig anything for you gordon i just like to say it's great to have the kids back in school so thank you to the entire staff i can tell you that i've got four uh very happy faces uh and i was glad to offload them a little bit myself too what's that [Music] dr riley anything on your end okay anything for you okay all right moving on uh comments from citizens um anna correct me if i'm wrong but we didn't have any this month okay uh next item is the consent agenda there are three items uh in the consent agenda typically no discussion unless you choose to remove something
004what's your pleasure second motion made there's a second all in favor opposed motion carries dr riley [Music] two things in your packet is the latest covid budgeting information you can see we're leveling off we did have one additional item that's the time our nurses are spending and i would like to thank them they've done an absolutely amazing job when i talk to other superintendents everybody's certainly struggling with this covet issue but our nurses gloria in particular our lead along with allison are on top of it but you can see where we are i did have a question about is this going to continue to increase and i don't believe so all of these items that are on here were the amounts that we estimate for the rest of the year so unless there is something
005that's surprising this should be it for for the boards for the costs the other item on here is a high school issue and i'd like mark to address the attendance and grade update mark thank you dr riley one of the practices we have at the high school is that in order to be awarded credit for a course in addition to passing the class with the grade you also we also have an attendance requirement where you cannot miss more than eight classes through a semester with all of their abilities with covid and online school and connectivity uh this is going to be quite a burden for some of the families so this for this school year we're going to suspend that practice and the kids grades and credit will be awarded based on their grade only
006any any questions for mark or i think that makes sense to me no actually dr riley i had some questions about um the kovig 19 update but sure it sort of goes in with the finance too so i'm not really sure you can say i'll defer to somebody else but i'll just try them out on you so sure um i was looking at this and i the face shields the student desk barriers and the teacher desk barriers i can understand about replenishing the the um masks and possibly the sanitizers but it looked like every single month were and i could just be not reading this correctly we're replacing the plexiglas dividers the drug spares and the tents so it's it's carrying it's carrying through it so it doesn't just keep recurring it's not reoccurring it
007stands stagnant month over month okay um so where you you would see something that is um changing month to month there really isn't anything really right everything looks like it's carrying right through so that's just a carrying through i thought it yeah i thought it was reoccurring well for the third item the bus monitors our original estimate back in september was 118 000 and that was so we thought the same in october that's where we were we found we didn't need that so that was reduced down to 31 000. so that's our estimate for the rest of the year from november all the way through june so that just carries over there's no additional cost um so and then and looking at the different ways that we compensate for kids who are falling behind um
008it weekends and wednesdays are pretty important ways of doing it right and also putting them in for four days a week those were two yes wednesday is the all remote for everybody day so we are bringing some students in that need that extra help we're also bringing in some students usually iep students or 504 students for four days a week as long as there's room and there has been for those students that need those four days a week so those are the big times that we have there's some after school but we're trying to take advantage of any any time that we can so there's a little bit of after-school time and but mostly wednesdays and the four days a week um so are there any open times so if students themselves feel that they
009need it and the teachers have not necessarily directed them can they just feel frustrated and go to a you know like a writing center or at the a math center or reading center knowing that they need help or must they be directed there by a an instructor well that can happen um on wednesdays at a lot of the different levels obviously the cave probably through eight their times structured during those days i know at the high school they have some where would it might have been a study hall or there might be some time when they would be able to access a teacher but usually during the day it's it's fairly it's fairly structured if they need help we have specialists interventionists and others that could help them so if they're in a math class
010with 12 other students and they need to help we can pull them out one-on-one or two-on-one that kind of thing and give them some of the attention that they need if they do need extra help the first person they should go to would be their teacher and the teacher can look at the time that the teacher might have because teachers all have some sometimes that are free and it would have to do with what other schedule that you know whatever other obligations the student had but the teacher could either help with a specialist or extra time or wednesdays or after school any any of those kinds of things that's i think that's important i just i'm hoping hoping that it's um that it's lessening the need for the summer program with all of this extra
011help i don't i don't know if that's possibly happening well you'll see that we are recommending an extended summer program you've probably seen that statewide and even nationwide there's a lot of discussion about that and it's you know it took it it took a while for us not us just our district but for the whole nation to kind of get started with this and then with when the teachers trying to teach a remote group and and half the students plus the other half at home we're not going to have the same quality of education we know that so having these other uh items that are listed here other times the students could get extra help and you'll see in the budget tonight there's two separate lines one is for an extended summer program and one's
012for additional time next year during the school year to help students that are behind to get caught up it is the bear cut academy and the learning hub are those extra um instructive instructional times as well yes their extra tutoring time the bear academy mark is after school correct and the other one is during school a student that might have a free time or need extra help they can go to the library media center and get that help and so there is actually somebody there and you'll see tutor you'll see tutors now and then and interventionists the tutors are classified when they're not teachers per se the interventionists are teach like a math teacher and they would be available for students depending on the degree of assistance that student might need yeah and so teachers
013could send them there knowing that there will be a resource there if they send them into the learning help into the library that there is somebody there that can deal with it that's and mark did if if if a teacher notices that a student needs extra help did they send them directly to the to the library or would they have to get a referral how would that work nice and i just had one other question what is what i need wednesday it was just where's that thanks thank you okay jack go ahead yeah i have another question and i'm gonna state the obvious i'm not an educator so bear with me on this one um just intuitively it seems like our most vulnerable students during this time are probably the kids that are learning to
014read and write learning the basics of mathematics and we have all this extra space here at the middle school so and you just made a statement that it's really difficult when you have half the kids at home and half the kids in school why not try to use utilize this space so so those kids you know all first graders second graders can come here and have you know as close to a full week experience as possible during these times you know like a monday tuesday thursday friday has that been explored would that even be worth doing we looked at that back when we looked at the original hybrid proposal either separate you know having classes here or even having some maybe middle school classes at the high school we have we have space we have
015cl building space but we'd have to hire you know another 50 teachers or whatever if we really wanted to keep all the students in four or five days a week you'd have to double the number of teachers because right now half the students go and we didn't have the space to do that and we certainly i didn't think it was appropriate to request i mean funding we're not going to come back and ask for you know 10 million dollars to hire a number of teachers the program you know our teachers are doing a phenomenal job it's difficult we we realize that we're trying to give them you know that wednesday time and extra planning you know the all the things that we can do to support to support them they also wanted to keep their
016keep their classes you know we thought about let's just have remote cl you know one teacher teaching only remote we have a couple of those at the middle school not in the high school but elementary you know everybody wanted to keep their 18 students they'll be you know maybe eight in class at a time but taking those students even mid-year and saying well you want you're going to be remote so you have to now go to this other teacher it just didn't seem good and we also didn't know and we still don't know exactly when we're going to go back so there could have been two or three changes during the year and that didn't seem appropriate either i mean it's not ideal no matter what we do but we we did look at um
017at all those options okay thanks you satisfied yeah i just thought that if uh from the outside looking in and if you had a class of say 20 kids and students and you brought them here it seems like we have a lot of space and you split them up into two different so they think in social distance into two classrooms and then had a pair and one and a teacher in the other you would be able to have me whatever our most vulnerable students are i'm not sure who i assume it's first graders second graders but i just remember walking through this building and seeing there's a lot of space and it's an advantage that stonington has over a lot of other school systems and we it's we literally have the space that we could
018utilize and it just from the outside looking in seemed like that would make sense but you know i don't i don't know the you know well i think the the big issue for me with making sure we have a highly qualified teacher with both of those groups and having a pair with one group and paris can help do certain things and they've been amazing but if we're going to split a class all day yeah we want to hire another teacher and you can imagine if you take all your kindergarten in first grade what the num whatever that number is 20 something and higher that number of teachers and then you're bussing kids over here they're not with their other program i mean there were we look we act we looked at all that and and
019there are some pluses to that but the costs and the actual instruction didn't seem to outweigh keeping things the way they were but that's a good point thank you all right so just getting back to what um mark shared with the board were there any questions for mark as it relates to what he shared anybody [Music] we are probably about 10 percent higher than what we've been normal no no actually we're yeah we're we're much better than a lot of towns that are surrounding us i mean we have to have to our families they're doing a good job of getting them to school but we still have you know the the variability is the connectivity and and the quarantining and the seeing doctors and getting testing it's just it's just really they're they're adding up
020for some kids any other questions or comments from mark thank you mark discussion and approval of 2122 school calendar van is that you or yeah we're presenting the recommended calendar we've run this by our uh our principals it pretty much matches the learn calendar we have schools starting after labor day you'll see the typical breaks that we have some early release days for staff development and when graduation is set it's a standard standard calendar we we did not put the snow days in again uh next year like we did not this year um it just seems that this year is working so all right any questions on the school calendar hearing none i'll entertain a motion to approve motion made is there a second second any discussion on the motion hearing none all in favor
021opposed motion carries next item on the agenda 2021 2022 um budget preview dr riley we're passing out the [Laughter] the copy of the budget for community members that are tuned in you can see a copy of the budget now on our website we just put that up and you're welcome to follow along it's on the stoney to public schools website and like we do usually at this time of year is spend a little time going through the proposed budget to the board of ed [Music] i would like to thank a number of people they hold a leadership team that's in the back of the room and particularly gary gary spent many many hours in the past couple months putting this together and making changes a few times along the way that did a great job
022the the typical process this year as as in the past we present the budget to the board tonight we'll go over it in detail we have budget workshops follow-up meetings on the budget set for the next three weeks and into february if needed what i would we're certainly willing to entertain questions tonight as we go through this typically because there's a lot of information most of the time board members will take this home take a look at it email questions to me and i like you and also to cc those to frank just so we we both have a copy and we will work on answers and get those back to the entire board by next by next thursday and then we'll do that again the following week and the following week if it's if
023it's necessary so what i'd like to do is start this tonight by looking at the narrative this is page one you can see the uh the introduction i won't read this to you the philosophy is the same this is my ninth budget nine budgets that's a lot of budgets the philosophy has is always the same to meet the needs of the district within conservative fiscal parameters and that's never easy but we've tried to do that each year the format i want to remind the board the format changed when i arrived in 2012 prior to that both the board and particularly the board of finance had some issues with the lack of detail and transparency i'll say we use the the format similar to the town where there's basically depart town departments for us at schools
024and departments and then a line by line items itemization of all of the expenditures with the rationale with comments on those and i think that's really helped the historical perspective i believe this year in particular is is really important for the last two years we've had a negative budget and certainly this last year it although it hurt it was necessary i think um with the with the with the pandemic and questions about taxes and everything else uh we cert we all i think understood where we needed to go with that but i do want to point out that two years ago we had a negative 0.3 percent this current year a negative 1.32 and that was the result that we we really came in with a zero increase and then the board of finance uh
025reduced that by 500 000 to end up with the negative 1.32 percent for the next year my understanding is the board of finance has suggested a maximum of increase of 1.5 percent so on page two i do want to make you know my recommendation to the board and we can go into detail on this if if we do only increase 1.5 for this coming year the three year average the last three years including next year would still be negative and at this rate the impacts on instructional programs would be significant i mentioned at the bottom of this page the with my proposal for this coming year the average for the last three years for the last year this year and next year comes out the 2.44 which i believe meets the educational needs and at
026least in the three-year average part is is reasonable and just uh for information i look back prior to these the negative budget i looked the last six years before that the average was 2.4 percent so that 2.4 number seems to be what we need to maintain and keep improving things for our for our community the local challenges there are a number of things that again i won't read this to you but certainly the pandemic has affected everything in addition um allison put a couple comments in here about special education in the annex that you can take a look at uh at your leisure but we the special education in particular we don't know what our our costs are going to be and because of the pandemic when we have students placed in other out and
027out placements we're at the mercy i guess is the word of the uh of the institution where they're placed as to what the increase will be legally we need to keep them there and if we get you know a 10 increase in in the next summer for the following year we have to adopt that i know allison's working with the state and others to try to help control that but there are some unknowns here we do our very best and allison has done a great job in estimating these costs but there are some things that we just don't know and all we can do is give it our best shot on page three we talk about enrollment a lot and there's some discussion here about the impacts of enrollment on on our programs and i
028just gave an example of the high school they've decreased by over three teachers between 2015 and 19 due to enrollment decline but as you know you can't just say well we you know our district enrollment's going down 30 students so we're going to reduce one teacher or two teachers it depends on where those students are usually they're spread out one or two per grade level and you just can't it it's really difficult to predict exactly what the enrollment decline or even an increase what effect that would have on staffing and on the budget at the bottom the three identified areas of concern certainly diversity equity and inclusion that's something that we're looking at i know that the board is very interested in that academic recovery you know we talked about summer school just a few
029minutes ago it's not just summer school it's what we're doing right now to help students catch up and keep up and it's what we need to do next year and probably the following year to make up for the differences in what students have been able to learn during this pandemic and then program integrity with the pandemic we want to return to these rich offerings that we've had the extracurricular activities athletics the encore classes on and on and we'll just have to we just wanted to point out these three three overlying themes are something that we want to keep looking at at the bottom strategies for keeping costs down i just made a list of some of the things we've done over the past you know number of years we've returned properties to the town we've
030consolidated the uh the middle school program we have reduced staff we've done a lot with utilities and energy conservation we continue to try to keep our costs down in keeping our quality of our program up the budget increased recommendation for next year with all this and we'll go through the detail is 8.94 that results in a three-year average of 2.44 in the last couple pages here we have just a summary of what we're doing with staffing at the high school the staffing would remain the same next year a comment about the assistant principal and associate principal positions uh marco has helped out with the annex along with of course allison is the is over here all the time but margo's helped out and alicia is that the with the associate principal has assumed some of
031the district title ix and the voice responsibilities the middle school will maintain the 23 core teaching staff and with this staff again there's no no additions we're not asking for additional staff the 23 will will be able to return to the encore programs we haven't been able to do that this year because of the scheduling with the pandemic and the distance learning but we do hope to you know keeping the same staff we could re-implement those programs and at the elementary to maintain the current teacher and classified staffing we are looking at the library media center as you know last year part of the budget was to reduce the stem position opposite the media center we haven't put that back in the budget but we're looking at that we did add one fte at west
032vine the first week of school in kindergarten because the enrollment was way up it was up about what 15 or 16 more than we had estimated so that was only because of enrollment but that's the only new teacher we had this year now when after you know gary in a minute is going to go through the the line by line but in this in this budget spreadsheet the the budget that gary will present is this is what we're doing right now this is what we have this year this is the staffing these are the programs etc and he'll go through that and we'll talk a little bit about that and certainly ask questions tonight or next in the next couple weeks one thing you'll see different at the end of the large spreadsheet there are
033two new line items the first one is for an expanded summer school and i'll talk about that a little bit this is um i'll do that after gary's done the the second line will be new programs and staffing for next year to help bring back and help the students that have fallen behind to help them catch up so those are two new line items we kept them separate from the regular budget the regular budget is really what we're doing now moving on to next year and the other two items are new so we didn't want to confuse you know a line item by adding those in i'll talk about those after gary is finished so gary if you'd like to look at your large spreadsheet you so i'll go i'll go through it line sort
034of line by line i'll highlight the most important things so if you look at administrative salaries you see an increase of just over 54 000 and there's nothing no new no new positions it just reflects the administrators contracts so there's there's nothing new there teacher salaries as dr riley said the increase is due to the contractual obligations and as dr ali said we added one kindergarten teacher this year that position is being carried forward for the upcoming year and i believe that position is going to be moved to fourth grade if i'm or a first grade i can't remember first grade so secretarial salaries again it's uh just a contractual what's in the employment agreement maintenance you'll see is up what we've done here as we said each month under the covid we have four
035new part-time custodians at 25 hours per week we're hopefully going to fund those because we're thinking right now we're probably still going to need them to sanitize and clean the facilities come next year we're not quite sure where the covet's going to go come the fall at this point in time the nurse's salaries again that increase as you recall for the last couple of months i've told the board that we've now put all the nursing salaries under nurse salaries whereas before we had them under part-time and subs but now under that same line item so i think it's better i think it's less confusing when we do that paraprofessionals this year i believe we added one new security paraprofessional at the middle school and we as usual uh throughout the school year we might add
036additional paraprofessionals based on a student's iep we've also looked at the behavior techs and bcbas and moving them from the non-certified line item we i put them under pairs now i think it's clear when i do that as i just said the non-certified we've moved some people around from there to the pair of professional salaries there's no no increase for sub teachers sub secretaries substitute nurses or substitute paraprofessionals so we're just keeping those line items at zero for the upcoming year if we look at the added teaching stipends this is due to a slight increase of just over six thousand dollars uh we look at the teacher's contract and we've reconfigured some of the positions they didn't add any or the costs but we just i think that we've reconfigured a few positions under extracurricular
037so this is really due to the teachers contract what's there for stipend positions and the costs again general overtime for secretaries maintenance custodians we've kept it what we have this year so there's no increase you'll see that oped line item it's up 125 000 so we took it out of this year's budget uh opeb stands for other post-employment benefits i think we went over that in fairly well detailed last year what that encompasses it's really an actuarial study looking forward for what a benefit might cost the district for a person just as an aside it really looks mostly at health benefits and those benefits are always included in our health benefits when we come up with the projected costs for health benefits all retirees if they're getting health benefits through us are included so there's
038we don't discount them and as i said health insurance there's a a big a big increase just under 1.2 million dollars this is based on an initial review by the district's health benefit consultants it's early still you know we're probably looking at at least another month out if not a little bit longer to really get some good data or revise data on what we think we might need for the upcoming year we're splitting if you remember we're splitting our health benefit reserve with the town now we have a memory in the agreement that the board approved i believe in november so we'll have separate bank accounts for that so this represents what our consultants are projecting for the upcoming year a reserve of 25 that's minimum we have to have in the memorandum of agreement
039but even even that i've reduced this by 550 000 from the health benefit reserve account i think there's going to be ample amount of funds in there when we finally do split those up and so we can reduce it at this point by 000 which i've done again it can change a little bit uh based on what the town of stonington finally tells us was left in that account as of june 30th they're still waiting for the audit report to come through and so we'll we'll see a little bit what what that looks like probably in two or three weeks and if you remember last year one of the things that we did in the budget is we not only reduced the health benefits i believe by just over 240 thousand dollars to begin with
040but then we took another half a million dollars out of the health benefit reserve as well so this is a little catch-up and i know dr riley alerted the board to that fact that in this year we might have to play a little ketchup because of what we did again the two factors updated health benefit projected costs and the amount of the health benefit reserve so that will have effector hopefully it will have a favorable effect once we get those figures on the budget that we might be able to reduce these costs so that's that's a large increase and i understand that uh but again it's right now i'm coming right from what our health benefit consultants projected our costs to be for the upcoming year minus a half a million dollars life insurance really
041slight slight increase town pension social security slight increases and again those are all based on wages so when the wages go up social security medicare and pension go up as well course credit this is based upon the teachers contract and i believe there's some in the nurse's contract and the maintenance contract but the the bulk of it is for the teachers under their contract that's for getting graduate and it's actually the second graduate degree they already have to have a graduate degree in order to apply for some reimbursement for course credit so that's what that is student enrichment is up just a little bit we see that dean's mill wants to enhance some their content area in the high school a little bit of funds for a voice program so that's that's the increase there
042professional development increase of 23 000. miss butler is going to focus on foundational skills early reading instruction hill literacy the need to support trauma-sensitive practices you know including covet increases for all staff training and the district dei goals as well so that's that's the increase there you see no increase in pupil services or the athletic trainer this thing fairly stable professional excuse me professional technical services that's a combination of things most of this is really under you know a lot of the technology side so a lot of it some of it is for legal fees as well the largest increase comes from us transferring the cost for printer copy release equipment we moved it from operations to tech services and this was close to sixty five thousand dollar move so that's the reason uh that
043you see such a large increase here for professional technical services in addition to that uh there's again a split between tech and operations we're looking to install i'm going to call it a security trap at both district office when you walk in and also at the middle school so there's there's a double entrance i'm going to call it to walk into the buildings not just one entrance that you come in so that's there tech's also looking at stormwind learning parent square carbon black endpoint security so all of those factors accounts for that large increase and i'm going to skip down to public utilities because there really is nothing in town travel referees or police services public utilities you would think it'd be up more because of the covid and because of the amount of fresh
044air we have to bring into the buildings so we have to heat that air we have to cool that air that costs money not only electrically but also for a heating bill but what's happened we've decreased this budget over the last three years because when we start tracing the kw usage we've seen that it was higher than what we have used in addition as i've told the board of finance we also have some additional funds in here to do some energy efficiency projects right now we're looking at doing a very large one at the high school that will pay for itself in four years with the energy savings so that's still in there that's that's in there so it's going to cost us a little bit of money to do that but we think it's
045worth it the payback is just over four years which is phenomenal to do a quarter of a million dollar project we get about a quarter of a million dollars in incentives from eversource to do it as well so to me it's well worth to do something like this so that's that's the increase it's not a large increase as i said we're hopeful that with that energy saving product and again hopefully that the kovid will start going away so we won't have to bring as much outside air in into the school classrooms repairs maintenance really it's less than a thousand dollars but again that's for hvac services phone system services in contracts and just regular repairs of maintenance on the buildings uh you know you never know when when something's going to go for instance we
046had a fairly large gas leak here in this building about a month ago the regulator went and so we had to shut down one of the boilers we had to evacuate the building for a few hours it's repaired now but those are the types of things sometimes you just can't plan for they happen and so that's why repairs and maintenance has a large budget just to begin with rentals again this is down because as i said the copy release the copier equipment has been transferred to tech services so that's most of that sixty thousand dollars is for that to transfer out into tech services regular transportation that's really we're just looking at the increase in our contract with first student that's really what that represents the special ed transportation is down that's that's an estimate
047of those special needs students who need to be transported to outside schools and sites we think there's going to be less students to do in the upcoming year not necessarily less intuition-wise but just less in the number of students and we're starting to do more in-house transportation we have four vans we've been using three for the last three years and we're starting to use that fourth for in-house and around the surrounding areas as well so we think we can save some large amount of money by doing that and that reflects the 100 over 130 000 reduction field trips is up again that's due to an increase and not only our contract with first student but hopefully we'll get back on track with extracurricular activities in the fall and so we plan for more of those
048versus what we've done this past fall or this past winter or the upcoming spring there was also a little bit of of additional funds at the elementary schools uh not much they have a total i think of fifteen hundred dollars or two thousand dollars uh for field trips so so not a lot property liability in student extra is student extracurricular insurance slight increase from what this year and last year remember as dr reilly said we did turn back to the town two skill buildings which helps to at least defer uh some of that liability insurance in the future tuition there's there's a big nut too 342 000 again that's a that's a projection most of the increase over 325 000 is for special ed tuition the rest of the increase is for adult ed and
049magnet schools so that's that's the bulk of it their um conferences decrease i'm sorry is due to less conferences under curriculum in the upcoming year mrs butler has projected that all that conference money we won't use in the upcoming year there's really nothing to say about non-instructional supplies it's no increase to speak of instructional supplies though is up forty four thousand again the largest increase is in the curriculum budget for a district-like district-wide license for tier two and two tier three reading eduseer ingenuity at the middle school the high school in the annex and we've moved dues and fees for block scheduling and the high school management system to this account from dues and fees so that's a large increase there but it's really a transfer from dues and fees for the upcoming year we
050have a small small budget for district tech supplies up for 400 total budget of 1600 maintenance supplies is up a little bit for the upcoming year nothing to to really speak of transportation fuel is down when we look at the amount of gallons we've used over the years we're able to decrease that even though the price per gallon is rising in the upcoming year i don't know if you remember we went out for bid for two years last spring and this we're basically going from about a dollar 20 gallon to 1.66 a gallon but as i said we've looked at our fuel consumption even with the increase in price we'll still be able we're still able to reduce our estimates for the upcoming year heat energy is up you know we're looking at what we're
051using now again because of the covid the amount of energy to heat the buildings to cool the buildings to bring in that outside air costs so we're bringing in 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 percent of outside air especially when it starts getting colder that means we have to heat the buildings when that outside air starts coming in which drives up the price of doing that and again the bid also included number two heating oil and as i said that's gone up substantially uh in the upcoming year it was a two-year bid very good for this year up about 40 cents in the upcoming year but if you go back three four five years it's really down almost 40 or 50 cents a gallon if we're still getting a good price as i said
052it's about 1.66 and if you look at your own number two heating oil bill it's probably about 279 to 289 right now so we got a good a good deal there library books it's up a little bit and we're up at beans mill west vine and the middle school media supplies us just uh up a thousand dollars nothing really there to talk about new equipment is down the decrease is emotionally mostly in the special education budget the non-instructional equipment is for operations such as floor buffers wet dry vacs cordless backpacks and to replace some broken vacuums the replacement instructional equipment equipment is is really mostly in the curriculum budget for science equipment music equipment p e equipment there is some money in there for technology the middle school does have some music equipment funds as
053well and at the high school this is the uniform replacement on a five year cycle so that's they've been doing that for quite a while now under 7 30 the decrease comes from athletics and as i said before we've moved some dues and fees into instructional equipment for things such as the high school management system and the phallet follett destiny system as well dues and fees for tech this is for such things such as google enterprise licensing and class link sso platform so that's the increase there if you go down to the special education excess cost grant with the tuition going up you'll see you see an increase even though it's in minus that's really a positive increase we're going to get we're projecting at least 175 000 more for excess costs we expect the
054transportation excess costs to go down as i said previously we're reducing that budget by about 131 000 and so those funds are going to be decreased that's our estimate in the in the upcoming year and even though the comparison uh how one relates to the other even though special ed is going up by about a hundred and about three hundred twenty six thousand dollars for tuition it's offset a little bit by this hundred and seventy five thousand dollars uh so when you take that away uh the increase is about 150 but yeah about 150 000 so we started splitting this out because some people were confused where we put it under tuition for special ed so now you can see it you can see the excess cost and just uh just so you know in
055order to get an excess cost for a special ed education student who's out placed or we we need to spend four and a half times our per pupil average uh for the for the district which was over eighteen thousand dollars this year times four and a half so until you reach that threshold there's no excess cost reimbursement from the state of connecticut and that's all i have a couple of comments before we entertain questions i would like the board to know that some of these items are are at the discretion of principles you know when you look at library books some instructional supplies some site equipment and the way that works is we we provide each principle what's called the formula allocation and it's there to their discretion to use for their instructional program each
056school gets thirty thousand dollars plus a certain amount per student so a larger school get a little bit more so that's why sometimes you'll see more money in library books because you know westby needed library books that year rather than something else um i would also like to uh expand a little bit on what gary said about the uh heating system the hvac system um you know i talked to peter probably every day about this one of our not only are are the costs going up but the wear and tear and the equipment is significant we are instead of having our air exchangers running at a 10 to 15 exchange rate we're well above 50 percent because we for us to have school we have to exchange a certain amount of outside air so this
057cold air comes in and then we have to heat it and then we blow it right back out so the students and staff are breathing basically fresh air all the time and you can see that that's i don't want to say it's a waste of energy it's it's what we have to do we have to heat the cold air coming in it also is going to take a toll on our hvac systems that we we have we have brand two brand new schools and uh the estimate peter we were talking about the equipment might last a third of the amount of years based on the amount of uh time we have to run it so that's not in this budget but it's something that the board should be should be aware of um i let's
058see what else oh the two lines at the bottom there not quite at the bottom but right before the total budget line the summer school due to covid and the request for new programs and staffing back in your narrative the last page i summarized this the summer school what we put in there is an amount where we can have a number of students probably 350 to 400 students of k-12 attend summer school four hours a day for six weeks and that includes busing that's very expensive it's something we haven't done for regular ed students in the past the budget line to do that is 352 that is something we need i think we need to do for to make up the the instruction that those students have lost the second light item is called new
059programs and staffing this light items provides uh several things and if you'd like some more detail i can provide that next time but it's really for additional academic and social supports during the school year it's after the summer school program elementary schools could reinstate their clubs and their after school programs and each level could employ a new academic math intervention teacher to assist with those needed areas in addition to middle and high schools we receive funds to offer in school and after school additional tutoring so all that together that's during the year every day we'd have intervention we'd have clubs we'd have after school activities that cost comes to 331 287 so those are two big items but they're to me they're really a result of the pandemic that we've experienced this year so in
060summary we um i'm recommending an 8.94 increase i'll keep saying that's a 2.4 percent average over three years um because i think that's really important for the board the board of finance the community to understand we can't keep it as zero or negative percent and maintain the quality of programs that we are currently offering so i'll leave it up to any questions you have again most of the questions usually come between now and next week but be happy to answer anything tonight or take some directions some things you'd like me to bring back next thursday night thank you so i i have one question related to health insurance i mean that really stands out it's about three percent of our total increase so is it safe to say that on the town side as a
061percentage they're seeing a similar increase they're look they're looking at our claims because we're self-insured and so we're we're claims driven uh number one number two we also look at large claims over the last year or two and we've had some large claims one has been consistent over the last two years very large claims now we have stop-loss insurance for that but still the blues look at it uh making this figure up if somebody's costing 600 000 um we only have to pay 125 but they're now they're saying wait a second we have to pay 475 000 for that person now do they take all of that and add it in probably not because we'll go back and say wait a second that's probably going away the other thing that's not necessarily known right now
062but the effect that kovid will have there's a lag because people were not going to the doctor's office or not getting elective surgeries or not going to the er this past year the medical trend right now is just under 9 pharmacy trend is over 11 dental trend is just over 3 percent but i'll clarify the dental trend uh talking with the underwriter from anthem yesterday we had a little workshop with brown and brown our health benefit consultants he's seen a huge lag in dental nobody's gone to the dentist for the most part so he's figuring a 20 increase in dental claims again we don't spend a lot of money for dental under 300 000 but that's still an extra 60 000 on top of that again as i said the other factor is i need
063to see at some point what our health benefit reserve is going from the town is going to be i don't have that figure yet it's about a 70 30 split it might be 27 or 23 about something in that in that range uh for the upcoming upcoming year under the new memorandum of agreement uh with the town but again we'll be looking at that probably uh in february again with our health benefit consultants because blue cross also said that they might go back another 18 months because what they usually do is take a trend they'll take a trend from basically november of their previous year up to december of this year they say that trend is no good the covid has we can't really get a good accurate trend so they might go back a
064year and see what they can do see what the figures look like over a two year period instead of a one year or 14 or 18 month period in the upcoming year so there's a lot of variables out there if you ask me my gut and you can't hold me to this i think that number will be decreased i think it will decrease the interesting fact is that if you look at their projections projections one year to projections this year uh it's not a huge increase to be perfectly honest but again we have to put this money back in uh the half a minute that actually it's three quarters of a million dollars that we took out of the health benefit benefit reserve for the current year as i said i'm taking out another half
065a million dollars might be able to take out more depending on that health benefit reserve number that the town gives to us so i do expect that number to go down uh frank but again i can't i don't have the facts yet right for that thanks gary yeah frank i guess just a follow-on to that gary when i so when i look at the health care that was about 1.2 million and then if you add in teacher salaries which are contracted you add those two together that's 64 of the overall increase or 5.76 right so if i look at that and then i add on new programs which is about 700 right so call that another 1.8 before we're doing anything new we're really looking at point eight seven point five eight percent right seven
066point six so i guess when you waterfall this down you start at the call it nine percent right eight point nine really when you take those three things out you're really looking at a 1.5 percent increase fair okay that's why i make sure i was reading it right yep okay check could you um not tonight but could you break down tuition at some point and i would be interested i should know this at this point but the numbers on if they're going up or down in terms of like the magnet school how many kids how much does each student cost us roughly and then the coaches that were cut earlier this year they've been put back into the budget like the assistant coach for tennis no no no no what what's going to be in
067this current ending budget are the coaches that weren't paid this year because of the pandemic but the positions that were the recut last year there was the teacher the stem teacher the you know the coach the other things those we didn't put anything back except what what we've mentioned you know there was again the one kindergarten teacher there was the social supports the clubs at the elementary those would be back in those were all reduced last year how did you pick and choose which which got which were placed put back into the budget and which were left out that's a good question i asked the way this budget starts i not only do we work with gary on here's where we are i ask each principal to give me i don't want to call it
068a wish list but what what would you really like to see for your school and they give me a list of everything and then over the last couple months we we look at that come to see where we are and you know my job is to try to balance what i think i can recommend to the board dollar wise with what the programs are and the priorities would be um with you know i'll ask the principals okay and this this amount i'll just i'll let you know the new program staffing was over 1.2 million in requests we sat down you know what are the priority and when it came down to with this interventionist having a teacher an extra person to help and having this social interaction these clubs were priorities over some of these
069other things that were there so that that's how it works it's really a priority based on our professional educators what they think is the most important and we really try to get it down to as low as we can and still meet the needs i have a question for gary the opeb uh is really sort of a phantom isn't it we're not actually paying that to anyone we just have to carry it on the books is that we paid for it other than this year we started paying for it three years ago who does it who does the payment go to payment uh actually goes to the town and so they then put it i'm assuming into an account they do uh because i get that report uh from them and it breaks it out
070the cost the projected actuarial costs for the town and for the board of ed right but i believe they projected 20 years or maybe 30 years i can't remember which one i'm trying to get at how much of that projected actuarial cost is actually expended dude is spent is that right it's actually not spent that's right i had i had asked the question to the actuary last year and i don't know if he was just being a little facetious his reply was you don't have enough money to take any of that money out and we had i don't know i'm making i'm probably making this up 300 350 000 uh but again it's it's under the gas fee rule uh that they have to do that to be honest with you but as i said
071we plan for that in our health benefit account we we take retirees into account when they project the cost the claims for the upcoming year and every year so it's not as though they're excluded they're included [Music] dr riley how built out is the summer school program at this point because i do think it's important for us to be able to demonstrate to the community and the board of finance what we anticipate this program to look like and the return on on that investment as i mentioned one of the things we don't know is how many students would sign up um and we were talking right now um allison has a summer school program that runs for five weeks three days a week this program that were that we put out on paper is for
072four hours a day for six weeks so it's a hundred basically 120 hours of instruction versus allison's 60 hours of instruction um one of the things that we can do usually the board says well can you come back with some ideas some options that kind of thing one you know and i have here um the tuition the jackass for that for the uh and the health we can look at more detail and we can also look at summer school um and and come up with some some options within that right now we it's it's staffed and paid for again for around 400 students to attend four weeks i mean i'm sorry six weeks four hours a day are there any other questions or or comments at this point a couple of questions please go ahead
073i'm sorry uh it's okay uh gary are these numbers as the 2020 2021 adopted budget any of those have the covert expenses in them or this is this is not what is actualizing this is what the actual budget is right that's correct yep now the the covet sheet that you saw earlier it's over a million dollars that we have spent we get back 400 or so thousand from state and federal money we still need to go to the board of finance and request that and that's not in any of this material okay so the the the utilities or whatever number that we're seeing here is what is budgeted not what is actualized minus that right thank you with the summer school how do you envision networking will you target certain kids and contact their parents
074or i'm just trying to think you know as a parent yeah are trying to make the decision whether i'd send my kid or not it you know what would the process be if we can fund this for 400 plus students it wouldn't just be for it would certainly be focused on the students that need the remediation the most but it could also expand to other students that need maybe not as much as some we usually look at you know maybe 15 percent of students that need something um and not all of those are going to come so with that it just right now it covers 120 hours for 400 students including all the transportation and that's in school this is not at this point maybe at the high school because they might be able to
075do it but these are in school 12 students in a class instruction thank you any other com advert sorry to but so some of these expenses like conference or course credit do you feel that this is the number we're going to end the year at or do you feel that it's going to be under this number let me let me bring that back and we could certainly i don't think conferences this year we're gonna you know we haven't gone anywhere we can't even go to thanksgiving yet our relatives so but let us look at those if there's particular ones like certainly conferences if there's other ones you have questions about i mean things like utilities you know the staffing to teach your salaries all those things are going to be fully expended but there may
076be some we'll look at the non-personnel ones because those are the ones that might we might not spend and i know one personally like jack mentioned with coat there may be some some coach some extracurricular salaries this year but at this point those would either offset the covered money or they go back to the town we ended up passing back i think it was 575 000 last june to the town and that would some of that was because of the the covert we stopped doing some things that we were doing prior to that um so we'll we'll bring that back next time an estimate of kind of what we think we might have in those non-personnel costs that's a good question because it also might help the cause if we go back to the you
077know the board of finance and say this is how much money we might have at the end of the year sure sorry i keep thinking more questions yeah go ahead um so as we have a declining enrollment um either are there any positions that you and envision over time being eliminated for instance i don't know i'm just gonna throw it out there read into it but like a school psychologist we might have two at i don't know how many we have maybe we have four i don't know at a school do you see that being that type of a position being reduced over time that's i i love that question because you know my i think my first couple weeks in this district we had a joint meeting with the board of selectmen board of
078finance board of ed and we talked about a long-range plan and that was a budget and of course without a staffing and those kinds of needs it's been difficult to to come up with with what you're asking um because part of that has to do with with finances but i really think the town the board of ed you know we need to look at that i've shared last meeting the enrollment projections next year's fairly flat but in a couple years there's some decreases at the middle school and then later on at the high school and you know in fact we have it on our on our um leadership team meeting for next wednesday to look at the enrollment and to start you know for mark and tim at least elementary looks pretty level out even
079out 10 years but the other ones where are we how can we maintain the current excellent programs we have when you're down 50 kids or whatever it's going to be so we'll bring that back that's not going to happen next year because we really are level or close to it but it's certainly something that the board ought to look at in a like we did with facilities you know we looked out 20 years here's kind of where we think things are going to happen we should do that also with uh with our instruction and personnel that's not again that won't happen by in this budget cycle but it's certainly something and i think i shared that in one of our suggested goal areas look at long range planning and that's exactly what we were talking
080about it's the follow-up to that with those professional type positions do you track for instance um how many students uh are served by one professional i mean is that not i know we did that last a couple years ago i don't know if we've done that recently how many students as a psychologist sees a speech person sees do you have all that i wasn't picking on that position in particular i just what came to mind but and then is [Music] um facebook well i've done this that kind of a study in other districts you look at at regular teaching staff you know you look at support staff whether it's certificated like we're talking about or even you know maintenance staff and secretary staff you look at everybody um but again that's going to take more
081time do we have right now but certainly someone wasn't picking on well before maybe next fall before the next budget round that you had at least a feeling for what could happen next year in the in a few years out yeah it's just a question that you get in the community people say well you know your numbers are going down um you know why aren't we seeing less whatever that you know you can finish the statement with pretty much any you know any any of the positions and so it's just nice to know that we're tr you know be nice enough but that we're tracking that kind of information any other questions or comments so i think uh dr riley if the board can submit questions by noontime on tuesday i mean you got monday
082that would be nice but again if you have a question thursday afternoon bring it up right but i'm thinking just yeah try to try it by by tuesday afternoon would be fine and then you can turn them around before okay and then for next thursday we have a budget workshop is it the preference of the board i know when we were together tuesday night we made the decision to go to two meetings a month and that second meeting would be virtual do we want these workshops to be virtual or what what is the feeling of the board i mean i'm okay with them being virtual i just want to get your opinion okay is everybody okay with that all right so we'll still seven o'clock yeah okay yeah seven o'clock still work for everybody okay
083all right so you can get with chris to make sure everybody gets set up appropriately okay all right monthly reports um there were three uh in the board packet any questions or comments for the authors of those reports no heidi did you have anything i remember you asking me about that about the student government but she'll give her report right well her report is in the monthly report so if you wanted to ask a question or comment you can before you give before she gives her report well no so her report was part of the reports that were submitted to the board ahead of time but i know you had yeah i do um so first of all i just want to thank you for taking an entire evening out once a month to represent
084all of yours all of their fellow classmates it's really important and um i really cheer that but then with that i'm not going to ask you to do something else burden you more but i'm wondering if as well each month you could um include in your report a comment on title ix impact on the student body so that you observe things i listed some here i can give them to you is just ideas um their comfort level of safety with regard to sexual harassment or and the understanding of process and procedure when a student encounters any sexual harassments um and then if you could tell us sort of the status of the student advisory committee the school climbing committee how are um students involved in that and really any other related comments that you could
085have as you travel the halls for the month so so heidi why don't why don't we revisit that list um to make sure like i think some of the things you mentioned are more they need to be handled a little bit differently than just her reporting out on it so let's focus her observation and that's really what i'm asking for is her observation just for observations as it relates to what if where the if their problems their frustrations their students that feel that they don't feel the safety we looked at what the goals and objectives were um and you know we was that why can't it be 100 feeling of safety but it i think it was like 85 where where are those where those problems lie and i think that just and in your
086day-to-day interaction with students whether it be in the cafeteria or in your classrooms just interacting during weekends that you can find this kind of thing out that maybe i couldn't craft the right question for but it just is a general awareness that you could share with that make sense yeah so so we can let's work together to refine it and we'll get it back to her at the beginning of the week okay just so we can go ahead you can you can speak sorry yeah figure out the microphone uh yeah i can do that um and then you figure out what list you need and i can make it happen um i don't know what you're referring to when you say student advisory committee though i decided there it was something that was commented um
087when we had their presentation um back in october is that the asap thing i wasn't sure really what it was and i i thought that you could begin to fill in what that actually meant is that the thing okay um is the vice president on that committee or now is idol malik on like minnie okay i can talk to her about that okay yeah we'll refine it and then we'll we'll get it back to you okay thank you we'll work we'll work with the administration and we'll get it done okay okay just want to tune in [Music] at some point we had uh someone in her position that enlightened us about some of the mental health issues and it was just a very general statement like you know if kids are struggling a little bit
088we're going to have some workshops so it really wasn't too detailed and it wasn't like yeah i think general observations is that was nice it's just a general general you know we weren't trying to do a run around or anything yeah i think a general observation like that is fine and then the students back then and i think i read in your report which i was pleased to read that you're doing kind of a follow-up to what the students had done a couple years ago and they had some health professionals come in i remember they had a speaker and it was well attended and it was really nice to hear that the students were kind of you know taking the bull by the horns and and hitting you know taking an issue and and running
089at it head-on and trying to you know help solve what appeared to be kind of a you know something that a lot of students are struggling with yeah so for the last two years um i started actually two years ago we've done a wellness week at the high school to kind of address those problems so i don't really know exactly what you're referring to when you're talking about the general statement but i know that the last two presidents who've held this position um both were really um pushing for that so this this week that we put on in usually march is a product of that and um so that will continue to be updated in my reports because that's the biggest thing we have going on we're working in coordination with the voice program except
090ours is uh it's not mandatory so we end up getting students who really want to be there so i think that we're gonna shift um focus a little bit just to kind of um work with the new situations and stuff like that so um as far as general statements go uh that's gonna be really applicable all right there was uh one committee uh report from the finance committee uh any questions or comments on that any items for future agendas frank will you speak about um the way that people will not be able to communicate that that'll come under board comments okay which is next board comments and concerns i guess dr riley knowing that teachers will be part of 1b with the vaccine um have you with the other superintendents you've spoken to gotten a
091a fee a sense for how that could impact um you know move from distance learning hybrid to back to school i know it's speculative but there's a lot of a lot of folks in town asking now that teachers will be eligible for this um what that potentially means for for back to school i think we had four or five different in contradictory messages today from health departments and sports organizations and all kinds of things um we also had a meeting with the learned superintendents and they were all over the board as to even where they are now what people are offering um i think the bottom line is p is district superintendents want to make sure we're following the cdc and the department of public health guidelines and i've heard everything from students won't have
092vaccines until next january to maybe they can start coming back in april so right now there's it's honestly it's all over the board we have to have um we have to make sure that vax you know we have vaccines and things are safe and we can provide whatever the guidelines are at the time so we monitor it i i want to say every day but it's more like five or six times a day i mean that's that's that's really the truth i know allison we and with gloria we it's really it's really complicated we went from turning our list of our employees in for vaccines to don't do that unless you're to now you can do it if you're 65 but put a hold on it i mean that happened those four things happen today
093it's it's really uh i want to say it's frustrating and then the state came up with the 1b has what a million and a half people in it something like that or 1.2 one point yeah and without any priority within that so the last thing at about five o'clock was well there'll be some kind of sub you know one b one and one b two and and so we still don't know how that's gonna work yet so i i think that the main thing that i've because i have questions every day from staff members when can i get a vaccine yeah will i get one where am i i say i will it you all know the minute i know we still are some districts have different relationships with their own local health departments and
094there i mean some teachers in the state i think have already had some vaccines we haven't in our area and we're still waiting to make sure we can get in line as soon as we can we don't want to be last we're ready you know we have all these lists ready to go but um we have to get permission to enter the end of the names so it's very it is very complicated it's a great question i wish i had an answer for it um i yeah allison right but hopefully it's once we get to that point it's it's kind of the next step in the process right yeah right no i think that's helpful i think i think most people in the town like that that's news to me i didn't i didn't know
095that i mean i think that's part of the problem with the media right you you read something and it's you know oh all these all these teachers are in one b group they're going to get it but you know because you see doctors and nurses and all those people know we're monitoring it and we're we'll push forward as fast as we legally and possibly can and we'll bring students back when it's when it's safe and we have the right protocols from health department cdc i mean i think that's helpful that i think that that helps everybody in town know kind of where we stand so thank you okay all right so uh going forward uh beginning in february the board is going to meet twice a month second thursday of the month will be our
096regular business meeting which will be in person the fourth thursday of the month we a committee of the whole meeting where we will review policy teaching and learning and financing facilities that will be a virtual meeting in the current environment that we're in and then as far as public comment is concerned beginning with our february board meeting uh you will be able to address the board as if you were in person uh utilizing the hand raising feature on zoom you'll be recognized and you'll be able to address the board and there'll be a two minute time limit for each speaker who wants to address the board are there any other board comments or uh concerns and frank just to be clear on that that that'll be verbal it's it won't be in the in the
097chat it'll be verbal we won't be reading it no right it'll be verbal any other questions any other comments or concerns okay hearing none we'll entertain a motion to adjourn the meeting motion made is there a second second all in favor opposed motion carries