001Evening everyone. I'd like to bring the uh Winchester Public Schools Board of Education special meeting to order. Um >> let's do the pledge of allegiance. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> Okay. Roll call. Uh, Joseph Santoro, >> Chrissy Rylander, >> Frank Oliver, >> Shane Sanchello, >> Kurt Warner, >> Julie Libby, Nora Mccurski, >> Elanor Bishop, >> Jonathan Mor. >> Okay, Carol should be on her way. All right, perfect. Let's move on to item two, information items, uh, presentation of superintendent's budget for the 2027 school year. Um, I just want to give you guys an idea of what tonight is about. Um this is just a presentation of uh the
002school budget. Um we will be diving into this budget once we get our budget books in the next few weeks. Um so tonight is just the presentation and then uh hopefully we can gather some questions and stuff and uh that will be on tap for Thursday's meeting. >> Okay. I'm gonna present some more. You should be able to see the slides from everywhere. Let's see. Is this picking up? Okay, wonderful. Okay, good evening. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to showcase our school district and present the budget to you tonight. And thank you for your engagement in this process. Board, your help in establishing our priorities and your efforts to learn as much about the district as possible will be so valuable to this process. I'd particularly like to thank my leadership team for
003their participation in developing the budget and for always putting children first. I think it's also important to thank the dedicated teachers and staff who show up every day and teach our students how to be self-regulated, respectful, and engaged so that they are available to think, question, and wonder about all of the rich curricula that we offer. I'd also like to add a special thank you to the most amazing with Matthew and Tiffany just making everything smooth for tonight and to thank everyone who's here to share in this moment. As I prepared this budget and saw the impact of rising costs on our bottom line, I wasn't happy with what I saw and know that you won't be either. In fact, I find myself wanting to apologize for the size of the increase. But then I'm
004reminded that this budget been eroded over the years so badly that even with this increase, we still will not have matched inflation over the last 10 years. This budget does not expand the Winchester public schools. It stabilizes a system that has been worn down by time, inflation, and unfunded mandates. I can't apologize for telling the truth about what our students need. While the budget conversation is uncomfortable, it is necessary. As a community, we must come together to support our children. This is the budget we need for the town we want. Here you see the district's vision and mission. Public schools exist to educate the children of the community, to prepare them to be contributing members of society, and to encourage them to lead lives of fulfillment. We take that responsibility very seriously. We are not
005teaching the children of 20 or even 10 years ago, though. Children today are plagued with mental health and behavioral challenges that are changing the way schools must respond. This is not just in Winchester. This is in districts across the state and across the country. We aim to do the absolutely best we can within the constraints of a budget that does not allow for all of the supports that our students need given the cumulative effect of so many years of flat buding. As Knowing our strengths and our challenges, we have established goals that are guiding our work. We are working hard to improve school climate and student attendance and also improve our talent management practices in order to ultimately increase student growth and achievement. We are committed to doing all that we can to develop and
006promote a budget that meets the district's needs while respectful of the community's ability to pay. We are proud of what we are accomplishing in our schools in spite of the financial constraints. In order to improve school climate, we have developed clear, consistent behavioral expectations and initiated morning meeting in all of our classrooms. We create opportunities for families to participate in school events alongside their children, such as last night's literacy night. our steam night and our end of the year barbecue. This year we are providing building and grade level newsletters showcasing student learning, school events, and student successes. In order to improve student attendance, we are making phone calls and home visits and holding meetings in order to identify and remove barriers to student attendance. We are also creating exciting learning opportunities designed to enhance student
007engagement and therefore attendance. In order to better develop and support our staff, we have expanded our search methods and improved our hiring practices. We have increased the alignment and quality of our professional learning opportunities. We have updated all of our evaluation protocols to allow for self-reflection and meaningful feedback. We are using a team approach led by our BCBA board certified behavioral analyst to better understand and address student behaviors that are interfering with learning. In order to improve student growth and achievement, we have developed a shared understanding of what high quality instruction means to us and are using that to guide all of our work. We have implemented instructional rounds that are focused on continuous improvement and aligned with our district goals and our vision for high quality instruction. Our instructional coaches support our teachers in
008their weekly collaborative planning meetings, in data analysis, in problem solving, and in their class. As we work towards our common goal of increased student achievement, the budget is what provides the resources and supports for students and staff that are needed in order to achieve our goals for students. The budget process starts early in the fall and is grounded in our goals. We start by reviewing every line of our current budget and identify ways that we can reduce or eliminate spending. We make certain that we are adhering to all of the legislative requirements and state mandates, contractual obligations and class size limits. We must provide special education services and 504 services for students regardless of our budget. We apply every grant dollar to reduce the appropriated budget request and continue to look for additional funding sources.
009We collaborate with the town and participate in consortiums in order to attain savings. We utilize shared services and resources wherever possible. We consolidate positions, reuse materials, and go without so many resources that other school districts take for granted. These slides, by the way, will be in your budget book and on our website. I realize I'm highlighting from it, not reading every word to you. To mitigate the increase to our budget, I negotiated with our vendors to ek out any savings that can be had and made reductions everywhere that we could. We have renegotiated our new bus contract to reduce the increase for the coming year. We renegotiated our medical advisor's fee to reduce the cost for the coming year. We renegotiated our contracted rates with P school to reduce the cost for the coming year.
010We reduced our instructional software budget by 38% by eliminating programs. We reduced our operational software budget by 20%. Also by eliminating programs, we reduced our dues and fees budget by 18% by cancelling professional memberships. We continue to evaluate various avenues to mitigate the health insurance increase. We will reduce the part-time security consultant removing current support and services. And we are repurposing to existing positions for three higher impact ones instead of requesting the needed support. When faced with a large budget increase due to rising costs, a responsible superintendent looks for ways to offset it. Typically, a superintendent would eliminate luxury positions such as bus monitors or library assistants. We don't have any positions like that. A superintendent would look to discontinue voluntary services such as transportation to out of town magnet schools. We don't do anything
011that we're not required to do. Much like the giving tree in the Shell Silverstein story, we've given up our leaves, our branches, and our trunk. And all that is left is a stump with nothing left to give. In each of the last two budgets, in order to mitigate the size of the budget increase, we gave up much needed positions that support students. Throughout the budget process, in our meetings and workshops, there was consensus around making certain that our students and staff have the necessary supports to ensure their success. To that end, the budget that you're receiving tonight includes my recommendation that we restore positions that support students, help us achieve our goals, and here and adhere to our priorities. This budget includes one additional board certified behavioral analyst, sometimes called BCBA, and one behavior tech,
012often called BT. Currently we have one BCBA and three BTS. The behavioral analyst provides required special education services to students and support for our behavior techs and teachers. The behavior tech provides required special education services to students. This position reduces the likelihood of expensive out of district placements. Both of these positions I should say. This budget also includes an additional special education teacher and educators based on the needs of our current and incoming preK and kindergarten students. We need to create a small, highly structured class to meet the significant needs of these early learners, which will again potentially avoid the need for costly out of district placements. The budget includes lunch monitors at both schools so that more students can receive academic support. Currently, our academic interventionists monitor the lunchroom throughout the middle of the
013day. The budget includes the restoration of gifted and talented services by way of four stipended positions. All students deserve to receive challenging instruction and have their individual needs met. Finally, this budget includes a point4 custodian in order to better maintain our schools. We believe that as we improve attendance, school climate, and instruction, student achievement will grow. To do that, we must address student behavior both proactively and reactively, provide positive programming to enhance school climate, support disregulated students, maintain manageable class sizes that are within our guidelines, and provide academic support to students who are not achieving on level. The proposed budget that you will hear about now and walk away with tonight was designed to provide structure and behavioral supports for students, maintain appropriate class sizes, and meet the varying needs of our students. This is
014not a growth budget. It is a stabilization budget that responds to costs we cannot avoid and needs that we cannot ignore. The largest by far sign significant factors contributing to the increase in our budget is tuition based on rising student needs. That includes special education program tuition, choice tuition for students at regional as well as magnet schools and the Gilbert school. The next major factor in the increase is benefits. Increasing premiums and mandated coverage have skyrocketed for people everywhere, not just us. And finally, transportation. Bus contract costs to safely transport students, both regular ation and also special education taking students all over the state to their programs. These three cost centers represent 84% of the entire increase. In this chart, you can see how tuition benefits and transportation costs are driving the vast majority of
015the increase. This slide not only demonstrates that the increases supported students across settings you have Pearson the Gilbert school out of district. It alsoates that the increases are universal and impact all educational settings. The total cost of the critical positions that were layered into the district is $377,59 which represents 14.8% of the increase and 1.4% of the total budget. What you see there is what the budget increase would be without those positions that I shared with you. And you can see that that is not the driver of the increase at all. You can see here that the increase is not driven by controllable costs. The portion of the increase that is allocated to address student needs is small by comparison. what you're looking at. The bottom bar is the current year's budget. The top bar
016is the current year's budget. And then the pieces to the right are the composition of the increase. So the orange is the tuition, benefits, and transportation, which is largely uncontrollable. The small gray stripe is the positions that are so critical to meeting student needs. And the tiny sliver on the end is everything else increases in all the little things that we do. 94,650 of the budget is allocated for supplies and student experiences. These are essentially the only controllable costs. This is less than 1% of our budget. Because there is so little discretionary spending, reductions to this budget will absolutely result in the loss of staff and services that directly support students. The loss of those staff and services would impact class size, student behavior, learning conditions, and ultimately student learning across the district. Board members
017will leave here tonight with a full budget book with thorough analysis and line item detail. The contents of the board members budget books will be available on the district website shortly after tonight's meeting along with the slides from this presentation. Board members, your homework is to read the first three sections of your budget book in order to prepare for our workshop on Thursday. Please feel free to mark it up as you read. If you have questions either from tonight's presentation or as you review your budget book or just that come to you and you'd like to discuss them at our upcoming meetings, I would encourage you to send them to me by email in advance. That way I can be sure we have the information prepared to give you a thorough answer to your question.
018I'll gather the questions that are emailed to me and keep them in a document and share it back with all of you and posted on our website so that all board members are aware of any questions that were asked and the answers that were provided. All of the scheduled budget workshops will be held here in the Hicks room and streamed on YouTube. Here's something to bring our thoughts back to our mission and our reason for being You are on the road that you can live by. And so become yourself because the past is just a good teach and feed them on your dreams. The one they fix, the one you don't ever ask them why they told you you would. So just look at them and know they love you. The children you just saw
019are why this budget exists. They are the future of our community. This budget is not about growth. It is about responsibility to our students today and to our community's future. It restores safety, stability, and opportunity for every student in Winchester. These are the schools we need for the town we want. Thank you. >> Thank you, Julie. >> All right. I know we have a lot to dive into. >> I know we're going to have a lot of questions. that we're going to want to ask. So, once we get our budgets tonight, we have our homework to do. Um, we will come back here at six o'clock on Thursday. Um, and as Julie said, if you have any questions between now and then, email it to her so she can have the correct answers for you
020available on Thursday night. Okay. Um, so with that being said, would anyone like to make a motion to adjurnn? >> Make a motion to adjurnn. >> Second. >> All in favor. >> All right. Meaning, >> let me get that budget. Everyone still have their bookmark.