001I'm going to give Jamie a minute since she just got in. I call the meeting to order of the Dudley-Charlton Regional School Districts. joint meeting on the Wednesday, February 11th, 2026 at 6.31 p.m. at Charlton Middle School. All committees, boards called to order by me, the chair of the Dudley-Charlton Regional School District. Without objection from the boards of selectmen, committees, FAA, and FinCom, and school committee chair, myself, Jean Costello, will facilitate the joint meeting with any votes being taken, if required, separately by committees and boards. The chair declaration in accordance with Mass General Law Charter 30A, Section 20, in accordance with Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2023. I announce this meeting is being recorded by the Dudley-Charlton Regional School District. And I ask if there is anyone else present that is recording today's meeting.
002Okay. Seeing none, please let the minutes reflect. I'll stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. and a moment of silence all right and then moving right along to the presentation of the dudley charlton regional school district fiscal year 2027 budget overview by stephen lamarche you may ask if you want to have everyone introduce themselves even thank you madam chair um i think it would be best for us to go around i i know um almost everybody but other people may not so why don't we go around the room and at least introduce ourselves so at least people can kind of see who's who okay stephen lamarche superintendent for dudley charlton regional school district Jean Costello, chair of the DCRSD school committee. Anthony Abbey, member of the DCRSD school committee. Kelly Zella, I am also a member
003of the W. Charlton Regional School District school committee. Kelly Drew, I'm the assistant superintendent. Jamie DeLauvo, school committee member. Kathy Carmignani, school committee member. Dana Kamarkot, student representative. Jeremy Foskett, Charlton Finance Committee. Ray Balcedo, Charlton Finance Committee. Henry Kamasi, Charlton Finance Committee. andrew goulas town administrator town shell steve coronas charlton select board professor zarofsky charlton select board karen speedwag chair of charlton select board rich carmignani treasurer town of dudley robin watson dudley faa janet deschain chair board of selectmen for dudley olivia antonson assistant town administrator dudley John rooted Dudley town administrator Sarah Mongeau town accountant Dudley Lisa Berg principal assessor Dudley Chris Ducheski collective board of thought Marlene chickering school committee Caitlin fans a school committee member Heather Harriman director of pupil personnel services Joe DeSantis director of finance and operations Great. Thank you, everybody.
004A couple of housekeeping things. One is if you are, we get to a point of asking questions, which we do want you to ask questions, if you could just move a microphone and direct it towards you in some way. These aren't, you know, the million-dollar microphones, so they need to be projected into for it to pick up so the audience can hear us, and the recording will capture it. We also have treats over there on the counter there that we bring for this meeting. So they are brown sugar shortbread cookies and... Terry Mizzou whoopie pies. I think I got the menu down on that. So please, they're behind the Dudley folks here. They're behind you. And for Charlton, you can look at them during the meeting if you'd like. And they're handcrafted with love by
005our own Heather Harriman. Yes. Now we understand the question. So town representatives, you have a green folder. All of the information is in the green folder for you. You have the agenda. On the left-hand side, you have the budget memo. You have other supporting documents, details that we're not going to get into all the graphic details, but it's there for you. And on the right-hand side, you have a copy of the presentation, and then you have all of the budget lines behind that as well, again, the details. This is a presentation that doesn't cover all of those details, but it is there for you, and if you have questions, we'd be happy to answer them. Do you want to introduce the principals too? Yes, Madam Chair. I'd be happy to introduce the principals, too. Would
006the principals like to introduce themselves? And we're missing Peter Olson, which I'm not sure why he's not here. We're missing Principal Gendesto, who I know why she's not here. So if we could go ahead. Mr. Audet? Yeah, Chris Audet. So in the event that you have a very detailed, granule question about the schools, they are here to try to help out with that. Okay? I'm trying to think of anything else on housekeeping. Okay. So tonight I'm going to present the budget. I did present it last week. I made a couple of edits and tweaks based off of the feedback from school committee last week within this presentation. I actually even did one today that's not in the copy you have, but I'll show you. I'll point it out to you. This presentation is set up
007in such a way that we're going to go over the fiscal year budget first. And then we're going to talk about the capital. Now, the reason why I'm separating the two is because the capital is something we have to continue to work with you on, on timing of that, what that looks like, et cetera. So that's why I separated the two out in this presentation this evening. So without further, does anyone have any questions before I get started? Okay. So the agenda this evening is to talk about the relevant information. This is pretty consistent to how I've presented the budget over the last couple of years. Keep in mind this is my seventh year presenting, no, my sixth year presenting a fiscal year budget. My first year I walked into a budget, so that was
008very nice. But this is my sixth year presenting a budget to the communities. So we'll talk about relevant information, which I've talked about in the past, assumptions and risk, which I've talked about in the past. fiscal year 2027 what that looks like for us as a school district at this time at this moment keep in mind that this presentation is capturing of it right now as of today we know that the governor's budget already came out we have don't know what the house budget is going to look like as you can tell over the past couple of years it's gone up and down if the governor comes out with a budget the house comes out with something more And then the Senate comes in and kind of tries to land the plane for everybody. And
009that doesn't really happen until June, sometimes even July, as you know. Capital plan, as I talked about, will be another part of this presentation. And then obviously questions on both of those we'll take. Okay? So the introduction, you hear me talk about that the budget process is not a – there is a budget season. The budget season is based off of us trying to put everything together and try to present everything. But the budget process is a very long process. It does take over the entire year. You hear me say 360. One of the slides in here talks about a 360 process, meaning that we're paying attention to our finances every single day of the fiscal year. We don't just wait until budget season starts for us to say, oh, what are we going to
010do for budget this year? It's an ongoing annual process for us. day in and day out because we have to be good stewards of your hard-earned tax money from the two communities coming to us as a district the work on anchors we have a lot of dialogue around what we need to do there are always competing interests as you know in your town budgets there's always competing interests and we have to try to measure those based off of not only what we have but where we're going but also you know what may be available for for revenue for us as a school district and that includes not only just the town money but talks about the state money as well. So to start this presentation, I do want to talk about the school committee goals
011because they are relevant to the work that we do here. The first goal is governance and leadership capacity. The Dudley-Chelton Regional School Committee will strengthen its governance practices and leadership capacity by building consistent systems, fostering effective communication, and deepening collaboration with families, students, and community partners. Their second goal is educational excellence and student experience. This is obviously a high expectation for our communities, but the school committee will ensure all students have equitable access to high quality instruction, effective educators, and enriching experiences that promote learning, engagement, and well-being. And then their next goal, obviously a very important goal, is fiscal responsibility and resource stewardship. Let me use the word stewardship a couple of times. But this is really we need to, this year the school committee really wanted to align the 10-year capital plan that we
012worked on all last year to bring to you as far as the communities, and we're bringing some of that forward, and we'll present on some of that this evening. Okay? This is also tied into our district plan, our district plan, which is a multi-year plan through 2030. Our district plan is really to strengthen the continuum of learning, making sure that we have, obviously, access for all of our students to the high-quality learning and instruction that we have, that we enhance our instructional practices. What we did 20 years ago is not always going to work in the classroom today. and then improve student achievement through that. We're also going to foster family and community engagement through meaningful partnerships and effective communication. I think we're working strong on the effective communication part of this. I think we
013still have some more work as a district on the meaningful partnerships that we create for our families. But that's part of our district plan. So here's the assumptions and risks that I talk about from year to year. And typically I have a lot more boxes. If it's a green box, a green checkmark, that means there is a level of confidence. It's almost like, as I joke with school committee, it's almost like predicting whether there's going to be a snow day or not. There are certain times that you have a high level of confidence that it's going to be a snow day. There are some times you don't have any confidence at all that it's going to be either an in-school, late start, early dismissal, all of that. So the green checkmark is that high level
014of confidence as to where we're at. If it's an open box, that means that there is a little bit of a shift in our confidence in that. So I'll talk about each one of these. The minimum Chapter 70 for FY27 is in place with the Governor's budget. That's $75 a head. That's a minimum contribution. So what I put in here is that now, and I've talked about this a couple years now, it's really at a head now because through my dialogue with my colleagues and stuff, we're really hitting, this is now impacting a lot of urban. districts, and trust me, when urban districts say something to the state, finances change for us rural districts. Now, we don't qualify for rural aid, but we are a suburban area, and then once the urban senate staff put
015themselves in this position, and the position I'm specifically talking about is we are a hold harmless district, meaning we only get the minimum aid per student. And for those that have a reference point, that's since 2009. Dudley-Charlton Regional School District has only received the minimum aid from the state. So right now, if you look at that number, 272 districts in our state are in hold harmless at this point in time. So there's something wrong with the formula. You can go to a neighboring town and they have a $3 million bump in their Chapter 70 this year. Literally. We're at $75 a head. So we're about $240,000 or something of that nature. It's our bump in Chapter 78. It's just the way it is. And now 85% of our districts across the state are in that
016hold harmless. Something's going to change. And hopefully it changes for our benefit and for the community benefit as well. But right now we're strapped. We've been strapped since 2009 with state aid. We get state aid, thank goodness, because that's half our budget. But at $75 a head as a minimum aid, it doesn't give us a lot of innovative practices that we can try to implement. It has us really rely on the local tax dollars. As you know, this is not new information to you. Access and deficiency is stable for this year. Again, we offset our budget by roughly $1.1 million of E&D, so that's all the money that we scrape by at the end of the school year. It ends up in E&D, and then we offset the following year's budget with that. You'll see
017a little green plus next to it this year, and I'll explain that as we go through this, that there is a little bit more of a bump in E&D for this particular year for usage for us to try to offset the cost of our budget. But E&D is stable for this year. School choice, charter assessment, stable for FY27? I'd like to say yes. As we continue to try to dive into the numbers, we think that the governance budget has a little bit of an elevated school choice assessment. So keep in mind, if students from our district attend school choice in the school choice program in a neighboring district, Dudley Charlton has to pay for that. That doesn't come as a way of check from us. It comes off of our state aid. So if we
018have a $240,000 bump, we have an increase in school choice, it could actually wipe that out completely. School choice is $5,000 per student. If you're a student with special needs or a disability, there's an increment of $7,500. And then if you have significant services, those services can be charged against school choice as well. We feel the governor's budget had us a little bit elevated based off of our math, our count, and what we've seen over the years for patterns. So we're using that to try to bring our budget down right now. Obviously, there's a risk there. That could change. That could change. The house budget may bring that down, and then we don't have that as an offset anymore. But that is a cost to us as a district. It doesn't come out of the
019towns. It comes out of the district to pay those charter school assessments and school choice assessments. Level-funded supplies and technology, yeah, this is, again, this is same old, same old. This is the way it's been since FY21. And trust me, we're feeling it. We're feeling it in our classrooms. We're feeling it. Our teachers are feeling it, and they're asking for more. But we don't know how yet to balance the budget by expanding this and not having something else with those competing priorities. Now, we are in a good position because you see HQIM, high-quality instructional materials, to the right of that. We are in a different position because we are leveraging the Amazon money to help us with increase for some instructional supplies, high-quality instructional materials. But when you look at level-funded supplies, we're talking about
020anything from wood shop to the classroom to... any unique technologies in there. As you know, a couple years ago we went with a lease purchase program for our technology. We're still paying that bill, so it's hard for us to add more technology while we're paying off the technology that's a couple years old. It's really an internal struggle for us, so it's level funded again to try to help balance the budget. federal entitlement grants stable for 2027 if anyone in this room has a clear understanding that all entitlement grants like title one special education title two title three a by the department of education which is going to be no longer in existence is going to be stable and come in on time for us for our budget please tell me now because i'll check that
021box but i have no information that that's accurate the best information i have is that things may be delayed next year So think about it. We get close to $2 million in these grants. If that goes away, that's a $2 million nugget that we have to work on. If it comes late, Title I. If Title I comes late, we stop the school year. We don't wait for the Title I funding. That comes out of operating, and then we look for an offset. But if Title I doesn't come out until December, then we're way behind. We're way behind. And we're not seeing any sizable increases in these anyways, just to be clear. Again, if somebody in this room has a direct line into the federal government and knows different, please tell me, and I'd love to
022check the box. But right now, we don't have an understanding that this is all set and squared away for us. It is built into our budget because we try to go with the most favorable numbers. You've heard me say that year over year as well. So our titles, Title I, Title II, Title IV, Title III, 240 grant. 240 grant is for students with special needs. It's somewhere close to $800,000 or $900,000. Again, that's money that we use. We apply to our budget. All of those together at a dollar? Close to $2 million. And then reimbursements remain stable. This one I can't check from year to year because, as you recall, this is a sliding percentage. At any point in time, the governor's budget still has some things favorable. Transportation is, I think, at $87 million.
02387. 87% right now. Last year, if you remember, the House budget came out in April and they said we're going to give regionals 100% reimbursement. We were all excited for that. The Senate came out and didn't give us that. We were down to 92, 93, about 92% reimbursement for this current year. Remember, all those reimbursements are lagging too. It's what we expend this year that we get next year. But we don't know because those are like circuit breaker. I've been in a district where circuit breaker has been as low as 46, 47% reimbursement on the costs. Right now the governor has it sky high at almost 100% covering the cost of Circuit Breaker. Circuit Breaker is for students with disabilities that it's an extraordinary cost for them to be out of district or out of
024our district because we weren't able to provide a program for them within our district. Some of those can run to $300,000 per student. Circuit Breaker is meant to try to alleviate some of that cost factor in there. It's never 100%. And also you have to keep in mind the formula starts with three times the, I always get this. I always intertwine this. Three times the local cost before they start reimbursing you. It has to be over a certain value before they start reimbursing you. They only reimburse you over that amount. Okay? Any questions on the assumptions and risks? Okay, as a reminder around this budget, it's a 360 process. We really do a lot of planning. We do a lot of thoughtful meetings with our principals. We really work hard. You know, year over year,
025we talk about the same things as far as if we need to reduce. We didn't put those on here, but if we need to continue to push, you know what they are. We've been saying the same ones year over year. You know, that wouldn't be new information if we gave you because there isn't a lot for us to reduce out of our budget. So we take every dollar that we have and we try to leverage it all the time. And we try to approach things from a very conservative perspective. And we're going to give you a very clear example of that in here. That we approach all of our funding and finance from a conservative perspective. I know we're talking big numbers and it's tough for people to equate a $62 million budget with conservative
026numbers. I understand that. So what are the areas of specific focus for our budget? This year, we'll class size. That is an edict or directive or a requirement of the school committee that we have certain class size within our school district, our contractual obligations. I tried calling Amazon, but they don't have a direct number to their building because I wanted to see, because I keep saying that we are the largest employer in the two towns, but I can't get a number out of Amazon as to how many people are actually employed there. I don't know if you guys know, but... We still run around 500 regular employees, and we have over 100 substitutes that can come and float in our district as well. So we have a lot of employees that we process within our
027district. I think you can say he can go with number two. With number two? Yeah. Amazon's bigger than that? But that's still good. Are they counting robots as a person? Not a lot of robots. No? Okay. Not compared to people. But I was surprised that they don't have a direct number right to that building. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. I don't know. Maybe you have. But our areas of focus, again, are really class size, contractual obligations as a very large employer, the second largest employer in Dudley-Charlton. Our active employee health insurance, as you know, this is not unfamiliar ground for you, for towns around health insurance, is a big bump. Our retiree health insurance benefits was even a bigger bump this current fiscal year. Student safety, these are areas of focus. We're looking at
028a cost share with the town of Charlton to add a school resource officer for the Charlton schools. We already have this in the Dudley schools. It would be nice to have a balance. And more than ever, this position is really needed within our schools. Society. Charlton doesn't escape society to say that things are really complicated, kids are complicated, family dynamics are complicated. This is a priority and I'm sure that the community understands that as well for the most part. Out of district tuitions, this wasn't on our budget last year, but we are seeing a bump in this for this year. And we saw this a couple years ago as well. And then regulatory overload restoration position is in here as well. Those were our areas of focus for this FY27. So to begin, let's look
029at the big numbers. If you look at FY25, it was a 2.68% increase. You look at FY26, this includes the capital. The total budget includes the capital. It was a 3.88% increase. And if we were level services and just moved forward, we would be a 5.83% increase for our budget for next year. We know that that's a large number. We know that we have to do more work. It's not as simple as just taking level service and moving forward. We have to drill down and try to figure out ways to try to lower that number for us, but also for you as communities. And we'll get to that. You won't see that yet. So in this budget, we have two requests for additions within this particular budget. The first one I'm going to talk about
030is the student safety school resource balance. So right now, we are targeting a fiscal commitment for a school resource officer in the Charlton schools with the town of Charlton. from the Charlton Police Department, excuse me, that this would be somewhere between $30,000 and $35,000 a year to share costs. And the main reason for sharing that cost is because I would imagine that the officer for the town of Charlton would be year-round full-time and school's not in session for all those months, so there would be a balance to that and how we would share that as well. So we would certainly work with Chief Dowd if we get this in place. We have a great working relationship in Dudley with Chief and Dudley, so we'll try to pull these things together. But we think it's time
031now that the Charlton schools have a dedicated school resource officer to assist with our families and students that are educated in Charlton. And this really is a balance added for our schools. So all of our schools will have a dedicated school resource officer available to them. And leveraging this as a cost share will help reduce the cost of adding a new police officer full-time for Charlton, but also for us adding a new full position for us too. Any questions on that? Okay, so the next position that we're looking at is regulatory overload and restoration. So this is a large number, so bear with me as I try to explain this a little bit more. We're looking at a budget increase of $105,000 for this particular position for an assistant director for pupil personnel services. There
032are very good reasons for this and I'll go over that a little bit. First, this restores the leadership role that we had before we went for the override. We've never restored that position since the override in the town of Dudley. That was around, it was between $40,000 and $50,000 if you add in all of the travel expenses for the people that were doing this job. They were really addressing out of district placements for our students and oversight of that. So that's a restoration of at least $50,000 to this position. So you could look at it. Yes, you should look at it as a $105,000 increase, but you should look at it as at least a $50,000 restoration as partial for that position moving forward. So it's not a total. It's not an unknown. We had
033this position before. Once it was eliminated for the override, we didn't bring it back, but it's time to bring it back for many, many reasons. The second bullet is we do have an increase of the number of students for out-of-district placements. Right now, again, we don't have somebody who is dedicated just to that role, meaning they don't have some other position within our district. But because of the cost, I'm sure you as community representatives would want to make sure that we have complete oversight of any student that's costing us as a district anywhere between $200,000 and $300,000 a year. I'm sure you want a lot of oversight of that. We do too. And with the increased numbers, the level and the requirements of this position adds to that. need for the assistant director. We recently
034went through an integrated monitoring review and we were a little surprised by this, but things that were typically considered general ed are now falling underneath the Department of Special Education. So you see IST in here. IST is Instructional Support Teams. So if there's a, in the school, if there's a student that is of concern for the teachers or staff within the school or a parent, it runs through what's called an IST process, an Instructional Support Team. And then there's a determination on how we support that student. It is not an entry point for special education, but now it is to try to support the student who may be struggling, but now the oversight of that comes under special education. That's new. That's a big take. It's a big undertaking by the special education department. And
035also this reflects that we've had a 30% increase in the number of students who have qualified as disabled within our district over the past couple of years. So we are now, I think, over 700 students. just under 700 students out of the 34 almost 3,500 students that we have that are on an IEP or receive some type of service and it could be a 504 plan as well the oversight of that a 30% increase of that is too much for our department to handle as it is structured right now so we need support with that we need oversight with that yeah the increase the fact that we're you know up 30% does that not open any any funding additional funding from the state based on the number of students that we have with disabilities like
036there's there there's no grant like there's nothing to try to offset that so that we can No, it's a great question. No, the only grant that's available from desi especially during the years what it was used to be considered a pothole grant or something like that and that's if we had an Extraordinary cost that popped up us on in said district the 30% increases happen year over year It's not like it just happened yesterday But there is no great desi does not provide any grants for that if you have an increase in your student services or something of that nature And even as I talked about earlier the federal grant just it's just not increasing. It's not So no, it's all, it's that cost and that exercise of oversight is really 100% our responsibility within
037our operating budget. Great question. All right, thank you. So to try to give you an example of the oversight and the need for oversight, I'm revisiting this. This wasn't there last year. I've talked about this in the past. I apologize, but it's a factual point. Please reference the point. So what you have on this page is you have the number, the districts that are, you have us at the top. Or you should actually say the bottom but you have us at the top And everyone who's in yellow right now is part of the southern Worcester County educational collaborative for which we're a member of So these are all my partners and peers out there and when we submit our finances for the end of the year This is our administrative costs. This is what it
038costs to run Dudley Charlton district from an administrative level We are at 295 dollars. You've heard me say this before them with the lowest in the state Well, I've got good news. For those of you who are looking and stretching for good news is we're the second lowest now. We're the second lowest. There is one community that's lower than us. But I didn't put that on here. But what I did is I put all the local communities around us. In the middle of the numbers there is enrollment. You'll see that we're the largest district out of this entire group. We pay the least amount for running our district. Some of the smaller numbers you'll see are part of Tantaskwa Union 61, 64. Those towns are independent of Tantasqua itself, so that's why Tantasqua has its
039own number. That's the middle and high school, and then you have the smaller communities. So if you look at that, our 295, and you take the next lowest one from us, 414 is Auburn, that's a variance of $416,000. That would go a long way for Dudley-Charlton if we added $416,000 to our budget. We know we're not going to do that. So the oversight that we're looking for, this is a clear indication that we are making it. We're surviving. We're doing well. We're working hard. But we do need a little more oversight. And right now the target is special education department. And if we add that position, that $105,000, that adds $29 to it, which brings us to $324, which is still lower than Auburn's, the next one there, Auburn. And it still creates a gap
040of $315,000. And for an eye-opener, I do, I have to say it, and it's not out of a lack of respect. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Bay Path as a school, as a program. Love it. But if you took what they spent for their administrative costs, that would be an influx of $2.2 million into our district. If you took the variance between us, what we spend, and what they spend for administrative costs, that would be an additional $2.2 million for W. Charlton. To try to make the point a little bit more. Because I know I've asked questions about, you know, well, did you compare it to this? Did you look at that? Did you take a look at this? So this slide with the blue is the regional schools. This is how
041regional schools, and these aren't all of them, but these are all the ones that are in that lower portion of the expenditure for administrative costs. So even if you took... The next one, Bridgewater Rain, which certainly has a lot more students than us, 5,500 kids. But even if you took that value, that would still, without adding the assistant director, that would be a gap of $567,000 compared to the next lowest regional school for us as a regional school. Then if you add the assistant director at $29, that comes out to roughly a $465,000 gap. Again, we'd love any part of that, but we are comfortable and we will accept support for the assistant director to give us some level of accountability in administrative costs to try to bring us a little bit closer in line.
042Again, think about it. We're at $295,000. The next regional school above us is a regional school is $457,000. So then the ones that are in yellow, again, are part of that Southern Worcester County and they're part of that group. So again, this is the rationale for us adding this for oversight purposes and why the need is there. Any questions on that? And again, you have the enrollment in the middle as well. Any questions on that? And the number of students qualifying for services from last year? No, not last year. Over the last couple of years. Okay. Were there changes in the assessments and how? So nothing's changed in 30% more? Also, it's a state trend as well. It's not just Dudley-Charlton. It's a trend across the state as well. A lot of it, people are
043justifying by saying coming out of COVID, this is what happened. But I can't make a strong correlation to that. I just know the needs of our students are increasing. Okay. Is there data that looks at... The need, like a severe need versus a less severe? We have more data than you. I would respectfully ask you to schedule an appointment with Heather Harriman, our director. She has more data than you will ever need to know about all of that. There are some things that we can work on here, and we have been working on. Heather Harriman has done a fantastic job with her department as best she can. We had an evaluation done a couple of years ago, and we exceeded everybody when it came to communications disability. It's kind of what you're asking. So we
044looked at that, and we're bringing that more into trend. But that didn't change the number of kids who qualify for it. Internal assessments or external assessments? Both. All of the above. I don't want to call it a labyrinth because it's unfair because we're talking about individual students, but it's a very complicated regulatory process. But again, schedule time with Heather. She knows more numbers than I do. The state average for students with disabilities is around 20% and that's where we are. So we are right around the state average. But for us it's a 30% increase over the past couple of years. Going from about 500 to 700 kids. That's a lot of kids. It is, yeah. Is it measured by an age group, a grade, or is it overall 30% increase? Overall. Overall, so it's not
045pinpointed, there's no one outlier. No, there's no, there was, in the business where sometimes we say what happened in 2019, no, there's nothing like that. Is that what you mean? Like we can target one year or one grade or one. Is it high school students returning? No. Okay. All right, that was my question. Actually, most of our needs are elementary at this point. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Any other questions on the assistant director? Yeah, I do actually. Yep. On this slide, it looks like Dudley-Charles Regional is the only one with the students that high that's a regional school. As far as a – I mean, I can see why Auburn and I can see why those costs make sense. But the cost savings for a regional school versus a standalone school, do you have another
046district that's more comparable student-wise to – No, you're the lowest. I don't know what you... I mean, is there another regional school that has... If you look at Whitman... Oh, never mind. I didn't look at Pete, too. He wasn't on that page. Oh, okay. Sorry. Yeah, I was looking for another... Yeah, so Whitman-Hanson. But that's 472. We'll take the difference between that, too. Any other questions on that? Okay, next is class size. As you know, year over year, this is what we typically use to help try to balance the budget. We look at class size. Last year, I was very happy to share with you that we had some good parity within our district. We have, I believe, some good parity again this particular year. We have two adjustments within this. Keep in mind, this
047class size is really pre-K through grade 8. This is not a class size for the high school because that could run the gamut. You could run from an AP class that has a... a dozen to a show choir class that could have 60 kids in it. So it's not easy to try to develop a class size for Shepherd Hill. So looking at this particular chart, we have some movement on this chart, but what's highlighted in yellow is where we're going to utilize attrition to try to do some cost savings for our budget again, to try to reduce that 5.83% increase that we showed you in the beginning. But again, our class size I think is pretty good. I think that there could be some confusion on that pre-K line because typically we put in the
048full number there and then people ask, how come there's 30-something kids in there? So I tried to just do the average class size within there for our pre-K sections. We have four pre-K sections across the district. But this is really our class size and it stays in line with what the school committee's expectations are for us budgetary. Any questions on that chart or that slide? It's all over the place. What? It's all over the place. Class size is a local decision. So you could run into a neighboring school district that has 25. Their water market is 25. Ours is not. You could go to another district and their class size could be next door to us and their class size could be 17. Ours is not. That's really a local decision. Do you have a
049follow-up to that at all? Okay. Our class size seems low? Yeah. Okay. All right. There are a few teachers that are going to call you later. So do you have to say anything a little louder in the microphone? They are good class sizes, yes. This is the average. This doesn't count anyone moving in. We always have move-ins. This is going off the census for kindergarten. We don't know exactly what that's going to look like because kindergarten is not required. And sometimes parents don't send their kindergarten students. So every year in the summer, we look at those numbers. And sometimes with school community, you have to come back and ask for another teacher because of that. You know, it's not a perfect science because you don't have, everyone who moves to town is not in grade
050three. And so it's all over the place. But they are good numbers, yes. From my perspective, too. But they're Dudley-Charlton numbers. Okay? So the numbers are presented with staffing changes. Yeah. What do they look like without staffing changes? Like, what exactly are the staffing changes that are referenced? Is it just the ones that are referenced here with moving, like? one teacher from like grade one to grade three or whatever the case is. It's a great question. So the way this works is we go with the population because not every year is the same number, but Joe does have the class size. So for example, if you were to look at Mason Road grade one, I believe the class, if we didn't reduce that by one section from six to five, we did look at a
051class size of 16 to 17 kids. 18. 18? Somewhere in there? Okay. And if we looked at Dudley Middle School for grade seven, if we didn't go from seven to six, we would have a class size of? 17.33. 17.33. Yeah. But again, we're looking, you know, our job is to really look at parity and equity when it comes to class size and try to balance the budget is the second part of that. Okay? So again, these were the areas of focus. So now I'm going to give you the numbers that are tied to this area of focus. Okay? So our transportation increase for next year is going to be $133,834. We didn't bring this in last year because we were able to work with it within our operating budget. I don't want to say it
052was negligible. It's never negligible. But keep in mind that we are entering our fourth year of a – we just finished a three-year contract with our transportation. We're entering an optional year, fourth year, and so that's why there's an increase of $133,000 for that instead of going back out to bid at this point in time. Transportation is a very high cost for any school district. And I'm not seeing the reason why I would not recommend a school committee, and I haven't recommended to them, is to go out to bid, is because the cost of transportation within our contract with the extensions is going to be far better at $133,000 increase than it would if we went out to bid and we saw a $2 million increase because we got a new contract. And that's what
053we're seeing across the state. We're seeing multi-million dollar increases to transportation for anyone going out to bid right now for schools. So we still think we're being conservative and we're having that one-year extension and we're seeing an increase of 133. But in totality, that adds up. Our contractual obligations for our staff, again, being one of the largest, if not the second largest employer in the area with all of our employees. You're the first. You're the first that we're paying for. Yeah. Okay. You're still number one. We're the number one largest employer that the town's paying for. Our contractual obligations going into next year is $1.4 million. We've talked about this in the past. It's always going to be over a million. It depends on where we go from there, but it's roughly, it's not roughly,
054it is 1.455802. Our active employee benefits for insurance right now, just active employees, is a $673,000 increase for next year. Our out-of-district tuitions is an increase of $250,000. Again, this was not on the budget last year. Our retiree health benefits, I don't know, you must be... informed that your retiree benefits, the retiree benefits went up January 1st for your communities. It did for us as well. We're doing everything we can to absorb it within this particular budget. Not asking for money now. We're not asking for anything special with that. We're going to try to absorb it for the remainder of this fiscal year, but going into next year for a whole year, it's a $522,000 increase just for retirees. So the little number I have on my screen, which I don't think is on your
055sheet, it's not on your sheet, that I added this today. is if you look at the retirees for the two communities for comparative analysis purposes. So for the town of Dudley, there are 50 retirees. For the town of Charlton, there are 54 retirees, which means between the two towns, there's 104 retirees. For the Dudley-Charlton Regional School District, we have 351 retirees that we pay for. 351 retirees that we're responsible for, which is the reason why the value is $522,000. So even if you look at our retirees, the town of Charlton and the town of Dudley together, active and retirees, totals 286 just for your two communities. We have 351 retirees alone, never mind the 500 employees. They don't all take insurance, but the 1,700 belly buttons is what they call it in the insurance business.
056We have 1,700 people on our insurance and all that kind of stuff. It's a sizable cost center for us. It's a huge cost center for us as a district. Just retirees alone, 50% is a half million dollar increase for next year. And I think everyone in here is aware of what's going on with health insurance or what I should say is what's not going on with health insurance. We all know that it's increasing exponentially, but we don't know why or what's going to change or how it's going to shift in some way. Our Worcester County retirement system has an increase of $173,379. Adding in the SRO, the Charlton SRO, school resource officer and the assistant director adds another 145 to the budget. The school choice assessment right now is an increase of $227,000. That's the
057governor's budget. Again, I think we're going to use that to help offset because we don't believe, we don't see the trend by that level of increase for us in the governor's budget. So right now we're going to use the most favorable numbers. And then other line variances, which you'll see in the graphic detail, you'll see some lines go up a little bit here, a little there, it goes back and forth, and all that back-end detail that you have in there, it's roughly another $45,000. So these are the big numbers we're really working with to try to balance our budget. So now I want to kind of get into some of the offset part of this. So this slide shares with what the Amazon money is being used for. This, I think... should be received as
058somewhat of a conservative approach again for the Amazon money. I want to continue to thank the town of Charlton for your support for this. This would have normally been in our operating budget. This would have been a request in our operating budget. But you'll see $290 here. We're really targeting $250. Somebody will ask, how do we have $250? That's not what Amazon gets us for year over year. The first year we received the payment, we basically put it in the bank. We didn't spend it. We approached it conservatively because we knew some larger costs were going to be coming. School committee really gave us a directive to spend it on high-quality instructional materials, not to spend it as just an offset, which was my original look at this. But I appreciate that because we do
059have needs for high-quality instructional materials within our schools. And so we're using that Amazon money to help pay for a new math program at the elementary level, which is needed. I think it was almost five years old when I came here seven years ago. So it's time for that to be looked at and evaluated. Open Sci-Ed, open science education materials for labs and implementation of a new course at Sheppart Hill Regional High School. We've implemented open Sci-Ed, open science education at the middle school, and we're moving it up to the high school level. So we need some cost. We need some money, revenue. Excuse me. We need some money to expend on that. And then high school geometry implementation of a new math program for high school. This is coming down the road. So this
060is what's being targeted instead of putting it in the operating budget. So this is going to be on an offset slide that you'll see. Any questions on that? We receive annually around $150,000 from Amazon. So after this year, we'll have $300,000. We're targeting $250,000. This shows right now if we were to go out and buy it today, it would be $290,000. That leaves a $10,000 balance in there, and then we go into the next year after that. Remember, we receive the Amazon money year over year. We don't receive one check to start the 10 years. So we're trying to be conservative and apply it so that it has the biggest bang and it helps us offset our operating budget. Any questions on that? Okay, so what do the offsets look like? How do we bring
061the 5.83% down? Our target became 4.49%. In my heart of hearts, I know that's probably still going to be too much for our communities, but I'm presenting this as a recommended budget as of what we know today. But how are we offsetting the 5.83%? So this slide, slide number 24, shares with you the exercise and the work to get there. So again, I'm going to share a conservative approach to the first one here. If you recall, FY26, last year, by the time the budget was approved, all of our budgets were done. And the minimum contribution was larger than what we put in our budget. So that value was given to us in our state aid. And you had two choices from there. So let's say in July and August we got the increment. You had
062two choices there. One, bring it to school committee to revote your budget, which obviously would impact all of you as well, for something that you need right now. So our conservative approach was we can't identify something we need right now to spend the $247,000 increment. So the second choice was to put it in E&D. So we moved this towards E&D, a very conservative approach. Again, I use the term money in the bank. I know nobody wants to hear me say that I'm putting taxpayers' money in a bank. I'm not doing that. But we took the additional per pupil that came out with the state budget and put it in E&D, and now we're going to use it to offset FY27. Again, we could have come to school committee last year and said we need the
06310 do hickeys for this person and four widgets for that person and I'm sure we could have spent the 247 but no, we took a very conservative approach and we put it towards E&D. So we increased our E&D and now we're going to use that increase on top of our $1.1 million that we use over year over year. So we're closer to $1.4 million in our 1.3, $1.4 million in usage of E&D to lower the operating budget for next year. Amazon money, I've already talked about that. Again, those requests would have been in our budget for next year for high quality instructional materials. We're now using that to offset it, and so it comes out of the operating budget. It doesn't need to be in there. The governor's school choice, while I do think that
064our analysis is good, I do think her number was too high. If you recall, her number was 227, 219. it's not her personally but the governor's budget we think that we could at least lower our budget by 140,000 with our trends and seeing what happens obviously this could change it's part of the risk slide but we want to use this to help offset and bring our budget down not only for us but for you as well And then our class size management, that slide that we talked about, I know you saw on that two yellow highlights. I already indicated to you that it doesn't include Shepherd Hill. We are looking to reduce the position of Shepherd Hill through attrition as well. So that's three total positions at $195,000. As you know, that's our model year
065over year as attrition. I know that is not always well received, but it's the truth. So that totals $832,000. If we reduce that from the $3,626 that we had for the original budget, it brings us to $2,793,827 as an increase. That's a 4.49% increase to our budget for next year as of today. So basically this slide just reiterates that. This is where we're at. Again. In my heart of hearts, I know that's still a large number. We want to work with you. We want to work with whatever the House comes out with numbers. We're going to try to provide the best numbers possible through that process. And hopefully we can bring this down a little bit more, but we may not. Who knows? There's still a little bit of time between now and what's next.
066So this would have been the original assessment sheet on page 26. This would have been the 5.83% increase. This is what it would have looked like. I don't want to go over this too much because this is not the recommended budget. Now, keep in mind, school committee could say, you know what, we want to go with the 5.83% increase after the budget hearing in March. I don't think so, but they could, and this would be what the assessment sheet would look like as what we know today. So if you look on page 27, you have the draft version, the 2.0 version. On page 27, this is bringing it to 4.49%, and this is what the assessment sheet would look like for FY27 based off of that increase for the communities. Any questions on slide 27,
067the assessment sheet? Okay, any questions on the operating budget? Because then I'm going to jump into capital. Yep. No, please. That's why you're here. True. So on, like, the very first slide, I hate to go all the way back, but one of the bullets was that we were... the budget tries to keep technology and supplies level funded from year to year. And I know we're not going over like every building's budget, but when I look at the increases for each building for the technology and supplies like line item, it looks like there is an increase of about 5%. So I'm just wondering like how you end up saying that it's that it's level funded if it looks like it's increasing by 5%. And that is across all buildings and including the decreases that are coming
068out of Charlton L and Heritage. I appreciate the question for clarity, and I'm going to rephrase that as level service. Okay. Okay? So level funded, yes. Level funded means that we start with 100 and we're going to keep going with 100. Level service means, for example, technology. I talked about that. We have a lease program that we have to pay. Yep. And so there are percentage increases to that. So it's a mix between level funded and level service for certain things. Okay? All right. Thank you. I appreciate the clarification. Yeah. No, I appreciate the question. Any questions on the operating budget? There's still time, so I don't want to overly pressure you, so I'm going to get into the capital planning part of the presentation. So now on slide 29. Sorry, can I just say
069one thing? Sorry. Gina, I just want to clarify on one thing, because I think I can kind of speak for the school committee on this one. I don't think we want a level fund. I think that was also kind of like a misspeak there. I don't think we want to level fund our technology and our supplies. I don't think the town of Dudley does either or the town of Charlton. I think it's just one of those things that we're kind of stuck. No, I'm certainly not. Saying that yeah, I think it was just a process and how it came across and then when you dig into the numbers It's not actually yeah funded. I like I just wanted to know what the difference was that's all and and I know that obviously like year after
070year technology is increasing we want our students to have access to all of that and there's a cost to so yeah i just didn't want to kind of leave it because it's recorded and it's out there and so if somebody's like later on watching it and it's like oh the district wants to have it level funded and i'm like no no no no you know so yeah of course sorry no thank you Sorry, Steve. No, that's great. So next is the capital requests. Keep in mind that we did, as part of the last capital program with the two communities, we did have an architectural review. That was done by Habib and Associates Architects. That plan is on our website. We provided that to you as communities. We did spend last year taking that architectural review
071and tried to work with it. Keep in mind that that architectural review had listed things basically in three categories. only three categories one was right now you got to really address this now you can wait just a little bit and then down the road you really need to take a look at this we tried to take a look at that and see how much we could kind of expand how much we can kind of push out over time and so we came up with a 10-year plan for our capital plan which we presented to you last year as well with that multi-year plan and now we're looking at what what are we really targeting for this capital plan moving forward now again this is going to be something that we're going to have to work
072with you on the timing of this the vote taking and all that kind of stuff and where we land and all that kind of stuff so this is not operating uh budget per se but obviously there's a value here and we wanted to present this information to you now because we are starting to work on this and share with you as a community okay The other thing we looked at is where MSBA, Mass School Building Authority, was for our particular buildings, especially based off of the architectural review. The school committee just took a vote the other night because MSBA, Mass School Building Authority, requires. We plan on submitting a statement of interest for Shepherd Hill again. That'll be the 17th and 18 years, I think. And then we now plan on providing a brand new
073one for a heritage school. And school committee voted at their last meeting to prioritize the Heritage School because Mass School Building Authority says if you're submitting two within your district, you have to identify and vote on which one's the priority in case they only pick up one project. So we picked Heritage. Now there's a couple reasons why we picked Heritage. If anyone read the review, the architectural review, they would see that Heritage needs a lot of work. Needs a lot of work. And so MSBA did a survey, came out to communities and did surveys of all the buildings, and they rated them on a scale of one to four. I'm going to do this a little injustice because I don't have it in front of me. They rated it on a scale of one to
074four, along with a whole bunch of other things. And out of the seven schools that we have, one being that the conditions are good, four being that the conditions need to be, four is kind of more on the urgent side. So I'm happy to report that most of our schools were not. None of our schools were a four. I'm happy to report that. We did have several schools that were, we had one school that was a one. That was Dudley Elementary School. Charlton Elementary was a two. Mason Road was a two. Charlton Middle was a two. Dudley Middle School was a two. And Shepherd Hill was a two. Heritage was a three. So that helped assist the school committee in deciding that heritage is the priority because MSBA identifies that as the school in most
075need within our particular district at this time. If I may just add one thing. Please. Through the chair, I just want to add one thing based on this MSBA survey report. On this report, it also gives you capacity utilization and listed on Charlton Elementary, it's listed at 141% utilization. With that in mind, I think we need to have the optics of looking at if we need to start shifting students up to heritage Where are we going to put them if we reach a point where we need to section off parts of the building for remediation? So that was also in play with our decision making to prioritize heritage I don't have that number No, it's based off of your It's a MSBA formula. It's based off of your whole bunch of variables, just like anything,
076like the amortization, capital. I don't have all my words on it, but it's based off of your community. So Shepherd Hill is the only one that would be a mixed formula. And so it's based off of per capita income and all that kind of stuff. So Charlton would have your own value on that. And Dudley would have their own for any school in Dudley. And because of the way the agreement is, heritage would be solely on the town of Charlton. for the capital improvement in that building, for the SOI. So for conversation, I saw that report last year, and it was like $40 million or something. So if we got 50%, then Charlton would be on the hook for a $20 million over it. And when the timing on that one, when you think, there's
077no way you can tell when the state's going to. It's a multi-year process. The SOI application goes in. They don't report back to us until the following year, and then there's days and windows and things, hoops you have to jump through to try to get it to the next phase. Every phase requires a lot of step. So I always say that, you know, from applying for the SOI and putting shovel in the ground, sometimes it's four to five years. It doesn't mean that you don't have to build the capacity. Anywhere else have you seen where that number three helps you in that list or wants you up in that list? It may help us. Again, anyone have an insight with MSBA? Anyone here work for MSBA? No, just kidding. I don't know. Because MSBA also
078wants to make sure that the community is ready for the project, too. Because they have to set their budget. They have to establish their budget for the year as well. So there's a lot that goes into MSBA. The first step of them approving it is to approve that, yes, we see the need. Now take these following steps. And that's really, it's an engagement with the community to say, these are our next steps. So that's the same process we went with the Shepherd View, right? Yes. And that was voted down by Dudley? Yes. Excuse me, but to be fair, did it take us 15 years to get to them, for them to consider the school that we had applied for? I think it was 15. Not much. 16 applications, I think, or something like that. Years
079to even get to that spot, so unfortunately it takes a little while. And you mentioned the four to five years. How sure are you about that? Could it be longer? Is that the average, or is it just... From past experience myself, but also watching things. It's around four to five years. But I was trying to clarify. Four to five years doesn't mean that that's when you, in year five is when you approve the funding. Year two, you're approving funding for this. Then you do feasibility studies. Then you come back and approve for more. And then you do more. And then the town decides what they want to do. Do they want to raise it? Do they want to close it down? Do they want to build a new one? You have to go through a
080lot of steps to get to that five-year shovel in the ground. That number is very helpful for planning purposes, obviously, so thank you. Yep. But, again, planning purposes for that, until the SOI is accepted by MSBA, there should be no. No, I mean for planning. It could be a framework for planning, but yes. But the SOI has to be picked up. Size of the school factor into it? Because, to me, one to four, two is not. Did it go up to shepherd he'll go up and it's raining from the last time this is the first time I've done this type of all state survey Because again knowing trying to read between the lines whatever MSP a tries to set a budget they try to fit programs within their budget Yeah, and that's could be based
081off of the one through four But it could also be based off of this communities ready. They haven't had a Project before and they're ready for this project. There's a lot of factors in there. It's run by the state treasurer So I guess my question is when the school committee looks at it, when we look at it, we all look at it, size has to be a factor in terms of making a decision. I would think if you don't have enough room in a school, that doesn't have any impact on the rating, right? But it helps you make the decision? Yes. Because a two to me doesn't sound too bad. If a one is great, but mostly two schools. I would think that you would pivot on to the size of the school. A two
082isn't bad, but you have to keep in mind, a two, and I didn't get into the graphic details, it's a very, it's a 100-page report or something, or whatever? Yeah. I'm only giving you one rating in that entire report. One, okay. Okay. Shepherd Hill, yes, the bones and the structure of Shepherd Hill is very sound. So it doesn't speak to the need for... Mechanicals and all that kind of stuff? Other smaller capital improvements that are needed to them. Correct. Okay. All right, that makes sense. Not in totality, no. I was giving you a totality number. So, for example, heritage has some structural issues. It's not unsafe, but they do need to be addressed. How old is heritage? 1989, I think, was open. It does come down to the way that building was constructed. I mean,
083Rich and I went to Shepherd Hill, so it should be ready to fall down right now. The janitors do a great job. Our custodians do a phenomenal job. But again, all that counts. So you're looking at reimbursements. Those count as points towards your reimbursement if you maintain your facilities. Part of the reason for that is because some communities let their facilities go into the, what's called the hopper, whatever you want to call it. And MSBA was like, no, time out. We're not covering for you for the fact that you wanted your building to go downhill fast for us to come in. Deferred maintenance. Deferred maintenance. Well, that's the way of life in public business. But our custodians do a phenomenal job, phenomenal job. And it does go towards points for reimbursement. It definitely does. So
084looking at the next slide, slide 30. So Habib and Associates, they had a multi-year plan, and they identified $164 million worth of work. So again, our approach is not to bring this all to you today, $164 million worth of work. Probably because we do want to work with MSBA and see if we can get some projects that could be reimbursed. The other thing that I didn't mention with MSBA is that they have an accelerated repair program, and that is for things like boilers, windows, some of the systems within the particular building, roofs, things of that nature. But that's not open this year. That's in every other year. So when that opens up next year, we're definitely going to file for Sheppard Health for that. uh for that deferred maintenance okay just in case the soi
085doesn't get picked up and not for yet deferred maintenance yeah i've already got stuck in my head john deferred maintenance we're going to apply for that for the systems in our buildings that need to be addressed keep in mind shepherd hills boilers etc are there since it was open in 1970 72 73 So, again, Habib and Associates identified $164 million. We've worked the subcommittee for the school committee, Joe DeSantis, the Director of Finance and Operations, Mr. Stephen Pusateri, who's in our audience here, who's the Director of Facilities. He worked hard to try to narrow this down and prioritize what this looks like for our first iteration of asking for some of the capital improvements that are needed within our particular buildings. Our focus really ended up being on student staff safety for the first time
086around. So if we looked at the total value as of today, for the town of Dudley that would be $4.6 million. In the Shepherd Hill, cost of that is $320,000. And then the town of Charlton would be $5.8 million, and the Shepherd Hill cost of that is $371,000. So that's the only variable split on that because you share the cost for Shepherd Hill. It's still a lot of money, don't get me wrong. I get it. It's not $164 million, but a total of $9 million or, excuse me, $10-something million. That's a lot of money to ask for capital improvement and enhancement. And again, you have the backup sheets with you in there, and we'll take any questions that you have. But right now I'm calling this Phase 2 because Phase 1 was the first. time
087that we went for capital with the communities. Keep in mind that was the architectural review was part of that capital. The two roofs that our two middle schools was part of that capital. So I'll call that phase one. If you recall in some of many of the meetings that we attended, people were saying, well, how do you know it needs this? What authority do you have to say that this building needs this? That's why the architectural review is in there. So I am not an architect. I don't work for Habib and Associates. But they went through all of our buildings very thoroughly and came up with a plan for us for capital improvement that should be addressed through capital improvement so we can answer the question, this is why this needs us. Okay? So on
088the next slide, slide 31, these are the items that are pretty consistent across our schools and not in all of our schools. But they're pretty consistent as to what we're looking for for capital improvements. Window safety film on our windows. Re-key system for our entire district because we have a multitude of keys all over the place, all over the district. It's a security thing. It would be nice if we were all keyed as one district. Our telephone systems, I continue to kind of try to joke about this, that people will call me and ask, I'll ask, can I have your number? And they say, oh, you've got caller ID. No, I don't have caller ID. I don't even know who you were calling. All I get is a ring. That's how old my phone is
089in my office. It tells me nothing. It's not dynamic, and if we need to replace it, we need to go to eBay and buy a nice phone on eBay for our phones. If we need to change an extension or change a room, we actually have to hire somebody to come in and do that for us. That's how old our system is. If we need to replace anything with our PA systems, we're told that they're obsolete. We don't have the parts for those anymore. We actually, here at this school, we had a custodian who worked very hard to... Installed, I think, his own semi-amp to try to keep the PA system. Say it again? His own. Yep. He brought in his own personal amplifier to do a makeshift fix for the PA system in Charleston Middle
090School. I can't tell you how important it is to have a PA system in a school. Fencing around some of our schools, playground upgrades, loading docks. We have a couple loading docks that have deteriorated and really need some work. Windows and masonry sealant, standby generators. Parking lots, driveway, sidewalks, I'm sure you've driven into parking lots of ours and seen that we need some help with those. Water filtration systems for Mason Road and Dudley L. IT network infrastructure, this is above and beyond what we have. We're putting those IT needs within our capital plan. One carpets, I'm being generous by saying that they're 25 years because I'm going back to Charlton Middle and Dudley Middle, but some of our rugs in our schools have been there for 38, 40 years. And what I've shared at the
091last school committee, and I'm still blown away by this, but the way these schools were constructed in Deli Child, I've never seen schools with so much carpet in them. These schools have so much carpet in them, but we're at a point where they need to be replaced. Fuel oil tanks, we still have a couple underground that need to be taken out. storm drainage, weather stripping, windows and doors, electrical upgrades. As we add more technology, we need some more electrical upgrades, and some site lighting needs to be worked on. So again, that's the kind of a generalization of it, but you have the graphic details in there, and that's, as you know, we'll work with you as a town. If you think that fencing is not a priority, take it off, then we'll continue to work
092with you. I'm not saying that's what you're saying, but I'm just proving to you that we will continue to work with you on what this capital looks like moving forward. But based on what you gave us last year, so this $10 million for Shepherd Hill, this is for the roof of Shepherd Hill? No, this has nothing to do with the roof of Shepherd Hill. Oh, I thought it was. Again, I'm looking at that engineering. Yeah, no, going back to slide 30, the total value for capital improvement for all the schools in the town of Dudley is $4.6 million for all the schools. $320,000 of that is for Shepherd Hill. That's a very small portion just for Shepherd Hill. Because again, we're going to apply for the SOI, MSBA. We're going to look for the accelerated
093repair. So we're not going to grab all of the recommendations from Mabeeb and Associates for Sheppard Hill and put it in a capital request at this time. And same with the town of Charlton. All of the Charlton schools, it's $5.8 million. And then the variance there for Sheppard Hill is $371. So the next slide is next steps. We meet March 4th. There's a school committee for a budget hearing at that meeting. Then there's another school committee meeting, I believe it's March 25th. And then May 19th, town meetings, this will be, I think, the third year in a row that the town meetings are on the same night? Third year in a row? Yeah. Yeah. So we will split. We will figure out a way. Okay, any questions on any of this? Capital, operating? And I
094wanted to, I know I keep cutting you off when I say any questions. I want to implore you to, if you have a question about our budget, the budget lines, the budget sheets you have, please contact Joe DeSantis, our Director of Finance and Operations. Not only will he talk to you over the phone, he will set up an appointment with you if you want to meet face-to-face. Mr. DeSantis is very good at meeting you head-on to try to answer your questions. And call me, too. I'm not trying to avoid it, but just... He won't even know who's calling. I won't know that it's you calling. So funny, because I'll answer my phone and people are like, I didn't know I got you, the superintendent. I said, yeah, it was ringing. The phone was ringing. That's
095why I picked it up. So any questions on both the fiscal budget and the operating budget as well as the capital? So at what point, looking at the numbers, it seems like an... I get that it's over the town line for me, so maybe I'm sticking my nose in a place I'm not supposed to. However, if one of the buildings is making up half of the estimated budget for repairs for capital improvements over the course of 10 years, at what point do you look at taking that building offline and doing an addition instead? Is that something that gets looked at down the road? And this is just like our starting point, like over the course of 10 years, if we keep everything the way that it is, these are the improvements that need to be
096made. Okay, great question. Just a couple points of clarity. Heritage alone is about $40 million. It's $164 million identified for capital improvement. $53 million. Sorry. So it's a little, it's a little, so there's still a hundred million in value in other buildings. I think one of the numbers I was looking at over the course of 10 years was about 90 million, which is where I was getting that like about half. No, no, not for heritage, like for across the district. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So when you, when you apply for a statement of interest with MSBA, you, you, you apply based off of that particular building. But once you enter, once they invite you in and they enter in, they want you to look at every single option in your district. Every option. And that could
097be anything from, again, closing it down, putting an addition on Charlton Middle School, you know, something of that nature. But that really comes down to recommendations, but the community is the one who has to drive that direction, what they want to do. And it usually is based off of the dollar figure. You know, to reconstruct and leave everything the way it is seems to be a very high cost. If you look for, and I like that, I look for strategic ways to see, maybe put an addition on Charlton Middle School with the land here and all that and move some grades here and, you know, renovate Charlton Elementary School or something like that and take heritage offline because of the incredible cost it is to try to keep that online, that's community decision-making down the
098road. But MSBA has you go through all of that. MSBA requires you to look at a renovation versus new construction as well. Perfect. When we apply for a statement of interest, we don't apply for it knowing what we want. Okay. Okay? Does that? Yeah, no, that totally answers the question. Thank you. An additional point of clarity to that $90 million figure that you were talking about, that's the totality for Charlton between Charlton Elementary, Heritage, Charlton Middle School, and Charlton's percentage of Shepherd Hill. based on the total estimated cost. Yeah. Like I said, I'm pretty sure I'm stepping where I'm not supposed to, but I was looking through the numbers and it just jumped out at me. So I wanted to make sure to ask. It's a great question of clarity. Thank you. But I think
099as we learned last year that the care for her heritage would be a year long, so the school would be closed anyway for that. If it came to that, you'd have to put the kids somewhere else. That's... Right. Again, state of the matter. MSBA, where we're going to go, it's not in the capital request at this point. Any other questions? You also don't even know. When I was living in Milford, we had one building that was in the middle of an MSBA project, and they kept half of it open. You can still have kids in school bonds being renovated and rebuilt. Yeah, our next town over has a renovation project going on, and they're still part of the building and not part of the building. Right. I think the part that continues to make me
100nervous is the cost of all the stuff. Not just the capital request we have here. That's a lot of money, $9 million worth of stuff. But when you're looking at school projects and school buildings, the year I left, we were finishing a project in my prior district, and it was $36 million to build that school. that was an elementary school I am now seeing and I and I've shared this with a couple people I've not I don't know if anyone's read this but you know Lexington just approved almost 700 million dollars for a high school just for a high school That's a lot of money. We're not Lexington, I know that, but that's still the trend of the cost of these. There were some districts who were, with the tariffs and all that, there were
101some districts where the cost just exploded, and MSBA tried to scramble to try to come up with some extra money, but basically said, no, we don't have any extra money for you, you've got to live within your project, stop cutting your project. There's a lot going on there. So I'm very nervous about all of that stuff with the uncharted territory for me. Those costs just seem too way out of control at this point in time. But heritage does need to be addressed. There's no doubt about it. purposes of clarity for our public if we can make sure that on the draft version of the budget that we have under capital you know we have store charges Shepherd Hill field debt the debt exclusions I'm just wondering if we could put in parentheses like what year
102we are on that payment schedule just so that people have an understanding when it's gonna roll when it's gonna come off the roll That assessment sheet does not include the request for capital right now, just to be clear. Just to be clear, because again, we need to work with you to get to that point. Yep. Obviously there's a lot more here than just heritage you know it's all the schools all of them have identified needs is there kind of a chunk of projects that are already brought together outside of the MSBA program as kind of like one project is there an estimated you know what's the estimated cost on that and kind of if there is what's the timing of approving of the borrowing on those Yes, so they have been prioritized if you take
103a look at the cover sheet for each one of the capital assessments you'll see that There are several factors in how we're deciding whether or not we want to prioritize and which projects were putting in front of others Certain buildings it makes sense to complete one system before you move on to the next For example, you know you may want to replace boilers before you come to another part of the heating system, for example. Again, it's also taking into the Habib and Associates study on what they find as the most dire scope. So yeah, we try to find that balance between whatever is not MSBA eligible, whatever we can potentially attack first with that first round of capital. We've already, and Steve Pusteri's done a really good job in doing this, have prioritized based on
104year. schedule what we think needs to come first what can wait a little further after that and what should come later while all keeping in mind we want to keep as close to parity as we can on a year-over-year basis. So he's done a really good job doing that. But again, we actively are updating that capital plan as we may be able to check certain projects off the box or as priority may dictate that we may have to move another project up. So again, it's very fluid as we're creating that capital plan. But this is, I appreciate everyone's time that met with us in December. These numbers have obviously changed quite a bit because we continue to try to decipher them. But we need to continue to work with you because you, the town shop
105may say 5.8 is not what we're, we're not going to, we can't support you with that. Come in with $4 million or whatever. We'll prioritize the, so as far as how the loan would look and all that kind of stuff, that's going to take time. Over that, we need to finalize the number and then finalize the process for how we're going to ask our communities to. elected or vote on it next do you anticipate a loaded question but do you anticipate coming for a capital of a large capital um money ask every other year probably by looking at this if you've got 164 million dollars in projects is it every other year maybe every three years something in the area 10 million or right now we're looking at this to get us through let's say
106and you see it on the slide there we're hoping that this goes to 20 through 2029 for us What we've identified for capital improvements right now, and that's outside of anything MSBA and that's alive But that's a multi-year process as well, but we're hoping what we presented to you. We won't come back to you until We're in FY 29 So we're trying to again make it the best we can coming in and expand it over time You know, that's why it's a 10-year plan for us. I don't know how you're getting there with that Well, I'm looking at that study you did last year. Maybe I'll we can take this off line. So I understand Okay I'm just a worker. We really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. I know we'll obviously attend meetings
107at some point in time coming down the road. We'll work with Andrew and John on that. And then we'll schedule a meeting to talk about capital and what that's going to look like moving forward too. Okay? Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, do you mind if we just recess for five minutes while everyone kind of clears out? Just so we can finish up, or do you just want to keep on going? Let's do a quick recess. All right. We're just going to recess for five minutes. And we only have the most important person with Danica. I know, right? All right, we're back from recess. And let's see, so we have the warrant that's already went around. We're on to communications. Does anyone have any communications? I just have one. Okay. The
108Charlton PTO has put together an evening for parents' night out. It's a bingo night. It actually does fall on the night of the DCEF, so pick and choose. That's obviously not for everybody, but it is another option. March 27th, I believe, is the date. What school is it at? This is for the PTO. It's a parent-adult. It's actually going to be held at the hall at the Charlton Vehicle Club. It's a bingo night. So if anybody is around and available, pass the word. But that's their fundraiser. They also have some dining out nights, which I didn't write down, but I'll tell you at the next meeting. All right, and then Maureen reminded me, there is no CPAC, no Dudley Charlton Special Education Parents Advisory Council for the month of February because they meet on the
109third Wednesday of the month, which actually falls on February vacation. Which is next week, right? No school next week? So CPAC will then be meeting at Shepherd Hill on Wednesday, March 18th. We'll be meeting hybrid and we'll be having Melissa Davis, I believe, at 7 o'clock at the Shepherd Hill Library. No, doesn't meet at Dudley Middle anymore. over at Shepherd Hill Library. And it'll be about, Heather, do you remember the topic? What the label is? It's about how to, I know it's about like behavioral, about like how to stop behavioral incidents from happening at home, but like what the actual topic is. I forgot to write it down. Well, Maureen, that'll be up for you the next school committee meeting to like do that communication. To make Kenny proud, okay? All right. And then moving
110on to the best of tonight, which is the student representative's report. Danica Mercotte. Okay, the boys basketball have their senior night tomorrow. They'll host Groton Unstable at 7 p.m. where you're maroon and gold. This past weekend, the show choir hosted their annual Central Mass Show Choir Festival in which they don't compete, they just perform. As well, this past weekend, the varsity cheer team competed at the Ram Rumble and won first place. Fantastic job. Add on to that one that Charlton Middle School received, I think, the top prize on that show choir competition for middle schools. So we're really excited for them. And both Charlton and Dudley Middle School got silvers. So it's great. That is great. Yeah. They did a great job. And let's see. So then we're moving on to public comment. Since we
111have one audience member now, it's very easy to see that. Kristen, do you have a public comment? Awesome. It's so great that you're here. Thanks for staying. All right. All right. And then moving on to new business. We don't have any new business because the policy is tabled. There's a policy subcommittee. It's Jamie, Maureen, and myself, and Maureen being chair. policy sub doing a fabulous job let's see the policy sub let's see we met yesterday and the chair was so nice that those were sent out for feedback on 121 2026 and when we met on 210 2026 we didn't receive any feedback so Steven, you're sending that back out for feedback? Yes, I am, by the end of this week. By the end of this week. And so then we're going to wait until the
112next time we meet to see if we receive any feedback, and then we'll see those policies again at the school committee. Tabling it until the next time when the policy subcommittee gets some actual feedback. All right. Everyone okay with that? Yeah. Okay. All right. So then moving on to old business, Program of Studies, Shepherd Hill. So, Darren, do you have any further feedback for the Program of Studies at Shepherd Hill? Any further updates on any tweaks? Aye. Okay. And are you looking for a motion to accept the Program of Studies as presented and discussed? Aye. Okay. So move. Okay. Any further discussion? Sorry. Aye. Who moved? Anthony moved and Kathy seconded the motion. Sorry. No, it's fine. I wasn't in the game. Any further discussion? Thank you very much, Mr. Elwell. Hearing none, all those
113in favor? Aye. Looks unanimous. Thank you very much. Hold on. Can we just do one moment of housekeeping? All right, is there any future agenda items people would like to bring forth? If no, you know how to email me later. I'll email you on a couple of topics. Awesome. Now, Anthony. I would like to make a motion to adjourn the meeting. That was seconded by Maureen. All right, non-debatable motion. All those in favor? Aye. It's unanimous.