001Next item, please. The next item uh is business services. Oh, C. Sorry. Page 21. 21. Oh, these are the Oh, sorry. Those are the business items. Sorry. Okay. Discussion items. Correct. Okay. We are on the first look at the 2025 2026 budget with Mr. Thomas Wall. Good evening again. Um on that 16, it's train, not trance. Just in case someone's actually looking for trance. There is no trance. It's train. Number 16, just as a note for the minutes corrections. I read it correctly for the record. Yes, it was spelled incorrectly. Trusty Barry, I read it correctly. Looking at you. I read it. T R A N C E. Yes, you read it correct. Resolution said train just so we're clear. Yep. Just want to fix that. All right. Good evening board. Um we're here to
002talk about the budget uh for next year. So the 2526 budget. Uh we're we're in the process. Uh unfortunately we do have a lot of information yet. The system at the legislative level is going very slow. So we'll talk about that. But on your calendar of our budget, we started obviously back in January when we had our first revenue consensus. We're about midway through where we're now looking at the April 14th first look at budget assumptions. So, we're going to talk a lot about budget assumptions, not the actual budget detail in any great detail. Uh thing to note that you'll see later on, we have one board meeting in May and we have one more board meeting in June. And we're required by law to have a budget hearing prior to the budget adoption by
003July 1st, which means at our next meeting, we're going to have our budget hearing where we'll talk more about the details of the budget. Unfortunately, we we are we might not know any more information then we do now, but we still have to go through our process to have an adopted budget. So, it'll also be based on a lot of assumptions. And then the last meeting is June when we actually approve the budget. So we'll get more into that in May of the actualformational, but just want to make sure you there's two board meetings left and each one will have budget discussions on each of them. Uh the legislative process as you can see by this graph uh the governor has proposed her budget. Uh the house did a very shortcut version. They say gave
004us the foundation allowance and everything else was eliminated. So that doesn't give us a lot of to work with. So I think they just said we're not going to discuss it now. We're just going to push it and wait to the conference committee. So when the Senate comes out with their budget, the three of them will sit down after the revenue consensus in May and then start actually working on the actual budget they'll eventually award, but that is further down the road. So there serious discussions won't happen until after the third Friday in May when they actually have the updated economy numbers and they'll sit down and kind of work out a budget process. Early discussion has stated that that might take some time well into our school year for next year, but we'll have
005to wait and see. Does it stop us from our legal requirement of actually having a budget adopted by July 1st and feel free to ask questions as we go along. So, looking at some of the information that came out of the revenue consensus in January and the key point is that revenues have gone up. That's the key point. So what they expected to have revenue at this time has been due to the economy is higher than what they expected. So they're making the adjustments. Next one shows where the dotted line is what we're currently spending on school aid and then you can see the yellow line is actually the revenue. So you can see there's quite a bit of difference. There's more than a billion dollars available in the school aid fund for use for
006funding. So again, it's a legislative process. So we'll know more as they go along, but there is money available. That's the key note on this screen is there is money available to give to schools for our school funding fund balances. Um if you look at this is very similar to even our fund balance that a lot of money was saved during the Esther fund from the federal money coming in. So, the state basically put money aside in their um year-end budget for surplus for future years. And as they start spending that money down, you'll see it their fund balance is getting back to normal. But still, there's roughly about a billion dollars still in the fund balance for school aid. Uh a percentage of budget growth based on the personal income. Uh you can see
007it went up again during the um and during the pandemic for we had a lot of funds coming in from the federal but it's kind of now back to stabilization background. So we're looking at the governor's budget because that had the most detail. Um you'll see that she's maintaining of what she's done in the past a lot of what she recommended in there. We're looking at roughly about a $400 per pupil increase. That would get our foundation allowance up to about $10,300 in change and the minimum foundation at 10,000. So you'll see that if you remember, if you ever look at proposal A, the gap between the lowest and the highest have definitely come to a close where we're just barely above where the minimum foundation allowance is. Whenever that does happen, our hold hard
008hold harmless funding that we have would go away. But we don't know when that'll happen. That'll be someday in the future, I'm sure, because they'll keep wanting to close that gap. All right. If we look at the federal funding, because that's always been a big question. What kind of role does that play for us in school funding? It's roughly about 9% of our budget. So, if you look at what the federal money is coming in, that 9% is significant for us because we get a lot of money for economic disadvantaged students and our EL population. So, it makes a big difference for us, but it's roughly about 9% of the state aid budget foundation allowance. We talked about that. It's roughly about a 4% increase. Um, ours would be slightly higher than the 10,000. The
009other thing to notice that the state of Michigan total population continues to decline and we'll talk about our own numbers later on. Yes. Do you happen to have a rough estimate of how many students in total are in the state of Michigan? Yes, I do. and how many districts because people have to understand all of this money is being divvied up. I'm going off forward a little bit. Oh, okay. But right there you'll see on the right hand side. So you can see it peaked in 20034 and since then it has gone down. So we've lost about 19% almost 20% of our kids since 20034 in the state of Michigan. Wow. So that's kind of a history because I think that's important and financially it helps us because whatever money we have is divided by
010less kids. That's why I wanted however you know it's still it's a it's a trend that you know in Michigan that we just continue to see that now Dearborn has been an exception and we'll talk about that later but we're now starting to see the trends also. So apologize I have to go back a few slides now. Sorry I don't want you to miss all this information. Um inflationary growth you can see by the uh revenue estimates and ongoing reception we're slightly higher but we do expect in future years where the rate of inflation will exceed our values it will be lo b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b
011b b b b b b basically losing the inflationary value on our funding. Uh again just talking about the budget reserves. You can see the state continues to add to that. So that number is getting higher and higher and again that's something they can pull at any time by legislative action to bring back into schools as they see fit. The school aid fund as you can see this is a pie from last school year. We obviously don't have this year out available yet but you can see 45% comes from state tax, 21% from income tax and the rest the state education tax is on bills on your property. So roughly about 65% of that comes from the economy. So as long as our economy is doing well, the school a fund is well protected and
012having funding to be able to put towards education. Uh there is a proposal out there now by the governor to take away our dedicated military school aid fund and use it for roads. That's something I'm always worried about. The less dedicated funds we have, the more is it subject to legislative process if they're going to make up those funds and vote on it on any given year. So just be aware of that. Just when you look at the school aid fund where they actually passed the bill roughly about 50% is the foundation allowance. The other parts in other parts of the budget. This is where we talked about in the past that we get a lot more grants. Now you've had a presentation at the last board meeting about how much grants are now coming
013in. Part of that is because the state has moved away from a flat foundation receiving our money. But we are also out there trying to get federal funds or local funds or state funds for other grants. You just saw that today on that 12A grant. That is not part of the school aid fund. It's part of the us that we applied for in a different division and brought money to us for repairing our buildings. Now, there was a matching fee on that, but we're looking at other ways than just school a fund to help with our infrastructure process. And on the right, you'll see, as we talked about earlier, the state uh change in student population. All right. Now, moving to our assumptions. Um I share this graph every year since about 2015 and you
014can see that the red line is the rate of increase based on salary increases. So you can see the red line that it was affected you know significantly in the 201011 we had the housing crisis and we asked all of our employees of the district to take a reduction in salary. Starting about 2015 we have started to get out of that hole and actually started moving up. Um, you can see that we've based a lot about it on based on our foundation allowance and the economy has been good. So, our foundation has gone up and so have our wages. So, it kind of mirrors that. The yellow line is our retirement rate. Um, I'm an oldie. So, when I first started school, we paid 0% for retirement. That is not the case now. Um, we
015have seen significantly increases in that over time. Uh, last year for the first time, they gave us a break on the retirement rate. However, this proposal in the governor's plan is putting it right back up. So that's why you see that little shape U at the end that that that reduction in the Mipers rate is not something that was going to go ongoing. And so now she's taking it back. I thought that was the whole point to So they basically have said that UA break you got last year, we're going to go back. It went up 5% roughly 5% again. They did reduce the employer rate, but it was absolutely not for the same dollar value that they did the prior year. Tom, yes. The yellow line, uh, the retirement, uh, expenses, uh, is that
016for all employees? All employees unless you have retired and come back to the district after your retirement. Okay, that's that's why I was like, okay, if that's for all employees, why? So, roughly, you know, it was as high as almost 50 cents on every dollar we pay an employee. doesn't matter what job they do. 50 cent on every dollar and then now it's was down to roughly about 40%. Now it's back up to roughly 45%. So why do we have only the the the DFT salaries in this graph? Because we follow that that is our base kind they're usually ones that negotiate first and all employees basically follow that same percentage. So if the teachers got a certain percentage all employees throughout the district got the same percentage. percentage, not percentage. Correct. Not the dollar
017value, just the percentage. Yes. And then the blue line is our foundation allowance. Yeah. You can see that kind of mirrors it below. Not always the case. Just last year, we were promised a foundation increase and they gave us zero. So that's why you see it kind of flat there, but then next year she is proposing 400. That caused us a little bit of a issue on last year's budget that we lost that money. We kind of weathered it. And so now, you know, this budget is trying to address that and projections going forward. And it wasn't just us. It was all superintendents talking about that, not getting that increase. Yes. And that was kind of a last minute change, too, which was kind of unplanned for everybody. And the green line is the student
018enrollment. As you can see, it's been steadily increasing to about 2122 when the pandemic hit and since then, it's been slowly decreasing. So that's something we have to take in account as we look at our future projections. Is that a trend that's going to continue? And if it is, we have something we have to address. There was a lot on that screen. Even though it was simple, there was a lot on there. This is just looking at student counts. It's not, you know, something we can really delve into. It's just estimates at this point. Uh we're going off the student service projection on student counts, which is based on this falling. We're roughly reducing it from what we had last year because of the 350 plus kids or 380 plus kids that we lost. And
019just through the mathematical side, we're looking at roughly about a 68 student increase over last year. Just but just based on the foundation loans, uh 90% comes from our fall count and 10% from last year's count. So our last spring account we just did is the 10% for next year and then the fall makes up 90%. wages. As you can see here, our current contracts are settled at 2% plus up to 2% for any foundation increase. And right now, using the governor's proposal of roughly about $400 increase, they'll roughly get a 4% increase for next year. That's what we're planning for in our budget assumptions. Obviously, we won't know that until the actual foundation allowance comes out. If the if they decide to do the switch like they did last year and give us 0%
020then it would be a 2% increase. So, but right now our budget assumption is that it's going to be more than the 2%. Right now it's roughly just under 4%. So, they would get the full 4% for next year. And looking at our most likely scenario, I won't go through all the details here. We'll go into it more next May. But we're trying to see how what we have to do to balance the budget. Uh looking at the 68% 68 student count increase, we know for right now that our fi our health care cost is only going up 0.2%. Roughly estimating about 50 retirements and a foundation across of 392. Uh we're still looking at an operational deficit of roughly $6 million that we're kind of going through right now to look at different options
021to see how that works. Does $6 million really scare me? That's only 2% of our budget. So it's not a lot but again it's it's it's changes that we have to work through discuss and make sure it makes sense for us. Yes. Yes. We need to discuss that. Uh I I I don't I wouldn't support just keep taking money from the fund balance every year. So that's that's going to be a discussion at the finance committee and correct we need we will have a finance committee next before our next discussion there because if we because you see what direction that's going fund balance. I'm not happy about that. I'm sure most of us are involved. So yeah, but those are the discussions. We're just starting them now because I get it. It's it's a very
022dynamic process. We have a good model to kind of go through and look at things and we'll have different options and as I work with our administrative team, we'll put that in our board briefs of some assumptions we're working towards so you have a better idea so it's not going to be a whole surprise to you by the time we get to May. I'm just planting seeds. I'm not questioning you. I'd never question you. I saw you die at a volleyball a couple weeks ago. This guy's nuts. I go up to stop the ball. I was short. I come down. All of a sudden, I get out of his way. He goes in diving. I'm like, "Oh, wow." Well, I sent him for me because I was at the conference. So, you wouldn't have dove.
023He did. So, but again, but there's a lot of options. No decisions have been made. You know, obviously, we very value our staff. So, we would not look at layoffs, you know. So, we're trying to figure out how that all fits and what's the ups and downs that we have to consider. Thank you. So even with the retirements, we're still Yes. $6 million. Correct. And part of that is for last year, you know, because we didn't get our foundation increase. The the last thing we want to do is interrupt classes during the school year. So now we have to look at what we had to resolve from last year and the assumptions this year. And that's the number we're trying to work towards. And some of that was planned last year because of that. We
024didn't want to disrupt when it happened. And then we had those students that came after count day. So we decided to absorb it into this year. Good. All right. So, if we're looking now, this is our student data. Um, thank you to David. Went all the way back to 1935. You probably have never seen that. So, I wanted to share it with you just so you would have that data. So, back in 1935, we were only 9,400 kids. And you can see that in 90 1954-55, we got up to about 21,000 all the way up to 22,000. Stayed there for a while. And back in 197374 we dipped again and then we've slowly kind of climbed back up there again. We're in 21 22 area we're over the 20,000 you know range and now we're
025starting to see the dip again. So again you know any reference from there a lot of things have changed in 50 years. We don't see we'll see the same pattern but I know student services takes into our current enrollment trends birth rates. They go into a lot of detail to kind of expect where we're going to be. I thought it was a good historical lesson just to see where different schools have been over that time. The little grant on top you'll see is our green line is our enrollment. The multibar chart is our staffing. So you can see where our staffing is actually has been below the actual total staff line. That's not unexpected because our staffing and student counts are very low for our class sizes. So, those are the things that we're going
026to be working on and discussing. Just wanted to point out, Trusty Petrickoff and I spoke to you about last meeting is uh even though we're getting new students, those numbers, the total numbers are still dipping. Correct. That's that's something that's very concerning. Yeah. And we've been seeing a decline in our secondary schools. Yeah. So, those are the things that we start looking at. And now, you know, so I'm not surprised also see our staff increase because we've gotten a lot of grants. And so, a lot of those grants are dealing with mental health, you know, and those kind of things. So, we've hired more social workers, more counselors, but again, the model we have to see is what kind of model can we sustain going forward, at least have a plan to address it. So,
027if if we do dip into fund balance, it'll be a planned approach, but obviously, we're not going to stay there. The long-term plan is to get that back into a more common approach. But again, you know, we're a service industry, so we don't want to lose our good teachers, any teachers. We have good teachers here. We don't want to lose them. So, we have to figure out how to get that on there without impacting people's lives as much as possible. All right. So, the other couple of things, um, infrastructure is something that we're going to look at. You know, as part of the staffing adjustment, our ESRE funds are done or we're finishing up the Henry Ford College building. So, a lot of our monies in capital projects have gone down. So, it becomes a
028pressure point for us now is how we're going to address infrastructure. I've told you before that we don't have the funds to maintain it as we did before because we took a lot of the reserves we got during esser funds and addressed our buildings. But now we're at the point where the infrastructure is going to become a more and more important part and we don't want to have conversations that we just can't do things. So we have to have a plan. And so at some point, you know, with our work from Quinn Evans working on our buildings and the historical aspect and what to do with them, they're finishing up and they're pretty much ready to meet with the board again and share their findings. So, at some point, I would like to have another
029maybe an hour work session with the board again to get their report from them, make sure you have understanding of what they did and how they went about it to come up with their recommendations. um understand they have a pretty good model that we could share with you that you can pick and choose different items and it gives you the bottom line. So that's something they so we don't need to address that here quickly just so we kind of keep that process moving and we have the other company ready to go out to the public. So it'd be good for the board to understand what the findings were from that process, give their feedback to the next group that will go out to community engagement to make sure everybody's on the same page and that
030you have the information. You know what it says, what it means to you and give what feedback you can to the company to go out and solicit information back from the community. So that's something we need to plan. Is that something that we need to do um for our next meeting perhaps? Preferably because we'll have our budget hearing in May and it'd be nice to be able to put some kind of input into that of where the budget's going to deal with that and what kind of impact we might have to have. Do we do that in between meetings? Yeah, you can do it anytime you want to. You know, you could do it. It's about an hour discussion. So we could put it as a discussion item. I know that will drag the meeting
031a little bit longer, but we can think about even starting the m the meeting earlier. We will have to have a finance committee prior to that also though on the bond should be a separate meeting an hour. There's going to be a lot of questions that question discussions. Yeah. And I I I don't like meetings to be boxed as well. So, um we'll think about that. Yes. Yep. I just want to bring it to your attention that they're ready to go and let's let's get it on the schedule because it takes time to schedule. Yeah. Uh just on the budgetary process, you can see we're we're moving along on our side. Um we don't have any tax data yet. So talking about millage rates, we have no idea where the tax rate is going to
032come in at just yet. Um like I said, the budget hearing is in May, so we have to put that in the paper at least 7 to 10 days prior to the actual meeting. We have our budget hearing. the public will have opportunities to, you know, discuss it or ask questions and the formal adoption at our meeting in June. And again, just want to caution everybody, it's going to be based on assumptions and estimates because we won't have any final data to actually base our true budget on. Any questions? I know um in the finance committee you discussed the worst case scenario and best we'll go through it all best case worst case and most likely case question you mentioned earlier the ESR fund at the state level um is still available. I thought there
033was a change of uh where the dates yes we spent all our money this last September. So last September 30th of 24, we finished spending our money. Some districts got an extension for an additional 12 months, that is the one that got caught about a month and a half ago from the White House saying, "Nope, we're not going to offer that money. We're not going to you're not going to be able to ask any reimbursements. Whatever you got to that date, it's done." So we were not part of that 42 million that was taken back for But it doesn't impact the state with the ESRE fund that you said they still have. Uh well that was the HR funding that that kind of flowed through for mental health grants that was eliminated. We have some
034we had some ESR funds for homeless but that was also spent at September 30th. So right now we have no ESSER funds available. Okay. And again always reach out to me you have individual questions. You know I'm always open. I can dig into the weeds as far as you want to go. All right. Thank you. Uh, next item, please. The next item is the 2024 2025 board goals by President Mos. Thank you. This should have said 2025 2026, but notice years 242. Okay. Um, that's we we actually set the goals two years back and they span two years, but um, David, can you get that on the screen, please? Yeah. Thank you. Thanks. So um I combined all of Thank you for Thank you to all of you for submitting the your goals. So I
035combined all of the goals and um to two buckets that I felt those are the categories. So feel free to uh tell me if your goal is missing or if you need it to be your own separate goal. Um there are two slides. uh the first slide has uh five categories and the second slide has two categories. So if we can show the first slide is um many of you and I I want to say one thing before I delve into the different categories is that I believe all of us feel strongly about all of these goals but I did limit everybody to three goals. So, uh, feel free to say I want to move to another goal if you want to change that. But I I do feel like I do care about all
036of these issues. It doesn't mean necessarily I don't have my name on it. I don't care about it. It's it's there because we're we're we want to limit those two two to three. So, let them know it's in the folder, too. Uh, it's in the folder, too. So it's in your So uh the first one was bullying prevention. Um trustees uh Barry Watts and Demio uh mentioned it in their submissions. So uh that's one of the goals that we have. Another one is community engagement. Trustes Darren Bersio, myself, Trustes Zar, um echoed that we need uh to improve collaboration and dialogue between the board, administration, staff, and parents. Um literacy is a huge goal for all of us, but the trustees that have presented it are Trusty Barry, Al Jahi, and Trusty Zar. I I
037put in the percentage myself if you were wondering uh because that was kind of my one of my goals and I thought I will tag it along but it's um it's something to put up there as something that we would like to see as far as the the school year uh 2520 26 uh trustees uh Peterskov myself uh talked about student discipline. We would like to decrease the amount of suspensions um and and solve the ab absenteeism issue that we do have especially at the secondary level. Um and then I do have my individual goal uh that I have talked about that before about classroom tech use to reduce that and I put up a percentage. Um it's arbitrary. It's not really something that we can quantify I believe but I I just put it
038there so it could be a smart goal. Uh for the second slide David um we do have uh trust Jahi bringing up a fiscal responsibility and transparency and u board conduct as a goal as well from Tusree trustees Watts and Petkov focusing on restoring respect and establishing acceptable behavior. a review of the school board governance code of conduct in the bylaws and and then the guidelines and I believe the policy committee might be starting to work on that. So um I left the last one blank for any other goal that you feel strongly that needed to be addressed. So Watts so mine was um not board but it was going back to um positive if you go back to one slide. Sure. uh under student discipline and positive school climate. So I was referring to
039um that. Okay. So, um I can put you in there and then any other uh additions um or if you want to tag yourself on any of these goals. I don't not having access to I just requested access. I I might have I might have feedback after I look at it. Sure. And we will have these goals um placed in the board briefs so you will have access to them um if you want to make notes too. So you can do that as well. I'll uh I'll approve your uh access requests right now. I'll put these on standing item on the cabinet as well. Perfect. Thank you. Any other questions? The only reason I said that is uh for me I think maybe you combine a couple of things that I had which I I
040could see that uh with the fiscal responsibility and the transparency which is the data component being able to see data um having data available and and present it not to such as um whether it's WEDA whether it's uh you uh different things. We want to be able to have dashboards where data is available. So if that's what you meant, then you have it. But if that's not if that's not the case, then you don't have it. Sure. So um we'll include that as well. Any other gold? Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. Um we will have those um as standing items on the board briefs and the administration will have access to those. Uh next item please. Next we move on to the board of education business starting with acknowledgement of correspondence. We did receive
041a lot of emails uh from the community u about range of issues. Uh but I'd like just to um call out two events that are coming up. There's the autism walk uh walk-in at OS Smith. I believe all of us uh received that email um from O Smith. It's happening on April 24th. And then uh DFT uh President Miss Kathy Martin sent an email about uh teaching with Representative Stalib about uh the education cuts. Um so that's happening on April 21st and it's a virtual meeting. So, I encourage all of the trustees to attend and ask questions um and be engaged with our congresswoman. Uh President Mos, there's also an autism walk at Whitmore BS on the 25th at 2:30 in case anybody couldn't make the other one. There's another one at that school. Thank
042you. Friday, I can sign it in the calendar too. Yep. Next item, please. Next item is board member committee and organization reports. No policy met before trusty Barry. Yes, policy committee met earlier. We spent the majority of our time uh discussing the student identification mear. Uh we left it at this uh Dr. Malik was going to check with legal what we'd like to do and Mr. Bob Addy and Mr. Mashur's got a little bit of homework to do to follow up on things. So we revisit it. We also talked about the guideline of the policy. The new guideline on cell phone search protocol for administrators was a good discussion. Miss anything great. Thank you. Uh does finance committee meet before us? I'm sorry. Next month is their meeting. Okay. Great. Thank you. Any other meetings
043or reports? You know, speaking of finance, uh we can uh also put on the agenda the banking services discussion and legal services for the next uh agenda, please. Thank you. Next item. Next item is board member and superintendent commentary. Commentary. Trustees. Well, I just want to um I want to to build on what Mr. Mustin talked about a little while ago is that April is ArabAmerican Heritage Month and we are here in Dearbornne as the uh unofficial Arab-American capital of the country and uh with a very robust student body from the Arab-American community. So um I encourage everybody this month um to celebrate the achievements of our students, teachers and administrators and all staff members who are ArabAmerican. Um, as we see all the time, Dearbornne is a frequent uh target of political attacks and
044precisely because of who we are in this community. So, it's important that we all stand up for each other and this month is as good a month as any to learn more about our community, learn more about the achievements of people from uh our background and the achievements of great Arab Americans in our community, which if we talked about it, we'd be here for a week naming all of them. So, uh, just want to say that on the record for everyone and, um, I'm proud of everyone on this board for always being aware of celebrating the amazing diversity of our community. Absolutely. Thank you. Any other commentary? Uh, next item, please. Request for information and or future agenda items. Trusty Barry, Dr. Mgo, as I was listening to Mr. all speak earlier. I'd like to
045see a graph of uh instructional non-instructional DFT and exempt employees both uh percentages and actual dollar amounts. We don't have to go back to the 90s 2010 and onward will work. Mr. Wall, if you have any questions, we'll talk about it later. Okay, sounds good. Thank you. Any other requests? There are no more requests. We can move to the next item, please. Next item is future meeting dates. Monday, April 28th, 2025, the Henry Ford College Policy Committee meeting will be at 6 p.m. at the Administrative Services and Conference Center in the Cabinet Conference Room. And Monday, April 28th, 2025, the Henry Ford College Board of Trustees meeting at 7 p.m. at the Administrative Services and Conference Center in the Rosenol boardroom. Thank you. And this meeting is adjourned. Thanks.